Slashdot Mirror
Aion Servers To Merge, XP Grind Softened
Massively reports that NCSoft's fantasy MMO Aion will soon be getting a round of server mergers to balance player populations and shore up in-game economies. A newsletter from Aion producer Chris Hager also brought word that character transfers will be an option starting in June, and NCSoft will be "offering them to all of our players for free for a limited time." This is happening in the lead-up to the game's 1.9 patch, due on June 2, which contains a number of measures to make the XP grind a bit less harsh (among other things; patch notes). They're creating more quests, increasing XP rewards from existing quests, and implementing a system that "grants you experience bonuses as you continue to play."
It always seems to me the Asian mmo's require more grind than a lot of the western mmo's. It's why I've avoided aion entirely and will most likely continue to do so. I'm not even sure it will continue exist a couple years from now. Still it's a pretty game, I think only eve has better graphics in terms of an mmo, granted space isn't super hard to render.
...I'm glad they're taking the time to make my OS grind a bit less when running their game. I never heard of XP rewards though, surely I deserve one? I've been running XP since it came out.
The matrix online is the last server merge i remember. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but three years later and poof, another somewhat decent mmo dead in the water. (there were other glaring issues along with the dwindling population though).Sony did the same thing prior to Mx0's downfall, exp boosting weekends, large server events. Heck they even redesigned the whole combat system after the server merge to make the game more appealing. (at the time the old combat system favoured certain classes far above others in both pve and pvp content).
Do I have to turn in my geek card since I've never heard of Aion? Is slashdot the place I should go to learn whenever some online game changes their game balance?
How many more years will slashdot have an off-by-one error on your Score in your profile?
I played Aion some, but didn't continue after the free period, it just didn't manage to hook me and there's also time constraints these days. Grind is really not the issue though, don't really understand what is everybodys rush to the max level. They should just make the journey there enjoyable. I guess the problem there is that to be effective in PVP you have to be max level. I remember back in the original EQ the leveling was nightmare compared to modern MMOs, but who cared, you played for fun, not to reach top level!
Exp. boosting weekends? Making the game easier? These things sound good on the surface but they're ultimately MMO suicide. This is because MMOs live and die by the perceived value of in-game achievements and items, and that perceived value is dictated by two major factors: how difficult they are to achieve in game, and how valuable you perceive in-game achievement to be to other people. This is fundamental to why people play MMOs at all: Players play MMOs to feel powerful and special.
Firstly, nerfing 'the grind'. Players bitch and moan about it but in the end, if there's no grind and no other challenge, then levelling up becomes meaningless. If the best items are trivial to obtain, then why would players care about getting them? Players only value what took time and effort to acquire.
Secondly, server mergers are THE death knell of any MMO. Why? Because no matter how it's presented, a server merger is always interpreted by the players as "lots of people are leaving the game". The main reason you play an MMO is that everyone else is playing it. If everyone leaves, who is going to admire your shiny epic gear? Players only value things that set them apart from others. If there're no others to admire their achievements, why bother?
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
I played WoW for about a year and a half after release, then put it aside for personal reasons, the foremost one being that I'm a flawed person with an addiction-prone personality!
Played and liked Guild Wars for two years, played and liked Age of Conan for two months, but I'm beginning to see a sameness in nearly all MMOs. Of course each will have their slight variations, but in the end ever subscription MMO is trying to beat Blizzard at what they do best (except Guild Wars...that game marches to the beat of its own drum).
Until a MMOG offers something revolutionary and enjoyable, they might as well name every single one "Not WoW", because that's how their potential customers see it.
I had the same thought... didn't Tabula Rasa (another NCSoft game) go through these same measures a short time before they closed up shop? Server mergers, more moves to bring people in... free periods of time... collapsing down to only a handful of servers, then close.
It's sad that we lose portions of the gaming world, some storylines that have the potential of being interesting, when online gaming servers close. I know TR had the initial potential of being interesting from the intro vid... yes, gameplay was a little poor, but the storyline had some potential. I think though this is possibly the start of the end, whether long (a few years) or short (maybe half year) of Aion.
World of Warcraft nerfs 'the grind' quite often now and from the start it was significantly less grindy than other similar games. Combined with the servers merging it might well be a last ditch effort but reducing grinding isnt neccessarily going to drive people away.
