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Why have MMO's turned to into gear scores?
Lazzaro
Member UncommonPosts: 548
I've noticed this in quite a bit of MMO's as of late. It seems like everything evolves around your gear and rotations if you want to experience anything end game, I'm sure it's been like this, but maybe I've just been oblivious to it until recently.
MMO's just seem more like a Job then actually jumping in and having fun like when I played UO and SWG.
Comments
Lately? Welcome to 10 years ago.
MMOs have focused solely on the carrot on the stick method of gameplay for a long time now.
Until they start focusing on making something "fun" instead of making a treadmill of item accumulation it will not change.
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You may get a rough thread here
most people know why this happened lol.
Every mmo i play its all bout "jump in and have fun", it was when i started and still is nowadays.
If i start to feel like a job i quit.
"Feel like a job" is a state of mind, nothing to do with game A, B, C...
In EQ in 1999, you'd pretty much end up with whatever gear for which you participated, as a progression, but to do the cooler (harder?) stuff, it was about resistances. You could do poh/pof in 30ish gear when you were 48 and earn the planar as you go several times, but having the stats on the planar didn't mean you'd be an awesome nagafen participant. For that, you'd use whatever fire resist you could find and actually gimp yourself quite a bit, but hey, you weren't melting, and that's all that mattered to the complete-heal-cast-rotation clerics who then only had to bother keeping the tank up. This continued being true through kunark and velious, many fights you'd have more resist on than anything else, stacked with resist buffs and potions, netted 0 ae damage, so it didn't matter how long fights lasted... until you got to sleeper and that was another subject altogether, because it was never intended to be beaten at all.
It has a lot to do with the fact many (imo) easymode, wow clone style themepark games only really centre around combat - even crafting is primarily based around improving combat
Q: what can we do to keep people feeling progression in our game that is based around combat
A: give them bigger numbers in combat
A game that has bigger choice than the mass market themeparks does not need to have gear scores play anywhere near as big a role in terms of player advancement - sure it will always play a part but it is far less significant and there will be many more areas to advance in with plenty being non combat orientated
There is no innovation in themeparks, there is no AAA investment in real sand boxes - so we have many years of same old same old gear progression based MMO
You can blame this on the hardcore players. MMo's used to be about having fun with others online. Now its like a job to get the best gear so you have fun playing with others. So now you have these hardcore players complaining that everything is to easy and needs to be harder which means higher gear scores. Thats why Wow is backing away from this slowly because they know it sucks for most players.
Your wrong. I know tons of people who are super hardcore and hate gear scores, myself included. It's because of min-maxing not hardcore.
"classification of games into MMOs is not by rational reasoning" - nariusseldon
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Try a MUD today at http://www.mudconnect.com/I like the way DDO did gear.
you could have very powerful sword with killer damage; but still do at least as much damage against a skeleton with a plain club. Naturally, strong hammer or mace would blow skeletons to pieces...
You could have strong metal plate armors; but do better sometimes with cloth, if it had say... acid resist and there was lots of acid damage floating around. A really dextrous build could achieve higher protection with lighter (and probably therefore cheaper) armors usually too.
Also in DDO, armor and weapon types had good overlapping class usage. So, it wasn't just 1 armor type per class. Chain mail, for example, could be worn by fighters, clerics, rangers, and rogues; and maybe other classes too. Lots of good trading and auction opportunities.
Biggest baddest assed heavy armor was not always the best; but sometimes it was the best. Gave a good feel of equipping for an adventure, outside of just what you were wearing. Might need fire prot. gears and potions at one point, so if you don't have them along,...
Still had BiS gear, but BiS was not always the same gear for a toon to have all the time. This gave me the sense of a life long professional fighter having a variety of weapons... "time to break out the old ooze bane club
"
Because the themepark models people have grown to love have nothing else to offer.
/Thread.
