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DAoC To Ameliorate Level Grind With Giveaways
Thanks to an anonymous reader for pointing to a 'State Of The Game' statement for PC MMO Dark Age Of Camelot, courtesy developers Mythic Entertainment, explaining that "We want to go even farther [to accommodate casual MMO gamers] and we will do so over the next few weeks." The "Gift of the Realm" system for the MMO is then explained, in which: "At certain time intervals... players will be able to go to their trainer and receive special rewards for their character. These rewards will include a new experience level as well as gold on a weekly basis. These changes are designed to help the casual as well as the new player succeed more quickly in DAoC." Could this be a solution to help reduce the grind in many MMOs? Update: 07/30 16:05 GMT by S : A commenter points to further details in a follow-up post from Mythic's Matt Firor.
here.
"Useless organic meatbag" -HK-47
Can't they make everybody level 60 with all artifacts and everything to begin with?
Like Carey in "Whose line is it anyway?": "Everybody gets a million points"
Oh, I see, the whole point of the game is to find the stuff and get the experience.
I see.
They're screwed. They are spoiling the children with faster and better toys.
Whatever happened to the days of 1d4 magic missiles?
"Piter, too, is dead."
One of the problems with DAOC is the new leveling grinds they keep adding with every expansion pack. All of these new grinds add benefits to lvl 50 characters, so even though you thought you were done grinding, every new expansion pack adds more grinding for all. If you started a brand new character today on a brand new account without knowing anyone on the server, I would hate to see the amount of gameplay it would take to get you to a lvl 50 with nice armor, a few artificats and a ML 10.
Johnkoerner.com
I wonder if they really will attract any casual players with this? If I were a casual MMOG gamer, it seems to me that a game like World of Warcraft or City of Heroes would offer more for me than any of the other crop out there right now, no matter how much they try to redeem themselves. In the sea of banality that is MMOGs right now, DAOC has exactly nothing to set itself apart from the masses of other MMOGs
I'm funny. If you come see me perform, I will make you laugh.
So you give kids levels faster... ok sure.
But remember this is DAOC, a huge point of the game is RVR combat. Levels are only a small part of the RVR equation. All this is is cutting down a little bit of one treadmill so people can focus on the other treadmill.. oh did we mention the other treadmill involves your greenhorn character getting his ass pounded by over and over again by other players who have more Realm Abilities and all sorts of other goodies that only killing in RVR combat can gain. Sure you got to 50 faster great.. but when your facing that guy who has more Realm Ranks than you do you can guarentee that you'll be taking a trip back to the bind stone asap.
You still have to keep up with the Jones after you "finish" leveling. Full spellcrafted gear, artifacts, realm levels and whatnot.
Unless you are playing on Ghaeris(the coop server) not alot of difference will be there.
"I am a kernel in the linux army"
an MMORPG with a built in welfare/unemployment system. :)
Couldn't find work (something to kill) this week, so get a free government (trainer) handout.
(And no, this was not meant as Flamebait, just as a joke, although someone will probably moderate it as such.)
--- It's not my fault this post looks redundant. I just type too slow.
I quit DAOC several months ago. I was a casual player and played about 1 hour per day. I grinded through all 50 levels although most of the time it did not feel like a grind. It took close to 2 years I quit because the high level content like Master Levels took a 5 to 10 hour chunk of time. How could they possibly expect people to sit at a computer for that long a period of time (when not at work :) ).
Even RVR takes a large time commitment. By the time you get a decent group moving my hour was up and the wife was yelling.
I don't think free levels is the answer. But making high level content doable for the casual player is a step in the right direction.
Lou Sir
the only way to truly eliminate the "Level Grind" problem in ANY multiplayer online rpg is to REMOVE LEVELS ENTIRELY.
improving your character should be about skills and abilities, not "levels" that somehow magically give you more hit/spell points or greater damage capability or in some other way generally make your character more powerful than some newbie with practically the same character (like same race, stats, etc). this is the sort of stupidity that leads to a situation where a level 10 warrior class who normally fights with a sword, for some reason decided to fight with a weapon he's never used (staff for example) and yet he can still beat a level 5 who has specialized in using the staff as a weapon, just because that level 10 has more hitpoints or some arbitrarily assigned bonus to his WC just for being level 10. it's stupid. that level 5 should be the one who wins in that sort of situation.
As someone who played the game for two years plus waiting for something else...
