thenoisyrogue's page

This thread was the moment I knew pathfinder online was in trouble:

http://paizo.com/threads/rzs2pasw&page=2?Why-this-whole-OnLine-Thing-wo rries-me#86

Captain Marsh came in with some valid questions and Ryan and the fanboys treated him like dirt. Lisa came in at the end and attempted to salvage the situation, but this is when she should have sacked him.

Captain Marsh hit it on the head when he said this:

"... In my business -- which I admit is not running a RPG company -- whenever someone demands your silence it's a marker.

It's a warning sign. It means that more conversation, not less, is warranted.

This is a company's website. But part of the business model is that it's also a community.

So quit hectoring and demanding that people respect your agenda. Converse, talk, listen.

If other members of your community are worried by something -- even if it's something that doesn't worry you -- respect that ..."

You fanboys who demanded everyone's silence who didn't agree with Dancey's grand plan are just as much to blame for this disaster. You enabled Dancey. You should hang your heads in shame.

I think the key question for some of us is whether or not countries outside of Europe and North America will have beta access or not. I'm specifically thinking of Australia.

Players begin with Rank 1 (neutral) and 0 rating with all alliances, meaning the player will not be killed on sight but will not be welcomed by any given alliance unless another force is involved, such as poor reputation. If a player helps a given alliance, in time they will increase to rank 1, at which point the alliance is friendly to them. On the other hand, if the player works against the alliance, they will become rank 0 and will be attacked on sight by NPCs of that alliance, and may appear as an enemy to other PCs of that alliance.

The general basis of this is more or less the same as several big MMOs from the past few years. The chief problem that I have with this is that it does away with any type of secret diplomacy and plotting. If I were a member of the Daggermark Assassins Guild, the last thing I would want would be for everyone else to know this. But with this system, as happens with other games, the game is up from the outset.

Like wise with me working against an alliance or group in secret to undermine them. As soon as you do anything against them then you're in the negative. Which means doing away with one of their members, in secret, in the woods, where nobody has seen the deed? Everyone knows. Not very immersive if you ask me. Surely you guys can do better than this.

Gambit,

To add to your great post, if one does have a rare mount or drop that was acquired by effort then this helps to promote a social aspect within the game. Other players will come over to you and ask how you got the item. Conversation will develop and perhaps the player will agree to help the other players on an expedition to see if they can find one for themselves.

Having a cash shop completely removes this multi-player interaction. You want one? Just go to the cash shop and buy it.

How do you old school gamers feel about badge loot from a vendor vs that elusive item RNG drop from a rare boss in a dungeon?

I ask myself when I started to lose interest in MMO gaming and I feel it was around the time toward the end of WoW burning Crusade, when every MMO seemed to be coming out with a vendor for their PvE content that sold you the cool items for a badge. To me, it just ruined the whole experience of wondering what I'm going to get, and brought up some repressed childhood memory of saving up pocket money. I just can't get into PvE MMO's with these badge systems, no matter how hard I try. I miss camping rare spawns even if it meant I only had a .25% chance of the item I wanted, getting the item just made it all the more worthwhile as an adventurer.

I totally agree with this sentiment.

I vastly prefer a monthly subscription payment method. There are a couple of reasons for this. Firstly, it is an automatic deduction from my card so I never have to think about it. I am paying but without acknowledging the fact, thus freeing myself of the idea of a transaction process. Whenever I open the game I am only thinking about playing, not paying. In fact I have kept subscriptions open for many months after having more or less stopped playing the game. I have tried cash shop games, and the constant reminder to pay takes away a good deal from the play.

My other reason is I want to know how much to pay. With a monthly subscription it is all set in stone and the decision is taken away from me and I can get on with enjoying the game. With cash shops I don't know how much to spend. What is a reasonable amount to play the game? Am I spending too little or too much? Thus, my enjoyment of the game is linked to how much I am paying, which is thus a constant reminder of financial anxiety to a small degree.

I play games to escape real life, you know. I don't want to be reminded of it at every turn.

