i dont know why people cant figure out the difference between linear levelling progression and non linear progression.
just because you dont have traditional levels i.e 1-50, doesnt mean you dont have a progression system.
My confusion is your own intertwining of "leveling" and "progression."
"Leveling is Dead" is quite different from "CHARACTER Level is dead." or "PROGRESSION is dead."
- Al
Personally the only modern MMORPG trend that annoys me is the idea that MMOs need to be designed in a way to attract people who don't actually like MMOs. Which to me makes about as much sense as someone trying to figure out a way to get vegetarians to eat at their steakhouse. - FARGIN_WAR
You obviously have a genuine love for questing, but the "level" isn't why your doing that content. Its just the gate system for the content. ESO proved beyond any doubt that it really doesnt matter what level you are.
you said youself you can turn the level off.
I just want to do that permanently.
I can turn the level off but the relationship between my current level and the mob stays. That is part of the challenge if there is no level the mob I am killing would be no different from one area to another something I completely detest as a mechanic. Here I can see by looking at the colours of the mobs vis a vis my level how much of a challenge they will pose. Without levels there would no such gauge and I would not be actually doing something interesting at all because the mobs will all be completely indistinguishable and hence I cannot actually challenge myself doing this dungeon.
A game without levels can still have enemies of different difficulties. Likewise, a lack of levels doesn't mean enemies in different areas have to be the same, you can have as much diversity as you can imagine.
An early example would be SWG. Not the greatest combat mechanics, but no levels and a wide variety of enemy difficulty.
A later example would be LotRO. Sure, it had levels and a level disparity between you and the enemy did factor into the combat mechanics. But, it also had different ratings: swarm (v easy), normal, signature, elite, super-elite etc. Also, enemies had different skill sets, so an orc in one zone might hit you with certain attacks, while an orc in another zone would do something different.
The only thing that would change, if you removed levels, is the difficulty of a given piece of content wouldn't change based on what you've been doing. You wouldn't be able to take on a dungeon "under level" to make it harder, nor could you wait and do it "over-level" to make it easier. You'd just have to do it the way the devs intended.
What you just wrote means the level mechanic is just hidden but it is there because how else is the game deciding the dungeon difficulty. Your solution merely hides it from the player but the game is still based on levels. In the end data mining will reveal the levels and people will know what level the dungeon is versus the player. There is no difference between different difficulties and levels if in the end the mechanic uses the same metric.
How will you create a game like Everquest 2 which has all these types of mobs of different difficulty depending on whether you're solo, grouped or raid without using levels or some metric that will measure the player versus the content. That metric in the end is a form of level scaling. Give me a better example than what you have in your post.
Your example also makes it so you never can out-level or be under-level against something meaning it will be uniform throughout the game. Talk about boring. This is akin to how WoW decided the rat you met at level 3 is just as powerful when you come back at level 32. That grew old fast.
You obviously have a genuine love for questing, but the "level" isn't why your doing that content. Its just the gate system for the content. ESO proved beyond any doubt that it really doesnt matter what level you are.
you said youself you can turn the level off.
I just want to do that permanently.
I can turn the level off but the relationship between my current level and the mob stays. That is part of the challenge if there is no level the mob I am killing would be no different from one area to another something I completely detest as a mechanic. Here I can see by looking at the colours of the mobs vis a vis my level how much of a challenge they will pose. Without levels there would no such gauge and I would not be actually doing something interesting at all because the mobs will all be completely indistinguishable and hence I cannot actually challenge myself doing this dungeon.
A game without levels can still have enemies of different difficulties. Likewise, a lack of levels doesn't mean enemies in different areas have to be the same, you can have as much diversity as you can imagine.
An early example would be SWG. Not the greatest combat mechanics, but no levels and a wide variety of enemy difficulty.
A later example would be LotRO. Sure, it had levels and a level disparity between you and the enemy did factor into the combat mechanics. But, it also had different ratings: swarm (v easy), normal, signature, elite, super-elite etc. Also, enemies had different skill sets, so an orc in one zone might hit you with certain attacks, while an orc in another zone would do something different.
