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Original post by bronco123 Duck, strike, turn, get that arrow in a vital point, ect ect. Yes this requires people to twitch occasionally, as in a FPS but it beats mindlesses watching the computer fight itself.

Agree.

little exploration value, crappy automated fighting, skills are boring, monsters are boring etc etc

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Original post by Ned_K Basically what you just said is this: You prefer the game designers to impose a pre-determined matrix on player behavior that pushes them toward certain types of behavior which you find more enjoyable.

No, basically what I have said is the opposite. Which is, to allow more playstyles to be accomodated inside a game, especially how to put RPers and non-RPers together, to put group players and soloers together. What I am actually against is the saying that One game should only be made for one playstyle and RPG cant be accomodated into a MMOG.

Moreover, I dont think you can give a *counter example* on how it conflicts other playstyles (I bet you cant), as your tone sounds to me that it only fits for my playstyle.

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Original post by Hawkins8 Quote: Original post by Ned_K Basically what you just said is this: You prefer the game designers to impose a pre-determined matrix on player behavior that pushes them toward certain types of behavior which you find more enjoyable. No, basically what I have said is the opposite. Which is, to allow more playstyles to be accomodated inside a game, especially how to put RPers and non-RPers together, to put group players and soloers together. What I am actually against is the saying that One game should only be made for one playstyle and RPG cant be accomodated into a MMOG. Moreover, I dont think you can give a *counter example* on how it conflicts other playstyles (I bet you cant), as your tone sounds to me that it only fits for my playstyle.

Then you need to be more precise how you spell out what you want. You said:

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Today's MMOG direction is, With only player encounters, and putting hope in causing player conflicts and player polictis to drive the game events. While a persistent virtual society doesn't exist. The opposite direction is, With both interplayer and player-NPC (or even NPC-NPC) encounters, game contents are driven by virtual conflicts and virtual politics, with the existence of a persistent virtual society.

What's the difference between "player encounters" and "interplayer encounters"?

In any event, you want game contents driven by virtual conflicts and virtual politics rather than simply allowing player conflicts and player politics to drive game events, right? Well, in order to get what you want, you have to force a particular format onto the players. In the event of lack of structure, people on-line will create structure of their own. It sounds to me that that is the part you don't like.

So I don't see how what you said is the opposite of how I summed up your position.

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Original post by Ned_K What's the difference between "player encounters" and "interplayer encounters"?

No difference to me.

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In any event, you want game contents driven by virtual conflicts and virtual politics rather than simply allowing player conflicts and player politics to drive game events, right? Well, in order to get what you want, you have to force a particular format onto the players. In the event of lack of structure, people on-line will create structure of their own. It sounds to me that that is the part you don't like. So I don't see how what you said is the opposite of how I summed up your position.

No, the word *force* is not right, that's what I am argueing. To me, a persistent world with a persistent virtual society is more natural than without one. A game without a virtual reason is simply an empty shell without anything in behind, that's not true even in today's MMOGs, every MMOG has a virtual reason behind the game. Quote me one MMOG doesn't have a virtual reaon to exist. The point is, why that virtual reason is needed and is that reason immersive enough? To me, a persistent world with a persistent virtual society is more immersive, and can accomodate more playstyles.

Secondly, I see no point how the existing of a persistent virtual society stops players from building their own [whatever], you mean players cant be a Jedi in MEO? You mean the framework or storyline of MEO is forced upon the players such that it limits them to become a Jedi as they want?

What I mean is, the MEO storyline or framework is not a restriction to players, in contrary, the more immersive that virtual reason is the better the game will be.

Moreover, it seems to me that you tend to conclude that all kinds of personal opinions are based on a selfish reason about what one likes or dislikes, what one wants or not want. And thus the tone in your every reply like, "You said this because you want to force something on others to get what you want", or "You said so because you dislike it, or you said so because you like it".

I am talking about today's MMOGs and my opinions on how they can improved, nothing as personal as you take them to be, including the player conflict stuff.

I simply dont think that causing player conflicts to drive game contents is a good direction. More importantly, it seems to be ignored that game contents can actually be driven by the virtual reason behind the game. While player conflicts exist inevitably in MMOGs, like it or not is not the point.

[Edited by - Hawkins8 on November 15, 2004 6:59:15 PM]

Ok let me jump in here a bit...So the question is "Whats the biggest problem with MMORPGs?". It's not the 23rd of November yet so I can freely say that what the biggest problem MAY be is that all characters/classes end up being almost identical to one another. It's the mass market, dummy proof, cookie cutter character progression design that has lowered the standards on what many of us think is actually a game.

When all is said and done it comes down to your character that at level 20 takes say 8 whacks to kill a creature of your level. Then when your level 50 it still takes 8 whacks, hmm well maybe its off by 1 whack once in a while (wow). Everything is almost designed with perfect RATIO. Are you really doing anything much different at level 20 then at level 40?!

