Now I’m not an MMO player, and I don’t knock the genre. I have plenty of friends who are all into games like this, but they don’t let it get in the way of their livelihood. I can understand fully the sense of accomplishment from taking down a ridiculously hard challenge, but at the same time, your priorities need to be correct.

[quote] The problem is that like it nor not, some accomplishments are objectively better than others. Things that improve your lot in life, or your health, are objectively superior to things that serve no purpose outside of the context itself.

[quote] Doing well at work benefits you OUTSIDE of work.

[quote] Doing well in a sport or with an exercise regimen benefits you OUTSIDE of the gym.

[quote] Doing well at raiding does not benefit you anywhere OUTSIDE of WoW.

While I wholeheartedly agree with all of the points in your disagreements with Blizzard’s raid model (in another post, not this one. XD), I think some of the grumpiness you’re seeing here might be because the tone of THIS rant devalues something people find important to them.

I understand where you’re coming from, saying that raiding doesn’t benefit you outside of WoW… but to then throw the pride that people take in it, if they do take pride in it, in the trash - seems to be a bit much.

I paint (digitally) these days, and I don’t do it for a living (unfortunately). Because I don’t make money from it, and I don’t get anything from it, and as digital paint, it’s ‘just a bunch of pixels’, does that make it a worthless pursuit, and me a ’sad’ person for doing it at all? Obviously I don’t (like) to think so. XD

Sooooo to reiterate - while I dislike Blizzard’s raiding model greatly (they’ve basically turned me off PvE raids in MMOs), maybe some of the emotional negativity you’re seeing in the posted replies is because you’re perceived to be unrepentantly denigrating something that others view as a part of their self worth.

Just my two cents!

Then there’s the time issue.

I don’t have the luxury of playing an online game 2+ hours a day, reality occupies most of my time, so I can never see myself matching the people who play 5+ hours or more a day in a grinding game.

My first online MMORPG is Lineage. To this day there are still many playing, and one of the reasons is because of the grind factor. There is essentially no level cap, basically the cap is as long as you “live”, and consequences for dieing, upgrading, and even player-killing/pvp is huge (although penalties lessened over the years, it’s still very harsh imo).

I guess what I am trying to say is that what you are encouraging in essence for a more “sophisticated” game should not focus too much on the grinding content, rather the game should listen to and adapt to the gamers. The reason why WoW is so successful is because it caters to the masses- the masses can only dedicate so much time and energy (and money) to an online game. Through WoW’s success comes financial resources to further develop and include harder and more challenging content.

So many hyped up games failed on launch is because they simply tried to do too much and the average gamer can’t digest it, accompanied by poor management and chaotic subscription you have a disastrous game. My suggestion for upcoming MMOs is try to establish a player base that can understand the system without spending too much time in it. Once you have that player base, you can work from there- such as build a healthy gaming community, and before you know it, word of mouth will propel your game to the masses.

I am right now posting this from the house of my grandmother. I am visiting her over the weekend.

I have shown her some high polish/resolution images of the church in Ramsau, near Berchtesgaden, and some other beautiful nature windows wallpapers.

Then I decided to check my blogroll, 3 updated entries.

Windows Live Mail displayed the “Buttons” image right in the middle of the screen.

… sigh…

But my grandmother agreed that it is a very nice image, too!

1. never seen by others
2. never visited by you because it’s out of the way
3. HAS functionality (crafting stations etc.) but the other crafting stations in the world are closer

I wrote a long post here when you were playing with the UI last night Cambios. I should have waited!

I belong to the hardcore faction that is strongly against RMT. Though I admit, I would rather see the game companies sell the money and players buying it legally than gold farmers making the cash.

But as I believe in an utopian perfect world MMO, that would make RMT totally useless, I will leave it at that for now.

JediOfTheShire is quite right, as soon as you allow people to buy what they could alternatively earn through ingame playing/time spent ingame, things will get VERY ugly. Envy and hatemongering towards the noob who has too much money at hand are guaranteed.

I am discussing something similar with Saylah the Mislead and Tesh the Fallen at the moment, by the way…^^

I don’t know how many countless people would have simply purchased their epic flying mounts in WoW with real money since the in-game expense is exceptionally steep. Holiday gifts to people could even come in the form of in-game money to buy the mount and now i’m having visions of the virtual world merging with the real world in the lives of susceptable children everywhere!

I must say I unfortunately follow the modern trend. I was a much more social player early on, in Ultima Online. I had a totally different focus, I thought about exploring, fighting, not about maximizing my effectiviness and minimizing levelling times or something like that.

