Why are we still in the "Kill 10 rats" era of MMOs?

[QuiJonPed]

*cough* so anyway to continue..

 

Why do we still have levels? UO and SWG(pre update), Eve to name a few proved that this wasn't needed.

Many MANY roleplaying games operate completely separate from levels. Popular ones even such as World of Darkness, Warhammer....

 

And when we bring up levels, and the grind of endgame, WHY oh god WHY does ever MMO have to be a giant epeen gear grind wankfest at endgame? Seriously? Why is it about the gear and not the player skill or strategy?

..

 

Urm *** are you smoking? Have you actually played any of those games? Warhammer Online was the most god awful Renown Rank grind going.

 

You mention EVE and SWG in terms of not having levels. Whilst this is true in the loosest possible sense, it's mere spin doctoring on your part. EVE has skillpoints, which you acquire over time. A person who has subbed for one year will have more skillpoints than a new player (ergo they are at a higher "level"). You do grind out levels in EVE. I've spent over 45 days waiting for Gallente Dreadnaught (level) V to finish training, that IS a grind (but NOT a complaint!).

 

SWG... again it had no level per se, but it had skill boxes instead. You had to grind out XP killing mobs in teh wild or generated via missions to fill a box before moving onto the next "level" of skill box. Once you had 16 boxes, you then had to grind out mastery points to "master" the skill. Don't get me wrong, I loved this feature as it meant you had total freedom to build your own template, but it was not level free grind.

 

TBH my question would be, why are we still in the era of forum trolls who post complete fallacies veiled as "truth"?

Edited April 19, 2012 by QuiJonPed

[Xeraze]

Everyone who doesn't like Fed-Exing and rat collecting needs to go pre order the great trinity killer.

 

Why does the wookie emoticon look like a brown jelly bean?

 

Fix the Twi'lek hood bug!

[Korghal]

The other version of grinding(real life like) have already been done and the gaming community rejected the idea.

 

There is no other way to do this unless you want it grindy, i for one want it grindy and hard and time consuming. The gaming communiy is screaming for more facebook-like games and less serious gaming, this is a sad development.

Edited April 19, 2012 by Korghal

[DeutschGamer]

 

CRAFTNG! Why don't we have quests involving crafting? You would be surprised how many folks would like this. Going out and finding rare minerals or materials, meeting buy orders etc.

 

lol, you don't pay attention much do you? People are already making up THEIR OWN quests to find crafting materials, look at those in search of schems or rare crystal nodes. Nobody told them to do that or come onto the forums to work together, they are doing it all on their own.

 

Every genre has a science, MMO's are no different. Its just that some people who have been exposed the genre for long enough can see the formula plain as day while they play, sapping the experience.

 

Happened to me with FPS games, no different here.

[Xenirath]

Eve took simple concepts and tried to make them difficult to confuse people....

 

Eve the only game where you are not punished for not playing... Your character can still advance.... There will always be players better than you because they have played the game longer. It doesn't come down to skill it comes down to who has had the longest active account. Also EVE has like 100000 subscribers...

 

EVE is a horrible example of an MMORPG .... It's just an MMO without the RPG element.

 

That's your opinion of course, however seeing as it has 200,000 subscribers its an MMO. And because you can do whatever you want its an RPG.

 

That point is invalid.

 

Secondly you can only advance to a certain point for every skill so if you have level 5 to all of your shield skills and level 5 to your fittings you use then you have as much chance as the 5 year subscriber with the same if not less trained skills because he went for a large ship.

 

Thirdly, bigger isn't better in EvE. A T2 frigate can overtake a battleship or a cruise/battlecruiser without too much trouble due to the tracking of the guns. If you can't break their tank then you can leave them and find a new target.

 

EvE isnt for everyone and I wasnt saying it was groundbreaking, in fact the opposite. I stated it was the same style MMO with better masking for the OP wanting less (Kill 10, collect 10).

[Xeraze]

The other version of grinding(real life like) have already been done and the gaming community rejected the idea.

 

There is no other way to do this unless you want it grindy, i for one want it grindy and hard and time consuming. The gaming communiy is screaming for more facebook-like games and less serious gaming, this is a sad development.

 

I'm sorry but you don't speak for the 'gaming community'. You may speak for Facebook however. I can NOT see PC gamers wanting to play more flash games..

[Xenirath]

CRAFTNG! Why don't we have quests involving crafting? You would be surprised how many folks would like this. Going out and finding rare minerals or materials, meeting buy orders etc.

 

Because if you script finding a rare resource it wouldnt be rare because it would

 

1. Show you where to find it

2. Make enough for everyone to find so they don't have an incomplete quest forever in their logs.

3. Make farming a mat more of a nuisance because after you find 1 crystal now you have to turn in the quest and get a new one.

 

All in all. Dumb Idea is dumb.

