@sunandshadow - I'll check out Dofus, it looks interesting.

Skill based and point based systems are by no means perfect. Most of them suffer from exactly what you describe. In AC, while you have a vast array of skills and stats to put points into, you still need to decide what type of character you want. If you want an offensive mage, for example - there was that certain path you needed to go down with your experience and points and if you didn't your character would be much less powerful than another offensive mage at the same level who did follow that path. In AC, if you didn't set your initial stat points properly, your character was forever gimped. I've never tried to think of a good solution for that issue in that type of system. The community of the game always come up with that most efficient path for a given class.

That is a whole separate design discussion though - off the postmortem topic.

Allow the reselection of skills/attributes/classes/etc, but require the player must re-play to earn these aspects. Don't let anything be free. Don't just throw and in-game currency fee on it. Make it earned through play outside of money farming. Make all stats posses values outside of class specific bonuses to make each attribute more viable to multiple archetypes. In order for this to be successful you can't force the players to grind specific things. Let them play how they see fit. Don't make gear too strong and don't make the acquisition of it too predictable.

Dilute, probably not the best word, the gear rewards, along with the power curve of the game, to make it more casual play friendly while also maintaining a more in-depth skill/attribute gaining system. You may be level 50, but that isn't the hard part. Working on your skills of choice to increase their potency isn't a quick nor easy task, but you can certainly compete without being maxed out. Provide multiple viable ways to play the same class differently from another player of the same class. Provide multiple options for gear without making anything beyond the basics a minimum requirement.

The rest of the game I have to talk about are all ones I spent at least a month playing, so it will probably take me several paragraphs to talk about each one.

A Tale In the Desert - First of all let me make the disclaimer that my comments do not apply to the current version of the game, although it usually doesn't change much between annual server restarts. Anyway. This MMO is fairly unique in that it does not have combat. It also for the most part does not have NPCs, although it has a few temples and schools that act as quest obtaining and quest turn-in points. It does have a bit of a quest sequence which is internal to each character - basically a list of what must be done to reach the next level of "citizenship", with the highest levels being Pharaoh and/or godhood. But the vast majority of the gameplay is gathering and crafting to climb a tech tree. You start out as basically an ignorant pre-historic human with nothing but what you can pick up off the ground and the gift of a couple of flax seeds. With mud and grass you make bricks, with wood and slate you build yourself a plane and make planks, with bricks and planks you make a house and a treasure chest and a kiln, with the flax you make twine and cloth, onward and upward, branching out into livestock and metallurgy until you are a one-person iron-age culture or even more advanced than that. A Tale in the Desert is one of the most successful instances I have encountered where a basically storyless game didn't feel too empty because it had me imagining my own little stories about my character and surroundings.

So why did I not play this game very long? Well, for one thing I like combat; it's exciting, and there just isn't any kind of challenging and adrenaline-pumping activity in the game to take its place. For a second thing the game world is way too big for the number of people playing in it, I rarely ran into other players in person. For a third thing it has no money system and worse no automatic world-wide bartering system. For a fourth thing the game has a pollution system where one player can get unknowingly screwed over by something another player did weeks ago, and the harmed player can't do anything to repair the situation. But the real deal-breaker for me was the mandatory group play. I'll probably rant about this in several of my comments on different games. I am a solo player; I like having other players around to talk to and trade with, but I don't want to be forced to spend an hour or more at a time being part of a group tackling some complicated task. That takes more planning, commitment, and socialization than I am up for. Finding out that one of the basic second-level building materials of the game could ONLY be gathered by a group just ruined for me the pleasure of being a one-person civilization. And it just further sealed the issue when I found out that marriage was a required quest for a higher level (IIRC it even had to be a heterosexual marriage, heteronormativity and gender stereotyping are another thing I'll rant about later.).

Beyond all that there were a few things about the game that could have used improving. The cooking system, as well as the activity of trying to make charcoal, were both pretty terrible. Actually they had some of the same problems as Ryzom's super-flexible crafting system - the player could try a thousand things, most would fail, there would be no feedback on what to do to succeed next time, and the only way to get anywhere would be to resort to the really annoying practice of taking notes on paper and doing a thousand rather boring experiments, which would take weeks to gather enough supplies to carry out. A Tale In The Desert also would have benefited from the ability to craft things to customize the character's appearances, as well as more customization for houses and the land around one's house. Mounts would have been really nice too, especially considering the fact that the world map would have taken most of a day (real time) to walk across. But the real answer to that would have been to make the game world modular, and only open one module at a time to dump all the new players into when existing areas were full. That would also have ensured there was a source of every resource in each sub-area, instead of some rare resources being present at only 3 places on the whole map.