The only thing that would change, if you removed levels, is the difficulty of a given piece of content wouldn't change based on what you've been doing. You wouldn't be able to take on a dungeon "under level" to make it harder, nor could you wait and do it "over-level" to make it easier. You'd just have to do it the way the devs intended.
What you just wrote means the level mechanic is just hidden but it is there because how else is the game deciding the dungeon difficulty. Your solution merely hides it from the player but the game is still based on levels. In the end data mining will reveal the levels and people will know what level the dungeon is versus the player. There is no difference between different difficulties and levels if in the end the mechanic uses the same metric.
How will you create a game like Everquest 2 which has all these types of mobs of different difficulty depending on whether you're solo, grouped or raid without using levels or some metric that will measure the player versus the content. That metric in the end is a form of level scaling. Give me a better example than what you have in your post.
Your example also makes it so you never can out-level or be under-level against something meaning it will be uniform throughout the game. Talk about boring. This is akin to how WoW decided the rat you met at level 3 is just as powerful when you come back at level 32. That grew old fast.
ESO does this. It seems to work fine. I think most players actually prefer it since they can do what they want in any order and it never quite becomes trivial. Even without the levels though it gets easier based on your skill and equipment.
In the past hard levels was used as a method to determine stats of a creature but nowadays monsters have skills, armor, weapons and AI to lean on so the difficulty no longer has to rely just brute force stats.
Under the level scheme you are far more limited in what you can do because everything has to be worth experience and if players find even 1 easy mob they will grind it indefinitely. If it has no experience tied to it, you kill it for other reasons.
it also makes players learn rather than just say "con" a blue although even eq1 has mobs that conned blue but were much tougher than the con. You dont really know how tough it is until you fight it, but you know you can at least hit it. Whether you can kill it or not is another story.
in 2016 they introduced One Tamriel as the game was dying and this update made everyone effectively level 50 regardless of their level with a scaling effect. It was a great success for the game and imo saved it from a horrible death.
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
in 2016 they introduced One Tamriel as the game was dying and this update made everyone effectively level 50 regardless of their level with a scaling effect. It was a great success for the game and imo saved it from a horrible death.
I won't disagree, I played it at launch and it's extremely linear level based progression model was a huge turn off.
Every zone was cleared by following a particular pattern and if you got it a bit wrong it was quite easy to over level content making it largely useless in terms of progression.
The current system is better, yet around level 25 or so my friends and I noticed our stats really weren't changing all that much as we added attribute points, hardly noticeable really.
At level 50 I accidentally used a reset stone, setting all attributes to zero.
I experimented a bit and found even putting most of my points into one attibute didn't raise it all that much more than my previous balance build.
So the illusion of progression was partially broken, and in the end ESO is really more about what your gear / CP scores are which is disappointing in my view.
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
in 2016 they introduced One Tamriel as the game was dying and this update made everyone effectively level 50 regardless of their level with a scaling effect. It was a great success for the game and imo saved it from a horrible death.
I won't disagree, I played it at launch and it's extremely linear level based progression model was a huge turn off.
Every zone was cleared by following a particular pattern and if you got it a bit wrong it was quite easy to over level content making it largely useless in terms of progression.
The current system is better, yet around level 25 or so my friends and I noticed our stats really weren't changing all that much as we added attribute points, hardly noticeable really.
At level 50 I accidentally used a reset stone, setting all attributes to zero.
I experimented a bit and found even putting most of my points into one attibute didn't raise it all that much more than my previous balance build.
So the illusion of progression was partially broken, and in the end ESO is really more about what your gear / CP scores are which is disappointing in my view.