I still insist that modern game design thrives on egoism, you play for yourself, YOU killed Kel’Thuzad, not “we”, or “our raid”, “our guild”. YOU got the loot. Or YOU did not get the loot, but some class/player that really did not deserve it.

The ability to play a mmo “solo” was often wanted, but Jedi is quite right when he points out to what it lead in the end.

I wonder if a game that HEAVILY forces grouping would have major success nowadays. Heck, just see Tesh or me, we value the ability to do things on our own. Despite the drawbacks of extreme anti-social gameplay experiences. I think some middle ground has to be found.

This sentence above needs editing:
The biggest difference between EQ and games now was the skill-based system (as opposed to loot-based) and because of all the focus on loot in the game groups are just ways to get better gear than you could get solo

To look like this:
The biggest difference between EQ and games now was the skill-based system (as opposed to loot-based) and because of all the focus on loot in games now group are just ways to get better gear than you could get solo.

I apologize for some confusing words where I somehow dropped a letter also. I need more sleep.

*shame*

Every generation has different expectations of other and of the world, and of games. This “WoW generation” is also the generation of Halo and WarCraft3, and all of these games have something in common- they require mad twitch skills. Because children learn very quickly there are some insanely talented six-year-olds that crush people at Halo, and the level of micro-managing that can be performed in WarCraft3 has ascended to an art form that if you cannot master it, you have no chance. WoW is a very very FAST game, and I believe that is the reason it has so much appeal to this younger generation of gamers. Fast is what they’re used to and what they like.

I wont go into the whole “TV is making everyone a little ADD” argument, but no one can deny that games are getting much faster (for the most part) and you have to become more twitchy to play them correctly (watching one of my friends play his druid PvP healer in WoW was kind of incredible). These tastes usually don’t go away as peopel get older. This fast pace of gameplay will stick with us- so the more adult-oriented games will continue to get faster and faster still is what I meant.

That was off-topic, I apologize. I felt, though, that it was necessary to clear up what could be a misconception.

Tesh says: “If I want to socialize when I play, I do. If I want to play the friggin’ game, forcing me to be social (including forced grouping or high traffic hubs in “travel loops”) is the fastest way to get your game uninstalled.”

Let’s look at the gaming community for a second. There seems to be a trend here that people want to do what they want when they want to- all the time. If you want to kill mobs and quest then by golly you’d better be able to kill mobs and quest or the game is bad. In this way games are now judged by a large majority of gamers by their ability to provide continuous entertainment.

—(I’d like to take a break here to say that I am completely against global chat channels. They don’t work as tools of socialization in my opinion, because the level of social interaction is so shallow. You talk to people you don’t know and in the end they all become in-game chatrooms and I find myself forced to leave or endure the extraordinarily rude/juvenile conversations.)—

If there’s an unwanted “break for socializing” in the game then the game is no longer giving you what you want, and many would see this as a flaw in the game’s design. So with games like WoW we begin to see MMO’s becoming single-player RPGs with optional grouping throughout and raiding end-game.

(Is this a problem? Not for most people, but for me? Kinda. I miss my EverQuest with its 5 minute downtimes for mana, forced grouping, and camping. I enjoy slower-paced games, where intelligence and strategy trump twitch-skills every time, and I loved nothing more than logging on, finding a group, and chatting all day while we butchered mobs)

Keep in mind that most WoW players would never go anywhere near EQ or a similarly styled game, because fundamentally it might as well be in a different Genre. Grouping to level and slow-paced gameplay are ideas that are now shunned in most MMOs.

Cambios says: “imagine if every 15 minutes or so there was an advantage (but not a requirement) to sharpening your blades or doing something else that was moderately interesting but not labor/brain intensive. That would create a natural break where people could chat a bit. That might be a good thing.”

Tesh says: “Tesh says: “Incentivize it, yes. Require it, no.”

Cambios the only problem I could see with this is that then people would take advantage of this combat-break for the sole purpose of getting the upper hand. I’ve tried to play D&D a few times in my life but it was ruined for me by people that would purchase the most random source books so they could make a character that was so powerful that normal campaigns could practically be completed with one character- the equivalent of soloing an MMO instance. This is not just a pen and paper trend though, which is why I mention it, when i played my mage in WoW I constantly had people in my guild telling me that I was the “wrong spec” because the other talent trees could give me more damage output.

