3-4 layers of xp,3-4 layers of currency,4-5 layers of combat depth,4-5 layers of questing and WAY better AI with mobs that can interact with each other.
ECO system,seasons,elemental properties,EVERYTHING except crafting is grouping no soloing except maybe first 10 levels to learn your player before grouping.
Hubs/main cities,auction houses with different rates.
REASON to go back to playing old zones so the game zones never seem dead,in other words uni lateral progression.
content such as farming,gardening,raising livestock,training and breeding pets and mounts.
zero hand holding,you have to talk to npc's and have to learn your surroundings.
Player>player combos very little soloing with combos.
TRAINERS:you don't get handed anything,you have to do a quest line that changes from player to player to learn a new skill.
EVERY NPC can be favored to aid you for 4 hours in combat ,even 5 npc's can be favored to form your own group.What they want is random among many things from items in the world to crafted items.
realistic terrain:No fire bolts in water and rain days severely weaken your fire attacks.Same for all other elements.
No levels ,only skill levels that are used to determine formulas for accuracy,avoidance,hit n miss ect ect.
The no levels also pertains to mobs,instead there would be a rating system NOT shown "remember no hand holding"?.You have to learn what mobs have a higher rating by challenging them,higher rated mobs would have more skills and spells and more classes to draw those from.
Leads me to my final one,multi class system similar to ffxi main class/sub class is 50% of.
Skills NEED to be used to be leveled up and make a big difference to hit n miss and dmg output.This means you may need food and drink for accuracy if fighting something far above your skill rating.Mob has 50 def and you only have 45 sword skill you may need a food and/r drink that rises your melee accuracy by 5+.
Hidden skills and abilities to be learned by rare npc's that roam everywhere ,never in the same place.How you get those rare spells and abilities would be random and timed "perhaps 1 hour"before the NPC moves on to another location.These rare abilities would be extremely valuable because could be used on any class.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
Ha, I totally did not recognize this thread after the title change. This is a much better question. *clap*
I started working on a reply by making a list of all the features I dislike in MMOs. Came up with about a dozen. But then I ran into a problem - I dislike these features so much I don't want to encourage anyone to include them in their MMO's design. [whine] I don't want to redesign them to be less objectionable! They still wouldn't be as good as just not having these 'features' and I'd still rather play a game that didn't have either version. [/whine]
Suggestions?
I want to help design and develop a PvE-focused, solo-friendly, sandpark MMO which combines crafting, monster hunting, and story. So PM me if you are starting one.
What alternative ways do you think those features could be done?
If you do not care for someone else's thoughts,
or know of issues related to an idea (players exploiting, etc),
then you are more than welcomed to add to other ways to go about such ideas.
instanced dungeon .. not enough stories and scripting. They can have a much better naratives and events inside instances then just kill this boss, and so on ...
My suggestion, throw em all down on the table and be certain to accompany them with the fact you hate these features. Possibly even, tell why you hate these features. Those features that you can come up with alternative ideas for, put that on the table too. Those that perhaps you can not figure out alternatives for, we have almost 3 million members on this site... although that is likely half I would imagine, given how many members simply did not delete their unused accounts and never returned? In any case, I am sure we have more than enough people to come up with alternative ideas to those features. Besides, if you hate them that much, they are more likely to turn up than not... at least, that would be my luck.
Hmm, yeah, if I can say why I hate the features that's a fair trade.
Okay, let's start with item storage and why we should NOT do it with BANKS. I'm talking about the kind where there's a branch in every town - your stuff is apparently magically stored in some pocket dimension that only banks can access. Why? If the bank's mages can tap into a pocket dimension, and I'm a mage, why can't I learn how? Or even learn how to craft a bigger backpack for myself so I can carry all my stuff around with me? Or I'd be quite happy to have a house and craft some storage chests for it instead of using a bank. Do banks contribute anything positive to the player's experience of the game at all? I think originally small backpack sizes plus banks were intended to encourage players to come back to 'civilization' regularly, as part of an attempt to emulate the Dungeons&Dragons/Tolkienesque feel of having stretches of adventure in the dangerous wilderness punctuated with 'business vacations' in towns and cities; went right along with players getting bonuses for logging off in an inn, where adventurers are canonically supposed to sleep.
