i can relate

[dollly]

this article, http://fidgit.com/archives/2009/01/five ... broken.php ,gets to the point of how most people ,(imo), are feeling about mmo's. it doesnt give any real solutions, but does point out some of the problems to be looked at.


love always
DD

[abizmal]

this article, http://fidgit.com/archives/2009/01/five ... broken.php ,gets to the point of how most people ,(imo), are feeling about mmo's. it doesnt give any real solutions, but does point out some of the problems to be looked at.


love always
DD

Cant' find any that I can apply to Ryzom,
So we good to stay

Abiz

[geezas]

Good points, not all applicable to ryzom, since I have some spare time and the energy to write something here go's: ( not all related to ryzom but yea, it comes close )

• 5 It will soon be payday for the people who work on ryzom, some grumbling about this 'money' people talk about will get to the developers penthouse.
• 4 Aggro works the sameisch and can be used (exploited?) as such. (focus aggro, taunt options etc)
• 3 Cast heal, wait a sec, cast heal wait a sec, cast heal wait a sec. Or set melee action on loop with dubble tap the button. Ever dug up anything? yep press those buttons baby!
• 2 kill the bandit leader (silan) kill X bandits in Y location.
  
  'Kill 10 snakes and give me their venom and I'l give you this leather shirt just marginaly better then the one you are wearing'
  
  "After that I'll have another one for the livers of 12 wolves and the shirt will have just a little better stats then the one I just gave you, but I won't tell you yet'
  
  'Give it now? Hah! First the venom of the snakes for the low shirt, then the better one for the wolves!'
  
  'Why not the better one now? Because I like to see you run around doing pointless dribble that is why you stinking piece of not creative enough to think up your own quests, to dumb to program yourself [ Edited for language - Boroshi ] I am your master cause you want the better wolves shirt, it has the more masculine sleeves that showoff your muscles better and has a +1 to your stamina en healthpoints, that is why! and I need a new car so You better try to find those wolves fast they pop once a day and are heavily camped!'
  
  'To bad, you whine, please do, I don't care just as long as you pay me to whine about something I'm pleased, I'm like a add for cleaning products, loud irritating and it sticks in your system so every time you boot up I'll be there! now pay the man, *****!"
• 1 Yeah but none of my friends are interested in playing on a planet without a horde...

The I marked piece at 2 is a combination of my experience of the way MMO's do things.

It's like everything we have now. Cheap crap just good enough to not make you come over the counter to start dealing out some damage for the crap you are being forced to endure or digest.

[abizmal]

this article, http://fidgit.com/archives/2009/01/five ... broken.php ,gets to the point of how most people ,(imo), are feeling about mmo's. it doesnt give any real solutions, but does point out some of the problems to be looked at.


love always
DD

Ooops!
This got posted twice for some reason *.*

[jared96]

this article, http://fidgit.com/archives/2009/01/five-ways-mmos-are-broken.php ,gets to the point of how most people ,(imo), are feeling about mmo's. it doesnt give any real solutions, but does point out some of the problems to be looked at.
love always
DD

I love it .... lotsa problems listed but no suggestions on how the author would do it better .... reading that i was thinking "this sounds like a conversation with my wife" ... lotsa talk about everything that I am doing wrong and no suggestions on how'd she do it better

[dazman76]

I think the important thing to note about this blog, is the apparent level of either humour or stupidity. To make a refreshing a change, I've decided to go with humour and give them the benefit of the doubt However...

Aggro: There is no analog for this in real videogames.

...that statement still makes me think I'm being too kind

He is quite right about some of these problems however, and there has never been a requirement to come up with the all the answers when being cynical. It doesn't make you irrational, which is sometimes the problem that drives arguments/conversations between partners

[acridiel]

Well, he certainly´s got some valid points and I think all of us have thought about one or the other all to ourself ever so often. Idly wondering how things could be done "better".
While better did not often mean all those things he says, but I´m pretty sure all of us would LOVE to see Ryzom to become the "non-static world" we were promised at the beginning of it all.



It surely is a herculean task to overcome the boundaries of todays technology, to produce something new and unique.
And while in some aspects Ryzom has already done that, claiming it´s got none of the "problems" he tells of is naive.
No offense intended.

He needed to vent his frustration, thats obvious.
And I´m with him for the most part, and while he´s in part right about subscription fees, he´s conveniently ignoring some very real and far more sensible reasons in favor of them, I guess you know which those are.

Button lock surely is something that could be done better and yes, I wish there´d be a better way to simulate battle in a game like ours too.
AoC and Spellborn do try and go new routes, let´s see if they catch on.

Aggro...
hmhm,... really difficult point. While it certainly IS in a way ridiculous to be killing one guard only a few feet away in plain sight of his comrades without those guys ever noticing, or thinking:
"Oh ****! An Adventurer! Maybe if I don´t move he´ll never notice me.",
thinking of, inventing and developing a new technology for judging the beginning and end of a fight sequence will be extremely hard.
There are only so few variants to consider, distance, level, maybe skill, special powers/equipment and well... thats about it.
What else could you choose of to judge "attack/not attack"?
Eyecolor? Level of loudness of the player swearing at the Screen?


