Spending a couple weeks training does not compare to a month hardcore grinding to get your lvl 60 stunlock rogue. You're comparing vastly different amounts of work there.
Again, all of you miss the point. It's pointless trying to balance everything to a knife's-edge; the objective should be to a) give people lots of usefull niches to fill, and b) give them freedom to move from one niche to another as the situation warrants it.
But you missed the point. Eve has unbalanced elements, but they don't have a problem because it is easy for a person to switch from ship to ship and loadout to loadout. If missiles are overpowered, then everybody can go get a missile boat and train up missile skills.
It's not a question of being perfectly balanced; it's a question of presenting an unfair situation to a player. Players in EVE can easily respond to an unfair situation. It's not like camelot where your lvl 50 whatever suddenly doesn't work anymore.
"The main problem is in games that involve both PvP and PvE."
I'm sorry, but this is simply not true. It is possible to design a game that works with both. I'll give two examples and how they do it:
1) Guild Wars. You pick your skill load-out before you leave the city. So your monk may have nice pretty heals and some smite spells in PvE, but in PvP you go with heals & anti-hex spells. Whatever, the point is that the same class does fine in both environments.
2) Eve Online. Again, you fly the ship and load it out based on your needs. So you bring your super-cruiser to a PvE base-busting mission, then trick out a frigate for a PvP raid.
I frankly don't agree much with the original article, both in tone and messaqe. "Nerfing" is fine; it's poorly planned nerfs that cause the problem. The dev teams need to balance, but they have to put a good amount of work in to do it right.
One final thing - the object isn't to make a perfectly balanced game. That's an ideal, of course, but I think a more practical goal is to make a game where everyone has a niche. So the big-gun boys are the talk of the town, as long as my crowd-controller is useful often enough to make me feel valuable, I don't care.
-Jeff
P.S. Btw, there is nothing written that says all players must be viable one on one with each other. There's nothing wrong with a little rock-paper-scissors action, or groups being greater than the sum of their parts.
Isn't the 7 people picking 1 person just survivor in reverse? I don't watch the show, and I don't see how this is a breakthrough or exciting.
Also, can someone explain to me why "non-violent" is so important? It's not like most mmorpgs are that terribly graphic about the violence anyways; certainly WoW, DAoC, etc don't rate beyond PG or PG-13 in that regard.
"A few more stamina points on your boots isn't going to mean a whole lot when a party of 5 orcs flanks you in a well executed pincer move."
It's not "a few". If you do not do instances and just survive on the greens, you will be around 100 attribute points behind (or resistance, or special ability). Just compare set items from the instances to "of the bear" or "of the monkey" stuff that you can find.
Your green is (at best) +17 str & stm. That's 34 attr.
Your blue is 48 atr (19 & 20 stm, 9 spi) and +10 frost resist. It's also 617 armor vs 570.
Now, do this for every piece of equipment on a person. Head, kneck, shoulders, chest, legs, hands, feet, belt, bracer, ring, ring, trinket, trinket, weapon, off-hand. If someone plays religiously, they will build up an enormous advantage in not only attribute points, but minor special powers and resistances as well.
Finally, note I only used a blue vs green. The reality will be purple or better (or blue set items, which is roughly purple anyways), vs green and random blue sellable drops.
-Jeff
P.S. I grant that tactics can and do make a difference, but equipment is vastly more important than you indicated.
"Bruce Wayne is a normal guy that everybody can relate to."
No. The comics "say" that, but what they show is someone who is impossibly accomplished by human standards. There is no one remotely capable of keeping with his physical and mental regimen at the same time.
Even if he were a flabby geek who devoted all of his time to reading, he still wouldn't be remotely human. He knows too much, too deeply, to be a real person.
No one notices though, because mental prowess is a lot harder to measure than physical ability.
WoW for me is one of the biggest dissapointments. Not because it's bad, but because it's very well done if you're willing to play hardcore. There's certainly a beginner's game in there, but if you want to seriously compete in the battlegrounds you'll need equipment, and for that you need many instance runs a week for a few months. There's no way I can manage another full-time job like that, so I can't participate.
There is no doubt that small portion of the population enjoys healing. Some enjoy the gameplay, some enjoy being important, some enjoy being needed, etc. But healers in every one of these games are the hardest to find, so by definition it's the least-liked job.
I think there is a business-case that says catering to the needs of the few is not worth the effect on the many.
