I don't think it was a feeling of entitlement to the content, although I do recognize that there was(is) some of that sentiment that exists.
Rather, I firmly blame World of Warcraft.
The marketing geniuses at Blizzard/Activision figured out if you could lessen (or remove) the burdens to get to content, so that casual players could get at it, you'd get more casual players. Not just a few more players; a lot more players. Millions more players.
It isn't because the players that were there felt entitled to content, it was that developers removed the restrictions and opened the floodgates, and the people came in droves.
I can make a gimpy analogy: There are those that despise people who shop at (Insert some high-end retailer here), but by and large, those people that shop there are not really torn down. Rather, someone like Wal-Mart comes in, offers similar products at much lower prices, and lo and behold - WalMart becomes the largest retailer in the world. It wasn't because the shopper demanded products and services, it was because the retailer found a way to make them available.
I think the OP is on to something, but has rather latched on to the wrong cause for the outcome.
I think the OP is grabbing at straws. The problem with these MMO's is they stopped being persistent virtual worlds and become Disney Land. Everything was laid out for you - they were stagnant. In games like AC with monthly story updates - whole towns could be laid waste. Also, players could impact the story...there is still a statue that pays respects to the players of a server in AC that changed the outcome of the Shadow Invasion and won - no other populace on the other servers did this.
Unlike EVE, today's MMO's are lacking any kind of player involvement. EVE continues to grow while these other games continue to die and EVE was one of the few MMO's that hasn't gone free to play yet.
I've said it before...and I will keep saying it...the further these games move away from their roots - the more they will slip into the abyss of mediocrity.
Which roots exactly?
Not all of the first MMOs were sandboxes. UO was just one of many. Most of todays MMOs are coming from WoW, which was based on Everquest, which was never really a sandbox.
Then you look at all the old asian MMOs, and realize most of them weren't sandboxes either.
I do agree that some MMOs are moving further away from what they should be (marvel heroes.. really?!), but a lot of the loss of 'player involvement' is a biproduct of a growing market. Back during the birth of MMOs, players were forced to cooperate, or not have a game to play. Now? There are multiple MMOs a year being made, and players can easily (and are) just hop from game to game the second things don't go their way. Such climate makes it nearly impossible to nurture the kind of risk / reward system & commitment it takes to develope a truly good sandbox. Essentially the players need to be patient, commited, and open to new game types. Currently, most gamers are none of those things.
I don't think I have ever seen anyone complain about how long it takes to level in an MMO on these forums. Well maybe except for Aion when it first launched.
The thing is, a casual's $15 is the exact same value as a hardcore player's $15 when you are talking p2p games. The hardcore didn't need to spend anymore money and the casual wasn't able to spend less. It was a flat rate for everyone, no matter what.
So if you build a theme park with only a certain number of rides that mainly catered to one group of people, you would probably notice that the Jones' theme park down the street that has more rides catering to even more types of people is making more money and also people from your theme park visit and buy tickets with them as well.
Business is about competition and catering to your customer's needs and wants. If you can't supply that then sure, you will have some loyal customers who like your few products that you offer, but you will lose out on all that profit from sales from other customers if you would have diversified. So you have to stay competitive and offer more goods and services to attract more customers.
TLDR: In way you thread title is right, except only close minded people will see it as a negative.
You must be blind. There were multiple threads in GW2 complaining that 50 hours to max level was ASIAN GRINDER MMO ridiculous...
Moving on, im not sure what you're trying to say because you're arguing the point we're making, but you don't even realize it.
Nobody is asking anybody to build a theme park filled with hard core high G' death defying roller coasters and nothing else.
A real themepark is just like you said, it has something for everyone. Tea Cups for the young girls, rollercoasters for the grown men or strapping young lads, crazy tall free fall rides for those people. Water rides, etc etc.
The difference is that when some parent comes up to the park manager and says "you know you should slow those high G rollercoasters down substantially so that my young girl can ride them and not be so scared", instead of the manager saying, "well sir, those coasters are not designed for small children and are designed to entertain people who like fast rides and high G's, Im sorry you feel that way, but we have multiple OTHER rides you can take your small girl on", the MMO developers have essentially gone "Oh jeez mister, let me change that for you, i guess all those other customers can F right off, i wanna make sure YOU are taken care of, even though your request is irresponsible and ridiculous'
"The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently."
Beating it on the hardest difficulty to earn the best gear isn't. (But no MMORPGs are designed this way.)
The Disneyland analogy isn't really appropriate because MMORPGs don't exactly strive to make everything visible to players on Day 1 of buying the game. It's basically the the opposite: they want to stretch their content as far as it can go without compromising quality.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
Maybe if the OP hadn't used words like "whiny" "dumb" and "entitled" I might seriously consider what he's saying. Instead, I'm going to ignore the insulting language and whatever the OP's "theory" is and chalk it up as another MMO elitist rant.
You can make a point without insulting people.
Is a man not entitled to the herp of his derp?
Remember, I live in a world where juggalos and yugioh players are real things.
I couldnt enter world 1-2 until i finished world 1-1 in mario and I payed for the full game...
But you were allowed to play Mario2 before finishing Mario.
meh ... ok, not a good analogy, I'll give you that round ... but mario isn't an MMO and we could go a long way down that rabbit hole getting more and more irrelevent in our analogies.
My point should be that if you don't want to coexist with other playstyles, if it's "us or them", then the only metric that matters is which one side brings in more money.
I don't think it was a feeling of entitlement to the content, although I do recognize that there was(is) some of that sentiment that exists.
Rather, I firmly blame World of Warcraft.
The marketing geniuses at Blizzard/Activision figured out if you could lessen (or remove) the burdens to get to content, so that casual players could get at it, you'd get more casual players. Not just a few more players; a lot more players. Millions more players.
It isn't because the players that were there felt entitled to content, it was that developers removed the restrictions and opened the floodgates, and the people came in droves.
I can make a gimpy analogy: There are those that despise people who shop at (Insert some high-end retailer here), but by and large, those people that shop there are not really torn down. Rather, someone like Wal-Mart comes in, offers similar products at much lower prices, and lo and behold - WalMart becomes the largest retailer in the world. It wasn't because the shopper demanded products and services, it was because the retailer found a way to make them available.
I think the OP is on to something, but has rather latched on to the wrong cause for the outcome.
I see where you are coming from, but i disagree, i'll give you a good example:
The main community arm/developer point of contact for WOW was a guy named Ghostcrawler.
Now, what happened is in Burning Crusade, the playerbase whined and pissed and moaned about having to crowd control mobs in dungeon runs, it was too hard and tedious, and it made them have to have a super specific group make up and blah blah blah blah. So, in WOTLK they made it so you could faceroll dungeons. Tanks literally would just run into a group, spam some AOE taunts, and then the DPS would AOE down the mobs. There was no more of this "kill the healer first, or take out the caster who is mana burning, etc". So, then when that happened people started complaining that dungeons were too easy, etc. So, in Cataclysm, they brought back some of the group mechanics, and guess what. People bitched, i mean 1000+ page threads on the forums, just bitching incessantly. So Ghostcrawler goes and makes a big blog post trying to explain to everyone the thinking behind this, and essentially tells people to L2P. This literally throws jet fuel on the fire and created a forum explosion of bitching that was unlike anything you had ever seen before.
People talk about vanilla wow with reverence because the game degenerated into ultra casual face roll MMO, SOLELY because of casual player whining. They whined about EVERYTHING, leveling times, loot drops, how hard mobs were, how having to spend 2 minutes walking to a dungeon entrance was ridiculous, so they added in porting straight into the dungeon. They complained that the skill tree was too complicated and so blizzard dumbed it down so basically you had enough points to fill almost the entire tree instead of actually havign to think about your spec and try to synergize abilities and such. The casuals complained EVEN MORE so they dumbed it down EVEN further to where you dont even have a skill tree. Now you can literally just mash 2 or 3 abilities and do MAXIMUM DPS!!!!11.
