I miss the old mmos when you got a New piece of armor and you had been working Your ass for a long time to either gather the materials needed for the Craft or getting the Money for it. And it wasnt even the top gear in the game.
Miss the old feeling of actual reward, now everything is easy, log in for a few hours, farm the same stuff or same Dungeon every day or week and get Your items like everyone else.
Miss the feeling of actual danger, and risk. Out farming mobs either solo or Group, and farming xp, diede 1 time and lost more xp than youve earned that day.
And what i miss the most is the PvP system from Lineage 2 in the old days, imho i think that is the best pvp system ever made, was a risk to kill someone, but the person u killed could drop gear (very low chance) but when u killed u got karma that wasnt so easy to get rid of, and if u got killed yourself With karma then it was almost certain you were gonne drop an item.
There is no risk in Dying in the "New" mmos, you only pay a few gold in repairs, and Money doesnt even matter in the New mmos. Because everything is Bound to Your char, so have to get a drop from a boss in the instance usally or buy from special vendors for raid currency.
Also sick and tired of almost every New mmo got factions and shit, everyone should be on the same map, and for the sake of pvp, remove all pvp maps, and introduce Clan or Guilds war system, so they can declare war on each other and stuff like that, always makes it more risky to go somewhere to pve, and it promotes teamplay too, going alone can be Dangerous in different areas.
DayZ is popular because zombies and perma death games are a fad right now and the only way to make a vampire game even moderately interesting is with perma death. Also these games have short play cycles, you can play for 20 minutes and your up to speed and can do stuff its much more like League of Legends than an MMORPG.
I played Rust and Nether for a while and they are fun games to pick up and sink a few hours but your not going to get the full MMORPG experience from that kinda of game because you simply can't put that much content into a perma death game or people wont enjoy it, since they will never get to access the content.
Its sad when we talk about difficulty in an MMORPG with pvp as the reference.
MMORPGs were designed for players to work together to accomplish goals and create communities. PVP was a side bet a way to have players have friendly matches.. this has gone to hell in a hand basket .
Players scream for balance in a game setting that is all about griefing and acting an ass. 1 on 1 fights are a joke as they are very rare most fights that happen in pvp are 3+ attacking a lone target. That destroys the concept of a fair fight.. so quit whining about balance.
pvp should have stayed in the FPS games where they started. When they were brought to the MMORPG the pvp experience should have remained separate from the PVE experience. Blizzard pretty much maintained that until the great gimme nerf of Burning Crusade.
This is why i like what Citadel of Sorcery is doing.. you are a PVE player... If you want to pvp there's an arena you can go to .. its not part of the main story world. If you want pvp make a pvp game.. MMORPGs are not the place for them to have "balance"
The best games had it figured out... its not the amount of danger or the risk of other players. It's the accomplishments of teamwork and a sense of skill.
tab target games are mostly button mashers and in pvp those with the highest level and best gear always win. they've taken skill and team work out of the game which is where the fun went with it. Casual players and players with no skill whined so much that the changed it so that all they have to do is become a wallet warrior and have instant win.
Quit asking for more difficulty and risk and ask for more skill based and teamwork driven game play. To me the perfect example of pvp was Fury the game that didn't last long because casual players didn't like the fact that a level 10 could kill a level 60 because the level 10 had skill and the level 60 didn't. Games like World of Warcraft in its gold era had it so that in pve you had to work as a team and come up with stratagies to beat raid dungeons which not everyone could do and in pvp you had to have some skill and teamwork to win. Sadly even they gave in to the casual and no skill players and went down the drain.
I think that characters that have to actually aim a cursor and fight with the mouse and use a combination of skills to survive with exact timing and work together so that you and your team pull off a fight is what needs to happen. Closest I can come to that example is Tera, it's not a perfect game and the community is as horrible as early days of League of Legends but it is and example of skill over gear.
