I am editing this cause Nethe posted first and I dont want to beat up on Rhino. Especially since I agree with them.
Rhino is a pvp player, as such they should be interested in a fair and balanced skill based competition. I assume gear and levels would be considered not part of that as they offer innate bonuses, advantages not releated to skill.
As such, a perfect PvP game for him would have no leveling to begin with, end-game would be the entire game as everything would open up immediately. Nothing stops you from getting in on the point of the game from the word GO (cept maybe a tutorial).
That's a design choice though. The intent is a pvp wonderland, and the design needs to accomadate that design.
Am I in the right ballpark?
You actually stated in great.
@Nerelith - I totally understand your desire for the journey to be fun. I enjoyed the journey in games like D&D and WtA. I do enjoy PvP games, in a high Fantasy setting; I don't like FPS games where there is no persistence. But we both agree that WoW make standards for leveling style games lower than you or I would like.
The game begins at level 1. Not 80 or 90, or whatever the cap is. The problem is, you do not demand that the company nmake the game engage you at level 1. You have given up on the idea that the game should be fun at level 1. There is NO difference between a Chess game, and an MMO... or a game of Monopoly, or parcheesi.
An MMO starts at level 1. The problem is, that WoW has many convinced that they should be happy to get through all the content they were unable to make fun and engaging.
They have a Lot of players convinced that since the game does not begin til the level cap... all attention should be focused on the level cap. So any attention focused on making level 1... or 5...or 15 relevant, engaging or fun would be a total waste of time.
People that played MMO's before WoW was released, understand that. So when I say " Wow has dumbed down the genre" they get where I am coming from. The phrase " the game begins at level cap." was something i had never heard...until I played WoW...and the person that told it to me... it turns out that WoW was their first game.
This is Like someone that comes Into a new restaurant that doesn't serve bottomless cups of coffee... and seeing that each refill is the same price as the original cup... being shocked when I ask." wait... there are no bottomless refills here?" " Of course not " they reply as if the idea were foreign..Not realizing that until only a short while ago..... bottomless refills were standard.
Fun, engagement... relevance...from level 1 til cap..used to come standard. Now it's something to be ignored, something to be played through in a week..... if that is the case..why not dispence with the levels to begin with? why not just hand everyone a bunch of skill points and tell them." just put themwherever you want...make a level 60 character." ?
If the game really begins at the level cap... and you are content with that, you have allowed the company to sell you short. That is Like buying a Book that only contains the last chapter, and snippets of the ones In between...the beginning, and the end.
The game begins at level 1.
Let’s discuss this: Class vs Skill. I completely agree that Skill progression games begin the moment you start the game. Dungeons and Dragons is a skill progression game (one I love), that let’s the player start having fun right from the start. Skill progression games are very open ended, and have a horizontal approach to leveling. It’s about what you do with your character in the subtle ways, not how far you take your character. On the other hand class progression games are very vertical (linear) and give you very little flexibility in how you develop your character.
Let’s look at a few skill progression games: All of the Elder Scrolls games (Morrowind, Oblivion, Skyrim), Darkfall, Mortal Online & EvE. These games allow you to start playing and having fun in the game right from the start.
Class level games on the other hand are all about “maxing†your character out, otherwise they wouldn’t have a cap on levels. Progressing through a Class leveling system is about learning your character, and getting all of your skills maxed out. Class level games eventually have a point where a player reaches max level and content is now on a repeat cycle. Games that fall into this category are EQ, Vanguard, AoC, WoW & Tera (just to name a few).
There is however a 3rd choice out there. This is the Hybrid – It starts off as a class based system, but has content similar to the skill based content. There are only 2 games like this that I know of: Dark Age of Camelot and Shadowbane. In Shadowbane it took 3 days to level, but you could play that character joyfully for years. In games like DaoC and SB, even though you were doing the same thing time and time again, it was also very different. Each siege was unique, each capture was fun, each fight you learned something. The mechanics of those games didn’t change each time, it was the experience of the player that changed.
Just because a game begins at level 1 doesn’t mean the enjoyment begins at level 1.
I have never played WoW, although I have played Warcraft. I did not cut my teeth on a game after WoW; I cut it on UO. I am familiar with games that took forever to reach cap, and I understand that their might be a fun factor involved in leveling up. Yes, game companies today seem to “dumb down†the content as leveling occurs.
You want to talk about EQ and its long leveling. I want to talk about UO and how leveling was never a concept in games until EQ. It should all be skill based like UO……….. /sarcasm
EQ was one way of providing fun to a niche group of high fantasy online players. Shadowbane was another way of providing fun to a different niche of players. The key here is they were niche games. Mainstream games have to dumb down their services to include the lowest common denominator.