People wonder why MMOs have no community and dont feel like worlds. But then god forbid they give up their porting straight into dungeons, LFG tools, flying mounts, quest trackers, taking more than an hour to make 1 level, etc, etc.
"The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently."
Although I agree with the original poster's thesis here I don't think the arguments he uses are very convincing. It is true that "I should see everything" crowd has contributed to the death of the subscription model.
The issue here is it is subscriptions are nothing like Disney World. No roller coaster takes two hours to ride on. What takes two hours is the line waiting to get on the roller coaster. The ride itself is maybe 2 or 3 minutes long. Part of the reason the lines are so long is Disney theme parks have a VIP system where people who pay more get to cut in line. Guests who stay in expensive Disney owned hotels also get to enter the park an hour early. Sound familiar? The pay to get ahead mentality is not just something that afflicts MMOs. It is deeply engrained in real world economics and in modern capitalist society as a whole.
Look at how the air lines run things. First class passengers get on the plane first and get a big meal and unlimited free beverage. Coach passengers have to wait to get on and then they are lucky if they get a meal at all or a can of soda. Go back even further and look at the titanic. First class passengers got on the lifeboats while 3rd class drowned. The idea that money talks in the real world is the Elephant in the living room nobody really wants to acknowledge. These trends have been going on forever.
When the subscription MMO got started in the late 90s the standard sub was $15/mo. In the 90s that was a lot of money to pay for online games. The MMO subscription could be seen as a First class ticket. You got everything because it was first class and the player was VIP. What has changed between now and then? The biggest thing is inflation. It is not 1999 anymore when gas cost gas cost 90 cents compared now it where costs almost 4 bucks. Everything has gone up in price from rents, labor costs, training, taxes, etc all have gone up since the late 90s. What has not gone up in price is MMO subscriptions. They are still $15/mo the same as 1999. I pay $100/mo for fiber optic internet connection but the MMO sub is still stuck in the dial up era.
The $15/mo sub isn't first class anymore in 2013. It is second or third class. First class is the cash shop now. People in the subscription bucket are complaining that they don't receive first class service anymore but are NOT willing to pay for first class. The subscription cannot remain at $15, it has to go up to regain first class status. Maybe $40/mo would be a more realistic expectation to see "everything." The $15 sub doesn't entitle you to anything. The standard sub payer is like the basic Disney patron who has to wait in 2 hour roller coaster lines while they watch the VIPs cut ahead. That is the cold reality that is setting in on MMO market.
Either adapt or perish, that is the mantra the will exist going forward. No company is going to run their game as a charity so players can keep their $15 subs and "see everything." Those days are over.
I agree complaints on THEIR time restrictions should not be shared by all,it is very selfish to think a game needs to cater to your needs.However game developers are making a huge mistake in their content ideals.
The premise has been for a long time that the challenging combat needs to take place in a large alliance and often instanced and often for many hours.That is far from the truth,a good developer should be able to create challenging fights that take less time and with only a standard 6 man group,Raids are NOT needed what so ever.A larger group size does not mean better,if anything it means worse because you might have 3/4/5 tanks ,one dies another moves in,but in a normal group ,your tank dies your whole group might wipe.Same goes for the healer,a Raid might have 4/5 healers where a normal group might have 1.
You can cater to everyone by creating a large array of AI.The Boss would change form several times and change resistances as well.This keeps players thinking and also does not cater to one type of DPS or play style as it would change all the time.
By creating that versatile AI,you could make it so the fight COULD end quickly if the players are on their toes and thinking,yet can be challenging and longer if you are not.This way the challenging aspect is there and the ability to end fast is there as well.
Then if players still complain because they are dying or can't end it fast,it is their fault,they need to think about what they are doing and not blame everyone else or the game.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
You're conflating a bunch of different issues in this thread that need to be addressed separately. At an absolute minimum, we need to separate the issues of cumulative time spent on a game across many play sessions versus time spend continuously in a single play session.
*snip*
However, for the second player to demand that real content be removed in order to allow him to finish the game faster is wholly unreasonable. But when do players ever demand that? The problem with "kill 1000 furbolgs to proceed" isn't that you're asked to kill furbolgs. The problem is that once you've killed 10, you've demonstrated that you readily could kill 1000 if you put the time in, but actually going through the motions of grinding something stupid to proceed is boring.
So, i understand what you're saying, but here is where i differ in opinion. What you describe is fine when you're talking about a single player game. I'm all for being able to pause, save, whatever a single player game whenever you want, even if its right before a boss fight. Thats kind of the point of single player games is that you play them at your pace.
The mistake you are making is the mistake a lot of people make which is confusing a long leveling curve/time investment with being a "grind".
Its only a grind when there is a lack of content. MMO's since WOW have had people level by doing quests. So if you ran out of quests your only option was to go slaughter mobs until you leveled. This was a failure in design principles of the game.
Looking at a game like EQ, which took most people over 600 hours to get a character to max level, worked just fine without having to "grind" because there was a plethora of content. They also made wise design decisions. I'll explain further.
In EQ you had usually between 3 and 6 zones you could go level in at any given level. It was like today where at best you have 2 small zones, or usually 1 small zone that is level appropriate. You also had multiple dungeons that overlapped a large range of levels. So if you didnt want to level outside, you could get buddies together and run a dungeon. This was incentivized by dungeons having an XP bonus, and by the potential for nice loot. If it took 10 hours to level one time, it wasn't a big deal because each dungeon was so large, you could easily spend 2 hours getting to 1 camp spot of a dungeon, and you usually had at least 2 other dungeons that were lvl appropriate.
People only sat in one area for 10 hours on end grinding mobs because it minimized downtime, and like all min/maxers they try to do everything as efficiently as possible. So yes, they could make XP 10% faster lets say by never moving from one area to another because the 10-15 minutes you spent getting to the new area was XP you weren't getting. But again, thats just standard min/maxer mentality on everything.
The problem then comes back to the casual entitlement whiners. They basically went, "well, i can only play solo by running quests, so you're disenfranchising me by making grouping level faster than soloing quests. So of course as people pointed out, the developers pandered to these people and made it so that questing was the fastest way of leveling. This basically negated any reason to run dungeons or pursue any of the other content. Normally gear would be a reason to pursue the other content, but as Mark Kern pointed out in his opinion piece, when the leveling curve is so fast that the 2 hours you spent in the dungeon getting the sword, had it been spent on XPing via questing, would of outleveled the sword you got...., then whats the point?
I'm not arguing that slow leveling curves are bad. I've been playing Uncharted Waters Online for most of the past two years, and haven't yet reached the cap in any type of experience or fame. (I did reach the adventuring level cap once briefly before the cap was increased.) I've only reached the favored skill cap on one skill out of nearly 100 in the game. That's slow leveling if there is such a thing. But it's fine because the game has massive amounts of content.
The problem with grinding comes if you have slow leveling in a game that doesn't have massive amounts of content. I don't want to be forced to do essentially the same battle more than about 10 or so times before being allowed to move on. If you vary the battles quite a bit, that's better. But an identical group of mobs dropped in 100 different places isn't really 100 different battles. Small differences in group composition that affect neither strategy nor the likely outcome aren't much of an improvement on this, either.
If the problem is being told to kill 100 mobs in 100 separate but basically identical fights, then telling players that instead they have 10 choices of mobs but have to kill 1000 in total doesn't fix the problem. Telling players that they have to do 100 battles to move on and can spread them among 20 substantially different groups to fight fixes the problem. I've never played EverQuest, so I don't know how much content it had, how substantially different the content was, or whether the level curve was unreasonably slow. But I have played games that most certainly were unreasonably grindy.
