ArenaNet's MMO Design Manifesto 178
An anonymous reader writes "ArenaNet studio head Mike O'Brien has posted his vision for a new type of MMORPG, which they used in developing Guild Wars 2. Quoting: 'MMOs are social games. So why do they sometimes seem to work so hard to punish you for playing with other players? If I'm out hunting and another player walks by, shouldn't I welcome his help, rather than worrying that he's going to steal my kills or consume all the mobs I wanted to kill? ... [In Guild Wars 2], when someone kills a monster, not just that player's party but everyone who was seriously involved in the fight gets 100% of the XP and loot for the kill. When an event is happening in the world – when the bandits are terrorizing a village – everyone in the area has the same motivation, and when the event ends, everyone gets rewarded.'"
Yeah, but.... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Yeah, but.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, but he doesn't realize how fun it is to kill someone. Take out that possibility and you take away some fun.
Only a small minority thinks it is fun to kill people in uncontrolled world PvP. And game developers generally don't care about that minority, as they cause other customers (the ones gang banged) to stop playing their game.
PvP is much better done as optional addon in controlled environments where all sides are fighting on even and clear terms. The idea of free world PvP is an antique that only ever satisfied griefers and the occasional masochist.
Re:Yeah, but.... (Score:5, Interesting)
Yeah, you just summed up the entire eve player base very very succinctly :)
Re:Yeah, but.... (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah, you just summed up the entire eve player base very very succinctly :)
And the reason for the success of EVE is exactly because it aims to satisfy a very specific minority. :)
So using the word antique in my original post was perhaps an exaggeration. It is more a matter of what client group you aim at. I would however be very surprised to see any new high value production aimed at world PvP. At least any western production. I know that Asia seems to have a generally different mindset around the whole PvP subject.
The what of Even? (Score:4, Interesting)
Eve is tiny, on any chart it rides the bottom. Oh, it gets a LOT of attention but that is in no relation to its financial success.
Most MMO's aspire to higher subscription ratings with 1 million being considered the line between success and an "also ran".
I always find it amusing to see PK and PvP and twitch fans scream that their genre's are OH SO POPULAR and yet not a single game that gives them what they want is a success. Odd that. Why are PK and PvP and Twitch fans not playing the games aimed at them?
Meanwhile, the closest to WoW is Lotro and that is a distinct PvE game of the old mold.
It is like saying people LOVE FPS, when Quake sells 10 copies. The figures would not support the claims.
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I always find it amusing to see PK and PvP and twitch fans scream that their genre's are OH SO POPULAR and yet not a single game that gives them what they want is a success. Odd that
No kidding... you'd think, if PvP was so hugely popular, there would be more games catering specifically to it. Instead we have what, Darkfall? Shadowbane (now defunct)? EVE Online? Maybe Warhammer? Guild Wars itself has the "fairest" PvP system, but it is only in controlled environments, not world.
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Most MMO's aspire to higher subscription ratings with 1 million being considered the line between success and an "also ran".
That's where EVE played it differently and were still very successful. They didn't NEED a million subscribers to make a good profit off of supporting their product for a lengthy period of time. They just built their market around the ability to buy additional time codes and sell them in game for in game money.
Essentially, they've diverted the money that would be flooded to chinese farmers back into their own pockets.
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There are not half a dozen MMOs out of hundreds with that number of paying subscribers. Lineage, Warcraft, and I can't think of any others other than those free web ones. Most have maybe six figures if they're lucky.
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Every PvP focused MMO that I can think of has died. As vocal as PvPers are, the majority of players who will subscribe to an MMO don't enjoy getting gang-ganked by assholes who play 16 hours a day. Here are the ones I can think of:
* Shadowbane - tried it, it sucked, it died.
* Pirates of the Burning Sea - at first it had tremendous potential, then the ganker assholes got ahold of it and the game became unfun for anyone who wasn't willing to play like a dickhead. Down to a few servers I believe
* Age of Conan
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Actually, no, in eve you can be attacked anywhere, even high sec.
There are rules and consequences, the gankers just work around the first and balance the second.
