Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
Quick Links
Why do vets want longer content?
monochrome19
Member UncommonPosts: 723
I often see mmo vets bemoan current titles because dungeons and the like can be soloed or done in 5-10 mins unlike in the past where it was face-stompingly hard (I'm assuming). Nothing wrong with this, I like a challenge myself, but thinking about it further I realized something. Isn't this content BETTER for vets? It's probably not a stretch to say this content was designed with you in mind. By now, most vets are in their 30s or 40s with a family, job, etc with very sparse time.
If challenging/long content WAS developed vets wouldnt be able to participate in it because of their limited time. So shouldnt we be seeing the opposite? Shouldnt vets be praising new developers for making content they can solo between a hectic life?
Comments
They seem to think longer, tedious, time consuming, etc is synonymous to challenging and difficult.
rpg/mmorg history: Dun Darach>Bloodwych>Bards Tale 1-3>Eye of the beholder > Might and Magic 2,3,5 > FFVII> Baldur's Gate 1, 2 > Planescape Torment >Morrowind > WOW > oblivion > LOTR > Guild Wars (1900hrs elementalist) Vanguard. > GW2(1000 elementalist), Wildstar
Now playing GW2, AOW 3, ESO, LOTR, Elite D
Well here's the thing, most vets, like myself, in their 30's and 40's have been multi-tasking life and their games since our teens. Only difference being instead of a real job and family, we had, back then, after school homework, sports/recreation, girl/boyfriends and part-time jobs. Case in point, real vets don't need games dumbed down to fit a certain life-style, as we have always factored in our game time with real life.
I do have way more spare time since i started to work. No idea why other students have so much spare time, but i certainly did not. Now i just work my 5-10 hours a day and have plenty of spare time left. Helps that my better half is playing games as well i guess.
Also id much rather spend my day bashing my head against a wall then playing current gen easymodes. There is just no fun to be had for me if failing is not possible and all i do is questing solo. I WANT to group up, i WANT to socialize and i WANT to do dungeons that can not be cleared within a few days. Days? Yes days. You don't have to clear a dungeon in one go.
So no, i don't think the current developers design games for me. And since everyone i see screaming for even easier and shorter content is sub 20, i kinda see a trend on who might be the target.
You obviously have no idea what people are asking for, or you would not write this at all. If you make CURRENT games longer they would be tedious and time consuming without fun and challenge. I agree.
Back in the EQ days dungeons simply used to be HUGE and FUN.
MMOs finally replaced social interaction, forced grouping and standing in a line while talking to eachother.
Now we have forced soloing, forced questing and everyone is the hero, without ever having to talk to anyone else. The evolution of multiplayer is here! We won,... right?
First of all, it's the filthy casuals who don't have their entire family playing with them or are unwilling to neglect their families for video games that are complaining about long dungeon times.
But in actual practice the complaint is, is that the dungeon itself is meaningless. The majority of dungeons are so boring that we need to twist, wall hump, false pull our way through it in order to minimize the amount of time physically spent in it. Today, dungeons are like grocery shopping, first few times you're like "I'm a fucking adult!" Then after a while you're just hoping they have the brand of jumbo egg you're looking for (in this case, loot or dungeon currency).
Vets want meaningful dungeoning, especially when it's going to be forced down our throats over and over again as we are forced to re-run the content endlessly.
Oh man, I laughed so hard I'm in pain lol.
Funnily enough we (I speak for myself and the people I know) didn't think it was tedious or time consuming and longer isn't exactly a bad thing. Some of my best memories were spending hours in the bowls of Guk with friends, spending 2-3 days in airplane with guildmates, or finally completing a long chain of quests that took weeks or months to get all the pieces to drop and having that awesome feeling in knowing you worked hard to accomplish something.
When you wiped in a very bad spot you had to run back naked or grab a spare set of gear out of the bank and fight your way back to your body if you wanted to get it. A game like WoW where you die and just run back to your body and click the rez button doesn't exactly make you feel like you are in any real danger or any sense of urgency since your body never decays and you never lost experience. Wheres the fun in that?
The fun is where anyone feels it's fun. You have your fun your way other people have their fun their way. What I'm saying is alot of people on this site seem to equate longer, tedious, and time consuming means challenging and difficult which is very far from the truth.
This goes to show that this clumping of vets or casuals has no merit to say any measure can be made on a certain demographic.
I am wondering on these statistics, and where are these factoids on vets or casuals?
And also which game has 5-10 minutes dungeons?
Write bad things that are done to you in sand, but write the good things that happen to you on a piece of marble
Today, games are made for the ones that can't see beyond their own nose, with A.D.D. and the smarts of a gnat. LOL
Ah, you used the dreaded S word.. Statistics, which as everyone knows, or should, is synonymous with Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics.
