Akratus
Bleep bloop.
Here's a post I made on the Bethesda forums in a topic on classes:
Really I think some kind of progression limiting process should be implemented. For example, that you would choose at the beginning whether your character has physical or magical talent. Then the skill rates for one or the other would be higher, and the other quite lower. And what I have always wanted to see in an mmo (that isn't eve) is a system where you can train in anything, but the rate at which you can do that decreases the more you learn. So if I have mastered all combat skills it would take maybe 10 times as long for me to maximize one magical skill. All in the interest of balance of course.
But this seems to all come down to the question of balance. And I would ask:
Is it truly in our best interest to make sure that the playing field is always level? Could we not simply segregate the more powerful players from the less powerful ones? This really seems to be an issue of making everything convenient and easy. That one would complain in an mmo that the world is full of characters more powerful than your level 1 character. And that a player expects the same rewards in avatar strength every single time they accomplish something. But that is only a symptom of a game where there are so many conveniences that these powerful players can even roam around and kill whomever in the first place. I do not think that players shouldn't be able to become powerful but the world should react to it. If you become a serial killer for instance there should be forces around trained in dealing with that sort of thing. Like in EVE, players can become pirates but this results in them being hunted by both players and an ingame police force. Sure, you might get killed whilst out in open space by a pirate and you might hate the game for letting a more powerful player barge into your work as you try to find your place in the world but that does not happen to everyone all the time, the player has options of dealing with it and the player who chose to harass a weaker player will have consequences attached to that. It's funny that a game with far more freedom is actually fairer than the game that tries to give every player the same experience.
MMO's hate to enforce consequences for actions, and want to box everything in. This is the crux of the themepark mmo genre and to me it is extremely simplistic and dull. If you go too far in the other direction people will see the mmo as having a steep learning curve and little user friendliness or friendliness to beginners, but that can be abated by making sure that low level players get into the game gradually. That is what eve does not do for example. I've heard of many players simply finishing or even skipping the tutorial, playing a few missions and then getting bored and quiting. They couldn't ease into the larger universe because the game does not make the players aware of it and give them a path to it, if they wish to be led in that way.
Now how does this apply to teso? Perhaps one could create two different worlds in this game. Not physically seperate places but sociological circles. For example, one could make large stretches of space were players begin simple themepark like questing and leveling areas. Then once someone has had their fill of that and progressed with their character they could for example move to the capital city of the land the player is in. This would be a place more seperate from the surrounding areas but it would have a direct connection to the politics (player directed and otherwise), pvp, endgame etc. of the experienced playerbase and rest of the gameworld. (The pvp area of cyrodill would be the perfect playing ground for this playerbase, and be the thing that seperates the activities of lower level and higher level players.)
This is comparable to what themepark mmo's already have, but the difference here is that there is no difference in complexity between those two things in a regular themepark mmo. Once you have reached the maximum level in say world of warcraft you go around from city to city taking part in pvp events or organizing your guild/a group to do pve events. But the complexity of the overal scheme of gameplay options and depth does not expand a whole lot. But it should. Immensely. You might say that it does in world of warcraft as endgame instances are far more complex than low level grinding. But they are not more complex as much as they are more time consuming and difficult. There is a difference. It is as though the developer holds this complexity back out of a fear that players are too simple minded to accept this but I do not believe it is so. In any case players shouldn't be restricted to simply more challenging versions of what they can already do at a lower level, that being pvp and pve. I say we get rid of those terms alltogether, for the good of gameplay complexity in mmo's. Take a look at this: http://swiftandbitte...wtd/eve-wtd.jpg
This is the thought that holds back mmo design, that the game can not be something too unknown, a thing that is not familiar at all for newcomers. This being so that someone who enjoys world of warcraft can far easier step over to this one. But that logic is broken. World of warcraft players already have world of warcraft. Nobody will ever want to lose all their progress only to switch over to something extremely similar. They will only switch over to something that is better.
