StarDestroyer.Net BBS

How does everyone feels about the level grinding required in various MMORPGs to get good skills?
While grinding mobs to get good drops is one thing, I find it extremely boring that one have to level up xp just to get the level required to get good skills. For example, warriors in WOW need to grind to level 40 to be truly effective using the talent tree. Cabal semi requires you to grind levels before you can use combos. Even kiddy games like Maplestory require levelling for you to reach job classes, although the only difference is jobs gives you AOE skills and more graphics/damage.

So..... how would you feel about an MMORPG where your character is essentially equipped with all usuable skills right from the start? Something akin to FPS like Team Fortress and Halo, where your character immediately has everything at the start. For character progression and customisation, other than equipment leveling, levelling or talent trees might serve to further upgrade your skills or give additional benefits such as additional HP, MP, reduced MP usuage or additional damage.

If your looking for that sort of game then Face of Mankind was a MMO trying to pull that off. It was essentially an FPS MMO with player factions in a Sci Fi setting.
PVE comabt was non existant during beta but they did eventually start bringing in AI alien monsters but the focus was on being completely player driven. The Military, Police, Mercs, Corporations and criminals were all factions you could choose to be in with no 'leveling up' beyond rank in the faction.
Rank was given by players at the top of the chain with various rank based powers like the ability to promote / demote, fine and mass mail members.

Overall, I found it interesting but the game was really boring during beta. Playing the LED police was a fucking nightmare because it was a bunch of kids playing cops with guns. I wont mention how much trouble was caused by stupid fuckers randomly shooting people or the fact the game was a laggy deathmatch with poor combat and limited stuff to do.

PainRack wrote:How does everyone feels about the level grinding required in various MMORPGs to get good skills?
While grinding mobs to get good drops is one thing, I find it extremely boring that one have to level up xp just to get the level required to get good skills. For example, warriors in WOW need to grind to level 40 to be truly effective using the talent tree. Cabal semi requires you to grind levels before you can use combos. Even kiddy games like Maplestory require levelling for you to reach job classes, although the only difference is jobs gives you AOE skills and more graphics/damage.

So..... how would you feel about an MMORPG where your character is essentially equipped with all usuable skills right from the start? Something akin to FPS like Team Fortress and Halo, where your character immediately has everything at the start. For character progression and customisation, other than equipment leveling, levelling or talent trees might serve to further upgrade your skills or give additional benefits such as additional HP, MP, reduced MP usuage or additional damage.

Various games have messed with this, you're not even remotely original here. Problem is, a sizable chunk of the MMO playing population actually want this behaviour and enjoy it. Frankly, saying 'zomg all skills at start' and then throwing out talent trees makes you look retarded - that's just another spec-grinding element, to replace the one you just took out. Players generally want a sense of advancement so they don't notice how horribly boring the actual game is, so leveling as required to do things is a fair slice of the MMO 'game'. Witness all the games with terrible late games, because once you've got everything, there's nothing to do. Whee, let's have that from the start!

I was a professional MMORPG developer for a couple of years, though on the engine/tools side rather than the content/scripting side.

The saddest thing about endless dull MMORPG grinding is not so much that people are paying through the nose for insipid crap, as that it is technically possible to make a game that stays fresh and engaging through dynamically generated content. Unfortunately it's (very) difficult and the attitude with most MMORPGs is very much profit-driven; put in the minimum amount of software engineering and content creation hours necessary to prevent the players from leaving for a better game. Combined with how pathetically risk-averse games publishers are these days, I'm afraid MMORPGers will be stuck with grind for a long while yet (and no, player-created content is not the answer, for a host of reasons, though it can work well in other contexts).

Or as Yathzee puts it, the grinding is what makes players spend so much time paying for the game.

Think Diablo 2. You could finish the game content in the standard 10 hours without your character reaching the theoretical maximun level (99 I think), yet droves of players spent weeks or even months mindlessly grinding to further enhance their characters. Now add a monthly fee, et voilá, you get the MMO economic model!

Stark wrote:Players generally want a sense of advancement so they don't notice how horribly boring the actual game is, so leveling as required to do things is a fair slice of the MMO 'game'.

Oh god yes. I'm actually surprised by how much of a draw I find the character progression in Too Human. One second I think I'm a normal human being, the next I'm all ZOMG SKILL TREES INFINITE CHOICES INFINITE POSSIBILITIES. This is probably quite strange.

Stark wrote:Players generally want a sense of advancement so they don't notice how horribly boring the actual game is, so leveling as required to do things is a fair slice of the MMO 'game'.