That paradigm is 40 years old now. When I play Skyrim modded to remove carry limits/penalties, it's way more fun and I still go back to town regularly. Towns have much more interesting functions to offer players than they did when banks were first envisioned as a standard feature of MMOs. Storing players' stuff is much less expensive in terms of hard drive space than it was then too. The only thing banks still provide is a gold sink, and we have a lot more interesting goldsinks now too. So I really think we should reimagine or eliminate banks.
How could we reimagine banks? Banks absolutely should not pay out interest to players - I've played a few games like this and it's like an anti-gold sink biased in favor of people who have been playing longer. Kill that idea with fire. What else? Player-run banks? Holy$h!% no! Kill that idea with fire and then bomb the remains into oblivion! Players making loans to other players would create instant drama and be 100% prone to abuse because there's pretty much no non-abusive way to do it.
If we forget the gold-sink aspect, players use their banks mainly for a few things: storing crafting materials until they feel like crafting; storing items to be auctioned until they feel like restocking their auctions or until their auction slots aren't all full; storing collectibles that they never intend to sell but can't display elsewhere. So, maybe we could make bank accounts accessible through the auction interface and the crafting interface, and forget having a separate bank building? Maybe we could replace the bank building with a museum/garden where players' collections could be displayed in rotation? Or, maybe we could replace the bank building with a portal to player housing, where players could display their collections and privately store their other possessions? Wouldn't either of these be more convenient and more fun?
I want to help design and develop a PvE-focused, solo-friendly, sandpark MMO which combines crafting, monster hunting, and story. So PM me if you are starting one.
You need more than just gear progression at 'max level'. Most of these games I just get bored as soon as I hit 'end game' because farming gear is just really dull. Something as simple as an AA system from EQ works. Having it so you can't really ever max out like EVE works. Making some sort of fame system of politics could work etc. I should never been farming just for gear and get no other method of progression.
Instances kill these games for me. I don't choose an MMORPG to play a game, I choose it to take part in a virtual world. I really wish at least some game designers would go back to trying to make one. There are so many better venues for just playing a game, MMORPG isn't worth it for that. Get rid of instances and add more content or add procedural content so it is unpredictable. Let the players drive the direction of the content instead of just consuming the content. These games are so bogged down in trying to tell a story that they forget that the point of an RPG is to create a story. I'm playing a RPG, not reading a book.
Over and over and over, we see lots of claims that basically wear the same clothing :
There are many ways to design ____insert feature here____,
but developers are not willing to.
Yes. That a statement is made which says "lots of claims are made that all sound the same, basically put in the same sentence and repeated the same way"... THAT is completely unclear.
Instead of making empty claims that deliver nothing, I figured I would begin this thread as an exercise in order to practice making constructive contributions. Here, let me begin :
Yes. That the statement is made which says, "people need practice making constructive contributions... as opposed to empty claims that give no answers"... THAT is completely unclear.
A level system is not the only way to deal with character progression.
Another form of progression could be through a levelless system, such that allows individual skills to be learned and then built up through use.
Further still, another form of progression could have nothing at all to do with your character progressing, but instead having combat gear you acquire be what actually builds.
Yes. That examples were given in how to go about such the exercise... THAT is completely unclear.
Now you try...
Yes. That the OP then states that the reader can now try to do the same, and thus establishes (I thought fairly bluntly) the purpose of the thread... THAT is completely unclear.
Your OP was completely unclear, hence the responses you got.
You want JUST a list of things that aren't done right in MMOs and a simple suggestion as to how it could be done differently or right, absolutely NO DISCUSSION on whatever anyone posts... just a list and only a list.
Nothing in the OP was opposed to discussions, debates or the like. I already know that debates can lead to plenty of ideas as much as the exercise itself.
The idea is "Alternatives". Period. Whether or not done right or wrong does not matter, but it was meant to be a "put up or shut up" to those that seem to love going around saying, "this sux... or this a wow clone... or there are so many ways to do this that and the other thing." of which, says nothing. This exercise should lead to a bunch of somethings.
Had you put it that way, people MIGHT have understood what you wanted.
I made it as clear as possible, as I have pointed out point by point. Internet ya know, who reads what they reply to, ijs?