Is that it will take 3-6 months of playing - grinding away to reach a point where you can be somewhat even competive wise. (right in time for them to nerf your toon type into oblivion)
7 day free trial! *snicker* you might be able to get into a chibi mini battleground, good luck on finding someone to play with/against.
This from a game whos main drawing point was realm vrs realm combat. Yet they did not bother to address some of the hudge problems in RVR for two and a half years after release!
I hope they really loose alot of memberships to the new games out there. (and investors)
Why I agree, most poeple don't...or at least most vocal people.
If you ever present that idea on a messageboard for a game, you'll get instantly rebuked by eveyrone and their dog.
It turns out, most the 'vocal' players of MMORPG live for the level grind, despite their complaints to the contrary. They'll tell you that you HAVE to have levels in order to distinguish all the hard work they put in. They'll tell you it's impossible to have an RPG without levels. They'll tell you that anything else is 'carebear.'
Also, the designers count on the 'crack aspect' of the level grind to keep players....they don't feel like experimenting with anything else.
--Welcome to the Realm of the Hawke--
The best MMO imo coming out will be Guild Wars. I've been following this game very closely since the E34E event. This game in an alpha build, blew my socks off. The game play is not dependent on levels or items so much (although they will be slightly) but much more on strategy. A new character should be able to beat a character that's got 5x's as much time spent in the game as him if the new character has better strategy. Of course, the game isn't released yet, so who knows if it'll live up to the hype. But with no monthly fee on top of all that, it looks great. Good pvp, good story, great graphics, the guys who left Blizzard. This game will be amazing. I'm convinced.
You're comparing (or confusing) apples and oranges. Dungeons & Dragons is to Everquest/DAoC/FFXI as a backyard game of football is to Madden 2005. (Or Madden 2007, or whatever iteration will give you the ability to play a full season online)
Yeah, the basic idea, and even (sometimes) the specific rules are the same... but they're completely different monsters. A pen & paper RPG is about having fun with your friends, and playing a role (hence the freakin' R). When's the last time you ran into somebody in a game online who did that (beyond the superficial use of archaic English)? A player who didn't do a very good job of role-playing was usually penalized - a character who lived only to fight would eventually meet something that was their definite superior, and they ended. Eventually the player learned, or quit. (This is in my experience with a few decent GM's. Your mileage may vary.)
A CRPG, on the other hand... well, before the days of MMORPG's, they were all single-player, and they were more like adventure games with customizable characters. In other words, they were about winning. But that was okay - the only characters who might get their feelings hurt were run by your 8086, 386, PS2, Xbox, or whatever. You're encouraged to 'power-game' on a CRPG - indeed, in a lot of cases, it's the only way to win without putting a huge amount of effort in.
But all that gets screwed up when you combine lots of players with computers. In a paper RPG, if none of the players have a lot of time to devote, the GM will probably advance things pretty quickly - large XP awards, big piles of treasure, whatever. (My campaigns in college come to mind.) On the other hand, when time is all you have (my high school years), you can advance slowly, and take your time at each level, and enjoy yourself a bit more.
But how does that work on a MMORPG? Do you reward people just on time they spend playing, or perhaps the amount of time they subscribe? Do you try to quantify skill in some way, or emphasis problem-solving or reward good role-playing?
The former two you can do with just computers - but the latter three require some degrees of human interaction. And that means paying people to be GM's... and that means the subscription fees would be much, much higher...
I really don't see a good solution for MMORPG's. (If I did, I'd probably be trying to get funding together. ;) ) Then again, that's why I haven't played any of them for more than a one-month trial...
Have you been touched by his noodly appendage?
I've been railing against level-based design since DAoC was in beta, and I couldn't agree more with you.
Levels were conceived for use in a Chainmail/D&D-style setting. They were a convenient yardstick for use by a couple geeks sitting at a card table in someone's basement, with a couple miniatures, a book or two, some graph paper, and a handful of D6s. Sure, levels glossed over virtually every technical aspect of character development, but they were a fair enough approximation for a game driven more by the players' creativity than anything else.
These days, we've got CPUs crunching billions of operations per second. Everything's become more precise; games calculate windage on bullets, have locational hit tables, and crunch a a dozen statistics together just to come up with the damage number that used to be decided by rolling a D6. Yet, despite details in actual combat systems, MMO designers haven't moved beyond the most unnecessarily clunky and burdensome concept in RPGs: levels.