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Are you arguing that MMORPGs shouldn't bother trying to accommodate players' real-life schedules, and should go ahead and require 4 hour contiguous blocks of time to play whenever they feel like it? Or do you agree with my contention that MMORPGs should try to allow people to play the game without having to be irresponsible in real life whenever there isn't a good gameplay reason to do otherwise? Or do you not take an opinion on that? It sounded like you disagreed, but you didn't elaborate.
I couldnt enter world 1-2 until i finished world 1-1 in mario and I payed for the full game...
But you were allowed to play Mario2 before finishing Mario.
i was also allowed to play soccer before finishing mario. I'm not seeing your argument.
If you're willing to give my clumsy rhetoric e a break, I was trying to use the example that looking at the mario series as a subscription, mario 2 was like the second month of the subscription, but it didn't force you to get an A on the mario 1 content in order to see mario 2 content. It all made sense in my head, but looking at it written down, I agree it's not exactly obvious what I was aiming for.
People talk about vanilla wow with reverence because the game degenerated into ultra casual face roll MMO, SOLELY because of casual player whining. They whined about EVERYTHING, leveling times, loot drops, how hard mobs were, how having to spend 2 minutes walking to a dungeon entrance was ridiculous, so they added in porting straight into the dungeon. They complained that the skill tree was too complicated and so blizzard dumbed it down so basically you had enough points to fill almost the entire tree instead of actually havign to think about your spec and try to synergize abilities and such. The casuals complained EVEN MORE so they dumbed it down EVEN further to where you dont even have a skill tree. Now you can literally just mash 2 or 3 abilities and do MAXIMUM DPS!!!!11.
People wonder why MMOs have no community and dont feel like worlds. But then god forbid they give up their porting straight into dungeons, LFG tools, flying mounts, quest trackers, taking more than an hour to make 1 level, etc, etc.
People talk about vanilla WoW with reverence because of nostalgia. I played vanilla WoW. It wasn't terrible, but it wasn't great, either. And it most certainly wasn't some great challenge; combat was mostly a check to see if your level and gear was high enough to pass, with only a narrow range in which the difference between an expert and someone who was mediocre but not completely terrible even mattered.
Also, it wasn't a 2 minute walk to a dungeon. It was more along the lines of typically taking about 15 minutes and sometimes upwards of 30 after you have a group in order for everyone to get there. Or more if the boats and/or zeppelins are feeling glitchy that day. Or a lot more if the server crashes, as they were rather prone to do. And this was often on top of taking 10-20 minutes to actually assemble the group in the first place. Or perhaps to spend that much time trying to assemble a group before giving up and not actually doing a dungeon at all.
I should see more than everyone else because I am willing to go looking around and doing what it takes. Meritocracy.
That's a perfectly valid gaming style and a perfectly valid expectation to have for an esport (it's ok to be an elitist in a competitive environment).
The problem is that not everyone wants that. But people still want their playstyle to get as much attention as yours for their $15. So it's going to be in the form of an easier difficulty on the same content, or other content that they will be playing more than you.
I worry that spinning your playstyle as a meritocracy isn't convincing other people to play your way - it's just blinding you to the validity of other playstyles.
Strongly disagree with your premise that meritocracy = e-sport elitism.
If I'm interpreting Robokapp's post correctly, he's simply saying that time and effort should yield greater results, period. It has nothing to do with competition vs. other players. If someone doesn't have the time or isn't willing to put in the effort to achieve by merit, there are numerous F2P games with all sorts of cash shop items to accommodate him. The end result might be a higher cost to play than the person paying a sub, but instant gratification isn't cheap.
If someone lacks time AND money, it's really not anyone else's problem, and to alter a game to cater to the needs of charity cases isn't fair to those with the means and ability to get the most out of a game on their own.
"You'll never win an argument with an idiot because he is too stupid to recognize his own defeat." ~Anonymous
The way I see it there are a ton of factors at work here causing some of these issues.
1 - The people who played MMO's back in the day endlessly (I'm talking UO, EQ, and put myself in this catagory) for the most part have lives to lead, careers and don't have the time they used to invest anymore for an MMO. By time I'm talking about 8-12 hour Saturday marathons or a 20+ hour weekend block (the good old days). Being able to get on in the time I have allowed and duo with the wifey is more important to me now than finding groups, raiding, or spending my days (and I do mean days) playing all weekend. Sure, getting in a guild, doing some dungeon runs or raids I can still do, but I'm not available and I'm sure others aren't either the amount we used to be.
2 - The younger generation (I preface this by saying not all) have this , for lack of a better word, entitlement mentality that regardless of ability, money or anything else...everything should be equitable at all times no matter what. This idea that the MMO genre should be equitable in all ways for everyone. As someone who now doesn't have the time I used to, I totally get players who are going to have stuff I don't, and i certainly don't expect to get the same items just because I play the same game.
The reality is for me I just don't care about that stuff like I used to. I still think skill > time invested though, so even though I don't have the time I used to, I still think I'm pretty skilled at playing these games (should be, been doing it so long. Trying to find that balance though is a huge issue, especially when one segment of the genre is always complaining about things being equal no matter what. I've even heard arguments made when it's skill vs. time with people saying skill shouldn't matter either...it's that attitude that I just don't get.
3 - Developers want to reach the most people they can, and to do that they need to make games accessible. What does Accessible mean? It means being able to accomplish alot with minimal time investment, F2P, with anything that requires a "real" investment of time being an after thought. Now mind you, I was never a fan of 5-6 hour raids with a .02% chance of getting a drop for your class, but certainly devs can do better. The trouble is what is their incentive to do so business wise?
So the bottom line is, when you're making a game what do you do? Do you cater to the "hardcore" crowd (whatever that means) and start off with a potential customer base lower than it could be?
Do you do a paint by numbers MMO that does nothing genre breaking but might make you some money because its accessible to more people?
Or do you try the old school EQ method and make meaningful content that is very time consuming that could scare off the older game if you charge a monthly fee?
At this stage I would be happy to throw money at option 3 even if I didn't have all the time in the world to play. As EQ was before I'd love to find that ONE game that will last me 10+ years...I'm still looking.
So instead of being like normal, sane people, who take 2 or 3 months maybe to read through the whole lord of the rings, you instead feel like the author should be obligated to cut it down to make it more palatable for you. In the process the thing is ruined.
"Ruined" is a funny word. There are as many writers who agree with their editors as rage about their editors.
Anthony Burgess still hates Stanley Kubrick for the film version of a Clockwork Orange. (Kubrick really wasn't responsible for the 'dirty work', in that particular case, Burgess' British Editor was).
And I'm sure you know how Chris Tolkein feels about Peter Jackson. Sour grapes over royalties...
Since these are all purely subjective qualitative judgements; do we side with the author (he done be wronged, maw), or do we side with the academy awards?
(personally, I think Burgess was a prima donna, C.O. was indeed a better work without the 21st chapter). LoTR..think I'll side with the novels, even knowing that 30% of the readers that begin them never finish them.
The way I see it there are a ton of factors at work here causing some of these issues.
You're missing that some of us got into the genre for the roleplaying game. I took fishing skill in UO not because it improved my dps more than anatomy, but because I wanted to make a fisherman.
( edit: but I agree with your overall conclusion that it's a hard decision that each game needs to make for itself - I'd hate to be a developer who loves specializing in designing hardcore raids but suddenly finds himself facing a wall of smiling players in fishing hats )
So instead of being like normal, sane people, who take 2 or 3 months maybe to read through the whole lord of the rings, you instead feel like the author should be obligated to cut it down to make it more palatable for you. In the process the thing is ruined.
"Ruined" is a funny word. There are as many writers who agree with their editors as rage about their editors.
Anthony Burgess still hates Stanley Kubrick for the film version of a Clockwork Orange. (Kubrick really wasn't responsible for the 'dirty work', in that particular case, Burgess' British Editor was).
And I'm sure you know how Chris Tolkein feels about Peter Jackson. Sour grapes over royalties...
Since these are all purely subjective qualitative judgements; do we side with the author (he done be wronged, maw), or do we side with the academy award?