I think eso has the best of whats available. It has levelling to 50 but its irrelevant, it has sort of used based skill up ( you have to slot it) and it has alternate advancement which i think could be done better in other ways ( specializations etc). It also has the best loadout system for armor, and due to controller limitations the skill setup is a loadout as well.
i would much prefer the role progression to be more like a map where you do things in game to uncover the "map". Each part of the map gives certain perks based on role and you can use a certain number of total perks with your character. The main progression then is to get enough perks to your limit, but has the flexibility for you to collect them all. Thus your character is a loudout system instead of a linear progression.
using the build a training device method introduces structural gameplay and additionally makes what you have uncovered available to your other characters. This mean we can have an open role system and you can uncover the whole thing the way you want to. I prefer roles to classes because roles are easier to balance and additionally it lets you combine roles as a form of natural specialization.
Of course it would require a unique non experience based system but I think that it is very reasonable to create a more complex algorithm which takes many things into account and not just how many monsters you've killed. I mean your achievements should count, where you been should count, what monsters you've faced and killed, what killed you and we can add many more factors. The lowest hanging fruit should not be the most valuable. Eso is proof of this.
If you combine this loadout system with other loadout systems like gear ( which is very successful in eso) and even bases/housing could have loudout systems built in and the total of all this would be your character.
AA's are built right into the combat design,they are a FAKE way to fool players into thinking they are achieving something.
To me it was VERY obvious when they made the changes because i left the game for a year and when i returned with no AA's my player was noticeably worse than when i left.
So they nerfed the players and did these AA's just to get you back to the non nerfed version ..lmao and it fooled people...sigh. WAY WAY too many hotbar icons,they should be condensed to have more meaningful abilities rather than 50 different dmg icons. Stats gear might be a fave of modern gamers but i know it is a bad way to implement combat.
Giving players some really good important abilities to use is how you allow players to have intuitive combat.Of course the EQ teams have failed like most do in that anytime you et something that is actually useful it doesn't work on Bosses...lame. You don't NEED anything versus trash mobs,the only time any of it matters is versus a Boss so yeah it is a big fail when you eliminate the positives of advancement.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
AA's are built right into the combat design,they are a FAKE way to fool players into thinking they are achieving something.
To me it was VERY obvious when they made the changes because i left the game for a year and when i returned with no AA's my player was noticeably worse than when i left.
So they nerfed the players and did these AA's just to get you back to the non nerfed version ..lmao and it fooled people...sigh. WAY WAY too many hotbar icons,they should be condensed to have more meaningful abilities rather than 50 different dmg icons. Stats gear might be a fave of modern gamers but i know it is a bad way to implement combat.
Giving players some really good important abilities to use is how you allow players to have intuitive combat.Of course the EQ teams have failed like most do in that anytime you et something that is actually useful it doesn't work on Bosses...lame. You don't NEED anything versus trash mobs,the only time any of it matters is versus a Boss so yeah it is a big fail when you eliminate the positives of advancement.
I consider alternate advancement a weak form of a loadout system. im most games you dont have to do anything specific, just grind up the exp and allocate points. It is still a loadout system though so better than a linear one.
i agree with you regarding putting things in the game like crowd control only to make nothing work. Its dumb and leads to everything being a dps fest as that's the only strategy that works. I think alot more can be done in this regard
early eq ( before the raids) used crowd control to great effect and it worked very well in providing strategy to split and isolate mobs but it failed in that you HAD to kill mobs one at a time. There is a middle ground here. Eso relied on groups of monsters but has extremely weak crowd control. I think somewhere in-between is the right answer.
The best way to design a game is OPEN advancement.That means you can take on ANY foe anytime you feel like you have advanced your skills/abilities. The problem is that developers are clueless on how to design their games so they like to take the easy way out and CONTROL you with levels and gear.
When we played for example Atlas we could go fight the top bosses anytime we wanted ,we didn't need to wait for level 75 or level 100,we only needed cunning,smarts.
MMORPG studios are sooo worried as witnessed in AOC that players need their hand held and given enough linear content to keep them occupied.Players don't seem to know how to play a ROLE PLAYING game,they think it should be levels and loot and raids and end game. There are people for example in Valheim like the Radioman "YouTuber" who seems to just enjoy his base building things.In Atlas MANY of us enjoyed getting pets/tames/mounts and building ships and homes we didn't need ANY hand holding. In Survival games players tend to just go out and Explore but in mmorpg's players look for ! ? markers over npc heads to tell them what to do.