Actually, WoW has exactly the same amount of 'grind' now as it had in Vanilla. My first ever character hit 60 in around 12 days of play time. My rogue (who I started levelling late in Burning Crusade) took around 12 days to hit 70. My paladin (who hit 70 a couple of weeks before Wrath was released) took roughly that amount of time as well. Blizzard has simply disguised the levelling grind with a huge network of quests. The timesink is still there, it's just that instead of kill 500 boars, you have to do 50 quests, each of which involves killing 10 boars. It's less monotonous but it's still there.
As for server merges - when has WoW ever had a server merge? They've used an ongoing series of free transfers to try and balance out realm populations, but I don't recall servers ever merging or being shut down even when this would have been the sensible technical solution. As long as you maintain the illusion of a stable population, the population is likely to stay stable, but any hint of a sudden population drop can easily trigger a wave of fickle players to quit, making the rumoured ghost town a reality.
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
Actually the stereotypical "Players" you describe with their wants & needs and what they value are only the Achiever kind of player in the Bartle Player Type classification (here).
The Explorers, Socializers or Killers do not necessarilly derive any enjoyment from endlessly repetitive tasks.
Even the Achievers don't derive any enjoyment from endlessly repetitive tasks - what they enjoy is achieving something hard or getting something rare or unique: the "hard work" needed to get those hard to get achievements needs not be endless grinding: in fact, complex, difficult encounters with hard to get pre-requisites can be just as satisfying.
The truth is that, in MMORPGs, grinding based game-playing is a cheap way for publishers to create time-sinks in the game instead of spending money in creating real content like areas, dungeons, boss encounters, story quests and others.
While most people that played MMORPGs in the time of UO and the like were willing to live with it (since there was nothing beter), nowadays, there's plenty of MMORPGs out there with massive amounts of content for players to enjoy (in my personal experience, both current WoW - it was worse in the past - and LOTRO are very good in that aspect).
So, you say that mmos are played by sad people who need constant validation from others and feeling of superiority not to quit?
Hint: There are thousands, maybe million of people who play the same game. If you play it to feel special, well, though luck. You will never be special, but one of crowd. Always one of crowd. Your equipment? The way you play? Achievments? They are being cloned over and over by others. The more hardcore you are, the more cookie cutter ("optimized") you will be even.
Grind is always "do something you have now so that you can do something you find fun later". Of course people are going to value it. People are always in denial over time wasted and it feels better to say they value what they did. You are never going to hear basement dweller say that he raids because he does not have anything better than that to do. And of course you are going to value that sword of epeness because noone would ever want to loose it and regrind it over again.
Simply put, it feels that hardcore-ish mmo players are full of shit when they say how they feel about their achievments or what they do.
Just ... accept playing mmo will not make you special. Whatever happened to playing game because it is fun?
-- Technology for the sake of technology is as pathetic as eschewing technology because it's technology.
You say this like it contradicts what I said. Why do you think MMO players complain so much? It's that they're seeking one experience (be the hero that they can't be in real life) but getting a different one (be just another schlub trying to gear up their rogue). You really think that ANY of the current crop of MMOs have interesting enough gameplay to work as single player games?
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
Why don't they then just quit? I mean, you can hunt carrot only for so long before realizing that, yep, i am hunting carrot and i will always be hunting carrot because that is how company turns profit.
I find it amazing that people are taking it so well: First round of quests in first wow expansion basically undone all precious work players did in vanilla by giving up "kill 10 boars" quest rewards beter than stuff that took months to grind. Knowing that once developers release new content, you will be kicked down to average joe level should feel pretty shitty.
---
Anyhow, you can theoretically play Guild Wars as single player, but but us not really average MMO, which coincidentally peaks character power about ~ 10% into game storyline, making it a bit more dependant on "having fun" than "boosting ego"
-- Technology for the sake of technology is as pathetic as eschewing technology because it's technology.
No mention of that, Chris?
After Lineage 2 sank under the groaning weight of bots and hackers, didn't you pledge to deal with that issue from day 1 in Aion with a dedicated bot/hack hunting team? How'd that play out for you?
Oh, and how about the the promises about cracking down on egregious gold farming, and the blatant market in bot-grinded accounts? Got all that sorted did you? Like you said you would?
Speak up Chris, it's all gone a bit quiet.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Aion went through the same thing every other overhyped MMO launch does: convince a ton of people to sign up inititally based on hype, and hope some of them stick around after 2 months.
A bunch of people I play WoW with all quit to play Aion. Within six months, every single one was back. The game has way too much grinding and way too little serious endgame content, especially if you're not a PvP focused player. People got to the level cap, looked around, said "now what?", and quit.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
Doesn't surprise me one bit. No innovation.
