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MMO: How do you level?

Started by November 22, 2011 05:20 PM
41 comments, last by sunandshadow 13 years, 1 month ago
There is really no question in my mind that the dungeon finder increased the use of dungeons by reducing the hurdles to using them. The fastest way to level is to use the dungeon finder. This was not the case when you had to rely on chat. I see no point in debating that fact. Plus a hurdle is a hurdle whether you like the hurdle or not. If given a choice between 100 exp in 1 hour or 2, players will by and large choose 1 hour. Some will even choose one hour and complain that the game doesn't have the time sinks EQ had.

As for it making the experience more grindy. There is no doubt that WOW was not designed with the dungeon finder in mind. I have been saying this since my first post. Most of your legitimate concerns boil down to the fact that WOW was not designed with the DF in mind.

The major reasons for this are the ease of the dungeons and the small number of them. People have all run them before and the only thing left to do is go through the same dungeon again as fast as possible. There is no point sitting around typing and tanks are good or bad based on their speed.

The other major issue is the fact they have to look at multiple servers to create a group. This is because of the segregation of players by levels.

As a side issue, if you are chatting you are probably not killing stuff. If you want people to talk then you either have to have a situation where they are not doing stuff or you integrate some sort of voice chat. Voice to text might be the best solution.

WOW's approach to world design is dying. What I mean by this is that I don't see too many succesful MMOs being made where the world is 90%+ solo quest content. WOW's use of phasing and story telling is good and will live on. That 90% number will decrease significantly. I think a game could be made where it is only about 33% of the land mass with another thrid going to PVP and another third to group content.

Look how much SWTOR spent on creating solo quests and even group quests. Meanwhile many reviewers look at it and consider it another quest grind. They spent a ton of money on that game and it could easily flop using the old WOW model. There have already been a fair number of failed MMOs that tried to use the solo quest model and failed.
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Although WoW doesn't, other MMOs have mechanisms in place to make both outside-dungeon and inside-dungeon content adapt to the number of people in group, from 1 (solo) to whatever the game's max is.


Yup, though that's always easier said that done. "Group size" does not necessarily equal "group power." So typically the most elegant solutions involving gauging how much damage a group can do within a set period of time or how much damage they successfully avoid taking (as just two examples) and basing the scaling partially on that. Oh, I've also heard of solutions that essentially rely on a "skill rating" the system automatically assigns each player (and modifies progressively over the life of the game) which is then used in these particular circumstances to auto-scale boss difficulty. I've never personally worked with something like the latter, but I like the sound of it.
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[quote name='sunandshadow' timestamp='1322671583' post='4889122']
Although WoW doesn't, other MMOs have mechanisms in place to make both outside-dungeon and inside-dungeon content adapt to the number of people in group, from 1 (solo) to whatever the game's max is.


Yup, though that's always easier said that done. "Group size" does not necessarily equal "group power." So typically the most elegant solutions involving gauging how much damage a group can do within a set period of time or how much damage they successfully avoid taking (as just two examples) and basing the scaling partially on that. Oh, I've also heard of solutions that essentially rely on a "skill rating" the system automatically assigns each player (and modifies progressively over the life of the game) which is then used in these particular circumstances to auto-scale boss difficulty. I've never personally worked with something like the latter, but I like the sound of it.
[/quote]

There are ways to do this but they will never match instancing for balance.
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So after a swift read over this whole topic this is why I'm excited for Guild Wars 2. I don't understand why all MMO's don't have systems like they have set up. Instead of it feeling like a game where you invite someone to your group, if you're just doing what the person next to you is doing you don't even have to be in a "group" to work for the same common objective. I think this will make the whole "dungeon queuing" feel of having random players whenever you play when you want all the time throughout the game. It will also get rid of any dumb queue times where you're waiting to do something since everything in the game scales according to the number of players participating. Now I'm sure there will still be places where you need a few people to do something efficiently but you won't have to worry because other people are going to want to do what you're doing too. The best thing by far (minus getting rid of any queue system) is the fact that you won't have to wait on a healer/tank ect. Of course this is just speculation till the game launches because we will never know how it works till we actually play but I believe having this kind of system in place will make the whole "Playing" experience as a whole more "Playing" than waiting.