What the world wants is a fantasy sandbox where everything "works" like it does in great stories, where people act like role players, where creative folk can add to the world, where everything is balanced so no "build of the week" is dominant, where the game never runs out of interesting things to explore, develop and/or dominate, where players can live in cool kingdoms or build their own, where there's an endless supply of really fun dungeons, that has photorealistic cloth, clothing, hair, and physics, runs on PC, Mac, Linux, iOS, and Android, plus XBox and PS3, has an amazing community filled with harmony, is free to play, millions of people share one server, but everyone's character is unique and special, and the AI could pass the Turing Test.

I've been following the Pathfinder development since the beginning but I can't find any mention of what payment model the game is going to follow. Can anyone help here?

Andius,

The problem with what you're saying is the massive development and upkeep costs for an MMO, made even worse by the fact that a themepark has to continually release new content to keep its subscribers interested. Thus developers have taken what they envisaged as a safe route, which was to copy WoW, (but stick in some gimmick that would apparently change the face of gaming for all time), as well as make their game as massive as possible.

Unsustainable, and eventually totally boring for most gamers with half a brain.

The sandbox market, however, has the distinct advantage of not needing huge development costs nor continual updates, as the players are the content. So maybe your dream can be realised in a sandbox world. One thing is for sure; the quality of player that a sandbox game manages to attract will have a bearing on the game's eventual success.

This is a cause for concern. Not going to lie. When I looked at the link Avena posted earlier... it tempted me to go play an SoE game. Being able to generate your own content that the entire community can enjoy... is kind of a big deal.

Hearing SoE is now planning a Pathfinder Online clone... they've got a strong mix going for them.

I would steal a little of their thunder, just like they are trying to steal yours, and figure out some ways to allow the community to create and submit their own content for developer approval.

I would consider things like:
Dungeons
Voice overs
Visual assets
Books (Like the ones scattered all around the Elder Scrolls games)

That could all be scanned over by and approved if they were theme/lore appropriate and met the standard for quality.

Think about the modding communities that surround some games. I remember an astounding amount of content made for Dungeon Siege and Freelancer by modders, and a lot of it being very high quality stuff. I think tapping into that as a MMO, may just give you a hell of a lot of content, for very little cost.

I think knee-jerk reactions like this would have a detrimental effect on the Pathfinder product. Far from being threatened by the Everquest news, I am heartened by it. It clearly shows that Pathfinder is on the right track. Will Smedley make a gigantic hash of it? Most probably, however Pathfinder's core audience won't be threatened. The reason I have faith in the Pathfinder product is entirely down to the fact that they are not courting the bandwagon type of player.

Smedley would like to make the sandbox version of WoW. I wish him great success as it will keep the hordes of idiots away from this game.

The article has zero application to a sandbox MMO such as Pathfinder. In a sandbox the players are the content, and thus we are the story. Personally, I feel that story has no place in any type of MMO, whether it be sandbox or themepark. It should be relegated to single player games.

Pointless thread is pointless?

While the OP's concerns are interesting, I think we should be more worried at the present state of investment in the MMO industry in general. First SWTOR laying off massive amounts of staff and now Studio 38 folding ingloriously in what can only be described as a total cluster. Check out Broken Toys for a good analysis of the situation:

http://www.brokentoys.org/2012/05/25/the-week-the-music-died/

All this makes Goblinworks task of getting investment that much harder. Though on the plus side I suppose there are a lot of game designers on the market at present.

Awesome effort; really stoked to see this when I woke up. Now if only I could get that damn widget for the project to work on my wordpress blog ... (that is a subtle cry for help by the way).

I've put my money where my mouth is and pledged. Here's hoping the gear arrives all the way down to us in Australia, (and more importantly we can actually get onto the server when it does start up ...)

Guild - Council of Shadows

Alignment - NE, LE, CN. No CE. CE = Chaotic Stupid and it's bad for business.