Tab targeting is dead its classic button mashing that even a bot can do, altho being limited to only 5 to 7 skills is also the easy setting... I would like to see a game with normal attacks/hard attack on the mouse BUT has 30 or more special skills that you can place on 3 to 4 hotbars with shortcut keys using 1-9, ctrl+1-9, alt+1-9 to use with shift as a dodge and tab as a class skill similar to Neverwinter BUT with more powers to use than 5.
Gear has always been the big decision in most all pvp and at the highest level most gears start to be seperated into Tiers which leaves a gap so big that its almost like extra levels. you get new level capped players with starting pvp gear up against players in top gear of the game that can just litterally stand there and take everything you have to dish out and laugh, then promptly turn and auto attack killing you in 1 hit. even an entire team in starting gear couldn't take out that 1 player. Gear should be there yes but NOT to make you a god... it should be there to provide you more survivability and help you land hits NOT to do more damage than the other players total health and definatly not so that your unkillable.
A perfectly balanced pvp is one that removes all your extra god mode and makes it so that both teams have an equal chance of beating one another, either by making you mount a vehicle or beast that have the same attacks and health like the argent crusade in WoW had or by ranking you by number of kills, deaths, and wins then matching you only against other players of the same ranking (they can prevent a missmatched preformed by doing a team average so that a really high level player grouped with noobs can't go up against another bunch of noobs and own them all). Gear score has been tried like this but players carry their good gear in a bag, flag for pvp with junk on, get into the match, and then put on their good gear to own everything, so it needs to be based on your past victories/loses and personal kills/deaths.
I can tell you from experience that pvp is no fun when its unbalanced. When you get overrunned by a group of players that never sleep and live in pvp having all the best pvp gear and they camp your spawn point AND when you can mow over other players so easily that most quit out or give up before the match is over.
MMO's have not been challenging for the last 10 or so years. Instead they have become increasingly infantile as more push for main-stream has occured and the rip-off known as WoW from the original MMO, EverQuest. Back in the day there was a danger in MMO's where the possibility of being snipped PKed by another player was possible or using the advantages of environment. These were one of the elements that made MMOs fun.
Now there is too much playdough in the sandbox and not enough rough and tumble. Gaming has become a simplified mattering of wowing a player with graphics only and simple mind-numbing gameplay. There is simply not enough challenge or risk in a game anymore and there is a sense of pretty much handed down on a silver-plate. We have game engines that can open up and offer so much more in terms of reward, andreline and exploration to those who love gaming. Instead these tools are stiffled into theme-park games where even the talentless can win and too much emphasis of combining real-world into the game-world in such tastelessness.
Gamer's there don't think anymore. There is no loss or danger in gaming and it is all too much carebearish. This artificial paint-coating in gaming is which is why some of the older game vets, including myself have moved into the sandbox/indie regions where we can have these things which have so lacked in the current main-stream games. This "everyone wins, everyone is equal" mentallity is absolutely stupid. No, not everyone wins and no, not everyone is talented. So why is a mmo game stupidified in this way? Even the old Mario especially Mario 3 provided more challenge than what is in a current MMO to date. Plenty of eye-coordination, reaction time, logic-thinking, and trial-of-error. Current MMO's have pretty much taken this away and nullified it with easy gogo stuff. It has become land of the brain-dead and gameplay easy enough to do with one's eye closed.
PvP danger leads to stupid things like having to form a group to do solo quests. Aion was this bad at some points where you could expect to die 20 or 30 times if you wanted to adventure in level appropriate areas, not from the monsters but from the PvP.
As for more danger in general, yes. I liked the idea of sand giants and griffons etc in Everquest. Thing is a monster like that does not discriminate like a griefer can.
I don't think by danger this column is talking about harder PVE but the danger of other players, but I agree, PVE in general needs to be much harder in most MMO's. The games referenced were all hardcore PvP games.
Everquest Sullon Zek server. No rules complete free for all deity based alignment. It was very fun. The good part was this server probably pulled every douchebag from every other server to this one.
Yes sure lots of danger all over the fantasy World is fun.What is less fun is not beeing able to move anywere without a support from a group, simply boring and hopefully is fading away from games.
