On MMO design

[Omgwtfbbqkitten]

Re: On MMO design

Not directly related but insightful all the same to RPG design:

Why skills are in, attributes are out in modern role-playing games | Joystiq

I tend to still see the merit in stats for games with larger parties of three or more, but its kind of dumb for an RPG where you only have one character you're managing. I don't really understand why Diablo 3 even bothered with it.

[Aeni]

Re: On MMO design

I tend to still see the merit in stats for games with larger parties of three or more, but its kind of dumb for an RPG where you only have one character you're managing. I don't really understand why Diablo 3 even bothered with it.

Player nostalgia. I think many people from the outside looking in don't realize that the suffixes are what drives the game, not the actual game play itself. In other words, loot, loot and look baby, more loot! I guess without the RMT aspect of D3, you can say that the item drops are in itself a kind of currency. Of course, this was completely ruined in D1, D2 with trainers, hacks, etc.

[Firewind]

Re: On MMO design

Personally the stats vs skills thing doesn't bother me. While it does sometimes seem like a bit of a cop out so some devs can claim "OMG we haz RPG mechanics!!elveven1", as long as it adds something fun to the game it doesn't bother me.

The only issue I have with stat heavy systems is that you tend to need spreadsheets to work out if a piece of gear is worth equipping or upgrading or not, or even if the gear you're about to roll for is even much of an upgrade. Though in a "true" skill based RPG system, gear should be nothing or or nothing less than sidegrades to aid with the roles defined by your skill selections. Problem is is that you get people whining about "no epix to eeeern to rayd with!11"

But on the subject of MMO design, I touched upon it in another thread but will bring it up again. Accessibility to the current endgame content is very important. Until very recently, raiding in mainstream MMOs was only done by a tiny . There's a number of reasons but the main reason is simple: gearing up used to be a nightmare. Grinding for gear so you can go grind for some more gear is not fun.

If we take WoW or SWTOR as an example, they both recently turned the paradigm in its head by making the endgame PvE content more accessible. Basically they did nothing whatsoever to raid difficulty. Argue that all you want but they did nothing to it. All that has been done is that instead of months of long grinds to maybe one day get the gear for the current endgame content (only for new content to come out and obsolete the current gear) is that they made it easier to get the previous tier's gear. FFXI was kind of ridiculous with grinding to access endgame content too considering that you were forced to do a LOT story missions to access Dynamis, Sky, Sea, Salvage and Einherjar. New players could hardly ever join it since it was almost impossible to find people willing to help you progress. Abyssea did address this and getting into it is pretty simple...And then it made the grinding even WORSE with Empyrian weapons and AF gear upgrades (which was a contributing factor to me quitting FFXI. That and valefor sucks if you live in the UK because there's like 5 UK players on the entire server and we have 3 of them).

But back to how WoW and SWTOR made things more accessible to the regular player. Basically instead of spending weeks grinding hard mode dungeons and then a few more farming a raid for gear so you can clear it, you spend about a week in dungeons (or doing PvP on SWTOR if you have grinding dalies since the mid tier PvP gear is perfectly fine entry level raid gear) and you should end up with the hear that will let you survive in a raid. That's all they did and yes there's still massive nerdrage about it on WoW, and on SWTOR people are screaming that everything is easymode when they're the ones who are blitzing through content. Honestly the only justification for being against making the endgame content of an MMO more accessible to the regular player is elitism.

Now this does actually bring me to the subject of gear progression. Is it right to obsolete the previous tier's gear? I actually don't mind it much as long as new players can get access to equivalent gear or easy access to the previous endgame stuff so they can still join in. Obviously for PvP, gear needs to be something completely different. Warhammer Online used to handle PvP gear perfectly. There were 5 different sets, easy having a slight progression but each also had different stat emphases. Basically the PvP gear was more like a side grade so you could pick and choose your gear to fit your role, and it had set bonuses that would emphasise and encourage that. Then Bioware took over and shows EXACTLY why PvE style gear progression does not work for PvP, especially when new players have no way to catch up. They still haven't learned from it in SWTOR but SWTOR's PvP has far more balance issues and let's face it SWTOR's PvP is shit compared to the PvE content, Bioware knows it and it shows.

[DakAttack]

Re: On MMO design

I don't mind stats, but I'd rather not customize them down the player character's bone. I like flexibility, and what I want to do one day isn't what I'll want to do every day. I don't mind D3's system where the majority of my stats will come from gear, which I'm free to swap in and out as I please, but the way Blizzard does stats makes them muddied and nearly meaningless, so it's really only two stats I'm ever interested in.

[Firewind]

Re: On MMO design

I liked Rift's system in that you could mix and match a trio of talent trees and then have up to 7 of them saved. You could switch between them out of combat and it allowed a lot of customisation and versatility. I did have one hilariously fun combo for my Rogue that could only be described as a Teleport Spamming NIN/RNG hybrid with enfire, a stupidly powerful enDark that could be stacked with barrage, and some pretty powerful spells to fling around. It was quite durable too with defensive abilities though anyone with a dispell would easily destroy me since it relied on obscene buff stacking and defensive skills that could be dispelled.

Rift was also the same system that let me play a melee Druidess that ran around with a huge hammer and a Faerie pet healing her or Satyr pet damaging her and buffing the group. Melee attacks would also heal the entire raid.

[Armando]

Re: On MMO design

Besides the fact that they're less relevant in games where you do things, heavily stat-based games have the problem that the devs don't tell you the formula they use the stats in. It's impossible to determine the value of "+5 Attack" in a lot of games. Even worse is that even if you find the formula, most times it's needlessly convoluted (see: FFXI) so determining the value of "+5 Attack" is tedious.

[Omgwtfbbqkitten]

Re: On MMO design

That +9 ogre knife never really seemed to give me a +9 against ogres.

[DakAttack]

Re: On MMO design

That +9 ogre knife never really seemed to give me a +9 against ogres.

Maybe you're just not into Ogres?

[Firewind]

Re: On MMO design

That +9 ogre knife never really seemed to give me a +9 against ogres.

Yeah but being a Dwarf gives you +1 to hit against Orges anyway and since you're automatically proficient in Warhammers won't need to use a knife.

[Armando]

Re: On MMO design

Maybe the knife belonged to a +9 Ogre?

[Icemage]

Re: On MMO design

I've been harboring a private theory for game design which closely follows this philosophy for quite some time, but haven't found the time or opportunity to put it into practice. The idea in the video gets it "almost" right, but still suffers from issues with power level escalation (i.e. new gear that adds to the potency of abilities, which causes the same sort of issues that vertical design has).

EDIT: Re: Diablo 3 chucking out stats almost completely

The problem with auto-levelling stats is that stats and skill points are a way for the player to directly control the growth of their avatar. Gear in Diablo 3 is (extremely) random, and taking some of that control away from the player is a bad idea because instead of a character build that stands on its own based entirely off of the player's decisions, you're much more dependent on what drops (or the dreaded Auction House) for builds that would otherwise be challenging-but-playable.


Icemage

[DakAttack]

Re: On MMO design

FFXIV dabbled in allowing players to allot their own stats, which was a bad idea. For a game that allows you to change jobs, being forced to either pigeon-hole yourself into a single role, or spread your stats out and be decent at everybody but great at nothing, was a bad idea. They removed it, but are planning to reimplement it in the future.