Give me the right lever and i can move a mountain, give me the right Statistic and i can prove that the mountain is actually somewhere else, and painted blue
The OP doesn't seem to realize that people get better and better at the things they do. Making games for people that are just starting out means they are too easy for those that have been at it for a while or are not interesting to those that have been there and done that.
We need all types of games to be made so we can all enjoy playing them. Right now the industry is targeting people in the early stages of their gaming hobby. The MMO vets are just asking for their types of games to be made too.
Ok you need to explain your point a little better. What games are these people referring to since the OP was about old MMO's where the content was harder as opposed to today's crop of games where you can step into a dungeon for the first time and not have to worry about dying because its holding your hand the entire way.
WOW and ESO come to mind. Wow only with a good group, but pushing for those 5 min runs was actually not all that rare within my guild. It was so damn boring, we had to do this to enjoy our time playing.
Did not see any dungeon in ESO that actually went for 5 min at all before i stopped playing.
There will be more, i am sure. Usually leave a game before i get into dungeons tho as they get boring way before that most of the time.
MMOs finally replaced social interaction, forced grouping and standing in a line while talking to eachother.
Now we have forced soloing, forced questing and everyone is the hero, without ever having to talk to anyone else. The evolution of multiplayer is here! We won,... right?
The industry needs to move past the hand holding and just make a game that is fun and challenging. If you can't learn to play your class then you re roll until you find one you can play. If not then you rage quit out of frustration and its like natural selection stepped in and pruned out the bad players before they can start wiping raids with their incompetence.
I don't entirely disagree with this. I think that, for a large number of gamers, they want longer, more difficult content not because they don't like easy. Rather, they want to feel some achievement from surviving / conquering / enduring the content. The reward justifies their time investment. The logical assumption is that an older gaming population is going to have less time to play. Yes, they have more responsibilities that vie for their free time.
But gamers are going to make time to game, even if it means a choice between gaming and sleep. Adult gamers have solved this problem creatively, by incorporating gaming into family activities, by limiting themselves to weekend gaming, or simply biting the bullet and playing until they are in danger of falling asleep in the big meeting tomorrow. I know quite a few people, including myself, that have used each of those excuses more than once.
Logic, my dear, merely enables one to be wrong with great authority.
You mention 2 different things there, length(time) and challenge. As far as both goes it is different.
Length(time): The idea in general is to have more full places ride for exploration or progression. For raids it wasn't about clearing a place in one day, but rather taking it bite by bite and completing it over sometime. This places the over-all experience far more enjoyable and gives a 'journey' rather then just some check list task to get through and be done with. Games like WoW show how this can fail quickly by having content finished up within a short timespan with other difficulties being 'progression'. Its a big reason why content in wow becomes boring a LOT faster then it had before where guilds took time progressing through and having something new to strive for.
Most vets I feel are fine with having shorter sections to do, but at the same time it should feel meaningful. I think most don't want tedious grind worth of content, just stuff that doesn't end just as quickly as it started. ^^:;
Challenge: Really? Do people really want to face roll through stuff without challenge? Why even play a game if its a laughing joke? I really don't see why people do like stuff that isn't a challenge. It's not just vets, honestly who DOESNT want challenge? What thrill do you get out of beating something a 5 year old could do without much trouble? Its not fun, it really isn't. I don't see how this view of a 'vet' would change for someone new in the MMO or general gaming environment.
As for the notion of vets having no time... BS. Vets didn't have much time even then. Not to mention you have a new generation that DOES have more time that can pick up and do things vets use to do for those who do have 'less' time.
I think the Star Citizen fan base has done this very thing.
100% this. I been gaming since I was in my early teens. I managed to play games while going to high school, being in several clubs and playing sports. I also managed time to go outside and play with friends.
In my 20's I managed to get into an IT Career then started going back to school via online classes for 2 degrees. I still was very able to play Vanilla WOW or TBC with out LFD tools, and instances that took an hour or 2 to complete. While I worked 60+ hours a week took 2 to 3 classes online I still managed during Vanilla and TBC to get some raid progression done and hard time consuming content done.
Now I am almost 35. Finished my Degrees, working in the IT field for 11 years, have a wife that plays MMOs with me, and 3 kids. I still manage to find time to play with friends who are not 3 time zones from me even if its only for 2 hours a week. I also find time to get in 8 to 10 hours a week a week of gaming. I put my 1 and 2 year old down in bed at 730 pm and I am gaming until about 930 pm 2 to 3 days a week. I get some more hours during the weekend and still manage to get content. done. I also do not expect every night to get into an instance because that is were friends come in and its time to chill with my friends. Yes they are friends even if I have not met most of them. I still have known many of them for 8+ years.
