While I agree with your sentiment, I have actually noticed enhanced cognitive functions on my own part while in fits of depression, irritation, or anger. Loss-of-perspective may follow, but I focus better on whatever tasks I can be bothered to do and generally do a better job at everything.
The biggest thought-killer for me is sex. The shot of endorphins plus whatever hormones go along with it make me a bit stupid and careless, at least in my opinion. This only applies to real sex and not the solo equivalent. Gee, wonder why.
Fighting only makes sense in an environment that is based solely on fighting. What if you have some other gameplay element? And why would someone want to play a class four times more powerful than anything else if they couldn't accomplish the things they set out to accomplish in doing so?
I would rather play the "weaker" class if it gave me the chance to do something I wanted to do, as opposed to the "stronger" class that forced me to do things that were too difficult or too different from what I had set out to do. Address griefing issues and the "powerful" class would be less of an idiot magnet.
MMOs don't have to be fast food, or at least, not exclusively. I think there should at least be the option to have more challenging gameplay, more compelling storylines, and so forth and so on.
One idea I had was to create a game with plenty of non-standard, "anti-grind" classes but have one area of the game called something like "The Pit" that would be a Nethack-style multi-level dungeon that would be near-instant death to anyone other than a subset of classes (Pit Fighters) that had skills/talents/abilities that only worked well within "The Pit" but outclassed most of what anyone on the outside could do. If anyone needed something from "The Pit" or needed to go through "The Pit" to reach some remote underground area or what have you, they'd have to turn to the guild of Pit Fighters to get it done. Gameplay within "The Pit" would be hack-and-slash so anyone looking to just beat stuff up would have something they could jump into, they would have a feeling of importance, and they would mostly be restricted to their own little sandbox.
As with any "hole in the ground" dungeon, levels could be added to "The Pit" whenever the devs felt like it.
Of course that's just one idea. You could have classes like soldiers or mercenaries or bounty hunters in the normal game world (as well as subclasses based on the above but with different methods of pursuing the same goal) whose main objective would be to whack specific targets or broad ranges of targets while getting lewtz to make the job easier. It would still be fairly simple, straightforward gameplay without the restrictive sandbox element.
Just because you had straightforward clases in the game (either in or out of a sandbox) doesn't mean you couldn't have a few oddball classes that did different things and, incidentally, wound up being fundamentally more powerful or less powreful than your standard MMO classes.
One of the main problems that other MMOs have had when trying to introduce character imblance, such as in the original EQ or SWG, is that the "more powerful" classes had superficial restrictions while pursuing goals fundamentally identical to those of weaker classes. This lead to problems since it was easy enough for "weaker" classes to observe that the stronger classes could perform the same tasks with greater ease because a). they could and b). the frequently did. Jedi from SWG pretty much had to grind xp the same way anyone else did, and the "more powerful" classes with nasty XP curves in EQ had to kill the same monsters and hunt for pretty-much the same loot. The fact that all the "hard mode" classes mentioned above (SWG Jedi, EQ Troll SKs, etc) didn't stop people from playing them or maxing them out. Once maxed out, the "hard mode" classes had virtually no drawbacks but plenty of advantages (unless you really counted the whole bounty hunter thing in SWG, but most Jedi did not seem to mind that).
People didn't mind playing the "hard mode" classes at all; it was everyone playing an "easy mode" class that bitched.
You can RP your way into providing excuses for different classes to have a mutual interest in slaughtering things, but in doing so, you've eliminated the player's ability to RP as a class that is not primarily (or even solely) motivated by acts of violence. Take a look at what has happened to the old thief class from AD&D (AD&D/D&D hs been deeply and irrevocably affected by MMO design theory): the thief became the rogue and is now more focused on the ability to stab things in the back or use any number of other funky combat maneuvers related to stealth and/or dexterity and/or dual-wielding or whatever convention your rogue-of-choice chooses to abuse. I'm thinking more of the 3E/3.5E Rogue but you get the idea. It's not like 4E has added more depth to the class overall.
MMOs should have one or more classes dedicated to running around and whacking things to appeal to those who want to do such things, but there should also be room in the game for classes motivated by other goals, and those classes need not conform to the same balance equations. If you want to escape the balance grind, which I think a great many designers/developers do on some level, you have to change the goals of the class entirely, just as you have to change the way that class interacts with the rest of the world. In the end, the point is for the player to have fun, and if you have a small niche of players that a). don't have fun killing monsters over and over and b). can really shake up the server environment in a way that is fun and interesting for other players when given a fundamentally different class that both can and must do things that other classes can't (or wouldn't want to) do, then it behooves the designer to give that small niche a set of tool different from what your average MMO guy has.
Anyone remember Dark Sun Online on the Total Entertainment Network? At the close of one phase of beta, a powerful Preserver named Crom (well, mage, everyone was assumed to be a Preserver in that game if they were a magic user . . . no Defilers, boo) exploited various bugs and balance problems in the game to murder people repeatedly in the game's main city. Chaos ensued, NPCs died left and right, etc. The admins put a stop to the chaos (I think) eventually, though it lasted for hours. On the following day, they held an in-game execution of Crom with Crom's willing participation. He was probably one of the best villains I had seen in an MMO environment. The developers had to stop that from happening in the future, so they changed Tyr (the main city) to be an anti-magic zone for the most part, so future attempts by players to become arch-villains sort of devolved into your usual pointless griefing. Crom was the greatest villain in beta, and arguably the greatest villain the game ever saw, period.
