XP curve was too steep before, Now its a downhill slope.
By
Aura_Familia,
Posted on: 2011-11-06 15:21 in CoH and CoV General Discussions
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Wow, man. How do you even manage to get any tarring done with a brush that wide? You must have hella strong forearms.
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Originally Posted by Goldbrick
The elitist model only made sense when the market was almost exclusively basement-dwellers with unlimited time to play, and had nothing else in their lives to stroke their egos.
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If this malarkey were even remotely true we'd have had power set respecs added to the game years ago. Same goes for transferring characters between accounts, and a dozen other things that players have been clamoring for for years. |
Originally Posted by Goldbrick
If the devs thought they could get a million subscribers by giving away a lvl 40 kheldian to anyone who has a VIP account, I'm sure we'd quickly see kheldians everywhere, like death knights in WoW.
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Damnit, thats how we blasters did it in the old days!
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Originally Posted by Scythus
Want to experience debt? Keep playing the character until you run out of patrol XP and die a few times. There, you now have debt.
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------->"Sic Semper Tyrannis"<-------
In my opinion, it's still a bit too steep in the mid-late levels.
Goodbye may seem forever
Farewell is like the end
But in my heart's the memory
And there you'll always be
-- The Fox and the Hound
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What do you mean DID? |
Originally Posted by ebon3
Damnit, thats how we blasters did it in the old days!
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Originally Posted by Zwillinger
GG, I would tell you that "I am killing you with my mind", but I couldn't find an emoticon to properly express my sentiment.
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Originally Posted by Captain_Photon
NOTE: The Incarnate System is basically farming for IOs on a larger scale, and with more obtrusive lore.
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Take out the snark, though, and you're left with the truth behind the "classic" MMOs of old - they were designed to be all-consuming giant time sinks which quite literally expected you to devote all of your free time to them and then look for real life activities you could skip so you could devote even more time. That was the only way to make decent progress. If I had to make a guess, the original idea behind MMOs was to target P&P fans, who could dive into this interactive but fairly aimless world and make their own fun, thus tailoring themselves after the slow progression of your typical D&D campaign, which could take weeks, months or even years.|
Originally Posted by Captain_Photon
Wow, man. How do you even manage to get any tarring done with a brush that wide? You must have hella strong forearms.
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When MMOs were a niche genre popular among hardy, loyal fans, they could afford to be time sinks and they could afford to waste people's time for the sake of atmosphere and achievement. As MMOs become more mainstream, however, and, more than anything, as they face more and more competition, they have to cater to players more than ever before. While EQ and AO could afford to treat people with tough love because there were so few options and their fans so determined, MMOs today exist in a saturated marker where if you tick off a customer, he can always ship off to the next MMO over.
Finally, with variety comes the power of choice. When you have all of one or two MMOs in the entire world, people take what they can get. When there are probably hundreds as there are today, people will pick the MMO they like, because chances are, one of the hundreds is going to be a match for almost every person. As such, people simply won't put up with things they don't like in an MMO.
As the genre matures and competition increases, businesses will be consistently forced into catering to their customers more and more. It's the nature of business, simply put.
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Originally Posted by Arcanaville
Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.
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Ill put it this way. From level 1-32 is pie...however Im fine with that.
Ill put it another way...35-45 is slower and feels longish. Or longer! Or something
45-50 feels like eternity, and thats when I usually drop a toon an make something different, because being stuck at 46 for what feels like forever is just a crawl.
But thats my oppinion
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Sam don't you think culture has a lot to do with it as well? Some of these grindfest MMO's are mainly based in Asian countries where that playstyle seems to be popular. Isn't it possible that the addition of what we westerners think of as mind boring content is a business decision designed to attract the kind of players that make those Asian based games so successful?
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Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow
Take out the snark, though, and you're left with the truth behind the "classic" MMOs of old - they were designed to be all-consuming giant time sinks which quite literally expected you to devote all of your free time to them and then look for real life activities you could skip so you could devote even more time. That was the only way to make decent progress. If I had to make a guess, the original idea behind MMOs was to target P&P fans, who could dive into this interactive but fairly aimless world and make their own fun, thus tailoring themselves after the slow progression of your typical D&D campaign, which could take weeks, months or even years.