The entire mentality of mmorpg's needs to change as survival games are MUCH more a role playing game than rpg's are.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
I prefer role advancement to purely open advancement. I would have three roles: fighter, mage, rogue. The trinity roles are obsolete especially in action combat in my opinion as all roles should be competent damage dealers, just in different ways.
fighter: Physical damage and mitigation expert mage: Magic damage and mitigation expert rogue situational expert
then of course there should be no hard end to where one role ends and another begins so players can tailor their role to their liking. All roles would have an array of crowd control available according to their role
the key factor is that of all the ways you can trick out your character increasing "damage" directly isnt one of them. Its completely a function of the weapon. You might have indirect ways but no direct ways.
Go try Second Life .. It has no Leveling................ Boring as fuck
People play it so it must have its merit.
that's the problem with discussions like this, it's all opinion.
That and there is a huge spectrum of progression between linear themepark character leveling and second life role-play no-leveling.
Some people see binary extremes and nothing in the middle. I personally don't see it that way, but like you point out, that's just my opinion.
When people bring up Second Life you wonder if the person even grasp the argument or just disingenuous? What part of levelless design does it sound like Second Life?
Go try Second Life .. It has no Leveling................ Boring as fuck
People play it so it must have its merit.
that's the problem with discussions like this, it's all opinion.
That and there is a huge spectrum of progression between linear themepark character leveling and second life role-play no-leveling.
Some people see binary extremes and nothing in the middle. I personally don't see it that way, but like you point out, that's just my opinion.
When people bring up Second Life you wonder if the person even grasp the argument or just disingenuous? What part of levelless design does it sound like Second Life?
There is no arguement , you cannot have an MMO without leveling , we have been down this road numerous times and you have never brought anything to the table showing otherwise ..
Im still waiting for someone to show me an MMO without leveling .. or an MMO system without leveling/tiers/skill progression which are equal to leveling ..
Its strange to me that people want so Badly to be able to call it something else .. very weird ..
If you dont want any sort of Leveling go play Second Life and report back to us about your expereince ..
There is no arguement to grasp .. you are grasping at straws to want to desperatley call Leveling something else ..
Good luck .. We have 100 of thousands of Devs the best minds in the industry have now been able to come up with an MMO system without leveling ..
The only real counter I can think of to 'experience' is just making progression focused around money. Personally, it does sound more appealing to me that I can just pay a trainer to learn certain secrets without needing the 'experience' to do so. Maybe even make it attached to a 'karma' system which some people will probably just think is another form of 'leveling' but I feel like if things make 'sense' within the game world, the labels should matter less. If I'm building fame with a group/city/etc, it should open up more options for me.
The only real counter I can think of to 'experience' is just making progression focused around money. Personally, it does sound more appealing to me that I can just pay a trainer to learn certain secrets without needing the 'experience' to do so. Maybe even make it attached to a 'karma' system which some people will probably just think is another form of 'leveling' but I feel like if things make 'sense' within the game world, the labels should matter less. If I'm building fame with a group/city/etc, it should open up more options for me.
Using currency to purchase better LEVELS of skills
Is Leveling the coin now becomes the XP needed to advance skill
The only real counter I can think of to 'experience' is just making progression focused around money. Personally, it does sound more appealing to me that I can just pay a trainer to learn certain secrets without needing the 'experience' to do so. Maybe even make it attached to a 'karma' system which some people will probably just think is another form of 'leveling' but I feel like if things make 'sense' within the game world, the labels should matter less. If I'm building fame with a group/city/etc, it should open up more options for me.
No. A good algorithm can take into account and approximate the "learning" aspect based on many in game parameters. These algorithms are used for all kinds of things like web browsers and such.
it's a more thorough and better approximation of true experience. Completely doable these days and completely reasonable to implement.
This opens the door to other forms of gameplay. For instance there might be multiple ways to achieve something.