If you gave the average player the power Crom had (and, realistically speaking, anyone in DSO beta could have done what he did . . . they just didn't figure out how to do it as well as he did), you get griefing or other nonsense. Give that kind of power to a player like Crom and you get something special. Similar events from my MMO past were the time that Rainz murdered Lord British (played by Richard Garriot) during a UO event with a scroll of firewall because someone forgot to set LB's invulnerability flag, or the time I essentially blacked out the res shrine in the first UO pre-alpha by spamming darkness spells on the shrine so often that nobody could see anything and got stuck in darkness after they ressed post-death (took a QA purging the darkness to get people out of there, but I had several dozen people trapped, ha ha). Griefing is dull, but epic events that significantly change the way people play can make a game a lot more fun to play, especially if it's a player that serves as a catalyst to that sort of event.
Then there was the time when a guy on a production UO server figured out how to create a mob of green slimes so large that it conquered all of Britannia and crashed the server (he trapped slimes in his house, purple potioned them to make them reproduce on one tile, and then unleashed them. They ate everything). Slimes were recoded to not split after that.
Interesting that you should bring up a system such as that used in Armageddon MUD. I think that is but one of many ways that you could deal with engineered class imbalance. OF course I have my own crazy ideas about death/permadeath but that's another issue. There are a great many things you can do to make the imbalanced class situation more interesting besides putting restrictions on what the player can or can not do. I think one of the main things that must be kept in mind is that you have to put the prospective MMO player into the driver's seat of one of these characters and ask yourself what they're going to do with it. A great many MMO players would want to use a powerful character to grief people in PvP or twink their buddies in PvE. Not everyone will think like that, but typical MMO play descends to that level after they're bored with whatever static or pseudo-random content the game throws at them. I can think of maybe a half-dozen things to address the obvious problems associated with a deliberately-imbalanced class, but maybe that would be better delineated elsewhere. Case in point though, take a look at Feral Druid dps in World of Warcraft. As of at least 3.1 (if not 3.2), Feral Druids had the potential to be top-tier PvE dps IF you could figure out the rotation and pull it off consistently. Refer to this for more information. But, to return to what I was trying to get at in my original post, I think you can provide a "vanilla" MMO experience to some people with conventional classes while offering people who are a bit bored with that the opportunity to do something different, and if you make the goals fundamental to those "alternative" classes sufficiently different from what is common to MMOs, you can at least partially resolve twink/grief problems common whenever one class winds up being more powerful than the other. Of course the manner in which players interact could be wildly altered to address twinking and griefing but that's a whole 'nother ball of wax. And while I think you are on to something with the idea of small-server community-based MMOs, please keep in mind that the NWN PW community started that kind of thing up on a small scale years ago.
I figure that if I ever do get to design an MMO, it would either be wildly popular within a small niche or just tank horribly. But who knows.
I still like single-player CRPGs well enough that I would jump at the chance to design one (or a small squad-based CRPG ala Icewind Dale), even though the market for them is not as large as is the MMO market. You can make more money producing a "free" MMO than you can a single-player CRPG these days unless you really hit it out of the park (Fallout 3).
The problem with balancing classes is that all classes are essentially expected to fulfill the same basic role - namely, that they are adventurers (well, in sword&sorcery/fantasy MMOs) out to kill monsters for xp/lewt. Can you please explain to me how a wizard's training would be furthered by killing hordes of monsters? Or a thief's? Or a cleric's? For some kind of a warrior or gladiator or what have you, I can see it making sense, at least to a point.
Sure, some MMOs feature class-specific advancement quests, but nobody's really tried taking an EQ clone with advancement radically different for different classes. Imagine being a wizard with four times the dps potential and more survivability than any melee class while being completely unable to advance by killing monsters or doing conventional errand-boy quests. You would think that everyone would want to be wizard on that basis alone, but the shake-out would be pretty fast when the wizard would have no "noob zone" or "bat yard" in which to squish little monsters and do pointless little n00b quests because, to get to level 2, they'd have to find some rare reagents and solve a complex puzzle. Combat with creatures might be an occasional nuisance and little more. If some sword n' board type wanted the wizard in his party, he'd have to give the wizard a damn good reason, such as serving as a meat shield for the wizard while in pursuit of said rare reagents, making for a party that might resemble one from real fantasy literature rather than from a standard MMO. The fighter might complain as the wizard out-dpsed him like mad for awhile until after the adventure was over, whereupon the fighter might realize that he just gained two levels whacking all the monsters the poor wizard had to wade through to get to the ancient ruins where his rare reagents were supposed to be, only for the poor wizard to miss one reagent or screw up the puzzle and not advance at all. Wah wahhh.