(personally, I think Burgess was a prima donna, C.O. was indeed a better work without the 21st chapter).
Ruined is not a subjective term. Something can easily be ruined. Whether it was ruined for the worse or for the better is something that can be debated and is subjective.
If something has an intrinsic purpose to it and that something is changed drastically to where it no longer resembles its original form, it has been ruined. That is quantifiable.
In your example, you side with the author, as his original work has been ruined. As far as whether or not the new product based on the ruined product is worthy of admiration, praise, etc, is an altogether different discussion.
Thats something a lot of people are missing in the whole debate. They argue that MMO's have "changed" for the better, when in fact what is out today is NOT an MMO. So, in the eyes of people who played real MMOs, yes, they have been ruined.
"The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently."
I'm not arguing that slow leveling curves are bad. I've been playing Uncharted Waters Online for most of the past two years, and haven't yet reached the cap in any type of experience or fame. (I did reach the adventuring level cap once briefly before the cap was increased.) I've only reached the favored skill cap on one skill out of nearly 100 in the game. That's slow leveling if there is such a thing. But it's fine because the game has massive amounts of content.
The problem with grinding comes if you have slow leveling in a game that doesn't have massive amounts of content. I don't want to be forced to do essentially the same battle more than about 10 or so times before being allowed to move on. If you vary the battles quite a bit, that's better. But an identical group of mobs dropped in 100 different places isn't really 100 different battles. Small differences in group composition that affect neither strategy nor the likely outcome aren't much of an improvement on this, either.
If the problem is being told to kill 100 mobs in 100 separate but basically identical fights, then telling players that instead they have 10 choices of mobs but have to kill 1000 in total doesn't fix the problem. Telling players that they have to do 100 battles to move on and can spread them among 20 substantially different groups to fight fixes the problem. I've never played EverQuest, so I don't know how much content it had, how substantially different the content was, or whether the level curve was unreasonably slow. But I have played games that most certainly were unreasonably grindy.
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Are you arguing that MMORPGs shouldn't bother trying to accommodate players' real-life schedules, and should go ahead and require 4 hour contiguous blocks of time to play whenever they feel like it? Or do you agree with my contention that MMORPGs should try to allow people to play the game without having to be irresponsible in real life whenever there isn't a good gameplay reason to do otherwise? Or do you not take an opinion on that? It sounded like you disagreed, but you didn't elaborate.
I think we're both on roughly the same page.
The argument i am making is that EVERY aspect of the MMO shouldnt cater to casuals. IMO and i think many would agree, games like WOW have taken literally every aspect of the game, whether its crafting, raiding, dungeon running, etc, and they have changed it and dumbed it down to the lowest common denominator.
Even in Vanilla WOW, you didnt raid if you didnt have at least 4 hours to put into it at once. That was well known, you dont have the time, dont ask to join the raid. Its not for you. Well, people bitched, and bitched, and bitched, and bitched. Because by god they pay $15 a month and they shouldnt have to have 4 hours of free time to raid. So what does Blizzard do? They make the raid fights shorter, they make the raid zones shorter, the make the fight easier, etc. So now, a raid only takes maybe 2 hours instead of 4. Well, thats not good enough for the casuals, cus now they have to spend time getting the raid put together and preparing for the raid, and its hard to get 40 people together, so, what does blizzard do, makes it 25 people. Then people complain about that being too much, so they make 10 man versions. Now they've complained about THAT being too much, so you can now "raid" with as little as 5 people. Its become a mockery and a joke.
Thats just one example. Every aspect of the modern themepark MMO has been catered the casual crowd.
Travel: Teleports every 100 yards, stupid fast mounts/flying mounts. Instant port to dungeon, instant port to raids.
Combat: Instead of having to manage 7 or 8 abilities, you can now be maximum effectiveness using only 2 or 3 abilities, not having to pay attention to recast timers or anything, just mash the buttons as you see fit.
Skill Trees: Trees have been removed, casuals complained that "elitists" were doing so much more damage than them because they didnt want to have to put any thought into trying to synergize their abilities or come up with rotations, or use abilities that work together in sequence.
Quests: Apparently actually having to search for 10 wolves to get wolf hides is too much effort, so now we've put big circles on the map where you can find wolves, because we can't abide having you spend 30 seconds searching out the zone to locate the wolves yourself, that would be inconveniencing.
I could go on but i think you see my point.
In the days of EQ the casual players didnt begrudge the players who had more time, skill, whatever. They had plenty of stuff to do and had fun doing it. It wasnt born of jealousy or entitlement, etc.
"The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently."
I see where you are coming from, but i disagree, i'll give you a good example:
The main community arm/developer point of contact for WOW was a guy named Ghostcrawler.
Now, what happened is in Burning Crusade, the playerbase whined and pissed and moaned about having to crowd control mobs in dungeon runs, it was too hard and tedious, and it made them have to have a super specific group make up and blah blah blah blah. So, in WOTLK they made it so you could faceroll dungeons. Tanks literally would just run into a group, spam some AOE taunts, and then the DPS would AOE down the mobs. There was no more of this "kill the healer first, or take out the caster who is mana burning, etc". So, then when that happened people started complaining that dungeons were too easy, etc. So, in Cataclysm, they brought back some of the group mechanics, and guess what. People bitched, i mean 1000+ page threads on the forums, just bitching incessantly. So Ghostcrawler goes and makes a big blog post trying to explain to everyone the thinking behind this, and essentially tells people to L2P. This literally throws jet fuel on the fire and created a forum explosion of bitching that was unlike anything you had ever seen before.
People talk about vanilla wow with reverence because the game degenerated into ultra casual face roll MMO, SOLELY because of casual player whining. They whined about EVERYTHING, leveling times, loot drops, how hard mobs were, how having to spend 2 minutes walking to a dungeon entrance was ridiculous, so they added in porting straight into the dungeon. They complained that the skill tree was too complicated and so blizzard dumbed it down so basically you had enough points to fill almost the entire tree instead of actually havign to think about your spec and try to synergize abilities and such. The casuals complained EVEN MORE so they dumbed it down EVEN further to where you dont even have a skill tree. Now you can literally just mash 2 or 3 abilities and do MAXIMUM DPS!!!!11.
People wonder why MMOs have no community and dont feel like worlds. But then god forbid they give up their porting straight into dungeons, LFG tools, flying mounts, quest trackers, taking more than an hour to make 1 level, etc, etc.
It feels like you're making all of this up.
Can you find isolated posts backing each of those statements up? Sure, you can find an isolated post in the WOW forums complaining about literally every single molecule of the game.
Meanwhile things like the talent tree changes actually were valid design refinements, given that 90% of talents were mathematically-solvable passives which someone inevitably solved for everyone, eliminating any true 'decision' to the choice. The current talent choices focus predominantly on the non-passive abilities, which were always the more interesting elements to the talent trees by far.
So could you find someone complaining about the old talent tree pre-change? Absolutely. But that wasn't really the root reason behind their decision (although when a game makes this sort of change if you can back it up by saying players requested it, it helps justify the decision to players.)
Dungeon changes were similar, and although I dislike the ease of dungeons they do tend to flow better without CC. And at the higher end of play, tanks actually have a better dynamic control over the difficulty of dungeons (if you pull 50% faster, the dungeon is 50% harder, and you earn rewards 50% faster.)
While I feel "life threatened in every pull" is a better policy for dungeon design, I also don't feel "CC all but 1 mob and kill things one at a time" is necessarily the most interesting way to achieve that goal. After years of doing that, killing things one at a time was rather flat actually (even though strategizing which mobs to CC with a new dungeon's release was certainly a nice frontloaded burst of fun and challenge.)
But again, the main point here is that Blizzard isn't being steered by player feedback so much as they take advantage of player feedback when it agrees with a change they already wanted to make ("...and we did this based on player feedback!") Which is really how a lot of "by popular demand" business changes happen, tbh.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
In the days of EQ the casual players didnt begrudge the players who had more time, skill, whatever. They had plenty of stuff to do and had fun doing it. It wasnt born of jealousy or entitlement, etc.
