Originally posted by Utinni I remember when people didn't care about how other people played the game. Noone kept score when I played in the glory days.
For the most part this is still the case, at least in PvE based games.
Also, this nostalgia day thing has no legs because every MMO out there has a super, ultra, elite, hard mode to most of the content. Nobody does it. The exception being uber, ultra, extreme hard mode primal instances in FF14 where old school mechanics are still applied. You macro down working rotations of F1 to F6 and dodge NPC I-Win buttons.
The only thing that was every really 'hard' was the still used LFG mechanics that are plagued with just enough people that think its fun to poop sock everyone by sabotaging the instances. Forcing us to spend 90% of the game doing nothing. Forcing us to care what the other guy was doing because he needed the attention.
Originally posted by Utinni I remember when people didn't care about how other people played the game. Noone kept score when I played in the glory days.
For the most part this is still the case, at least in PvE based games.
Also, this nostalgia day thing has no legs because every MMO out there has a super, ultra, elite, hard mode to most of the content. Nobody does it. The exception being uber, ultra, extreme hard mode primal instances in FF14 where old school mechanics are still applied. You macro down working rotations of F1 to F6 and dodge NPC I-Win buttons.
The only thing that was every really 'hard' was the still used LFG mechanics that are plagued with just enough people that think its fun to poop sock everyone by sabotaging the instances. Forcing us to spend 90% of the game doing nothing. Forcing us to care what the other guy was doing because he needed the attention.
I will never trust what you say until you change your name....
"This may hurt a little, but it's something you'll get used to. Relax....."
Originally posted by Utinni I remember when people didn't care about how other people played the game. Noone kept score when I played in the glory days.
There were still jerks in PUGs but at least they didn't flash up the exact amount of DPS everyone did during the battle...
On the other hand were it not uncommon to kick somewone outside the dungeon based on their gear, that is less common now except with raiders.
Lol, I think the worst PUGs I ever had was in EQ2 2006-2008. This one tank almost made the healer cry with blaming her for the 6 wipes we had in a dungeon. My swashie got upset and took over the tanking, after that only a single character died (twice), him.... And he was DPS ing then. I also met the rascist, manchuvanist palladin that constantly cursed everyone, he got pretty upset when I kicked him from the group.
Honestly have there always been jerks in MMOs and will always be. Certain games tend to either attract more or bring out the worst in some people.
I believe we had this discussion at one point, but it was determined that skill is only important with large quantities of time and penalties in place. If you can restart at almost the same point with no penalty you will just keep repeating it until you win. You might even make the same mistakes over and over, but just get lucky.
On the flip side if you end up losing when there is a system in place that penalizes you then you have to be skilled enough to complete said task well x percentage of the time.
In one system you just have to execute well 10% of the time and in the other you have to execute well 95% of the time. If you don't you will not progress in the game.
I wouldn't say grinding for long periods of time takes skill except it does to an extent. Generally the more you do something the more tired the body gets. If you can continue to execute the same thing over and over again optimally for a long period of time then puts you above the person that starts to make mistakes over time.
No, we determined the exact opposite by stepping through things logically:
Challenge is the amount of skill required to avoid failure. It requires skill to unicycle over a tightrope while juggling, without falling into the net.
Some time is needed for skill to be tested; excessive time stops testing skill and starts testing patience. A 1-foot-long tightrope doesn't provide enough opportunity to fail (even if you're unskilled, you can scoot across before failing.) A 100,000-foot-long tightrope no longer measures skill but simply patience (which isn't skill.) So you need a little time to be involved, like 20 feet of tightrope, so that the activity provides enough opportunity to fail but doesn't devolve into testing patience.
Penalties are only involved if you fail. If you peddle and juggle in exactly the same way, you will succeed. (With or without a net.) So we understand that penalty has zero bearing on skill.
Players repeating the same mistakes will fail. Over and over.
Almost nothing is luck. "Luck" is a copout term. It says "rather than try to understand the factors that led to this result, I'm going to call it luck." Rather than look closely and see that this time the players interrupted the boss, you prefer to call it a "lucky" victor. But if you actually observed the factors involved, you'd see it's not luck: the players won because they interrupted the boss this time.
The reason why is games are overwhelmingly deterministic. If you do a, b, and c, under conditions d, e, and f, then the result will always be x. This list of factors is frequently too numerous or complicated to fully understand, and in that case "luck" is often the term that gets carts out (rather than confronting the system and attempting to understand it.)
Grinding for a long time doesn't take skill. Not even "to an extent". It takes patience. Not skill. The #1 player in Progress Quest isn't skilled. They're patient.
Executing well 10% vs. 95% of the time sounds more like skill than the rest of what you've been saying. So given that we've again established that neither time nor penalty affect the skill required, you should drop those false notions and instead figure out the factors causing that 10% vs 95% to be the case. Those will be factors related to the challenge itself, not to time or penalty.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
I believe we had this discussion at one point, but it was determined that skill is only important with large quantities of time and penalties in place. If you can restart at almost the same point with no penalty you will just keep repeating it until you win. You might even make the same mistakes over and over, but just get lucky.