[Xenirath]

Everyone who doesn't like Fed-Exing and rat collecting needs to go pre order the great trinity killer.

 

Why does the wookie emoticon look like a brown jelly bean?

 

Fix the Twi'lek hood bug!

 

last i checked it wasn't a bug for twilecks. It is design to make it not need a different model for twilecks exclusively. Tho if the redid the hood "bug" they could add TOGRUNTA!

[Encima]

I agree with the dark/light criticism. KOTOR was awesome because you could start over and get a completely different story, I expected that from TOR as well.

[QuiJonPed]

That's your opinion of course, however seeing as it has 200,000 subscribers its an MMO. And because you can do whatever you want its an RPG.

 

EVE is a great game, I'm still subbed abd may well ditch ToR at some point and go back to EVe as my main MMO.

 

It sorts the wheat from the chaff nicely, plus it is a sandbox.

 

Double win.

 

The people whining about how hard it is need to HTFU or give me what is left of their stuff (I presume they got ganked in high sec whilst under the impresion they were "safe" in a PVP sandbox).

Edited April 19, 2012 by QuiJonPed

[Xeraze]

last i checked it wasn't a bug for twilecks. It is design to make it not need a different model for twilecks exclusively. Tho if the redid the hood "bug" they could add TOGRUNTA!

Well, let's not hijack too much but...OMG YES TOGRUNTA PLS!

[Xenirath]

well, let's not hijack too much but...omg yes togrunta pls!

 

ikr, togrunta!!!

[DieAlteHexe]

Why do people whine, whine, whine about quests and never offer up any reasonable solution? It's easy to whine about it but offering up a solution which doesn't suck is another thing altogether.In other words, have a take, don't suck, and if you can't offer up a better solution then don't whine about it.

 

People have been.

 

I would love to see something ala UO again. Not so much the PvP part but the "okay, here's a world, go forth and do what you want" aspect. The way you built a character was by doing. You could avoid fighting entirely. You could craft only or you could be a mage or a fighter or an archer or a combination of those.

 

It was grand...even with being ganked every 10 minutes. LOL!

[DieAlteHexe]

because real puzzles confuse people and make them give up on the game.

 

Myst.

 

*head explodes*

[redsovereign]

Sorry to burst your bubble, but Daeada is right. If you look hard enough, you can easily say that all games are just "go from A to Z."

 

To me, it seems like you want high-quality set pieces that games like Mass Effect and even the newer Call of Duty games feature.

 

looooooooool!!

 

ME and CoD "quality"

 

loooool.....

[DieAlteHexe]

I agree with the dark/light criticism. KOTOR was awesome because you could start over and get a completely different story, I expected that from TOR as well.

 

I *want* that but I pretty much couldn't see how they'd pull it off in an MMO. I did hope but I'm not freaked out because I came in skeptical of how it was possible in an MMO.

[DataBeaver]

How do you suggest they make the entire planet back under republic control after you finish your story quest without making it under republic control for every else? I believe you want a single player game.

Either that, or the other extreme: an MMORPG where every character is backed by a player or a GM.

 

The problem with NPCs in computer games is that computers are stupid. They can only do things they are told to do. They lack imagination. For a computer controlled NPC to do something, a human must have told them to do that. A game as large as SW:TOR has thousands of friendly NPCs, and tens, if not hundreds of thousands of enemies. Giving them all things to do would be a huge effort. You can't even consider each NPC separately, but you have to account for other NPCs in the same area and how they interact with each other. It's entirely understandable why game companies will rather spend time on the actual things players will be doing rather than environments they'll only notice in passing.

 

A human-driven MMORPG isn't without problems either. The first one is that players want to do things. They want to be heroes and villains. Some might like to play a vendor for a while, but no one will want to do it every day for 5 years. And certainly no one will want to be the ordinary townsperson with a boring everyday job who rarely speaks to anyone. Games populated with only heroes and villains feel just as unrealistic as ones populated with incompetent, apathetic NPCs.

 

But what if we have the ordinary townsfolk controlled by hired GMs? That brings us to the second problem, which is that it's horribly expensive. Even with sophisticated tools, a single GM can only control a single area while still giving the NPCs some kind of lively feel. Each planet in the game would need dozens of GMs to run things. There are almost twenty planets in the game, and hundreds of servers, each of which needs its own set of GMs. The tally comes up to around a hundred thousand GMs at the very least. Let's say it's one GM per 20 players, and hiring a GM costs the company $4000 per month. Would you want to pay $200 per month to play such an awesome game? I guess not.

 

And there's a third problem. Most players don't even want to roleplay. A sith inquisitor isn't going to stop a smuggler in an empire-controlled area and ask what's her business there. Unless it's a PvP server, in which case one or both will probably attack each other with no questions asked. Players won't team up to do content they can manage alone, because then they'd have to share the loot. It's not worth it to spend hundreds of millions to create an immersive roleplaying environment for your players if 98% are just going to ignore it.