Few days ago there was an article about how MMOs became boring and it's deepy connected to this issue. I gave an example of RPG samp servers (that I concidered true next-gen MMO material - despite it's age) which featured constant danger/benefit on interacting with other regular player, however at the time I thought it was just my personal preference. If the numbers here are correct (about the demand of that type of game features) it seems to be more objective than I thought then.
For people arguing that there is no need for more danger, but instead challange - come on. In most mainstream games there is a true challenge in getting the final titles/gear where you put tons of hours into game and turn your gameplay into perfection. That challange does not make the overall game experience any better, since you really didn't have anything of significant value to claim or taken any risk while claiming it. It's just regular.
I'm not a pvper. I don't mind dangerous wandering mobs in PVE centric games but I'm not interested in games where I can be griefed by other players. No thanks.
We need a stiffer death penalty in PvE. Equipment has to be lost or damaged. That way you keep the crafting economy going and people will be more careful instead of charging straight in like crazy.
More PvE danger with death penalties yes, but I'd also like to see optional PvP flags that make PvE XP gain faster. So grinding while open PvP will get you faster XP but you can be jumped.
You need danger, but at the same time, Darkfall's model just doesn't work. I mean, Unholy Wars is already tanking huge and it's not even been out for a year.
You need danger, but at the same time, you *cannot* have an MMO model where the bottom 10%, bottom 25% of skilled players just *cannot* have fun. Darkfall is that kind of game - huge PVP focus, and - well - if you are a below average player, you're going to have a bad time.
That's the kind of game Day Z is. It's a great premise and it will be a financial success, but I predict it'll be at about half of its starting subscribers after its first year. Why? Each month, the bottom 10% will quit because they aren't having fun. They can't have fun, because all the game is to them is "spend hours getting gear, step outside, get crushed, lose all your gear, start over." But once they're gone, there's a new bottom 10% - the ones who could only beat the 10% that just quit. Now they'll follow the previous model, and eventually quit.
I do agree - players don't know what they want. They want Hardcore, at least as long as they're giving as good or better than they're receiving. Once they find themselves in the bottom 10% via attrition, they get fed up and move on.
After 12 months of the bottom 10% quitting, it's not going to be a pretty picture. Darkfall followed about the same pattern until there's just a handful of hardcores left in a very empty world.
Day Z should just take the money it's going to make and run, because at this point, the more money they invest, the more they'll probably lose.
Problem is players want to be in Control: Example how can you Control 50 9 year old Pvpers that like to Corpse camp and harass you (with 50 ppls you know and trust ? omg i wouldn play that game way too time intense) how can you Control going linkdead and loosing all your gear by random (you cannot in a mmo)there needs to be controlable danger and risk so if you as a player arent prepared may be able to loose something you wouldn like to loose. But it needs to be a fair Danger not a Monster that randomly instant kills 1 of 12 ppls or so in example. Something u can avoid by Playing skillfull and by having an escape plan in case stuff goes wrong.
My main problem with MMO's today is simply that they are brain-dead and illicit little feeling of excitement, mystery or association with you character or the world around you.
I'm not generaly in favor of FFA PvP as those tend to be more socio-path simulators then anything else. Fine if I happen to be in a mood for a completely distopian experience but in most cases I'm not.
Loss from death's main function was to increase the hardship of the game because it removes simple brainless repetition until one stumbles upon the correct "formula" for success as a viable strategy. It places consequences on failure and therefore allows Developers to design for the possability of failure. It also creates a sense of adversity and hardship that encourages players to band together to assist each other in overcoming....remeniscent of the scenario's presented by true table-top gaming....rather then FFA PvP which are the antipathy of that.
Evoking a sense of danger and fear is important, but there are many different ways to achieve that. FFA PvP doesn't really do that for me....mostly it evokes a sense of being a virtual anger therapy device for angst ridden tweens, not something I'm really interested in.
I want a game experience where the player fears the creatures that go bump in the night, not some teenager sitting in thier mom's basement.