You're correct; it did take quite some time before gamers began to see everything in MMOs as competition.
If, for the same cost, you fail to entertain as much as another entertainment product, you won't be as successful.
Now if you twist it a certain way, this expectation of something being at least as entertaining as other similar products is "entitlement"
But really it's just the natural expectation that my time shouldn't be wasted, and in fact I should feel like I'm getting more than my money's worth by playing this game because the game eagerly lavishes satisfaction on me.
So it's completely silly to pain instant gratification or entitlement as bad concepts in gaming. If a game fails to satisfy (which is instant gratification) or fails to meet expectations (which is entitlement) then it's a bad game.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
You know what bothers me the most about this crowd of people? Most of them still never got around to seeing any of the content they cried for because they were either A. Terrible players, or B. They decided they were not that interested in high end raiding anyways because the rest of us were "Elitists"
In fairness, most high end raiders are elitist douchebags. If I can't make raids 5 nights a week because I have a job and school then fuck you. I'll make it when I can. The best times I've had were doing end game raids in EQ1 with a casual guild that raided once a week. We didn't do the raids the day the expansion came out but we finished before the next expansion came out. End game shouldnt be the whole game
Originally posted by Salahudin definitely 15$ a month ought to give access to all content... but whether you get to it or not should depend on your skill and play..
Everyone has always had access to all content in P2P games. Everyone could raid in WoW. Whether you got around to it was determined by the time you could invest in the game and skill you had to play your character in a raid setting.
I pay $45 a month (with in game currency) to play EVE online with 3 accounts. Have I done all there is to do in EVE? No. Will I do all there is to do in EVE? Will I fly EVERY ship in EVE? No. But I have the same chance as everyone else who subscribes to the game to ANYTHING I want as long as I put in the time and effort to train skills and be a good pilot.
Maybe the real issue is that most P2P games now and in the past would funnel everyone into a singular play style, raiding. Perhaps if they had the decency to offer other kinds of content at end game with their own epic loot progression, it wouldn't be an issue. It really sucks to have these "casual" MMOs out there and yet they turn into hardcore raidfest turds and people like me feel like we've been ripped off and forced to subsidize niche content in a game that was suppose to be targeted at us casuals.
I see where you are coming from, but i disagree, i'll give you a good example:
The main community arm/developer point of contact for WOW was a guy named Ghostcrawler.
Now, what happened is in Burning Crusade, the playerbase whined and pissed and moaned about having to crowd control mobs in dungeon runs, it was too hard and tedious, and it made them have to have a super specific group make up and blah blah blah blah. So, in WOTLK they made it so you could faceroll dungeons. Tanks literally would just run into a group, spam some AOE taunts, and then the DPS would AOE down the mobs. There was no more of this "kill the healer first, or take out the caster who is mana burning, etc". So, then when that happened people started complaining that dungeons were too easy, etc. So, in Cataclysm, they brought back some of the group mechanics, and guess what. People bitched, i mean 1000+ page threads on the forums, just bitching incessantly. So Ghostcrawler goes and makes a big blog post trying to explain to everyone the thinking behind this, and essentially tells people to L2P. This literally throws jet fuel on the fire and created a forum explosion of bitching that was unlike anything you had ever seen before.
People talk about vanilla wow with reverence because the game degenerated into ultra casual face roll MMO, SOLELY because of casual player whining. They whined about EVERYTHING, leveling times, loot drops, how hard mobs were, how having to spend 2 minutes walking to a dungeon entrance was ridiculous, so they added in porting straight into the dungeon. They complained that the skill tree was too complicated and so blizzard dumbed it down so basically you had enough points to fill almost the entire tree instead of actually havign to think about your spec and try to synergize abilities and such. The casuals complained EVEN MORE so they dumbed it down EVEN further to where you dont even have a skill tree. Now you can literally just mash 2 or 3 abilities and do MAXIMUM DPS!!!!11.
People wonder why MMOs have no community and dont feel like worlds. But then god forbid they give up their porting straight into dungeons, LFG tools, flying mounts, quest trackers, taking more than an hour to make 1 level, etc, etc.
It feels like you're making all of this up.
Can you find isolated posts backing each of those statements up? Sure, you can find an isolated post in the WOW forums complaining about literally every single molecule of the game.
Meanwhile things like the talent tree changes actually were valid design refinements, given that 90% of talents were mathematically-solvable passives which someone inevitably solved for everyone, eliminating any true 'decision' to the choice. The current talent choices focus predominantly on the non-passive abilities, which were always the more interesting elements to the talent trees by far.
So could you find someone complaining about the old talent tree pre-change? Absolutely. But that wasn't really the root reason behind their decision (although when a game makes this sort of change if you can back it up by saying players requested it, it helps justify the decision to players.)
Dungeon changes were similar, and although I dislike the ease of dungeons they do tend to flow better without CC. And at the higher end of play, tanks actually have a better dynamic control over the difficulty of dungeons (if you pull 50% faster, the dungeon is 50% harder, and you earn rewards 50% faster.)
While I feel "life threatened in every pull" is a better policy for dungeon design, I also don't feel "CC all but 1 mob and kill things one at a time" is necessarily the most interesting way to achieve that goal. After years of doing that, killing things one at a time was rather flat actually (even though strategizing which mobs to CC with a new dungeon's release was certainly a nice frontloaded burst of fun and challenge.)
But again, the main point here is that Blizzard isn't being steered by player feedback so much as they take advantage of player feedback when it agrees with a change they already wanted to make ("...and we did this based on player feedback!") Which is really how a lot of "by popular demand" business changes happen, tbh.
I'm making shit up? Here ya go, took me all of 45 seconds to find, even though it was 2 years ago:
A tank’s job is to protect the group. A big part of that is controlling the enemy. A big part of controlling the enemy is staying alive. Tanks have a lot of tools to stay alive, and mastering those is a major component of learning to play a tank. On the other hand, some of these tools are on long cooldowns, and on some encounters they are intended for use at specific moments in the fight. Furthermore, staying alive isn’t the sole responsibility of the tank, because there will always be one or more healers present whose job it is to keep the tank alive. As such, staying alive can’t be the only thing tanks have to focus on.
So, let’s back up a moment to controlling the enemy. “Control” includes things like positioning the boss, or doing specific things at specific times, such as swapping with an off tank. It also includes making sure the boss doesn’t attack anyone else. That’s where threat generation comes into play.
If threat generation is too easy then the entire risk of the encounter drops. Newsflash: we don’t actually want encounters to be easy. We want encounters to be fun, and for most players, that includes both rewards and risks.
We want tanks to care about the buttons they hit instead of just relying on auto-attacking to control their target. We don’t necessarily want very complicated tank DPS rotations, because as I mentioned above, tanks do have other things to keep track of. But we want their combat abilities to be engaging. Good tanks should be those who control, survive, and generate sufficient threat.
blah blah blah, the rest of it continues on
______________________________________
Now, pay attention to the ONE THOUSAND responses (actually 1135) the majority of which was pissant whining on part of the players.
Now, google "ghostcrawler L2P backlash" and then tell me im making shit up.
You obviously never spent even a second on the WOW forums, all they are is constant whining about everything.
Edit: Honestly, did you even play wow, or rift, or any of these themepark MMO's? I've had countless times where people refused to run a certain dungeon because it was "too hard" or, this dungeon only takes 15 minutes, i dont want to spend 25 minutes on this dungeon. That kind of garbage was a DAILY occurance in those games. Everything in those players minds was motivated by how easy is it, if it was too hard they wouldnt do it. They WANTED to faceroll everything. They didnt WANT a challenge of ANY kind.
"The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently."