OOC - Taking out political opposition is our specialty. By blade, by poison, by spell - its never the tool that matters, only the results. We're professional dissidents that expect to be paid to undermine the status-quo... and have fun doing it.

RP level - Softcore but present. We exemplify our characters as extensions of some of our more sardonic nature.

Internally - We have an inner-council. The Five plot our goals. We integrate our organizational leaders who help implement the strategies to see our goals met. Rinse/repeat. Very much a meritocracy. We take care of our own. Loyalty is paramount.

History - We've been together online since 1995 (some of us have been gaming tabletop together since '79). Core membership is about a dozen fairly hardcore players. We've run up our membership well into the 50's in Azeroth, including managing several major alliances in Norrath that pushed over 120 players consistently. We've played most of the big MMO's - some of us are in the 'industry'. We maintain excellent relationships with current and all former members. We're looking for what's missing in the MMO world right now: community. As active Pathfinder fans - Ryan's blog is like music to our ears. We wants the precious.

Dean,

Could be interested in this if you're looking for new members with a similar background.

To those of you arguing how guilds should be led and under what conditions:

Man is a social animal. In any social context he will continue to make the same mistakes. The sheep are easily persuaded. What makes you think an online social game will be any different?

I highly doubt that the game's designers will wish to protect us socially from ourselves. I mean, they have to have some fun too, right?

It sounds excellent. However, no word on that dreaded tool that did so much to take the social aspect out of MMOs - the dungeon finder. If players only choice to group is by making the effort to meet people in game then it will work. If all you need to do is press a button and consume then it won't. So I hope you're not thinking of putting any LFG tools in there.

I feel that if you start to go down the 'immersion breaker' argument in this way then two things happen:

1. Anything can become a potential immersion breaker.
2. It can be a somewhat lazy way of making your case.

In the example of the metric system, I think that this is a fine example of something where playability is vastly more important than immersion breaking.

I'm in Australia, so if we are blocked I just might consider putting a plastic bucket over my head and setting fire to it. That or strap myself down and put that 'Friday' song on endless loop repeat.

@Ryan's comment about people playing FPSs. I'm sorry but most FPSs have absolutely no relevance to the MMO PvP. They are two totally differ horse of two totally different colors... in fact one is camel. FPS matches are quick (rarely more then 30 minutes) sides are often scrambled at then end to distribute "better/weaker" players to help balance play, and you can always quite and join a different server/match. There is no true "loss" of gear/stats/etc.

There is another difference between FPS and MMO games and I find it quite interesting: a player in a FPS gets better at the game by actually playing. In current incarnations of most MMOs a player improves by crunching numbers, watching online videos, reading blogs, discussing on forums etc.

One is more fun than the other for the majority of people I would think.

thenoisyrogue, I imagine that the merit badge system will be more varied than that. There will be some merit badges which are simply a case of spending time training to achieve. This is something you'll do in the due course of playing the game anyway. Then, you'll also get those achievements that give some kind of visual reward/bragging rights for getting but if you're not personally interested in getting them, you haven't lost out on anything vital.

I'd also point out that something like this will be needed for the hardcore. When you remove the achievement people will get from levelling up ridiculously quickly, you need something that will take a stab at keeping them interested.

Hey John,

Keeping them interested is the problem. What other games have been doing with achievements is using them as a substitute for developing an inspiring game world. However, Ryan has responded that they intend to do much better so one must place their faith in the devs that they are aware of this.

On the subject of the 'Great Capstone Debate':

I think many people are missing a greater point here. What this system gives players is choice. And real choice, not some resemblance of choosing. But with choice comes consequences. You have the freedom to branch out in all directions, which is a short term advantage. But there is a long term advantage of staying in the one direction. This satisfies not only different play styles but different personalities as well.

I think its wonderful that game designers are finally thinking along these lines.

Just a few quick questions for Ryan, and if this has already been covered in replies my apologies. You mentioned alignment in the blog. How do you envisage implementing this if the world will be player driven? SWTOR has attempted to use a darkside/lightside alignment system but this is only possible with a huge storyline, something which is more suited to a single player RPG than an MMO.