I hope that JGE has someone experienced on the helm, but honestly experience doesn't make a darn bit of difference if valuable lessons were not learned in the process. Take a gander at Raph Koster: has he ever been involved in a project that you, personally, liked? For me the answer is no. Then you have guys like Richard Garriot that go from a dedicated, intelligent game designer/lead developer/programmer/etc (U4) to . . . whatever he is now. It's not like he's disallowed from changing as a person, but it's pretty clear that he isn't a game developer anymore, so I wouldn't take his experience to be worth anything nowadays. It wasn't worth anything during Ultima 9's tumultuous dev cycle either.
btw, nice article you linked there. That would certainly explain a lot! Seems like Blizzard has forgotten their current cash cow a bit.
I had considered this, but of course if your statement is true, then any game based on PvP in the beginning will inevitably suck in PvE no matter how hard they try. That isn't balance, that's just lop-sidedness. If you're determined to neglect PvE, then sure, balancing PvE is easy because balance won't matter. Nobody's going to bother with it anyway.
Maybe I do, but the same dev that posted this is going to (hopefully) be drudging through even more obscure mechanics in his own project soon. Granted, I'm not addressing him, but this is about his rather broad-sweeping statements about PvP and PvE balance. And the 3.2 changes to Paladins were the first thing that came to mind (and aren't you glad I didn't even go into Holy or Protection Paladin changes?).
Would it have been better had I dredged up some old paper on Ebolt mechanics from UO in its heydey? If any game had PvP balance issues, ye gods. That's a case study in doing everything possible you could do wrong, to every degree possible.
Or maybe I should have gone on about an obscure Hungarian MUD I used to play on . . .
As an aside, yes, the summary paragraph would have been sufficient, but really it's a biased statement to make without something to back it up. I figured anyone reading this thread or posting to it would eat up game development and mechanic issues rather than vomit all over them. Yeah, I'm a geek, so what?
Not really. I may know too much about it, but I don't care all that much. This is just an example of PvP balance screwing up PvE balance. I wanted to be detailed instead of offering people vague assurances that, yes indeed, this will be a problem real soon now.
As you seem to have conceded, PvE balance issues can crop up in the strangest places when you balance for PvP. If you wish to create a dichotomy between player powers in PvP and PvE then so be it, but don't act all surprised when the player base reacts with some hostility to a gun that is a peashooter in PvP and a planet-destroyer in PvE (an extreme example, I must admit, but look at Guild Wars). There is something to be said for continuity.
Check my post below yours. PvP balance in WoW isn't all beer and skittles, especially for the PvE crowd. Let's see if the QQers can get Chaos Bolt nerfed next. Poor Warlocks.
Dude, this is a discussion about game design. Give me a break. WoW happens to be one of the biggest MMOs ever (if not THE biggest ever), and it provides a perfect example of why the Jumpgate: Evolution dev responsible for writing TFA is just not right about PvP/PvE balance.
All it will take is for one "class" of ship to look balanced in PvP but weaker-than-everyone-else in PvE for the crying to start.
Jumpgate Evolution is going to have its own balance considerations that are not necessarily related to balance issues in other MMOs, but stating that balancing classes in PvP makes PvE balance "easy" (when the goal is making the player "feel powerful" in PvE) is nonsense.
Take a look at what Blizzard is going through with WoW patch 3.2. One of the changes in the upcoming patch is that Seal of Blood/Seal of the Martyr (Paladin abilities) are being pulled from the game. For those not familiar with WoW Paladins, those seals (identical seals with different names for the Horde and Alliance respectively) caused all melee and melee specials of Paladins to inflict a boatload of extra damage that can not specifically be resisted and is not eaten up by armor (some things can reduce it, but generic armor/resists can not). Paladins using those seals also eat some of the damage their seal dishes out (10% under most circumstances), though usually it is not hard to cope with that "recoil".
Seal of Blood/Seal of the Martyr were fingered as a culprit when non-Paladins complained that their damage in PvP environments was "too bursty", even though few players with credible opinions ever bothered complaining about Seal of Blood/Seal of the Martyr in PvE. When they decided to pull SoB/SotM, they attempted to compensate Paladins for their loss by changing two seals often neglected by Retribution Paladins (the sort fond of using SoB/SotM): Seal of Vengeance/Corruption (same seal, different names for Alliance and Horde respectively) and Seal of Command.
Seal of Command they revamped entirely to be nothing but a weak version of SoB/SotM with no recoil. For reference, it does 36% of weapon damage on strikes as opposed to 48% for SoB/SotM. This change has not thrilled Retribution Paladins at all since it costs a talent point to even learn Seal of Command (all Paladins learned SoB/SotM automatically regardless of talent ditribution) and since the new Seal of Command will be weaker than the old SoB/SotM were. Of course, Seal of Command has always been weaker, which is why any Retribution Paladin worth his/her salt stopped using it once they could learn SoB/SotM.
Seal of Vengeance/Corruption, both of which applied "damage over time" (DoT) effects that could stack up to 5 times, will stay the same but provide a 33% damage bonus and improve critical damage from 150% to 200% once the target has 5 effects stacked on them. Applying the DoT effects is not difficult, and it has been pointed out that the new SoV/SoC actually improves overall damage-per-second vs. SoB/SotM in any fight lasting longer than about 20-30 seconds, but this only applies if the Paladin is not forced to switch targets. The problem is that the DoT effects themselves do not last longer than . ..12 seconds, I think, which means that if the Paladin is stuck in any boss fight with a gimmick that forces the Paladin to attack a new target, he/she/it is now forced to establish another "5-stack" on the new target before he/she/it can once again enjoy the 33% damage bonus plus the boost to critical damage, and after that, if he switches back to his previous target, the old "5-stack" will probably be gone, forcing the Paladin to apply yet another "5-stack" to his/her/its initial target. In fights which require such behavior from a Paladin, some of them have taken to switching to Seal of Righteousness, a relatively low-damage seal that just happens to outdamage Seal of Command provided said Paladin has 5 talent points in Seals of the Pure (see below).