You completely rewrote your OP several times... what you consider to be clear, wasn't... hence the rewrites. My reply was based on your constant reexplaining of what you were after... my reply was MUCH CLEARER, as was your latest rewrite of the OP.
If it has to be rewritten, reexplained, et al... it is not as clear as you thought it was. May make perfect sense to you, but then you aren't speaking to yourself, you are speaking to an audience that has no idea what is in your head.
Originally posted by Ender4You need more than just gear progression at 'max level'.
No you don't. The whole Diablo series is nothing but gear progression at the max level, and some play D2 for over a decade.
It is clearly a formula that works.
Some play it, most don't. D3 added Paragon levels because people hated just gear grind so much. Anyway this is my features, not yours~. The largest portion of D2's player base played different modded versions to find different ways to enjoy the game. They also had ladders so you would constantly start the leveling process over. The group that just play one character and grind away is extremely small compared to the whole.
For me to enjoy a game it can't just be a gear grind. I spent a long time playing WoW and I would reach max level, grind up to decent gear and then a new season would come out and my gear would be obsoleted. When I raided I would get decent gear but then we'd stall in camp mode instead of new content mode and I'd just quit. At that point I would reroll because leveling was more fun than playing a gear based end game. I quit D3 after I got admirable gear as well, same exact reason. Gear grind simply cannot sustain my interest by itself, there has to be more.
Originally posted by Ender4You need more than just gear progression at 'max level'.
No you don't. The whole Diablo series is nothing but gear progression at the max level, and some play D2 for over a decade.
It is clearly a formula that works.
Some play it, most don't. D3 added Paragon levels because people hated just gear grind so much. Anyway this is my features, not yours~. The largest portion of D2's player base played different modded versions to find different ways to enjoy the game. They also had ladders so you would constantly start the leveling process over. The group that just play one character and grind away is extremely small compared to the whole.
For me to enjoy a game it can't just be a gear grind. I spent a long time playing WoW and I would reach max level, grind up to decent gear and then a new season would come out and my gear would be obsoleted. When I raided I would get decent gear but then we'd stall in camp mode instead of new content mode and I'd just quit. At that point I would reroll because leveling was more fun than playing a gear based end game. I quit D3 after I got admirable gear as well, same exact reason. Gear grind simply cannot sustain my interest by itself, there has to be more.
I am mostly of that mind set as well. I do think that leveling up increases characters power to much, but if done right you could have a lot of levels or skills that only increase your power a small amount as mentioned in another thread. I've never been a huge fan of level or gear grind. Both are fun mechanics to have in game, but IMO they shouldn't be the purpose of the game. They should just be part of making the game more engaging to players (not the sole purpose of the game).
Originally posted by Ender4You need more than just gear progression at 'max level'.
No you don't. The whole Diablo series is nothing but gear progression at the max level, and some play D2 for over a decade.
It is clearly a formula that works.
Some play it, most don't. D3 added Paragon levels because people hated just gear grind so much. Anyway this is my features, not yours~. The largest portion of D2's player base played different modded versions to find different ways to enjoy the game. They also had ladders so you would constantly start the leveling process over. The group that just play one character and grind away is extremely small compared to the whole.
For me to enjoy a game it can't just be a gear grind. I spent a long time playing WoW and I would reach max level, grind up to decent gear and then a new season would come out and my gear would be obsoleted. When I raided I would get decent gear but then we'd stall in camp mode instead of new content mode and I'd just quit. At that point I would reroll because leveling was more fun than playing a gear based end game. I quit D3 after I got admirable gear as well, same exact reason. Gear grind simply cannot sustain my interest by itself, there has to be more.
I am mostly of that mind set as well. I do think that leveling up increases characters power to much, but if done right you could have a lot of levels or skills that only increase your power a small amount as mentioned in another thread. I've never been a huge fan of level or gear grind. Both are fun mechanics to have in game, but IMO they shouldn't be the purpose of the game. They should just be part of making the game more engaging to players (not the sole purpose of the game).
I guess i do have to reverse myself a bit because personally i do enjoy paragon leveling *and* the greater rifts leader board (I am on the top 1000 wiz!!!!!).
However, I think my point is that gear grind is still a part of the diablo (not just 3, but 1 & 2 too) experience, and *some* do play it like that. It is an integral part of hack-n-slash.