- Albert Einstein
Problems started when Damage meters became mainstream along with Gear score and more recently a marked increase in Power gains to supplement poor content releases. Ban both and only give metrics for overall group performance and you would have a totally different landscape where it was actually about the group and not person A abusing person B because of perceived relative performance.
Put it this way, you never hear someone saying - wow great performance relative to your gear do you, its always used as an evidence for abuse and blaming.
rpg/mmorg history: Dun Darach>Bloodwych>Bards Tale 1-3>Eye of the beholder > Might and Magic 2,3,5 > FFVII> Baldur's Gate 1, 2 > Planescape Torment >Morrowind > WOW > oblivion > LOTR > Guild Wars (1900hrs elementalist) Vanguard. > GW2(1000 elementalist), Wildstar
Now playing GW2, AOW 3, ESO, LOTR, Elite D
Yeah, been a few years since those two titles came out, the MMORPG space has moved on a bit but really, gear scores are just the mathematical representation of what has always been true of gear centric MMO's which included EQ1, DAOC and others, without the proper gear, you can't complete the content. (or beat your PVP opponent)
Gear scores just make it easier to tell whether or not you have the right gear. I remember in early WOW joining a raiding guild before GS's became popular, so they did an examination of my gear to make sure I was wearing all blues. I remember still having two green rings and they made me grind out a few dungeons first to replace them before I was permitted to join.
That was an imprecise method, as in fact one of my green rings had really good stats which I ended up replacing with an inferior blue ring but the leader wouldn't budge on it, so really, gear scores make more sense.
Now that doesn't mean I like them, I just stopped playing games based on gear grinding, I don't find them fun so I'm pretty much relegated to EVE atm.
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It does nothing though does it, we all know that Gear has absolutely no bearing on the skill level of the player. It is enough that an instance is gated at a certain level. As soon as 1 player makes a decision to exclude another player based on a number then you enter the mmo world we see today, elitism, arrogance, plaing wrong decisions. Gear should be selected by the player to suit their own abilities - but they cant because its all measured in Stupid meters.
Perfect example, a new dps player should be able to up their stamina a bit to help them survivie to learn fights. They cannot lol because 1) they get slated for 'poor dps' on the meters and 2) people start taking the piss because they have a stamina gem when a dps gem gives more 'dps' etc etc This is the reality of these games, even in Guilds. MinMax gear is more important than the person.
On top of this you also have other abuses like 'omg your dps is high because you are whoring' (ignoring metrics showing you are low in damage taken) again metrics, even positive metrics are used to abuse.
rpg/mmorg history: Dun Darach>Bloodwych>Bards Tale 1-3>Eye of the beholder > Might and Magic 2,3,5 > FFVII> Baldur's Gate 1, 2 > Planescape Torment >Morrowind > WOW > oblivion > LOTR > Guild Wars (1900hrs elementalist) Vanguard. > GW2(1000 elementalist), Wildstar
Now playing GW2, AOW 3, ESO, LOTR, Elite D
NM, read it wrong.
But yea I agree it just splits the player base and turns the game into a job where I need this to do this and so forth.
I know it's a different market then it was 10 years ago, but when I logged in to SWG I felt like I could do whatever I wanted and didn't have anyone tell me I need this 'gear score' to group or run PvE battles or do PvP fighting between the player cities because my DPS wasn't high enough or my healing was too low.
I digress.
rpg/mmorg history: Dun Darach>Bloodwych>Bards Tale 1-3>Eye of the beholder > Might and Magic 2,3,5 > FFVII> Baldur's Gate 1, 2 > Planescape Torment >Morrowind > WOW > oblivion > LOTR > Guild Wars (1900hrs elementalist) Vanguard. > GW2(1000 elementalist), Wildstar
Now playing GW2, AOW 3, ESO, LOTR, Elite D
Focusing on gear is good for the cash shop. Gameplay now revolves around what is good for cash shops. We have had more gear centric MMOs in the past, but now they are all like that.
If anything puzzles you about gameplay your first question should be 'does this favour micro-transactions?'. I call it 'cashplay' as that is what the design is built on.
