What is one aspect of MMO design past or present that wish was added or taken away.

[Shurrikhan]

What the new experience lacks is preemptive commitment. In old MMO dungeoneering, you had to commit to even get to the dungeon. This lent itself to the experience, and was directly part of said experience, and the more out of the way the dungeon was, the more locked in people were to complete the task at hand. Compare/contrast with the modern experience of, unlock dungeon > Queue > Wait on Queue > Do dungeon > Leave.

See, what I find odd there is I typically had slightly more parties fall apart from leavers back when I had to run to the dungeons than when simply match-made and teleported to. What with the time to FP and ride and wait for XdoUrdenX or Caticus Majesticus to finish up some quest on the way, etc., the added punishment (in terms of time lost/wasted) for failing/disbanding was still faintly outweighed by their added annoyance going in. Maybe I just got consistently unlucky for those ~four years, but I didn't really see that preemptive commitment paying off, since as much as the investment time increased -- and, one would think, the added pressure to actually complete the run -- so, too, did tensions.

Personally, my favorite dungeoning experiences were variously late night matchmaking queues here, in Wrath of the Lich King, and in Blade & Soul. On average, a third of my party would be people I'd run with last time, and half of them from within the last two runs, but the runs themselves felt very low-stress, with plenty of chat between fights despite having no additional pressure to work with one another; I might even say it felt more friendly because we didn't feel in any way like a captive audience/cohort.

__________________


Additionally, I feel like we have a slight disconnect here (my fault, though):

Dungeons are part of the world, yes, even in FFXIV. They're segregated though by their instance boundary. The old dungeons were part of the world too, but only separated by their zone line. You could enter them alone, even if you stood no chance against what was inside, but you could exit just as easily.

(Gets a bit long)

Perhaps I should have specified dungeons in the larger, more experiential or holistic sense. Admittedly, though, perhaps I'm subconsciously hedging or muddying this question more than I should...

For me, the question is how sort of tied the experiences are together, in the same sense as "characters" or "lore" might be tied back to the open world, or not. It's not really a yes-no question so much as one of degree.

When the open world is rich with clues, its scale seems appropriate for what the lore says is happening there, we can say that the open-world and lore are very well tied together. When those clues instead come primarily from external/auxiliary sources and/or there seems poor alignment between the lore and what one actually sees (e.g., a three-village nation-state like Doma, a small caldera in which so many warring Au Ra clans can manage not to kill each other when only a few minute's jog apart, etc.), that relationship is far more tenuous.

We can always say that in a sense characters are, yes, technically part of the open world because we interact with them in that space, and lore is, yes, part of the open world in that every clue can be thought to have ultimately come from or through some location tied to player-visible zones (even if perhaps future ones instead), but is that enough to say that characters or lore "are a part of the open world"? If our thoughts about a given character are inseparable from the open world or its sort of encapsulating experience, and the "stuff" (motivations, settings, etc.) that intersect in a character also intersects with the open world (e.g., when we think about Hien's motivations, we cannot help but think about similar thoughts we had when going through Doma), then to me that's sufficient to say "characters" as implemented in the game "are part of the open world". After all, they'd then be adding to the open world experience, and the open world experience not only adding to them but also being requisite for anywhere near their full experience.

But dungeons? That's been hit and miss. I can't say South Shroud did a damn thing to situate Toto-rak, for instance, except to introduce part of its color palate. Doma Castle, on the other hand? Decently situated. It could be better, but I can't say the dungeon would be any better for it. And perhaps that's the more essential criteria: Do dungeons share criteria for success that would seem iconic to the open world? Does our perception of the dungeon vary with those prior successes in the open world? Or are they largely separate -- their relationship little more than arbitrary (like one's relationship with a city when their house sits at its edge but one only ever really eats out or meets with anyone near their work, several cities away)?

I don't know. If that earlier came off as a trick question, I didn't mean it to be. If it has now come off as a very murky, confusing, or otherwise existentialist question, it wasn't meant to be that either, but I can't argue with the description.

[Shurrikhan]

As for horizontal gear progression/maintenance being required to do things you care about... mmm... I can only speak so much to that. In old MMOs there was often a way to get equivalent gear or gear that almost as good as the best stuff you could pursue, if you did a different piece of content. This sometimes lent itself to getting you a foot in the door of a group doing said content that you want to do. I don't like that as a design route, but it wasn't always a bad thing. Certainly another growing pain sort of thing, with devs trying something, and then finding that people hate it. But you could also say, in some cases anyway, that it was a playerbase driven route anyway. Like in FFXI, for instance, it was entirely possible to enter into any of the endgame scenarios in gear you could purchase from the Auction House, but the number of Linkshells that would take you to content right away were either ones just forming or ones desperate for members or desperate for your job. The closest analogue to this now is iLvl restriction in PFs. Though all of the extreme/savage content doesn't require more than semi-skilled i510 geared people, people often request higher iLvls because they're looking to be fast and efficient and let mistakes be made up for by gear.