As an added point of frustration, those hoping to maximize their damage per second using the new SoV/SoC will need to put 5 talent points in a talent found in the Holy tree called Seals of the Pure, which means Retribution Paladins will have to pull 5 points off something else. Such a change to their talents will reduce their overall utility.
But wait! There's more. Another change they've made to reduce Paladin "burst" damage in PvP is to change a Retribution talent, Crusader Str
Problem is that some private landowner or public entity(local/state/federal government or what have you) owns that wilderness and monitors it with some degree of vigor to prevent squatters from showing up and attempting to subsist as a farmer, hunter, trapper, etc. I know there are some pot farmers that are using public parks in the US (and are making a terrible mess in the process) but even they get busted every now and then. The have pretty extensive operations and go to a lot of effort to stay hidden.
You might be able to get away with squatting in some places but if it's public land, you will probably get shooed away at some point. If it's private land, who knows. Up to the owner I guess.
It is curious that nobody here has stopped to mention what influence China's notorious lack of respect for IP law might have to do with this incident. I'm not a huge fan of patents and the like, and there are plenty of ways for large, well-funded corporations to end-run patents in "the West", but if one were to lose an iPhone prototype in the United States, one would reasonably assume that it would be difficult for anyone to do anything meaningful with it without some serious reverse-engineering (unless someone from China stole it and took it overseas). Sure, it would be a problem, but there would be a lot of hoops for the tech thieves to jump through before they could make bank on their crime. If you could prove that they stole the thing and used it for their own commercial success, you could probably sue them anyway, and you might even win years down the line (bring your warchest).
Now imagine losing a valuable prototype of an unreleased product in China. How it got lost and to whom (in the event of a theft) would have everything to do with whether or not the prototype could be recovered. In the event of a theft, the thief's backers and influence with the government would have everything to do with whether or not the stolen unit could be used for the purpose of manufacturing cheap knock-offs with release dates comparable to the real product. Foxconn has to know this and had to have been operating under the assumption that the prototype might have fallen into the hands of a well-connected rival that could have (and would have) mass-produced units based off the prototype, which is something neither Apple nor Foxconn would have liked very much. Naturally they would go to every effort to keep a prototype out of "enemy" hands since they know their production models will be copied as soon as they hit store shelves anyway; much of their profit will come from the lead time they get on their cloner competition (it would take a few months to ramp up production of a rip-off). That lead time is all you really get before the cloners flood the market (at least domestically if not internationally). Losing a prototype cuts down on your lead time. In the case of the iPhone prototype, by how much, we do not know. A hasty cloner willing to make a sloppy release might be able to roll out knock-offs before the actual iPhone product itself hits the market, giving people the option to buy a potentially-buggy pre-release version of the product before the actual product hits shelves. Apple wouldn't like that very much, especially not if the knock-offs found their way onto eBay and beyond. Foxconn wouldn't like that much either.
Not that any of the above justifies roughing the guy up or pushing him towards suicide, but seriously, this whole issue has to be viewed in the proper light. Foxconn and Apple can't just sue whoever turns up with the prototype. In all likelihood, they will never see it again until millions of units just like it show up in Chinese warehouses.
If Foxconn had any reasonable expectation of being able to file suit against a well-heeled competitor who magically turned up with the prototype and began furiously cranking out knock-off products, maybe they wouldn't have tormented the poor soul allegedly responsible for losing the prototype. Oh sure, being able to rip off anyone's tech is all fun and games when you're poaching the tech from foreign competitors, but when cloners start cannibalizing the creations of their domestic neighbors, things aren't so fun anymore. At least, not for the Chinese, and especially not for that one poor schmuck to whom Foxconn entrusted iPhone prototypes.
2). It doesn't "just take one". We've suffered more than one nuclear reactor failure in this country without experiencing mass-contamination events along the lines of Chernobyl. Three Mile Island wasn't the only one.
You are more right than you know. The United States could profit greatly from transactions such as this. All we need to do is continue to offload worthless assets to clueless foreign investors. The Hummer brand has little to no value, and now that everyone (well, presumably everyone) knows that Hummers will be Chinese-owned (and possibly Chinese-manufactured), what little American machismo the Hummer has left will be gone.
You're going to have to paint Paro's fur orange so as to deter poachers. I don't imagine that a patient's stress levels would be very low after seeing their baby seal buddy clubbed into oblivion.
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Also, what are travel agents supposed to do if they want to set up a standalone website to showcase their travel packages to Burbank, CA? Huh? Huh?
Or the West Bank.
Or the Outer Banks.
Or . . . yeah, you get the idea.