It's disheartening, though: I spoke to a friend about the virtues of lateral character growth, such as skill-based advancement and sliding statistic scales, and the first words out of his mouth were along the lines of "you're taking out levels? What would a player do, then?" Leveling has become such a deeply-ingrained concept that it seems no one even questions its relevance anymore. What could you do without levels? You could focus more on enjoying the gameplay than making the treadmill tolerable. You could have dynamic world events, deformable terrain, real-time war fought by actual players with actual consequences... Instead, it seems all that players expect from the MMO genre is to camp progressively larger variants of bats, rats and snakes, essentially ad nauseum, in some quest to get a new piece of loot and move on to the next to repeat the process.
I had an experience like that with WoW... beta was great, for about a month, before it starts feeling like World of EverUltimaAnarchy of Camelot. They're all fundamentally the same game. The genre's hit critical mass; each new MMO is essentially cannibalizing the player base from the ones before it. But instead of taking their cues from the likes of Horizons and Shadowbane, they just keep cranking out more of the same tripe.
Meanwhile, at least I believe, there's a massive untapped audience for MMOs that want to enjoy the gameplay itself, and won't touch the current incarnation of the genre until something dramatically changes. I know I'm one of 'em, and I think players like me fall at both ends of the MMO scale -- the veterans, who simply aren't impressed with the engine upgrades for Meridian 59 these developers keep trying to pass off as new games, and the non-MMO players, who would rather play a game like Starcraft or Tribes, where their skill matters, and there's actual gameplay to be enjoyed.
But these current MMOs? They're nothing but virtual gambling for virtual prizes. I could do that with Poker on my TI-82 back in high school; the only differences are the fancy graphics, and the 'pleasure' of having thousands of people around who could just as well be replaced with bots.
I'll just remind you that Ultima Online is a skill based game. I've heard they've altered the formula to add prestige classes (gasp! classes), but even then there're plenty of free shards that use the 100% skill based system. On a side note, I've also heard some changes to UO are quite good so the pay service is still worth looking into.
I by no means think UO is the end-all to MMORPGs, though. I also think you're right in saying we could all do without levels. Back when Bioware was designing Neverwinter Nights I was part of a big debate on whether the engine should be real time or turn based (that long ago). My argument was that the rules (2nd edition) had tables for the time duration of movement and combat phases and there's no reason not to let a computer handle all the conversions. At the time I didn't think about it, but now I think the same can be said for leveling and character progression. There is much the computer can handle without the interaction of the player and I think character progression is no exception.
But, I don't play MMORPG's and don't plan to ever so all this discussion is moot. If I cared so much about the genre I would be working on my own game right now because I could. But I think MMORGPs and internet games in general are dull in comparison to games in meat-space. Tabletop role playing, board games , card games, multiplayer console games, LAN games. Oh yeah, they're fun. MMORPGs and Yahoo chess? Like playing my pocket calculator but less interactive. At least it makes moves in a timely manner and doesn't disconnect in the middle of the game or act like an ass hat or a 3D animated screen saver of "roots" "nuke" "nuke" "heal" "sit". No thanks. I'll have the guys and girls over at my house on Fridays and we'll have a better time the old fasioned way.
it reminds me of IE's domination of the browser world. there's better stuff out there, but people are used to seeing the same thing over and over and don't feel like going another route.
which is really a shame. I've been playing Horizons since it went live and had a hell of a fun time with it. I've got buddies that sing the praises of Shadowbane, but by and large those two games are dying off.
and if you're interested in seeing Horizons through my eyes, check out the video that I put together
The World's Worst Webcomic!
Problem is though, people seem to LIKE the level grind, no matter how much they may complain about it. Just take a look at how (un)successful Horizons and Shadowbane are in comparison to the more level-driven comptetition.
I do agree that in this day & age, there really isn't a terribly good reason to use a level-based system. It is just as easy to define a character by a set of skills as it is some arbitrary numbering system. But, for some reason, people gravitate towards games with levels. People apparently like to work for their rewards, and like to have a simple way to compare two characters (I'm level 10, you're level 5, I'm better than you).
yrs,
Ephemeriis
"Work is the curse of the drinking classes." -Oscar Wilde
Of course your 'solution' to remove the grind doesn't remove the grind, it just replaces it with another grind.
Vermifax
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I couldnt agree more. I gave up SWg and Eve because of the stupidity of the level grinding crap.
I thought the RP bit in MMORPG stood for roleplaying. All most MMORPGers want is to get mroe 'l33t loot' and a bigger ship/better sword.
There is no roleplaying, no real virtual world. Just a lot of people competing to see who can get the most stuff fastest. There is enough of that in real life thanks.