Apologies for the split replies, but this is its own bucket of worms, imo, so I thought it might be best discussed separately.

To me, the goal of horizontal progression should primarily be to give a sense of incidental commitment. A bit of a paradox, I know. But consider:

When a game is new, horizontal progression tends to work nicely in that people become the best at something gear-wise merely in the course of becoming the best at something knowledge-wise.

Especially in a game with incredible attention to open world cohesion (ideal/theoretical example here -- bear with me), just as you grind such and such area in Monster Hunter, you're also learning the attacks and behaviors of those mobs from which their predators and those predator's predators attacks and behaviors derive, along with the environment and pathing that might allow you to beat a given rare or boss. It's not-quite-generalizable progression, and while that can feel bad in certain senses, it can often form a net positive in player satisfaction. It acknowledges your mastery and your time spent in a particular space, among particular mechanics and/or characters, activities, etc.

Moreover, it makes the game a bit less linear on the whole, in that there is more overlap in power necessary (i.e., gear-checks) as one moves up and through zones or similarly packaged activities. Horizontal progression can therefore help a game avoid that attention-deficient or thin-spread feeling of, say, retail WoW before Chromie time, in which people would barely have started experiencing a zone before moving onto another (or, even afterwards, if one fully optimizes that experience into a single leveling path each time -- albeit for greatly increased boredom at minor efficiency gains).

But consider the opposite ends, when (1) the game is older and all mathed out -- especially if it's not highly balanced -- and/or (2) doesn't merely concern different takes on a similar gameplay loop (as per zones) .

By then we know where we should go at each step, and while the horizontal progression can still help us from seeming to spend too large a portion merely traveling or otherwise feeling too touch-and-go, it's still adding a sense of static friction that, once everything's laid out before you anyways, players will perceive as holding them back more often or greatly than they perceive it as rewarding their engagement/efforts. Worse, if it separates altogether different gameplay loops, then it, naturally, would seem to separate your Dungeon-runners from your Rare-hunters from your PvPers from your Crafter-Gatherers, etc., such that a player feels they have less freedom to explore the world as they please, since they'd be held back by those gear requirements and the added time investment required to progress in each path.

Now, to an extent, that can still be reasonable. For instance, gear-checks can be a good thing if (and perhaps only if) they have very strong correlation with other things we wish to check. This is in part what I mean by "incidental". If the gear is merely something to make visible an altogether different and more necessary/fundamental sort of progression, such as learning, then that's progression one would have had to spend time towards either way. So long as that is clear to the average player, the playerbase isn't likely to begrudge that process of gearing up. They'd likely even appreciate finding fellow hunters or body-guards or PvPers or dungeon-crawlers or the like out in the open world, and knowing where, approximately, their teammates stand in terms of relevant knowledge just from the gear they're wearing. Heck, it can add to immersion, too.

But that is an awful lot of things that have to right. You'd need to have deep systems that make those rewards pertinent, gear would have to be capable of enough detail to match said systems (rather than a T4 of one path being better than T3 of another even in the latter's path), the gear cannot for the average player be the primary reward sought after, the gear can't be the markedly best option for something outside its own path (else you force people to play something their not directly interested in), etc. etc. That's not to say we shouldn't ever attempt something like this, but there's an awful lot going on beneath the hood. We can't rightly say "horizontal progression good" and call it a day -- not that you have, of course.

And, hell, even vertical progression is still rather worm-ridden. My post from before wasn't exactly joking when I requested that we

drop the majority of vertical gear progression -- i.e., all but the parts that would most inspire / appeal to a [typical] player.

[Vyrerus]

what I find odd

This is where my lack of variety in MMOs fails me, as I've only experience specific subsections of specific MMOs. I've only ever really played Runescape when it was 2D into a couple years of it being 3D(3D is now considered classic, which is very odd to me). FFXI, FFXIV, Guild Wars 1 ever so slighty, and about 45 minutes of Everquest before my friend kicked me off and got back to his grind lol.