For instance, say your a "hardcore miner" in high sec, you get the best ship you can, the hulk, you deck it out with the best mining gear and go to work in a high sec zone. A person in a cheap setup battleship can pop that ship in about 3 volleys and have enough insurance that they will not be out of pocket at all when their ship gets destroyed by t
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Chart 2 is the "also ran" chart. Try chart 1: http://www.mmogchart.com/Chart1.html [mmogchart.com]
Eheh, CHART 1 is what counts (Score:2)
Come on, at least try. They created chart2 because WoW makes everyone else a brown line at the bottom. CHART 1, that is the secret to success.
Eve does alright but it the typical niche MMO. Nothing wrong with that, but Guild Wars aspires to more and has done more (although unfair to compare since GW is free after you buy the box). I do NOT dislike Eve, I just get upset when people try to pretend it is a contender to AAA titles. Respect it for what it is but accept that if gameplay of Eve was really what peo
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EvE is not free world PvP - you can stay in high security space and be pretty certain that nobody will attack you (if you stay in 1.0 security space, help is coming in seconds). You might still die, but there's little chance of someone camping you
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Free world PVP also satisfied social gamers. Part of the game is generating and organizing a large social network. If you want to be safe from attack, you need to be bigger and more organized than the next guy. You need military equipment, training and organization. This is how warfare works in the real world and when it works that way in an MMO, it can be fun.
When you have "arena" PVP where the teams are automatically generated by the game itself, it removes the social part of the game. The part of the gam
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When you have "arena" PVP where the teams are automatically generated by the game itself, it removes the social part of the game.
In this case, Guild Wars had random arenas (no need to form a team), team arenas (form a group of 4), faction arenas (form a group of 4, team up with two other groups for 12v12), and guild combat (8v8 guild teams).
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That is somewhat entertaining, but Diablo 2 suffers from the typical problem plaguing these kinds of games: Invulnerability.
If you're a high enough level, you are essentially invulnerable to anything below a certain level. That's boring and quite frankly silly.
While you can find that in modern
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That sounds a bit like school yard bullying (and, worryingly, international diplomacy). "The only way to be safe is to spend time ganging up against everyone else, and you need to watch your back the whole time". Or you could, you know, go for fun and entertainment without the "I may be in the strongest group, but what if they turn against me?"
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I like socializing, engaging in intelligence and counter-intelligence operations, and organizing networks of allies and battle groups from time to time ... but then again I study psychology and economics at university because that's what I find interesting, and I'm a big chess player. Maybe we just have a different idea of what fun and entertainment is ;-)
The truth is, I enjoy lots of different games. MMO's are fun and I like the social meta-game but they tend to take up too much of my time (which would be
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My way of putting it is that some people are dumb enough to want an MMO to be a war simulation, overlooking the facts that: (1) War is generally anything but fun; and (2) any game has to have sufficient motivation for the losers to keep playing, or it will eventually end.
PvP could be different - current designs are bad. (Score:2, Insightful)
Only a small minority thinks it is fun to kill people in uncontrolled world PvP.
But why is that?
Because they implemented PvP wrong.
Being invaded and killed could have been a thrilling experience. What makes it utterly dull for most people is that your options seems to be:
A) Respawn and die again.
B) Log out.
Imagine a game where lowlevel players that are killed in their home areas would be conscripted as local militia and set to control siege-like defensive installations. Instead of being spawnraped, the lowlevels getting killed would be given immense power - but limited in time and only
So forcing it upon them makes it better? (Score:5, Insightful)
The fact is that nevertheless some of us don't want to have anything to do with PvP at all. It's not a question of feeling stronger or weaker, it's simply a question of it not being what I want to do in a game. Conscripting me into some group that _has_ to do PvP is just going to piss me off more and make me cancel the subscription.
That's the kind of solution that presumes that everyone else too is a complexed idiot who's just there to feel powerful by ganking someone weaker. Some of us play for entirely different goals and reasons, though.
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Oh, nothing against the way WoW implemented it. What I was ranting against was the whole idea of being shanghaied into a PvP minigame, as advocated by the post I was answering to.
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Instead of releasing or waiting, you occasionally get an option to be the "defender" depending on the circumstances in which you were killed. If you want to keep on questing, you can just go about your business--but if you want to extract your revenge, you can come back as a short term town guard of sorts.
Of course I sold my WoW account years ago and will probably never play another MMORPG (at least not to the extent equivalent to having a best-on-server
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Well, you have to remember (or scroll a bit up) that said remedy was supposed to make it fun for those being ganked in their home areas. And more specifically in a context boiling down to, basically, "how to make uncontrolled PvP ok for the victims."