Hey, fuck off! City of Heroes is fun no matter what I do, where I go, or what baddies I'm currently beating the tar out of. And while the grinding parts of WoW suck, the rest of the game - going through quest storylines, teaming up with friends and slaughtering my way across Azeroth, building new and weird gadgets - hell, just exploring the game world - is a heck of a lot of fun as well.

The only thing I dislike having to grind to get in WoW is a mount, just because I've been spoiled by the movement powers in CoH.

The grind can be actually fun if you play it with a group of friends. My best experiences in WoW out of RPing where when I had a solid party with whom to level.

The part I find problematic is the raid grinding, in wich you need a full guild, and guilds tend to go "pro", demanding that a) you spec in whatever manner they want, thus forsaking your own playstyle, and b) spend ungodly amounts of time raiding to remain "profitable".

As Yathzee says, "I don't hate mmorpegers, I hate what they do to people"

Molyneux wrote:Hey, fuck off! City of Heroes is fun no matter what I do, where I go, or what baddies I'm currently beating the tar out of. And while the grinding parts of WoW suck, the rest of the game - going through quest storylines, teaming up with friends and slaughtering my way across Azeroth, building new and weird gadgets - hell, just exploring the game world - is a heck of a lot of fun as well.

The only thing I dislike having to grind to get in WoW is a mount, just because I've been spoiled by the movement powers in CoH.

Explain how any of this nonsense defeats the idea that most players DON'T like this stuff? The strength of these games is the multi, the meta, anything is good when you're playing with your friends. Doing the same thing over and over actually isn't a draw, as can be seen by the effort all MMOs put into fresh new content and rebalancing. By describing yourself as someone who enjoys 'quest storylines' you're putting yourself in the massive minority.

I don't expect you to accept this, because most people are unable to look beyond their own narrow tastes. Please amuse me by telling me I can't do this, even though I just did.

Stark wrote:

Molyneux wrote:Hey, fuck off! City of Heroes is fun no matter what I do, where I go, or what baddies I'm currently beating the tar out of. And while the grinding parts of WoW suck, the rest of the game - going through quest storylines, teaming up with friends and slaughtering my way across Azeroth, building new and weird gadgets - hell, just exploring the game world - is a heck of a lot of fun as well.

The only thing I dislike having to grind to get in WoW is a mount, just because I've been spoiled by the movement powers in CoH.

Explain how any of this nonsense defeats the idea that most players DON'T like this stuff? The strength of these games is the multi, the meta, anything is good when you're playing with your friends. Doing the same thing over and over actually isn't a draw, as can be seen by the effort all MMOs put into fresh new content and rebalancing. By describing yourself as someone who enjoys 'quest storylines' you're putting yourself in the massive minority.

I don't expect you to accept this, because most people are unable to look beyond their own narrow tastes. Please amuse me by telling me I can't do this, even though I just did.

Where did I say that I enjoy doing the same thing over and over again? A hell of a lot of the new content that they keep adding in is story content.

I said that I enjoy:
a) going through cohesive quest lines (which you see a lot more of in City of Heroes and FFXI than WoW, but I digress).
b) teaming up with friends (you know, the "multi" you just mentioned yourself?)
c) building new and weird gadgets, and
d) exploring the game world.

How the fuck does any of that imply that I enjoy doing the same thing over and over again?

PainRack wrote:So..... how would you feel about an MMORPG where your character is essentially equipped with all usuable skills right from the start? Something akin to FPS like Team Fortress and Halo, where your character immediately has everything at the start. For character progression and customisation, other than equipment leveling, levelling or talent trees might serve to further upgrade your skills or give additional benefits such as additional HP, MP, reduced MP usuage or additional damage.

What you're basically describing is the 'endgame' of most MMOs.

The pre-level cap period in an MMO theoretically teaches you how to play your character by slowly introducing the abilities to you rather than overloading you with them, gives the designers scope to work in narrative elements, etc.

A lot of players really do enjoy this period - it depends on the attitude taken, really. If you just sit there and grind pigs you're not going to enjoy yourself. If you take the time to get involved in the story it's much more entertaining. There's a lot of entertainment to be had in this period! Everyone remembers that time they were in "Zone X" and it was really scary etc.

That said, I greatly prefer the endgame phase. The content tends to be epic in scope and more involved as the designers will have a much better idea of what your characters are capable of, and can tune appropriately. It also tends to be the most social period.

There's basically two types of MMO gamers - 'casuals' who endlessly level many characters and 'hardcore' who focus on playing a main character.

Yes, the amount of time spent playing does not actually determine if you're 'casual' or 'hardcore' in the MMO sense.