In FFXI, quest design was so obtuse that there wasn't often multiple lumpings of quests or missions. Like, if I went and shouted for 5-3 CoP Mithran Trackers fight, that is literally all the group would be focused on doing, with literally nothing else in mind (except more CoP progression if the group stuck together after). Perhaps if we ran into a Notorious Monster along the way, and were actually of level to kill it... an incidental pause might occur, but in general stuff like that rarely happened. Getting to most boss arenas or fight entrances usually took your group through very dangerous monster grounds, so you had to stick together, ideally using sneak/silent oil/prism powder/invisibility spells/items and fighting anything that could detect through those. Not saying I never had groups disband, but it was fairly uncommon. Anecdotal, I know, but I've had far more abandoned duties in FFXIV, though this is partially due to how fast we can cycle through the content and how fast people can get back into it.

I think one of the biggest weaknesses of convenience based MMO design is that it gives players the impression that they can have it all if they're efficient. I guess I can't 100% say old MMO dispelled that illusion, but I knew a sight less people who tried to do it all in older MMOs.

As for dungeons being part of the world, uhh... we're given in game descriptions of what they are, where they are, and how they fit into the world. If you do the zone sidequests, then they generally fit in nicely with what you learn about each area. I will say that their visibility does hinder some of them, as some of them seem like they are not entrances to what the dungeon actually is, but then again, why design an elaborate dungeon entrance that gives the dungeon a presence in the overworld, if all it is to most players is a queue box checked or not?


Also to be fair, the modern day scenario for dungeons is quite a bit better, given that they actually have explanations as you certainly unlock them. In Ye Olde days, dungeon entrances were either very obvious or not. A lot of dungeon entrances in FFXI were literally just sudden zone lines in caves or between trees that you never saw until you hit them. There was no such thing as unlocking a dungeon, except for the super special endgame story mission related ones, but I guess it's also true that these old dungeons often had multiple entrances, some of which affected where you could actually go in the dungeon. This gave those particular dungeons a feeling as though they were innately part of the world, since said dungeons often were the subterranean area beneath overworld zones.

FFXIV basically gives us holes in the wall or dungeons as connecting tunnels(Sohm Al, loosely Ala Mhigo, Drowned Skalla, Hell's Lid). Most are holes in the wall, but they can't really be designed in many other ways due to the need for dungeons to be short and punchy as dictated by convenient design. I prefer when they connect us to something, both by story or physically, but it's just not meant to be with how convenient design eschews the overworld anyway.

[Dzian]

I can understand that perspective, but not all players play for the same reasons. Perhaps I'm in the minority, but I really enjoy the focus on an epic story that I'm involved in, since I play FFXIV almost exclusively as a solo affair.

Changing the focus doesn't necessarily change the epicness or mean your character is less involved.

This is one if the biggest differences between xi and xiv. Xi is very workd centric. Vanadiel is the centre of the universe and everything in game rotates around vanadiels rules.. eorzea is just a lifeless world that bends to the player consistently. And serves as little more than a lobby for the next instance battle. Because on xiv you the player are the centre of everything. In a big way. Those 3 7 or 21 other people in your party are all nobodies as far as the world is concerned. And if you can't succeed at something the world changes the rules and makes it easier for you...

However the differences don't necessarily change your involvement. Or epicness. I still have fond memories to this day of that epic battle verses the shadow Lord back in the day in xi.. and I could name every person that was in the party when we did it. Or beating other epic fights like tenzen in cop or Alexander in toau. All still epic moments despite the world being centre stage and not the player. XIV the only thing that ever cameclose to feelingepic was smashing bahamut in ARR. everything else basically feels handed to you on a platter. Theres msq instances you can go afk and still win.

If anything xiv being player centric often ruins things. It's been said many times that it makes no sense that you as the player are the slayer of gods and mighty primals. So why in the world are we killing a bunch of bugs destroying some random farmers crops..

but id love to see crowd control, exploitable weaknesses and vunerabilities and all that stuff come back add some actual depth to the comabt instead of this shallow mindless zerg till dead.. mobs are so boring.. a level 80 has the exact same defence toughness and resistances as a level 1 ladybug in thanalan.. easily tested by goin out there tossinga spell and then using the same spell against a level 80 boss. exact same damage.... the only difference between mobs is how much hp they have.. which is lame and boring.. variety and diversity wouldbe so cool. mobs that are tough as nails heavily armored but slow, mobs that are soft and squishy but agile and fast as hell. as well asvaryingelemental properties and stuff... would open the door for somereal job identity anddiversity and get rid of this homogenized boring af system we have now where eveything is exactly the same..

final fantasy 14 where you can play every job on one class but they all play the exact same so what does it matter.

