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Original post by WeirdoFu Sure its nice to go to, say, New York City for the first time in your life and spend days walking around exploring all the stores, shops, streets, alleys, etc., but wouldn't your time be better spent by simply asking someone who lives in New York about what's worth seeing? We do it all the time in real life, why not in a game.

Preach it!

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Also, one of the main reasons for MMORPGs is for people to be able to play together.

That's actually my biggest complaint about MMORPGs. One of my favorite parts is to be able to play with others. However, it's never long before I'm either 10 levels behind or 10 levels ahead of someone I've been playing with. At that point, the lack of balance in levels becomes a problem when trying to quest together.

There're many games that discourages out-of-character conversations, quest spoilers in chat, fail to cooperate and you'll be banned out of chat or muted.

Some fascinating ideas. I especially like the random factor, which I think is what adds the mystery in roguelikes, my prefered type of RPG. I don't play mmorpgs, mostly for the reasons you described. The sense I get in mmorpgs is of people who need to be the loudest and baddest, and can't do that in real life, so they do it in a game. I would really like if there were some way of making people stay in charachter, but that seems unlikely.

I also like your ideas about everyone's path being different. I would say that instead of making it randomly different, make it different according to small, seemingly insignificant choices, in addition to the random factor. That has the benefit of making it more like RL, but more importantly it makes it a richer, deeper world. The spoilers will still be there, but they won't be so easy. the answers won't be obvious to anyone.

An example of what I'm trying to say here is this: a mage , on the path to becoming a mage, kills a bunny rabbit by the side of the road. That arbitrarily changes the course of his initiation. but it didn't have to be the rabbit. it could have easily been the rat. or the fox. or it could have been a thief. or it could have been investigating a bogus rumor from an old man. or etc.

by the time you get to the point of the trial, the nature of the trial is already chosen, and it is difficult for an advanced player to know what trial the novice is engaged in. and it would be difficult to predict which questions it would be, because the form of the question is random is random.

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Original post by NIm Some fascinating ideas. I especially like the random factor, which I think is what adds the mystery in roguelikes, my prefered type of RPG. I don't play mmorpgs, mostly for the reasons you described. The sense I get in mmorpgs is of people who need to be the loudest and baddest, and can't do that in real life, so they do it in a game. I would really like if there were some way of making people stay in charachter, but that seems unlikely. I also like your ideas about everyone's path being different. I would say that instead of making it randomly different, make it different according to small, seemingly insignificant choices, in addition to the random factor. That has the benefit of making it more like RL, but more importantly it makes it a richer, deeper world. The spoilers will still be there, but they won't be so easy. the answers won't be obvious to anyone. An example of what I'm trying to say here is this: a mage , on the path to becoming a mage, kills a bunny rabbit by the side of the road. That arbitrarily changes the course of his initiation. but it didn't have to be the rabbit. it could have easily been the rat. or the fox. or it could have been a thief. or it could have been investigating a bogus rumor from an old man. or etc. by the time you get to the point of the trial, the nature of the trial is already chosen, and it is difficult for an advanced player to know what trial the novice is engaged in. and it would be difficult to predict which questions it would be, because the form of the question is random is random.

I'm pretty sure we'd all like some randomness in games. It would be cool if everyone in an MMORPG has to take a slightly different path, but I personally hate to be on the side of the designers. Seeing that this is a game design forum, I guess we can all imagine what kind of living hell that would be.

Now, if the game had, say, 1000 players in total, well, we can probably make everyone's story slightly different. Now, let's make it more realistic and multiply that by 100. Ok, I guess with some sort of controlled randomness we can create 100,000 slightly different paths. But then who is going to debug all that. And then imagine something on the scale of say WoW, which has 1 million players, last I heard. If we made quests doable in at least 100 different ways based on the way your character has developed, that would already be a huge task a drain of time and resources, and that's only 1 quest. Usually a MMORPG has at least close to 1000 if not more quests ranging from the small to the large.