Comments
I don't think it was a feeling of entitlement to the content, although I do recognize that there was(is) some of that sentiment that exists.
Rather, I firmly blame World of Warcraft.
The marketing geniuses at Blizzard/Activision figured out if you could lessen (or remove) the burdens to get to content, so that casual players could get at it, you'd get more casual players. Not just a few more players; a lot more players. Millions more players.
It isn't because the players that were there felt entitled to content, it was that developers removed the restrictions and opened the floodgates, and the people came in droves.
I can make a gimpy analogy:
There are those that despise people who shop at (Insert some high-end retailer here), but by and large, those people that shop there are not really torn down. Rather, someone like Wal-Mart comes in, offers similar products at much lower prices, and lo and behold - WalMart becomes the largest retailer in the world. It wasn't because the shopper demanded products and services, it was because the retailer found a way to make them available.
I think the OP is on to something, but has rather latched on to the wrong cause for the outcome.
Which roots exactly?
Not all of the first MMOs were sandboxes. UO was just one of many. Most of todays MMOs are coming from WoW, which was based on Everquest, which was never really a sandbox.
Then you look at all the old asian MMOs, and realize most of them weren't sandboxes either.
I do agree that some MMOs are moving further away from what they should be (marvel heroes.. really?!), but a lot of the loss of 'player involvement' is a biproduct of a growing market. Back during the birth of MMOs, players were forced to cooperate, or not have a game to play. Now? There are multiple MMOs a year being made, and players can easily (and are) just hop from game to game the second things don't go their way. Such climate makes it nearly impossible to nurture the kind of risk / reward system & commitment it takes to develope a truly good sandbox. Essentially the players need to be patient, commited, and open to new game types. Currently, most gamers are none of those things.
You must be blind. There were multiple threads in GW2 complaining that 50 hours to max level was ASIAN GRINDER MMO ridiculous...
Moving on, im not sure what you're trying to say because you're arguing the point we're making, but you don't even realize it.
Nobody is asking anybody to build a theme park filled with hard core high G' death defying roller coasters and nothing else.
A real themepark is just like you said, it has something for everyone. Tea Cups for the young girls, rollercoasters for the grown men or strapping young lads, crazy tall free fall rides for those people. Water rides, etc etc.
The difference is that when some parent comes up to the park manager and says "you know you should slow those high G rollercoasters down substantially so that my young girl can ride them and not be so scared", instead of the manager saying, "well sir, those coasters are not designed for small children and are designed to entertain people who like fast rides and high G's, Im sorry you feel that way, but we have multiple OTHER rides you can take your small girl on", the MMO developers have essentially gone "Oh jeez mister, let me change that for you, i guess all those other customers can F right off, i wanna make sure YOU are taken care of, even though your request is irresponsible and ridiculous'
"The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently."
- Friedrich Nietzsche
Seeing everything is fine.
Beating it on the hardest difficulty to earn the best gear isn't. (But no MMORPGs are designed this way.)
The Disneyland analogy isn't really appropriate because MMORPGs don't exactly strive to make everything visible to players on Day 1 of buying the game. It's basically the the opposite: they want to stretch their content as far as it can go without compromising quality.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
Maybe if the OP hadn't used words like "whiny" "dumb" and "entitled" I might seriously consider what he's saying. Instead, I'm going to ignore the insulting language and whatever the OP's "theory" is and chalk it up as another MMO elitist rant.
You can make a point without insulting people.
Is a man not entitled to the herp of his derp?
Remember, I live in a world where juggalos and yugioh players are real things.
But you were allowed to play Mario2 before finishing Mario.
meh ... ok, not a good analogy, I'll give you that round ... but mario isn't an MMO and we could go a long way down that rabbit hole getting more and more irrelevent in our analogies.
My point should be that if you don't want to coexist with other playstyles, if it's "us or them", then the only metric that matters is which one side brings in more money.
I see where you are coming from, but i disagree, i'll give you a good example:
The main community arm/developer point of contact for WOW was a guy named Ghostcrawler.
Now, what happened is in Burning Crusade, the playerbase whined and pissed and moaned about having to crowd control mobs in dungeon runs, it was too hard and tedious, and it made them have to have a super specific group make up and blah blah blah blah. So, in WOTLK they made it so you could faceroll dungeons. Tanks literally would just run into a group, spam some AOE taunts, and then the DPS would AOE down the mobs. There was no more of this "kill the healer first, or take out the caster who is mana burning, etc". So, then when that happened people started complaining that dungeons were too easy, etc. So, in Cataclysm, they brought back some of the group mechanics, and guess what. People bitched, i mean 1000+ page threads on the forums, just bitching incessantly. So Ghostcrawler goes and makes a big blog post trying to explain to everyone the thinking behind this, and essentially tells people to L2P. This literally throws jet fuel on the fire and created a forum explosion of bitching that was unlike anything you had ever seen before.
People talk about vanilla wow with reverence because the game degenerated into ultra casual face roll MMO, SOLELY because of casual player whining. They whined about EVERYTHING, leveling times, loot drops, how hard mobs were, how having to spend 2 minutes walking to a dungeon entrance was ridiculous, so they added in porting straight into the dungeon. They complained that the skill tree was too complicated and so blizzard dumbed it down so basically you had enough points to fill almost the entire tree instead of actually havign to think about your spec and try to synergize abilities and such. The casuals complained EVEN MORE so they dumbed it down EVEN further to where you dont even have a skill tree. Now you can literally just mash 2 or 3 abilities and do MAXIMUM DPS!!!!11.
People wonder why MMOs have no community and dont feel like worlds. But then god forbid they give up their porting straight into dungeons, LFG tools, flying mounts, quest trackers, taking more than an hour to make 1 level, etc, etc.
"The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently."
- Friedrich Nietzsche
Although I agree with the original poster's thesis here I don't think the arguments he uses are very convincing. It is true that "I should see everything" crowd has contributed to the death of the subscription model.
The issue here is it is subscriptions are nothing like Disney World. No roller coaster takes two hours to ride on. What takes two hours is the line waiting to get on the roller coaster. The ride itself is maybe 2 or 3 minutes long. Part of the reason the lines are so long is Disney theme parks have a VIP system where people who pay more get to cut in line. Guests who stay in expensive Disney owned hotels also get to enter the park an hour early. Sound familiar? The pay to get ahead mentality is not just something that afflicts MMOs. It is deeply engrained in real world economics and in modern capitalist society as a whole.
Look at how the air lines run things. First class passengers get on the plane first and get a big meal and unlimited free beverage. Coach passengers have to wait to get on and then they are lucky if they get a meal at all or a can of soda. Go back even further and look at the titanic. First class passengers got on the lifeboats while 3rd class drowned. The idea that money talks in the real world is the Elephant in the living room nobody really wants to acknowledge. These trends have been going on forever.
When the subscription MMO got started in the late 90s the standard sub was $15/mo. In the 90s that was a lot of money to pay for online games. The MMO subscription could be seen as a First class ticket. You got everything because it was first class and the player was VIP. What has changed between now and then? The biggest thing is inflation. It is not 1999 anymore when gas cost gas cost 90 cents compared now it where costs almost 4 bucks. Everything has gone up in price from rents, labor costs, training, taxes, etc all have gone up since the late 90s. What has not gone up in price is MMO subscriptions. They are still $15/mo the same as 1999. I pay $100/mo for fiber optic internet connection but the MMO sub is still stuck in the dial up era.
The $15/mo sub isn't first class anymore in 2013. It is second or third class. First class is the cash shop now. People in the subscription bucket are complaining that they don't receive first class service anymore but are NOT willing to pay for first class. The subscription cannot remain at $15, it has to go up to regain first class status. Maybe $40/mo would be a more realistic expectation to see "everything." The $15 sub doesn't entitle you to anything. The standard sub payer is like the basic Disney patron who has to wait in 2 hour roller coaster lines while they watch the VIPs cut ahead. That is the cold reality that is setting in on MMO market.