Allow the reselection of skills/attributes/classes/etc, but require the player must re-play to earn these aspects. Don't let anything be free. Don't just throw and in-game currency fee on it. Make it earned through play outside of money farming.

Personally I strongly disagree with this. It's my preference to be able to do all the activities within a game with a single character, rather than creating a new one. If I've played my way to level 50, I feel I deserve the freedom to experiment with all possible builds that can be done by a level 50 player. I'm offended by games that make it impossible to respec or painfully costly in terms of money or effort. I don't at all agree with the argument that this is realistic - the average person these days has at least three careers in their lifetime, and they don't forget one to learn a new one either. However, that's my personal opinion, as the type of player that I am. Other types of players may very well prefer a system which encourages them to make several characters or restart a character. *shrug*

@sunandshadow - I'll check out Dofus, it looks interesting.

Skill based and point based systems are by no means perfect. Most of them suffer from exactly what you describe. In AC, while you have a vast array of skills and stats to put points into, you still need to decide what type of character you want. If you want an offensive mage, for example - there was that certain path you needed to go down with your experience and points and if you didn't your character would be much less powerful than another offensive mage at the same level who did follow that path. In AC, if you didn't set your initial stat points properly, your character was forever gimped. I've never tried to think of a good solution for that issue in that type of system. The community of the game always come up with that most efficient path for a given class.

That is a whole separate design discussion though - off the postmortem topic.

Eh, I'd rather have some off-topic posts scattered through the thread than stifle discussion. I thought I'd mention a few other problems with stats and character-building that I've seen. Of anything an MMO can do, one that seems to induce the most sheer rage and feelings of somewhat justifiable betrayal in a player is if an update to the game nerfs a build or class. If a player has spent three months or more building a high-level character, having the game change out from under him to invalidate all his work... that's bad news all around. A related problem is that it's not only difficult to balance each build against each other, there's usually an additional factor that they need to be balanced in both PvP and PvE situations, both solo and dungeon party situations, in leveling speed and money earning capacity, and at many different levels. I've played several games where there were one or two classes in constant shortage because they were mandatory for any dungeon run (generally healers and tanks), and one or two classes that were pariahs because they couldn't pull their weight in a dungeon, usually due to being halfway between a tank and a dps (pet users, paladins/druids). In one situation the class that was unwanted in dungeons for being weak in that situation was the SAME class that ruled 1v1 PvP and had the ability to level and earn money the fastest in solo play. Can't fix that with any simple buff or nerf. It might even be some sort of general truth of the universe that specialists classes are weak solo and generalist classes are weak in groups. And it would also be quite difficult to fix a situation where dungeons were built for a different mix of characters than players were making. A 5-man dungeon party is typically 1 tank, 1 healer, and 3 dps. But if only 1 in 10 characters created is a healer there's going to be a perpetual shortage of healers and difficulty doing dungeon runs.

Lets go indy sandbox

Haven and Hearth

Joined before all the newbie "quality of life" updates were made. So here we have a blank map that would take over a literal day to cross filled with various annoying beasties that will knock you out(and eventually kill you permadeath style if your wound health bar gets to 0, players can do the same). So your goal at this point was to grind out learning points while barely managing to keep yourself fed. After far too much time you'll eventually run into another person to find you you don't just automatically know their name and actually need to introduce each other. also around that time I've built enough learning points to advance my skill tree to the point I could start farming, building a cabin and various other supply chain stuff. At this point I can keep my food bar completely full for some of my play time so I start experimenting with combat and other mechanics. I eventually hit another "kind of dead end" Since metal comes from mines and mines were in limited supply that means trade is pretty forced on new players(the weakest and least interesting) to the longer played players.

BAM

end of alpha/beta whatever with a world reset. now that I knew what I was doing I pretty quickly develop shelter and similar. I also develop skills fast enough to find a mine. and a few people join me. I laugh at how easy it is to actually get metal, hardest part is getting the mine and "space" requirements from the building you need produced if you want to mass produce. We eventually get a nice little fortress set up with the highest tier buildings and a laughablely large amount of food. Play around with the new combat a bit, do some mapping of the surrounding area, then never again log in without ever making a conscious choice of quitting. Also ended up getting pretty darn lost in caves once, and was interested by the fact that I ended up finding a different exit out.

Permadeath actually works pretty darn well in the game. Since animals won't kill you or similar. Most players also won't kill you unless you wrong them, if you do steal or murder you'll leave scents behind which can be used to track you, or summon you if you're offline. Meaning the community has a way to actually police themselves, which means that permadeath actually worked(also means people would go after people around their level or above theirs for the "level of risk" to justify itself).

I find feedback and impression of designers irrelevant. We all are old geezers who played all the games and are bored of them already. We have seen everything and tried everything. We strive only for originality, not for gameplay and fun. Designers are completely unlike normal player and have not much in common

It's like asking critics for opinion of the new movie. The real viewers have different tastes than critics, so favourable impression of critics might even be a death kiss for a movie.

