Patch 2.2, Accessibility, Difficulty Levels, and Throwing Away Content

[Worm]

Similar ideas to what I'm suggesting have already been done by other games, and they didn't crash and burn because players didn't get to bump their iLVLs up every six months to a year.

Would you list some? I'm kind of interested in what you define as a crash and burn.

Also don't you think a game with really good content which is gated and has power creep would be reasonably successful? I feel like you're making too much of an equivalency between the lack of two things you don't like and a game being good. You still need really good content and game management, which more often than not is the problem with these games.

[ApolloGenX]

Would you list some? I'm kind of interested in what you define as a crash and burn.

Also don't you think a game with really good content which is gated and has power creep would be reasonably successful? I feel like you're making too much of an equivalency between the lack of two things you don't like and a game being good. You still need really good content and game management, which more often than not is the problem with these games.

There is a substantial difference between the amount of power scaling between "tiers" in a game like Everquest and in a game that follows the formal WoW tier structure like this game. In EQ, there was a blend. The expansions were very broad and deep, with gear quality overlapping well up into the expansion, with the high end raid gear pulling ahead. In many cases this was with additional effects, clickable effects, or later with new types of stats that were relevant to the raids in that expansion.

Why does this matter? Because core power could remain steadily increasing, without a huge leap... but effects could change in relevancy from expansion to expansion, without characters becoming massively overpowered on the whole.

Example: Luclin brought gear with Flowing Thought (that was originally VERY rare)... but it introduced negative stats to pay for it, except for the most exclusive Vex Thal gear. PoP brought armor sets with spell enhancement, while GoD introduced DoT shielding. PoP gear was still useful in GoD. DoT shielding was just a nice stat relevant to those raids. Luclin gear became obsolete for most people in late PoP, but that was because the level was raised.

That is how gear should work. It should stay relevant in the level range, and become obsolete when levels are raised, not because new content makes the prior content in-tier pointless. You can have a whole array of effects, clickables, divergent stats, whatever for a level range of gear- offering a huge variety of options for a max level character.

Why would you not have thematic gear for your raid releases? They could all be comparable but follow different themes... all sets could be viable, but if you have three high end raids, you could have one set that is optimal (the effect provided) for tanks, one for healers, one for dps... it's not difficult to think beyond the Ilevel rush oversimplified system we have in place.

I still remember getting my (ethereal mist?) armor on my EQ cleric. Multiple planes had similar gear, but I wanted EM for the look- it was purple. Loved it.

[itscoreylol]

Yawn, another blah blah blah I want FFXI 2.0 horizontal progression thread.

An MMO of that nature wouldn't survive in todays market. I also want more difficult content because I'm all for content inaccessibility so I can lord my purples over the plebians in mor dhona though.

[Fendred]

Without going into specific MMOs, it is difficult to talk about why certain MMORPGs crash. The biggest problem of the last decade was developers copying WoW's system down to the letter and trying to put a new coat of paint on it. SWTOR was a monumental project with a lot of hope behind it that turned into the colloquially named "Tortanic" due to every aspect of its gameplay being a direct WoW rip off. The real issue though, came after the release, where the developers blamed the quickly bleeding player base on a lack of end game content, when clearly many of the players were leaving before they even reached end game.

Because we have all played the same system for so long, people who regularly play contemporary MMORPGs know at some level the problems with these kinds of systems, probably even moreso than the people designing the games. One of those is the upwards progression associated with WoW. The thing is, you can make a game's content have lasting value, since every other genre of game does that. Someone who beats Skyrim will get the same satisfaction now that people who beat it back in 2011 did. Certainly they have fixed a ton of bugs and problems since then, but the experience is just polished, not permanently altered or changed. Not to mention they also add new stuff without irreversibly changing the old.

It also hurts the RPG elements of the game to constantly expand upwards. If a sword is supposed to be a relic of great power, why would it suddenly become irrelevant statistically in the story the second Leviathan is encountered? Must we ascend an endless ladder of supposedly priceless holy relics apparently each more powerful than the last for no explicable lore reason just to down a boss? MMORPGs already have enough story telling problems as is.