Somewhere in the world is the "Book of battle axes" if your lucky you'll find this and gain the knowledge it gives instantly. If your not lucky you can still pick up a battle axe and start using it. The algorithm will determine if and when you have done enough with battle axes to get that knowledge. Having knowledge of battleaxes then, might help you learn other things.
other examples might be you find a spell in the world and its yours, but if you don't find it there are other ways. Another player might be nearby casting it, you might actually get hit with it. In this case the algorithm determines when you've had sufficient exposure to grant the knowledge.
Go try Second Life .. It has no Leveling................ Boring as fuck
People play it so it must have its merit.
that's the problem with discussions like this, it's all opinion.
That and there is a huge spectrum of progression between linear themepark character leveling and second life role-play no-leveling.
Some people see binary extremes and nothing in the middle. I personally don't see it that way, but like you point out, that's just my opinion.
When people bring up Second Life you wonder if the person even grasp the argument or just disingenuous? What part of levelless design does it sound like Second Life?
There is no arguement , you cannot have an MMO without leveling , we have been down this road numerous times and you have never brought anything to the table showing otherwise ..
Im still waiting for someone to show me an MMO without leveling .. or an MMO system without leveling/tiers/skill progression which are equal to leveling ..
Its strange to me that people want so Badly to be able to call it something else .. very weird ..
If you dont want any sort of Leveling go play Second Life and report back to us about your expereince ..
There is no arguement to grasp .. you are grasping at straws to want to desperatley call Leveling something else ..
Good luck .. We have 100 of thousands of Devs the best minds in the industry have now been able to come up with an MMO system without leveling ..
But you keep up the good work its fun to watch
You do not have to having leveling as mechanic which is specific you gain experience to gain an level. You have a fallacy that all advancement is a level. Skill gain is not a level because there nothing level about it.
Levels are about a platform of power 90% of the time, a level. The other time it is usually placing skill points earned. Skills with or without levels for example are uneven gains. For example level 10 human warrior are equal to 10 human warrior. The differences are + - character advancement choices, gear and etc.
Skills without levels are gained usually in isolation and not usually tied to overall power of a character. Like a character who just beat on a dummy with sword has no defense skills vs. a character who had defense, magic resistance, combat experience and the same sword skill is much more powerful.
Progression in any form are levels. So you are just arguing sementics here. The fact that anti "level" people can't see it is kinda sad. Your ideas aren't original at all... but here, you can't have your participation trophy. /sigh All of it as already been done one way or another in the past. Skill base or whichever progression type you want to get behind is no less "tradionnal" or "classiic" than what you are complainning about. /thread
Then just as well leave the forum because everything under the sun has been discussed. If pro-level people are fine with the genre what is the point in participating in discussions like this?
I don't think it's semantics because there are distinctions in how the game is played based around how you advance. Traditional levels are about earning experience and uniformity in advancement. It is a very distinct style of play. If can't see the difference the question is does your replies even warrant real discussion in this thread.
Progression in any form are levels. So you are just arguing sementics here. The fact that anti "level" people can't see it is kinda sad. Your ideas aren't original at all... but here, you can't have your participation trophy. /sigh All of it as already been done one way or another in the past. Skill base or whichever progression type you want to get behind is no less "tradionnal" or "classiic" than what you are complainning about. /thread
...It is a very distinct style of play... because I said so and it is what I like.
...It is not a very distinct style of play... because I said so and it is what I don't like.
AA's are built right into the combat design,they are a FAKE way to fool players into thinking they are achieving something.
To me it was VERY obvious when they made the changes because i left the game for a year and when i returned with no AA's my player was noticeably worse than when i left.
So they nerfed the players and did these AA's just to get you back to the non nerfed version ..lmao and it fooled people...sigh. WAY WAY too many hotbar icons,they should be condensed to have more meaningful abilities rather than 50 different dmg icons. Stats gear might be a fave of modern gamers but i know it is a bad way to implement combat.