I want a game experience that makes the player think....actualy involves the word "strategy" and that allows for failure and gives a consequence to failure.
I want a game experience that encourages comradship and cooperation with fellow players to overcome adversity.
I want a game experience that makes one feel connected to the world and ones character and place in it.
I want a game experience that is about creating ones own story, not acting out the script of the Developers story....and this is where recent Bioware games tend to really fall down.
The cool thing about having scores of MMOs to choose from is that you can pick the one that has the level of risk or danger that you want.
Currently playing: EVE, Mortal Online, Pirate 101
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein "Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
Comments
I miss the old mmos when you got a New piece of armor and you had been working Your ass for a long time to either gather the materials needed for the Craft or getting the Money for it. And it wasnt even the top gear in the game.
Miss the old feeling of actual reward, now everything is easy, log in for a few hours, farm the same stuff or same Dungeon every day or week and get Your items like everyone else.
Miss the feeling of actual danger, and risk. Out farming mobs either solo or Group, and farming xp, diede 1 time and lost more xp than youve earned that day.
And what i miss the most is the PvP system from Lineage 2 in the old days, imho i think that is the best pvp system ever made, was a risk to kill someone, but the person u killed could drop gear (very low chance) but when u killed u got karma that wasnt so easy to get rid of, and if u got killed yourself With karma then it was almost certain you were gonne drop an item.
There is no risk in Dying in the "New" mmos, you only pay a few gold in repairs, and Money doesnt even matter in the New mmos. Because everything is Bound to Your char, so have to get a drop from a boss in the instance usally or buy from special vendors for raid currency.
Also sick and tired of almost every New mmo got factions and shit, everyone should be on the same map, and for the sake of pvp, remove all pvp maps, and introduce Clan or Guilds war system, so they can declare war on each other and stuff like that, always makes it more risky to go somewhere to pve, and it promotes teamplay too, going alone can be Dangerous in different areas.
DayZ is popular because zombies and perma death games are a fad right now and the only way to make a vampire game even moderately interesting is with perma death. Also these games have short play cycles, you can play for 20 minutes and your up to speed and can do stuff its much more like League of Legends than an MMORPG.
I played Rust and Nether for a while and they are fun games to pick up and sink a few hours but your not going to get the full MMORPG experience from that kinda of game because you simply can't put that much content into a perma death game or people wont enjoy it, since they will never get to access the content.
Its sad when we talk about difficulty in an MMORPG with pvp as the reference.
MMORPGs were designed for players to work together to accomplish goals and create communities. PVP was a side bet a way to have players have friendly matches.. this has gone to hell in a hand basket .
Players scream for balance in a game setting that is all about griefing and acting an ass. 1 on 1 fights are a joke as they are very rare most fights that happen in pvp are 3+ attacking a lone target. That destroys the concept of a fair fight.. so quit whining about balance.
pvp should have stayed in the FPS games where they started. When they were brought to the MMORPG the pvp experience should have remained separate from the PVE experience. Blizzard pretty much maintained that until the great gimme nerf of Burning Crusade.
This is why i like what Citadel of Sorcery is doing.. you are a PVE player... If you want to pvp there's an arena you can go to .. its not part of the main story world. If you want pvp make a pvp game.. MMORPGs are not the place for them to have "balance"
.
Played: UO, LotR, WoW, SWG, DDO, AoC, EVE, Warhammer, TF2, EQ2, SWTOR, TSW, CSS, KF, L4D, AoW, WoT
Playing: The Secret World until Citadel of Sorcery goes into Alpha testing.
Tired of: Linear quest games, dailies, and dumbed down games
Anticipating:Citadel of Sorcery
The best games had it figured out... its not the amount of danger or the risk of other players. It's the accomplishments of teamwork and a sense of skill.
tab target games are mostly button mashers and in pvp those with the highest level and best gear always win. they've taken skill and team work out of the game which is where the fun went with it. Casual players and players with no skill whined so much that the changed it so that all they have to do is become a wallet warrior and have instant win.