How do you intend to handle attribute generation? Because if this is some random roll then you'll be seeing a lot of characters with very high scores as everyone is going to sit there and hit reroll until they get what they want.

The merit badge system sound nice, but it also has uncomfortable images of being like the awful achievement systems which are so prevalent nowadays. Any comment on this?

Very interesting thread, and I think the topic encapsulates the main problems facing MMOs today. I unfortunately haven't been able to follow most of the threads on the board at present, so I'll ask this question but please correct me if it has already been covered somewhere else:

If Pathfinder eliminated instance based dungeons and raids, would this go some way to solving some of these issues? I remember when the gates of AQ40 came down the first time on our server on WoW. It took a large amount of effort to get to that point, (admittedly most of it involving tedious tasks). What if taking out a dungeon full of nasties was similar to this, in that it required a cohesive effort from the player base over some period of time? Keeping in mind of course Ryan's point of not making PvE too hard.

And what if the reward for finally overcoming the dungeon was not loot per se but the real estate of the dungeon itself? Which would then put it up for further attacks from other player factions who wanted it for themselves.

With only one example of a dungeon, and with a lot of time and cooperation needed to overcome it, the problem of static encounters and all its incumbent issues might be resolved.

Good job at making the new guy feel welcome. I'm sure he appreciates the hostile tone of the responses in this thread, and it speaks well of the tone you should expect to see in the early adopter community for the proposed MMO.

Oh, it's fine. You should see some of the comments that I get on my blog. Water off a duck's back.

Let's be more specific then. Current iterations of MMO's are missing a vibrant community, (with the exception of EvE, but even their devs stuffed it up when they put a cash shop in the game, as they themselves admitted). WoW, the yardstick against which all MMOs are measured, is essentially now a single player online game. The player is on rails from level 1 to 85, and there is no need to interact or associate with other players. If you want to run an instance you jump on the looking for group tool. Some players mistake this for interaction, but the only interaction you will see there is people telling you to hurry up, people who you will never see again. This is not a community, and the community will be the most important part of a sandbox MMO.

So here is an off the cuff list of points that the devs might want to consider when setting this thing up:

Make the world big. Really big. You want player housing and cities and castles and whatnot? It was estimated that the total area of WoW is 80 square miles. If you don't want your world to be filled up very quickly then you're going to have to plan for this well in advance.

New Player Bias. There has to be a way for future new players, lets say a couple of years after launch, to be able to quickly find a place within the world and be competitive. You do not want the first rush of players to stitch everything up for themselves at future players expense. You build a castle? Great, but unless it is actively maintained it's going to fall down. See how Wyrm Online handles this element. Otherwise you may end up with something like Darkfall, and if you've ever played a new toon there you will no what I mean, which leads me on to the next point;

Death needs to be meaningful. This could well be your biggest challenge. Nobody wants to play their beloved toon for a year only to have them die. But new players don't want to appear and have their heads cut off for no reason. There must be consequences of being a random murderer. Age of Conan PvP server was a classic example of this. Anyone could kill you at any time for no reason with no consequences.

Story. Avoid it completely. Players in a sandbox don't want your story, they want to make their own. Story is for single player RPGs, not MMOs. And stories have no shelf life because once players go through it then they want a new one to be spoon-fed to them, which means that you have to keep coming up with new content.

Balance realism and fun. Being able to carry as much as you want is unrealistic and breaks the third wall. But having to account for every pound carried and applying movement penalties for going over the limit is not fun. Find a balance, which is easier said than done.

Community. Cross server battlegrounds and instances killed the WoW community dead. It was instant gratification gaming at the price of not having to talk to anyone ever again. That's what games like Skyrim are for, not MMOs.

Immersion. The key to this is variation and an element of risk. If you make the game trivial then the player becomes a tourist. The levelling game in WoW is a classic example of this.

The end game. If you can, avoid it completely. This can be done by throwing out the levelling game. Hard core end game raiding satisfies a small percentage of players, but the entire game needs to be built around them.