[quote name='Caldenfor' timestamp='1313900784' post='4851806']
Allow the reselection of skills/attributes/classes/etc, but require the player must re-play to earn these aspects. Don't let anything be free. Don't just throw and in-game currency fee on it. Make it earned through play outside of money farming.

Personally I strongly disagree with this. It's my preference to be able to do all the activities within a game with a single character, rather than creating a new one. If I've played my way to level 50, I feel I deserve the freedom to experiment with all possible builds that can be done by a level 50 player. I'm offended by games that make it impossible to respec or painfully costly in terms of money or effort. I don't at all agree with the argument that this is realistic - the average person these days has at least three careers in their lifetime, and they don't forget one to learn a new one either. However, that's my personal opinion, as the type of player that I am. Other types of players may very well prefer a system which encourages them to make several characters or restart a character. *shrug*
[/quote]

I think this comes entirely down to the type of game being designed and how the system is employeed. The content of the game determines what subsystems work and in my opinion a game with competitive PVP and/or a solid community should never have instant respecs. Yes, people are going to find some of their decisions unpleasant, but you also need to take other players into account. If you can just instantly swap to anything you want you bring forth the issue of making individuals obsolete at times and all sorts of Flavor of the Month trouble. Need a fourth healer? "Well, I am a Berserker, but I will just instantly turn into one!" What about that poor healer sitting around looking for a group that just lost out because of a flawed system?

It all depends on the game. There are plenty of games where changing around is suitable and even partially necessary, but that is not a game I would design or play. Freedom of choice is key to MMORPGs, outside of certain Theme Parks, and we should aim to retain player choice. If you train a skill, say the use of a Shield, so that you are a master wielding a shield. Awesome. Now you want to do something else? Set it to lower while you set your new skill to raise, similar to Ultima Online, and then go through the process of retraining. This is best used, in my mind so far, for a game where attaining maximum character level is rather casual, but developing your character and the skills it possesses are what takes a little extra time. The system would provide you the option to play the entirety of a game on just one character, but it requires time involved in training in order to try out everything.

[quote name='elondon' timestamp='1313899276' post='4851799']
@sunandshadow - I'll check out Dofus, it looks interesting.

Skill based and point based systems are by no means perfect. Most of them suffer from exactly what you describe. In AC, while you have a vast array of skills and stats to put points into, you still need to decide what type of character you want. If you want an offensive mage, for example - there was that certain path you needed to go down with your experience and points and if you didn't your character would be much less powerful than another offensive mage at the same level who did follow that path. In AC, if you didn't set your initial stat points properly, your character was forever gimped. I've never tried to think of a good solution for that issue in that type of system. The community of the game always come up with that most efficient path for a given class.

That is a whole separate design discussion though - off the postmortem topic.

Eh, I'd rather have some off-topic posts scattered through the thread than stifle discussion. I thought I'd mention a few other problems with stats and character-building that I've seen. Of anything an MMO can do, one that seems to induce the most sheer rage and feelings of somewhat justifiable betrayal in a player is if an update to the game nerfs a build or class. If a player has spent three months or more building a high-level character, having the game change out from under him to invalidate all his work... that's bad news all around. A related problem is that it's not only difficult to balance each build against each other, there's usually an additional factor that they need to be balanced in both PvP and PvE situations, both solo and dungeon party situations, in leveling speed and money earning capacity, and at many different levels. I've played several games where there were one or two classes in constant shortage because they were mandatory for any dungeon run (generally healers and tanks), and one or two classes that were pariahs because they couldn't pull their weight in a dungeon, usually due to being halfway between a tank and a dps (pet users, paladins/druids). In one situation the class that was unwanted in dungeons for being weak in that situation was the SAME class that ruled 1v1 PvP and had the ability to level and earn money the fastest in solo play. Can't fix that with any simple buff or nerf. It might even be some sort of general truth of the universe that specialists classes are weak solo and generalist classes are weak in groups. And it would also be quite difficult to fix a situation where dungeons were built for a different mix of characters than players were making. A 5-man dungeon party is typically 1 tank, 1 healer, and 3 dps. But if only 1 in 10 characters created is a healer there's going to be a perpetual shortage of healers and difficulty doing dungeon runs.
[/quote]

That certainly depends on the quality of the dev team behind the changes, and to a certain extent, how flawed the rest of the game is. In Dark Age of Camelot Midgardians received the old "Left Axe Nerf". Sadly, it was necessary. Classes that were using it were overly dominate in PVP. Problem? Quick sweeping change to "bring them back in line". I feel a more subtler approach would have been more tact. Slowly adjust classes, don't just tear them down with changes and then bring them back up when you find out you over did it. This is just a loose example that I am sure would hit a few people very personally.