So, say we actually pulled it off and created a game like that, and realistically, there's no way to test everything properly. So we're caught in patching hell. Some guy plays for 3 months and find that he can't do a quest that he's suppose to be able to do because of some bug that may have been due to the way he played. Maybe a month ago, he killed a monster he shouldn't have. Now we can always label that as a feature, but then assuming its a bug, it would be one hell of a debugging task. Even if it is a feature, you'll still get endless complaints about how certain people will always have the biggest baddest and coolest thing just because they happen to make some random choice when they started that made it possible. Then we're back in square one where people will post guides about how to get to where everyone wants to get to, down to what monsters to kill, how many and when (come on, we all know there's no true randomness in programming especially when you want to create a virtual world that is going to be shared by who knows how many people).

In the end, we all have what we want to see in an online game. The question just comes down to whether the current "definition" of MMORPG is the genre we want. Maybe what people want is more a fall back to limited cooperative gaming? Find some friends in real life, each create a character and start a game and the world is just for you guys to run around in. Then you have control of how you want to play the game. Or maybe what we really want is something like what is proposed in .hack//fragment (an MMORPG, sort of, that just got released in Japan). In that game, you log into a chat room, find the people you want to party with and then just choose a series of keywords and jump into a random zone/dungeon generated by the keywords. Then the ranking system ranks you by how many dungeons you've cleared and what rare items you were able to get. On a side note, levelling up in the .hack world isn't hard and lvl 99 is the hard cap. Getting there usually isn't the issue. Its getting all the rare items that money can't buy that matters. And maybe the bragging rights to clearing all million or so random dungeons.

What I've found so amazing, to tell the truth, is that the first really successful MMORPG, Ultima Online, is still going almost 10 years after it originally launched. I mean, seriously, look at the limitations of that game. It sticks out like a sore thumb, obviously from a different era. It's tile based point and click, has an ugly adhoc 3D implementation, most of it's artwork is as old as the game, and from expansion to expansion very little has fundamentally changed.

Although it has no global chat, thank God. I think the low low requirements for running it have an appeal too. It ran on a Pentium 66 for crying out loud (modern copies suggest closer to 200 though). Compare that to Star Wars Galaxies with its 3-feet-in-front-of-you draw distance and 40+ MB patches. Speaking of SWG, what a ghost town. Population density over 99.9% of the server was only slightly higher than the moon. Both games have their share of annoying players, either because they greif you or have a single track mind bent on gaining 25 levels today. It really ruins the atmosphere, which is often a major selling point to me.

Personally, what bothers me most about the 3D games is that they're still stand-around-and-autoattack-or-autodefend-until-one-of-you-falls-down. Ten years and there still hasn't been enough advancement to move beyond that? I also don't care for instancing or zoning, as both diminish the MM part of MMORPG. That's a large part of why I balked at NWN.

City of Villains is only the 3rd MMOG I've put real time into playing and I think the leveling system (new powers, not %ToHit++) among other things (big open cities for starters) helps mitigate what concerns me a bit about the genre as of late. Fees are a bit steep and I forsee the missions getting old but for now it's something to do and it's got the novel idea of having a supervillainesque slant to everything. However, I would never be so foolish as to treat it as an RPG in the same vein as Ultima, if only because no server where breaking the atmosphere is punished exists. That's unfortunate IMO, however it'll continue being an issue until subscription fees are no longer required.

If you're not an anti-2D player, I highly suggest you look into getting a copy of Ultima Online (for $10 at the store or free through EA's online promotions) and find a private server that has active GMs and espouses roleplaying as a major theme. That is by far the MMORPG experience I've consistently enjoyed the most over the years. Even programming though some of the tools has been a good learning experience.

Oh yes Ultima Online the only MMORPG that I palyed longer the 2 weeks with out getting bored. I play UO on and off for about 1 year. Best RP environment I have found to date.

there is a way to keep the fun! make all the secrets very hard and encourage people to help each other! i say...if you cant beat them-join them! this way you'll still be searching for quests because everyone will be! it's all about untill someone finds it (which will happen less because it'll be harder)

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Original post by tont [...] play for 2 hours or so isnt going to want to spend those 2 hours running around trying to find where to go for just 1 quest. its pointless to play the game then.[...]