The option to at least not be shanghaied into more PvP would of course be better than making it mandatory to take it. But refusing it still won't do anything to remedy the fact that I was ganked in my home area, when I didn't want to take part into PvP at all in
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I think the issue that the GP pointed was uncontrolled PvP environment.
What you describe is actually a controlled PvP environment.
Re:PvP could be different - current designs are ba (Score:5, Insightful)
Why does ganking exist? Because the penalties for losing are so *low*. Unrestricted PvP works in Eve (and I'd argue, pretty much only in EvE) because there are serious penalties. Lose a major ship, lose training time- it can take a while for things to get back to where you were. Even the gankers realize this, and avoid combat unless they know they are going to win, and they realize the guy may well be back with friends to stomp them into the ground.
Compare this to something like WoW. What's the penalty for dying? Running back to your corpse. Even in something like Darkfall with full looting you just have people run around naked, since there's no real penalty for dying otherwise.
Imagine a PVP game where dying killed your character dead. No resurrection. Of if that's too harsh, perhaps losing 5 levels as well as giving the keys to your bank to your slayer, or having the character lock out for a month. Or perhaps having every guard in every town on the continent kill you on sight? You think people would randomly attack strangers? Ganking would vanish in a heartbeat. You'd probably end up with a feudal system very quickly, where everyone was in one of a few massive guilds that would issue kill on sight orders for anyone that harmed one of their own- this may not be what the designers/players want, but it would work. Make losing hurt and the ganking issue solves itself
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Imagine a PVP game where dying killed your character dead. No resurrection. Of if that's too harsh, perhaps losing 5 levels as well as giving the keys to your bank to your slayer, or having the character lock out for a month. Or perhaps having every guard in every town on the continent kill you on sight? You think people would randomly attack strangers? Ganking would vanish in a heartbeat. You'd probably end up with a feudal system very quickly, where everyone was in one of a few massive guilds that would issue kill on sight orders for anyone that harmed one of their own- this may not be what the designers/players want, but it would work. Make losing hurt and the ganking issue solves itself
And you can also imagine that this game will be just as destitute in players as Darkfall. The vast majority of people aren't going to want to play that.
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Imagine a PVP game where dying killed your character dead. No resurrection. Of if that's too harsh, perhaps losing 5 levels as well as giving the keys to your bank to your slayer, or having the character lock out for a month. Or perhaps having every guard in every town on the continent kill you on sight? You think people would randomly attack strangers? Ganking would vanish in a heartbeat.
Those would also effectively kill PvP in your PvP game.
Re:PvP could be different - current designs are ba (Score:4, Informative)
What you are describing was implemented in Ultima Online. Kill a player, all the guards in cities mark you KoS (kill on sight). The solution was to not go to cities anymore. No banking, but there's plenty of killed player corpses to loot.
So, roving gangs of PKers hang out at the load points between areas, and kill your character while your computer is loading the next area's graphics. The solution for a while was the formation of anti PKers, who would descend in mass and swarm a PK group. But, now their characters were also flagged as PKers.
So yes, it ended up as a feudal system. Unfortunately, it was a world where the PK eventually won.
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Why does ganking exist? Because the penalties for losing are so *low*. [In a world without ganking, players] avoid combat unless they know they are going to win.
Sounds like ganking to me. I actually enjoy PvP with people close to my skill level and see no point in penalizing anyone for entering into a fair fight. If anything, penalize players for be dishonorable by entering into a not fair fight (maybe losing honor/arena points in WoW).
But hey, that's my whole issue with the vast majority of RPGs and RTSs
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PvP in MMOs is not popular for a lot of different reasons. Some people don't like PvP. Generally, one person has a huge advantage over another based on gear. For Eve, it is that there are fairly harsh consequences to death that encourages people to stack the deck so that a normal player doesn't even have a chance as they warp in t
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PvP is competition. Many players want nothing to do with competition. PvP should always be consensual without any exceptions. If someone has a te
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It's not a matter of fun.
The rules of the world should be the same for every entity in the world: be them players, monsters or NPCs. If players are different from the rest of the world, then they're not really part of it.