It's a pretty game. That's the only good thing I can say.
It has the exact same crafting system everquest shipped with 11 years ago.
I find being offended by me offensive.
I think you are right about the grind. The grind used to be the only mark of achievement and it was boring as hell but the rewards were great and it was the only way to differentiate. But now they are finding better ways then "do this instance 1000 times and you statistically ought to have this item". WoW is winning because they are creating content faster than most people can complete it. Everyone can "win" in wow because time isn't so much of a factor.
Keep the content coming and you can reward people with new gear sooner. Finishing a gear set is the real reward not time spent.
No one cares if you did Blackwing lair a billion times or the new instance 6 times. Once you have the set you have won.. for now. And the player is happy so long as their is somewhere new to go afterward.
It used to be a grind in the first place because there was no point in the player being done with content until their was new content to explore.
Now content can be created at a rate that makes the treadmill less abhorrent.
This is all reinforcement behavior 101. Regular reinforcement and less skill of course. The average gamer doesn't want it to be impossible to obtain anything just because they have sausage fingers.
Prior mmo's had a longer harder progression that fewer people could stomach because they didn't have the subscription base to pay for the developers to develop the content to come out more quickly than people got bored with.
WoW has found the juicy middle ground of consumers with less time who still want to feel like winners and don't want to be bored by content. In affect everyone, who wants to be able to, can continuously win. Keep winning every item you want from each new dungeon before you get bored knowing there is gonna be another dungeon soon. Probably sooner than you are ready to explore it. Require each new dungeon can only be explored by those have explored all prior.
Provide ways to leapfrog certain amounts of earlier material to get new players to the point that they battle through the content that the developers can comfortably stay ahead of. Rinse, repeat.
Disagree. I play a MMO because there are no real MMORPGs available. I don't play to socialize, even though I have made a few friends and played with a few RL friends on WoW. And WoW lacks anything that sets the max level toons apart. 50 max level hunters from 50 servers at the same level of raid progression will be identical except for faces, names and haircuts. I play WoW to entertain myself, not to show off my shinies, that are worthless, as anyone can get anything I have. Not to be powerful, hello, it is a video game. Powerful in a video game means what exactly? And I value the hell out of dragonfin angelfish, although they are not difficult to get, merely a little time consuming. But a few drinks, something good to watch on the other monitor and I can fish for 2 hours and get a couple of stacks. Yep, 77th level, three vanity guildbanks at 5 tabs each, almost a million gold spread out over guild banks and various bank toons. More to my playing than just rush to cap and raid,raid, raid.
Lol, server balance. Tell that to my toons I have on Cho'Gall Alliance side. Been there and /who at 8:15PM server time on a Friday night and there was 39 players on Alliance side in the entire world. Seen as few as 5, with me dual-boxing two of them. But Blizzard says there is no server imbalance.
There seems to be an odd cultural difference for some reason in MMO's, although to be fair I should perhaps also put this party on age.
Aion and similar titles are often defended because they are very pretty... no they are not. They are flashy, but that is not the same as pretty. But when you are 12 or asian, that seems to be the case. Consider a tricked out city car, or if you are really gay an American Chopper versus the clean lines of an e-type. No e-type needs blue leds.
The Asian MMO's seem to play similar to a hack&slash, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bABf-SL3rQQ&feature=related the action takes a while to get going, but notice what happens when he hits an enemy. HUGE floating damage numbers. No western MMO would do that, you have a health bar somewhere on your hud that tells you this. It might seem a small difference but think about what single player games have huge floating damage numbers and which do not. Beat-em-ups and hack&slash games, Mortal Kombat and Bayonetta (sorry if they are mispelled, they are not my kind of game) vs Fallout and well any Bioware game (why are there only two RPG makers?). I dare say that while I did enjoy a bit of Diablo, on the whole the two types of games cater to different types of players.
Aion looks pretty, if you like flashy, at first glance, but its beauty is really only skin deep, it has the same very basic character customization that all asian MMO's have. There is no depth to flash and it lacks functionality. You swing a huge sword around in the same basic animation forever and it never has anything to do with the damage. You can sweep straight through an enemy and miss and do a move on enemy behind you 100 meters and score an instant kill. It is the ultimate example of a spreadsheet game with a disco lightening show bolted on top. Great if you like that, but since servers are being merged, apparently not many do.