Ok here's THE biggest problem :) All the large publishers are doing these and basically ONLY these. It's where the money is. China as many of you may know will be the largest online gaming market in a few years, maybe in 3 to 4 years at most. That what many have their sights set on. I hope many Indies here start filling the huge gap that has widened over the past 5 to 7 years. I've played all the major MMORPG's since UO, I know why these make money. Yea, so thats the biggest problem. I now have to get on my computer and make a computer game from scratch like I did 25 years ago because there isn't anything unique being done anymore :) Most MMORPG's seem to have only about 2 hours of fun SPREAD out over 12 hours of play.

I have had some good memories from them, and I think they are getting better with World of Warcraft soon out, but they really have to kill the character cookie cutter and ratio design.

There's been more valid points, and more contradicting yet equally correct points than I could begin to mention.

For every single valid point brought up, I could think of ten ways to pick it apart, and someone could then come up with counter's to each of the ten ways I picked it apart. There isn't necessarily any right, or wrong, and the biggest problem, can't be defined in any one way (as this post has clearly shown).

A couple points of mention however -
Persistent worlds, repetitive quests, and the ability to directly change and affect the environment.

While these are all great "ideas" the realization for these ideas is quite far from the ability to implement them.
- Questing, and how we all killed the same bad guy. If quests needed to be unique, and were available only once per attempt (I sunk the pirate ship, now no one else can) those who can, and do, dedicate more time, will clean the world of those following of the ability to do anything. The ship comes back up, so the person who logged into the world an hour later than night can participate and enjoy the same quest.
- Changing the environment. Again, fairly obvious... with the amount of players who participate and subscribe to these games, and the innumerable amounts of playstyles that exist, players would destroy the game world inside of a month. Blow up the tavern, blow up the town, level the forest... soon you have a empty world far worse than any have complained about thus far in this thread.

One point I saw mentioned early on, is that "players have no clue really about what they want in an mmo", and that alone leads to designers, publishers, developers etc creating cookie-cutter mmo's. Unfortunately it is a sad catch 22 that the MMO genre is currently in. Attempt to do something new, unique, break the rules, and the players, the public, will smash you... create a new experience based on tried and true rules, and design that works, has held hundreds of thousands of subcribers for months to years, and you will again be put down. If 3 years is spent making a game, I know which side of the catch 22 I'd rather get caught on.

Another major point/flaw is playstyle, and what each person who spends their money per month wants, desires, and expects out of a game. Twitch elements (manual targetting, etc) alienate those that wish to play at a slower pace, that slower pace turns off those that want to blow stuff up.

I agree with many ideas I've seen mentioned here, but the implementation is daunting, untried, untested.

Bread and dggamer, you are hitting a nail on the head.

Let those players know how today's MMOGs work, what can be deliverd from the games, more importantly, what cant be delivered. Such that players wont give false hope to the games. Actually, many players have already lost their faith on today's MMOGs. And the EQ clones start losing playerbase, more players start to voice out what they really want. I simply think that an EQ clone can no longer be an easy cash cow anymore.

Yet the tons of ideas are untried and untested simply because an MMOG experiment is worth some 10M to carry out. An alternative is to scientifically develop the game theories behind the MMOGs games, such as how exactly the RATIO design works in keeping the 70k subscribers in each EQ clone, what's their way of cashing money, more importantly how the ratio design is tweaked or enhanced to allow other fun factors and game elements to drop in. Only with theories, ideas can become realistic and implementable in the absence of an actual experiment.

On the other hand, even when you have 10M for a game, without the theories you may still be left in the darkness and dont know exactly how to make things right, and it turns out that you have no choice but going back to the ratio design in order to minimize the risks and costs to ensure the profit.

Moreover, i think players cant tell exactly what they want sometimes just because they have no idea about what theories laying behind the scene, once they know what's going on, what the games can give and cant give, they can tell exactly what they want which the game cant give, they can even tell how things can be done right in a more realistic way.

All in all, without the theories, only genius can do things right, while talented people can only make innovations out of existing theories. And with theories, players will know why the games are designed that way, and why they cant deliver what the players want and they will ask for changes in a more realistic way for the designers to re-engineer their games, again, in a more realistic way based on those developed theories, thou sometimes things can only be proven by an actual experiment.

[Edited by - Hawkins8 on November 16, 2004 9:02:44 PM]

China and Korea market is quite different from the NA market, they like Siege type clan-based games (including Lineage II). Off-game clans are well established, alot of clans are with 200-500 active members off-game. So the market seems to be more in favor of hardcore clan-based games with Castle Siege contents than the actual RPG genre, even so, there's still room for the RPG genrre simply because it's a huge market with mass of online gamers.