Playing (or not playing) with the people you want to depends entirely on you and that´s his own problem in this regard.

I could go on and even post a "few lines" I´ve send Beau on related matters, but that would be too much now

CU
Acridiel

[fadebait]

Well the static world is really a quest design issue not a world issue at heart.

Quests, by and large, are ported directly from single player games with no transferrence involved.

NPC to Player: Go, kill this evil guy and the world will be saved.

This is basically the concept behind a scarily large percentage of MMO quests. Even Ryzom's RoS is guilty of this.
This quest model is simply inappropriate for an MMO.
Quests built around providing food for a village a a lot better - villages always need food and there's no obvious contradiction in lots of players doing this.

Large public quests, or events (e.g.temple building event in ryzom) where people work togethre, or against each other towards a goal work well too.
We need to get away from the idea that every player character is a hero - in an MMO that simply makes no sense.

I think his comments about the subscription model are poorly thought out however - there's nothing that prevents people sampling subscription based games as long as there is some sort of free trial mechanism (which most games have).

As for the social aspect - I think that's just fundamentally wrong. SPeaking for myself I and my closest in-game freind play together constantly - whatever MMO we are playing we will be grouped. Therefore if required we choose classes based not only on what we like the look of, but what will fit well together. We have lots of other friends too, who we will often group with, but we level up together so are always on the same part of the content.
Moreover, excepting high-end endgame content it mostly doesn't matter if everyone isn't at the same place in the game. If some lower level freinds want to join us that's fine - they come along too and we try to keep them alive as best we can
For him it seems to be that it's all about the game - he wants to be doing the best he possibly can be in the game, witht he perfect group, and finds that his freinds don't always fit into that. That's skewed thinking IMO.

Button watching? Dunno about that. I just learn where the buttons are so I don't have to look at them. I know what the cooldowns are on my skills (if playing a game with CDs on skills), and rarely have to do more than an occasional glace at the button bar. Never been an issue for me, or my closest freinds, I do admit that the concept of buttons to perform pre-scripted actions isn't the best idea for a UI. Maybe a more 'heads-up' interface perhaps even including mouse guestures would help? Not sure it's a real priority for me, however.

Aggro is something I do agree with - up to a point. The reason that tank,cc,dps,heal is used so widely is that it forces cooperation between players playing very different classes, and this is a good requirement for hard content. Cooperation *should* be the goal in MMOs - that's really the point of them. I don't like the aggro radius - so that you can walk right by an enemy and it will just stare at you, but in order to get around that you have to accept a lot of compromises in the gameplay area, which I am not concerned are worthwhile.


Everyone these days is writing articles that claim to have the problems of MMOs spelt out. Most of them are wrong. This is no exception.
The real issue with MMOs (it's present in first person games too, but gets amplified to a far larger degree in MMOs) is that basically, people don't know what they want.
They want a living, breathing and challenging world full of danger where they, a not especially talented person, can be a special and unique hero, without too much effort or hardship. A game can't be both hard *and* easy. It can't require both lots of time and hardly any time at all. It can't require both lots of knowledge and almost none. And most people, lots of the time, aren't even sure which of those they want.
In the end, although people will generally tell you they want a hard game - when they actually play it there will be so many complaints that it actually *is* hard, and this means that they can't actually do what they want to do all the time that it gets watered down, and stops being hard. So then they complain that it's easy.


The problem isn't the games, it's the players and thus the market. Games are made for the market - the market isn't created around the games.

P.S. This ended up being almost as long as the original article. Damn.

[geezas]

P.S. This ended up being almost as long as the original article. Damn.

It was a better thought out piece then the article to kuddo's

[sx4rlet]

About the article, kinda sad he points out 'why mmos are broken' but hardly makes a point how to repair them. It's always easier just to complain then to be constructive...

That said, he might want to check out some newer games. Tabula Rasa was a crossbreed FPS and MMORPG, making you shoot aliens. Hitting the aliens depended on where you aimed and the distance you were away from the alien, not what button you hit.
Then there is Spellborn. The combat system in Spellborn is quite unique and is much more dynamic then any other fantasy MMORPG i've seen so far.

A dynamic world is much more difficult ofcourse. But like said by Fadebait, devs need to let go of the standard single player MMO. That even has been done before. The first MMORPG's I played had a story that slowly evolved. In Earth and Beyond suddenly a planet was taken by an alien race, now that was a shock. And players were able to do things about it.
In SWG (in the early days) there was a story and the players could do things that influenced the story, kinda like the temple event on Atys.

I think they need devs that can think of more creative ideas. For example, you could make mobs more dynamic. (Even more then in Ryzom!)
For example if you don't hunt yubo for too long, they really become a plague, start swarming everywhere, and might even attack players because they are out of food...
And if you hunt to much of them, they get scarce in a certain region.

Or let's look at the well-known bandit leader. If you just killed him, it's not logical to have a new one jump in 5 minutes after that. You could start with one or two bandits that start a camp which becomes bigger and bigger.
There might even be a way to help the bandits grow their camp quicker, etc, etc.

I don't say it has to be this way. But most likely this would be much harder to make then the standard mmo quests.