On the flip side if you end up losing when there is a system in place that penalizes you then you have to be skilled enough to complete said task well x percentage of the time.
In one system you just have to execute well 10% of the time and in the other you have to execute well 95% of the time. If you don't you will not progress in the game.
I wouldn't say grinding for long periods of time takes skill except it does to an extent. Generally the more you do something the more tired the body gets. If you can continue to execute the same thing over and over again optimally for a long period of time then puts you above the person that starts to make mistakes over time.
No, we determined the exact opposite by stepping through things logically:
Challenge is the amount of skill required to avoid failure. It requires skill to unicycle over a tightrope while juggling, without falling into the net.
Some time is needed for skill to be tested; excessive time stops testing skill and starts testing patience. A 1-foot-long tightrope doesn't provide enough opportunity to fail (even if you're unskilled, you can scoot across before failing.) A 100,000-foot-long tightrope no longer measures skill but simply patience (which isn't skill.) So you need a little time to be involved, like 20 feet of tightrope, so that the activity provides enough opportunity to fail but doesn't devolve into testing patience.
Penalties are only involved if you fail. If you peddle and juggle in exactly the same way, you will succeed. (With or without a net.) So we understand that penalty has zero bearing on skill.
Players repeating the same mistakes will fail. Over and over.
Almost nothing is luck. "Luck" is a copout term. It says "rather than try to understand the factors that led to this result, I'm going to call it luck." Rather than look closely and see that this time the players interrupted the boss, you prefer to call it a "lucky" victor. But if you actually observed the factors involved, you'd see it's not luck: the players won because they interrupted the boss this time.
The reason why is games are overwhelmingly deterministic. If you do a, b, and c, under conditions d, e, and f, then the result will always be x. This list of factors is frequently too numerous or complicated to fully understand, and in that case "luck" is often the term that gets carts out (rather than confronting the system and attempting to understand it.)
Grinding for a long time doesn't take skill. Not even "to an extent". It takes patience. Not skill. The #1 player in Progress Quest isn't skilled. They're patient.
Executing well 10% vs. 95% of the time sounds more like skill than the rest of what you've been saying. So given that we've again established that neither time nor penalty affect the skill required, you should drop those false notions and instead figure out the factors causing that 10% vs 95% to be the case. Those will be factors related to the challenge itself, not to time or penalty.
To start off patience is considered a skill. It something you learn. Not something you are born with.
In your scenario you say that executing at the right time proves the player has skill. That is indeed incorrect. You can get lucky by performing the skills in the right order by chance. We are not talking about rocket science here. We are talking about pushing some buttons at the right time. If there is no repetition or penalty anyone can do it. I believe that is the point of todays games. Generally anyone can do it if they want to. Not everyone has the skill of patience or the ability to perform something over and over again at a high level of correctness. That is why we automate most things in life today. Most computers and machines can perform a repetitive task at a much higher level of accuracy than a human can. Before we had computers and machines to perform these tasks being able to do them over time with accuracy was a highly valued skill.
Taking that into consideration we can conclude that games today are not designed to challenge you in anyway. They have tutorials to guide you through everything. The bosses are made easy enough to kill by everyone. As I said in the other post the only real challenge in a game comes from patience, precision, and persistence. Nothing else in a game has ever really been challenging.
MMO's were so hard . . . that they took a lot of time.
Other things that are hard by "glory day MMO" logic - watching grass grow. Observing river bed erosion in real time. Doing 1000 loads of laundry. Driving 1000 miles at 5mph.
All of these things take a lot of time and are therefore, very hard things to do.
MMO's were so hard . . . that they took a lot of time.
Other things that are hard by "glory day MMO" logic - watching grass grow. Observing river bed erosion in real time. Doing 1000 loads of laundry. Driving 1000 miles at 5mph.
All of these things take a lot of time and are therefore, very hard things to do.
I'll bite.
A better comparison would be working in a factory where you need to repeatedly put something together over and over again with precision. Some will be able to do it and others wont.
Another example would be having to update a database by hand everyday. You would probably make mistakes. One of the reasons computer programs are being written to automate such tasks.
The examples you posted aren't really like playing old MMOs though if you were doing laundry all day long you may well make a mistake and put the a dark in with the light as your body becomes tired from doing the laundry non stop. You also might crash your car if you are driving 1000 miles and don't stop to rest.
Watching grass grow is generally irrelevant. This might be interesting to some people though as it is a marvel of nature. The underlying mechanics to grass growing is likely more complex then any computer program ever written.
I believe we had this discussion at one point, but it was determined that skill is only important with large quantities of time and penalties in place. If you can restart at almost the same point with no penalty you will just keep repeating it until you win. You might even make the same mistakes over and over, but just get lucky.
On the flip side if you end up losing when there is a system in place that penalizes you then you have to be skilled enough to complete said task well x percentage of the time.
In one system you just have to execute well 10% of the time and in the other you have to execute well 95% of the time. If you don't you will not progress in the game.
I wouldn't say grinding for long periods of time takes skill except it does to an extent. Generally the more you do something the more tired the body gets. If you can continue to execute the same thing over and over again optimally for a long period of time then puts you above the person that starts to make mistakes over time.