While I agree with your sentiment, I have actually noticed enhanced cognitive functions on my own part while in fits of depression, irritation, or anger. Loss-of-perspective may follow, but I focus better on whatever tasks I can be bothered to do and generally do a better job at everything.
The biggest thought-killer for me is sex. The shot of endorphins plus whatever hormones go along with it make me a bit stupid and careless, at least in my opinion. This only applies to real sex and not the solo equivalent. Gee, wonder why.
Fighting only makes sense in an environment that is based solely on fighting. What if you have some other gameplay element? And why would someone want to play a class four times more powerful than anything else if they couldn't accomplish the things they set out to accomplish in doing so?
I would rather play the "weaker" class if it gave me the chance to do something I wanted to do, as opposed to the "stronger" class that forced me to do things that were too difficult or too different from what I had set out to do. Address griefing issues and the "powerful" class would be less of an idiot magnet.
MMOs don't have to be fast food, or at least, not exclusively. I think there should at least be the option to have more challenging gameplay, more compelling storylines, and so forth and so on.
One idea I had was to create a game with plenty of non-standard, "anti-grind" classes but have one area of the game called something like "The Pit" that would be a Nethack-style multi-level dungeon that would be near-instant death to anyone other than a subset of classes (Pit Fighters) that had skills/talents/abilities that only worked well within "The Pit" but outclassed most of what anyone on the outside could do. If anyone needed something from "The Pit" or needed to go through "The Pit" to reach some remote underground area or what have you, they'd have to turn to the guild of Pit Fighters to get it done. Gameplay within "The Pit" would be hack-and-slash so anyone looking to just beat stuff up would have something they could jump into, they would have a feeling of importance, and they would mostly be restricted to their own little sandbox.
As with any "hole in the ground" dungeon, levels could be added to "The Pit" whenever the devs felt like it.
Of course that's just one idea. You could have classes like soldiers or mercenaries or bounty hunters in the normal game world (as well as subclasses based on the above but with different methods of pursuing the same goal) whose main objective would be to whack specific targets or broad ranges of targets while getting lewtz to make the job easier. It would still be fairly simple, straightforward gameplay without the restrictive sandbox element.
Just because you had straightforward clases in the game (either in or out of a sandbox) doesn't mean you couldn't have a few oddball classes that did different things and, incidentally, wound up being fundamentally more powerful or less powreful than your standard MMO classes.
One of the main problems that other MMOs have had when trying to introduce character imblance, such as in the original EQ or SWG, is that the "more powerful" classes had superficial restrictions while pursuing goals fundamentally identical to those of weaker classes. This lead to problems since it was easy enough for "weaker" classes to observe that the stronger classes could perform the same tasks with greater ease because a). they could and b). the frequently did. Jedi from SWG pretty much had to grind xp the same way anyone else did, and the "more powerful" classes with nasty XP curves in EQ had to kill the same monsters and hunt for pretty-much the same loot. The fact that all the "hard mode" classes mentioned above (SWG Jedi, EQ Troll SKs, etc) didn't stop people from playing them or maxing them out. Once maxed out, the "hard mode" classes had virtually no drawbacks but plenty of advantages (unless you really counted the whole bounty hunter thing in SWG, but most Jedi did not seem to mind that).
People didn't mind playing the "hard mode" classes at all; it was everyone playing an "easy mode" class that bitched.
You can RP your way into providing excuses for different classes to have a mutual interest in slaughtering things, but in doing so, you've eliminated the player's ability to RP as a class that is not primarily (or even solely) motivated by acts of violence. Take a look at what has happened to the old thief class from AD&D (AD&D/D&D hs been deeply and irrevocably affected by MMO design theory): the thief became the rogue and is now more focused on the ability to stab things in the back or use any number of other funky combat maneuvers related to stealth and/or dexterity and/or dual-wielding or whatever convention your rogue-of-choice chooses to abuse. I'm thinking more of the 3E/3.5E Rogue but you get the idea. It's not like 4E has added more depth to the class overall.
MMOs should have one or more classes dedicated to running around and whacking things to appeal to those who want to do such things, but there should also be room in the game for classes motivated by other goals, and those classes need not conform to the same balance equations. If you want to escape the balance grind, which I think a great many designers/developers do on some level, you have to change the goals of the class entirely, just as you have to change the way that class interacts with the rest of the world. In the end, the point is for the player to have fun, and if you have a small niche of players that a). don't have fun killing monsters over and over and b). can really shake up the server environment in a way that is fun and interesting for other players when given a fundamentally different class that both can and must do things that other classes can't (or wouldn't want to) do, then it behooves the designer to give that small niche a set of tool different from what your average MMO guy has.
Anyone remember Dark Sun Online on the Total Entertainment Network? At the close of one phase of beta, a powerful Preserver named Crom (well, mage, everyone was assumed to be a Preserver in that game if they were a magic user . . . no Defilers, boo) exploited various bugs and balance problems in the game to murder people repeatedly in the game's main city. Chaos ensued, NPCs died left and right, etc. The admins put a stop to the chaos (I think) eventually, though it lasted for hours. On the following day, they held an in-game execution of Crom with Crom's willing participation. He was probably one of the best villains I had seen in an MMO environment. The developers had to stop that from happening in the future, so they changed Tyr (the main city) to be an anti-magic zone for the most part, so future attempts by players to become arch-villains sort of devolved into your usual pointless griefing. Crom was the greatest villain in beta, and arguably the greatest villain the game ever saw, period.