[Shurrikhan]

I prefer when they connect us to something, both by story or physically, but it's just not meant to be with how convenient design eschews the overworld anyway.

Same, more or less. I wouldn't want them all to be that way, but between a totally optional dungeon and an MSQ one, especially where it feels like a necessary and iconic step in that storyline, the latter's going to have an almost inherent bump in quality for me.

I think that's what felt so pivotal/iconic about many a single-player FF dungeon. And while I'm sure some would be quick to, just because those dungeons happened to be in single player games, pretend those designs would be impossible in an MMO, I'd argue there's nothing inherently different about them outside of the ability to further overgear them (albeit as an inefficient use of time) in single-player; they're both just MSQ dungeons after all, with very similar concerns as to accessibility and unique challenges.

Those design constraints are also why I've been thinking a lot over the years about how the daily roulette systems (especially the likes of Expert), etc., might be doing more harm than good, at least as presently implemented, in that any flat reward will tend to either homogenize the content it applies to or disappoint whomever randoms a dungeon that's slower than the quickest possible option.

A quick but far from comprehensive improvement, for instance, might be to (1) have the dungeon rewards themselves become scaled towards the best reward-per-minute possibility -- such that when you do a 50/60/70/80 roulette, even doing a 50 dungeon would still give an average party the tomes per minute of having done the most rewarding 80 dungeon -- and (2) show the number of people already specifically queued for a given dungeon, including whether there'd likely be a Sprout bonus to pick up.

This is where my lack of variety in MMOs fails me, as I've only experience specific subsections of specific MMOs.

Eh, that's still a decent sample size, if maybe a bit skewed towards tab-target games (not that such changes the dynamics of the dungeoning group experience in terms of party retention -- only in how teamwork likely functions).

Mine isn't that much more expansion, though a bit more shifted towards the modern: WoW, XIV, some XI (own and friend's account, mostly DRK, RDM, WAR, RNG), GW2, Path of Exile, Blade & Soul, Vindictus, Aion, Tera, Warhammer Online, Secret World, Neverwinter Nights, a bit of ESO, some Lineage II way back when, Archeage (not much), Black Desert Online (again, just enough to really get a feel for the combat and world, not the near-endgame grind). That puts "action" MMOs as the larger sample space, slightly, but I've ultimately far, far more hours on tab-target ones. That's enough to make me an unhealthy MMO addict, but it still leaves me far from having any sort of comprehensive understanding of the genre.

I think one of the biggest weaknesses of convenience based MMO design is that it gives players the impression that they can have it all if they're efficient. I guess I can't 100% say old MMO dispelled that illusion, but I knew a sight less people who tried to do it all in older MMOs.

This is true, but I'd say it has more to do with perceivable reward thresholds than convenience itself. By those, I am referring to, say, our daily roulettes or weekly challenge logs, etc., for which completion offers (or at least appears to offer) greater reward per minute spent. This can make them feel, to some players, obligatory. While those thresholds give you a bit more to work towards or look forward to at the start, they also work a bit like any fatigue system thereafter. (To be fair, systems of bonus reward/experience up to a set point and decreased reward/experience after a set point are just two sides of the same coin -- identical so long as they scale evenly.) More importantly, they also reduce your own agency, sort of instilling a certain pacing in place of whatever you'd prefer. In some cases that can be good, as you might otherwise not care to play at all without that carrot dangled in front of you (or the stick, via the threat of falling behind on the leveling/gearing treadmill), but I feel that's an issue already largely mitigated by just having a game that's inherently fun to play, and the more you saturate those intrinsic rewards with extrinsic ones, the more the prior's appeal is muddied and caused to rust.

[Gabadabs]

Changing the focus doesn't necessarily change the epicness or mean your character is less involved.

However the differences don't necessarily change your involvement. Or epicness. I still have fond memories to this day of that epic battle verses the shadow Lord back in the day in xi.. and I could name every person that was in the party when we did it. Or beating other epic fights like tenzen in cop or Alexander in toau. All still epic moments despite the world being centre stage and not the player. XIV the only thing that ever cameclose to feelingepic was smashing bahamut in ARR. everything else basically feels handed to you on a platter. Theres msq instances you can go afk and still win.