Either adapt or perish, that is the mantra the will exist going forward. No company is going to run their game as a charity so players can keep their $15 subs and "see everything." Those days are over.
I agree complaints on THEIR time restrictions should not be shared by all,it is very selfish to think a game needs to cater to your needs.However game developers are making a huge mistake in their content ideals.
The premise has been for a long time that the challenging combat needs to take place in a large alliance and often instanced and often for many hours.That is far from the truth,a good developer should be able to create challenging fights that take less time and with only a standard 6 man group,Raids are NOT needed what so ever.A larger group size does not mean better,if anything it means worse because you might have 3/4/5 tanks ,one dies another moves in,but in a normal group ,your tank dies your whole group might wipe.Same goes for the healer,a Raid might have 4/5 healers where a normal group might have 1.
You can cater to everyone by creating a large array of AI.The Boss would change form several times and change resistances as well.This keeps players thinking and also does not cater to one type of DPS or play style as it would change all the time.
By creating that versatile AI,you could make it so the fight COULD end quickly if the players are on their toes and thinking,yet can be challenging and longer if you are not.This way the challenging aspect is there and the ability to end fast is there as well.
Then if players still complain because they are dying or can't end it fast,it is their fault,they need to think about what they are doing and not blame everyone else or the game.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
I'm not arguing that slow leveling curves are bad. I've been playing Uncharted Waters Online for most of the past two years, and haven't yet reached the cap in any type of experience or fame. (I did reach the adventuring level cap once briefly before the cap was increased.) I've only reached the favored skill cap on one skill out of nearly 100 in the game. That's slow leveling if there is such a thing. But it's fine because the game has massive amounts of content.
The problem with grinding comes if you have slow leveling in a game that doesn't have massive amounts of content. I don't want to be forced to do essentially the same battle more than about 10 or so times before being allowed to move on. If you vary the battles quite a bit, that's better. But an identical group of mobs dropped in 100 different places isn't really 100 different battles. Small differences in group composition that affect neither strategy nor the likely outcome aren't much of an improvement on this, either.
If the problem is being told to kill 100 mobs in 100 separate but basically identical fights, then telling players that instead they have 10 choices of mobs but have to kill 1000 in total doesn't fix the problem. Telling players that they have to do 100 battles to move on and can spread them among 20 substantially different groups to fight fixes the problem. I've never played EverQuest, so I don't know how much content it had, how substantially different the content was, or whether the level curve was unreasonably slow. But I have played games that most certainly were unreasonably grindy.
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Are you arguing that MMORPGs shouldn't bother trying to accommodate players' real-life schedules, and should go ahead and require 4 hour contiguous blocks of time to play whenever they feel like it? Or do you agree with my contention that MMORPGs should try to allow people to play the game without having to be irresponsible in real life whenever there isn't a good gameplay reason to do otherwise? Or do you not take an opinion on that? It sounded like you disagreed, but you didn't elaborate.
If you're willing to give my clumsy rhetoric e a break, I was trying to use the example that looking at the mario series as a subscription, mario 2 was like the second month of the subscription, but it didn't force you to get an A on the mario 1 content in order to see mario 2 content. It all made sense in my head, but looking at it written down, I agree it's not exactly obvious what I was aiming for.
People talk about vanilla WoW with reverence because of nostalgia. I played vanilla WoW. It wasn't terrible, but it wasn't great, either. And it most certainly wasn't some great challenge; combat was mostly a check to see if your level and gear was high enough to pass, with only a narrow range in which the difference between an expert and someone who was mediocre but not completely terrible even mattered.
Also, it wasn't a 2 minute walk to a dungeon. It was more along the lines of typically taking about 15 minutes and sometimes upwards of 30 after you have a group in order for everyone to get there. Or more if the boats and/or zeppelins are feeling glitchy that day. Or a lot more if the server crashes, as they were rather prone to do. And this was often on top of taking 10-20 minutes to actually assemble the group in the first place. Or perhaps to spend that much time trying to assemble a group before giving up and not actually doing a dungeon at all.
Strongly disagree with your premise that meritocracy = e-sport elitism.
If I'm interpreting Robokapp's post correctly, he's simply saying that time and effort should yield greater results, period. It has nothing to do with competition vs. other players. If someone doesn't have the time or isn't willing to put in the effort to achieve by merit, there are numerous F2P games with all sorts of cash shop items to accommodate him. The end result might be a higher cost to play than the person paying a sub, but instant gratification isn't cheap.
If someone lacks time AND money, it's really not anyone else's problem, and to alter a game to cater to the needs of charity cases isn't fair to those with the means and ability to get the most out of a game on their own.
"You'll never win an argument with an idiot because he is too stupid to recognize his own defeat." ~Anonymous
The way I see it there are a ton of factors at work here causing some of these issues.
1 - The people who played MMO's back in the day endlessly (I'm talking UO, EQ, and put myself in this catagory) for the most part have lives to lead, careers and don't have the time they used to invest anymore for an MMO. By time I'm talking about 8-12 hour Saturday marathons or a 20+ hour weekend block (the good old days). Being able to get on in the time I have allowed and duo with the wifey is more important to me now than finding groups, raiding, or spending my days (and I do mean days) playing all weekend. Sure, getting in a guild, doing some dungeon runs or raids I can still do, but I'm not available and I'm sure others aren't either the amount we used to be.
2 - The younger generation (I preface this by saying not all) have this , for lack of a better word, entitlement mentality that regardless of ability, money or anything else...everything should be equitable at all times no matter what. This idea that the MMO genre should be equitable in all ways for everyone. As someone who now doesn't have the time I used to, I totally get players who are going to have stuff I don't, and i certainly don't expect to get the same items just because I play the same game.
The reality is for me I just don't care about that stuff like I used to. I still think skill > time invested though, so even though I don't have the time I used to, I still think I'm pretty skilled at playing these games (should be, been doing it so long. Trying to find that balance though is a huge issue, especially when one segment of the genre is always complaining about things being equal no matter what. I've even heard arguments made when it's skill vs. time with people saying skill shouldn't matter either...it's that attitude that I just don't get.
3 - Developers want to reach the most people they can, and to do that they need to make games accessible. What does Accessible mean? It means being able to accomplish alot with minimal time investment, F2P, with anything that requires a "real" investment of time being an after thought. Now mind you, I was never a fan of 5-6 hour raids with a .02% chance of getting a drop for your class, but certainly devs can do better. The trouble is what is their incentive to do so business wise?
So the bottom line is, when you're making a game what do you do? Do you cater to the "hardcore" crowd (whatever that means) and start off with a potential customer base lower than it could be?
Do you do a paint by numbers MMO that does nothing genre breaking but might make you some money because its accessible to more people?
Or do you try the old school EQ method and make meaningful content that is very time consuming that could scare off the older game if you charge a monthly fee?
At this stage I would be happy to throw money at option 3 even if I didn't have all the time in the world to play. As EQ was before I'd love to find that ONE game that will last me 10+ years...I'm still looking.
"Ruined" is a funny word. There are as many writers who agree with their editors as rage about their editors.
Anthony Burgess still hates Stanley Kubrick for the film version of a Clockwork Orange. (Kubrick really wasn't responsible for the 'dirty work', in that particular case, Burgess' British Editor was).
And I'm sure you know how Chris Tolkein feels about Peter Jackson. Sour grapes over royalties...
Since these are all purely subjective qualitative judgements; do we side with the author (he done be wronged, maw), or do we side with the academy awards?
(personally, I think Burgess was a prima donna, C.O. was indeed a better work without the 21st chapter). LoTR..think I'll side with the novels, even knowing that 30% of the readers that begin them never finish them.
You're missing that some of us got into the genre for the roleplaying game. I took fishing skill in UO not because it improved my dps more than anatomy, but because I wanted to make a fisherman.
