I am getting back into some MMOs I dipped into. Trying to level my old abandoned characters. The zones full of nice art and gameplay elements
Is nothing but a ghost town. A Deadzone. No life anywhere besides 1 or 2 players.
What an economical waste of development resources.
I tend to see this rapid deadzoning of leveling Zones start within a month of most modern MMO releases. People progress and move on to higher level Zones and content with little to no reason to come back besides holiday events or crafting stations.
So much wasted resources. These Zones only serve as gates for early players to level through and nothing much else.
Why are MMOs still being designed like this?
Philosophy of MMO Game Design
Comments
Godfred's Tomb Trailer: https://youtu.be/-nsXGddj_4w
Original Skyrim: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/109547
Serph toze kindly has started a walk-through. https://youtu.be/UIelCK-lldo
I feel like a huge group should sit down in a thinktank situation to reasonably come up with a better solution, otherwise they will just keep using what "works" or at most is just accepted.
One is the separate server model of splitting players into servers. If there are ten times as many players in zone A as in zone B, that's fine if there are ten times as many instances of zone A as zone B. If developers insist that there must be exactly the same number of instances of each zone, then rather than having one or a few full instances of zone B, you get a large number of mostly empty instances of zone B. Games that don't have a large enough playerbase to fill even a single copy of a zone are inevitably going to leave zone B mostly empty, but there's no excuse for having multiple instances of a zone that doesn't have enough players to fill one.
The other problem is that many games make their leveling content trivial and miserable. The ideal model would be that new players join the game or older players create alts and go through the leveling content that way. But many game developers go out of their way to make the leveling content dreadfully boring, so that if you're not already at the endgame, there's no sense in picking up the game at all. They seem to think that they're trying to help players get to the endgame faster, or at least not get stuck, but trying to convince new players that your game is awful and they should quit doesn't result in more of them reaching the endgame sooner or ever.
Logic, my dear, merely enables one to be wrong with great authority.
At the end of the day nobody wants to play a peasant forever no matter how sharp his/her/its pitchfork may be.
Building up to the challenges is literally the ideology we are raised with in almost every country, whether it be strength, faith, or education. That's why it appeals and remains mainstream, perhaps?
Godfred's Tomb Trailer: https://youtu.be/-nsXGddj_4w
Original Skyrim: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/109547
Serph toze kindly has started a walk-through. https://youtu.be/UIelCK-lldo
Well you can play in Trammel , and not have to worry about PvP at all ..
The challenge rating of content is pretty scalable in D&D. Many tabletop games, because it allows you to extrapolate out the average level, gearing, skills, etc, allows you to find a difficulty at which your current party can approach the content. A lot of challenges are dynamically scaled by dungeon masters in that manner to tailor even prefab modules to the group they are playing with.
The thing is, this is a mechanic of tabletop that has never translated into a CRPG effectively.
It remains a holy grail of game design to have a fully autonomous "dungeon master" guiding a digital game experience with the adaptability, creativity, and reactiveness that a human DM can pull off.
What that means for computer RPGs is they have always created more rigid user experiences than tabletop can provide.
You don't need to "break from the past" if you've never even caught up to it's potential. You need to reassess game design to figure out how current systems still fail to live up to it, and how to solve that.
There was also the market in East Commonlands tunnel so that place saw a lot of traffic. People came back to cities to bank too and craft. Of course as the game matured people had more money for ports and so on you saw less traffic in the Karanas or Kithicor and ButcherBlock.
"True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde
"I need to finish" - Christian Wolff: The Accountant
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
In many real life situations once most humans master a particular challenge they move on to a new one if they have the time and resources to do so.
Sure, some folks will climb the Matterhorn multiple times, trying a different route or face each time, but eventually most move on to Kilimanjaro, McKinley or Everest.
My father used golf regularly at his local club, but he used to travel the country playing on different courses and would have played a different one daily if he could have afforded to.
Surfers, same thing, from California to Hawaii to Australia to the positively insane 100 foot waves off the coast of Portugal, given they have the resources no one surfs the same waves if they don't have to.
Perhaps folks here are trying to solve the wrong problem?
As I see it the real issue is why do new players to any game eventually taper off to near zero.
New gamers enter the market every day, yet there are hundreds of thousands if not millions of gamers who have never played a particular MMORPG, even amongst those who favor the genre.
Also it's an issue of retention, millions have tried EVE according to CCP, and many still give it a go even today, yet they rarely stick around.
So I'm thinking the real problems which there needs to be more innovation on are attracting and retaining new players ad infinitum so that lower level content always remains active.
I realize neither solves the issue of making them relevant forever to those who've already completed the content, but hey, no way to make climbing the same mountain fun forever either is there?
"True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde
"I need to finish" - Christian Wolff: The Accountant
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
"The 'outdated content' problem was (and still is) an issue with tabletop games. It's incredibly difficult to create content that low and max levels can both succeed at the same time without creating massive unbalance in the game."
It's not "low and max levels", it's Low and Mid, and Mid and Max, levels.
Having content designed for all takes away from Advancement. That's not good.
Why do people still ignore the most obvious "Fix" there is?
Reduce the Power Gaps.
You can easily enhance the leveling experience with all of the ideas that have already been used. Maybe come up with some new ones too.
Such as WoW's Rogue ability to throw down that powder and go into stealth, as just one example.
Such a game has so much potential for all the things that are wrong, or missing, from the status quo.
While I love the Skill based ideal best, I'd gladly play a Class based game with reduced Power Gaps, especially if they added in a mix of Class and Skill add-ons.
Once upon a time....
Either your toon is tuned, or the world is tuned to your toon, it doesn't matter, it's all the same basic thing. And it feels empty of meaning.
Once upon a time....
I could find groups easily in most every mmorpg. Even Vanguard at the end when populations were at their lowest.