Perhaps Asian MMO's are just meant to be played differently, you don't play Diablo when you want to loose yourself in a fantasy world and its rich characters do you? It is often claimed Koreans especially play their games in the social settings of a Internet cafe, were they play for long stretches at a time but do chat, drink, smoke at the same time. A western player is more likely to play alone, at home and be limited to the interaction in the game. I get the impression that a western player expects more downtime between fighting. He has few, smaller battles that give him what he needs. While a Asian player expects to be pounding enemies for an hour straight.
As said, these are impressions, but on the whole, if you want to play Aion coming from a western MMO background, you better be ready for the differences. Expect to grind. Expect the best quests to be on the level of the worsed western quests. Expect player killing. Don't expect raiding. Expect PvP being the only end-game content. Expect items shops. Expect them to matter.
It can be fun, but it is NOT the same as a western game. Really, it is Bayonetta vs Dragon Age. As long as you go into the game knowing this, you might be pleasantly surprised. Sadly many people didn't and expected WoW
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
XP can mean many things. My first thought when I read the title was it was either about Windows XP or Extreme Programming. The farthest thing from my mind was "experience points".
MMOs have become misguided by the quick-fix masses
The above post I completely agree with, why do us westerners want to get to the top level and be the best within a week of the game coming out. I play alot of MMOs and the reason I play is generally the journey, the story, the random walking about wasting time, talking to people. Yet all the big MMOs in the last few years are trying to make all levels in the game but the top most unrewarding. Everyone rushes, THEN everyone complains when they get to the top levels and there is no content? (STO I am looking at you!)
The reason I like EvE-Online, is there is no Grind, Yes the skill training is a bit of a time sinking BUT no grind, no predefined idea of best which I think allows people to be more creative with their end game.
I believe one of the biggest appeals of MMOs is to stand up and be noticed, with sharded servers with caped populations, top level gear (epics) and level cap, everyone in the game has the same goal as everyone else, make MMOs more expressive for the characters themselfs and then people would be less likely to grind. SWG had it down pretty well with a great crafting system that then expanded in to whole cities.
All MMOs do it (as there is simply not enough content to keep people busy for 40 hours a week).
In WoW there is a lot of grinding at max level, you have to grind gold and/or chemistry if you want to raid.
There are many quests but again, most of them is "kill X things", "keep killing things until they drop X thingies".
Must be an NA problem? I haven't seen a gold seller in months on the EU servers.
'Hacking' is a different matter unfortunately - radar hacks are still pretty prevalent (assuming that's what you mean by hacking) - but the first way that NCSoft will think to stop that is by turning GameGuard on, which is not an option i want to see considered.
They never said that. There just isn't much they can do about it, because it's a self-fulfilling problem. Server imbalance breeds more server imbalance. Short of flat out shutting off Horde character creation on the server and offering some crazy Alliance creation incentives, they're powerless to the fact that Alliance players don't want to play there.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
Why don't they then just quit? I mean, you can hunt carrot only for so long before realizing that, yep, i am hunting carrot and i will always be hunting carrot because that is how company turns profit.
They generally don't quit for one of (or a combination of) a few reasons:
1) They've already invested a lot of time into a character, and they don't want to throw that away.
2) They're playing primarily for social interactions and the "grind" is mostly something to do while hanging out with friends, so they don't mind it.
3) They're playing for the end-game raiding, which for many people *does* provide enough enjoyment to balance out any grind.
4) They're playing for the PvP, and they enjoy that enough to balance out a grind.
5) Hope springs eternal, and they suffer through a current grind because looking toward or getting that next shiny really is that much of a reward to them.
I've personally experienced all of those at times (1 a little less so), and I've definitely seen them in people I've played with (I don't play MMOs anymore).
The ringing of the division bell has begun... -PF
Those haven't been killers for WoW, but that may be because WoW got it "reasonably" right to begin with.
Aion, on the other hand, had a brutal grind initially, driving away all but the most hardcore. Releasing a broken MMO and fixing it later doesn't work - see the epic failure of Dark Age of Camelot's Trials of Atlantis expansion. ToA destroyed the game, and by the time Mythic accepted that fact and fixed the problems, their subscriber base had already been decimated.
Too many MMO developers are reactive "we're losing subscribers, fix it!" rather than proactive "WoW is clearly successful - how can we compete with them without being a clone?". Once you're already losing subscribers, it is too late.