Molyneux wrote: Where did I say that I enjoy doing the same thing over and over again? A hell of a lot of the new content that they keep adding in is story content.

I said that I enjoy:
a) going through cohesive quest lines (which you see a lot more of in City of Heroes and FFXI than WoW, but I digress).

How the fuck does any of that imply that I enjoy doing the same thing over and over again?

You said you enjoyed city of Heroes' quests. Quite frankly after playing CoH for a couple months, I realized I was just really doing the same fucking mission over and over with no real variation. It was sort of interesting at first because of the character creation system, but then it got really fucking stale when all the maps and badguys started looking identical.

General Zod wrote:

Molyneux wrote: Where did I say that I enjoy doing the same thing over and over again? A hell of a lot of the new content that they keep adding in is story content.

I said that I enjoy:
a) going through cohesive quest lines (which you see a lot more of in City of Heroes and FFXI than WoW, but I digress).

How the fuck does any of that imply that I enjoy doing the same thing over and over again?

You said you enjoyed city of Heroes' quests. Quite frankly after playing CoH for a couple months, I realized I was just really doing the same fucking mission over and over with no real variation. It was sort of interesting at first because of the character creation system, but then it got really fucking stale when all the maps and badguys started looking identical.

When did you play the game?
That used to be true to a major degree, but they've really gotten some nice variation into the game, especially after CoV came out, and they started experimenting with the weirder mission ideas (like sneaking into the Midnight Club in the guise of a member's father).

I do make one exception for bank robberies, though; I never get tired of busting into the vault. The way the door cracks at around 1/3 health, the big explosion when it finally gives way, smashing my way back out through guards, Longbow, and a hero or two, just never gets old for me.

Molyneux wrote: When did you play the game?
That used to be true to a major degree, but they've really gotten some nice variation into the game, especially after CoV came out, and they started experimenting with the weirder mission ideas (like sneaking into the Midnight Club in the guise of a member's father).

I do make one exception for bank robberies, though; I never get tired of busting into the vault. The way the door cracks at around 1/3 health, the big explosion when it finally gives way, smashing my way back out through guards, Longbow, and a hero or two, just never gets old for me.

I played the game about a year, year and a half ago. Considering everything started looking the same once I got my character up to the 20s in Level I didn't really have any inclination to stick around. Plus the control scheme was boring as hell with almost no interaction whatsoever.

General Zod wrote: I played the game about a year, year and a half ago. Considering everything started looking the same once I got my character up to the 20s in Level I didn't really have any inclination to stick around. Plus the control scheme was boring as hell with almost no interaction whatsoever.

It depends on the class, Playing a Mastermind is like playing a Battlezone game, you fight but it's more about moving your minions around, supporting them and controlling the fights. Brutes ride the razors edge trying to keep fighting to keep their rage up while not getting themselves killed. Tankers meanwhile are team focused but can do the same. Corruptiors are team focused classes like Defenders hero side are. Stalkers are mostly solo focused since they can walk into any mission and size up any room, kill two, run away hide again and come back to kill the rest, if you do it right they can all die before they know your there thanks to secondary powers.

I just started playing again two weeks ago after reactivating my old account and the game has increased in complexity and the mission tile count has gone up three fold. Even old missions have gotten redo's. I've seen the old Warehouse tile set redone as a Rave, redone as a huge human prison complex, and seen it "battle damaged" IE on fire, walls missing and the like. That's three redo's of the same timeset, and new rooms to boot.

The game has seriously improved since first release and even more since COV's release. While some things have fallen totally flat(Bases, Power customization) while others are hit or miss(PVP is balanced... kinda. Different levels do better, end game PVP its possible to have a nice balanced minute long fight or a two second alpha strike curb stomp depending on who gets the jump on who)

LordOskuro wrote:The grind can be actually fun if you play it with a group of friends. My best experiences in WoW out of RPing where when I had a solid party with whom to level.

Amen bro. I play WoW mostly with my friends. Its fun leveling up a new character, running into a new instance, and basically relearning how to beat the boss from a different perspective.

Then theres the solo exploring part, which is occasionally fun. Either new places, or places youve been and shouldnt be going yet with a new character.
The excitement of taking my 39 Tauren druid for a ride on the Deeprun Tram, or soloing Gnomergan with a 62 warlock

The part I find problematic is the raid grinding, in wich you need a full guild, and guilds tend to go "pro", demanding that a) you spec in whatever manner they want, thus forsaking your own playstyle, and b) spend ungodly amounts of time raiding to remain "profitable".

One of my friends is this type. At some point I just say they've fallen in, and sort of write them off as victims of the game. Im playing to have fun, I dont need another job.