You should be able to kill a player just as well as a monster. To avoid bullying, you just need to have some kind of police force (probably NPCs, note they should still be killable) that maintains order and that
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1. level separation. There is no way for a bunch of lower level players to kill a higher level player (if the separation is enough, say 10 or 15 levels). Outside of a city where the NPCs are, the only defense is to group up, and after a couple levels, it just doesn't matter. So the higher level ganker is immune to any attack and the lower levels can either log out or continue dying.
2. No long term negative effect of ganking. A high level character that goes around and
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Long term negative effects should apply to the player who is ganked too! Let them turn off their accidental PVP flag
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It's not a matter of fun.
It's a game. It's ALWAYS about fun.
The rules of the world should be the same for every entity in the world: be them players, monsters or NPCs.
Not every player is a simulationist. I'd imagine that quite a few players would rank "This game is fun to play" above "This game implements a realistic simulation of a world" in their scale of "things worth paying a monthly subscription fee for".
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Immersion is what make people addicted to a MMORPG. If you don't feel like you're really part of the world, then there is no point playing.
And that applies whether you're aware of it or not.
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Only a small minority thinks it is fun to kill people in uncontrolled world PvP.
I've never understood world PvP (uncontrolled) in an MMORPG. You have level imbalances (one side might be significantly higher level than the other), class imbalances (always an issue in one-on-one or small groups), gear/equipment imbalances (a staple of these games is the loot), and numbers imbalances (one side significantly outnumbers the other side). Mix this in a cauldron and you get crap stew for gameplay.
I can see controlled PvP, along the lines of WoW's battlegrounds, or GW's alliance battles. At
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Only a small minority thinks it is fun to kill people in uncontrolled world PvP.
People think PvP is niche gameplay but the reality is that it's niche in the MMORPG world. In FPS, it's the most popular multiplayer game model running. Guild Wars came close to an MMORPG with PvP because it took so many of the elements of FPS and tossed it into a relatively open world. Like Quake with swords and spells and a touch of character advancement.
I'm not a big PvP fan other than, in general, computer AI sucks in MMO
This small minority has a name (Score:3, Insightful)
It reminds me of a discussion about griefing that I read about a few months ago on some internet forum. Naturally, the "real" players were mocking the "carebears" and the latter was levying the usual futile appeal to empathy.
Q: But don't you feel bad that you've just ruining someone else's experience?
A: Why should I feel bad?
Naturally, the "griefers" just couldn't understand this appeal to empathy. There's a reason for that. One of these "griefers" went on to try and reverse the appeal, arguing along the
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That's a great observation. Maybe they're not psychopaths in real life, but choosing to portray them in-game certainly raises the question.
To each their own (Score:5, Insightful)
To each their own. I realize that some people thrive on ganking and being an ass, but then a lot of people don't. And each game can choose their own niche, and decide if they want to cater to one category at the expense of losing another.
The griefer segment is kind of an easy choice, though, since you mention taking it to the point where you're trying to get people out of the game. A single unchecked griefer can lose them a hundred subscription of other people, so basically they're actually losing money by catering to those. They're not any sleep if you leave for lack of that kind of fun.
But, at any rate, each dev team and publisher ultimately makes choices to cater to market A at the expense of market B. E.g., Blizzard chose to cater to the medieval fantasy fans, at the expense of being less fun for some of us who'd have preferred a good SF MMO. (Say, World Of Starcraft;) E.g., they chose to have guns and explosives and helicopters, which actually was at the expense of losing some purists who'd have preferred a more Dark Ages kinda setting where the highest tech is maybe a crossbow. (Heck, much as I'm otherwise for SF, I'd prefer to keep medieval stuff medieval, if it had to be medieval in the first place.) E.g., they chose to have no xp penalty for death, even though that made some people cry bloody murder. E.g., they chose to have cartoonish graphics, even though for some people it causes them to cancel the subscription. Heck, it's still the #1 stated reason for not playing WoW. E.g., they chose to have separate servers, which some of us like, but then it made the fans of a more Guild Wars style instancing say it sucks. Etc.
Ultimately you can't please everyone. To make player group X happier, you have to make player group Y unhappier. You get to choose which group you want more.
E.g., to make medieval fantasy fans happier, you have to make strictly SF fans a lot less interested in the game. And, again, you can't please everyone. You can't make a game that's high fantasy with elves and horses _and_ SF with warp drives and tricorders, because you'll just annoy both groups instead of catering to both. (Though using SF as a backstory for a medieval game sometimes works.)