I find it amusing that Aion planned to fail from the beginning - They refused to provision enough servers initially because they planned for their populations to drop like a rock, citing Warhammer as an example of "overprovisioning" when in reality, underprovisioning gives your game a perception of being laggy/buggy/badly executed and refusing to address it makes you look like an asshole to your customers, both of which are a killer to MMOs, and Warhammer was underprovisioned initially and just had a shitty game that couldn't retain a subscriber base. The reality is that at least 50%+ of MMO subscribers try a new game because their friends are trying it - If their friends have a bad experience, others won't even give the game a chance. As frustrated as I was with the grind, I was going to continue giving Aion a chance until two of my hardcore gaming friends quit - with them gone, there's no real reason for me to grind.
It says much about the sad state of MMOs these days that said hardcore friends have taken up, of all things, Mafia Wars...
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
"Even the Achievers don't derive any enjoyment from endlessly repetitive tasks - what they enjoy is achieving something hard or getting something rare or unique: the "hard work" needed to get those hard to get achievements needs not be endless grinding: in fact, complex, difficult encounters with hard to get pre-requisites can be just as satisfying."
This is how a non-grindy MMO like WoW appeals to the achievers...
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
"Actually, WoW has exactly the same amount of 'grind' now as it had in Vanilla. My first ever character hit 60 in around 12 days of play time. My rogue (who I started levelling late in Burning Crusade) took around 12 days to hit 70. My paladin (who hit 70 a couple of weeks before Wrath was released) took roughly that amount of time as well. Blizzard has simply disguised the levelling grind with a huge network of quests."
That's not exactly what they're doing, what they're doing is providing a fixed amount of effort required to get to the level cap where the majority of players congregate. The biggest reason to play an MMO is the social aspect (raiding, pvp, even role playing for some people). The 'grind' gives you something to do, as a backdrop to supporting the social aspect. "Bill, do you want to come kill this dragon with us?" "Yeah, i'd love to, need to go get my widgets first though". The 'grind' is there to reinforce commitment to your character, and give you a sense of accomplishment that you share with other players.
Threadcapping MMOs is easy. A GM can give you "Sword of Awesome + 1million" with a few keystrokes, but it would be meaningless. The joy comes from participating in a shared environment, with a common set of rules, that emphasizes social interaction. You don't 'win' Wow or Aion, you go there to have fun.
John Maynard Keynes: "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do?"
One might suggest keeping such indignant retorts and demands (addressed directly to the game producer no less) to the Aion website News comments section.
As completely ignored as that comment section is by the GMs, to say nothing of Chris Hager himself, it's at least a degree of separation closer than posting a reply on slashdot.
Just saying.
If addressing third parties in didactics was good enough for dead Greek dudes, it's good enough for me.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
There is a huge difference between taking you a hundred monsters to level up and taking you four hundred monsters to level up.
The only MMORPG i took time to play was RF Online, and with 30X exp we had to level (as a group, otherwise that was impossible as characters died in literally two hits, tanks in three) on a cave where it took it anywhere from 1 to 3 minutes to kill a mob. The experience table was such that each level needed twice as many mobs to kill. Every mob gave me 0.3%.
I was 8 levels away from the maximum level.
Those were the highest mobs in the game.
That was grinding.
That is pointless.
Oblivion Awaits
here in korea your performance deteriorates if you keep playing to slow people down and get them to take a break.
"2) They're playing primarily for social interactions and the "grind" is mostly something to do while hanging out with friends, so they don't mind it."
Experience boosting weekends and speeding up the grind allow new players to catch up with their friends who are at the level cap so that they can all go raid together. Without server mergers, you may have servers that are so low in population that you can't always get enough people together for a high-end dungeon, so server mergers can help to increase social interaction on low-pop servers by putting you in contact with more people. Heck, I remember people playing on low-pop WoW servers starting forum threads asking for their server to be merged with another for just that reason.
If you don't have the social experience in an MMO, then you may as well go back to playing single-player RPGs. Stuff like this does actually matter on occasion - some of this stuff might get the Aion players who still want to stick around a better chance to hang out together.
Libertarians somehow believe that private businesses should be stronger than governments but weaker than individuals.
pGameGuard, HackShield and all the "pre-packaged" anti-hacking solutions also already have "pre-packaged" bypasses already - aka they have all been already cracked.
This will just deter hacking for at most 2 weeks...
Depends - Blizzard did all these things and more (for instance you can buy special gear to give your next character 20% more exp on everything they do) and they keep gaining subscribers.
There is something to the design concept "it really does need to be fun to play" - never mind how hard it is.
I think WoW scales pretty well - there's plenty of stuff to do even if your terrible at the game, plenty of hard modes to do in raids if you're really quite good at it. Leveling shouldn't be the end all to any mmo - neither should gearing up a character (to a certain extent). Most people are still terrible at the game, and making it easier didn't change that, but at least there's something for those people to do.