I started playing PC games some 20 years ago on a AppleIIe and later a PC XT, including game series like King Quest, Bard's tale, Ultima, Might'n Magic, Wizardry, Phantasy, SSI's AD&D and so on. And I was there on day1 of UO.

Regarding to the repetitive quests in today's MMOGs, I think quests may have to repeat themselves in a game server with more than 10k active players, unless there's a quest engine which can randomly generate quests. That reminds me of what's inside the game King Quest I, where you need to find out 3 hidden items. That's a game with a small map, a few NPCs with their houses, and some in-game items linked up to some lengendary elements such as a golden egg in a big bird nest up above on a tall oak tree, an ancient dagger deep inside a dry waterwell and etc. So I hope that the map-npc-item-legendaryelement-simplestory scenario can be automatically generated by a quest engine.

Moreover, I think there's still room for the improvement of today's goto-x-kill-y-get-z repetitive quests. First is an automatic AI oriented terrain/map generation. With an dynamically generated map instance, the same goto-x-kill-y-get-z quests will become less repetitive to the players, as each time you will be brought to a totally strange area, the mobs will not be in a familiar spot, teh location of the quest item will also vary. It's like putting the players into a dynamically generated puzzle box with the x-y-z combination changes from time to time.

Second, let the quests find the players instead of letting the players always go to the same town x to spot the NPC y to get the same quest z over and over again. I think this not hard to be implemented by simply making a list of a thousand ways of how a quest can be given out and roll it through, like a dice with a thousand faces.

For example, when you 8x8 alone in UO with no other players around, the game mechanics will randomly pick and attract you, say, by showing up a whirlpool near your ship, if you want that quest, you just drive your boat to go into the whirlpool and it will teleport you to a totally strange map to do whatever your quest content is. Or a big whale/shark/turtle will swim near your ship and if you want that quest, you just cast a teleport to the whale and you will be *gated* to a map/or an NPC for your quest.

A randomly dressed up mage/fighter attacks/heals you after you fought a mob alone, then you start to talk about a quest...
A twister floating around when you are alone and you decide to go inside...
A special unicorn shows up when you hunt alone and it flies when you try to ride on it...(just for awhile for your quest)
You dig/fish up a treasure box and open it to find a balloon/carpet/palm leaf and you can fly...
You see another ghost when you are killed when fighting alone and he's yelling for help...
You try to fight a ogre lord yet he speaks...
You try to smelt an ore pile and have found an orb melting away and you click the quest button and the orb will bring you to...
You see two drunken NPCs fighting with each other and a purse goes off with a quest message...
You see two NPCs talking about a quest and you go before them for that quest...
You see a teleporter tile unusually appears in the wildness and you step on it...
........
Finally;
You always go to NPC x in location y to get the quest z...

[Edited by - Hawkins8 on November 17, 2004 3:12:17 AM]

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Original post by Ned_K Quote: Original post by bronco123 Duck, strike, turn, get that arrow in a vital point, ect ect. Yes this requires people to twitch occasionally, as in a FPS but it beats mindlesses watching the computer fight itself. Agree.

Yeah, this is in my "If I don't want anyone to play my game" list of things to do. Maybe I was targeting my MMOG at 14-24 year olds. But if you want an MMOG to succeed, you have to target it at your longer-term players. That means the 25-39 market. If I had a choice between having 10 18 year olds play my game for 2 months straight and 4 34 year olds play my game for 2 months, I'd take the 34 year olds. Why? Because the 25-39 year olds will keep playing for another 2 years. The 18 year olds are going to drop off in 6-9 months (or less), or when the latest thing comes out (HL2, WoW, whatever).

I'm not big on HL, Unreal or Quake. If I was going to play them I sure as f*ck wouldn't play them in a MMO setting. I hate dying without seeing my opponent as it is. It presupposes some lack of skill in the game. If you get first shot, you probably win. If you can click and twitch faster than I can, then you win. My brains don't even factor into it.

I'm ROLE-PLAYING. If I wanted to role-play a 33-year old computer network admin/game developer with a quick wit, but relatively slow reflexes and a twisted ankle, I guess I'd get off my damn computer, wouldn't I? I like the idea of playing the Ranger with quick reflexes, good intuition and the ability to take more than 1 hit from a BFG.

Not to mention that you'd have to make NPCs based around the whole 'click and twitch' mentality and when you get to the higher end game, you'd end up with NPCs who you could only beat with 6 PCs on 1 NPC, simply because their reflexes would be based upon having 4GB of RAM and two 3Ghz processors. I'm pretty sure that no matter how fast you *think* you are, I can make a computer program that will ALWAYS be behind you and will always kill the healer first.