The Gaming Den

Koumei wrote:

Fuchs wrote:We already have a game where those with more spare time can enjoy their hobbies more - it's called real life. Why should MMOGs favor those as well?

Not without money we don't.

Depends on the hobby. Unless the hobby itself is costly, more fee time means more time for hobbies.

Even if your hobby is "masturbating to pornography on the internet", having more money gets you ahead in the hobby. In real life, I can devote a lot of time to putting together an army of space marines or figuring out how to fly fish, and guys with stupid amounts of cash can still waltz in and do better right off.

There are vanishingly few hobbies where huge piles of cash don't make you much better at it by default. In fact, the only ones I can think of are bowling and MMOs. Everything else from model trains to mountain biking has a heavy cash path.

-Username17

I don't know... While having money will buy you better equipment in many hobbies, just having better equipment doesn't give you better skills and/or knowledge. You're essentially paying for ignorance, and those people who spend like they're hardcore but don't have the knowledge and experience to back it up end up looking like douches to other people with the same hobby.

When I was in college, I had one fellow student vocally express his displeasure during my hiking class that I was wearing tennis shoes on a hike, and that if I was "serious" I'd have bought $200 hiking boots. Luckily, the teacher was a hippy and told him to blow it out his ass.

Wait, a hiking class?
As in, learning to walk?
And it's a college course?

Blasted wrote:Wait, a hiking class?
As in, learning to walk?
And it's a college course?

PE class, probably. Go out and hit the trails for a while.

I can think of worse things to do than go walking for an hour on a nice day.

And better things to do than go walking in crappy weather for any real length of time.

Fuchs wrote:The problem with MMOGs is that a lot of their content is not fun to start with.

If people would rather pay than level grind your game sucks.

With the general design of current MMOs this is unavoidable.

1. An MMO needs a critical mass of players or it fails.
2. That in turn necessitates people to keep playing the game. If they can actually finish it, they will do so and then leave, critical mass is gone, game dies.
3. When your game world is static, the only thing you can do to retain players is add more and more content. And you need to add it for those players who are close to finishing the game - the upper 10 to 20%.
4. Those players are also the most likely to have the time/motivation/organisation/smarts to just plow through massive amounts of new content the day it is released. So your new content needs to be hard and take time to complete. Hence grinding. Because if it can be completed without massive investments of time people will do so and be done with your game, which then dies.



Until we can get non-static worlds, with objectives other than having a better character sheet, we are stuck with grinding, at least for non-casual players.

There are other ways to extend gameplay other than focusing on the last ten percent of the game which not everyone gets to. Most of it is by increasing the number of questlines available at a given point of the game. Most games further extend this by creating multiple classes and multiple factions, all of whom get their own unique questlines.

In my experience, people do not play one single character to the end and then quit. They probably have a favorite character they play consistently, but they also have other characters they're playing around with, possibly to experiment with builds and playstyles, or just to find quest lines they didn't play the first time around.

The big problem with Massives is that questlines tend to be pretty formulaic. Go here, kill this number of that creature, get the shiny doohicky and come back to me. Not only is it boring, but it actively hurt massives in the long run because it taught gamers they only need to know what to kill and in what quantity, and what to get while doing it, meaning that there was no reason to actually read the mission's boxed text. This meant that if you tried to deviate from the formula, players wound up lost, frustrated and angry, angry at you. WoW was especially bad about this due to large stretches of time where it was either the only kid on the block, or by far the biggest kid on the block. Now, other games are starting to find (Some, few) handholds and WoW doesn't quite have the clout it used to, and players are sick of turning in their "Kill 20 Edgeriver Gnolls" mission to be handed a "Kill 25 Riveredge Gnolls" mission, so things are starting to get better on that front.

There's other ways to retain players than increasing the grind. You can make the game fun itself - TERA is on to something there - and you can rely on players to provide the content, through PvP, mission builders, and roleplay/social activities. All more cost-effective than adding grind after grind, and all more likely to foster a community - which will keep people playing, to the point of people playing a game they don't even like, just for the friends they made.

So I've been playing the Torchlight 2 'Stresstest Beta weekend' last weekend and a bit of the trial version of D3.
I was talking and playing with friends, and apparently I mostly hold the mouse button in hack & slash games, while some like to click on their mouse a lot.

So that for example if you have a group of 20 enemies, I only click if I change my attack, not if I spam the same attack a few times, while some of my friends do click for every single use.

Which do you prefer?

ps. I so hate the D3 always online part. Had to quit playing because there was a server update, while in Torchlight 2 beta I only had the only option which still continued to work perfectly even as my connection died. Just that nobody could join my game.

I prefer spam clicking myself. Hard to say why, really.

name_here wrote:I prefer spam clicking myself. Hard to say why, really.

