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Best Games for Theorycrafters
vader999
Member UncommonPosts: 136
For equipment I've not seen anything even close to approach Anarchy Online. Making the perfect build can result in days just trawling through the items database to find the gear you need to equip the gear you need to equp the gear you want. Theres a greater variety of stats on equipment than any game ever made and although there are the popular builds, even after all these years people still come up with new ways to employ what appeared to be useless or impossible to equip equipment. Most people dont find that fun, but for people who like to theorycraft AO rocks.
Its biggest downfall is skills. With a very constrained scope for skills (nanos) each class can use, and further constraints although not as limited for weapons and their associated skills.
Guild Wars takes the prize for skills with the system of only having 8 skills out of a potential 50+ for each class which can then be merged with another 50+ from a secondary class, limitless potential especially when you're making a build for a team of 8. I'm not sure if things have changed but definitely in the first 18 months there was always room to employ unique ideas effectively against the popular builds. Setting up 8 players around a few core strategies and deciding all their skills, equipment and tactics and having it work effectively was much more rewarding than producing a perfect equipment setup.
Are there any others games in either of these categories (equipment, skills) that as someone who theorycrafts alot you've enjoyed.
EDIT: For those that didn't get what the ef I'm on about. I'm after games with complex systems to muck around with.
Its biggest downfall is skills. With a very constrained scope for skills (nanos) each class can use, and further constraints although not as limited for weapons and their associated skills.
Guild Wars takes the prize for skills with the system of only having 8 skills out of a potential 50+ for each class which can then be merged with another 50+ from a secondary class, limitless potential especially when you're making a build for a team of 8. I'm not sure if things have changed but definitely in the first 18 months there was always room to employ unique ideas effectively against the popular builds. Setting up 8 players around a few core strategies and deciding all their skills, equipment and tactics and having it work effectively was much more rewarding than producing a perfect equipment setup.
Are there any others games in either of these categories (equipment, skills) that as someone who theorycrafts alot you've enjoyed.
EDIT: For those that didn't get what the ef I'm on about. I'm after games with complex systems to muck around with.
Comments
I dunno are they making a dress me up barbie dance off game?
i remember implant stacking and begging for mochams gift, hated it.
these days, eve is my theorycrafting heaven. we even have graphs to find the optimal orbit range
Im sorry but i didnt completely get what you were trying to day.
Do you want a game with a very in depth and deep crafting system where you can make items to your own liking? If so, id say try Ryzom. Free for now, but will be P2P soon.
Ryzom has an amazing crafting system, you can buy plans with ure skill points, for example a shield plan, then get materials (Theres thousands of varietys which effect the outcome of the shield in many ways.) And build.
You should check it out.
Eve. Dear lord, I spent days planning ship setups, and that was years ago when they had much less content.
Your thread title makes it sound like you want any sort of theorycrafting. Your post makes it sound like you exclude most theorycrafting except for two narrow subsets of it. Nontrivial gear theorycrafting is an almost non-existent subset, even.
If you're willing to count other notions of theorycrafting, then you've really got no right to fancy yourself a theorycrafter unless you've played A Tale in the Desert a good bit. I dare say that I don't expect to see another commercial game in my lifetime that goes that heavy on the theorycrafting.
Most people in thread have no idea wtf you are talking about. But I do.
EVE Online one person mentioned has it. You already know what skills to grab to maximize your ship effectiveness but its great fun playing around in EFT (EVE fitting tool) and messing around with different ship setups. Also checkout EVEMon / Battleclinic. Lots of setups for ships
EVE almost rivals GW here. It might be its equal if we focus on ship fittings I agree with above guy [edit]
okay I'm looking at fits for Ishtar right now in EVEMon. There are over 176 loadouts. Some might share somethings in common.
I'd say GW will take the lead but next up is EVE
-- hey are we discussing PVP Here? Although for PVE my answer remains the same
meh dare I say it?
WoW has a bit of it going on with the talent trees to be honest.
it has a great deal of it actually with tiered gear and talent trees. Much more than anyone here will give it credit for.
"If you want a picture of the future, imagine a robot foot stomping on a human face -- forever."
For theorycrafting as you described it, I would suggest A Tale in the Desert, EVE Online and maybe even City of Heroes.
- A Tale in the Desert is extreme crafting, organization, planning and strategy in terms of a crafter's know how. There's ample room for you to experiment with crafting and invent new ways of doing things.
- EVE Online is so in-depth and complex that to get ahead, you'll HAVE to theorycraft to some extent. Whether it comes down to starting your own industry, designing your own method of combat, or your own get-rich-quick scheme, EVE is probably the most theorycraftable game. The only downside is, you'll be waiting a lot to get where you want to go.
- City of Heroes, while not so deeply ingrained with theorycrafting, can be interesting to those that want to go against the grain and make it work. Coming up with a character concept, picking a unique set of powers and then slotting that character accordingly and making him viable in a group/solo setting requires a great deal of creativity and imagination. A lot of people in CoX stick with flavor of the month builds and follow the crowd - others like to spin ideas around and make innovative characters that actually work.