No, we determined the exact opposite by stepping through things logically:
Challenge is the amount of skill required to avoid failure. It requires skill to unicycle over a tightrope while juggling, without falling into the net.
Some time is needed for skill to be tested; excessive time stops testing skill and starts testing patience. A 1-foot-long tightrope doesn't provide enough opportunity to fail (even if you're unskilled, you can scoot across before failing.) A 100,000-foot-long tightrope no longer measures skill but simply patience (which isn't skill.) So you need a little time to be involved, like 20 feet of tightrope, so that the activity provides enough opportunity to fail but doesn't devolve into testing patience.
Penalties are only involved if you fail. If you peddle and juggle in exactly the same way, you will succeed. (With or without a net.) So we understand that penalty has zero bearing on skill.
Players repeating the same mistakes will fail. Over and over.
Almost nothing is luck. "Luck" is a copout term. It says "rather than try to understand the factors that led to this result, I'm going to call it luck." Rather than look closely and see that this time the players interrupted the boss, you prefer to call it a "lucky" victor. But if you actually observed the factors involved, you'd see it's not luck: the players won because they interrupted the boss this time.
The reason why is games are overwhelmingly deterministic. If you do a, b, and c, under conditions d, e, and f, then the result will always be x. This list of factors is frequently too numerous or complicated to fully understand, and in that case "luck" is often the term that gets carts out (rather than confronting the system and attempting to understand it.)
Grinding for a long time doesn't take skill. Not even "to an extent". It takes patience. Not skill. The #1 player in Progress Quest isn't skilled. They're patient.
Executing well 10% vs. 95% of the time sounds more like skill than the rest of what you've been saying. So given that we've again established that neither time nor penalty affect the skill required, you should drop those false notions and instead figure out the factors causing that 10% vs 95% to be the case. Those will be factors related to the challenge itself, not to time or penalty.
To start off patience is considered a skill. It something you learn. Not something you are born with.
In your scenario you say that executing at the right time proves the player has skill. That is indeed incorrect. You can get lucky by performing the skills in the right order by chance. We are not talking about rocket science here. We are talking about pushing some buttons at the right time. If there is no repetition or penalty anyone can do it. I believe that is the point of todays games. Generally anyone can do it if they want to. Not everyone has the skill of patience or the ability to perform something over and over again at a high level of correctness. That is why we automate most things in life today. Most computers and machines can perform a repetitive task at a much higher level of accuracy than a human can. Before we had computers and machines to perform these tasks being able to do them over time with accuracy was a highly valued skill.
Taking that into consideration we can conclude that games today are not designed to challenge you in anyway. They have tutorials to guide you through everything. The bosses are made easy enough to kill by everyone. As I said in the other post the only real challenge in a game comes from patience, precision, and persistence. Nothing else in a game has ever really been challenging.
The only reason why one would argue against what Axehilt said, is because that someone has little of what would be considered player skill.
Of course you have to play to get good. It is a simple matter of practice. What does not take skill is trivial repetition. Something which the old MMOs had in abundance. Grind.
I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been-Wayne Gretzky
I believe we had this discussion at one point, but it was determined that skill is only important with large quantities of time and penalties in place. If you can restart at almost the same point with no penalty you will just keep repeating it until you win. You might even make the same mistakes over and over, but just get lucky.
On the flip side if you end up losing when there is a system in place that penalizes you then you have to be skilled enough to complete said task well x percentage of the time.
In one system you just have to execute well 10% of the time and in the other you have to execute well 95% of the time. If you don't you will not progress in the game.
I wouldn't say grinding for long periods of time takes skill except it does to an extent. Generally the more you do something the more tired the body gets. If you can continue to execute the same thing over and over again optimally for a long period of time then puts you above the person that starts to make mistakes over time.
No, we determined the exact opposite by stepping through things logically:
Challenge is the amount of skill required to avoid failure. It requires skill to unicycle over a tightrope while juggling, without falling into the net.
Some time is needed for skill to be tested; excessive time stops testing skill and starts testing patience. A 1-foot-long tightrope doesn't provide enough opportunity to fail (even if you're unskilled, you can scoot across before failing.) A 100,000-foot-long tightrope no longer measures skill but simply patience (which isn't skill.) So you need a little time to be involved, like 20 feet of tightrope, so that the activity provides enough opportunity to fail but doesn't devolve into testing patience.
Penalties are only involved if you fail. If you peddle and juggle in exactly the same way, you will succeed. (With or without a net.) So we understand that penalty has zero bearing on skill.
Players repeating the same mistakes will fail. Over and over.
Almost nothing is luck. "Luck" is a copout term. It says "rather than try to understand the factors that led to this result, I'm going to call it luck." Rather than look closely and see that this time the players interrupted the boss, you prefer to call it a "lucky" victor. But if you actually observed the factors involved, you'd see it's not luck: the players won because they interrupted the boss this time.
The reason why is games are overwhelmingly deterministic. If you do a, b, and c, under conditions d, e, and f, then the result will always be x. This list of factors is frequently too numerous or complicated to fully understand, and in that case "luck" is often the term that gets carts out (rather than confronting the system and attempting to understand it.)