The auto-attack function in games like Everquest really turned me off. The point at which I didn't even have to be there to have my paladin grind pushed my interest in the hobby down to zero.

-Username17

Maxus wrote:

Blasted wrote:Wait, a hiking class?
As in, learning to walk?
And it's a college course?

PE class, probably. Go out and hit the trails for a while.

I can think of worse things to do than go walking for an hour on a nice day.

And better things to do than go walking in crappy weather for any real length of time.

Yeah, it was part of my PE requirements. I liked it because the teacher was more interested in going out there and teaching as we went along and let the class dictate the pace and such, I didn't like it because it was during the winter and it tended to get cold and a bit rainy at times.

FrankTrollman wrote:

name_here wrote:I prefer spam clicking myself. Hard to say why, really.

The auto-attack function in games like Everquest really turned me off. The point at which I didn't even have to be there to have my paladin grind pushed my interest in the hobby down to zero.

-Username17

You should give TERA a try then - no auto attack, no auto-aim, no tab targetting. You still have specials and cooldowns, but it's far more dynamic than usualy MMOGs.

Fuchs wrote:

FrankTrollman wrote:

name_here wrote:I prefer spam clicking myself. Hard to say why, really.

The auto-attack function in games like Everquest really turned me off. The point at which I didn't even have to be there to have my paladin grind pushed my interest in the hobby down to zero.

-Username17

You should give TERA a try then - no auto attack, no auto-aim, no tab targetting. You still have specials and cooldowns, but it's far more dynamic than usualy MMOGs.

Also, pantyshots.

Probably nothing close to Agent Aika, but then, what is?

Stahlseele wrote:Probably nothing close to Agent Aika, but then, what is?

1. Ikkitousen
2. Najica Blitz Tactics
3. Freezing

(Also: the other two Aika series)

Phantasy Star Online 2 looks incredibly awesome. So many customisation options, OPTIONS EVERYWHERE. And you can go decorate your base, making sure you have the right tablecloth (for the magic tea parties) to match the curtains and so on.

That reminds me of the long, long times I spent in Pokemon Ruby/Sapphire, hunting for the perfect secret base.

Having a secret base to decorate is something I wouldn't mind if more games did...

So just in case you wanted to play D3 single player and you find out you can't log in :

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2012- ... ems-stolen

Koumei wrote:

Stahlseele wrote:Probably nothing close to Agent Aika, but then, what is?

1. Ikkitousen
2. Najica Blitz Tactics
3. Freezing

(Also: the other two Aika series)

Phantasy Star Online 2 looks incredibly awesome. So many customisation options, OPTIONS EVERYWHERE. And you can go decorate your base, making sure you have the right tablecloth (for the magic tea parties) to match the curtains and so on.

I-wha-wh-WHY DO I WANT TO PLAY THIS NOW!?!?

ishy wrote:So just in case you wanted to play D3 single player and you find out you can't log in :

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2012- ... ems-stolen

Oh, wonderful. Another reason for me to love forced online play when all I want is single-player anyway.

I just started playing yesterday. The lag wasn't too bad except for about an hour-and-a-half in the mid/late evening. It wasn't so bad as to make the experience "unplayable", but the game does become literally unplayable for ten seconds at a time once every minute or two, that is a real problem.

Luckily, I never died due to lag, but I did come close twice, and that was even from me being at full health from the get-go. Which basically adds the extra dimension of needing to wait for your potion cool-down to expire before pressing on just in case the game happens to lag again at the wrong time...

RobbyPants wrote:Oh, wonderful. Another reason for me to love forced online play when all I want is single-player anyway.

According to http://gucomics.com/archives/view.php?cdate=20120522 blizz login has A) no limited attempts and B) Isn't case sensitive

I am at a loss for words that in this day and age they have passwords which are not fucking case sensitive.

It's not what?

Christ, it is literally more difficult and time-consuming to make string comparisons case insensitive (although not all that much more), so there is just no excuse.

I mean, ordinarily I'd blame people who made weak passwords, but case-insensitive passwords are absolutely retarded and I feel every sympathy for those people.

Do they at least have a time delay between attempts?

name_here wrote:It's not what?

Christ, it is literally more difficult and time-consuming to make string comparisons case insensitive (although not all that much more), so there is just no excuse.

I mean, ordinarily I'd blame people who made weak passwords, but case-insensitive passwords are absolutely retarded and I feel every sympathy for those people.

Yeah, that is terrible. Like you said, they have to add in an extra line of code to convert both the password and the login attempt to lowercase (or uppercase, I guess), and it seriously weakens the strength of the password. That's 26 of those 97 character combinations lost. So an 8 character password only has 71^8 combinations instead of 97^8.