"Yeah, well, if your reason is so that you can brag about your über-whatever with a gazillion gold to the lower levels, you're not playing at all; you're being a pompous ass that the game would be better off without."
What exactly was your reason again? If I understand correctly, you're proud that you can play in a hollywood set and pretend it's the real thing. How is that superior to people who are competing?
I wonder how long it will take for governments to get in on the action? After all, if you're selling something for real-world dollars, then a local jurisdiction can tax it.
I have to ask why the tone is so defensive? They've been paid to find every little bit... now it's your job to help your management put the report into context.
"Apparently, the Native Americans are not so much a peoples to be exploited and killed off with pox-infected blankets as they are partners in your war against the other countries. I'm a little uncomfortable with this revisionism"...and to continue the above poster's thread, the Native Americans actually were often partners. For example, Hernan Cortez enlisted signficant numbers of native allies in overthrowing the Aztecs, and the French and British both employed Indian allies against each other.
-Jeff
P.S. The history channel is running a series called "The Conquerors" on sunday. The last two episodes featured both Andrew Jackson's conquest of Florida and Hernan Cortez's conquest of the Aztecs.
It's not a question of people - of course people are just people, wherever you go. It's a question of governments.
If the law in a country allows us to go after and punish people like this, then I don't care. If it protects them, then raise the "damn foreigners" invective a notch. If you want to argue the grey area where cultures are different resulting in different acts being termed "crimes", talk to a lawyer or philosopher cause I ain't biting.
I find these discussions fascinating. Somehow the gamers with more money than time are worse than the gamers with more time than money. So it's ok for the time people to have more time to get the best equipment and then trouce the money people, but it's wrong for the money people to buy the equipment to make it a fair fight.
Time=Money. Some gamers have more of one than the other; arguing that one is right or wrong is just silly, IMO.
"Leaning stuff from books and Internet is boring. Learning stuff from a teacher with other pupils can be fun."
Different strokes for different folks. I much prefer books and the internet. Classes largely acted as a distraction to me when I was growing up. Occasionally they acted as competition which sparked my interest.
But that's me. There are different viewpoints out there as well.
Is really track the sales on ebay (and similar places). When someone an auction is successful, and the account switches hands, you ban both buyer and seller from the game using their credit card #s, and share this information with other mmorpgs.
That will stop this nonsense.
-jeff (getting ready for the privacy freaks to whine)
Re:Too bad they don't get that way about RL
on
The Million-Gnome March
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
"Guessing the answer to every one of these is no for 90%+ of these guys."
Your guess means nothing sir. What you wrote was pure speculation and mostly drivel. You imply that reading a forum post and making a lvl 1 character are somehow great efforts, which they are not.
There is nothing insightfull about your post. It's the same old "kids today" crap that people have spewed since the dawn of time.
"Myth #4 - any new MMORPG must feature a complex, impossible-to-balance skill-based (non) "class" system.
Again, bullshit. WoW's simple, single-track class system is easy to understand and is well-balanced for both PVE and PVP (the usual nerf-calling notwithstanding)."
You setup a strawman. What is needed is a way to customize my warrior vs your warrior. Whether it's classes with talents (wow) or classes with skills (SWG) or whatever is immaterial.
What WoW seems to have done well thus far is giving us just enough to make us feel different, while still keeping everybody in rough balance. "Rough" is in the eye of the beholder, but I don't see them reworking most of their classes and the combat system like SWG had to do.
Guild Wars is very close to what you are looking for.
http://www.guildwars.com/
I tried on their open weekend a couple months ago and saw a lot of potential and quite a bit of polish. Not perfect by any sense, but given it's stage of development, very nice.
Let's not go overboard, though. I loved old microprose as well: heck MOO and MOM sucked my life away for a time. But these games were also buggy and unbalanced. Big, fun, but they weren't perfect by any stretch.
Slashdot Mirror
Spending a couple weeks training does not compare to a month hardcore grinding to get your lvl 60 stunlock rogue. You're comparing vastly different amounts of work there.
Again, all of you miss the point. It's pointless trying to balance everything to a knife's-edge; the objective should be to a) give people lots of usefull niches to fill, and b) give them freedom to move from one niche to another as the situation warrants it.
-Jeff
But you missed the point. Eve has unbalanced elements, but they don't have a problem because it is easy for a person to switch from ship to ship and loadout to loadout. If missiles are overpowered, then everybody can go get a missile boat and train up missile skills.