Grinding for a long time doesn't take skill. Not even "to an extent". It takes patience. Not skill. The #1 player in Progress Quest isn't skilled. They're patient.
Executing well 10% vs. 95% of the time sounds more like skill than the rest of what you've been saying. So given that we've again established that neither time nor penalty affect the skill required, you should drop those false notions and instead figure out the factors causing that 10% vs 95% to be the case. Those will be factors related to the challenge itself, not to time or penalty.
To start off patience is considered a skill. It something you learn. Not something you are born with.
In your scenario you say that executing at the right time proves the player has skill. That is indeed incorrect. You can get lucky by performing the skills in the right order by chance. We are not talking about rocket science here. We are talking about pushing some buttons at the right time. If there is no repetition or penalty anyone can do it. I believe that is the point of todays games. Generally anyone can do it if they want to. Not everyone has the skill of patience or the ability to perform something over and over again at a high level of correctness. That is why we automate most things in life today. Most computers and machines can perform a repetitive task at a much higher level of accuracy than a human can. Before we had computers and machines to perform these tasks being able to do them over time with accuracy was a highly valued skill.
Taking that into consideration we can conclude that games today are not designed to challenge you in anyway. They have tutorials to guide you through everything. The bosses are made easy enough to kill by everyone. As I said in the other post the only real challenge in a game comes from patience, precision, and persistence. Nothing else in a game has ever really been challenging.
The only reason why one would argue against what Axehilt said, is because that someone has little of what would be considered player skill.
Of course you have to play to get good. It is a simple matter of practice. What does not take skill is trivial repetition. Something which the old MMOs had in abundance. Grind.
I just refuted what he said in a post that is right below this. (with examples)
I've already covered why grind is a skill.
It is all in the post below the one you just quoted.
Today's games are very simple to learn. You are held by the hand every step of the way from point b to point d. You are not given any major challenges along the way. Old games were also fairly simple, but they did require some skills (that I pointed out above) you needed to succeed. Ones that you don't need in today's games. They are simple set up to be beaten easily by anyone. That is how they maximize profit margin.
The only reason why one would argue against what Axehilt said, is because that someone has little of what would be considered player skill.
Of course you have to play to get good. It is a simple matter of practice. What does not take skill is trivial repetition. Something which the old MMOs had in abundance. Grind.
I just refuted what he said in a post that is right below this. (with examples)
I've already covered why grind is a skill.
It is all in the post below the one you just quoted.
Today's games are very simple to learn. You are held by the hand every step of the way from point b to point d. You are not given any major challenges along the way. Old games were also fairly simple, but they did require some skills (that I pointed out above) you needed to succeed. Ones that you don't need in today's games. They are simple set up to be beaten easily by anyone. That is how they maximize profit margin.
There is a good kind of hard and a bad kind of hard. The sort of difficulty which comes from poor UI, lacking documentation, lacking tutorial and bugs is the sort of difficulty you want to avoid. The sort of difficulty which is designed in, challenge, is the one you want.
Easy to learn, hard to master. That is the holy grail to which every game designer should aim for. People who think a lack of a tutorial is a good way to provide "content" for the player and makes the game "hard" are idiots, plain and simple.
Doing a trivial task over and over for a period of time does not suddenly make it hard. Or can you point out at which point hisec mining in Eve gets hard? Or in any of the use-to-improve skill systems where you put a weight onto a button to hold it down in order to keep your character chopping wood?
If I can achieve that while drunk, high and half asleep. It is not difficult. By no means, can excessive repetition be considered hard unless the action which you are repeating is hard.
I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been-Wayne Gretzky
2) You shared your account with 2 ppl so as a team you could have the best character.
3) If you died you were so screwed.......
What else...?
Number 3 I can relate to in EQ before they made a way for you to pay to summon from anywhere. Raids in deadly zones could mean corpse rotting with all your stuff if you didn't have the right character types to recover.
Ark: survival evolved can be just as unforgiving and even more fun due to the heightened danger. there is also hardcore servers on Ark for those who want the ultimate in over the top survival and having to think thru each move before you do it.
I can say that I have lost full sets of gear and tamed animals due to one miscalulation or a wrong button press without proper forethought. remember if you go flying on a bird....always bring a parachute and have it hot keyed and have the bird on follow....lol
To start off patience is considered a skill. It something you learn. Not something you are born with.
In your scenario you say that executing at the right time proves the player has skill. That is indeed incorrect. You can get lucky by performing the skills in the right order by chance. We are not talking about rocket science here. We are talking about pushing some buttons at the right time. If there is no repetition or penalty anyone can do it. I believe that is the point of todays games. Generally anyone can do it if they want to. Not everyone has the skill of patience or the ability to perform something over and over again at a high level of correctness. That is why we automate most things in life today. Most computers and machines can perform a repetitive task at a much higher level of accuracy than a human can. Before we had computers and machines to perform these tasks being able to do them over time with accuracy was a highly valued skill.
Taking that into consideration we can conclude that games today are not designed to challenge you in anyway. They have tutorials to guide you through everything. The bosses are made easy enough to kill by everyone. As I said in the other post the only real challenge in a game comes from patience, precision, and persistence. Nothing else in a game has ever really been challenging.