Quit asking for more difficulty and risk and ask for more skill based and teamwork driven game play. To me the perfect example of pvp was Fury the game that didn't last long because casual players didn't like the fact that a level 10 could kill a level 60 because the level 10 had skill and the level 60 didn't. Games like World of Warcraft in its gold era had it so that in pve you had to work as a team and come up with stratagies to beat raid dungeons which not everyone could do and in pvp you had to have some skill and teamwork to win. Sadly even they gave in to the casual and no skill players and went down the drain.
I think that characters that have to actually aim a cursor and fight with the mouse and use a combination of skills to survive with exact timing and work together so that you and your team pull off a fight is what needs to happen. Closest I can come to that example is Tera, it's not a perfect game and the community is as horrible as early days of League of Legends but it is and example of skill over gear.
Tab targeting is dead its classic button mashing that even a bot can do, altho being limited to only 5 to 7 skills is also the easy setting... I would like to see a game with normal attacks/hard attack on the mouse BUT has 30 or more special skills that you can place on 3 to 4 hotbars with shortcut keys using 1-9, ctrl+1-9, alt+1-9 to use with shift as a dodge and tab as a class skill similar to Neverwinter BUT with more powers to use than 5.
Gear has always been the big decision in most all pvp and at the highest level most gears start to be seperated into Tiers which leaves a gap so big that its almost like extra levels. you get new level capped players with starting pvp gear up against players in top gear of the game that can just litterally stand there and take everything you have to dish out and laugh, then promptly turn and auto attack killing you in 1 hit. even an entire team in starting gear couldn't take out that 1 player. Gear should be there yes but NOT to make you a god... it should be there to provide you more survivability and help you land hits NOT to do more damage than the other players total health and definatly not so that your unkillable.
A perfectly balanced pvp is one that removes all your extra god mode and makes it so that both teams have an equal chance of beating one another, either by making you mount a vehicle or beast that have the same attacks and health like the argent crusade in WoW had or by ranking you by number of kills, deaths, and wins then matching you only against other players of the same ranking (they can prevent a missmatched preformed by doing a team average so that a really high level player grouped with noobs can't go up against another bunch of noobs and own them all). Gear score has been tried like this but players carry their good gear in a bag, flag for pvp with junk on, get into the match, and then put on their good gear to own everything, so it needs to be based on your past victories/loses and personal kills/deaths.
I can tell you from experience that pvp is no fun when its unbalanced. When you get overrunned by a group of players that never sleep and live in pvp having all the best pvp gear and they camp your spawn point AND when you can mow over other players so easily that most quit out or give up before the match is over.
MMO's have not been challenging for the last 10 or so years. Instead they have become increasingly infantile as more push for main-stream has occured and the rip-off known as WoW from the original MMO, EverQuest. Back in the day there was a danger in MMO's where the possibility of being snipped PKed by another player was possible or using the advantages of environment. These were one of the elements that made MMOs fun.
Now there is too much playdough in the sandbox and not enough rough and tumble. Gaming has become a simplified mattering of wowing a player with graphics only and simple mind-numbing gameplay. There is simply not enough challenge or risk in a game anymore and there is a sense of pretty much handed down on a silver-plate. We have game engines that can open up and offer so much more in terms of reward, andreline and exploration to those who love gaming. Instead these tools are stiffled into theme-park games where even the talentless can win and too much emphasis of combining real-world into the game-world in such tastelessness.
Gamer's there don't think anymore. There is no loss or danger in gaming and it is all too much carebearish. This artificial paint-coating in gaming is which is why some of the older game vets, including myself have moved into the sandbox/indie regions where we can have these things which have so lacked in the current main-stream games. This "everyone wins, everyone is equal" mentallity is absolutely stupid. No, not everyone wins and no, not everyone is talented. So why is a mmo game stupidified in this way? Even the old Mario especially Mario 3 provided more challenge than what is in a current MMO to date. Plenty of eye-coordination, reaction time, logic-thinking, and trial-of-error. Current MMO's have pretty much taken this away and nullified it with easy gogo stuff. It has become land of the brain-dead and gameplay easy enough to do with one's eye closed.