It's not a question of being perfectly balanced; it's a question of presenting an unfair situation to a player. Players in EVE can easily respond to an unfair situation. It's not like camelot where your lvl 50 whatever suddenly doesn't work anymore.
-Jeff
"The main problem is in games that involve both PvP and PvE."
I'm sorry, but this is simply not true. It is possible to design a game that works with both. I'll give two examples and how they do it:
1) Guild Wars. You pick your skill load-out before you leave the city. So your monk may have nice pretty heals and some smite spells in PvE, but in PvP you go with heals & anti-hex spells. Whatever, the point is that the same class does fine in both environments.
2) Eve Online. Again, you fly the ship and load it out based on your needs. So you bring your super-cruiser to a PvE base-busting mission, then trick out a frigate for a PvP raid.
I frankly don't agree much with the original article, both in tone and messaqe. "Nerfing" is fine; it's poorly planned nerfs that cause the problem. The dev teams need to balance, but they have to put a good amount of work in to do it right.
One final thing - the object isn't to make a perfectly balanced game. That's an ideal, of course, but I think a more practical goal is to make a game where everyone has a niche. So the big-gun boys are the talk of the town, as long as my crowd-controller is useful often enough to make me feel valuable, I don't care.
-Jeff
P.S. Btw, there is nothing written that says all players must be viable one on one with each other. There's nothing wrong with a little rock-paper-scissors action, or groups being greater than the sum of their parts.
The real lesson here is that there are no hard and fast rules with art.
-Jeff
Isn't the 7 people picking 1 person just survivor in reverse? I don't watch the show, and I don't see how this is a breakthrough or exciting.
Also, can someone explain to me why "non-violent" is so important? It's not like most mmorpgs are that terribly graphic about the violence anyways; certainly WoW, DAoC, etc don't rate beyond PG or PG-13 in that regard.
-Jeff
"A few more stamina points on your boots isn't going to mean a whole lot when a party of 5 orcs flanks you in a well executed pincer move."
It's not "a few". If you do not do instances and just survive on the greens, you will be around 100 attribute points behind (or resistance, or special ability). Just compare set items from the instances to "of the bear" or "of the monkey" stuff that you can find.
Actually, I'll grab a couple real quick:
green - http://www.thottbot.com/?i=5355
blue - http://www.thottbot.com/?i=20124
Your green is (at best) +17 str & stm. That's 34 attr.
Your blue is 48 atr (19 & 20 stm, 9 spi) and +10 frost resist. It's also 617 armor vs 570.
Now, do this for every piece of equipment on a person. Head, kneck, shoulders, chest, legs, hands, feet, belt, bracer, ring, ring, trinket, trinket, weapon, off-hand. If someone plays religiously, they will build up an enormous advantage in not only attribute points, but minor special powers and resistances as well.
Finally, note I only used a blue vs green. The reality will be purple or better (or blue set items, which is roughly purple anyways), vs green and random blue sellable drops.
-Jeff
P.S. I grant that tactics can and do make a difference, but equipment is vastly more important than you indicated.
"Bruce Wayne is a normal guy that everybody can relate to."
No. The comics "say" that, but what they show is someone who is impossibly accomplished by human standards. There is no one remotely capable of keeping with his physical and mental regimen at the same time.
Even if he were a flabby geek who devoted all of his time to reading, he still wouldn't be remotely human. He knows too much, too deeply, to be a real person.
No one notices though, because mental prowess is a lot harder to measure than physical ability.
-Jeff
WoW for me is one of the biggest dissapointments. Not because it's bad, but because it's very well done if you're willing to play hardcore. There's certainly a beginner's game in there, but if you want to seriously compete in the battlegrounds you'll need equipment, and for that you need many instance runs a week for a few months. There's no way I can manage another full-time job like that, so I can't participate.
Run-on paragraph, blech.
-Jeff
That's like saying photography is easy, but writing the article is hard. Both are forms of communication, and both take real effort to do right.
-Jeff
Zork made me the monster that I am today!
:-)
I love it.
-Jeff
There is no doubt that small portion of the population enjoys healing. Some enjoy the gameplay, some enjoy being important, some enjoy being needed, etc. But healers in every one of these games are the hardest to find, so by definition it's the least-liked job.
I think there is a business-case that says catering to the needs of the few is not worth the effect on the many.