I dont need Fast food 15 minute instances because to me that is a waste of time. 30 to 45 minute instances which take a bit of coordination while we check on TS works very well for a casual gamer like myself. The people that always bring up the TIME EXCUSE BULLSHIT I love to tell them to leave MMOs because they dont belong because they want a genera that is built on the Social Aspect and having to work as a TEAM to achieve goals to be dumbed down to playing Angry Birds on their phones while taking a crap. Sorry that type of game does not mix at all with MMOs and that is why the genera is in the toilet.
The only thing MMOs do not need is old time Time sinks like it would take me to jump 3 planets in SWG and could take me up to an hour to get out to point A. We also do not need or want LFD type tools because they take and chance a social game into a lobby based game where they wait in a city wanting an queue to pop every 5 minutes.
I can accept things will take time like raid progression, or instances, even finding a group for the instance. What I cannot accept is fast pace clear shit in weeks and have months to wait for content unless you are the most hardest core of the hardcore players. If you are an average player no you should take months to get through the content.
Right, an inability to separate challenge from time consumption is definitely a factor.
This is really just an extension of the money-grab of early subscription games. For decades games didn't have excessive timesinks, and then suddenly a new business model comes along (subscriptions) which charged for time, and at the exact same time excessive timesinks start to be part of games (and just those games.) It doesn't take a rocket surgeon to notice the correlation, but if we wanted we could hear it from a MMORPG's lead designer as they define timesink in their own words too.
But there's this strange trait to veteran MMORPG players where many of them will still defend timesinks to this day, even after you point out how it was just a blatant money grab. It's a strange psychological trait.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
Hello Subscriptions were there day 1 of MMOs. UO was the first MMO and they had a Subscription. The Model was designed so they could keep severs up and running and pay for Operations. An MMO By definition is a timesink. Having people to manage servers, having power to keep the servers online, internet access for the servers and Developers to fix bugs and create new content. All of this cost money and is not free. They need people to sub to their game so they can pay their operational cost. Free does not pay the bills.
Now do we need 1 hour timesinks to travel..... NO. However how enjoyable is a dungeon when you can do it 10 times in a day because its 5 or 10 minutes of content? You will get bored as all hell and quit because you are no longer enjoying the content. So having a 30 min to a 90 min dungeon is not unacceptable and no its not a timesink if done correctly.
LOL. I rarely see people who have been playing a long time (I feel veteran, though technically able to be applied here, isn't proper for gaming) complain about lengths of dungeons.
In fact, I see a lot of guys state that now that they have families they enjoy the shorter dungeons.
However, why not have both? Lots of games do this already. I think this is a non issue. Make the games fun again and people wont care. Don't have time to dungeon run? Well back in the old days you'd be able to go do so much more that was equally fun. But hey... today is the world of instant gratification. Every want and suggestion is taken, and the developers take it too literal and go to far with it.
EDIT:
Got to bring this up again, but older games like UO and EQ had a mixture of both. You could one night in either game, feel like doing an epic adventure. Turn off the lights. Get your beverage of choice. You'd have to plan your way through dungeons, maybe even how to get everyone to that particular dungeon. You'd have multiple levels and bosses. You'd have an immense sence of accomplishment if you succeeded and ambition to go back to it later if you failed.
BUT if you wanted a shorter play period, you could easily go to one of the smaller dungeons, explore and fight mobs that may even have rare drops. And tons of shit more that was also a dungeon run or equally stimulating.
Now a days, you don't have that same type of options in the majority of games.
I don't see anyone asking for an entire games worth of dungeons to be long and challenging. This is a made up argument.
What I do see... a bunch of newbies who comment on things they don't know about. Half of you don't even know what MMO means. You guys didn't play the original games. You didn't know how much variety they offered. Today's games typically have less some how. All these "new" things, but they still have less. But hey, how would you know? You aren't a "vet". Enjoy your uninformed opinions.
Now a days games are:
-Finish short dungeon to get 1-2 pieces or experience or your daily
-Repeat that dungeon another 100x until you get what you need to do the next one
-Finish the second short dungeon to get 1-2 pieces or experience or your daily
-Repeat that dungeon another 100x until you get what you need to do the next one
That is such repetitive content.
Plus, you guys get to miss out on awesome stuff as a result of actually long and challenging dungeons that you plan for. You get stuck with a team. Maybe you allowed one guy into your group earlier for another dungeon and liked him, and now he invited you to his group of buddies. You meet a bunch of people. Some hilarious, some conceited. Make some new buddies you look forward to grouping with. Form a new guild out of all the new people that just met.
Today's version is shitty. You join up with a LFG tool, run a short dungeon as fast as possible with almost no time to chat or talk, and then leave the dungeon and join another LFG with new people because the others have different quests or just left after dungeon was over.
You could do that in older MMO's as well. But it wasn't your only option.
Oh please, there are plenty of people that played those old games. They just don't agree with the total exxaggeration from a small niche of people of how good the good old days were. Opinions are opinions, people like you need to stop harping about how your opinion of good is better than others.