If you gave the average player the power Crom had (and, realistically speaking, anyone in DSO beta could have done what he did . . . they just didn't figure out how to do it as well as he did), you get griefing or other nonsense. Give that kind of power to a player like Crom and you get something special. Similar events from my MMO past were the time that Rainz murdered Lord British (played by Richard Garriot) during a UO event with a scroll of firewall because someone forgot to set LB's invulnerability flag, or the time I essentially blacked out the res shrine in the first UO pre-alpha by spamming darkness spells on the shrine so often that nobody could see anything and got stuck in darkness after they ressed post-death (took a QA purging the darkness to get people out of there, but I had several dozen people trapped, ha ha). Griefing is dull, but epic events that significantly change the way people play can make a game a lot more fun to play, especially if it's a player that serves as a catalyst to that sort of event.
Then there was the time when a guy on a production UO server figured out how to create a mob of green slimes so large that it conquered all of Britannia and crashed the server (he trapped slimes in his house, purple potioned them to make them reproduce on one tile, and then unleashed them. They ate everything). Slimes were recoded to not split after that.
Interesting that you should bring up a system such as that used in Armageddon MUD. I think that is but one of many ways that you could deal with engineered class imbalance. OF course I have my own crazy ideas about death/permadeath but that's another issue. There are a great many things you can do to make the imbalanced class situation more interesting besides putting restrictions on what the player can or can not do. I think one of the main things that must be kept in mind is that you have to put the prospective MMO player into the driver's seat of one of these characters and ask yourself what they're going to do with it. A great many MMO players would want to use a powerful character to grief people in PvP or twink their buddies in PvE. Not everyone will think like that, but typical MMO play descends to that level after they're bored with whatever static or pseudo-random content the game throws at them. I can think of maybe a half-dozen things to address the obvious problems associated with a deliberately-imbalanced class, but maybe that would be better delineated elsewhere. Case in point though, take a look at Feral Druid dps in World of Warcraft. As of at least 3.1 (if not 3.2), Feral Druids had the potential to be top-tier PvE dps IF you could figure out the rotation and pull it off consistently. Refer to this for more information. But, to return to what I was trying to get at in my original post, I think you can provide a "vanilla" MMO experience to some people with conventional classes while offering people who are a bit bored with that the opportunity to do something different, and if you make the goals fundamental to those "alternative" classes sufficiently different from what is common to MMOs, you can at least partially resolve twink/grief problems common whenever one class winds up being more powerful than the other. Of course the manner in which players interact could be wildly altered to address twinking and griefing but that's a whole 'nother ball of wax. And while I think you are on to something with the idea of small-server community-based MMOs, please keep in mind that the NWN PW community started that kind of thing up on a small scale years ago.
I figure that if I ever do get to design an MMO, it would either be wildly popular within a small niche or just tank horribly. But who knows. I still like single-player CRPGs well enough that I would jump at the chance to design one (or a small squad-based CRPG ala Icewind Dale), even though the market for them is not as large as is the MMO market. You can make more money producing a "free" MMO than you can a single-player CRPG these days unless you really hit it out of the park (Fallout 3).
The problem with balancing classes is that all classes are essentially expected to fulfill the same basic role - namely, that they are adventurers (well, in sword&sorcery/fantasy MMOs) out to kill monsters for xp/lewt. Can you please explain to me how a wizard's training would be furthered by killing hordes of monsters? Or a thief's? Or a cleric's? For some kind of a warrior or gladiator or what have you, I can see it making sense, at least to a point.
Sure, some MMOs feature class-specific advancement quests, but nobody's really tried taking an EQ clone with advancement radically different for different classes. Imagine being a wizard with four times the dps potential and more survivability than any melee class while being completely unable to advance by killing monsters or doing conventional errand-boy quests. You would think that everyone would want to be wizard on that basis alone, but the shake-out would be pretty fast when the wizard would have no "noob zone" or "bat yard" in which to squish little monsters and do pointless little n00b quests because, to get to level 2, they'd have to find some rare reagents and solve a complex puzzle. Combat with creatures might be an occasional nuisance and little more. If some sword n' board type wanted the wizard in his party, he'd have to give the wizard a damn good reason, such as serving as a meat shield for the wizard while in pursuit of said rare reagents, making for a party that might resemble one from real fantasy literature rather than from a standard MMO. The fighter might complain as the wizard out-dpsed him like mad for awhile until after the adventure was over, whereupon the fighter might realize that he just gained two levels whacking all the monsters the poor wizard had to wade through to get to the ancient ruins where his rare reagents were supposed to be, only for the poor wizard to miss one reagent or screw up the puzzle and not advance at all. Wah wahhh.