PREDATOR490 wrote: Overall, I found it interesting but the game was really boring during beta. Playing the LED police was a fucking nightmare because it was a bunch of kids playing cops with guns. I wont mention how much trouble was caused by stupid fuckers randomly shooting people or the fact the game was a laggy deathmatch with poor combat and limited stuff to do.

Are you fucking kidding? Once you got to Rank 2, got a mike, and joined Vent, LED was the best faction. You clearly weren't around for the big war that went on over the prison colony, either. Or the raid on the hippy city in conjuction with the military.

LED were boring until shit went down. And then they became the single most intense faction, because they were the first line of response. I used to have to carry at LEAST six mags of rubber bullets and three of hollowpoints when I was doing a patrol. Even just in the Boston markets, you needed that kind of ammo.

Stark wrote: Various games have messed with this, you're not even remotely original here. Problem is, a sizable chunk of the MMO playing population actually want this behaviour and enjoy it. Frankly, saying 'zomg all skills at start' and then throwing out talent trees makes you look retarded - that's just another spec-grinding element, to replace the one you just took out. Players generally want a sense of advancement so they don't notice how horribly boring the actual game is, so leveling as required to do things is a fair slice of the MMO 'game'. Witness all the games with terrible late games, because once you've got everything, there's nothing to do. Whee, let's have that from the start!

Oh dear:D I hope I wasn't suggesting that this's an original idea. I was just wondering what the posters opinion here was, since I actually read about this from another article elsewhere, they essentially suggested making endgame straight from the start.

To be honest, my only gripe with levelling was more about "I need to make it to level 15 to use said skill". Its not as if FPS can't have story content and even progression in difficulty.... I would rather progression be more in terms of equipment which allows you to tackle harder opponents than xp points.
Sure, that may mean grinding to get good gear, but that's something I think is impossible to cancel in an MMORPG.

You could easily remove all the grinding elements entirely, but the problem is that the entire game is a structured reward system.

A first person shooter is designed to provide slow spots to recover, tense parts, climatic moments--occasional humor--and a mix of highs and lows that keeps you interested and keeps the player from simply coasting along at the same 'energy' level. An MMO keeps the same level of intensity by and large for the entire game, except major boss-fights, which are generally so ponderous and scripted that it's only tense because redoing a boss-fight is expensive in terms of time wasted and loss of XP. It's not a challenge persay, it's just a matter of aggro management and healing patterns. This is not to say some fights aren't hard, but once you know what to do, the results are easy to reproduce when you have the proper prep-time.

The vast majority of time spent in an MMO makes even the downtime elements of Oblivion and other games seem exciting. Grinding enemies for experience, farming bosses repeatedly for rare drop items, travelling from place to place, and waiting around for a party. This is simply a nature of the game in a sense, but it's also a failure of the game model.

The fights are generally a matter of numerical power and good timing, which ends up being pretty boring overall. Staying calm and on-time with heals and nukes is the way to do best, so really, the person best suited to winning a fight is one who has bored indifference but is paying attention enough to press the button on time. And the reward for your troubles isn't a big storyline piece or newer, more innovative sequences. The reward is gear and experience, and often the reward is only gained on your 25th or so run-through, at least. You're basically required to do the boss many, many times just to get the stuff you even went on the quest for.

The way to remove the grind is to remove the requirement to level up on your own between quests and make gear drop for all characters in the mission at once, so the only reason to re-do a mission is because you want to. Problem is, you apply that to modern games and you end up with a very short game, something more like Guild Wars. That works, but it's not the same money-maker. The fact that people will stay around and pay fees just to redo the same relatively boring content repeatedly discourages game-makers to go far outside that norm.

The question for a game maker seeking to make a non-grind MMO is "What can I offer in terms of content, besides grinding, that will offer months and months of play--possibly years--and be available to the widest demographic?"

I hate grinding overall in an MMO, but I'm not against in in all cases. I feel like instead of making me fight the same respawning bears for 10 hours to get the Bear Claw Beret or whatever, why not just offer me a basic, quite challenging, and less time-intensive solo dungeon to get it? The answer is clear: the real objective isn't to challenge me, but to make me put in X amount of time to get it, to extend their pay period.

The way they do it now is the best way, really. MMO gaming has less to offer than most platforms because it can't be a high latency action game without breaking things. If MMO'ers didn't have such an inane fetish for open-world content you'd be able to do more things like instanced battlefields that would allow for FPS-quality action, or for more God of War style combat (instead of autoattack and 1-9 button special moves). As it stands, the model is what it is. But you never know, offer something else and it might catch on. So far it hasn't.