With the concept I was describing in the previous post above you could remedy this issue to an extent. Providing the player the freedom to change their class would save people from having to reroll completely. Being able to raise/lower skills rather than needing to "earn" a respec, either by cash or finding drops/waiting for dev help to save you, would also help to assist the players in the situation of not liking their class/specialization any more. The sacrifice? Your class/build is no longer fun, which sucks, and you have to take the time to retrain your character. If a class/build is no longer playable, communicate with the proper people, and hopefully you can one day train back to be what you once preferred to be if they make adjustments you want to try.


As for the group/healer shortage issues. Develop a design where you don't limit groups to just five people. Why not eight? Then you will be less restricted on what you can bring into a party and if you have a system where more than just 1-2 classes can heal. Current design plan for my concept has 14 classes and at least four of them can heal, if specialized to do so, while two of those four can heal despite specialization. The design also employs a tactic where a player can fully specialize in one line, but they would have more points so they could sub-heal spec and thus, heal. Not a primary healer perhaps, but they can help.

I find feedback and impression of designers irrelevant. We all are old geezers who played all the games and are bored of them already. We have seen everything and tried everything. We strive only for originality, not for gameplay and fun. Designers are completely unlike normal player and have not much in common

It's like asking critics for opinion of the new movie. The real viewers have different tastes than critics, so favourable impression of critics might even be a death kiss for a movie.

I can't claim to be a designer, but I like to think about designing games. I am not bored with everything. I am just bored with how it has been presented as of late. When I design I try to compromise to find what is best for the developer and the player alike. Not overly complex so it becomes impossible to balance while also providing options for players to help them retain individuality.

As for movies.. I can pretty much watch anything. I don't like certain types of movies, but I can watch them, and show appreciation for what I felt was done right or wrong. People that critique need to look at the desired audience targeted not just how much they personally liked it. Unless, well, that is the aim of the critic. "If you follow my advice and have the same exact tastes, here are the movies you should watch, but don't watch Star Wars: Return of the Jedi because I hate Sci-Fi." Sorry, tangent there lol.

It all depends on the game. There are plenty of games where changing around is suitable and even partially necessary, but that is not a game I would design or play. Freedom of choice is key to MMORPGs, outside of certain Theme Parks, and we should aim to retain player choice. If you train a skill, say the use of a Shield, so that you are a master wielding a shield. Awesome. Now you want to do something else? Set it to lower while you set your new skill to raise, similar to Ultima Online, and then go through the process of retraining. This is best used, in my mind so far, for a game where attaining maximum character level is rather casual, but developing your character and the skills it possesses are what takes a little extra time. The system would provide you the option to play the entirety of a game on just one character, but it requires time involved in training in order to try out everything.

That is one of the things I loved about Ultima Online. You had 700 skill points to distribute however you wanted. There were the classic builds - like a tank mage or sword melee but you could also make hybrids and get creative and your character would still be effective against others who used those classic builds. The more you used a skill the more it raised and you could lock or lower skills as well. If you had a fully built tank mage and you really wanted to, you could turn that character into an ingot mining blacksmith. And hey, if you still had your magery skills high enough you might have a nice surprise for a PK who tried to kill you for your ingots. The argument could be made that the classic builds were the most effective and that may be correct - but there was still 700 skill points and your character could take up and work any skill they wanted with those 700 points and if you wanted to change your character around you could slowly do so without deleting and re-creating. You still had multiple character slots so you could get creative with your account - but there was no pick a class or race at the beginning and get locked into a certain style of play. 700 skill points. Have fun.

Note that I do use past tense because I haven't played UO in probably 10 years. I have no idea what it is like now, but I know it isn't like it was.

Bottom line for me is this: While I've played WoW extensively, I've always put it down (along with all of the clones) because spending 10 hours getting a level, seeing no reward or advancement in between, and just getting a new spell at the end of that 10 hours just doesn't do it for me. Aside from the few extra HP points and mana, I just don't feel like my character is going anywhere. Just quest after quest of the same stuff. It gets mind numbing. Granted, a lot of people love mind numbing. They did ALOT better imo with the expansions. Quests are more fun and have variety, the gear you get during those quests does give you some feel of advancement - but still, eventually, I get bored and wonder why I wasn't programming or working on learning something in that time.

Now Eve - that seems like a great idea to me. Level skills and stats in real time while you are not logged in? Brilliant. Problem is, from what I saw in the limited time I played, Eve is not very newbie friendly and of course when anyone first starts playing they are exactly that. I really didn't have much of a clue and the tutorials and some of the missions were fine but I still found myself thinking, "Ok. Now what?" Or wondering if what I'm doing is actually correct or advancing my character.