Giving players some really good important abilities to use is how you allow players to have intuitive combat.Of course the EQ teams have failed like most do in that anytime you et something that is actually useful it doesn't work on Bosses...lame. You don't NEED anything versus trash mobs,the only time any of it matters is versus a Boss so yeah it is a big fail when you eliminate the positives of advancement.
I consider alternate advancement a weak form of a loadout system. im most games you dont have to do anything specific, just grind up the exp and allocate points. It is still a loadout system though so better than a linear one.
i agree with you regarding putting things in the game like crowd control only to make nothing work. Its dumb and leads to everything being a dps fest as that's the only strategy that works. I think alot more can be done in this regard
early eq ( before the raids) used crowd control to great effect and it worked very well in providing strategy to split and isolate mobs but it failed in that you HAD to kill mobs one at a time. There is a middle ground here. Eso relied on groups of monsters but has extremely weak crowd control. I think somewhere in-between is the right answer.
Enchanter in early EQ was a blast....Probably the most fun I had playing in a MMO.....I liked that as I leveled up the spells got better and better and was a great incentive to gain levels.....
Comments
- Al
Personally the only modern MMORPG trend that annoys me is the idea that MMOs need to be designed in a way to attract people who don't actually like MMOs. Which to me makes about as much sense as someone trying to figure out a way to get vegetarians to eat at their steakhouse.- FARGIN_WAR
How will you create a game like Everquest 2 which has all these types of mobs of different difficulty depending on whether you're solo, grouped or raid without using levels or some metric that will measure the player versus the content. That metric in the end is a form of level scaling. Give me a better example than what you have in your post.
Your example also makes it so you never can out-level or be under-level against something meaning it will be uniform throughout the game. Talk about boring. This is akin to how WoW decided the rat you met at level 3 is just as powerful when you come back at level 32. That grew old fast.
In the past hard levels was used as a method to determine stats of a creature but nowadays monsters have skills, armor, weapons and AI to lean on so the difficulty no longer has to rely just brute force stats.
Under the level scheme you are far more limited in what you can do because everything has to be worth experience and if players find even 1 easy mob they will grind it indefinitely. If it has no experience tied to it, you kill it for other reasons.
it also makes players learn rather than just say "con" a blue although even eq1 has mobs that conned blue but were much tougher than the con. You dont really know how tough it is until you fight it, but you know you can at least hit it. Whether you can kill it or not is another story.
I don't know how ESO is now but when I played it it wasn't like that.
"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
Every zone was cleared by following a particular pattern and if you got it a bit wrong it was quite easy to over level content making it largely useless in terms of progression.
The current system is better, yet around level 25 or so my friends and I noticed our stats really weren't changing all that much as we added attribute points, hardly noticeable really.
At level 50 I accidentally used a reset stone, setting all attributes to zero.
I experimented a bit and found even putting most of my points into one attibute didn't raise it all that much more than my previous balance build.
So the illusion of progression was partially broken, and in the end ESO is really more about what your gear / CP scores are which is disappointing in my view.
"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
i would much prefer the role progression to be more like a map where you do things in game to uncover the "map". Each part of the map gives certain perks based on role and you can use a certain number of total perks with your character. The main progression then is to get enough perks to your limit, but has the flexibility for you to collect them all. Thus your character is a loudout system instead of a linear progression.
using the build a training device method introduces structural gameplay and additionally makes what you have uncovered available to your other characters. This mean we can have an open role system and you can uncover the whole thing the way you want to. I prefer roles to classes because roles are easier to balance and additionally it lets you combine roles as a form of natural specialization.
Of course it would require a unique non experience based system but I think that it is very reasonable to create a more complex algorithm which takes many things into account and not just how many monsters you've killed. I mean your achievements should count, where you been should count, what monsters you've faced and killed, what killed you and we can add many more factors. The lowest hanging fruit should not be the most valuable. Eso is proof of this.
If you combine this loadout system with other loadout systems like gear ( which is very successful in eso) and even bases/housing could have loudout systems built in and the total of all this would be your character.
