Samuel_Tow

At some point, you're going to have to expect from people to just do better. You can't let players play as poorly, as sloppily and as stupidly as they choose and still expect success. At some point, the game has to say "OK, you failed. Try this again and DO BETTER!" It doesn't have to be via a "game over" screen, but you're going to have to go there eventually.

Granted, I draw the line on "unwinnable" situations, where you fail not because you did badly, but because of something you did prior to your last save point, which you cannot go back and fix. Few games let this happen these days, but all too often you'll find yourself hitting an auto-save point low on health and with little ammo left even in contemporary games. This extends to builds in MMOs. There's nothing worse than encounters expecting you to have a power you don't have, or worse - CAN'T have.

But when it comes to performance that is within the player's hands in real time irrespective of past events... Yeah, we can expect the player to be on the ball, at least. And, frankly, I'm getting a little sick of our playerbase's aversion to any map more complicated than straight, wide corridors. I mean come on!

Or you close your eyes and pick at random. You can't have it both ways. Either you stick to the rules (ALL of them), or you abandon the rules (again, ALL of them). If you abandon one rule but keep another, then that really doesn't matter, because if you abandon one, the rest really don't count.

Essentially, if you ignore the definition of Origin in the game, then you don't need to resort to the definitions of the SOs. At this point, you're making it up from scratch anyway.

That's assuming I write what I do for the social interaction. Though, given how loose your idea of social interaction is, whatever my reasons for doing anything may be, they'd still fall under "for social interaction" anyway, so this point is entirely moot.

Right... I assume you have some sort of study to back this up, so I won't talk about "people," but rather speak for myself. I don't play my games for the social interaction. I don't believe I ever have. True, certain games I'll play for the good story and characters, usually hot-wiring the actual gameplay to enjoy the narrative, but any game I play for the gameplay, I do not play for social interaction. In fact, in-game and in real life, I actively avoid social interaction for the most part, because it's A LOT OF WORK. And I'm probably the last person on the planet who's going to put up with work in my leisure time. Hell, I can barely put up with work AT WORK.

I write a lot and I've gotten pretty good at dealing with people expressly BECAUSE I'm very good at AVOIDING people and social interaction for the most part.

Very well, actually. It's given Capcom probably 20 years of smashing success, and it gave me the bulk of my childhood gaming experience. Back then, games didn't have time sinks and boring, repetitive grinds (for the most part), so it never came down to time vs. reward. Being good enough, or knowing enough of the tricks to finish the game was what counted, and I enjoyed being good enough. I still do. And what do you do when you exhaust the all of 30 minutes of game time? Start all over again, of course. But a game that's good enough, you don't just jump in and complete on the same go.

With emulators, it's very easy to forget what these games once meant, because you have unlimited credits. But I actually enjoy the sobering reality of seeing Game Over with NO WAY to continue from time to time. Games that do that rarely have a lot of "investment" to them, so getting a game over isn't that big a deal, but when you can't just cheese past the hard parts, that really makes you think.

Well, maybe I blinked and all the gamers I grew up with all died, to be replaced by a new generation of completely different gamers who can't handle games like that, but neither myself nor my friends ever shied away from a challenge short of complete and utter cheese. A friend of mine and I still have the occasional duel in Marvel vs. Capcom, and despite him being initially VASTLY stronger than me, that never stopped me from trying to beat him, because ultimately it's the fight that's fun, win or lose.

And I realise that I've talked a lot about how I like things easy and dislike a challenge, but that's largely based on the fact that the ACTION is, for the most part, out of my hands. I don't run from challenge in arcade games, and have in fact purposefully taken the harder approach to enemies I could cheese through. But even then, it's actually EASY for me, because I'm fast and clever enough to make it easy for myself. In an MMO where most of what matters is what powers I took and how I slotted them, difficulty is just cheese and nothing else.

That's a HORRIBLE argument. Are you seriously suggesting that any system in any game only ever has to be limited to the OBVIOUS mechanics? I mean, I know players these days border on brain-dead, but even THEY aren't quite that dense. Yes, the "slotting more than one of the same kind" is a problem with City of Heroes, but that's not because the system is bad, but because it has been ill-explained to us.

And are you seriously going to ask how you tell people what they can and cannot do with items? Isn't it obvious? You TELL them! That's what manuals are for, that's what tutorials are for, that's what helps are for, that's what tooltips are for and, failing all that, that's what the Internet is for. Games don't need to be designed for empty heads. Sometimes, to play a game, you have to actually LEARN a thing or two about how it operates.

And, trust me, explaining to someone how implants work is FAR simpler than trying to give someone even a basic glimpse behind something like the D&D system. I've been playing computer games that use it for YEARS and I still don't know what the hell is going on, chiefly because I didn't want to read entire textbooks on it. But you don't have to ever reach that height of complexity. You CAN have unusual things that are still pretty simple. Sooner or later we're going to have to stop treating players like idiots and have them read a bit and think a bit.

I think our own development team is proof positive to the contrary. The designers themselves come down here, say "Hey, we just did that. What do you think?" and we reply. To them directly. Yes, it's an aberration, but to me at least, it makes me feel like I have more of a voice than just the power to take my ball and go home if I don't like it. I realise other games' development teams (as a whole) likely won't hear what I have to say or care about it, but that hasn't exactly stopped me from saying it in the past, anyway. No reason to change my approach in the future.

Ugh... I just feel like Mod 8 is looking over my shoulder, ready to club me in the head because of the comment we all know I'm going to make. Why do you people always try so hard to get me mod-smacked?

I still can't see the social aspect. All it does is reduce the game to a glorified chat room, and that's far easier to achieve without having to show up for a raid. Just chat with people over a global channel and that's that. But an event that requires me to show up and DO NOTHING is just not well designed.

Especially for me, since the "social aspect" irritates me a lot more than it helps me enjoy the game.

Supplementary ideas and concepts are all fine and good, but they CANNOT override written descriptions in their official capacity. Going off what SOs do to you is not a BAD idea (provided you actually use them at all), but it should only ever work IN ADDITION TO the definitions of the origins as stated. You can use any and all tools at your disposal to spin and interpret origin definitions in whatever way you can manage, but you should not outright contradict these definitions.

What "origin" means as a term in this game is already defined within the game's own caption boxes. If you contradict that on purpose, then you may as well close your eyes and pick at random, because once you disregard the rules, there's no point in accounting for them at all. Any story which picks and chooses which rules it upholds and which it disregards is no better than a story which disregards ALL rules.

I keep using the word "spin" because that's exactly what it was. The definitions of the origins are vague enough to where you can explain anything three different ways and still follow the definitions to the letter. You don't need to disregard the definitions as given and replace them with definitions of your own choosing, because you can EXPLAIN around the problems, rather than just kicking them out of the way.

That's... And awfully abstract interpretation of social interaction. I mean, I have a hard time accepting even SIMULATED social interaction (that is, talking with NPCs) as something which counts, but I'm willing to concede on that part. But Tetris as a social interaction because you have a computer which governs the internal rules of the game? But that interpretation, chopping wood or clipping your toenails could count as social interaction.

I'm sorry, maybe I'm not smart enough (no snark involved) to see things for what they are, but I can only call something "social interaction" if it has other people or people simulades in it. REAL people simulades, not just abstract concepts that, if you squint and tilt your head, sort of remind me of something that kind of maybe looks like a very vague simulade. The border is understandably ill-defined, but Tetris would most certainly fall far, FAR on the OTHER side.

I just don't see how the ESSENCE of a game has to be social interaction each and every time. Yes, I'm sure an abstract argument can be made that every game is, even games that aren't, but that's much in the same vein as the arguments that can be made as to whether SuperMan is Natural or Science origin. I really don't buy that the point of every game is to act as surrogate social interaction for the things we can't have in real life, specifically since I, myself, and not actually interested in social interaction in the slightest, yet I've played games since I was 6.

That scenario would pretty much ruin the game and everything it stands for. I grew up on the old arcades and I forged through all of their cheap, cheesy, unfair and downright malicious design. I suffered through Sunset Riders where getting shot once cost you a life and all your upgrades, I toughed it out through Knights of the Round, where one mistake could land you on the bottom of a dog pile. And because I didn't have unlimited cash as a kid, every play session of mine was limited to about three or four credits for the day.

Most significantly, I managed to play Crusader: No Regret from beginning to end without using a single save, because the game I had was bugged in some way, I don't know how or why. It just didn't let me save, so my days would consist of waking up, launching the game at, say, noon, and then finishing the game at about 6-8 PM in the evening, never having died once, because if I died, the game would start me over from the beginning. And that's a game where one wrong step can put you on top of instant-kill mines or get you a fatal face-full of rocket turret rockets.

But all of those games depended pretty much solely on my ability to play them and pretty much not at all on random chance or ahead-of-time preparation. Yeah, sure, some of them depended on having a good gun or having enough upgrades, but only tangentially.

I like how Battlefield 2142 did this. Everyone has a standard kit, with players unlocking some nifty gadgets and weapons as they gain ranks in the game. For the most part, the most vital things (like a defibrilators or grenades) can be unlocked right out the gate, but pretty soon you're fighting with the same equipment as everybody else. This is one reason I used to like FPS games so much - they didn't depend on who put in more time or who came more prepared, they depended on who was just plain better. I was never a twitch fighter, which is why I've kept off FPS in recent times (that, and they haven't been very good), but I actually wrote a big guide on UT2004 for this precise reason. A person who knew his guns and knew his tactics could reliably beat a much stronger foe who just played on twitch.

This is one thing that is sorely missing in contemporary MMOs. Battles are almost never won because you, as a player, are just that damn good. They're decided because you had the right build, the right gear and knew the right tactics. Stay out of the tunnels so you don't summon the Whelps, as it were. Action RPGs HAVE existed, and I'm actually pretty sad I haven't seen more games like Revenant in recent times. To a certain extent, games like Devil May Cry have some RPG elements, but as time moves on and EA make more games, this is becoming more of a tacked on time sink than an actual draw fro the game.

But whether or not focusing on gear is a good thing, that's where MMOs are. I'm just tired of seeing this gear presented as swords and shields you pick off the ground, especially in settings NOT set in Fantasy Land. Why can't I visit elemental forges and imbue my Soul Reaver with an element? Why can't I put cybernetic legs on myself and jump higher? There are interesting variants out there, we don't need to keep repeating ourselves.

"Play," within the context of an MMO, usually means "spend more than a few hours on a free trial." The question wasn't why I'd TRY a new MMO that was just a rehash of the same old, same old and not just KEEP PLAYING the MMO I'm already playing which gives me the exact same thing. It's like the saying goes: "You don't drag people away from WoW by offering them the same things WoW offers them. If that's what they wanted, they can just play WoW. You drag people away from WoW by offering them things WoW DOESN'T offer." Like... Loot, an auction house, banks, crafting and... Yeah, that.

I seem to have misread. The point was, I suppose, that a new game has to offer something more than an old game if there is to be any point to play it. Why would I stop playing WoW, for instance, if another game offered me exactly the same things and nothing more? At the very least, WoW is "the big thing" AND the game I'm currently playing. "Same old, same old" is not enough to shift me.

If my choice is between telling designers that their baby is ugly and sitting on my hands, I opt to tell them. All else aside, feedback counts. If it's just me, then who cares about me? But what if it's not? What if many people feel the same way? If all of us, then, tales the time to let designers know how we feel, that just might make a difference. The same way I vote with my money. If a game sucks, I don't pay for it. If a game is unimaginative and derivative, I don't pay money for it. I don't expect to wag my finger at people and have them turn red in the face, but I'm not going to keep my opinion of them to myself, either.

And it's not just about making things I, in particular, want. It's about making something, anything, that is new and novel. They CANNOT survive by remaking the same basic framework over and over again. This is not going to last. It cannot last. Sooner or later someone is going to have to innovate, or someone is going to go bankrupt. We'll see how the Star Wars MMO does, but sooner or later something somewhere will have to give. The MMO genre can't subsist on clones indefinitely.

That's about all I need to read. Your whole poin hingest on that, and that is simply not true. You're still cherry-picking to ignore what the text says about origins, yet not ignore what the text says about enhancements, and while you're free to do so for your own characters, it's not something you should try to extend over OTHER PEOPLE'S characters.

As far as I'm concerned, Origins already have written definitions. As long as they're going to mean anything at all, they're going to mean that. What the actual word "origin" means is irrelevant, because we have a definition of what the TERM "origin" means in City of Heroes.

I actually DO agree with you, and I actually see no reason to simplify the process at all, not in practical terms at the very least. These contemplations are intriguing purely as a discussion, but in a very practical sense, with origins as loosely-defined as they are, it's often possible to drive an argument for at least three of them on any character you pick.

But that's part of the fun. It's not a mechanical process of picking the right answer, it's a creative process of coming up with a concept, picking an origin for it and trying to explain away why that concept is of that origin.

Anecdote: a friend of mine complained about a character he'd accidentally made Science when she should have been Technology, as her power came solely and only from her power gloves. She was too high level to reroll, so we sat down and tried to macgyver some middle ground between spin and ret-con that would retain most of his concept but fit the Science origin anyway. My suggestion was to shift the source of power in her body as the result of a scientific accident, with the gloves acting only as amplifiers and focusing devices, which would have shifted her origin far enough to call it Science. Even though Positron has much the same origin and he's Technology, but that was the point - simple methods for picking the right origin are fun to talk about, but in practice, they're loose enough that you can just explain them away even if they're "wrong."

True, but at least it's done well enough in hiding them, even if most are hidden in plain sight. You don't have to reinvent the wheel as long as your rims are cool enough, so to speak.

It's not really about getting my head out of the clouds so much as it's about getting my money out of my wallet. I vote with my money and I only ever buy games I actually respect and enjoy. My problem is that there simply aren't any such games in the MMO genre that are being made, now or in planning. None that I know of. And that's kind of worrisome, because I know this one won't last forever.

Honestly, that's one of the things I mentioned before. I don't KNOW what my perfect game would be like, since what I would instinctively want is not only unrealistic, but from what I can tell out and out impossible. Within the realm of possibilities, I don't know what I would want, outside of saying that it's something OTHER than what the MMO market is currently flooded with. I'm actually fairly confident that the "guaranteed returns" bubble will burst at some point, I'm just worried it will last long enough to sour me on MMOs altogether.

Once upon a time I'd started drawing out a concept for a possible action RPG style game, but that was long before I started playing MMOs and most of what's in it is both largely unimaginative and actually inapplicable to MMOs, not to mention driven by lack of knowledge or planning. I'll see if I can't resurrect the idea at some point.

For teleporting, yes, it's hardly quick. In-battle, I can RUN from place to place faster than I can teleport across that distance. Base run speed is 14.32 mph. which is 75609.6 feet per hour, or around 21 feet per second. So I can run 21 feet while teleport is activating, and it would need to be a GIANT melee for me to need to do that. In fact, it gets better.

With sprint slotted for... Let me see... One +1 run speed SO, I'm seeing 23.98 mph, which is around 35.2 feet per second. So, with Teleport taking two seconds to animate, I can run over 70 feet. At least so the numbers say.

Numbers aside, I know that, for the time it takes me to puff up my chest and teleport, I can usually have simply RUN in and saved myself a wad of endurance. Teleportation useful in combat and, above all, COOL, needs to be INSTANT. Instant enough for it to activate simultaneous with the mouse click, or as close to it as ping would allow.

Teleport is fat. It costs to much, it delays too much and it just feels heavy, like trying to use Fly in melee, with all the drift and suppression. A sharper, faster, cleaner teleport would definitely be nice, even if it were capped at 10-20 feet per activation and several seconds' worth of recharge.

I, on the other hand, love outlevelling contacts and have no problems ignoring any contacts in my "Inactive" list. You already have... Oh, wait...

Then suggest changes to that and keep your hands off my difficulty settings.

Unless YOU are prepared to put together a team for me whenever I feel like tackling an elite boss, kindly keep your hands off my ability to solo my own missions. Archvillains scaling down into elite bosses was a change specifically designed to allow people to solo their own signature enemies, so trying to argue forced teaming is a doomed sell.

"Should" is a very poor argument, and your position stands directly against all requests to make the game easier, including requests already fulfilled. If your game is too easy, you have the option to up your difficulty. Stop trying to mess with MY difficulty. The game was never too easy for me and you have no place trying to dictate how hard it "should" be.

Yes, I do actually. If that's what people want, then let people have that. If it's such a problem for me, I can always elect to not look at them.

I think you dug up a post of mine that's like a week old.

To point, when are you going to make these Roman numerals visible? If they're off the majority of the time, then the problem with ambiguity remains. Since you replied to a very old post of mine, I don't know where to look for your suggestion.

That isn't actually neutral, though, not in D&D terms. Neutral in D&D, from how much I've played, has to do with the balance between good and evil, and is most characteristic of druids, from what I've seen. It's the belief that the world is governed by the balance of nature, and allowing either side to triumph would upset the natural order of things.

Now, of course, I could well be wrong, since the last time I actually dealt with these alignments was in Icewind Dale, and that was operating under the aD&D system.

Man, I liked the flashing envelope of the old forums better! With these ones, I can never spot my new PMs!

Checking.

Yeah, I did. Fixed!

Hmm... I wasn't aware he could shoot lasers out of his bare hands.

Wait, what? ALL games are copies of social interactions? What kind of social interactions is, say, Tetris a copy of? Or Sudoku, for that matter. Or the many Breakout games. I can agree that, to some extent, MMOs can be billed as social experiences, but even then not every part of them is one.

Wait, I'm obviously missing something. Last I checked, say Street Fighter didn't have anything I could describe as "gear," yet last I checked, it was one of the most popular games out there. Pac Man has no "gear" unless you count the power pellets, and that's a REAL stretch. The original Load Runner had no gear, either. More contemporary Need For Speed have something which would qualify, but older Need For Speed games did not.

Or are you saying an MMO can't exist without gear? And even if you were, you missed my point by a mile. I never said I don't want the system in the game as such. I asked why it had to be GEAR. Why does it have to be swords, hats, shoes and armour? Why, even in contemporary games? Why, even in games that don't actually NEED items that you hold on your hands or put on yourself? Even Champions Online, the purportedly revolutionary game, still has me dressing myself up, albeit in items in name only. City of Heroes had a good idea, in my opinion. Enhancements - abstract concepts that enhance your abilities in ways OTHER than directly putting something on your body (a lot of the time).

There was an old game called Harbinger that had a very interesting idea. Two of its three classes were perfectly standard Diablo ripoffs, but its third, the "Gladiator," was a robot who didn't actually use almost any weapon or armour. Instead, all of his "items" came in the form of upgrades that you installed inside his body. Power cells, hydraulic pistons, shield generators and so forth. I think Skaarj-style blades were the only thing you could put on the outside.

I'm not saying I don't want items as a concept. What I don't want is items literally implemented as items. Plenty of games have been more than capable of working with alternate systems, such as "equipping" abilities, using enhancements or altering your characters, but apparently if you can't pick up a sword off the ground and swing it, it's not "items enough."

Which means precisely zilch, since those games PLAY very much the same. I've tried many of them for a while, and they all offered me pretty much the same thing. Hence my question. Let me put it like this - different platform, different manufacturers, different game names and even different graphics do not make a different game. Much like every story ever made about the three ghosts of Christmas is, at its core, just a rehash of an old story I am SICK of watching about, so very many MMOs these days are a rehash of an old system I grew bored with incredibly quickly.

Wrong. Really, do I HAVE to say it? Every time you start a sentence with "you probably" or "you wouldn't" or something like this, just stop, backspace over it and rewrite. You don't know me, so making assumptions about what I would and wouldn't do is a total crapshot. To prove a point, you are completely, totally and utterly WRONG.

I love Torchlight. More than any game in recent times. Torchlight has given me more playtime than anything I've played other than City of Heroes for YEARS now. And Torchlight is a clear, obvious, shameless Diablo clone. And I love it for that. Not only is it a Diablo clone, but it's a clone of the ORIGINAL Diablo, before Blizzard decided to overcomplicate things. Before it, Dungeon Siege, probably the cheesiest game of all times, struck the same note with me. It came out at the time Diablo 2 was in full swing, but it came out with a system much more reminiscent of the original Diablo, and like Torchlight, I fell in love with it. I'd still be playing it today if I hadn't hit a grind spot that forced me to essentially gain a lot of levels somewhere else and go back to the Utraian Peninsula.

But I've not seen a Diablo clone in years, and even back in the day, I didn't see all that many. I've seen a lot of Diablo 2 clones, including the Harbinger I mentioned, but clones of the glory days of the original Diablo are rare. In fact, remakes of truly old games like this sell not on the merit of the actual game (Torchlight isn't actually all that spectacular), but rather on the nostalgia value of the brand, and as such innovations actually HURT them. If the Ur Quan Masters started trying to re-write the game, how many people would even care?

JUST being derivative is not a bad thing. Nostalgia value or room on the market can sell a lot of clones of the same thing, and I wouldn't really complain. But there comes a point where a concept simply dries up. You can't keep re-releasing essentially the same game without bringing in something truly innovative. It just doesn't happen. Yes, you can wait 20-30 years and release the same game again, and people will buy it, but if you re-release it once every year, how long is that going to be meaningful? OK, some companies can manage it, but that's not a general thing.

And again, why are you arguing against my desire to see something new? Why does my dissatisfaction with the same old thing being re-released for 10 years now somehow make me a pariah? Are you saying that you'd rather every MMO launched from here on until we die be the exact same sword and sorcery crap under a new name? Because that's what I'm getting. I'd be happy to be proven wrong, but I'd need to understand how you can claim innovation shouldn't happen, that the status quo is just fine, and yet not vouch for exactly this.

Arcana, I agree with your general argument, but this paragraph in particular has a big hole in it. Batman may have decided to become a super hero, and would have become one technology or no technology, but in either case, the origin of his powers would have been VASTLY different. Consider a few examples:

Batman has only him body to rely on, so he trains in martial arts, builds up his body and gets himself only very basic tools to work with. He's a super hero, but he is decidedly Natural.

Batman gets a brainwave and develops staggering futuristic technology. He builds himself an anime cyber ninja suit complete with all sorts of gadgets and gizmos. He's still Batman, but his origin is much more heavily Technology.

Batman discovers an old crypt in his bat cave and finds an amulet that makes him super strong, super fast and nigh-on invulnerable as long as he has the will to control it. He's still Batman, but he is very much Magic.

What I have a problem with here is that we're putting undue impetus on intent and development, sometimes to the exclusion of the NATURE of the actual powers. I don't believe the question is which came first or which started it all or how the character feels, so much as the much simpler "is it the tools or the man who uses them that makes the hero. Take away Batman's batarangs and he'll still be able to outsmart his foes even with more spartan methods. Take away Iron Man's armour, and he's helpless (as his stories prove time and time again).

So, yes, I agree with your conclusion, with the above caveat.

The kind that only has a PC under it. I found out on my own.