I hope that JGE has someone experienced on the helm, but honestly experience doesn't make a darn bit of difference if valuable lessons were not learned in the process. Take a gander at Raph Koster: has he ever been involved in a project that you, personally, liked? For me the answer is no. Then you have guys like Richard Garriot that go from a dedicated, intelligent game designer/lead developer/programmer/etc (U4) to . . . whatever he is now. It's not like he's disallowed from changing as a person, but it's pretty clear that he isn't a game developer anymore, so I wouldn't take his experience to be worth anything nowadays. It wasn't worth anything during Ultima 9's tumultuous dev cycle either.
btw, nice article you linked there. That would certainly explain a lot! Seems like Blizzard has forgotten their current cash cow a bit.
I had considered this, but of course if your statement is true, then any game based on PvP in the beginning will inevitably suck in PvE no matter how hard they try. That isn't balance, that's just lop-sidedness. If you're determined to neglect PvE, then sure, balancing PvE is easy because balance won't matter. Nobody's going to bother with it anyway.
Maybe I do, but the same dev that posted this is going to (hopefully) be drudging through even more obscure mechanics in his own project soon. Granted, I'm not addressing him, but this is about his rather broad-sweeping statements about PvP and PvE balance. And the 3.2 changes to Paladins were the first thing that came to mind (and aren't you glad I didn't even go into Holy or Protection Paladin changes?).
Would it have been better had I dredged up some old paper on Ebolt mechanics from UO in its heydey? If any game had PvP balance issues, ye gods. That's a case study in doing everything possible you could do wrong, to every degree possible.
Or maybe I should have gone on about an obscure Hungarian MUD I used to play on . . .
As an aside, yes, the summary paragraph would have been sufficient, but really it's a biased statement to make without something to back it up. I figured anyone reading this thread or posting to it would eat up game development and mechanic issues rather than vomit all over them. Yeah, I'm a geek, so what?
Not really. I may know too much about it, but I don't care all that much. This is just an example of PvP balance screwing up PvE balance. I wanted to be detailed instead of offering people vague assurances that, yes indeed, this will be a problem real soon now.
As you seem to have conceded, PvE balance issues can crop up in the strangest places when you balance for PvP. If you wish to create a dichotomy between player powers in PvP and PvE then so be it, but don't act all surprised when the player base reacts with some hostility to a gun that is a peashooter in PvP and a planet-destroyer in PvE (an extreme example, I must admit, but look at Guild Wars). There is something to be said for continuity.
Check my post below yours. PvP balance in WoW isn't all beer and skittles, especially for the PvE crowd. Let's see if the QQers can get Chaos Bolt nerfed next. Poor Warlocks.
Dude, this is a discussion about game design. Give me a break. WoW happens to be one of the biggest MMOs ever (if not THE biggest ever), and it provides a perfect example of why the Jumpgate: Evolution dev responsible for writing TFA is just not right about PvP/PvE balance.
All it will take is for one "class" of ship to look balanced in PvP but weaker-than-everyone-else in PvE for the crying to start.
Jumpgate Evolution is going to have its own balance considerations that are not necessarily related to balance issues in other MMOs, but stating that balancing classes in PvP makes PvE balance "easy" (when the goal is making the player "feel powerful" in PvE) is nonsense.
Take a look at what Blizzard is going through with WoW patch 3.2. One of the changes in the upcoming patch is that Seal of Blood/Seal of the Martyr (Paladin abilities) are being pulled from the game. For those not familiar with WoW Paladins, those seals (identical seals with different names for the Horde and Alliance respectively) caused all melee and melee specials of Paladins to inflict a boatload of extra damage that can not specifically be resisted and is not eaten up by armor (some things can reduce it, but generic armor/resists can not). Paladins using those seals also eat some of the damage their seal dishes out (10% under most circumstances), though usually it is not hard to cope with that "recoil".
Seal of Blood/Seal of the Martyr were fingered as a culprit when non-Paladins complained that their damage in PvP environments was "too bursty", even though few players with credible opinions ever bothered complaining about Seal of Blood/Seal of the Martyr in PvE. When they decided to pull SoB/SotM, they attempted to compensate Paladins for their loss by changing two seals often neglected by Retribution Paladins (the sort fond of using SoB/SotM): Seal of Vengeance/Corruption (same seal, different names for Alliance and Horde respectively) and Seal of Command.
Seal of Command they revamped entirely to be nothing but a weak version of SoB/SotM with no recoil. For reference, it does 36% of weapon damage on strikes as opposed to 48% for SoB/SotM. This change has not thrilled Retribution Paladins at all since it costs a talent point to even learn Seal of Command (all Paladins learned SoB/SotM automatically regardless of talent ditribution) and since the new Seal of Command will be weaker than the old SoB/SotM were. Of course, Seal of Command has always been weaker, which is why any Retribution Paladin worth his/her salt stopped using it once they could learn SoB/SotM.
Seal of Vengeance/Corruption, both of which applied "damage over time" (DoT) effects that could stack up to 5 times, will stay the same but provide a 33% damage bonus and improve critical damage from 150% to 200% once the target has 5 effects stacked on them. Applying the DoT effects is not difficult, and it has been pointed out that the new SoV/SoC actually improves overall damage-per-second vs. SoB/SotM in any fight lasting longer than about 20-30 seconds, but this only applies if the Paladin is not forced to switch targets. The problem is that the DoT effects themselves do not last longer than . . .12 seconds, I think, which means that if the Paladin is stuck in any boss fight with a gimmick that forces the Paladin to attack a new target, he/she/it is now forced to establish another "5-stack" on the new target before he/she/it can once again enjoy the 33% damage bonus plus the boost to critical damage, and after that, if he switches back to his previous target, the old "5-stack" will probably be gone, forcing the Paladin to apply yet another "5-stack" to his/her/its initial target. In fights which require such behavior from a Paladin, some of them have taken to switching to Seal of Righteousness, a relatively low-damage seal that just happens to outdamage Seal of Command provided said Paladin has 5 talent points in Seals of the Pure (see below).