To me it was VERY obvious when they made the changes because i left the game for a year and when i returned with no AA's my player was noticeably worse than when i left.
So they nerfed the players and did these AA's just to get you back to the non nerfed version ..lmao and it fooled people...sigh.
WAY WAY too many hotbar icons,they should be condensed to have more meaningful abilities rather than 50 different dmg icons.
Stats gear might be a fave of modern gamers but i know it is a bad way to implement combat.
Giving players some really good important abilities to use is how you allow players to have intuitive combat.Of course the EQ teams have failed like most do in that anytime you et something that is actually useful it doesn't work on Bosses...lame.
You don't NEED anything versus trash mobs,the only time any of it matters is versus a Boss so yeah it is a big fail when you eliminate the positives of advancement.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
i agree with you regarding putting things in the game like crowd control only to make nothing work. Its dumb and leads to everything being a dps fest as that's the only strategy that works. I think alot more can be done in this regard
early eq ( before the raids) used crowd control to great effect and it worked very well in providing strategy to split and isolate mobs but it failed in that you HAD to kill mobs one at a time. There is a middle ground here. Eso relied on groups of monsters but has extremely weak crowd control. I think somewhere in-between is the right answer.
The problem is that developers are clueless on how to design their games so they like to take the easy way out and CONTROL you with levels and gear.
When we played for example Atlas we could go fight the top bosses anytime we wanted ,we didn't need to wait for level 75 or level 100,we only needed cunning,smarts.
MMORPG studios are sooo worried as witnessed in AOC that players need their hand held and given enough linear content to keep them occupied.Players don't seem to know how to play a ROLE PLAYING game,they think it should be levels and loot and raids and end game.
There are people for example in Valheim like the Radioman "YouTuber" who seems to just enjoy his base building things.In Atlas MANY of us enjoyed getting pets/tames/mounts and building ships and homes we didn't need ANY hand holding.
In Survival games players tend to just go out and Explore but in mmorpg's players look for ! ? markers over npc heads to tell them what to do.
The entire mentality of mmorpg's needs to change as survival games are MUCH more a role playing game than rpg's are.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
fighter: Physical damage and mitigation expert
mage: Magic damage and mitigation expert
rogue situational expert
then of course there should be no hard end to where one role ends and another begins so players can tailor their role to their liking. All roles would have an array of crowd control available according to their role
the key factor is that of all the ways you can trick out your character increasing "damage" directly isnt one of them. Its completely a function of the weapon. You might have indirect ways but no direct ways.
it's a more thorough and better approximation of true experience. Completely doable these days and completely reasonable to implement.
Somewhere in the world is the "Book of battle axes" if your lucky you'll find this and gain the knowledge it gives instantly. If your not lucky you can still pick up a battle axe and start using it. The algorithm will determine if and when you have done enough with battle axes to get that knowledge. Having knowledge of battleaxes then, might help you learn other things.
other examples might be you find a spell in the world and its yours, but if you don't find it there are other ways. Another player might be nearby casting it, you might actually get hit with it. In this case the algorithm determines when you've had sufficient exposure to grant the knowledge.
its a natural way to learn the game.
Levels are about a platform of power 90% of the time, a level. The other time it is usually placing skill points earned. Skills with or without levels for example are uneven gains. For example level 10 human warrior are equal to 10 human warrior. The differences are + - character advancement choices, gear and etc.
Skills without levels are gained usually in isolation and not usually tied to overall power of a character. Like a character who just beat on a dummy with sword has no defense skills vs. a character who had defense, magic resistance, combat experience and the same sword skill is much more powerful.
I think they can be more interesting and your constant generalizing will not inspire anyone.
I don't think it's semantics because there are distinctions in how the game is played based around how you advance. Traditional levels are about earning experience and uniformity in advancement. It is a very distinct style of play. If can't see the difference the question is does your replies even warrant real discussion in this thread.
Enchanter in early EQ was a blast....Probably the most fun I had playing in a MMO.....I liked that as I leveled up the spells got better and better and was a great incentive to gain levels.....