To some extent you can try to give group Y something else to do. But sometimes it's not easy to reconcile. You can't give griefers something else to do, because they need those unwilling victims. At some point you just have to just let go of group Y.
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You don't have to cater to one or the other. It is possible to design a game that appeals to both. The obvious solution is to turn griefing behaviour from a liability into a boon.
Allowing griefers to play as outlaw characters at a certain cost (that cost being whatever it takes to make sure that it remains a minority activity, and ought to vary according to supply and demand) and providing incentives for law abiding players to hunt them down gives both parties what they want. The griefer gets to annoy peopl
Still doesn't work (Score:4, Insightful)
The obvious problem is that if everyone else actually liked hunting someone down in PvP, they'd already be on a PvP server anyway. You're proposing a system which basically asks some people to play the game how they don't like it, and not pursue the goals _they_ want, just to give some sad loser the attention he craves.
I suggest you start with reading Bartle's paper.
The achiever segment (those who'll just have to have more gold and reputation) and the killer segment are actually very distinct categories and natural enemies. They like different things in a game, play for different goals, and both tend to despise each other. Asking an achiever to play a killer role in that pose isn't giving him fun stuff to do, it's trying to convince him to do unfun (for him) stuff and ultimately conclude that the game sucks (he hasn't been doing what he likes, after all) and leave. It's akin to trying to make some gazelles hunt lions. Even if they could, they're not going to enjoy it.
It also does nothing whatsoever for the other categories. The socializers aren't even going to be motivated by that gold and fame to take a role they despise. The explorers won't find anything to discover in it either.
So essentially all that would happen is that some killers might be convinced to play with other killers... but that's something that's not much fun for them. Unwilling victims are where their fun is at.
And in the process you gave both free hand to ruin everyone else's fun.
Besides, the "player run justice" idiocy has been done to death before, and never worked. Letting the players deal with "bandits" so you don't have to, has been not just tried and failed on UO, it's been the holy grail on MUDs too and it failed abjectly there each time. As Benjamin Franklin once said, "Madness is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result." I fail to see why an experiment which failed every single time before, should be hailed as _the_ solution that'll work this time.
And finally, well, I've heard the "provide some colour" excuse before. And the "I can't RP if I can't gank" and the "it's unrealistic" and "without someone ganking them those players will lack a challenge and leave in droves!!!!11eleventeen" In my brief days of coding for a MUD, you'd be surprised how many people felt a need to whine about why they should be allowed to drive others off the game, and how limited a repertoire of excuses they had.
In the end it's a non-sequitur. What matters isn't "colour" for its own sake. Nor "realism", nor "challenge", nor "RP" for their own sakes, for that matter. What matters is whether enough players like it or not. If the larger mass doesn't, well, take your colour somewhere else, really.
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Oh, that griefers want to be famous badasses isn't what I'm disputing. What I'm saying is that for the badass-vs-posse scenario you've proposed, someone has to play the posse. And it's there I'm seeing a problem. Most people don't want to play a posse to start with. And most people couldn't give a damn that there's a posse somewhere, when they're still getting their open instance event ruined by a jackass. That someone will then go and play cops-and-robbers with the jackass doesn't really do anything for th
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Oh, that griefers want to be famous badasses isn't what I'm disputing. What I'm saying is that for the badass-vs-posse scenario you've proposed, someone has to play the posse. And it's there I'm seeing a problem. Most people don't want to play a posse to start with. And most people couldn't give a damn that there's a posse somewhere, when they're still getting their open instance event ruined by a jackass. That someone will then go and play cops-and-robbers with the jackass doesn't really do anything for them.
Exactly, that is 100% the problem. The problem in creating a game which makes both griefers and non-pvp players happy is that any "incentive" for the non-pvp players to willingly go hunt down the griefer simply does not exist. Because hunting down the griefer would involve something the non-pvp players by definition do not want to do: pvp. If I log on and look forward to partying with my friends and xping in the dungeon of ultimate doom, I do not want to interrupt that to go hunt down some griefer for an ho
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That goes both ways, though (Score:2)
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Allowing griefers to play as outlaw characters at a certain cost (that cost being whatever it takes to make sure that it remains a minority activity, and ought to vary according to supply and demand) and providing incentives for law abiding players to hunt them down gives both parties what they want. The griefer gets to annoy people and gain a reputation as a badass. Everyone else gets to hunt him down for fun and money.