As an added point of frustration, those hoping to maximize their damage per second using the new SoV/SoC will need to put 5 talent points in a talent found in the Holy tree called Seals of the Pure, which means Retribution Paladins will have to pull 5 points off something else. Such a change to their talents will reduce their overall utility.
But wait! There's more. Another change they've made to reduce Paladin "burst" damage in PvP is to change a Retribution talent, Crusader Str
Problem is that some private landowner or public entity(local/state/federal government or what have you) owns that wilderness and monitors it with some degree of vigor to prevent squatters from showing up and attempting to subsist as a farmer, hunter, trapper, etc. I know there are some pot farmers that are using public parks in the US (and are making a terrible mess in the process) but even they get busted every now and then. The have pretty extensive operations and go to a lot of effort to stay hidden.
You might be able to get away with squatting in some places but if it's public land, you will probably get shooed away at some point. If it's private land, who knows. Up to the owner I guess.
I can see someone saying that in general chat being reported as a spammer. People aren't supposed to be selling rl services in-game anyway.
I never liked them much anyway. So cold and impersonal . . .
How long will it be until Apple patents goading a supplier into assassinating employees responsible for losing sensitive product prototypes?
It is curious that nobody here has stopped to mention what influence China's notorious lack of respect for IP law might have to do with this incident. I'm not a huge fan of patents and the like, and there are plenty of ways for large, well-funded corporations to end-run patents in "the West", but if one were to lose an iPhone prototype in the United States, one would reasonably assume that it would be difficult for anyone to do anything meaningful with it without some serious reverse-engineering (unless someone from China stole it and took it overseas). Sure, it would be a problem, but there would be a lot of hoops for the tech thieves to jump through before they could make bank on their crime. If you could prove that they stole the thing and used it for their own commercial success, you could probably sue them anyway, and you might even win years down the line (bring your warchest).
Now imagine losing a valuable prototype of an unreleased product in China. How it got lost and to whom (in the event of a theft) would have everything to do with whether or not the prototype could be recovered. In the event of a theft, the thief's backers and influence with the government would have everything to do with whether or not the stolen unit could be used for the purpose of manufacturing cheap knock-offs with release dates comparable to the real product. Foxconn has to know this and had to have been operating under the assumption that the prototype might have fallen into the hands of a well-connected rival that could have (and would have) mass-produced units based off the prototype, which is something neither Apple nor Foxconn would have liked very much. Naturally they would go to every effort to keep a prototype out of "enemy" hands since they know their production models will be copied as soon as they hit store shelves anyway; much of their profit will come from the lead time they get on their cloner competition (it would take a few months to ramp up production of a rip-off). That lead time is all you really get before the cloners flood the market (at least domestically if not internationally). Losing a prototype cuts down on your lead time. In the case of the iPhone prototype, by how much, we do not know. A hasty cloner willing to make a sloppy release might be able to roll out knock-offs before the actual iPhone product itself hits the market, giving people the option to buy a potentially-buggy pre-release version of the product before the actual product hits shelves. Apple wouldn't like that very much, especially not if the knock-offs found their way onto eBay and beyond. Foxconn wouldn't like that much either.
Not that any of the above justifies roughing the guy up or pushing him towards suicide, but seriously, this whole issue has to be viewed in the proper light. Foxconn and Apple can't just sue whoever turns up with the prototype. In all likelihood, they will never see it again until millions of units just like it show up in Chinese warehouses.
If Foxconn had any reasonable expectation of being able to file suit against a well-heeled competitor who magically turned up with the prototype and began furiously cranking out knock-off products, maybe they wouldn't have tormented the poor soul allegedly responsible for losing the prototype. Oh sure, being able to rip off anyone's tech is all fun and games when you're poaching the tech from foreign competitors, but when cloners start cannibalizing the creations of their domestic neighbors, things aren't so fun anymore. At least, not for the Chinese, and especially not for that one poor schmuck to whom Foxconn entrusted iPhone prototypes.
1). Inhabitable? Don't you mean uninhabitable?
2). It doesn't "just take one". We've suffered more than one nuclear reactor failure in this country without experiencing mass-contamination events along the lines of Chernobyl. Three Mile Island wasn't the only one.
You are more right than you know. The United States could profit greatly from transactions such as this. All we need to do is continue to offload worthless assets to clueless foreign investors. The Hummer brand has little to no value, and now that everyone (well, presumably everyone) knows that Hummers will be Chinese-owned (and possibly Chinese-manufactured), what little American machismo the Hummer has left will be gone.
Well, electrons spin too, don't they?
You're going to have to paint Paro's fur orange so as to deter poachers. I don't imagine that a patient's stress levels would be very low after seeing their baby seal buddy clubbed into oblivion.