My experience with Aion is it feels like a Free to Play game in terms of quality and progression, but they charge for it. Its defining feature - you have a character that can fly - completely feels gimped. The grind past level 30 (despite the amount of times they said they'd fix it) is really awful, but you can buy XP boosters and play on double exp weekends (sounds like F2P to me there), crafting is a horrible grind (someone described Aion's crafting system during the beta as the mmo equivalent of cutting yourself - thats bad press for a "game"). The killer for me is the one feature they borrowed from Lineage/Lineage 2 that makes no sense. You grind your way through a farking dungeon (not even a raid) for 4 sodding hours and the boss only has a *chance* to drop loot - he/she may not drop jack.
To me MMO suicide is server mergers. Your admitting as a company your game isn't successful - its a death knell as your game slowely loses interest the playerbase get smaller and smaller and to keep the game going you have to make the server pool smaller.
Make it sound like it's irrational for people to want to get to max level, while you overlook many of the common reasons for doing so.
1) Many games put more work and emphasis in end-game content, so players feel like that is where they need to be in order to really get what the game offers. It's where the content that lets players set themselves apart by something more than levels occurs (such as high level pvp, raiding, getting the best gear, etc).
2) The older a game gets, the player population tends to be clumped on the higher level end instead of lower levels, making it harder to find groups at lower levels.
3) Often new people join because of friends, so now the new person wants to be able to catch up with their veteran friends.
4) Many MMO's include Player vs. Player combat (even if just optional). Quite often, there is a desire to be higher level in order to have an advantage against other players.
5) Many MMO's include Player vs. Player combat (deja-vu?)... Quite often, players want to get to a higher level in order to defend themselves against higher level players preying on the weak.
6) MMO cultures tend to equate game achievements, such as level, with your skill. It's flawed, but it still exists.
The reasons may not apply to you, and you may not agree with the reasons, but there certainly are many reasons, at least a few of which are completely reasonable.
I don't get it; why is grinding necessary? I always thought it was because the subscription based model required that the developers build BF Skinner's rat in the box model to get the players addicted by incrementally and randomly providing rewards. This is explained in great detail by John Hopson who has a PHD in behavioral and brain sciences. http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3085/behavioral_game_design.php?page=1 Grinding for XP, items or whatever isn't a feature, it's a mechanism designed to do one thing only; get the players to behave a certain way. In other words, keep them playing and paying the subscription fee forever.
Players only value what took time and effort to acquire.
Close, but not quite right.
Most players tend to only value what most others do not have. It's the have vs. have-not itself that is important to these people. The effort doesn't come into the picture except for a very tiny minority who honestly value the effort. The majority would quite happily exploit in order to feel special by e.g having an item very few other have.
Those people also tend to bitch the most when later on some mechanism is introduced which will allow others to get things that were until then "hard" to get through other means (like e.g exploiting.)
The people who truly enjoyed the challenge and effort in getting their stuff tend to not be bothered when such "easier" methods are introduced for others to use. I mean, why should they? They already have the pride of having done it the hard way, and that's what they value, isn't it?
Right.
As I said, a very tiny minority acts and feels that way. The majority still consists of greedy ass-hats. :-)
The PvP system, the PvE system are all incredibly less grindy to do now than before. PvP would take days of doing battlegrounds to stay in the same place. Raids used to drop 2 or 3 items shared between 40 people. You need 20% less experience to go 1-60 and you can get experience in different (and sometimes faster) ways. As well as that heroic 5 mans give gear one level below current raiding gear. Reputation grinds (except for a couple) in general offer more reputation per quest, at any level and have more and faster quests.
To me MMO suicide is server mergers. Your admitting as a company your game isn't successful - its a death knell as your game slowely loses interest the playerbase get smaller and smaller and to keep the game going you have to make the server pool smaller.
Exactly what I was trying to get at with the last bit of my post. As soon as players start getting the *illusion* that people are leaving the game (which is the message that server mergers send) they're much more likely to leave themselves... which starts a nasty vicious cycle.
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
Good call. Generally the grind is what differentiates the haves from the have-nots, but you're right - it's being different and better which is valuable.
I read an eloquent post on the WoW forums once (no, really!) detailing how the equal availability of gear was a bad thing, and I quite agreed with it. Back in Vanilla, you'd see someone decked out in Naxx gear and you'd think "wow, that's amazing!" Now you can get decked out in Icecrown gear and it's like "meh, just another character in the same gear".
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.