If anything xiv being player centric often ruins things. It's been said many times that it makes no sense that you as the player are the slayer of gods and mighty primals. So why in the world are we killing a bunch of bugs destroying some random farmers crops..

but id love to see crowd control, exploitable weaknesses and vunerabilities and all that stuff come back add some actual depth to the comabt instead of this shallow mindless zerg till dead.. mobs are so boring.. a level 80 has the exact same defence toughness and resistances as a level 1 ladybug in thanalan.. easily tested by goin out there tossinga spell and then using the same spell against a level 80 boss. exact same damage.... the only difference between mobs is how much hp they have.. which is lame and boring.. variety and diversity wouldbe so cool. mobs that are tough as nails heavily armored but slow, mobs that are soft and squishy but agile and fast as hell. as well asvaryingelemental properties and stuff... would open the door for somereal job identity anddiversity and get rid of this homogenized boring af system we have now where eveything is exactly the same..

final fantasy 14 where you can play every job on one class but they all play the exact same so what does it matter.

I mean... I enjoy having things handed to me on a platter? It's not like I'm doing high level raiding or really much multiplayer content outside of the occasional dungeon.
For me XIV is a game that I go to to feel like a superhero and relax, I don't feel that I should need to "earn" that. My sub should be enough payment for me to continue to get what I like out of this game.
It reminds me of when everyone told me how much better classic WoW was VS retail, and I always felt that the opposite was true. Grinding through it's cobbled together zones doing massive quantities of menial chores, essentially, wasn't fun.
You had to earn cool gear, and work a lot. Which isn't why I play these games.

[Ultaniku]

I wish, which i know won’t happen in XIV, they had the classes that were a little more diverse. Example, like a dps who in general had weak damage but could like debuff and such. Or flip it, a job who’s main goal is to buff and support their party members and have lower damage themselves. I don’t mean dancer or bard style of support either. I know this isn’t how XIV will ever work, but it’s just wishful thinking.

[Puremallace]

MMO Design? I hate RMT cash shops with a passion. EA made them acceptable but there was a long period of time where an MMO would lose a VERY large percent of their playerbase for putting things in the cash shop.

[ReynTime]

Changing the focus doesn't necessarily change the epicness or mean your character is less involved.

This is one if the biggest differences between xi and xiv. Xi is very workd centric. Vanadiel is the centre of the universe and everything in game rotates around vanadiels rules.. eorzea is just a lifeless world that bends to the player consistently. And serves as little more than a lobby for the next instance battle. Because on xiv you the player are the centre of everything. In a big way. Those 3 7 or 21 other people in your party are all nobodies as far as the world is concerned. And if you can't succeed at something the world changes the rules and makes it easier for you...

However the differences don't necessarily change your involvement. Or epicness. I still have fond memories to this day of that epic battle verses the shadow Lord back in the day in xi.. and I could name every person that was in the party when we did it. Or beating other epic fights like tenzen in cop or Alexander in toau. All still epic moments despite the world being centre stage and not the player. XIV the only thing that ever cameclose to feelingepic was smashing bahamut in ARR. everything else basically feels handed to you on a platter. Theres msq instances you can go afk and still win.

If anything xiv being player centric often ruins things. It's been said many times that it makes no sense that you as the player are the slayer of gods and mighty primals. So why in the world are we killing a bunch of bugs destroying some random farmers crops..

but id love to see crowd control, exploitable weaknesses and vunerabilities and all that stuff come back add some actual depth to the comabt instead of this shallow mindless zerg till dead.. mobs are so boring.. a level 80 has the exact same defence toughness and resistances as a level 1 ladybug in thanalan.. easily tested by goin out there tossinga spell and then using the same spell against a level 80 boss. exact same damage.... the only difference between mobs is how much hp they have.. which is lame and boring.. variety and diversity wouldbe so cool. mobs that are tough as nails heavily armored but slow, mobs that are soft and squishy but agile and fast as hell. as well asvaryingelemental properties and stuff... would open the door for somereal job identity anddiversity and get rid of this homogenized boring af system we have now where eveything is exactly the same..

final fantasy 14 where you can play every job on one class but they all play the exact same so what does it matter.

I agree with most of the sentiment here, but I actually never played XI.

[Elladie]

I wish they would lose the Duty Finder and go back to the old days when you put up your flag and waited for an invite to a levelling party. You earned your levels with other people on your server so you couldn't behave badly or else you got a reputation for being a dick. Ahhhh the nostalgia. I made some great friends in those old levelling parties, people I'm still friends with today, people I play XIV with. Yes I know it won't happen, but I do truly wish it would. Not that I ever use DF anymore, I run with Trusts or friends if I really need a dungeon