When MMOs were a niche genre popular among hardy, loyal fans, they could afford to be time sinks and they could afford to waste people's time for the sake of atmosphere and achievement. As MMOs become more mainstream, however, and, more than anything, as they face more and more competition, they have to cater to players more than ever before. While EQ and AO could afford to treat people with tough love because there were so few options and their fans so determined, MMOs today exist in a saturated marker where if you tick off a customer, he can always ship off to the next MMO over. Finally, with variety comes the power of choice. When you have all of one or two MMOs in the entire world, people take what they can get. When there are probably hundreds as there are today, people will pick the MMO they like, because chances are, one of the hundreds is going to be a match for almost every person. As such, people simply won't put up with things they don't like in an MMO. As the genre matures and competition increases, businesses will be consistently forced into catering to their customers more and more. It's the nature of business, simply put. |
I don't see much difference in leveling time, but I have joined the game when leveling was already easier.
Doing regular content (+TFs) it still takes me between 2 months and 3+ years to reach 50 (I still have alt from the beginning that haven't reached 50). Getting to 35 is easy and maybe bit to fast, but then getting from 35-50 is still slow, especially for people that have lot of alts.
If you think you are leveling too fast there is always the option to turn of Xp so that is not that much of the problem.
About new low level content I still prefer Praetoria missions, but it is much harder to find team there and being stuck till level 20 is bad. Maybe letting people choose side at lower level and be allowed to leave Praetoria and return if they want to continue with missions would be the best option that would make more people want to play it again. I know that missions are harder there, but I like choices and it never get bored doing Praetoria stories unlike Atlas or Mercie ones.
"If you want to win you must not lose."
"Easiest way to turn defeat into a victory is to put on the enemy's uniform"
"Better strategic retreat than dishonorable defeat"
- Il Numero Uno (The Number One)
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The thing with culture is... This didn't originate in Korea. Much like how anime is (or started as) Japan's knockoff of old Disney animations, but with Japanese themes, so the current generation of Korean grindfest MMOs are little more than Korea's take on the MMO progenitors of EQ and AO. I honestly don't think we can blame Chinese gold farmers or Korean people who died from playing WoW for MMOs being a grind, because a grind is what they started life as. And I honestly believe that they started life as a grind because they tried to emulate pen and paper RPGs and their methodology of creating a living, breathing world for adventurers to forge their adventures in, minus one GM/DM.|
Originally Posted by Forbin_Project
Sam don't you think culture has a lot to do with it as well? Some of these grindfest MMO's are mainly based in Asian countries where that playstyle seems to be popular. Isn't it possible that the addition of what we westerners think of as mind boring content is a business decision designed to attract the kind of players that make those Asian based games so successful?
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If anything, the current move of MMOs away from repetitive grinds, away from hundreds of hours of time sinks and away hostile difficulty curves is a response to MMOs becoming more mainstream all over the world. As they become more common and more people play them, the number of "hardcore" fans who welcome the punishment and yearn to dish it back out becomes diluted with people like me, who would never have gotten into MMOs to begin with if the game weren't easy or teaming weren't mandatory or rewards weren't fairly swift. Even back in the day, City of Heroes was one of the easier MMOs, and to be honest... This hasn't changed by all that much. It's still easy and quick, those are just simpler to achieve.
There will always be room for more classic, punishing MMOs, but as the years roll on and competition increases, there will always be room for the simpler, easier, more casual-friendly MMOs, as well.
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Originally Posted by Arcanaville
Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.
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There's no going back. MMOs want to get new players heavily invested in their characters as fast as possible, because there may only be a window of a few weeks or a month to get them hooked.
The crappy old model of devote-your-waking-life-to-our-MMO is a failed one. MMOs are no longer a niche entertainment, meant just for kids or basement-dwellers. They're now going after all ages, all demographics. But regular folks have regular lives, and can only spend a couple of hours a day, at most, on an MMO. If they can't make progress in a handful of hours per week, it isn't their regular lives that will suffer, they'll dump the MMO. Making very slow progress week after week is very b o r i n g for those who have balanced, fulfilling lives. And they can go right back to those lives without regret.
If CoH hadn't adopted the elitist model of the olden days (Everquest and even earlier games like Kesmai and Kingdom of Drakkar), I bet this game would have a few million subscribers today.
The elitist model only made sense when the market was almost exclusively basement-dwellers with unlimited time to play, and had nothing else in their lives to stroke their egos.
Goldbrick 50 inv/ss tank
Other 50s: Power Beam, Rocky Mantle, STORMIE Agent, Matchless, Major Will, Knightmayor, Femstone, Space Maureen, Crimebuster Ako, Dr. Twilight, Doc Champion, American Gold Eagle