Patience is not a skill.
Nobody is out there saying "Wow, you're amazingly skilled at Progress Quest!" without being sarcastic about it. That's because the game is only a measure of patience, and people understand patience isn't skill. PQ involves no decisions, so it involves no skill.
Your interpretation of a player's intentions are irrelevant. If they hit the right abilities which beat the encounter, then they played skillfully. That's reality. They were in situations d, e, and f, they made choices a, b, and c, and they won as a result. To call it "random", "lucky", or "by chance" is to deliberately ignore what happened. They didn't win randomly. They won because they did a, b, and c!
It will become enormously difficulty to have this conversation if you're going to deliberately ignore reality. Please don't do that.
(The irony of the Sherlock pic earlier is that what I'm describing is very similar to that character's method of thinking and observation. He doesn't blindly attribute things to "luck". He observes reality and draws inferences based on the patterns he sees.)
There are few things in life I feel aren't deterministic. Even the roll of dice is deterministic -- the result will be based on the trajectory of those dice off the person's hand, the surface they land on, the imperfections of the corners, the weighting of the dice, and all sorts of other factors like that. While I might socially say "Lucky!" when the dice land favorably, the reality is that their result couldn't have been any other way, given the factors that led to that result. Socially, it doesn't matter
So again, when a player beats a skill-requiring encounter we know they have skill (or that their group's skill is enough, in the case of group challenges.)
Not everyone kills all bosses in all games, so the end of your post certainly devolves into useless hyperbole. Let's discuss reality, not hyperbole. Hyperbole is a bunch of useless lies.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
Originally posted by rojoArcueid The so called glory days of mmos didnt attract enough players. Back then it was cheaper so mmos could stay alive with empty servers. If mmos of today only catered to that small audience from the past, we wouldnt have mmos to play.
This is false. Lineage and Lineage II had huge populations and these were some of the hardest MMOs ever made. Both games had over 2 million subs each at their high points. What modern game pulls in 2+ million subs besides WoW.
What has really changed is there wasn't a lot of choice in MMOs in the early 2000s. The only real choices back then was Ultima Online, Everquest, Lineage 1 and 2, or DoAC and Star War Galaxies. It was either play those or play nothing. In 2015 there are 1000 different MMOs to choose from.
There was actually more choice in 2003 than you think.
In addition to the games you mentioned, there was Asheron's Call, Earth and Beyond, FFXI, Necron, Ragnarok Online, Neverwinter Nights, Runescape, Anarchy Online, Legend of Mir 2, Furcadia, Meridian 59, EVE, Entropa Universe, Everquest Online Adventures, Istaria, Maple Story, Puzzle Pirates, Rubies of Eventide, Shadowbane, A Tale in the Desert and a number of smaller titles.
The strange thing is, there was more variety and creativity in terms of game designs and mechanics in this small list of games than the "thousands" that are out there today.
Were all ideas good? No, of course not, but I sure wish some mechanics had evolved and were still available today.
BTW, in my day MMORPG's were sooooo hard we fought our way through dungeons in the snow....uphill both ways.
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
Why is it in L2 (the grindiest game ever), you could gather 100+ people (levels 60-75max) and rely on them to play their class/roll accurately and properly?
Why is it in WoW, almost nobody could play their class (level 60max), and way too many Leroy Jenkins's?
My answer, the grind is what helped the player hone their skills.
...
In short, the more you do something, the better you get at it. Hence, the more skilled you are at playing it.
Repetition is the mother of study. It allows you to get better at repeating the same action. It has no bearing at all on one's ability to apply or expand on what they've learned, just their ability to do what they've learned. It doesn't even mean they understand what they've learned.
In short, the more you do something, the better you get at repeating that one something. Any claim beyond that is, at best, an assumption. At worst, completely false.
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein "Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
4) That only the weak and worthless shared their accounts to strive for max level.
Did you eat lead paint as a child? Grinding with mouse clicking and keyboard strokes, sitting for years at a time, and being a mmo junkie does not make you strong and worth something.
Why is it in L2 (the grindiest game ever), you could gather 100+ people (levels 60-75max) and rely on them to play their class/roll accurately and properly?
Why is it in WoW, almost nobody could play their class (level 60max), and way too many Leroy Jenkins's?
My answer, the grind is what helped the player hone their skills. At one point or another, they were forced to utilize them at max capacity (weather it be saving a grind party that went wrong, or unexpected pvp happening). They have mastered the time it takes to cast a skill, the chances of them landing, the skills and movements needed in between them, and throw it into a reaction planned calculation of which skills to use within the given time frame.
In between the grind, the punishment of the player loosing hours of exp grind caused the player to never want to make mistakes. This means the player wanted to play good, instead of half-assed.
This is why at end levels, I never saw very poorly skilled players (unless they were bought accounts which ended up being rejected and blacklisted by the community anyways).
In short, the more you do something, the better you get at it. Hence, the more skilled you are at playing it.
Practice does cause players to be more skillful.
Which is why the overall comparison is a joke. You're measuring by level, but practice is measured in hours. Obviously if you're looking at max-level players in a game where it takes ~9 days playtime to hit max level and comparing it with one where it takes months (?) to reach max level, you're not comparing equal things at all.