So after a swift read over this whole topic this is why I'm excited for Guild Wars 2. I don't understand why all MMO's don't have systems like they have set up. Instead of it feeling like a game where you invite someone to your group, if you're just doing what the person next to you is doing you don't even have to be in a "group" to work for the same common objective. I think this will make the whole "dungeon queuing" feel of having random players whenever you play when you want all the time throughout the game. It will also get rid of any dumb queue times where you're waiting to do something since everything in the game scales according to the number of players participating. Now I'm sure there will still be places where you need a few people to do something efficiently but you won't have to worry because other people are going to want to do what you're doing too. The best thing by far (minus getting rid of any queue system) is the fact that you won't have to wait on a healer/tank ect. Of course this is just speculation till the game launches because we will never know how it works till we actually play but I believe having this kind of system in place will make the whole "Playing" experience as a whole more "Playing" than waiting.


Isn't this what they had in WAR and Rift with the public quests?

This is not a bad approach, it just isn't as effective as you would think.

One reason is that it is still hard to get a group together. Especially after the intiial influx of players into the game. If you want players to group then making sure they find groups is the number one design priority. It is really a make or break issue and the less likely they are to find a group the more single player content you need to make which in turn lowers the chance they will group.

IF you want them to group then there needs to be a solution that works consistantly.
--------------My Blog on MMO Design and Economieshttp://mmorpgdesigntalk.blogspot.com/
Yes and no. WAR was the very early realisation of this idea and then RIFT built upon it making the whole thing less static. The problem with the holy trinity of tank/DPS/healer is that most people will take the DPS option. Take away the trinity and you lose the ability to make a player feel they have a specific role to play, i.e. they lose their purpose.

As I pointed out before, the event system in GW2 allows the player to be part of a group while not being part of an actual group. They don't have to interact with others but can still be part of the multi-player aspect of the game. Out of all the levelling systems i have seen it is this one that has the best chance of replacing quests as the dominant levelling system in my option.

[An earlier post I made has links to gameplay showing the event system in GW2 if anyone missed it]

There is really no question in my mind that the dungeon finder increased the use of dungeons by reducing the hurdles to using them. The fastest way to level is to use the dungeon finder. This was not the case when you had to rely on chat. I see no point in debating that fact. Plus a hurdle is a hurdle whether you like the hurdle or not. If given a choice between 100 exp in 1 hour or 2, players will by and large choose 1 hour. Some will even choose one hour and complain that the game doesn't have the time sinks EQ had. [/quote]


It's about which is easiest not which is fastest. Grinding was the fastest way to level in vanilla WoW although most people opted for quests because they were easier for them to do. You can in a sense balance a level system along those lines; faster things are harder to do while slower things are easier to do. If something is easy and fast then you may have a problem, at that point you as a designer should really ask if you want such a system in your game (its not your job to make the game easy, its your job to make it "fun").

What the LFG tool did was make leveling through dungeons realistic for anyone who played the game. For those either on high pop servers or with friends they regularly play with the system did little to change the speed at which they gained exp, in fact it may have slowed them down as they rely on the system and not on their own abilities to find groups. Not to mention the LFG tools results with vary wildly from player to player.


As for it making the experience grindier. There is no doubt that WOW was not designed with the dungeon finder in mind. I have been saying this since my first post. Most of your legitimate concerns boil down to the fact that WOW was not designed with the DF in mind.[/quote]

Most of my issues with the system come down to its poor implementation within WoW true, but there are still issues inherent in the system itself. It is really a system designed to compensate for the lack of players on a server, you can see that in RIFT (where it isn't cross server) that it is a poor levelling tool; asking in chat would results is faster groups more often than not. So on a single server of the classical size (say a few thousand people) then there's no point having it as a levelling tool; it provides no benefits and merely takes away from developing other more useful systems. The same can be seen with its use, or more accurately its lack of use as a tool for finding groups for quests within WoW.

At that point to make it work as a levelling tool you need to make it cross server resulting in the myriad of problems WoW now faces.

If you instead have a large server population then adding it does little to change the situation, people can find groups fast because there are plenty of people around to play with them. Instead of interacting with other players to make a group the player presses a button and waits. The benefits it brings to a player are minute at this point when compared to the possible development time you have to put into making a system like this. Player's may of course want a system like that but that doesn't mean it's in their best interests to have one.

If you are talking about allowing people to instantly port between locations then see my previous posts as to why that is a bad idea. You can also implement that much better within the game by having character specific abilities etc.

To have a MMORPG focused around a LFG system that ports you back and forth from locations means you end up with nothing more than a lobby game. The persistent world is at that point pretty pointless, will only feel out of place and take up resources that could be better used elsewhere. Remove that and you will undoubtedly make it a better game but it won't be an MMORPG.

The major reasons for this are the ease of the dungeons and the small number of them. People have all run them before and the only thing left to do is go through the same dungeon again as fast as possible. There is no point sitting around typing and tanks are good or bad based on their speed.[/quote]

Dungeons are expensive and time consuming things to make, quests in comparison are not. In an ideal world you could have so many dungeons a player would never have to do them more than once but this is not an ideal world. However much you focus on them as a level tool they will inevitably provide a grindier experience than quests ever will.

The other major issue is the fact they have to look at multiple servers to create a group. This is because of the segregation of players by levels.


That can be solved by having a smaller number of servers with large populations. I won't go over my reservations about removing player levels for certain parts of the game again, but i will add that player level will often denote the experience the player has with the game. Remove levels and use a random system like this will result in new players playing with veterans which will often be frustrating for both parties.


As a side issue, if you are chatting you are probably not killing stuff. If you want people to talk then you either have to have a situation where they are not doing stuff or you integrate some sort of voice chat. Voice to text might be the best solution.[/quote]

VC does improve the whole experience of grouping that is true. Plenty of conversations can occur during even a fast dungeon run though. It is largely down to the player's but with the LFG tool there is even less reason for said players to communicate; VC won't fix that.

WOW's approach to world design is dying. What I mean by this is that I don't see too many succesful MMOs being made where the world is 90%+ solo quest content. WOW's use of phasing and story telling is good and will live on. That 90% number will decrease significantly. I think a game could be made where it is only about 33% of the land mass with another thrid going to PVP and another third to group content.[/quote]

To do that would almost certainly require the removal of levelling as a mainstay of MMORPG gameplay. That may happen at some point in the future but that doesn't mean the WoW system of levelling will die out, you will still have MMORPGs that cater to that style of play with others will cater to the kind of world layout you explained.

You also have to remember that % of land used for X system doesn't mean players will spend the equivalent amount of time doing that. 90% of WoWs world may be quests but that doesn't mean they spend 90% of their time questing. Questing is a nice way to fill out land which would otherwise be wasted and thus make the player feel like the world is much bigger than it really is.

Look how much SWTOR spent on creating solo quests and even group quests. Meanwhile many reviewers look at it and consider it another quest grind. They spent a ton of money on that game and it could easily flop using the old WOW model. There have already been a fair number of failed MMOs that tried to use the solo quest model and failed.[/quote]

At this point I would say those reviewers are playing the game wrong. The story heavy quests in SWTOR require the player to work through the content at a steady pace and not for long periods of time, playing it in a similar way to WoWs quests will of course ruin that experience. In-fact SWTOR does a fair amount to improve the questing system found in theme-park making the whole levelling system a lot more meaningful.

I am surprised you chose SWTOR since it seems to be (despite the lack of a LFG system like WoWs) following similar trends to what you have advocated earlier. You may want to try it before you condemn it for using "the old WoW model".

Those "failed" MMORPGs you talk will have certainly failed for other reasons outside of the questing system.
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Trying to advance in an MMO is not playing the game wrong. Ever.

--------------My Blog on MMO Design and Economieshttp://mmorpgdesigntalk.blogspot.com/

Trying to advance in an MMO is not playing the game wrong. Ever.


I didn't say that advancing in an MMO was playing the game wrong. I said that looking at the SWTOR story driven system as a grind is wrong and treating it as such is effectively playing the game incorrectly. SWTOR is just as much about the journey to max level than just getting to max level. If you wish to treat SWTOR like WoW or any of the other level based theme-park MMORPGs then you will inevitably feel the whole experience is a grind and that is more down to the reviewer than the game.



[quote name='FLeBlanc' timestamp='1321989535' post='4886644']
Personally, I believe that once you have dungeon-finder style lobbying in place, the world simply doesn't matter and probably can't be made to matter to the majority of people who like the LFG system you have built. You've created an entirely different game, no different from the lobby-based match games we've had for years. You've also neatly segregated your player base. You'll have people that run around doing quests because they like it, and you'll have people slamming the LFG queues and sitting on their glowy mounts in Org in the meantime; and rarely shall the twain ever meet. I don't like Blizzard's cross-realm LFG; it's sins are, to me, especially egregious. It's tantamount to ripping the living soul out of a server. In my opinion, the guild perks were band-aid fixes to the problem of people not knowing each other on their home servers, and not caring to know each other. I think that if you're going to go ahead and design a game around an LFG system, then it is pointless to also set it in a large, rich, and open world. Just my two cents.

I completely disagree with this, but I want to focus on the bolded part because that's more on the side of fact and philosophy, less just opinion due to the fact that I personally like solo questing and only run dungeons if it's quick and easy to find a group and get to the dungeon. But it's true that in general people don't care to know each other. I don't understand why some game designers are completely unwilling to let people not know each other if that's what people want to do. It's NOT an MMO designer's job to try to force people to get to know each other. A game should let players do what they find fun and not do what they don't find fun, or it's failing at the most essential part of being a game. If a designer wants to encourage group play, making it convenient is the approach likely to please the most people and offend the least people.
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A bit late reply, but I wanted to comment on the above. I'm not sure I agree with your view on the game design right there, concerning the social aspect of the games. Majority of the players are lazy by nature and there is little wrong with that to be honest. We want to have fun, we want a challenge, but if there is an obvious and easier way around it, we will take it. For example if there is a labyrinth on my path to delicious cake, but I can go around it, I would do so. But if I had to go through the said labyrinth, the reward in form of cake would feel lot more achieving and I would probably have fun figuring out the way to it.

The above is sure a far-stretched example, but I hope it gets my point across, without knowing it people will skip feature or activities they would find fun and entertaining if they just invested some time in them. I think it is a designers job to properly introduce the player to said features, such as socializing, instead of finding a ways of how to make it more and more easier. I might not always have enjoyed waiting 5 minutes on a boat in WoW, but while doing so I have made some great friends (I've met one of my best RL friends in that way actually) and some entertaining nemesis too.

You could argue that even with all possible benefits there would be certain cases of players just finding the said features annoying no matter what, but can a game appeal to everyone? I don't think so. However, you probably didn't really mean it the way I took it, but rather that a designer should make a game as least annoying as possible.. well, I can't argue with that really, although imho a good game should have a good pacing of minor annoyance in form of challenges, that's when you feel most rewarded once you have beaten it, rather if a game was a smooth and joyful ride all along, a player would get overloaded with rewards and get bored. My two cents, I hope it made sense, rather then coming out as incoherent gibberish.
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wow lost a lot of subscribers this year and on that group I count too I had had a level 85 character I got bored of it because of many things first of all because so many skills I guess well I just wonder what would happen if they use a playstyle like rakion online or another third person non- role action playstyle

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