I don’t think the focus is on enjoying a game that you play with other people anymore. It seems to me that the MMO world now mimics the capitalist culture of “be better than everyone, make more money (get more loot/treasure) than anyone, get more promotions (raid more bosses) than anyone, get lots of stuff (get the best epic gear!) and enjoy everyone worshipping you for having all this stuff”

That may seem a little extreme but back when I played EverQuest the forced grouping, and in those groups the forced roles of the different classes, was something you came to terms with. You were happy with your “job” or you got a new one! The biggest difference between EQ and games now was the skill-based system (as opposed to loot-based) and because of all the focus on loot in the game groups are just ways to get better gear than you could get solo. In EQ you stayed grouped because you got more xp that way, in WoW (and such) you stay grouped until you get gear, then a lot of people bail on the instance before you’re done (not too many, but a significant number of people have done it to me).

As a result in EQ socialization was part of the norm and so everyone did it, and no one complained. Yes the game forced it, but it forced it through the game’s mechanics (forced grouping) not a manufactured situation put in by the developers to promote a certain behavior.

To me it seems like the bottom line is that if you want to make a game where people feel like they should be socializing, and want to, then you will have to change the game mechanics to force grouping, and I don’t think that’s what anyone wants (but me and a few others). I don’t think you CAN make a game where you give people the option to group or solo all the way up, and where people feel compelled to interact socially. In that situation people will always be using groups to further their own “material” ends (for loot) and then the group will no longer serve a purpose.

I’m not sure a whoel lot of people want the socialization though… how many millions of people are content to play WoW? More adult-oriented MMOs like EQ (hopefully I don’t make enemies by saying that.) will always always have a far smaller audience than games like WoW, and their audience will always have significantly different tastes than that of “the WoW generation” I fear (until they all grow up of course!).

So I have no clue if I provided any useful insight here. I’m still working on being a little more concise…

But they are not much more than that, combat oriented pvp buildings. Destroyable player housing would be very combat focused and kill creativity. You cannot build the Garden of Eden or a nice small parlor, whatever, if every day players can destroy it. MMO rule, if people can destroy something, they will. If players have chances to grief other players, heck, they will! We already have plenty enough MMOs that are 99,9% combat focused, we do not need to strengthen and emphasize this aspect even more.

About pet breeding, is it an interactive minigame… oh noes. I need to focus on work now, laters…^^

In the “non-PvP” Empire space I can read a book while travelling there. But in the dreaded 0.0 security pvp space I have downtime, too. Not every gate is guarded, and as long as there are no red lights on my radar I can use the chat interface to talk about this or that with other players. So there is definitely some truth to the downtime necessary for socialization. You can indeed not chat or use voice chat if you are busy with this or that.

But how can the lesson applied to other games? More downtime in WoW would not make people more happy. See the infamous “Barrens” chat. People have to walk long distances and the result is not more socialization, but 99,9% flames in the general channel. Of course we can say that a lot of WoW players are just awful, but many players tried this or other MMOs, too, and I doubt they are all kids. I think the nature of the game is also setting the tone and style of conversation.

In EVE, talk is centered on the economy and on planning ahead in general. After that you can make friends with people and talk about more private things. I also liked the newbie channels, people WERE HELPING each other and discussing issues of the more complex gameplay, like signature radius, how to aim, how to make money.

Try this in WoW, the cities are overcrowded and the other zones are void of players except the high end zones, but even there mostly dungeons are filled, and people focus on their run.

The question is how Cambios wants to implement time for chit chat and socialization without having people to sit down after every mob for some seconds or minutes to make people socialize?

Because THIS is the question, how to make people socialize. The focus on “having downtime for socialization” is theoretically sound, but how to incorporate the idea in game design without the annoying aspects of downtime.

“OOM. Health low, let’s wait.”
“We are meant to socialize now.”
“Yeah. Damn health bar takes too long to refill.”
“Yeah.”
… 7 seconds
“Ready!”
“Ready & go”

-> I still think the major difference between games that encourage socialization and those that don’t is that EVE is much more and not nearly as combat centered as World of Warcraft. The moment where killing stuff for loot and levelling takes over, downtime is an evil, not time for socialization.

Housing should be functional as well, insofar as storage, possibly a forge or the like goes. Dont’ see asthetics mattering half as much, would be nice but in practice customizable housing is a huge waste of programming resources in return for what it adds to the game.

Basically gaming (especially MMOs/MUDS) have lost the whole risk/reward balance. You either have no real risk whatsoever, or risk that can only recovered from by HOURS of repetitive monster slaying. Best MUD I ever played you could lose your character taking a big risk, but if you didn’t die you got quite the reward.

In terms of Threshold, a better model would be to have say 1/10th a player level loss of XP for “normal” fights. But, have a higher death penalty for certain boss fights/areas that give far more xp/serious player competitions. Give skilled players the ability to gain an edge that doesn’t just involve investing more time into the game.