Group size is also a factor. The larger the group, the easier it is to miss a few players If a player is failing, it's easier to miss that in a big group. WOW's content has much lower player limits.
Depth is also a factor. A player with 50 hours experience in Tic-Tac-Toe is far closer to mastering that game than a 50-hour chess player.
I frequently use the Warlock rotation as evidence of WOW offering some of the deepest (and thus hardest to master) combat of MMORPGs. In all the threads I've brought it up in, only once has evidence arisen of classes being as deep or deeper (FFXIV's Lancer.)
In the previous thread, no evidence surfaced of L2's combat being particularly deep.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
Originally posted by Abuz0r 1) Nobody was max level.2) You shared your account with 2 ppl so as a team you could have the best character.3) If you died you were so screwed.......What else...?
Yes, I remembered those days, but do I still want to play a game like that?
You had to spend two summers to get your mining level up to mine the ore only available in the deepest, darkest corner of a land where you could be attacked by anyone, only to carry a backpack of these pieces home hoping you didn't meet any PKers and if you did you'd run hoping you weren't in attack range since it take a mere minute before your energy ran out.
Then you'd max your smithing to make endgame gear<3
2) You shared your account with 2 ppl so as a team you could have the best character.
So much truth xD
I wish more games had a duel arena where you could squander all your belonging.
To start off patience is considered a skill. It something you learn. Not something you are born with.
In your scenario you say that executing at the right time proves the player has skill. That is indeed incorrect. You can get lucky by performing the skills in the right order by chance. We are not talking about rocket science here. We are talking about pushing some buttons at the right time. If there is no repetition or penalty anyone can do it. I believe that is the point of todays games. Generally anyone can do it if they want to. Not everyone has the skill of patience or the ability to perform something over and over again at a high level of correctness. That is why we automate most things in life today. Most computers and machines can perform a repetitive task at a much higher level of accuracy than a human can. Before we had computers and machines to perform these tasks being able to do them over time with accuracy was a highly valued skill.
Taking that into consideration we can conclude that games today are not designed to challenge you in anyway. They have tutorials to guide you through everything. The bosses are made easy enough to kill by everyone. As I said in the other post the only real challenge in a game comes from patience, precision, and persistence. Nothing else in a game has ever really been challenging.
Patience is not a skill.
Nobody is out there saying "Wow, you're amazingly skilled at Progress Quest!" without being sarcastic about it. That's because the game is only a measure of patience, and people understand patience isn't skill. PQ involves no decisions, so it involves no skill.
Your interpretation of a player's intentions are irrelevant. If they hit the right abilities which beat the encounter, then they played skillfully. That's reality. They were in situations d, e, and f, they made choices a, b, and c, and they won as a result. To call it "random", "lucky", or "by chance" is to deliberately ignore what happened. They didn't win randomly. They won because they did a, b, and c!
It will become enormously difficulty to have this conversation if you're going to deliberately ignore reality. Please don't do that.
(The irony of the Sherlock pic earlier is that what I'm describing is very similar to that character's method of thinking and observation. He doesn't blindly attribute things to "luck". He observes reality and draws inferences based on the patterns he sees.)
There are few things in life I feel aren't deterministic. Even the roll of dice is deterministic -- the result will be based on the trajectory of those dice off the person's hand, the surface they land on, the imperfections of the corners, the weighting of the dice, and all sorts of other factors like that. While I might socially say "Lucky!" when the dice land favorably, the reality is that their result couldn't have been any other way, given the factors that led to that result. Socially, it doesn't matter
So again, when a player beats a skill-requiring encounter we know they have skill (or that their group's skill is enough, in the case of group challenges.)
Not everyone kills all bosses in all games, so the end of your post certainly devolves into useless hyperbole. Let's discuss reality, not hyperbole. Hyperbole is a bunch of useless lies.
First of all you have basically said patience is something that is easy and comes to everyone naturally. That couldn't be further from the truth. Please read the above links. In fact patience is something that is indeed learned and something most of us don't have these days. It's also not an easy skill to learn and utilize.
I see you basically ignored all the factual data I put in my post about why I don't believe most things in today's games are not difficult.
Lets look at this from a mathematical standpoint.
Lets say it takes 100 points to get to the next level. You gain 1 point of experience per kill. Quests give no experience. If you die you lose 80 points of experience. That means your need to be successful 80% of the time to advance to the next level.
Now lets look at a current game. Lets say it takes 100 points of experience to get to the next level. You gain 1 point of experience per kill. You gain 80 points of experience per quest. There is no penalty for dying. This gives you a 100% success rate of advancing to the next level.
To me that looks like the first one is a lot harder to advance in.
You are correct to say that many of the things you do in game are skills and you can become better at them. What you won't admit is that these are setup to be easy to complete for everyone. The more people the game brings in the more money is made and that's all they care about these days in MMOs IMO. If the game was truly challenging in anyway then it would only be played by a small group of people because others would quit from lack of patience in completing the tasks set before them.
Comments
4) Basing your tactics on lag due to a dialup modem.
For the most part this is still the case, at least in PvE based games.
