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PVE is boring
bishbosh2
Member Posts: 66
The problem with PVE is that it is that once you know how to do it, it loses its charm. It is impossible for developers to develop PVE content at the rate at which it is consumed and this means there will always be not enough content. Developers employ grind mechanics as a damage control and as a result we have silly things like gear grinds.
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The problem with PVE is that it is that once you know how to do it, it loses its charm.
Disagree. In istaria, one player told me she went to kill certain Golem each time she chose new school. One time as Cleric with tons of heals, second time as Warrior with strong hits, third time as Shaman with lots of curses/life stealing. When I am bored in Istaria, I come to low-level monster zone and just kill poor lvl.2 grulets with some tool, say, needle or mining pick. I gain no xp, I got no trophies - it's just fun.
Fun.
The word OP forgot. It may be just fun to kill some monster or help someone to kill or come without armor against 5 monsters.
Developers employ grind mechanics as a damage control and as a result we have silly things like gear grinds.
Let me doubt if grind can be eliminated in MMORPG. One would grind in PvP for some prestige/legacy/whatever. One would grind in crafting (gather 1 ton of resources, make 100 StormRifles, deconstruct all StormRifles and repet...).
PVE, if done right, may not be boring. One monster is social and would aid any of his kind. Another is un-social and won't help anyone. One named monster may be stronger than another same level named monster. Yet another monster may spawn limitless monstress to aid him. Some monsters may be "human-like" and have some abilities players have. Some monsters may be hard even for a strong group of players (I could tell about Blood skulks in Istaria...).
One can try different tactic just out or interest. Would Great Sandstone Rabbit be killed with Smashing Sword or is Fire Rain better? What about if I attack with with Spear of Energy? Use Reflect Shots? Cast a spell that aggro 10 Great Sandstone Rabbits and try to hold off without any spell?
Conclusion: PVE may be interesting if done right and updated/changed from time to time.
http://www.mmoblogg.wordpress.com
Well, then why on 99% of the games the pvp servers are the first ones to get empty and the last ones to get full?
And whast you said about "learning the drill" on pve can also apply to pvp.
What we need is two things: First, more sandbox elements (and please, sandbox does not mean full loot open pvp); second, we need companies to finally start researching properly into proceduraly generated content.
i think sandbox PVE is interesting because of the way PVP interacts with PVE in sandbox game. farming fire lizards in volcano mountain for their scales to make fire lizard scale armor seems like a good idea until you realise there is people there waiting to kill you and steal all your scales. PVP is what makes the PVE fun and exciting.
I spent 30 minutes in a pvp map in GW2 the other night to get a wolf pet out of the zone. I left as soon as I was done with that.
I don't know what the hell you guys see in that crap.
Don't get me wrong, I do plenty of PVP... Just that I hardly ever choose MMOs for my PVP doze.
However the "PVP is what makes PVE exciting" does not address my question: Why in 99% of the games the first servers to get empty and the last ones to get full are the PVP ones?
I think it's the other way around. Open PVP does not make PVE exciting for most players. It makes it frustrating. Unless you enjoying having a boss almost dead and beeing jumped by another group, or getting ganked while trying to do your low level quests.
Again, open PVP and Sandbox are different concepts that coexist plenty of times but that do not need to.
It is not impossible at all, you just needs a slightly better AI. The problem is that the trinity combat makes mobs retarded and whenever you increase the AI people tend to whine because they actually have to work a bit.
Look on the AI in modern FPS games compared to Doom, making mobs a bit smarter in MMOs doesnt really take a lot of bandwidth or anything, they dont need to be geniuses, just Forrest gump smart.
A bit more randomness wouldnt hurt either.
No need to hate on the trinity, it's not the root of all evil. DAOC was as trinity as they come, a simple camp grinder, and yet the groups I was part of there wiped more than any modern MMO out there today.
Couple of reasons for this as I recall. One, respawns were somewhat random, and more than once they would drop on you when least expecting it. Also, aggro mechanics were unpredictable. You might be facing a camp of 40 NPC's.....and most times your puller could peel away 20 of them (or whatever number was comfortable for the group without problem. But every now and then, the whole camp came at you, with the predictable result of some or all of the group dying.