Yeah, they already tried that, it was called "UO", and it ultimately didn't work. Why n
Actually... (Score:2)
Actually, WH40K doesn't pretend to be both medieval and SF at the same time, does it? I mean, sure, it has power armours and chain swords and whatnot, but, really, those are just as much SF props.
I wouldn't mind a WH40K MMO, to be honest. It has a metric buttload of lore and character by now.
Is it ? (Score:2)
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He never really says that. He's talking about killing mobs together. In existing games you always get less XP or level slower if you're playing in a party, and if you happen to be in the same area you can't just join them in a fight. If another player has already pulled the mob, you won't get any XP or rewards for helping to kill it.
Actually, the problem goes the other way around. If you've pulled a mob and somebody else joins the fight to kill it, you get less experience. This makes players in the open areas avoid each other, killing the social aspect. It seems Arena Net is trying to encourage ad-hoc parties both through removing that disincentive, and by providing events which require large groups.
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Except that giving 100% XP for everybody (as claimed for Guild Wars) means that either all your player base will rocket to ubberness or most of your mobs will be just too hard for single-killing.
The reason for penalizing is to avoid level-riders, I mean, the newbie that goes from level 1 to 10 because he just followed a level 80 around, hence starting his career as an ubber newbie.
Players still happily gang together to kill super-mobs that are impossible to be killed alone and the XP given is supposed to be
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Guild Wars doesn't give any benefit from grinding, though. The level cap is 20, and the benefits from elite armor are minimal and cosmetic. In other words, nearly all characters reach their maximum statistics relatively quickly, increased power comes from additional skills (of which only 8 can be equipped upon leaving a town) and the tactics of using them.
It also seems that they are preventing level-riders by only giving XP for 'meaningfully contributing' in combat. They also already have a system that
Warhammer Online (Score:3, Informative)
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Yes, they did. You and the grandparent are both right, though. For "normal" world event quests, the ranking was based on your contribution, plus the bonus factor of how many times you've done it without getting the special goodie bags. Taking keeps, however, was done based o
Communism (Score:2)
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You're asking for communism?
Only the paranoid still used that word. The new word(s) is "caring and civilized society." It's kind of a mouthful, but you get a warm feeling when saying it.
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Yeah, Chinese sweatshops are really warm.
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Hopefully... (Score:4, Insightful)
It won't follow the existing model of Guild Wars 1.. a few short months of "experiencing the story", followed by years of title grinding for a bronze wall plaque in the sequel.
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Think about it, Guild Wars is probably one of the best bang for your buck you can get as far as RPGs go, if you forget for a second that it's a MMO on top of that.
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Think about it, Guild Wars is probably one of the best bang for your buck you can get as far as RPGs go, if you forget for a second that it's a MMO on top of that.
Unless you count games with plenty of free mods available :)
Shared plus extra (Score:2)
What about pooled experience + extra experience, as I noticed used in 'Valthirian Arc':
50% of the experience gained is put into the shared pool (equal amount to all contributors), and the rest is distributed around based on proportional contributions.
e.g. two PCs, PC1 does a very small amount of damage, PC2 does almost all damage: PC1: 25% total experience, PC2: 75% total experience
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Because this still violates their principle. Even then, if someone joins the fight part-way through, those who were there from the beginning get less experience.
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I'm a little confused with why you replied to me. I'm actually in favor of the Arena Net system, which parallels that of the parable (same reward, regardless of time engaged).
While the GP's suggestion is counter to this example, I wouldn't call them polar opposites. The issue there is that his example is a zero-sum system, while Arena Net (and Jesus) give examples which are not zero-sum. However, A-Net is more concerned with the early participants receiving lesser rewards as additional participants arri
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And the healer, in whatever shape or form, gets shafted? ;-)
Why? Admittedly it makes contribution calculations harder, but you could consider healed damage (including regeneration) in the experience calculation. Damage would need to be named (23 points of damage from X, 18 points of damage from Y) and either cued or stacked depending on what model better fits -- does it make sense to heal old wounds first?
That might encourage people to get a small whack from every monster they encounter, then run away and wait for regeneration (or get a friend to heal), so that they
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Then define to me the point of creating a character strictly for buffing and/or crowd control. No healing, no damage, but VERY useful in group situations. Are you going to further complicate that equation to include damage the "might" have been caused by the mob sleeping? Who was this mob attacking? Warriors mitigate more damage than a wizard.