Also, this nostalgia day thing has no legs because every MMO out there has a super, ultra, elite, hard mode to most of the content. Nobody does it. The exception being uber, ultra, extreme hard mode primal instances in FF14 where old school mechanics are still applied. You macro down working rotations of F1 to F6 and dodge NPC I-Win buttons.
The only thing that was every really 'hard' was the still used LFG mechanics that are plagued with just enough people that think its fun to poop sock everyone by sabotaging the instances. Forcing us to spend 90% of the game doing nothing. Forcing us to care what the other guy was doing because he needed the attention.
I will never trust what you say until you change your name....
"This may hurt a little, but it's something you'll get used to. Relax....."
There were still jerks in PUGs but at least they didn't flash up the exact amount of DPS everyone did during the battle...
On the other hand were it not uncommon to kick somewone outside the dungeon based on their gear, that is less common now except with raiders.
Lol, I think the worst PUGs I ever had was in EQ2 2006-2008. This one tank almost made the healer cry with blaming her for the 6 wipes we had in a dungeon. My swashie got upset and took over the tanking, after that only a single character died (twice), him.... And he was DPS ing then. I also met the rascist, manchuvanist palladin that constantly cursed everyone, he got pretty upset when I kicked him from the group.
Honestly have there always been jerks in MMOs and will always be. Certain games tend to either attract more or bring out the worst in some people.
MPBT on AOL.
The 9600-baud owners (atop the rankings) ganged up on the1200-baud guys (in the basement), the advantage of response time was both clear and enormous.
"Mad Skillz" in the Good Old Days.
I only remember hearing that about Diablo 2.
No, we determined the exact opposite by stepping through things logically:
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
To start off patience is considered a skill. It something you learn. Not something you are born with.
In your scenario you say that executing at the right time proves the player has skill. That is indeed incorrect. You can get lucky by performing the skills in the right order by chance. We are not talking about rocket science here. We are talking about pushing some buttons at the right time. If there is no repetition or penalty anyone can do it. I believe that is the point of todays games. Generally anyone can do it if they want to. Not everyone has the skill of patience or the ability to perform something over and over again at a high level of correctness. That is why we automate most things in life today. Most computers and machines can perform a repetitive task at a much higher level of accuracy than a human can. Before we had computers and machines to perform these tasks being able to do them over time with accuracy was a highly valued skill.
Taking that into consideration we can conclude that games today are not designed to challenge you in anyway. They have tutorials to guide you through everything. The bosses are made easy enough to kill by everyone. As I said in the other post the only real challenge in a game comes from patience, precision, and persistence. Nothing else in a game has ever really been challenging.
MMO's were so hard . . . that they took a lot of time.
Other things that are hard by "glory day MMO" logic - watching grass grow. Observing river bed erosion in real time. Doing 1000 loads of laundry. Driving 1000 miles at 5mph.
All of these things take a lot of time and are therefore, very hard things to do.
I'll bite.
A better comparison would be working in a factory where you need to repeatedly put something together over and over again with precision. Some will be able to do it and others wont.
Another example would be having to update a database by hand everyday. You would probably make mistakes. One of the reasons computer programs are being written to automate such tasks.
The examples you posted aren't really like playing old MMOs though if you were doing laundry all day long you may well make a mistake and put the a dark in with the light as your body becomes tired from doing the laundry non stop. You also might crash your car if you are driving 1000 miles and don't stop to rest.
Watching grass grow is generally irrelevant. This might be interesting to some people though as it is a marvel of nature. The underlying mechanics to grass growing is likely more complex then any computer program ever written.
The only reason why one would argue against what Axehilt said, is because that someone has little of what would be considered player skill.
Of course you have to play to get good. It is a simple matter of practice. What does not take skill is trivial repetition. Something which the old MMOs had in abundance. Grind.
I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been -Wayne Gretzky
I just refuted what he said in a post that is right below this. (with examples)
I've already covered why grind is a skill.
It is all in the post below the one you just quoted.
Today's games are very simple to learn. You are held by the hand every step of the way from point b to point d. You are not given any major challenges along the way. Old games were also fairly simple, but they did require some skills (that I pointed out above) you needed to succeed. Ones that you don't need in today's games. They are simple set up to be beaten easily by anyone. That is how they maximize profit margin.
There is a good kind of hard and a bad kind of hard. The sort of difficulty which comes from poor UI, lacking documentation, lacking tutorial and bugs is the sort of difficulty you want to avoid. The sort of difficulty which is designed in, challenge, is the one you want.
Easy to learn, hard to master. That is the holy grail to which every game designer should aim for. People who think a lack of a tutorial is a good way to provide "content" for the player and makes the game "hard" are idiots, plain and simple.
Doing a trivial task over and over for a period of time does not suddenly make it hard. Or can you point out at which point hisec mining in Eve gets hard? Or in any of the use-to-improve skill systems where you put a weight onto a button to hold it down in order to keep your character chopping wood?
If I can achieve that while drunk, high and half asleep. It is not difficult. By no means, can excessive repetition be considered hard unless the action which you are repeating is hard.
I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been -Wayne Gretzky
Number 3 I can relate to in EQ before they made a way for you to pay to summon from anywhere. Raids in deadly zones could mean corpse rotting with all your stuff if you didn't have the right character types to recover.
Ark: survival evolved can be just as unforgiving and even more fun due to the heightened danger. there is also hardcore servers on Ark for those who want the ultimate in over the top survival and having to think thru each move before you do it.
I can say that I have lost full sets of gear and tamed animals due to one miscalulation or a wrong button press without proper forethought. remember if you go flying on a bird....always bring a parachute and have it hot keyed and have the bird on follow....lol
Patience is not a skill.
Nobody is out there saying "Wow, you're amazingly skilled at Progress Quest!" without being sarcastic about it. That's because the game is only a measure of patience, and people understand patience isn't skill. PQ involves no decisions, so it involves no skill.
Your interpretation of a player's intentions are irrelevant. If they hit the right abilities which beat the encounter, then they played skillfully. That's reality. They were in situations d, e, and f, they made choices a, b, and c, and they won as a result. To call it "random", "lucky", or "by chance" is to deliberately ignore what happened. They didn't win randomly. They won because they did a, b, and c!
It will become enormously difficulty to have this conversation if you're going to deliberately ignore reality. Please don't do that.
(The irony of the Sherlock pic earlier is that what I'm describing is very similar to that character's method of thinking and observation. He doesn't blindly attribute things to "luck". He observes reality and draws inferences based on the patterns he sees.)
There are few things in life I feel aren't deterministic. Even the roll of dice is deterministic -- the result will be based on the trajectory of those dice off the person's hand, the surface they land on, the imperfections of the corners, the weighting of the dice, and all sorts of other factors like that. While I might socially say "Lucky!" when the dice land favorably, the reality is that their result couldn't have been any other way, given the factors that led to that result. Socially, it doesn't matter
So again, when a player beats a skill-requiring encounter we know they have skill (or that their group's skill is enough, in the case of group challenges.)
Not everyone kills all bosses in all games, so the end of your post certainly devolves into useless hyperbole. Let's discuss reality, not hyperbole. Hyperbole is a bunch of useless lies.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
There was actually more choice in 2003 than you think.
In addition to the games you mentioned, there was Asheron's Call, Earth and Beyond, FFXI, Necron, Ragnarok Online, Neverwinter Nights, Runescape, Anarchy Online, Legend of Mir 2, Furcadia, Meridian 59, EVE, Entropa Universe, Everquest Online Adventures, Istaria, Maple Story, Puzzle Pirates, Rubies of Eventide, Shadowbane, A Tale in the Desert and a number of smaller titles.
The strange thing is, there was more variety and creativity in terms of game designs and mechanics in this small list of games than the "thousands" that are out there today.
Were all ideas good? No, of course not, but I sure wish some mechanics had evolved and were still available today.
BTW, in my day MMORPG's were sooooo hard we fought our way through dungeons in the snow....uphill both ways.
"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
Repetition is the mother of study. It allows you to get better at repeating the same action. It has no bearing at all on one's ability to apply or expand on what they've learned, just their ability to do what they've learned. It doesn't even mean they understand what they've learned.
In short, the more you do something, the better you get at repeating that one something. Any claim beyond that is, at best, an assumption. At worst, completely false.
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein
"Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
Did you eat lead paint as a child? Grinding with mouse clicking and keyboard strokes, sitting for years at a time, and being a mmo junkie does not make you strong and worth something."What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
Yes, I remembered those days, but do I still want to play a game like that?
Probably not.
You had to spend two summers to get your mining level up to mine the ore only available in the deepest, darkest corner of a land where you could be attacked by anyone, only to carry a backpack of these pieces home hoping you didn't meet any PKers and if you did you'd run hoping you weren't in attack range since it take a mere minute before your energy ran out.
Then you'd max your smithing to make endgame gear<3
So much truth xD
I wish more games had a duel arena where you could squander all your belonging.
Sway all day, butterfly flaps all the way!
http://www.answers.com/Q/Patience_is_it_a_skill_or_quality
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/patience
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/skill?s=t
First of all you have basically said patience is something that is easy and comes to everyone naturally. That couldn't be further from the truth. Please read the above links. In fact patience is something that is indeed learned and something most of us don't have these days. It's also not an easy skill to learn and utilize.
I see you basically ignored all the factual data I put in my post about why I don't believe most things in today's games are not difficult.
Lets look at this from a mathematical standpoint.
Lets say it takes 100 points to get to the next level. You gain 1 point of experience per kill. Quests give no experience. If you die you lose 80 points of experience. That means your need to be successful 80% of the time to advance to the next level.
Now lets look at a current game. Lets say it takes 100 points of experience to get to the next level. You gain 1 point of experience per kill. You gain 80 points of experience per quest. There is no penalty for dying. This gives you a 100% success rate of advancing to the next level.
To me that looks like the first one is a lot harder to advance in.
You are correct to say that many of the things you do in game are skills and you can become better at them. What you won't admit is that these are setup to be easy to complete for everyone. The more people the game brings in the more money is made and that's all they care about these days in MMOs IMO. If the game was truly challenging in anyway then it would only be played by a small group of people because others would quit from lack of patience in completing the tasks set before them.