-Jeff
"Evolution does not work that fast."
Sure it does. If something breeds quickly (e.g. fruit fly) you could certainly see a genetic shift in response to the environment in that time.
I don't think this is "evolution", of course, just pointing out that your blanket statement doesn't seem correct.
-Jeff
"Yeah, well, if your reason is so that you can brag about your über-whatever with a gazillion gold to the lower levels, you're not playing at all; you're being a pompous ass that the game would be better off without."
What exactly was your reason again? If I understand correctly, you're proud that you can play in a hollywood set and pretend it's the real thing. How is that superior to people who are competing?
-Jeff
I wonder how long it will take for governments to get in on the action? After all, if you're selling something for real-world dollars, then a local jurisdiction can tax it.
:-)
Where are the servers located?
-Jeff
I have to ask why the tone is so defensive? They've been paid to find every little bit ... now it's your job to help your management put the report into context.
Do your job.
-Jeff
"Apparently, the Native Americans are not so much a peoples to be exploited and killed off with pox-infected blankets as they are partners in your war against the other countries. I'm a little uncomfortable with this revisionism" ...and to continue the above poster's thread, the Native Americans actually were often partners. For example, Hernan Cortez enlisted signficant numbers of native allies in overthrowing the Aztecs, and the French and British both employed Indian allies against each other.
-Jeff
P.S. The history channel is running a series called "The Conquerors" on sunday. The last two episodes featured both Andrew Jackson's conquest of Florida and Hernan Cortez's conquest of the Aztecs.
It's not a question of people - of course people are just people, wherever you go. It's a question of governments.
If the law in a country allows us to go after and punish people like this, then I don't care. If it protects them, then raise the "damn foreigners" invective a notch. If you want to argue the grey area where cultures are different resulting in different acts being termed "crimes", talk to a lawyer or philosopher cause I ain't biting.
-Jeff
I find these discussions fascinating. Somehow the gamers with more money than time are worse than the gamers with more time than money. So it's ok for the time people to have more time to get the best equipment and then trouce the money people, but it's wrong for the money people to buy the equipment to make it a fair fight.
Time=Money. Some gamers have more of one than the other; arguing that one is right or wrong is just silly, IMO.
-Jeff
"Leaning stuff from books and Internet is boring. Learning stuff from a teacher with other pupils can be fun."
Different strokes for different folks. I much prefer books and the internet. Classes largely acted as a distraction to me when I was growing up. Occasionally they acted as competition which sparked my interest.
But that's me. There are different viewpoints out there as well.
-Jeff
Is really track the sales on ebay (and similar places). When someone an auction is successful, and the account switches hands, you ban both buyer and seller from the game using their credit card #s, and share this information with other mmorpgs.
That will stop this nonsense.
-jeff (getting ready for the privacy freaks to whine)
"Guessing the answer to every one of these is no for 90%+ of these guys."
Your guess means nothing sir. What you wrote was pure speculation and mostly drivel. You imply that reading a forum post and making a lvl 1 character are somehow great efforts, which they are not.
There is nothing insightfull about your post. It's the same old "kids today" crap that people have spewed since the dawn of time.
-Jeff
"Myth #4 - any new MMORPG must feature a complex, impossible-to-balance skill-based (non) "class" system.
Again, bullshit. WoW's simple, single-track class system is easy to understand and is well-balanced for both PVE and PVP (the usual nerf-calling notwithstanding)."
You setup a strawman. What is needed is a way to customize my warrior vs your warrior. Whether it's classes with talents (wow) or classes with skills (SWG) or whatever is immaterial.
What WoW seems to have done well thus far is giving us just enough to make us feel different, while still keeping everybody in rough balance. "Rough" is in the eye of the beholder, but I don't see them reworking most of their classes and the combat system like SWG had to do.
-Jeff
Guild Wars is very close to what you are looking for.
http://www.guildwars.com/
I tried on their open weekend a couple months ago and saw a lot of potential and quite a bit of polish. Not perfect by any sense, but given it's stage of development, very nice.
-Jeff
I could only imagine the body count if we had gone to war with microsoft!
-Jeff
Let's not go overboard, though. I loved old microprose as well: heck MOO and MOM sucked my life away for a time. But these games were also buggy and unbalanced. Big, fun, but they weren't perfect by any stretch.
:-)
Certainly no Blizzard.
-Jeff