I don't think by danger this column is talking about harder PVE but the danger of other players, but I agree, PVE in general needs to be much harder in most MMO's. The games referenced were all hardcore PvP games.
Few days ago there was an article about how MMOs became boring and it's deepy connected to this issue. I gave an example of RPG samp servers (that I concidered true next-gen MMO material - despite it's age) which featured constant danger/benefit on interacting with other regular player, however at the time I thought it was just my personal preference. If the numbers here are correct (about the demand of that type of game features) it seems to be more objective than I thought then.
For people arguing that there is no need for more danger, but instead challange - come on. In most mainstream games there is a true challenge in getting the final titles/gear where you put tons of hours into game and turn your gameplay into perfection. That challange does not make the overall game experience any better, since you really didn't have anything of significant value to claim or taken any risk while claiming it. It's just regular.
No bitchers.
Currently playing: Eldevin Online as a Deadly Assassin
You need danger, but at the same time, Darkfall's model just doesn't work. I mean, Unholy Wars is already tanking huge and it's not even been out for a year.
You need danger, but at the same time, you *cannot* have an MMO model where the bottom 10%, bottom 25% of skilled players just *cannot* have fun. Darkfall is that kind of game - huge PVP focus, and - well - if you are a below average player, you're going to have a bad time.
That's the kind of game Day Z is. It's a great premise and it will be a financial success, but I predict it'll be at about half of its starting subscribers after its first year. Why? Each month, the bottom 10% will quit because they aren't having fun. They can't have fun, because all the game is to them is "spend hours getting gear, step outside, get crushed, lose all your gear, start over." But once they're gone, there's a new bottom 10% - the ones who could only beat the 10% that just quit. Now they'll follow the previous model, and eventually quit.
I do agree - players don't know what they want. They want Hardcore, at least as long as they're giving as good or better than they're receiving. Once they find themselves in the bottom 10% via attrition, they get fed up and move on.
After 12 months of the bottom 10% quitting, it's not going to be a pretty picture. Darkfall followed about the same pattern until there's just a handful of hardcores left in a very empty world.
Day Z should just take the money it's going to make and run, because at this point, the more money they invest, the more they'll probably lose.
My main problem with MMO's today is simply that they are brain-dead and illicit little feeling of excitement, mystery or association with you character or the world around you.
I'm not generaly in favor of FFA PvP as those tend to be more socio-path simulators then anything else. Fine if I happen to be in a mood for a completely distopian experience but in most cases I'm not.
Loss from death's main function was to increase the hardship of the game because it removes simple brainless repetition until one stumbles upon the correct "formula" for success as a viable strategy. It places consequences on failure and therefore allows Developers to design for the possability of failure. It also creates a sense of adversity and hardship that encourages players to band together to assist each other in overcoming....remeniscent of the scenario's presented by true table-top gaming....rather then FFA PvP which are the antipathy of that.
Evoking a sense of danger and fear is important, but there are many different ways to achieve that. FFA PvP doesn't really do that for me....mostly it evokes a sense of being a virtual anger therapy device for angst ridden tweens, not something I'm really interested in.
I want a game experience where the player fears the creatures that go bump in the night, not some teenager sitting in thier mom's basement.
I want a game experience that makes the player think....actualy involves the word "strategy" and that allows for failure and gives a consequence to failure.
I want a game experience that encourages comradship and cooperation with fellow players to overcome adversity.
I want a game experience that makes one feel connected to the world and ones character and place in it.
I want a game experience that is about creating ones own story, not acting out the script of the Developers story....and this is where recent Bioware games tend to really fall down.
The cool thing about having scores of MMOs to choose from is that you can pick the one that has the level of risk or danger that you want.
Currently playing: EVE, Mortal Online, Pirate 101
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein
"Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre