Comments on That's a Terrible Idea: On Balance, Part 1: Strategy and Depth

WOW. After reading through the slide that Schubert...

2009-11-01T12:18:19.203-05:00

WOW. After reading through the slide that Schubert put out I can say I am now even less likely to purchase the new Star Wars MMO. I had a inkling from other interviews that bio-ware was looking to absolutely destroy the group dynamic of MMOs and this kinda confirmed it.

Solo game content kills social community. Why will People group? What common good do they have to come together for?

The corner stone of solo play should be crafting, followed by quests in and around the the starting area. The need for grouping should grow , slowly at first, as a char levels and start getting more needed around the middle lvls. However, the want and desire should be there as well. Make grps of xp multiplyers, etc. Make in game solutions for Looking for groups or scheduling

Seriously, I have a great idea. Lets make a game that is built on soloing for 50 levels, they never have to make a group and should be able to level ever couple of hours, then when they hit 50 lets give them raid content (guess from his slide) so we can throw a bunch of people together who haven't grped and don't understand what their role in a group is or how they interact with their group mates.

They have decide to "up the ante" so to speak with this MMO and try to out due blizzard in the BS everyman carebare kind of MMO. We should see how well it does.

Damion Schubert's session at AGDC convinced me...

2009-10-30T23:59:13.577-04:00

Damion Schubert's session at AGDC convinced me that Solo is a playstyle which cannot be ignored.

http://www.zenofdesign.com/2009/09/19/agdc-2009-the-loner/

MMO's are losing alot of depth and strats, but...

2009-10-30T20:17:21.737-04:00

MMO's are losing alot of depth and strats, but that doesn't mean all MMO's have no depth. WoW, which is what this article references, was created to (IMO) to be an Every-mans MMO where all can compete, play and have fun. From the begining, WoW wanted to target people that has never played a MMO before and bring them into this great genre. From a business perspective, this strategy has worked beyond anyones dreams. WoW currently owns 62% of the MMO market and I think it could be argued that at least 20-30% percent of that was because of the surge in MMO players that came with it. In Short, they expanded the MMO demographic beyond what was considered normal.

The problem with this is the need by alot (not all) of this player base to have instant gratification and not really wanting to work for it. Raid mobs are starting to get easier, and all of the new MMOs that are comming out don't exactly talk about being a challenge. Hopefully, this ezmode mentality will not stick around long. They will either burn them selves out and leave or start to actually want a challenge.

Also, another trend I see that is somewhat concerning to me, is the demand for solo content. I can not understand the desire / want / need for solo content on a MMO. I can understand "some" solo content. But being able to go from lvl 1 - max cap solo is crazy. The whole point of paying 15 bucks a month is to be an active part of a virtual community and help shape the world. Tons of solo content starts erode this, the only "complete" content that should be solo in a MMO is crafting. A good group dynamic, where you have to actually think about what classes you need and how best to fill that need, is what makes an MMO fun. Having more than Just Heals + 5 other DPSer is not dynamic. Learning to play your specific role, be it: Support, DPS, Heals, Tank, etc, and how you interact with the other people in your grp/raid gives you the ability and enviorment for depth and strategy, which == fun. However, you still need encounters that demand this type of thinking. Having run of the mill "tank and spank" mobs and encounters to nothing to help this. There should be a variety of strategies from: Tank-n-spank all the way up to specific scripts that all members of the group must participate in order to beat the encounter and failure to follow this script results in a wipe until you get it right.

just my .02cents

In an MMO as deep as chess, there would be enough ...

2009-10-26T15:15:33.942-04:00

In an MMO as deep as chess, there would be enough depth to allow the best players in the game to play almost indefinitely. There'd be a lot more to do in a deeper game because the number of viable strategies for beating a given encounter would explode. When the encounters are above trivially easy, increased depth means that people will voluntarily try new strategies to beat challenging foes. The culture of raid strat memorization would be severely undercut because players would have to think on their feet and play well in order to win encounters reliably. If you require players to engage with the game more deeply throughout, they'll naturally build skill and knowledge of the game over time and will probably not burn out on the game as is the current trend. This doesn't mean a game has to be hardcore, just that it has to have a learning curve and difficult curve that are actually existent before hard-mode raiding content.

I don't really think more depth will help. A l...

2009-10-26T12:27:51.185-04:00

I don't really think more depth will help. A lot of people play chess only casually, and the amount of effort to advance in skill is higher than most are either willing to or capable of doing. Not being able to visualize far enough ahead, or be able to memorize openings tends to handicap "advancement" as it were.

In an MMO that would be like if only grandmasters got to the level cap, and everyone else was stuck at level 20-30. The difficulty of going higher would increase till people hit their natural limit, and they'd stop. It's a testament to chess that players keep with it, but with no real sense of progression, an MMO with similar depth would quickly fade.

Current MMOs may be easysauce, but that means most people can reach cap, and partake in endgame content. In an MMO deep as chess, you'd be lucky if you retained players for more than a few months.