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Hmm, yes, I see. You could then get into working out "normal" damage per second (and healing per second) for all individuals, and any change to that where damage is dealt from/to the monster could be considered a contribution to the battle... but that's getting into the realm of silly.
What about redirecting damage (e.g. away from a weak wizard onto a PC with heaps of hit points), where the damage doesn't change, but the target does?
What about PCs who sit on the outside and play a command role, just issuing
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One thing I noticed in Warhammer Online's "enfless trial" area is that it was extremely easy in the early Public Quests to get the most contribution points solely by healing. This was on the Chaos side as the Zealot class.
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That should have said "endless trial" as in the area that people using trial accounts can access.
Dear Mr O'Brien (Score:2)
Thank you for the insightful article that quite a few people on this site have actually read. I know all the comments so far don't indicate that.. and you really shouldn't hold out hope for some interesting comments. Guild Wars 2 looks like it will be awesome. I look forward to reading more articles about it, and will probably buy the game when it comes out.
It has already been done (Score:5, Informative)
Dungeons and dragons online already does this.
All XP and rewards you get are based around how you as a group finish the instance (you do get penalties and bonuses depending on how many times you die though, and if you left the dungeon), you always run around with a group and no other characters are visible outside of the cities and all characters in the cities interact with you as if you are on of the few heroes helping it.
No collecting wolves tails there, you help people from level 1 and forward with actual questing which feels like it's helping someone.
Otoh, the game started breaking at around level 8 or so when I played it, especially due to haven essentially eternal gold and quite simply too large monsters which made claustrophobic dungeons pretty much impossible.
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You missed out on a lot then, the later dungeons where absolutely awesome. What kept me playing DDO for years was the teamplaying aspect, was (and still am) bored with WoW kids acting like spoiled brats.
In DDO, no co-op and coordination == wipe, all quests are done easily if you work together, if your tank just rushes off and burns the clerics mana you are dead.
Well it used to be like that, but after level 16 and crafting got introduced the game got too easy (weapons and players where way too powerfull) so
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I lost interest back when the level cap was 10 and my 4 ranger/6 fighter couldn't hit anything because I wasn't a pure fighter with the +10 to hit perk. Then my level 10 wizard went into the top end raid at the time and saw nothing but saves from every spell I cast, to the point that all I could do was magic missile my way through the game and occasionally buff people with resists. Then my level 10 paladin ran into the same missing thing my ranger hit.
Essentially, the house rules they tacked on to 3.5 to ma
Sounds like a great idea (Score:2)
Sounds like a great idea, and I wonder if they push it all the way through. Does rare loot also spawn for everyone? Or does everyone get their own "chest" with their own drop? Could be intresting but what are mobs going to be like that might be attacked by 500 low levels at once? There is a reason most games don't encourage grouping like this, it upsets the game balance. 500 lvl 1's could team up to defeat a lvl 10 monster and all get lvl 10 drops?
Mind you, I don't see that as a problem, that is smart thin
A lovely idea, but... (Score:3)
This is how MMO gaming should be, with nothing coming at the expense of another player. Unfortunately, there is a portion of the MMO population that will not be satisfied unless they can have their domination and bullying fantasies, and even though they ruin gaming for everyone else, they're big enough that few game makers have the guts to take them on.
Someone finally got it right (Score:3, Insightful)
A mmo should aim for MASSIVE multiplayer. that is the whole point of it. it shouldnt encourage seclusion, isolation, animosity in between players.
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Maybe, but it all comes down to implementation. The reasons that party, xp, and loot systems are as they are in many MMORPGs is that they are the lesser of 2 evils. On one hand you have someone being happier because their kill was not stollen. On the other hand, you have a boatload of exploits to deal with that make it much harder to balance encounters for fun/loot/xp
why ? they are already leveled. there are already encounters for 3-4 people, dungeons for 5 coordinated people, and raids for 25 people. so, the system is there.
it doesnt hurt us to allow xp and loot to everyone who joins the fight in the open realm in any measure. harder creatures, they cant manage, and will need coordination.