The phenomenon that gear is important to the RPG mechanics of a game is, of course, far older than MMORPGs.
There are two main problems:
1) Most gear-centric MMOs need perpetual "progression" (technically you are really standing still rather than regressingbut w/e) means gear becomes more and more the main determinant as time goes on.
2) Most of the MMORPGs have nothing besides personal power going for them as the main point of the game. The entire games boils down to how hard can I hit or how hard of a hit can I take.
While many many other CRPG games of various types have had gear as anything for fairly important to critically important most of the non-MMORPGs had some other point to the game besides that. MMORPGs don't. Thus time has reduced things to the most efficient represntation. You are your gear score because its 90% of your effectiveness and effectiveness is the only thing that matters because these types of MMORPGs have no real underlying games. If you had various novel ways to APPLY that effectiveness things might be different. But these types of MMORPGs are simple binary decisions, i
if (effectiveness >= score ) then do content
where "do content" is basically always the same thing with different names or slightly different script. This is not meant to say there is no skill in execution. But that the game itself is pretty much just one mental "if statement". Not only is the decision completely trivial, but they is nothing except "do content", i.e. a dungeon run or mob grind over and over.
I agree with Nilden that it is about Min-Maxing. There can be only one true path for each class, because diversity is too hard for Devs to balance. The classes have to be balanced because everyone must be the same, and that is also why they have Gear Based progression, because inherent qualities in a character are bad. They need you to be building toward the ultimate build, which means adventuring for gear. So homogenous classes, differentiated gear = easiest to develop.
Because they set a static difficulty for endlessly repeated difficulty 5000 fights, you have to be able to reach the 5000 mark or risk wasting other players' time. So everyone gets shoe-horned into the alpha build for the same fight done the same way, time after time.
OP, I am not a fan of gear scores but I understand why people rely so heavily on it when grouping. Basically, the general assumption is that if your gear score is high enough you:
1. Have done the encounters before.
2. Should in theory have enough health/damage/etc to contribute to clearing the content
3. Allow people to feel "special"
Sadly the difficulty of most MMOs today are greatly dependent on gear and people are looking to blow through the bosses with the least resistance. Kind of sad IMO but it is what it is.
Simple answer is that the MMO genre has turned into, and has been for a while, big business. And in big business the only metric which matters is profitability. In simple therms, how much you spend minus how much you get back, i.e. return of investment. And creating a squirrel wheel gear progression MMO is far simpler than creating a virtual world sandbox MMO, so the investment will be lower.
And they will put in a cash shop with either pay to win gear or silly cosmetical gear which increases the profitability even more and the main reason why the industry is pushing for F2P.
Also the myth is that "this is what people want" but that is BS because almost every single triple A MMO for the last decade all have had declining sub numbers which means people are leaving the game. Then they turn it into F2P, thus inflating the numbers with people who just download it and play some casually. But in the end, the people who suffers are real MMO gamers who dont gear for shiny bling bling and simplistic gear progression, squirrel-wheel type of play as there haven't been a single big budget MMO released for the last decade which is not your typical themepark, gear progression type of MMOs.
Only exception was ArcheAge, which was ruined due to mis-managment and greed with a messed up cash shop which puts another nail in the coffin of virtual world type of MMOs.
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You can thank blizzard for it for it was blizzard that introduce gear score in 1st place in way of show it to play but all mmo have score on there gear but it is not show to player.
BINGO..
Games are nothing more then a simple "carrot on the stick" treadmill.. It is the easiest and CHEAPEST design formula.. As long as the market keeps supporting $$$$ that design, it won't change anytime soon.. I haven't spent a dime on MMO's in years and for good reason.. I refuse to support those designs.. As Sam Walton said one time, "There is only one boss. The customer. And he can fire everybody in the company from the chairman on down, simply by spending his money somewhere else.".. and that is how I vote
This happens when developers give too much information about how their game works. I think RPGs in general are much better when stat information is limited.