The point is, it shouldn't be pointless to spend 2 hours trying to figure out a quest, it should be fun. The fact that all 'real'(as opposed to something the player made up in their head to amuse themselves, such as mystery where there is none) enjoyment comes from 'grinding' in current MMOs is what the OP is complaining about.
At least, that is my interpretation.

One of the reasons people TURN to walkthroughs is POOR quest design.

A typical quest in a lot of MMOGs is similiar to this:
Type: "Kill Task"
Description: "Kargoth, a Woggle of immense size, has been terrorizing the people of the land."
Objective: "Kargoth the Woggle"

What does that tell us? It tells us our task is a "Kill Task", meaning we need to destroy the objective. The description tells us the reason for doing so.

But where is it?
Is Kargoth the Woggle always spawned?
If not, what time of the day is it spawned?
Also if not, how often (in days) is it spawned?

Players NEED to know this information. If they go out to where someone said they saw Kargoth the Woggle, and it isn't there, people will be pissed.

Pissed people do (irr?)ational, like quit the game, or post why the game sucks on message boards which is bad publicity.


A better way of structuring the quest is something like this:
Type: "Kill Task"
Description: "Kargoth, a Woggle of immense size, has been terrorizing the people of the land."
Location: "The survivors have said he is in the northern part of the Zoot Mountains."
Sightings: "Kargoth the Woggle has been sighted by scouts only during the night, and only on the third day of the week."
Objective: "Kargoth the Woggle"

This tells us every piece of information a player needs to know, and does NOT waste his or her time running through the forests of Bizarro Land in search of a creature who actually lives in the mountains. It doesn't tell *exactly* (ie: coordinates) where Kargoth is, but it gives a small area of habitat in which the creature resides.

There's such a thing as too much information in addition to too little.

Furthermore, farming for a specific random drop pisses me off as a player. I don't want to spend 10 hours camping a spot for an item that I MUST HAVE in order to play the game -- such as a game where PvP is a main focus (I'm looking at you, Dark Age of Camelot: Trials of Atlantis). Worse than that is having to do so while forced to be with other people or alternate accounts rather than solo (die, Everquest, die).

And then, there is the 'tried and true' level system -- which is really, really horrid. Levels mean far too much in most of these games. Ultima Online has done character advancement the best, by far. The fact that you are permanently stuck with a character's skills (short of rerolling), with the excuse that you must make choices wisely when the game itself is subject to change, is retarded in the extreme.

While City of Heroes/Villains and Dark Age of Camelot have added 'respecs' as they are called, they are limited and people almost have to have them anymore. As far as I know, you're SOL in most of the other MMOGs -- save Ultima Online and Planetside, where it was never a problem because they were designed to allow it. Even CoH/V and DAoC don't allow the ability to respecialize your class, while PS and UO do because you simply exercise the skills you desire (is that still true with the newer UO expansions?).

Then there's the inherent problem with class imbalances. While UO and PS suffer from this less than the other games, it is still there -- and it is deadly to a MMOG. Dark Age of Camelot has something like 44 different classes now (divided close to equally in three seperate 'realms'), and balancing that many classes versus each other cannot be any sort of fun. Even worse, each of those classes has different ways to specialize, but only a few may be viable -- Shaman (a support class in DAoC) can go for Healing, Buffing, or Offensive spells, but their best bet is Buffing, and to a lesser extent Offensive (which are weaker than any caster generally)... so why roll a Shaman if you don't want to be a buffer?

And yet in the above example.. Buffing is boring as hell, partially because once you do it (for most of the spells), it stays via a Concentration pool which limits the number of buffs you can have active. The developers still haven't addressed things like this. Some of the specialization lines and even classes are powerful in PvP while others are powerful in PvE, and sometimes those aren't mutually exclusive... leading to rather overpowered classes.

These things are what kill a Massively Multiplayer Online Game.

-Greven

I believe the problem lies in the fact that quest rewards are either generic; or unique rewards are a dime a dozen. I've never seen an MMORPG that featured true unique items. Everyone has the Excalibur, so why is it called a unique? Put only one in the game and only one quest to do it. The first person to figure out and complete the quest gets the unique.

This would (indirectly) solve your problem and make the world much more fascinating.