No heros. If everyone is a hero then nobody is one. Every player can't be the one to save the world from the dragon. But they can be able to grab a bunch of friends and go hunting in the mountains for a dragon. This can apply across the board. Epics are not epic any more in WoW, everyone has a bunch of them.

Power progression. If you make it go up too fast then you risk breaking game balance. And doing more damage becomes meaningless in context.

Slow combat down. This isn't a FPS. And we don't all have reflexes of an 18 year old. Likewise, go easy on the number of abilities. Just give us a few of them and let us master those. Look at the combat in Skyrim. It's slow and clunky and you basically do one thing, but it doesn't matter as the immersion is so good. Oh, and tone down on the pyrotechnic spell effects. It's got to the point in WoW where you have no idea what's going on. A screen full of magic explosions is fun - once.

Large mobs. I don't know about you but I find it slightly demeaning to constantly have my face in a monsters crotch.

Don't separate PvP and PvE abilities and powers. If you do, most of your time and energy will be spent trying to balance the game, and all you'll do is piss everyone off.

We're not lab rats. So get rid of daily quests, (hell, get rid of quests), stop with the pointy arrows and the hand holding. And if you put achievements in the game then you will have already failed.

Travelling. If you make getting around your world trivial then your world will become trivial.

It's not a game, it's a world. A game give you instant gratification; a world lets you exist. A game gives you a fix; a world gives you time to breathe. Players shouldn't need incentives to keep playing your game. Because either those incentives will break the world experience or it meant that your world wasn't worth being in in the first place.

And finally, leave it the hell are alone. After you've made it, and we've moved in, back off. The one area of WoW that worked in a sandbox style, that gave you social interaction, that made you log on to the game for reasons in of itself, was the auction house. And it was the one area that Blizzard stuck in and for the most part left alone. Let the players drive it by their actions, not by what they complain to you about on a message board, (ironies!!)

Hi all,

First time poster, but with news of this new MMO release I feel that I have to jump in with my 2 cents.
I am an MMO blogger, and have been playing MMO's and RPG computer games for many years. I started playing D&D way back in 1984. I've been playing Pathfinder for the last year, (got myself a sexy cleric).

Since Blizzard released the total disaster that was the Cataclysm expansion, a bunch of us bloggers have been writing on the subject of what it would take to make a successful fantasy MMO to appeal to the original gamer crowd, the crowd that at present is disenfranchised within its own community due to the mass marketing of MMO titles to the lowest common denominator.

We understand that MMO companies must show a profit, but in attempting to appeal to everyone they have in the last few years appealed to nobody. People still play, but only because there is nothing else.

We feel that there is a huge market gap at present for a sandbox fantasy MMO, along the lines of what you have put forward with this Pathfinder title. This has become even more apparent in recent days with the release of Skyrim and the positive effect it has had on the community. Many bloggers have written that if only a MMO could foster the same feeling and atmosphere that Skyrim does.

I do not know what talent you have working on this project, and the last trap you want to fall into is trying to appeal to fanboys. But we have written and argued this point back and forth for the last year, and I am of the opinion that some of what has been written could be of interest to you. I write this not to promote various blogs but to try and help you succeed in your goal.

If you're interested I recommend the following blogs:

Eldergame www.eldergame.com
Nils blog www.nilsmmoblog.blogspot.com
Hardcore Casual www.syncaine.com
Tesh www.tishtoshtesh.com
Tobold www.tobolds.blogspot.com
Gevlon www.greedygoblin.blogspot.com

My own blog is www.thenoisyrogue.wordpress.com

Check out the blogrolls on these blogs for other excellent bloggers. I will be promoting this new MMO and will spread the word amongst the blogging crowd. I would have sent this directly to the developers without posting on the forum but I couldn't find a contact email, and anyway I'm sure that others might want to chime in on this as well.

I sincerely wish you the best of luck in your endeavours and hope that you produce the fabulous MMO that we have been waiting a long time for.

Adam.