[Slteath]

EVE is a great game, I'm still subbed abd may well ditch ToR at some point and go back to EVe as my main MMO.

 

It sorts the wheat from the chaff nicely, plus it is a sandbox.

 

Double win.

 

The people whining about how hard it is need to HTFU or give me what is left of their stuff (I presume they got ganked in high sec whilst under the impresion they were "safe" in a PVP sandbox).

 

You want my stuff? I didn't rage quit, just didn't have time to continue my corporation legacy, ie. invade and conquer more space.

I have a caldari pilot who can fly carrier effectively, and all skills towards passive tanking. iirc, i have about 600mil, 1x nighthawk, 1x crane, 1x mantis, 1x interceptor, and numerous other ships. it's heavy combat focus, but i can fly a barge as well.

[Sir_LogiC]

This is a problem with all MMO's, you cannot make even 6 months of content with none of it feeling repetitive or grindy. EVE has been mentioned as so well EVE is the grindiest game in existence, even more grindy than Runescape. Unless of course you are training, in which case you don't even really play the game at all.

 

Now I mention Runescape again. That has amazing quests. The controls make them a huge pain to do, but with a nice interface (like in SW:ToR) they could be quite nice. AFAIK there isn't a single "go kill x bears" quests at all. Of course there is still grind, in fact the premise of the game is to grind, with quests being a diversion.

 

SW:ToR, like most AAA MMO's makes quests a part of the grind. I hate daily quests and I am not looking forward to them. Some players like them though. I like tradeskill grinding, as in collecting stuff to tradeskill with, though some players don't like that.

 

Seriously though if they didn't have those boring quests to drag out gameplay, if it took only a week or two to cap out playing casually, then what would you do? I guess a solution I have thought of before is to add an ability to keep the levelling pace fast. Say once you get a level capped character, you can choose to play another character with bonus XP enabled. Would work by boosting the main story missions XP rewards, the fun part, and keep you levelled up enough so you don't have to slog through the boring quests over and over for each toon you make. I think this addresses the biggest problem with them, and that being having to redo them with each character after the first.

[Mashy]

Um, Eve does have levels, there are skill levels in that game. The reason that many roleplaying games follow a level and gear formula is because most people want clear and reachable objectives in their game. Even shooters are taking elements from RPGs and adding in a bit of level and/or gearing to give people something to reach for. Pure skill-based results aren't even in sports game, because you are still gearing up your team by trying to build the best players, and then utilizing those players to maximum benefit to win.

 

You seem to want less of a game, and more of a virtual world. Second Life is still going, and turning a healthy profil still, that may be something that suits your preferences more.

 

I just wonder if the word "dynamic" would help this particular scenario? It seems to be what people are after lately. That random sense of 'omg, this is happening right in front of me, what can I do about it' type stuff. It would appear that it needs to be singular and personal. At least that's the vibe I am getting from most game forums of late. It's not a bad thing either, I just have no idea how the game devs would implement it so that people would be happy. GW2 is having a crack at it or so we are led to believe....... But we have been led to believe it many times now....

[Zeruhn]

RPGs went from menu driven battle systems to active time to real time battling/sword fight, awesome exploration, free flowing skill systems, and incredible presentation.

 

I see MMO's as an extension of RPG's. They are RPG's with *lots* of people playing in them with you. The first Baldur's Gate was one of the very first games I ever played that had me totally hooked and SWTOR seems to me to be a direct descendant of BG in its "style". [bioware!! ] The differences between those 2 games can be seen with improvements in technology. However, I'd like to say that Bioware's stories are still extremely fun to run through, the music is beautiful, and the voice acting is second to none.

 

"Heh! You TELL 'EM, Marle!"

 

 

Edited April 19, 2012 by Zeruhn

[Lord_Ravenhurst]

there is no MMO coming out in the next couple of month sticking to the oldschool MMO concept.

SWTOR is the last blue whale marking the extiction of that outdated genre.

[Varteras]

there is no MMO coming out in the next couple of month sticking to the oldschool MMO concept.

SWTOR is the last blue whale marking the extiction of that outdated genre.

 

Until the next company comes along that wants to make an MMORPG and copies Everquest, WoW, Rift, and TOR. Mostly because attempts at making MMOs outside of that style are not nearly as financially successful.

[Truvu]

Until the next company comes along that wants to make an MMORPG and copies Everquest, WoW, Rift, and TOR. Mostly because attempts at making MMOs outside of that style are not nearly as financially successful.

 

Except Guild Wars 2.

[Halfadozen]

Things are the same because that's the nature of the genre, and that's what we enjoy.

 

Perhaps some people should reconsider if MMORPGs are the genre of game they like playing.