Originally posted by nariusseldon I guess i do have to reverse myself a bit because personally i do enjoy paragon leveling *and* the greater rifts leader board (I am on the top 1000 wiz!!!!!).However, I think my point is that gear grind is still a part of the diablo (not just 3, but 1 & 2 too) experience, and *some* do play it like that. It is an integral part of hack-n-slash.
And that is personally fine. I don't mind grinding gear, it just can't be the only thing I'm doing. Something similar to the Paragon system tacked onto max level will always make for a better experience. There should always be 3 or 4 layers of progression possible. That is true within the gear as well. There should be multiple ways to improve your gear, not just find a new item too. Devs have just gotten really lazy about this stuff.
Comments
3-4 layers of xp,3-4 layers of currency,4-5 layers of combat depth,4-5 layers of questing and WAY better AI with mobs that can interact with each other.
ECO system,seasons,elemental properties,EVERYTHING except crafting is grouping no soloing except maybe first 10 levels to learn your player before grouping.
Hubs/main cities,auction houses with different rates.
REASON to go back to playing old zones so the game zones never seem dead,in other words uni lateral progression.
content such as farming,gardening,raising livestock,training and breeding pets and mounts.
zero hand holding,you have to talk to npc's and have to learn your surroundings.
Player>player combos very little soloing with combos.
TRAINERS:you don't get handed anything,you have to do a quest line that changes from player to player to learn a new skill.
EVERY NPC can be favored to aid you for 4 hours in combat ,even 5 npc's can be favored to form your own group.What they want is random among many things from items in the world to crafted items.
realistic terrain:No fire bolts in water and rain days severely weaken your fire attacks.Same for all other elements.
No levels ,only skill levels that are used to determine formulas for accuracy,avoidance,hit n miss ect ect.
The no levels also pertains to mobs,instead there would be a rating system NOT shown "remember no hand holding"?.You have to learn what mobs have a higher rating by challenging them,higher rated mobs would have more skills and spells and more classes to draw those from.
Leads me to my final one,multi class system similar to ffxi main class/sub class is 50% of.
Skills NEED to be used to be leveled up and make a big difference to hit n miss and dmg output.This means you may need food and drink for accuracy if fighting something far above your skill rating.Mob has 50 def and you only have 45 sword skill you may need a food and/r drink that rises your melee accuracy by 5+.
Hidden skills and abilities to be learned by rare npc's that roam everywhere ,never in the same place.How you get those rare spells and abilities would be random and timed "perhaps 1 hour"before the NPC moves on to another location.These rare abilities would be extremely valuable because could be used on any class.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
Ha, I totally did not recognize this thread after the title change. This is a much better question. *clap*
I started working on a reply by making a list of all the features I dislike in MMOs. Came up with about a dozen. But then I ran into a problem - I dislike these features so much I don't want to encourage anyone to include them in their MMO's design. [whine] I don't want to redesign them to be less objectionable! They still wouldn't be as good as just not having these 'features' and I'd still rather play a game that didn't have either version. [/whine]
Suggestions?
instanced dungeon .. not enough stories and scripting. They can have a much better naratives and events inside instances then just kill this boss, and so on ...
Hmm, yeah, if I can say why I hate the features that's a fair trade.
Okay, let's start with item storage and why we should NOT do it with BANKS. I'm talking about the kind where there's a branch in every town - your stuff is apparently magically stored in some pocket dimension that only banks can access. Why? If the bank's mages can tap into a pocket dimension, and I'm a mage, why can't I learn how? Or even learn how to craft a bigger backpack for myself so I can carry all my stuff around with me? Or I'd be quite happy to have a house and craft some storage chests for it instead of using a bank. Do banks contribute anything positive to the player's experience of the game at all? I think originally small backpack sizes plus banks were intended to encourage players to come back to 'civilization' regularly, as part of an attempt to emulate the Dungeons&Dragons/Tolkienesque feel of having stretches of adventure in the dangerous wilderness punctuated with 'business vacations' in towns and cities; went right along with players getting bonuses for logging off in an inn, where adventurers are canonically supposed to sleep.
That paradigm is 40 years old now. When I play Skyrim modded to remove carry limits/penalties, it's way more fun and I still go back to town regularly. Towns have much more interesting functions to offer players than they did when banks were first envisioned as a standard feature of MMOs. Storing players' stuff is much less expensive in terms of hard drive space than it was then too. The only thing banks still provide is a gold sink, and we have a lot more interesting goldsinks now too. So I really think we should reimagine or eliminate banks.
