V13 tidbit

Ctaylor said:
I like having rewards for casual players (off-line time can be used as a resource), and think that casual/solo players should always be able to make progress. Ultimately, however, the player that invests more time into the game will be able to make faster progress and earn more rewards. The same way that a person spends more time mastering a hobby or a sport. The differences in skill are important, too. A skilled player should have advantages over lesser skilled players.
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No question about that, and I too don't have a problem with players who play the most being the best. That isn't really what I meant with my comment. I just want it to feel rewarding to play at a casual pace as well.

I'm not looking, or caring about, having the "best" character in the game. I just want to feel rewarded for my time commitment, even if its a small amount of time. In many of the MMOs I've played, if I didn't have hours to spend at a time I couldn't get anything done that was worth playing for. And if I didn't string together many of those long sessions, I might well have not even been playing the game at all.

Those people who want to spend 24/7 on the game should get more, and "better", rewards by the very nature of the fact that they have put more time into it than I will. I would never ask to be able to match them as somebody that is well aware of my own limitations in terms of the amount of time I will put into an MMO.
 
We are constantly thinking about how to better involve the players into the world (from player-driven economies, to player-created content and other player-focused systems). We have some new ideas on how to involve players into the overall story. Some of them are very tricky, but if we can pull it off, players will have more control over how the world turns out than any other game I can think of (except, perhaps, A Tale in the Desert).
-Chris Taylor
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Any reason it couldn't feature a bunch of non level/non raid based mechanics? As doofy as Puzzle Pirates is, I really rather like the series of minigames that they use to do most things there in the sense that there isn't a classic grind.
 
Corvin said:
Any reason it couldn't feature a bunch of non level/non raid based mechanics? As doofy as Puzzle Pirates is, I really rather like the series of minigames that they use to do most things there in the sense that there isn't a classic grind.
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There are already some non-level/non-raid based mechanics. Not as blatant as the Puzzle Pirates activities, as that does tend to mess around with immersion. I'm also currently playing Wizard 101, and they have some great minigames for recharging mana. We won't be as blatant as them either, but the idea of mixing up gameplay so you're not doing the same thing over-and-over is a strong one.
 
This is going to use S.P.E.C.I.A.L. right, so I don't see how it's going to fit the normal MMORPG format. [Tank / Healer / DPS] I mean we're not gonna see someone roll up the Combat Medic class, and shoot allies with stimpacks propelled out of a gun are we?... right? I didn't just give someone an idea did I? :?

Well, I'm still looking forward to this with cautious optimism. Though, I am a bit confused how it can get the money to see the light of day in the first place.

Also about WoW... is there an article or something that can describe to me what the big deal is with this game? I've never played it, nor do I ever plan to. I'm constantly at a loss whenever it's used in an argument. My MMORPG experience has only been...

Ultima Online
Asheron's Call 1 & 2 - Beta's only
EverQuest 1 & 2
Anarchy Online
City of Heroes
Horizons: Empire of Istaria - Beta
Lord of the Rings Online - Beta

What is it that makes WoW significantly different from my experience with those games?

Ugh, I'm rambling... Seacrest out
 
"What is it that makes WoW significantly different from my experience with those games?"

Absolutely nothing, wow just was easy for the retards to understand, because it had hand-holding everywhere, and easy as fuck quests.

Anyone calling "every" new MMO to come out a wow clone is someone who's parents are brother and sister, or some other horrible genetic deficit.

Most people that do this are people who got to know MMO's through wow, and found that anything new was a chance they had to do the "entire thing" all over, so they get defensive, scared that their first love(or first rape, however you put it) will break up with them.

I would LOVE a Post-apocalyptic MMO with guns, having some great fun with FalloutOnline at the moment, even though it's broken and cryptic, the idea of traversing the wasteland, looking for stuff to kill, and loot to sell, is basicly the core of my fallout experience, that and well written quests.

Allthough i am a bit worried how they are going to do these, might be an idea to look at the PQ-system from Warhammer: age of reckoning.

The only gripe i have with an MMO of fallout, is that they will probably make it so that you can't kill people in town, or can't kill people unprovoked at all, which would ruin MY experience of the game, as half the fun of an MMO is either killing people FAR below your level, or getting killed by someone FAR above your level while exploring.
Call me a twat or a ganker, but PK'ing helps make a believable world
 
There are already some non-level/non-raid based mechanics. Not as blatant as the Puzzle Pirates activities, as that does tend to mess around with immersion. I'm also currently playing Wizard 101, and they have some great minigames for recharging mana. We won't be as blatant as them either, but the idea of mixing up gameplay so you're not doing the same thing over-and-over is a strong one.
-Chris Taylor
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Thanks. That's good to hear. That upgrades me to the cautious optimism level. I tend to reach a serious boredom curve in the grind games... despite the 'grind' being designed to keep me playing. I also don't like having to rely on vast amounts of people to accomplish game goals. I think there's a naturally solo bint to Fallout... it's a Mad Max like wasteland with room for people to band together... but it's also about wanderers on empty terrain.

I'd love the ability to not be subjected to idiots babbling, an utter lack of RP, and limitations on player killing/adult stuff (drugs, sex, the Wasteland) but I understand those are harder to achieve practically.
 
Spoonfeed said:
The only gripe i have with an MMO of fallout, is that they will probably make it so that you can't kill people in town, or can't kill people unprovoked at all, which would ruin MY experience of the game, as half the fun of an MMO is either killing people FAR below your level, or getting killed by someone FAR above your level while exploring.
Call me a twat or a ganker, but PK'ing helps make a believable world
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I totally agree with you there. Thats why, for myself, Ultima Online, at the very beginning was the only MMO I've ever really liked.

And I'm saying that as somebody who WAS NOT a PK at all in that game. When UO came out I was in my final year of college, so I was barely even going to class and I could spend all the time on the game (which I think permenantly alienated me from a girlfriend of about 5 years). And I can't tell you how frusterated, angry, and pissed off random PKs made me time and time again.

But if you take that away, you are left with little reason (IMO) for the game to even be online anymore, other than being a chat room. I mean, once you learn the world there are no suprises. If I can go out into the woods or a dungeon and know what I'm going to have to deal with, where is the fun in that? As frusterating as it was, it DID actually make it feel like a virtual world when a group of ravaging PKs came through a dungeon slaughtering innocents at random.

Do I try and recall to town, making a hasty retreat to save my own ass? Or do I stay and try to help protect some people, or just go down swinging? At least its a somewhat meaningfull choice.

And its not just the PK freedom. It was the free looting. Sorry, if you're killed out there, your stuff is going to get swiped. And also the pretty severe death penalties too played into it. There is no reason to even fear death in MMOs anymore. What do you lose that you can't make up for in a half hour? Some MMO's even less than that. Don't make it too easy for me.

But, the days of that kind of real feeling "danger" in an MMO are long gone I'm afraid. Nobody is going to take the risk of the crying customer quitting their game because they lost their shiny sword to a mean PK, anymore.
 
No, the problem doesn't lie with the disgruntled customers.

MMOs have become an economy.

With gold farming, power leveling, ebay auctions and the like (violation of ToS maybe, but there's no denying they have become popular) some players actually spend money on their characters. Beyond that, MMOs with monthly fees practically charge the player for being able to create that there character who would then be wiped at will, if only due to lag and bad luck.
Let's not forget micropayments and its ilk, either.

The problem is that the initial view of the player's character as just another savegame has been replaced by that of a commodity. A commodity you, the player, spend money (and effort, which equals money from an economical POV) on and therefore make more valuable.

The problem isn't just that the players in general care too much about their characters, it's more that there's too many players, and thus too many griefers.

PKs are one thing, griefers another. PKs may provide challenge. Griefers only provide discontent.
 
Ctaylor said:
I'll admit that I didn't give EVE a fair chance, I think EQOA or SWG shipped around the same time and held my attention longer. EVE is easily one of the more interesting games out there, but mining asteroids was terribly boring. Never making it past that stage, I'm know I missed a lot of game. I try to follow what's happening in EVE, but that's not the same as playing it. (The new tactic of using an Orca to bring in -10 players to secure areas cracks me up as a sign of player ingenuity.)
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EVE's difficulty curve is pretty strange for most games these days, it starts out way higher than most games and goes from there so the first few hours are crazy (the original tutorial was like six or eight hours long, I think it's down to an hour or two now) which I personally liked as it drove away a lot of the casual crowd (and hence a large portion of the asshats) but I understand why some people would have issues with it. My beef with EVE is that the gameplay is repetitive and not super interesting unless you're part of a corporation (which is good and bad, it's good that corporations are good and nice that they aren't required to play any missions I ran into [don't know about high level missions] so it doesn't force the player to join them but, at the same time, the nature of the game does kind of force players to band together [which can be good or bad depending on taste]). The real beauty of EVE is how player based the entire game is, the economy, space stations, piracy, dangerous sectors, and I'm sure more that I'm not thinking of, are player based. The developers set up most (all?) of the sectors in non-low level space and have a bunch of quests and such for players to do but the beauty of the game is the player centric content.

Another great thing about EVE is that they don't have soul binding or any of that crap, when your ship gets destroyed every item gets rolled for to see if it's destroyed or not (hence solving the problem) while the rest is left where you died, which all in all feels very natural.

That said, where I think EVE falls apart is in some of the core gameplay, stuff like mining and their missions (even the combat ones, which do become better with more people) generally aren't overly interesting. I do like that missions are in areas created for you and your group only, allowing the player to play through it as intended and allowing for more interesting and structured missions/quests. It wasn't all of the game and to some degree it's probably due to the setting of the game that this is really believable but it was a nice feature. It also seems to cut out the need or use of crap kill quests (still has Fed-Ex quests) like "Kill 30 boars" because there's no interference from other players. I think where EVE (and every MMO I've ever played) comes up short is in the solo gameplay and maybe even combat in general (which again is a standard problem of MMOs).

Ashmo said:
MMOs have become an economy.
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Indeed. I think that by nature of allowing players to pay cash for in game content (usually in the form of microtransactions), the player doesn't want to lose that content out of shitty luck or because another player killed them and swiped it and will feel cheated if they do. Personally, I like the idea of getting a reward for killing another player like a randomly chosen item (except for crap, so only equipment) from their inventory. Now I think that games like Fallout and EVE that don't have magical crap have a bit of an edge up when it comes to dealing with equipment because there isn't magical shit so it and you don't have to fight Bubba Hotep fifty-seven times in hopes that he drops an item with a 1/10000 drop rate so you can outright destroy items when players die as well (could do the EVE system and have it determine how much is dropped [or destroyed against NPCs] when a player is killed). Durability is also a solution if you limit the number of times a player can repair an item (but I think I already mentioned this).

Ashmo said:
PKs are one thing, griefers another. PKs may provide challenge. Griefers only provide discontent.
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Indeed. Griefers should be punished and PKers should be rewarded but to do that a game needs to be clear about what makes a player a griefer and what makes them a PKer. Again, EVE has a good solution to this by having areas with different security levels and areas with higher security levels are basically safe from PC pirates while those with low levels are a risk. EVE also has a bounty system in order to reward other players for killing PKers and griefers while PKers get rewarded by being able to loot the wreck of the ship they destroyed.
 
Ah I really can't buy a MMO if it has monthly fees, I just can't bring myself to do it. If I buy it, I will HAVE to play it or my money is wasted (for that month). Also, depending on how much it costs each month, it is probably going to be too much money for me to spend. Sad.
 
The biggest issue for me is the monthly fee. It's ok for me to pay 40/50€ for the box, if the game is awesome. If not, then about 25€ at most. But for monthly fees NOTHING else than 5€, and that's already too much. With 5€ a month I can pay for a server of my own to play in along with 100 other players, and they play for free, without lag...
 
