Equoowe's page

Make the game too "good", and what happens is that too many people say the game is "broken" or "not fun", and they won't play it long enough to get good enough to gain mastery over the AI. There are just too many options in the gaming universe for people to play instead of a game that frustrates them and makes them feel stupid.

if you make players feel like they ccan win even after wiping out they'll keep playing even if its really hard

Conversely, if the opponents are humans, this issue goes away. Being beaten by a real person who is better than you is far less of a problem. This is why multiplayer FPS games are so insanely popular - getting headshot by a 12 year old is a different experience than being headshot by an AI.

people keep playing because they think they can still win even if winning to them is just getting a bunch of kills like in a FPS

so many times while pvping if i felt i couldn't win i would just log off, if the other team is scissor and I'm paper i'll either try to avoid them or just log off

There is a tricky inverse function at work too. The harder you have to work to solve a theme park puzzle, the less acceptable it is to die trying. If you have to get 20 people together, wearing the correct gear, with the right character skills and abilities, and they have to follow a pre-arranged script of actions to win, those people will quit in disgust if after all the work required the game throws them a curve-ball and TPKs them. The "reward" of some new shiny loot simply isn't enough to overcome the easy-to-exit situation into other games.

while raiding it wow for me it was less acceptable to die on the easy stuff then the hardest fights in the game, i stopped raiding because i was sick of wiping on the easy stuff because of bad players (then that guild disbanded and most players quit because the core group was sick of the same thing)

this is all from the point of view of someone who plays most games really competitive, most of what i said wouldn't really apply to a lot of people

giving every class a way to stop damage is great, it can work in both PvE and PvP but i don't really know of any MMO's that don't have a hate/threat system like wow and does PvE good and im really yet to see how this game could make it work

also talking about MMO's that are similar in combat design, not talking about shooter mmo's and other games like that

threat is wow was just one thing you had to worry about during a fight, the best fights were the ones where you had to dodge spells and move around a lot

Even in WoW, most guilds don't care what class/spec you are. Only the top guilds with sponsers who are competing with each other for firsts really care about that enough to tell people how to play. And they're not playing a game, they're working.

People will gravitate towards obviously stronger options. But that is a balance problem, not a design problem.

my WoW guild before i quit was US top 10 at one point and always in the top 3 oceanic guild (doing stuff with 200-500 ping ftw), the only time it wasn't fun is when people needed to be told how to play haha, generally if you are in a guild like that you should know how to play and people really don't like wasting time because someone didn't

also by how to play i mean having the right spec, knowing strats, right gear/enchants, etc

The real question for me is: will there be enough incentive to creating a character that is totally worthless in combat?

Star Wars Galaxies had a great crafting system so you could play the game and have fun without doing any combat, the best crafters were known server wide for the items they made because it wasn't just get 5 mats and you craft a weapon that is the same every time, crafting a good item in SWG took some effort

The big reason for this complete watering down of all classes can be directly traced to Arena pvp(IMO), which(again, IMO) ruined the game completely. I'm glad that PFO will have PvP prioritized from the beginning so that we can avoid the balancing act a few years down the line.

that is very far from true, the focus with WoW was always PvE, they very rarely changed something in PvP even it was it overpowered because it would effect PvE. people love to blame the arena for killing WoW but really it kept a lot of PvPers from leaving because BG's at that point were extremely boring and no longer competitive because they were cross server, arena was new, fun and no longer just face rolling people in BG's who have no idea what they were doing

even with PvP in PFO being a big focus of the game there is no getting around the balancing act, there will almost always be times when something is strong or weak

one way to try to stop people from being the op class is making every class different and fun, if all the classes feel the same most people will just play the best class/spec, give every class something unique that would make someone want to play it and make other people want to have in there group

Now, things are pretty well balanced. There's almost no reason to ask anyone to respec unless you don't have the proper roles filled or are in a top progression guild and need that extra couple percent. Additionally, dual spec makes respeccing as easy as pushing a button.

The key to WoW's balance is that everyone's dps (appropriately specced) is competitive, everyone's tanking (again, appropriately specced) is competitive, and everyone's healing (you guessed it) is competitive.

I'm sure you remember in vanilla WoW, warriors were the best tanks, priests were the best healers, pure dps classes were the best dps, and many people felt that was how it should be. However, that design philosophy invalidated many specs and even reduced certain classes' roles to single spells (ie: innervate, blessings). This made whole classes feel marginalized, as it was clear they had only one road to success, and an unglamorous one at that.

What Blizzard realized is that people resent having "options" that aren't viable. People don't like being given 3 choices and then being told which one is correct. Then the other 2 choices are nothing more than "traps," as Scott said.

The one thing I think WoW's crazy success can be attributed to more than any other single thing is simply that they made all specs viable. That is relatively easy balancing act for WoW though...

Blizzards idea of balance is to make every class a face roll class with no variety, pre-wotlk every class was fairly different which led to top pve guilds stacking certain classes because they had a skill that worked best for a fight and led to a few classes stomping pvp (arena pvp), lucky for me i played a dps warrior and the whole time for pre-wotlk they were good haha

you could do good with some of the worse classes and specs but top pve guilds always wanted the best, also most people weren't good enough to get high rating without going for the best specs and classes (you saw pretty much no feral druids but so many resto druids)

post-wotlk they have given every class the same skills, nothing is really unique to a class which sucks but makes it easier to balance

having some good variety between classes is good for fun factor but horrible for balance, have to meet in the middle, its not easy to balance even the most basic MMO but i would rather see good variety then a dumbed down game for the sake of balance

It's your opinion that the number of people who will not play a game with unrestricted PvP is less than or equal to the number of people who will play a game they otherwise would not if it features unrestricted PvP?

its hard to tell but PFO seems to be going in the direction of having fairly open pvp and i very much doubt the game will fail because it hasn't catered to the people who don't want that

Fact: Everquest FOCUSED on PvE before WoW. But gave the option of PvP on 4 separate servers.

If Pathfinder Online has unlimited PvP, I won't play, lots and lots of people won't play it. PvP is stressful and some people either CAN'T deal with it due to anxiety issues, or just don't want to deal with stupid little kids griefing people cuz it's fun making other people miserable.

I play MMORPGs to relax from stress at work.

those people that won't play because there is open pvp will just be replaced with a lot of people who enjoy open pvp so its no real loss to the game

EQ and WoW are PvE themepark mmo's with pvp as a afterthought, PFO is a sandbox mmo with PvP as a big focus, you can't have a sandbox pvp mmo without open pvp, this means that some people will get ganked when they leave the safer zones

now you can either deal with the game world being dangerous outside of safe zones, play smart and avoid parts of the game that will get you killed or you can just not play

What we should be aiming for is a universal server to which the law in enforced similar to that of a contemporary society. You can do wrong but you risk everything. You can join an army and goto war. Nobody is vindicating Open PvP everywhere. I am simply against a PvP switch or allowing open pvp in a minority of zones. Allow a minority of safe zones, but allow risk and reward to dictate the security of vast regions beyond these (think Eve Online).

Yes people get murdered here and there, yes we are subject to criminal activity, but the criminals and murderers are punished and life is that much more special because we are not invulnerable. I do not consider myself 'griefed' by serial killers or burglars.

putting so many pvpers into 1 spot with pvp zones ruins the fun, it takes away any chance of there being smaller scale pvp

also agree that there should be some kind of punishment, games like wow there is no risk when ganking someone who can't even fight back, would love to see some kind of bounty system that rewards people who stop his kind of ganking

if you want to see a living world in a sandbox mmo you need a lot of freedom and that means that people will get ganked and forced into pvp if they leave safe zones