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second, that can be alleviated by preventing repetitive xp from the same source. you measure the average different encounter number that one toon would have while following a certain questline (as in the storyline) a
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It is not happening in the game's I'm playing or have played, because monsters weak enough to be killed by mindless AE macroing give close to zero XP. Seriously, not worth setting up a macro, you would spend 2 weeks to go up a single level. I contest that that's completly false. If you share XP equally without a party you can then mindless grind monsters that give you a signifant amount of XP. That's a huge difference. Seriously, pick a popular game and try leveling by AE grinding alone and see where it gets you.
my experience with wow belies this proposition. i have come upon countless chinese farmer toons, and quite a good number of them were non aoe classes (hunter). they kill their targets one by one. yet, they just grind.
Restricting XP from a single source- now you are making decisions for how someone can and can't level up, what about the people who want to grind? What's the number you have to kill before you have to pick some other monster? Am I going ot have to move once an hour, or if I'm a grinder am I going to have to start questing and give up that playstyle?
that totally depends on the game and would be different from game to game for each game.
I don't get what a straight player is. All games have rules, all players are forced to follow them. If a game lets you do something, it is straight and part of the game. That includes using the best method of progressing in a game.
that goes for everything. one would argue that also aoe grinding would be proper and within rules. since its a spell and there are monsters. it would be illogical to first give something out then try to exce
Disagree (Score:2)
FTA:
When you play an RPG, you want to experience a compelling and memorable storyline.
No. Common new-school mistake.
http://deltasdnd.blogspot.com/ [blogspot.com]
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You missed the "when someone kills a monster".
But probably is a habit of your party to take sentences out of context just to attack the opposing one...
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Yeah, not to mention that the grandfather is further refuted because EVERY mmog that has currency farmers has inflation, its a fact of life, or well, virtual life.
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I continue to wait for a massively multiplayer version of GTA. Not this pathetic pickup game crap.. as if GTA is Quake or something. GTA is a sandbox game.. I want to knock down the other kid's sandcastles. I want them to try to knock down mine - and fail, because I'm better. If I have to team up with someone else I want it to be because if I don't I can't compete. And through adversity maybe I'll start to bond with my crew and fight to protect them.. but if one of them squeals to the cops, he's dead.
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And you don't have to. Problem solved. That said, it allows you to 'help' people for purely selfish reasons, as well, since you get full loot and XP.
I have no problems with a 'care bear' experience, as long as it keeps the d-bags like you out. Go play a game designed for guys like you.
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The only problem I have with this... people hanging out near boss battles or high exp mobs. Wait for a party to attack, hit it a few times and walk away, get 100% exp. If you have an area full of groups/people hunting then you have people who will sit there popping off arrows to as many engaged mobs as possible to increase their exp intake without risking their own death.
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Then we get into the problem of how you determine who contributed. If I happen to have a controlling class and I root one of the mobs that are attacking, do I get credit for keeping them alive? What if that haste spell I cast on a passerby helps him to barely kill a mob that he wouldn't be able to without my haste... do I get credit for helping him out or am I required to do damage?
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I trust ArenaNet to take what you've suggested into consideration and come up with a good algorithm (for lack of better term) for determining just who deserves XP/loot.
Either your standards are too low or you haven't played Guild Wars since the inception of "Loot Scaling"
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So a snake is going to drop 20 snake eyes on death?
Sure. Why not? Realism? Yeah cus that's less realistic than a snake dropping 0 or 1 eyes, or wolves with no liver. Or a single eye taking up the same amount of space in your backpack as a 20 gold gold bars, or... Yeah. Who cares.
But wait, it's only if they "significantly" contribute- good luck with that. You will have people playing characters that can do the most damage. Or healers who just heal everyone who doesn't need it.. fighting for heals such
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I'm not trying to say everything is realistic, but at least there is a vauge sense of realism.
Haha, no there isn't. How realistic that spiders carry gold coins and swords, animal skins instantly turn to leather when cut from the body, you can carry 100 gold bars around and be as encumbered as if you were carrying 100 flowers, and so on. You can rationalize the behavior of the random number generator, but that's not realism. But who cares? Game mechanics before realism. When realism gets in the way of
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It's not about just being successful. It's about innovating a very stale MMO space.
I welcome ArenaNet's enthusiasm and risk-taking and hope more developers follow their lead.
Are you kidding? What little info they've been trickling out about GW2 points more and more to moving away from what made GW different and towards a far more WoW-like game.