Heck, some mobs would chase you all the way to the zone line, so you had to be a pretty quick runner if you wanted to survive and come back and revive your party.
The trinity has suffered some, used to be a bit more complicated, you needed more than DPS, Tank, healer, was very important to have good, reliable crowd control and sometimes buffers and debuffers as well. (having 8 people in your group made this all possible)
Last but not least, taunting wasn't all powerful. Often, if a healer wasn't very careful he would draw aggro from the mob that couldn't be pulled off by the tank no matter what they did, and healer just died. (which made having a back up healer essential if the group was to pull through, and even then.)
When you talk about improving the AI in modern MMO's, most people point to modern raids which seem to me to be more excercises in "Dances with the Starts" or Simon Says. Everyone memorizes the dance moves, executes well, and the content goes down.
My last point, PVE in single player games was often more engaging, because they could be more liberal with the design. PVE in MMO's was generally the "work" you did to achieve some sort of goal, be it to level up, earn gold to buy/craft new gear, or help fund your guilds new castle. You never really worried about it being terribly "fun" it was something you did to achieve a means.
EVE is all about this, at the end of the day all PVE activities are done to support a greater metagame, by themselves they aren't particularly engaging (though I do love seeing ships go boom) Right now I'm running logistics (healing) in Incursions, and all I do is orbit my anchor (tank) and shoot my allies with healing (shields) to keep them from dropping to the Sanshas. (npcs).
You should see my screen, I have almost no visible room, just an endless pletheora of watchlists, fleet chat windows and the like. I might as well be fighting from a submarine, the combat is very much akin to that. Yet I enjoy this, it's "fun" in an odd sort of way, and the 150M ISK it brings in for a couple hours work is the real reward in the end.
"True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde
"I need to finish" - Christian Wolff: The Accountant
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
Ah yes, you're so right *NOT* If PvP was so successful and better than PvE, then why do most games have more PvE servers with bigger popultion than they have PvP servers? Why do games like DF and MO not have the millions of subscribers because of the lack of the boring PvE you describe?
I think PvE is the best part of a MMORPG since there the story of the game is told. I even dare say that PvP only games do lack story & background to start with. Just look at DF and MO. Yes, on paper (and their site) there is a story and background, but who cares about it when the only thing you do is bash the other player?
I do agree though that PvE AI (in general) should be improved. A lot of games have a real bad AI, and others have a somewhat 'impossible to die during PvE' mentality with exteremely weak monsters.
The trinity is not the root of all evil, no and in the past we seen better and worse trinity systems, but you have to agree that it still makes mobs rather stupid and predictable.
Sorry, but tanking really needs to go if you want to improve PvE and we need a new group dynamic instead. Mobs must act more like humans and with tanks that just is impossible.
I have to agree with your logic, the reason is that most MMO mechanics are mainly made for PvE.
I think we need to make PvE and PvP closer to eachother and get new mechanics that fits both styles as good.
Lets face it, both can be more fun.
But can that even be done? Because PVE is generally about beating a set of scripted mechanics (unless it's randomized and even then there is still scripting involved), while PVP is fighting against real life people who are capable of being highly unpredictable and who have a wide variety of skill levels.
I agree OP, PVE is pretty boring. Oh yay, I killed another mob... Or oh yay, I ran the same instance for the millionth time.
At least PvP gives you a new experience,... most of the time.
Until MMOs learn that not everyone needs to be a combat class, PVE will continue to suck. Bring back meaningful crafting classes like SWG was and PVE becomes fun and a competition, which at the heart of it is the reason for MMOs.
Exploiting does suck and it does a nice job of ruining the competion that PVE could be. But even with exploits, PVE would be better without forcing everyone to be a combat class. Being the best crafter on the server could mean something if Devs wanted it to.
Well it is clearly subjective but...
Admittedly I am biased because I am not a fan of PVE in the first place but for the main part in most games, yes PVE is incredibly boring. From the tedious rinse and repeat quests (DE's in GW2 are just as boring) to the actual act of beating on highly predictable mobs.
Quite often pvp can be boring as sin as well, but pvp offers randomness and people acting/reacting on the fly. This is, for me, the one of the big things lacking from PVE and it will only be altered when developers focus on improving AI in order to improve "challenge" as opposed to simply giving mobs massive amounts of health and a zerg to death special fired on cycle.
