Space and Time in MMOs

Axehilt

Vermillion_Raventhal said:

Its hard to imagine he's blind to it.  Apparently he's either trying to save face or a plant or just trolling. 

The "address these named MMORPGs with marginally better travel" argument was invalidated long ago.  It wasn't really a viable argument.

• Take an arbitrary scale of game depth from 0 (completely shallow) to 10 (extreme depth.)
• Basic MMORPG travel is perhaps a 2.  There's a set of infrequent shallow decisions involved in navigating terrain and avoiding mobs, but it's overwhelmingly shallow.
• Archeage (one of the named games) is like a 2.5.  It only adds "press this turbo button every time the cooldown is read" cooldown abilities.
• First off, great job! That's a step forward.
• Second, it's still staggeringly shallow.  So it hasn't made any relevant point.  For travel to be enjoyable to players it has to be more in the 5+ range (the same general depth as the deeper mechanics a game offers, like combat.)

It's like we're discussing aircraft design and I'm telling you prop-driven aircraft are a bad design and mentioning jets going 2193mph, and you guys are like "oh yeah, well the Tupoplev is a really fast prop plane!" and I'm like "It goes 540mph, why are you even bringing it up?" and then several pages later in the thread you make some random claim that I never addressed that plane you named by name.

Deivos' second point just sounds totally irrelevant.  When travel is unavoidable required in a game, if it's shallow then it makes the game shallower, because it becomes an unavoidable part of the experience of playing the game.  So if travel is unavoidable then deep travel becomes important (travel deep enough for the player to work towards mastery of it.)

Deivos

Axehilt said:

Vermillion_Raventhal said:

Its hard to imagine he's blind to it.  Apparently he's either trying to save face or a plant or just trolling. 

The "address these named MMORPGs with marginally better travel" argument was invalidated long ago.  It wasn't really a viable argument.

• Take an arbitrary scale of game depth from 0 (completely shallow) to 10 (extreme depth.)
• Basic MMORPG travel is perhaps a 2.  There's a set of infrequent shallow decisions involved in navigating terrain and avoiding mobs, but it's overwhelmingly shallow.
• Archeage (one of the named games) is like a 2.5.  It only adds "press this turbo button every time the cooldown is read" cooldown abilities.
• First off, great job! That's a step forward.
• Second, it's still staggeringly shallow.  So it hasn't made any relevant point.  For travel to be enjoyable to players it has to be more in the 5+ range (the same general depth as the deeper mechanics a game offers, like combat.)

It's like we're discussing aircraft design and I'm telling you prop-driven aircraft are a bad design and mentioning jets going 2193mph, and you guys are like "oh yeah, well the Tupoplev is a really fast prop plane!" and I'm like "It goes 540mph, why are you even bringing it up?" and then several pages later in the thread you make some random claim that I never addressed that plane you named by name.

Deivos' second point just sounds totally irrelevant.  When travel is unavoidable required in a game, if it's shallow then it makes the game shallower, because it becomes an unavoidable part of the experience of playing the game.  So if travel is unavoidable then deep travel becomes important (travel deep enough for the player to work towards mastery of it.)

And you managed to ignore a good chunk of what was said in order to make these claims again.

Your bullet points amount to your opinion on the circumstance and you have naught but one comment to chare on any of the referenced content, stating only your opinion on the state of AAs mechanics (and the assessment being remarkably poor for only looking at one aspect of travel in the riding a mount from A to B scenario where there are plenty of others utilizing travel and mounts of many sorts such as the gliders I mentioned).

"Basic MMORPG" is already the start of a false argument. IT's been clearly established that the type of game you are referring to is the western themepark style MMO with heavily scripted content, not the (technically more common) iterations of MMORPG titles we see from Korea and the likes, and which I mentioned several of that do exactly what you've deigned to claim MMORPGs can't because it doesn't fit with your type of game experience.

Your analogy is, as a result, an amazingly pointless tangent that doesn't even hit the mark. Before you try to make any analogy pause and try to figure out the argument first.

The second point I made was a direct refutation of a claim you prior made. If you claim it's irrelevance you are only claiming your own irrelevance on the matter. You have now once again presented the false argument of "a mechanic is isolation is boring" where the statement I made clearly was on it being a mechanic integrated with the rest of the tools to develop depth.

Besides which I can quote Cadwell on the matter of limiting player tools again;
"Tools need to be limited in some way, it could be that they are inconsistently available. It could be that you have options A, B, and C and all of them have different uses or importance. It could be that there's a lot of cool-downs. It could be that they're just not provided to you when you need them by some mechanic. I think that's really really important, it can force players (if it's done in a way that doesn't feel arbitrary and lame, it feel's natural to the game) players naturally get into this "making do" and creativity mode."

So this would be yet another straw-man you have tried to create.

You have no argument, you have only apparently resolved to repeat the same flawed logic over and over no matter how many times it's corrected until everyone gives up. That is not the act of an intelligent or sane person.