Morbus said:
The biggest issue for me is the monthly fee. It's ok for me to pay 40/50€ for the box, if the game is awesome. If not, then about 25€ at most. But for monthly fees NOTHING else than 5€, and that's already too much. With 5€ a month I can pay for a server of my own to play in along with 100 other players, and they play for free, without lag...
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In all honesty, I rarely care about the monthly fee.

For me, as long as I get what I pay for, I'm happy. Be it content, good patches, blah blah blah... It's one of the reasons I have to give WoW props for. I genuinely feel that I'm getting something for my $15 a month.

On top of that, it's not like Blizz is pocketing that $15. I remember reading somewhere that at the end of the day, after all their expenses and such, Blizz only keeps something like $.49 of each subscription fee.

Paying for the packaging and such makes sense, considering how many hands it went through to get put on the shelf for you to buy.

But yeah, I'm ok with it, it all makes sense in my little world :)
 
Critter said:
On top of that, it's not like Blizz is pocketing that $15. I remember reading somewhere that at the end of the day, after all their expenses and such, Blizz only keeps something like $.49 of each subscription fee.
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I highly doubt it, link?

Critter said:
For me, as long as I get what I pay for, I'm happy. Be it content, good patches, blah blah blah... It's one of the reasons I have to give WoW props for. I genuinely feel that I'm getting something for my $15 a month.
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WoW is like EQ in that it really hurts the pocket book, not quite as bad as EQ but still it charges you a large monthly fee (though thanks to WoW, $15 a month has become increasingly common) in addition to buying the game and all of it's expansions off the shelf.

My thing with charges is either have it be monthly fees or off the shelf cost, not both. If it's going to be pure monthly fee based then a higher subscription fee is reasonable but when you're buying it off the shelf then the monthly fee should be reasonable and do no more (rounded up to the nearest dollar) than pay for the server related fees. For example WoW should give you at least a three months subscription when you buy the game off the shelf for $50 ($5 for packaging, shipping & handling, and the game) and all of the expansions should come with the service and should not have to be bought separately. I found out with WoW (which I got minimal enjoyment from) and FFXI (which is one of my favorite MMOs [possibly because I had an entertaining linkshell {private chat channel}]), though I have no love for it doing the same shit with expansions that WoW does) is that $15 a month is just plain too much. $10 a month is the most I can see myself paying but that'd be borderline, $5 a month and I'd pick up a subscription to FFXI and EVE from time to time.
 
Slaughter Manslaught said:
Morbus said:
It doesn't in my poor little world.
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My poor little world is poorer than your poor little world.

I feel your pain.
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Eu sei, eu sei... :(

UncannyGarlic said:
I highly doubt it, link?
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It MAY be true. But if it is, then the whole development cycle of the expansions and maybe the game itself are supported by that monthly fee, so all sales are pure gain.

Still, I should remind everyone that the game comes with at least 1 month of play, as far as I know. And it's possible that there are some promotions. But I agree that, at 15€/month, it should be only monthly fees and a free gamebox. Either that or a gamebox worth 60€ should come with four months of play.
 
Morbus said:
Still, I should remind everyone that the game comes with at least 1 month of play, as far as I know. And it's possible that there are some promotions. But I agree that, at 15€/month, it should be only monthly fees and a free gamebox. Either that or a gamebox worth 60€ should come with four months of play.
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Indeed and that was my point, paying $50-60 for a game with only one month of play that costs $15 a month is fucking ridiculous, especially when they also sell expansions for $30 (which, I think, also come with a month of play). I don't really like Guild Wars' gameplay but I like their sales method, they sell a new stand alone expansion every six months (for $50-60 I believe) which averages out to the same cost as monthly fees but is assured content. That's really part of my problem with the monthly fees, it wouldn't be so bad if every $50-80 worth of fees you got an expansion pack worth of new content but most don't, it seems to average out to probably around a year for most games (two years for some) which is, for most games, between $120-180. It's the fundamental problem with MMOs, the price/content is completely out of whack with other games on the market which includes online games (Diablo games are my favorite to compare to MMOs).
 
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