Think of all those thousands of mobs you have mown down in your time, including elites, vets, champs et al. How many of them really posed an interesting challenge? Some maybe did once or twice, but after that you learn the cycle and you simply go through the motions. In all honesty the only vaguely interesting moments come when something goes tits up and you have to react to say a sudden zerg train pull on you, or specials not going off etc.
"Come and have a look at what you could have won."
I can have fun with pve though. Some sorts of pve bore me senseless mind. Molten core many years ago comes to mind, never mind second job, it was considerably less fun than my real job.
This is actually one reason Im kind of looking forward to OOM. One of their features they list is mobs, especially bosses) learning and adapting causing the fight to never be the same twice.
If they can actually pull it off well, its going to be awesome. The lack of learning & adapting is what bores the crap out of me in PvE and I enjoy PvP mor ebecause I get to play against thinking, reacting humans who can change up their tactics.
What I would like to see, if it could be done, is a game where the mobs are essentially given the same, or very similar, skills to what players have and to create a system where the game is constantly analyzing data from players in PvP and adapting to match it. Make it so that the AI reacts very similarly to the way people are playing against eachother. Basically teach the game to recognize the sae types of things most of us look for as players such as targets to focus on, how to take them down effeciently, how to protect ourselves when getting focused, etc.
Good post. I've never played DAoC but from what I've read about it from your posts over the past few months I think the group structure and PvE was fairly similar to EQ in some ways. I think another one of the big reasons PvE has become boring is the absolute joke of a challenge the mobs have become. I remember the EQ days of single pulls, chain or double if you were really good, and that being a pretty good challenge. I have a hard time doing these "Kill 10 X" quests to help these level 60 guards who could one shot me because they need a hero's help in defeating the big bad level 5 racoons...of death! I mean, if I can handle 3 or 4 of these at level 4...why do they need my help? All too much trying to make the player feel like the hero and all powerful when we should be a part of a virtual world.
I had this issue the past few nights of GW2. I'm just a recruit for the Vigil, yet I'm the one making tactical decisions against an invading Charr army? I'm the one getting coffee in one cutscene, then turned around and told to figure out where to position our troops and whether to assault them or defend our position? I thought you were the commander, that's what you told me last cutscene and told me to shut up because I was a lowly recruit.
Played: EQ1 (10 Years), Guild Wars, Rift, TERA
Tried: EQ2, Vanguard, Lord of the Rings Online, Dungeons and Dragons Online, Runes of Magic and countless others...
Currently Playing: GW2
Nytlok Sylas
80 Sylvari Ranger
There we go, that's better, now we can have a sensible talk about it.
To me it isn't. I enjoy it, just like a huge part of the MMORPG player base (I would even say the majority of the MMORPG player base).
You are free to go play those games that focus on PvP and avoid those that focus on PvE though.
Chess computers provide the best PvE - the 'artificial intelligence' scales to your level of ability and you may select the computer's style of attack (e.g. defensive / aggressive / random).
Basically I agree with you - this is an otherwise neglected area of development.
This is the basic dissonance of this debate. You find teh PvE to be boring and need to spice things up with PvP. I find many types of PvE fun and challenging so for me PvP is just a needless distraction from the 'real action'.
When I am at the beach and building sand castles, the fact that some random yahoo can come up to me and wreck my castle is a negative thing. The PvE of castle builing is not made better by the PvP of dealing with people who like to wreck my work. In that scenario the PvPers are like mosquitos: annoying but ultimately irrelevant to the real goals.
Well, I think tanking does a reasonable job of simulating reality.
If you were in combat in the field, you really couldn't disengage from the heavy armor wearing dude swinging the broadsword in your face to go attack the archers standing in the background.
I mean, in a game, if we're going to let mobs move around in that pattern, they would have to suffer huge penalties for turning their back on the guys I previously mentioned since they'd get chewed to pieces.
Now I do agree, NPC mages should do more than cast one spell in a fight, or melee should block as well as attack, but overall I think a well managed trinity can do a decent job.
Its just what we have today sort of has been simplified too much IMO.....
"True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde
"I need to finish" - Christian Wolff: The Accountant
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon