The Future of MMOs 224
IGN has some interesting coverage of a panel at GDC 2008 that featured some of the top names in the MMO world who got together to discuss the future of the genre. "On hand were Jack Emmert of Cryptic Studios, Mark Miller of NCSoft, Min Kim of Nexon and Rob Pardo of Blizzard Entertainment. MMO newbie Ray Muzyka was also on hand to share his thoughts as BioWare moves into the MMO arena. [...] The conversation got a lot more heated when the subject of micro-transactions was introduced. This is a popular revenue model in Asia, where the games themselves are free to play but charge a premium for a variety of premium extras, from vanity items to additional content or abilities. It's a model that's working well for Korean developer Nexon but hasn't been adopted by many American developers."
The future of MMOs... (Score:2)
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Let's think before we import (Score:5, Funny)
Making your games so awesome that people pay for 5 days straight and die from exhaustion is also popular in Korea. Let's not import that, though.
why? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:why? (Score:5, Interesting)
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For instance, you could kill all the rocket engineers and janitors (sorry for the offensive stereotypes). The average intelligence might be higher, but we would never get to Mars and the bathrooms would be dirty.
Or whatever.
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Re:Let's think before we import (Score:4, Insightful)
I Hope MMOs All Die (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I Hope MMOs All Die (Score:5, Insightful)
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It's not the genre that's the problem. It's the networking and gameplay that comes from being multi-player
over the internet that's part of it- plus how things like PvP are handled that ends up scotching most of them.
But wait, there's more! (Score:5, Funny)
Of course they're already predicting that people will complain this is far too similar to 'life' and not want to play it, but that's expected to take a fair amount of time.
Re:I Hope MMOs All Die (Score:4, Insightful)
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Try some SciFi MMORPG for a change.
Seriously, I saw this exact discussion way back in the dark ages, in 1990, when people discussed which MUD to play.
SciFi is just the same with different names for stuff.
The problem is the target audience is the same: mainly spotty teenagers en young men. Nerds (hi!). And they all have the same target audience. Second Life does best, but that's not a game.
A problem they will encounter is that for 90% or more, it is an addiction that blows over after some years. It did for me and I have found nothing th
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Now let's talk about games. Play Peggle [popcap.com]
Re:I Hope MMOs All Die (Score:5, Funny)
Yes, but you can gank cell R19, take all its stuff, then call it a faggot.
That's good times.
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Re:I Hope MMOs All Die (Score:5, Interesting)
I want something that will shake to the core. Something that doesn't feel scripted.
No more quests from NPCs, no more boring and predictable leveling (ding, new skill!), no designed 'tanks' and 'healers'. I'm not sure exactly what I want, but I'm bored of the gameplay. I want more chaos, combats that require realtime strategizing and role changes during the flow.
I would also like improved customization. It's impossible to be unique in these games. Sad that they work so hard on graphics and then you choose from faces 1-8, and all wear the same armor. Make me feel special. I want to design my own emotes, and design my own abilities.
Just some crazy ramblings though...I ain't expecting anything.
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APB (Score:4, Informative)
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a world that never changes (Score:5, Insightful)
I think one of the fundamental problems with MMORPGs is that the world never changes. Cities are never overrun and burned to the ground, quest givers never die (or if they do, they respawn quickly), trees never grow, the seasons never change, even things like weather and time of day are mostly cosmetic and don't impact gameplay much if at all. Monsters always spawn in the same places and if you kill them all, they'll be back in ten minutes. The modern MMORPG, it would seem, was designed with Sisyphus [wikipedia.org] as the target audience.
A related problem is that too much is abstracted away; players and NPCs don't need to eat, they don't need shelter, items spawn magically in the vendor's shop and money spent disappears into a black hole. Animals spawn, they aren't born in the natural way. Species can't become extinct by killing the last breeding pair. A town does not trade with the outside world, it does not suffer if it is besieged, and there are no famines if the year's harvest is poor. The terrain can't be altered.
Designing a mmorpg around a realistic world would be much harder than the current crop; it may be too much to ask for a MMORPG to be able to support any of the events of the preceding paragraph, but couldn't the world be at least slightly interactive? Like, maybe we could plant a tree every once in awhile and watch it grow, or maybe the grass could be worn down by the passage of many feet? I've played WOW and I'm currently playing Lord of the Rings Online, and I just don't feel like I'm part of the world. It feels more like an amusement park.
The questing/leveling/grinding rut is a big problem too, I'm not disagreeing with you there, but it would take a book for me to say what I want to say about that.
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Agreed, just whatever you do, get yourself into a 0.0 corp ASAP and never go into empire again.
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*I am not affiliated with CCP beyond playing their game.
Re:I Hope MMOs All Die (Score:5, Insightful)
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But all these MMOs... I played WoW for a little bit, and City Of Cookie Cutters, and some other ones, and all I could remember of the experience was "Man, Diablo II was more fun than this
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I played WoW for about 2 months (right after release) and promptly sold my account. Didn't really like it, although some of my longtime friends are still playing it. Wasn't enough depth for my taste. EQ, I feel like even though I've played for 6 years, I've barely scratched the surface.
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Where do you live?
Here is a summary for Spaghetti:
1/2 box of speghetti - 1.75
1 jar of sauce - 4.00
Ground beef (couse you have to have meat sauce and canned meat is sick shit) - 4.00
Total: 9.75
FOR SPAGHETTI!!!
It may be cheap if you are vegitarian (I can't even spell it apparantly), but when I eat, something dies.
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Dude, if that's one meal for you, you must weigh 250lbs.
That's like 3-4 meals.
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But come football season... watch out. Green Bay Packers on a 50" DLP
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Re:I Hope MMOs All Die (Score:5, Interesting)
It's all kind of trippy when you think about it. Lovecraft's dreamers were among the literary firsts, people who were unassuming and mundane in real life but fantastically respected and powerful in a separate world. That could be seen as an extension of the literary world where some authors were hugely famous and respected but only within very small circles of admirers. Cyberpunk liked to take that idea further with the idea that online personas were as famous and powerful as super-heroes and yet could be stuck working as pizza deliverators and living out of converted storage units.
If one pushes the whole idea of cyberspace to a semi-plausible future, say 50 years out, so much human interaction would be virtual, and not just via telephone or using what's basically a chat client with a game attached like Warcraft. Falling back into fiction tropes, you could have someone as powerful as any mob figure or revolutionary or super-criminal conducting all his business as a digital avatar. When it comes to mobsters, the best way to make certain competition is dealt with properly is a hit. But how do you assassinate someone you've never even seen? Faerie tales like to talk about knowing someone's true name as being power, there's also the idea of the magic talisman that is the key to a monster or wizard's power and thus his ruin. Well, you'll end up having a real world comparison of that here: knowing who that person really is will be true power, knowing where they live means you can also kill them.
That sort of thought just has me thinking of the sort of cat and mouse game you'd have when bad people with guns try to personally remove one of these metaverse important people. I'm imagining this great online force of nature and information broker being a paraplegic in a nursing home who is living out his life online because the real world is unbearable. The guys with guns hit the nursing home and blow away the guy two rooms down from him, falling for the misdirection. The guy they killed was just playing Warcraft but the one they meant to kill was fucking with the Russian Mob's phishing operation. That would be an awful kind of situation, motionless in a bed and knowing that the bad guys are coming. Let that be a lesson for you, don't play MMO's or the Russians might kill you by mistake.
Just ban Asia/FTA's and all proxies for US/EU (Score:3, Insightful)
I've seen this work out (Score:2)
"...but charge a premium for a variety of premium extras, from vanity items to additional content or abilities..."
I play the web-based MMORPG Kingdom of Loathing, and this has worked well for them for at least the past three years. They do a decent job of balancing it such that purchasing these extra items does give you a sense of being 1337, but doesn't necessarily give you a huge advantage over other players.
Plus, you can (in most cases) sell the premium items purchased with your hard-earned cash for in-game currency.
Emmert? Oh, no. (Score:2, Interesting)
Similarly staggering is his apparent inability to learn from his mistakes. Early in City of Heroes development and testing, it was discovered that tabletop-style 'choose your own
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For example, you don't need a pages an creating a energy blast.
Assuming the game will enforce a speicif point range during creation that limits the number of rules as well.
However, you will still have people who can optimize a character more then someone else.
For 100 point's I could pretty much make an unstoppable character. Fortunatly, I put role playing first.
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Re:Emmert? Oh, no. (Score:4, Funny)
No wonder I don't play any of these things. Hard enough on a level playing field. Getting gang-raped by the n00bs is what I bought BF2 for.
Not really fair (Score:3, Interesting)
This isn't really fair. The devs did underestimate the extent to which people would minmax and the extent to which it would break the game. However, despite that, the game is CLEARLY a better game post-ED and post-GDN, where
Micro-Transactions and game balance (Score:5, Interesting)
Personally, my suggestion is to eliminate the grind by allowing players to buy levels. That preserves the skill because at high level they still need to be able to use the character, and there would still be items that must be collected, but eliminates the tedium of grinding and is compelling enough that many people would be willing to pay for it.
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hmm.
Blizzard did a great job of allowing you to learn your classes abilities one a few at a time.
difficult. Perhaps an exp bonuses for every character level on a server? A small amount per level. I figure if you have 3 different classes at 70, a 30% increase in XP and rep would be fine.
I just want t
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Then perhaps World of Warcraft isn't the game for you.
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Allowing purchase of levels and items would bypass a lot of boring crap, eliminate the farmers and streamline things, especially if you require an account to have one toon levelled normally. Part of the reason I burned out was getting stuck at level 56 (pre expansion) on an alt and just being sick of doing the same stuff over and over.
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This is simply, untrue. Almost every MMOG has resource monetization. While it's true players prefer not to link endgame content to real-world money, micro transactions are wildly popular and there is little stigma to "buying in" to an
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This is simply, untrue. Almost every MMOG has resource monetization. While it's true players prefer not to link endgame content to real-world money, micro transactions are wildly popular and there is little stigma to "buying in" to an elevated gear/skill level.
Micro-transactions are unpopular in the US because Americans for the most part want convenience above everything else. One monthly fee that happens automatically is pretty darn convenient. Having to confirm payment for craploads of little $1 purchases all the time is not convenient.
Buying gold or a max-level character is not at all the same thing is a micro-transaction. Micro-transactions in WoW terms would be that every piece of epic gear would have a small price in real world money. Like perhaps a cheap
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What you describe is not a system anyone would implement (might want to describe how someone would come about choosing that model?)
If you implement micro transactions correctly, ideally they would be optional, periodically available, and easily accessible.
The idea of MTs for ORIGINAL kinds of items (previously unavailable items like WoW BoP Epic gems of +5Int/+5Dodge or even vanity item graphics, look at the crappy
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On the other hand, I stopped playing WoW because WoW puts too much emphasis on the endgame's eternal grind...I can make it to 70 as fast as most anyone, but then I quickly devolve into noobdom because I'm not willing to run the instance progression until I'm max
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In most MMOs the only allowed currency is time spent playing the game.
It can be very frustrating to play an MMO that you'd only like to invest an hour in here or there without commitment, and find that anybody you make friends with ends up playing 40x more than you and is quickly onto challenges that your character just can't handle.
You make friends with a noob and they're like "wow -
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In the USA, there is a strong belief that, with all things being equal at the beginning, the amount of labor that an individual is willing to perform should determine the advancement of the individual. This is especially prevelent in the modern racial/sexual/*-equality work ethic, and is a common conservative/libertarian political plank that the only thing that holds people back is
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Re:catch22 (Score:2)
I'd imagine if you had a game where a couple pieces of clothing were purely cosmetic and not 'gear', you could do quite well with for-pay cosmetic stuff. Blizzard has basically done it themselves with tabards and non-combat pets alone. Though they're currently using that demand to drive people to Blizzcon and their CCG.
Imagine what they could pull off with housing, decorations or even just 'exclusive' guild logos for ta
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Pay to win, not play (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Pay to win, not play (Score:4, Insightful)
Correction (Score:2)
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A game is supposed to be fun. If you don't have time for the game, do something else with your time. If you use a lvling service you're literally paying somebody else to play your game. "Here's 250 bucks, go play WoW and tell me how much fun it is" Then when you get your account back in a few days you'll have no idea how to do anything and other high lvl players will know you bought your account and you won't be able to play again because everybody hates you.
Unless of course you've already leveled other characters up to max level, possibly even of the same class. Grinding is not fun, and never has been, but some of the things you do after you get done grinding are fun, and that's the catch. You need to do the grind to get to the fun. Using a leveling service is really almost a form of optimization as you can be doing more interesting or useful things instead of grinding, and then come back and enjoy the good parts of the game.
For the record, I do not, and ne
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Why?
No, seriously. The only answer I can think of is "So the developers have sufficient time to leech money from you."
Rob
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I've played multiple MMOGs at very high levels including EQ, DAOC, AO, Eve-online, EQ2, etc before I burned out and never really played them to that degree anymore. What it comes down to is sitting watching TV, with auto-follow on. When you hear noises coming from your computer you just heal whoever is hurt and the group does the rest. Granted it only works for healers but it's not exactly rocket science or even needs much of your attention to play an MMOG.
Y
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1. You're trusting complete strangers not to steal your account and the money you paid them to level you.
2. You don't learn how to play your character's class.
3. You don't run dungeons and get those nice rare items.
4. You miss out on the part of the game that's actually fun. Seriously, maybe some people enjoy the whole raid scene, but most of the time it seems like an exercise in masochism to me.
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My wife likes EQII (I was more of an original Everquest type myself) and I play occasionally on both a station exchange server and a non-exchange server, just to try them both out, and at mid-40's I can't really
Some of the free one work like this (Score:3, Interesting)
you can play for free but you may get kicked off at peek times / have to wait a long time to log on / you are caped a low level / locked out of some area and so.
To be able to play the full game you need to pay xx a month and this lets you do more then what the free people can do but does not give you a boost over others who are paying to play as well by paying even more.
Already here in the United States (Score:2)
Hellgate: London. (Score:2)
FWIW: (Score:2)
(Note: I really like the game; I just wouldn't call it an MMORPG in the traditional sense.)
Microtransactions? (Score:2, Insightful)
Your face and my ass, sweetheart. The entirety of the World of Warcraft CCG is a microtransaction, with the addendum that you're not actually guaranteed to get a vanity item when you buy them. Just go l
Fantasy MMORPGs are getting stale (Score:2)
Also now that the creator of FASA (Battletech/Shadowrun) has his IP back, maybe we can see a decent Battletech MMO, so long as its better than that one they tried several years ago that wasn't even really an MMO because you could only play 4
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When I say that what I mean is you level, you grind, you get new gear. and thats it. Sure some of these games throw in some weak PvP once in a while, but nothing groundbreaking. I guess I just don't get impressed much and get bored to quickly when actions become repetitive.
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I'd have to agree with you, although my bigger complaint with MMOs is the inability of players to affect the world in any meaningful way. If you make 10 characters, you'll end up going through the exact same world 10 times, doing pretty much the same missions/quests 10 times, without
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I have an idea that is at least an intermediate, and it stems from my initial thoughts on what a Warcraft MMO would m
Start praying now. (Score:2)
Crom! I have never prayed to you before, I have no tongue for it...
Breaking out of the grind (Score:2)
MMOs stopped being fun for me once I realized how shallow the gameplay felt compared to my other, non-MMO games.
Character Development! (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Character Development! (Score:4, Interesting)
Play Eve. Take two characters with the exact same gear, but one has 2 million skill points, the other has 10, and the 10 million point char should slaughter the other without breaking a sweat.
Provided they're both training combat skills that is. If that 10m SP char is an industrial character, they don't stand a chance.
After skill points, or in some cases before, it's all about your skills. Take someone who doesn't know how to put together a good ship, or how to fly one well, and then your 2m SP char is ruining the 10m SP char's day.
Plus scamming is part of the game. Makes for a very paranoid, careful feel. Get out into 0.0 security (no law enforcement at all) and suddenly you're in the wild west. In spaceships.
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You must have played a different version to eve-online then I did, there was no "flying" skill in eve as you double click to move in certain directions. Since you don't directly control your ships I fail to see any "skill" in it.
Combat as in most MMOGs is about pushing the right combo buttons at the right times, that is all. There is no skill involved in pushing buttons and having your random damage count upped by your characters statistics.
Sorry if this makes all that time you spent f
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Calm down.
The skill comes in a lot of ways: being able to identify the capabilities and probable loadout based on ship type, knowing how to approach an enemy while keeping your transversal speed up so their turrets can't track you, orbiting at the right distance to do the most damage, balancing your MWD (turbo boost) added speed vs the fact that it makes it easier to lock you and hit you with missiles (unless you're going fast enough to counter-act that). Some people's setups can run permanently, some can
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I don't know where you got the idea from my text comment that I was at all angry... but you completely missed my point.
I said the following..
If you read closely you'd see I was saying that eve-online isn't difficult to play and that pretending you have some kind of "flying skill" is ridiculous. If this was a fli
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In EQII there are a number of abilities and spell upgrades that come with levels and quest completions. You can defect from you
The future is now (Score:2)
that are not FUN to play at all (more "realistic" just ruins games).
Re:Micro-complaints. (Score:4, Informative)
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Oblivion then came out with more mods that added value to the game and the community's received them much better.
The funny thing is though, that none of the mods released by Bethesda can even come close to the level of mods being released by the Oblivion modding community. The mod community saved Oblivion from... well oblivion I supposed. The game really is pretty crappy out of the box. I had quit playing by the time I reached level 14 because the level-scaling of the enemies was just dumb and made the game boring.
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the level-scaling of the enemies was just dumb and made the game boring.
Yeah, I completely agree. One of the reasons that I play RPGs is because if I'm wanting a challenge, I can run to a higher-level area and knock out a few monsters (with a lot of extra effort) and get some killer gold. Or avoid monsters altogether and get some awesome loot from the land. And sometimes it's nice to go knock out some lower level quests to get experience easy. And sometimes it's fun to get a challenge, to see how long you can go without potions or resting. Personally, I think that Might and Ma
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Personally, I think that Might and Magic 6 and 7 were the best for that; I would love to see another game with the wide-open-world-yet-awesome-story flavor. If you've played those games and can suggest some that are similar, I would be open to them.
I haven't found anything like that lately. I'm just playing Oblivion with a bunch of mods that get rid of level-scaling and other annoying things about it, as well as adding a ton more content (specifically FCOM, Supreme Magicka, some UI mods, and a lot of other little tweaks to things like bows and stealth, landscape mods, and some nice quest mods as well).
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Square Enix has programmed the game to shut down if you try to change to another window. This is particularly nasty with IM clients that automatically pop up, such as, well, all of them. There is an addon to stop that, but it's in violation of SE's terms of service.
The game is also heavily reliant on a gamepad control scheme. Its keyboard/mouse scheme is just horrid.
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No one uses a mouse because the UI is such that it is either easier with a gamepad and keyboard or a keyboard only. I use a keyboard. I should have been clearer, no one in their right mind uses a mouse with FFXI.
Console users may try to play with just a game pad, but they will get a keyboard in very short order if they continue to play. There is an onscreen key
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Rob
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There's nothing worse than having some 12-year-old dipshit sharing his musical tastes for your gaming group, or finding out that Princess Fairyglen has a voice like Harvey Firestein. Or being the only keyboarder on a team that can't be bothered to share their Ventrillo server. Or being kicked from a team for not having a Mic.
If there's one thing I learned from DDO it's that I'm done gaming when I have to listen to all the other shitbags argue about rappers and NASCA
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