Fun, engagement... relevance...from level 1 til cap..used to come standard. Now it's something to be ignored, something to be played through in a week..... if that is the case..why not dispence with the levels to begin with? why not just hand everyone a bunch of skill points and tell them." just put themwherever you want...make a level 60 character." ?
You have just described the basis for a “skill†based game. Skill based games (compared to class based) allow the players to put points into the skills they see fit. We are not talking about how much skill an individual player uses in a game. Let me ask you how you would enjoy a game that let you create your character as you saw fit, based upon groups of skills? If the game allowed you to explore and interact with content in a slow way, would it matter if you had all skills available to you at day 1 vs day 1001?
Class base games make you level up; I have not seen a class based game that doesn’t make you level up. But eventually that leveling stops and you hit a cap. Now you have access to all the content in the game, but this doesn’t happen until you have reach max level. Look at Tera, there are several dungeons that can not even be accessed until max level; same with the Battle Grounds in Tera, only available for level 60 players. Skill based games allow you to have access to all the content the game has to offer, at day 1. You may not be able to conquer all the content without fleshing out your character with a few more skills, but the content is all available to you.
Tera is not an inherently flawed game. However there are aspects of the game that are flawed and need work; Vanarch anyone? But content at max level should be the first thing a developer thinks of, as that is where most of the player base will spend there time for years to come. Again why a Shadowbane style game is great, because you code the content once, and then let the playerbase fight over the cities for years to come. Content for low level characters should be secondary, and this is a flaw that too many companies in the industry make. They try and build the first few levels to get a player in, instead of concentrating on the content that players could play for 5+ years.
That is Like Boris Spassky, or Bobby Fisher wantimng to ignore the first 40 moves In chess... and start off without any pawns half the Bishops, and none of the Knights.
" All I want is to get to the endgame." If The whole game is engaging... and fun... then you can afford to slow the game down... and make the economy relevant. But we have all these social networkers that never played DAoC, or EQ... they started with WoW... a dumbed down game that appeals to the Lowest common denominator. They believe that WoW is what an MMO used to be.
I think I am also ready for a game developer to say " you know what? I might not make the next WoW...but I can make a game that will appeal to a steady playerbase..I can make it engaginbg... and fun..all the way from level 1 til cap...I can make it a slow progression, that is full of things to do... so the economy is also relevant from level 1 to cap..and I can make the combat exciting... " If that guy showed up..I'd toss My money at him happilly." And I would Like to think that you and I are not the only ones that would. I just fear it will never happen. As you said, these are business people... and why want to make money...and mney is made by appealing to LCD. even if the product ends up mediocre, all they ask is..' will it sell?"
This is where I have differences in opinion with you. In a game like chess you are playing the game right from the start. In a game like WoW the game doesn't start until you hit max level. I think that short leveling to max cap is the best way to go in game design. However you have to have the end game content to back that up. Meaning you have to have 100 things for a player to do at max level, that never increases his stats, but increases his fun factor.
I look at things through a PvP view point. So when I say that max level is what we are aiming for, it's because anything below max level can't adequately compete, and that's not fun for players. So max level is where the game starts, because it is the place where the most "fair" competition can take place.
In a pure PvE game, I would agree that you can have fun from day 1, and the game can be designed in such a way that max level is not the goal. Now EvE is fun, has no max level, has a huge learning curve and has a great economy. It was built as a PvP game though, with the PvE always being secondary. EvE is the only game I can think of that is similar to your slow down and smell the roses analogy of game play.
So going back to the original post, I don't think Tera is flawed, I think the industry is flawed.
At any rate there is nothing wrong with niche games, if you are in that niche it is fantastic. Also companies can still make money through identifying and targeting a niche market. All I'm saying is that a lot of modern mmos are actually very polished and striving to bring a fun gaming experience to a larger group of people, there are still other games about where you can spend endless hours grinding if thats your thing.
That's the problem, very few companies want to go Niche these days. The Niche game I would want is one that is pure PvP, has no dungeons, no PvE servers, nothing at all to do with PvE; it would be an exact replica of Shadowbane.
The way I view my above post, is that Baseball is niche (like Darkfall), Basketball is niche (like Mortal online), Soccer is niche (like Shadowbane) etc. The conglomeration of these games is what we have now, no longer offering the fun we had with the games in their pure form.
I'm waiting for a game company to say yes we have PvE and we have PvP servers, AND the gameplay is going to be completely different on each type of server. I'm waiting for a game company to realize that we don't need dungeons on PvP servers, if they give us good siege mechanics, and we don't need PvP on PvE servers. See we don't need companies to try and mix and match PvP with PvE, we need them completely separate.
I don't think that Tera is flawed at the core design, I think it's implementation has been flawed. Like having a GvG for Vanarchs on a PvE server; flaw. Someone from a PvP server should be awed at what the PvE server has because it was never on their PvP server. Game companies should be separating the PvE/PvP experience not trying to make it 90% the same.