Hope that helps.
Don't play city of heroes it got frakked beyond recognition in issue 13 pvpers left in herds. It's all slow and looks like a WoW duel. Before i13 we were true heroes, able to travel superfast and combat. IT makes me weep to see that ncsoft trashed it so.... I should resub just to see how bad it is.........
Even before it wasn't all that great you'd get quickly frustrated. only heroes were any good. Villians were weaker and got massacred in pro Guids vs Guilds. I was there. I had L50s. it sucked
Yeah, hero wise you had experimentation. Meaning now you regulated to Arena matches primarily. H vs Villian is a no-go.
^ This guy is of course, referring to PvP.
If you're a hardcore PvPer, you don't really need to be playing CoX anyways - it's famous for it's grouping/strategic PvE. There's still ample experimentation and inventiveness to be had there.
guild wars.
builds for individual characters that form your guilds build and then shitload of tactics during the match itself.
strategists game of choice lol
Dark Age of Camelot has (used to have) a very complex itemization process. With the introduction of spell crafting and later the Trials of Atlantis expansion there were many many variables to consider to perfectly balance all stats with a combination of loot and crafted gear. If one is into that sort of thing... There are/were even tools written by community members, backed up by extensive item-databases, that would allow you to play around with all possible combinations - for hours. And then came the minor part of actually getting all the things you need for your perfect template, yuck.
Used to be a *major* grind - gotten better now, tho.
Spreadsheet wars mmo. My excel macros will own you all.
You just don't understand how awesome it is to delve deep into game mechanics. You need to understand that this is like deep space exploration, you have an insanely limited range of tools to gather information than need build the whole picture off of that.
I find it amazing that by 2020 first world countries will be competing to get immigrants.
Macros? Ha! My spreadsheet just to decipher cooking from the third telling of A Tale in the Desert was about 7 MB. And if you want to do paint in A Tale in the Desert, Excel simply isn't powerful enough to keep things straight--unlike a lot of applications that really ought to be done with a real programming language. Write a pretty efficient program, leave it running overnight, and you'll have a decent approximation of your answer the next day. (Well, that or get the relevant programs from someone else who already wrote them, but I digress.) People tried to write programs to systematically pick apart alchemy pretty much failed at it.
it has a great deal of it actually with tiered gear and talent trees. Much more than anyone here will give it credit for.
I'll give it plenty of credit for it.
In fact, it's one of the reasons I stopped playing.
The game is just a network of numbers and statistics. The raids, bosses, mobs, walls, floors, trees... it might as well all just be floating math, because that's how most of the players see it.
Grouping used to be fun. Now it's:
Player 1: "Hey, thanks for the group invite."
Player 2: "Your hit rating is 1 point below the cap. Because of this I can only assume that you are a horrible human being."
Player 1: "It's just a game."
Player 2: "I hope you get a terminal illness in real life because your hit rating in World of Warcraft is one point below the cap.
Player 1: "That's a horrible thing to say."
Player 2: "Die in a fire."
Science flies people to the moon. Religion flies people into buildings.
WoW doesn't really have very deep theory that players need to deal with. As far as gear goes, usually it's this piece is better than that piece. That's not complicated theory; that's completely trivial. For talent trees it's more complicated, but even that is just pick your build once and leave it, because it's expensive to respec frequently.
Talent Trees in WoW is not theory crafting. Customization in general is not theory crafting.
Just because you can choose to take your character one of three routes, doesn't make him unique. A Fury Warrior is not any more unique of a theory than another Fury Warrior, and just because he was the option to be an Arms Warrior doesn't make him innovative.
I'm a big fan of WoW, but it's definitely not great for it's theorycrafting. That's ridiculous.
EvE: Played for many years, should have mentioned it in the OP though I just touched on two extremes, Eve does have a greater variety of areas to explore.
WoW: Unless things have dramatically changed since the first few months of release it has as much depth as any other game on the market, especially the wealth of carbon copy 3-tree clones ever since Diablo. Saying that Diablo 2 has more depth with the greater number of stats on gear that you build in tandem with the skill trees. I'm not saying WoW and similar games are for dumb people, they're just not for spreadsheet nerds
CoX & ATITD: I'll definitely be looking into them, however I should have stated in my OP that the main motivating factor for me to delve deep to learn game mechanics and being bored shitless sifting through and sorting information ike its a job is PvP. Without the carrot of an uber pwnage build it just wouldn't be worthwhile.
Either way the replies have been useful for me and hope for a few others too.
Opinions differ on whether A Tale in the Desert is PvP. Some would say that the game has no PvP. Some would say that everything in the game is PvP. Neither are entirely wrong.
Now, it doesn't have PvP combat. The PvP, such as it is, is far more vicious than mere combat.