( edit: but I agree with your overall conclusion that it's a hard decision that each game needs to make for itself - I'd hate to be a developer who loves specializing in designing hardcore raids but suddenly finds himself facing a wall of smiling players in fishing hats )
Ruined is not a subjective term. Something can easily be ruined. Whether it was ruined for the worse or for the better is something that can be debated and is subjective.
If something has an intrinsic purpose to it and that something is changed drastically to where it no longer resembles its original form, it has been ruined. That is quantifiable.
In your example, you side with the author, as his original work has been ruined. As far as whether or not the new product based on the ruined product is worthy of admiration, praise, etc, is an altogether different discussion.
Thats something a lot of people are missing in the whole debate. They argue that MMO's have "changed" for the better, when in fact what is out today is NOT an MMO. So, in the eyes of people who played real MMOs, yes, they have been ruined.
"The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently."
- Friedrich Nietzsche
You're judging by artistic merit.
Can't be anything but subjective.
Burgess insists Clockwork Orange is a failure without the 21st chapter.
His editor disagreed; and so did the motion picture academy (indirectly).
Having read that 21st chapter, I have to side with Kubrick on that one. Sorry Tony, your original ending sux0red.
I think we're both on roughly the same page.
The argument i am making is that EVERY aspect of the MMO shouldnt cater to casuals. IMO and i think many would agree, games like WOW have taken literally every aspect of the game, whether its crafting, raiding, dungeon running, etc, and they have changed it and dumbed it down to the lowest common denominator.
Even in Vanilla WOW, you didnt raid if you didnt have at least 4 hours to put into it at once. That was well known, you dont have the time, dont ask to join the raid. Its not for you. Well, people bitched, and bitched, and bitched, and bitched. Because by god they pay $15 a month and they shouldnt have to have 4 hours of free time to raid. So what does Blizzard do? They make the raid fights shorter, they make the raid zones shorter, the make the fight easier, etc. So now, a raid only takes maybe 2 hours instead of 4. Well, thats not good enough for the casuals, cus now they have to spend time getting the raid put together and preparing for the raid, and its hard to get 40 people together, so, what does blizzard do, makes it 25 people. Then people complain about that being too much, so they make 10 man versions. Now they've complained about THAT being too much, so you can now "raid" with as little as 5 people. Its become a mockery and a joke.
Thats just one example. Every aspect of the modern themepark MMO has been catered the casual crowd.
Travel: Teleports every 100 yards, stupid fast mounts/flying mounts. Instant port to dungeon, instant port to raids.
Combat: Instead of having to manage 7 or 8 abilities, you can now be maximum effectiveness using only 2 or 3 abilities, not having to pay attention to recast timers or anything, just mash the buttons as you see fit.
Skill Trees: Trees have been removed, casuals complained that "elitists" were doing so much more damage than them because they didnt want to have to put any thought into trying to synergize their abilities or come up with rotations, or use abilities that work together in sequence.
Quests: Apparently actually having to search for 10 wolves to get wolf hides is too much effort, so now we've put big circles on the map where you can find wolves, because we can't abide having you spend 30 seconds searching out the zone to locate the wolves yourself, that would be inconveniencing.
I could go on but i think you see my point.
In the days of EQ the casual players didnt begrudge the players who had more time, skill, whatever. They had plenty of stuff to do and had fun doing it. It wasnt born of jealousy or entitlement, etc.
"The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently."
- Friedrich Nietzsche
It feels like you're making all of this up.
Can you find isolated posts backing each of those statements up? Sure, you can find an isolated post in the WOW forums complaining about literally every single molecule of the game.
Meanwhile things like the talent tree changes actually were valid design refinements, given that 90% of talents were mathematically-solvable passives which someone inevitably solved for everyone, eliminating any true 'decision' to the choice. The current talent choices focus predominantly on the non-passive abilities, which were always the more interesting elements to the talent trees by far.
So could you find someone complaining about the old talent tree pre-change? Absolutely. But that wasn't really the root reason behind their decision (although when a game makes this sort of change if you can back it up by saying players requested it, it helps justify the decision to players.)
Dungeon changes were similar, and although I dislike the ease of dungeons they do tend to flow better without CC. And at the higher end of play, tanks actually have a better dynamic control over the difficulty of dungeons (if you pull 50% faster, the dungeon is 50% harder, and you earn rewards 50% faster.)
While I feel "life threatened in every pull" is a better policy for dungeon design, I also don't feel "CC all but 1 mob and kill things one at a time" is necessarily the most interesting way to achieve that goal. After years of doing that, killing things one at a time was rather flat actually (even though strategizing which mobs to CC with a new dungeon's release was certainly a nice frontloaded burst of fun and challenge.)
But again, the main point here is that Blizzard isn't being steered by player feedback so much as they take advantage of player feedback when it agrees with a change they already wanted to make ("...and we did this based on player feedback!") Which is really how a lot of "by popular demand" business changes happen, tbh.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
You're correct; it did take quite some time before gamers began to see everything in MMOs as competition.
Wonder where that went wrong...
As for 'entitlement' used as a derogatory term?
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
In fairness, most high end raiders are elitist douchebags. If I can't make raids 5 nights a week because I have a job and school then fuck you. I'll make it when I can. The best times I've had were doing end game raids in EQ1 with a casual guild that raided once a week. We didn't do the raids the day the expansion came out but we finished before the next expansion came out. End game shouldnt be the whole game
Maybe the real issue is that most P2P games now and in the past would funnel everyone into a singular play style, raiding. Perhaps if they had the decency to offer other kinds of content at end game with their own epic loot progression, it wouldn't be an issue. It really sucks to have these "casual" MMOs out there and yet they turn into hardcore raidfest turds and people like me feel like we've been ripped off and forced to subsidize niche content in a game that was suppose to be targeted at us casuals.
I'm making shit up? Here ya go, took me all of 45 seconds to find, even though it was 2 years ago:
http://us.battle.net/wow/en/blog/1693171
"Threat Needs to Matter"
A tank’s job is to protect the group. A big part of that is controlling the enemy. A big part of controlling the enemy is staying alive. Tanks have a lot of tools to stay alive, and mastering those is a major component of learning to play a tank. On the other hand, some of these tools are on long cooldowns, and on some encounters they are intended for use at specific moments in the fight. Furthermore, staying alive isn’t the sole responsibility of the tank, because there will always be one or more healers present whose job it is to keep the tank alive. As such, staying alive can’t be the only thing tanks have to focus on.
So, let’s back up a moment to controlling the enemy. “Control” includes things like positioning the boss, or doing specific things at specific times, such as swapping with an off tank. It also includes making sure the boss doesn’t attack anyone else. That’s where threat generation comes into play.
If threat generation is too easy then the entire risk of the encounter drops. Newsflash: we don’t actually want encounters to be easy. We want encounters to be fun, and for most players, that includes both rewards and risks.
We want tanks to care about the buttons they hit instead of just relying on auto-attacking to control their target. We don’t necessarily want very complicated tank DPS rotations, because as I mentioned above, tanks do have other things to keep track of. But we want their combat abilities to be engaging. Good tanks should be those who control, survive, and generate sufficient threat.
blah blah blah, the rest of it continues on
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Now, pay attention to the ONE THOUSAND responses (actually 1135) the majority of which was pissant whining on part of the players.
Now, google "ghostcrawler L2P backlash" and then tell me im making shit up.
You obviously never spent even a second on the WOW forums, all they are is constant whining about everything.
Edit: Honestly, did you even play wow, or rift, or any of these themepark MMO's? I've had countless times where people refused to run a certain dungeon because it was "too hard" or, this dungeon only takes 15 minutes, i dont want to spend 25 minutes on this dungeon. That kind of garbage was a DAILY occurance in those games. Everything in those players minds was motivated by how easy is it, if it was too hard they wouldnt do it. They WANTED to faceroll everything. They didnt WANT a challenge of ANY kind.
"The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently."
- Friedrich Nietzsche