Now very few companies are into developing games for fun, instead it is all about the 12million subs they want to get with their smoke and mirrors.
They now strive to develop games that larger parts of the community find enjoyable and want to play.
Do you like sports at all? If so, what is your favorite sport of the big 5 - Hockey, Soccer, Football, Baseball, Basketball?
What if a new league started up (like the movie Baseketball) that combined all of those sports together. So your goal is to take a hockey stick and try and dribble a soccer ball (on grass) to score in the endzone; sounds fun right because it takes the best of the best and combines them.
Niche games are more fun because they give that niche player base what they are craving. WoW is trying to give everything to everyone and other game companies are following them; and it doesn't work for these smaller companies. SWTOR could have been awesome, but they just chose to lump every single mechanic into one game.
Personally I want another city management and siege game that is pure PvP. Give me Shadowbane with a new engine, new art, 10k players and I would be happy. I don't need to play a game with hundreds of thousands of other players. Why? Because that is just more servers where I never meet the other people anyways. If a game had 1 or 2 servers with 5k-10k people on each server it would still make money. Sure it's not the big 12mil subs that WoW sees; but there game probably only cost a fraction of the cost as well.
The problem is that people are either too dumb or too ill-informed to make their own choices here, so MMO devs choose to make preset classes to avoid players creating a character that's worthless 40 levels down the road at which point the player is furious with the developer for giving them the rope they hung themselves with.
I see your point but if properly designed, you can give the players a reset so they can re-spec sort of speak to get just the right "path".
The Secret World is a classless game that is quite unforgiving in this aspect so I wonder how many people are going to be pissed off if they made bad talent choices and not at least get a redo or paid redo.
This is where you have to have quick leveling. Shadowbane was great that way; if you messed up on a character you could have another leveled in 3 days. Quick leveling does not diminish from fun, but the developers have to have content already put in for a quick leveling system to work. This is why I love siege systems. From day 1 of a game a city siege system already has the content in the game that will be playing for years to come. I never once felt in Shadowbane that I needed more than the siege system.
In a game like Shadowbane you also didn't have the "holy trinity"; instead you had archetypes of the fighter, healer, rogue and mage. Fighters were high damage, but easy to hit, Healers could be high damage hard to hit or easy to hit, rogues were hard to hit because of high defense and mages were your typical ranged damage. No one archetype was superior to any other, and the only thing you needed in group PvP was at least 1 healer. The type of spec groups that ran around in Shadowbane were numerous, from the dwarf chuckers (axe throwers), to Flying Neph groups, high defense rogue groups, meat shield groups (all fighter types with high HP and high Damage), your stealthers with low damage but super fast attacks etc.
I dislike that I can't climb the mountains in Tera, and that simple things like how large the Camp fire collision box goes out is very frustrating. They have taken away our freedom of true exploration. But that's the difference between sandbox games and theme park games; theme park tell you where to go and how to get there, expecting you to come back for more gear gear gear. To this date, the best two games I have played have been Shadowbane and EvE online (I was going space crazy in EvE, needed more high fantasy).
To me the thing that has been taking games down hill are the complaints of sandbox mechanics and it started back in Trammel. There has also been a big shift in how games are developed due to Blizzard. They changed the niche gaming and brought it mainstream; forever losing what a lot of gamers like in high fantasy settings. Now very few companies are into developing games for fun, instead it is all about the 12million subs they want to get with their smoke and mirrors. No one is going to beat Blizzard on subs. What I hope for is a company that will choose the model like CCP did; build the playerbase with an initial sub number of 10-50k and see it grow to 400k.
The best class based system I ever played was Shadowbane, followed by EvE online.
In EvE you are able to get every skill in the game; but it literally takes years to do it. That doesn't mean you can't be an effective pilot after a few months, and enjoy the game, but you would never want to have a freighter pilot as your combat PvP pilot, you would want 2 different accounts for those 2 different styles of pilots.
I have always felt that class based systems are better. I was talking to a guildy how we need more diversification in games though; his response was it would be too complicated and he would not like that. A game like Shadowbane had a lot of different types of damage: fire, ice, lightning, poison, slashing, blunt, pierce, mental, holy, unholy and maybe a few more. Each class was good at 1 primary form of damage, but could also use a few secondary types of damage. That meant that your enemy had to know what type of damage you were using so they could mitigate against that damage. In Tera we have 1, ONE, type of damage.
For example Sorcerers should have the ability to choose a main damage (fire, ice, lighting - each with different secondary effects besides damage), healers should be able to choose from holy (good) or unholy (bad) damage. Then we as players could have crystals that help mitigate that damage; i.e. 50% less fire damage, 50% less ice damage etc. For melee it would be slash, blunt, pierce and you could choose the type of weapon you want to use. The animations are the same, but the look and speed of the weapons may be different. A hammer is blunt, and slow but does lots of damage; where an axe is faster does slashing damage but does slightly less damage.
I am so used to Shadowbane where you had 18 different classes and so many types of damage. It made the game great, because things never got stale.
Ok that gives me history, but it doesn't justify its implementation.
Why would they make that decision? I question the reasoning behind deciding to have it this way.
Its not contributing anything tangible to the political system by its implementation.
And thus, I feel trainer npc control should be removed.
Why are you hung up on the trainers? In my leveling I never had a problem making it back to Velika, which is where I did all my training (other than the first 10 levels at Isle of Dawn). I understand that trainers are one of the things that Vanarchs currently control.
If you read my post about Shadowbane using Player trainers, because NPC trainers could only train so far, then you would realize that not all game companies and devs want to make things easy for their players.
There is a huge difference between easy and fun. Something can be hard, yet still fun, while it could also be easy and no where near fun (enchanting RNG anyone).
The devs just wanted to let the Vanarchs control that aspect of the game. I don't know why - you would have to write to Blue Hole and ask them; talk to their lead designer, because only he/they will have the answer you are looking for.
Ok, well then I can ask why are you so hung up on defending something that serves no justifiable purpose in the system in which it is implemented? Ok you don't know the reason, then how can you defend it?
Because it is? Because the developers intended for it to be that way? Well I don't feel its effective and it doesn't serve any tangible purpose in adding anything useful, fun, good, challenge wise or otherwise to the Vanarchy system.
What now?
I'm not saying it makes or breaks anything for me.
I'm saying whatever their reasoning its not functioning in any way that is helping anything. Its not creating challenges, its not making the game harder.
Its just there.
And it shouldnt be.
We can go around and around on the trainers. The bottom line is that the devs created the game this way. Each developer is different, and in this case someone thought it would be neat to give the Vanarchs power over the vendors and trainers. It does actually create a system where you can judge between good and bad Vanarchs.
In a perfect world, there would be 2 guilds (or more) for every 1 Vanarch spot, healthy competition, where every province had shops open. Even if we were to, for a moment, use a perfect example of all provinces having a Vanarch and all shops/trainers open, we are still left with the major concern; there is no benefit to the Vanarch. Which means we move away from a "perfect" situation of having lots of competition into the one we have now where vendors are closed.
My argument is this: No benefit to the Vanarch creates a situation where guilds will not run, because it is not worth to them or their members to keep shops/trainers open for a player base that won't spend enough in their province so that the winning guild can recoup the outlay of 3k gold for the registration fee.
My solutions: 1. Give better benefits for being a Vanarch; thus creating a "want" in the player base to actually be Vanarchs.
2. Reduce the registration cost to 2k gold
3. Reduce the number of PP needed to open shops/trainers by 20% (instead of costing 500PP it would only cost 400PP)
My Assumptions: 1. Most provinces operate at a loss
2. Most Guilds see Vanarch as work not as fun
3. Most Vanarchs do not see a level of benefit equal to their level of effort. (How would you like to get paid 40k a year for running a Fortune 500 company?)
4. If Vanarchs saw a benefit (beyond a Horse) they would gladly open all shops/trainers
I love the idea of a Vanarchy, and with a few minor tweaks I think the player base would be a lot happier about it as well. Solution 2 above is something that En Masse could do right now - before the next elections to make it more beneficial to the guilds running. That one act alone would make it easier for smaller guilds (that really want to run) be able to afford the registration fee and actually have a chance of not operating at a loss.
so why would you only offer one way of trying to make ingame gold and not others?? how does that make any logical sense? wouldn't it be better to offer the mounts to be sold in game or pets like WoW does cuz obviously this is using their model.
Actually this is a direct take from EvE online and their PLEX system.
Tyrantrevolver on 07/18/2012, 01:29 PM
Ok that gives me history, but it doesn't justify its implementation.
Why would they make that decision? I question the reasoning behind deciding to have it this way.
Its not contributing anything tangible to the political system by its implementation.
And thus, I feel trainer npc control should be removed.
Why are you hung up on the trainers? In my leveling I never had a problem making it back to Velika, which is where I did all my training (other than the first 10 levels at Isle of Dawn). I understand that trainers are one of the things that Vanarchs currently control.
If you read my post about Shadowbane using Player trainers, because NPC trainers could only train so far, then you would realize that not all game companies and devs want to make things easy for their players.
There is a huge difference between easy and fun. Something can be hard, yet still fun, while it could also be easy and no where near fun (enchanting RNG anyone).
The devs just wanted to let the Vanarchs control that aspect of the game. I don't know why - you would have to write to Blue Hole and ask them; talk to their lead designer, because only he/they will have the answer you are looking for.