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Letter to cwatkins, open for comment.
RipperjackAU
Member Posts: 124
in Fallen Earth
I sent the following to Christophe Watkins, and I thought you all might want to comment on what I had to say to him. I am sure you all have come across these issues in other games, so why not take the time to add to the letter here.
Good to see you guys are making progress with your product, and I look forward to hearing more from your development team. However, I would like to take the opportunity to bring your attention to a number of issues I have discovered in other products that I feel you will need to address. These are detailed as follows:Forced Grouping. Neglecting the solo gamer.To be frank this issue alone has killed games like City of Villains for me stone dead! There is nothing worse than getting to the end of a given instance, finding an all but unbeatable boss, then trying for hours to recruit other players to slay the evil foe only to fine nobody available to help. With the low populations on City of Villains, matched with the early hours that I play being from Australia, means that there are some missions that I simply cannot do... period!This matter is made worse, especially in City of Villains, in that their mission structure is very linear. You cannot complete the mission chain until you complete a given mission in the sequence. This means that there are a series of story arcs that are denied to me as I cannot find other players to assist. I find this deplorable that the devs lock me out of content, as I cannot find other players at my "graveyard" times, to help me.So...1. Remember that not everybody can get a group, keep solo players in mind with your content design.2. If you want to have "forced group" content, make it OPTIONAL! I cannot stress then enough. Keep the "core" missions solo friendly and have group content as "extra". So if solo players cannot do the forced group content, then they will not have mission blockage.Share the knowledge. How NOT to encourage community.Another issue that I have found in World of Warcraft, is that of making knowledge exclusive to a single character. With their current crafting system, most of the good items are made from knowledge picked up from recipes/patterns/plans scrolls. These scrolls are mutually exclusive in that once they are learned by a character, the scroll is destroyed.This leads to many fights, arguments and bidding wars in the WoW auction houses for these precious nuggets of knowledge. This in turn drives a wedge though the WoW crafting community, between the "haves" with large guilds and coin to secure these scrolls and "have nots" who are left with core recipes and nothing more.Why not try to bring the community together with teaching. Allow for characters to have a teaching skill to allow them to pass on knowledge of most recipes to other players. Of course this could be exploited, so you would need to instigate mechanisms to limit the amount of knowledge in a given period. Also, knowledge gain would not be automatic, so students would have a chance of failing to gain knowledge, after a given teaching session.Also you would allow for the teaching of "common", "uncommon" and some "rare" recipes, but you could have special "unique" recipes that could not be taught. Thus trade secrets could be preserved by select players, if you wanted to foster an "elite" class of crafters for instance.You could still have recipes/patterns/plans in the game of course, this is by no way a means to replace it. However this might be a new feature that would allow for crafters to contribute to the community beyond just the items they make.
Comments
Do you want suggestions for a future letter, or do you want us to actually write in our own paragraphs? A lot of people (or at least some) won't agree with me on this, I'm sure, but I think there ought to be something in there about the "tough luck" attitude games take with new players and how some choose to mercilessly subject them to PvP from the get-go, thus driving them away in huge numbers.
I'd also like to add something in about having oversaturated markets, missions that are too lengthy, failed attempts at "action" oriented gameplay, unsuccessful "hands-off" approaches to player-built societies, etc...though I'm not typing all of that out just yet.
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Go you must.
No guest shall stay
in one place for ever.
Love will be lost
if you sit too long
at a friend's fire.
-- The Havamal
While I understand your solo argument, I still think I'd rather them concentrate on group missions rather than solo ones. Don't get me wrong, the solo content definitely should be there, because there will always be times you don't want to deal with other people or can't find anyone to group with. But the reason for playing an MMORPG is the "massively multiplayer" aspect. If someone is hell bent on playing exclusively solo content, I'm not sure why they don't just play a single player game.
The real fun in an MMO shows when you group with good players and tackle hard missions. Soloing can be fun but the social interaction is what makes the game worth playing.
http://www.fallenearth.se - Your source for Fallen Earth information
Sorry to basically condemn you for the fact that you don't live in N. America, but I think that the whole "concentrate on soloing, to accomodate people in other time zones" idea isn't going to go places. The fundamental reason for this is; Money vs Effort. The time and effort of the developers will financially be better spent consolidating their content for North Americans, purely because of the reasons you've been saying it's difficult for you to find a group. It's a vicious circle.
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I agree
This is far too subjective. I play in a world that's shaped by other human players and is persistent, but that I'm capable of existing in on my own. I'm not sure about missions per se, but there should at least be things for players to do when playing solo.
-----------------------------------
Go you must.
No guest shall stay
in one place for ever.
Love will be lost
if you sit too long
at a friend's fire.
-- The Havamal
What you mention about crafting is a good point, and makes me think of several things.
1. Much like SWG, you can teach anything you know to people who meet the requirements for that skill. I think this was a great idea, and the idea of apprentice points, after a while it became less meaningful, and I don't know how to combat that, maybe make it harder to be taught, and even harder to learn things another way, don't have any ideas.
2. Makes me think that a cool crafting idea would be no lvls, no skills learned. Anyone can make anything at anytime, they just need to know what to use, and how much etc. You might get levels in craftmanship, also better equipment, which makes whatever you make higher quality. It's like this. IRL, I could make a knife, well technically. I'd get a piece of metal or something, and sharpen it, and then make a handle so it's easier for me to hold, and boom, I've got a knife, very crappy but a knife. So in game, you bring up the crafting window, you can choose what materials to use, how much of them, what processes to use on them, how long to fire the metal or whatever, and in the end, push craft. It may make nothing, and you've lost you're materials, or it may make something. When you find something you can make, you experiment (really experiment) by trying different metals, or firing it longer or making it lighter or heavier or something. And you try different things until you get it better and better. Then, things crafted would truly be unique, as long as others didn't use the exact same stuff the exact way on the exact equipment.
This would likely be way too complex to develop in the proper depth, but a decent idea. And then I thought to myself, "Man, this would be cool, like real life or something." lol, a little of the subject, but have any of you thought about all the energy we Nerds put into games and our little enterainment? If we channeled that energy into something positive, we're rule the world or something lol. We'd play real life like a game, having courage when we don't feel we have it, going places and trying things we'd never dare, because we're not ourselves, we're something better, stronger, braver. Don't know, very tired, pondering... stuff.
You mean you don't? I consider myself a hardcore gamer, but I'm also, for instance, the youngest person in my workplace, and have already moved past people years older than me, just through putting the same kind of focus into my work as I do with video games. Kind of makes you wonder how the generation of youth brought up playing MMORPGs will affect the business world. Make it more cutthroat, perhaps? But this is way off topic.
Crafting has to be kept simple enough that it appeals to the average person, otherwise the game will be unbalanced. Arranging pre-created pieces in unique ways would be my hope, much like the Half Life 2 Garry's Mod, except you'd have to find the materials to work with yourself, instead of creating them out of thin air.
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This has got to be the biggest (deepest? longest?) thread necro I've ever seen.