How could we reimagine banks? Banks absolutely should not pay out interest to players - I've played a few games like this and it's like an anti-gold sink biased in favor of people who have been playing longer. Kill that idea with fire. What else? Player-run banks? Holy$h!% no! Kill that idea with fire and then bomb the remains into oblivion! Players making loans to other players would create instant drama and be 100% prone to abuse because there's pretty much no non-abusive way to do it.
If we forget the gold-sink aspect, players use their banks mainly for a few things: storing crafting materials until they feel like crafting; storing items to be auctioned until they feel like restocking their auctions or until their auction slots aren't all full; storing collectibles that they never intend to sell but can't display elsewhere. So, maybe we could make bank accounts accessible through the auction interface and the crafting interface, and forget having a separate bank building? Maybe we could replace the bank building with a museum/garden where players' collections could be displayed in rotation? Or, maybe we could replace the bank building with a portal to player housing, where players could display their collections and privately store their other possessions? Wouldn't either of these be more convenient and more fun?
You need more than just gear progression at 'max level'. Most of these games I just get bored as soon as I hit 'end game' because farming gear is just really dull. Something as simple as an AA system from EQ works. Having it so you can't really ever max out like EVE works. Making some sort of fame system of politics could work etc. I should never been farming just for gear and get no other method of progression.
Instances kill these games for me. I don't choose an MMORPG to play a game, I choose it to take part in a virtual world. I really wish at least some game designers would go back to trying to make one. There are so many better venues for just playing a game, MMORPG isn't worth it for that. Get rid of instances and add more content or add procedural content so it is unpredictable. Let the players drive the direction of the content instead of just consuming the content. These games are so bogged down in trying to tell a story that they forget that the point of an RPG is to create a story. I'm playing a RPG, not reading a book.
You completely rewrote your OP several times... what you consider to be clear, wasn't... hence the rewrites. My reply was based on your constant reexplaining of what you were after... my reply was MUCH CLEARER, as was your latest rewrite of the OP.
If it has to be rewritten, reexplained, et al... it is not as clear as you thought it was. May make perfect sense to you, but then you aren't speaking to yourself, you are speaking to an audience that has no idea what is in your head.
No you don't. The whole Diablo series is nothing but gear progression at the max level, and some play D2 for over a decade.
It is clearly a formula that works.
Some play it, most don't. D3 added Paragon levels because people hated just gear grind so much. Anyway this is my features, not yours~. The largest portion of D2's player base played different modded versions to find different ways to enjoy the game. They also had ladders so you would constantly start the leveling process over. The group that just play one character and grind away is extremely small compared to the whole.
For me to enjoy a game it can't just be a gear grind. I spent a long time playing WoW and I would reach max level, grind up to decent gear and then a new season would come out and my gear would be obsoleted. When I raided I would get decent gear but then we'd stall in camp mode instead of new content mode and I'd just quit. At that point I would reroll because leveling was more fun than playing a gear based end game. I quit D3 after I got admirable gear as well, same exact reason. Gear grind simply cannot sustain my interest by itself, there has to be more.
I am mostly of that mind set as well. I do think that leveling up increases characters power to much, but if done right you could have a lot of levels or skills that only increase your power a small amount as mentioned in another thread. I've never been a huge fan of level or gear grind. Both are fun mechanics to have in game, but IMO they shouldn't be the purpose of the game. They should just be part of making the game more engaging to players (not the sole purpose of the game).
I guess i do have to reverse myself a bit because personally i do enjoy paragon leveling *and* the greater rifts leader board (I am on the top 1000 wiz!!!!!).
However, I think my point is that gear grind is still a part of the diablo (not just 3, but 1 & 2 too) experience, and *some* do play it like that. It is an integral part of hack-n-slash.
And that is personally fine. I don't mind grinding gear, it just can't be the only thing I'm doing. Something similar to the Paragon system tacked onto max level will always make for a better experience. There should always be 3 or 4 layers of progression possible. That is true within the gear as well. There should be multiple ways to improve your gear, not just find a new item too. Devs have just gotten really lazy about this stuff.