[NefGP]

FFXI lasted for a solid 9 years (abyssea launch) until it started to really lose most of its base (WoW took a sizeable bite out of it but it still maintained a steady 500k subs while other MMOs came and went, barely lasting a year or 2)

The current market be damned, all it shows is it's a volatile, fickle group of people who either don't know what they want or got burned by the failings of traditional MMOs. This is why I still love XI and feel like it was a model that just needed improving, not discarding. Can check my other threads for more detailed posts as I'm not about to rehash the pages and pages of examples I've given, but suffice to say if it ain't broke don't fix i, which is exactly what's happened both post 1.23 XIV and post-abyssea XI;


For all the improvements ARR's made (and it has fixed just about every gripe I had with XI) it's thrown away what made XI such a good, lasting and (IMO) revolutionary game.

[Ketra]

Instead of patching in more and more HM dungeons... And no one plays them. It is very very obvious, I don't see anyone looking dungeon party in FC, LS, PF, shouts, etc.

Why bother making content when no one wants to do them. Not even casuals are doing them. Casuals are mostly doing EMs and Coil 1-4.
In 2.2 HM halati will be obsolete the next day after it's release.

I suggest SE look into FFXIV's itemization. Or even make HM dungeons more exciting and challenging than wasting time making them a cake walk that no one ever walks to walk through again.

[Virgil]

XIV is fucked. I hope I'm wrong, but with the way things seem to be going it seems much more likely than not.

MMO's since WoW have been disappointment after disappointment and I'm honestly losing my faith in the genre as a whole.

[kukurumei]

Why bother making content when no one wants to do them. Not even casuals are doing them. Casuals are mostly doing EMs and Coil 1-4.
In 2.2 HM halati will be obsolete the next day after it's release.

There's a lot wrong with that I don't know where to begin.

Considering that Yoshi's own internal data directly goes opposite of what you're saying...you're not only wrong, you're proven wrong. Roulette has been a boon for the "casuals" and not so casuals. Most dungeons are still played.

[Velhart]

Without going into specific MMOs, it is difficult to talk about why certain MMORPGs crash. The biggest problem of the last decade was developers copying WoW's system down to the letter and trying to put a new coat of paint on it. SWTOR was a monumental project with a lot of hope behind it that turned into the colloquially named "Tortanic" due to every aspect of its gameplay being a direct WoW rip off. The real issue though, came after the release, where the developers blamed the quickly bleeding player base on a lack of end game content, when clearly many of the players were leaving before they even reached end game.

I'm not debating on the topic of "throw away content." However, the reasons for SWTOR's faults at launch were not as you say. I played on day one as a Bounty Hunter from 1-50 and while the leveling experience was a blast and a wonderfully written story, when you got to end game, there was almost little to nothing to do. Barely any content to keep a PvE player the least bit satisfied till the next major patch, and any dungeons we spammed led to conflict with the story within the dungeon we still had to endure each time and fighting over with others to take the dark or light route because people needed to get their Dark Side or Light Side leveled up. Having no Duty Finder system itself was unappealing to players who have been spoiled by other MMO's with it. PvP was horrifically unbalanced to the point that the opposing sides were literally helping each other stack up points through an exploit.

It wasn't because it was "a WoW clone," SWTOR simply did not offer the quality it promised and was plagued with issues to the point that people didn't care to stay on it and moved to the next MMO. Actually, the battle system and UI were probably the best mechanics of SWTOR's system. It was smooth, fast paced, fun and utilizing simple tasks were great with a UI that worked well. Even then, SWTOR is not a failure game, they are still pushing content out and still have a fairly sized fanbase to keep it up and running.

[ZoroRoro]

GW (1st one) remains my favorite. The dual class system with builds was great. Expansion packs had fun stories. All the toons' /dance moves were hilarious. And Ritualists were the best.