What I Hope RSI Learns From Other Games - Early MMORPG

[ColdDog]

Folks,
I was thinking about how the games evolved over the years and why some games continue where others do not.

1. CCP/Eve Online - I played this game from 2004 to 2013 when I finally got frustrated with the toxic community. I recent resumed play and there is much that has changed in the past 5 years. Sure the community remains toxic because the devs encourage that behavior, but at the same time, they are trying to make it more accessible. PLEX allows a 0 day character to obtain very specialized skills. The draw back, and why I think people stay hooked is because they want to stay in the game to make the most powerful character possible. But the cool thing is you can be a day 0 toon and "gank" someone who has been skill training for four years. Is this pay to play... kinda but the attraction is not the skills or the ship... its timing, scheming, and patience. For many people this is how they like to play - slow, steady, and mythical.
(PVP Oriented)

- PVP (9/10)
- PVE (3/10)
- Crafting (6/10)
- Market (8/10)
- Community (4/10)

2. Blizzard/World of War Craft - I played WOW a long time ago and the game seemed to be more directed toward raid game play while they had a ton of pve to exploit. It was fun playing but, just like eve but if you did not do the "raid" dance correctly you quickly found that raids were not for you.
(Raid and PVE)

- PVP (5/10)
- PVE (8/10)
- Crafing (7/10)
- Market (6/10)
- Community (6/10) - Because I got banned by people complaining about my character "Camel Toe"

3. Everquest II/Sony - This was my first mmorpg game. I loved it and met some great people playing it. It was the first game that had a little of everything and was released around the same time as eve online. For the first time you could make your own apartment, build a community area. It has been years since I played but I have fond memories of it.
(Raid and PVE)

- PVP (5/10)
- PVE (9/10)
- Crafting (7/10)
- Market (5/10)
- Community (8/10)

4. Warhammer (original) - I loved that game. I loved attacking the castles with some random factional warfare. Simply join a random group and jump in. No tactics just brute force with catapults and ballista. It was a lot like WoW but you would randomly group up and take down citadels held by the other factions (teams). Fond memories of that game.

- PVP (6/10)
- PVE (8/10)
- Crafting (5/10)
- Market (3/10)
- Community (8/10)

All these games had great themes, stories and potential. Sorry that I did not lay out my reasoning for the gaming experience but I simply do not want to make a book on the subject. Obviously, there were many other games I have played but these are the four I remember loving and hating.

 

[Vavrik]

2. Blizzard/World of War Craft - I played WOW a long time ago and the game seemed to be more directed toward raid game play while they had a ton of pve to exploit. It was fun playing but, just like eve but if you did not do the "raid" dance correctly you quickly found that raids were not for you.
(Raid and PVE)

It's still geared toward raid and PVE, but there's a lot more PVP right now than there has been since Cata, maybe more. They now incorporate PVP in the regular game, it's optional but worthwhile. There's also no difference between PVP and PVE gear. They're making it more worthwhile to go back to do the thousands of quests that I never did before, follow story lines that you might not have done before stuff like that. They scale your toon's skills to do that and make it still a challenge.
I don't play more than an hour/week though for the last year, and that's not likely to grow to much more than that. It's kind of funny that someone with a visual difficulty can play SC just fine, but can't play WoW properly without undue stress. Blizzard -1, CIG +5

 

[Printimus]

But what about Hello Kitty Island Adventure II?

 

[Michael]

Toxic eve community: I stopped eve in 2013 or 2014. What exactly is toxic for you can you name an example?

 

[Lorddarthvik]

Toxic eve community: I stopped eve in 2013 or 2014. What exactly is toxic for you can you name an example?

I've played for 2 years about a year or two before it went free to pay. The community was toxic in all kinds of ways. Incas in starter org first, the few of us who okayed daily were friendly, but we got robbed by a "new" player who turned out wasn't that new at all. Then we all got bounties on our heads by a larger org cos they didn't kite that we existed, and got hunted even in high second space for a few weeks non stop. It wast pleasant and there was no way to retaliate or stop this from happening. I almost quit right then, but I didn't. After that I joined larger orgs, but they kept kicking me out for not having the right ships, not having the money to pay them weekly for being in the org, or for missing some PvP op that was at an ungodly hour which I didn't even know about Anyways. I was stuck mining by myself and that got old fast. You either play Eve as a second job, or as a total utter asshole, or you are stuck forever with week ships and no money. Pve content was laughably bad and boring, it okayed like crap and it got impossibly hard to solo, or even to complete in a party if you didn't have really expensive ships and mods. I got bored with the "be a bastard or get fucjed" mentality of the game and quit.

Lessons learned: don't make your game so "open" that the only way ahead is to be the worst kind of person you can be. It only works for a small amount of ppl, others will simply go play something that's fun.


WoW was fun, and even more fun back until Cataclysm, played for 14 years, and I still play classic, because of the community. In retail, since Cataclysm, it was much easier to get ahead by being selfish and not interacting with others. In classic it's much easier to get ahead by being a nice person and helping out others, and it makes it a much more pleasant experience. There are the usual assholes who will steal your kills or resource nodes, or pull a whole bunch of mobs, tag em, just to drop aggro and they attack you instead and you're basically killing (or most likely dying) for the asshole's benefit. But it's rare. In retail Not a single person thanked me in like 10 years for buffing then or saving their ass in a fight, because it got meaningless. In classic it's the other way around. I even got gear upgrades just for saving someone in fight. Huge difference.

Lessons learned: don't dumb down, your players are not as stupid or lazy as you might think! Hard but not impossibly hard content will encourage ppl to play together, and result in fun.

Edit: sorry about all the spelling and other nonsense mistakes, the autocucumber on my new phone is worse than before, even though I'm using the same damn keyboard

 

[Crymsan]

I played EVE a long time ago and it was then and always has been a community based game. I enjoyed being part of a community the guild I was in. Doing anything outside that was pretty much impossible, even just moving around the universe. This made it a difficult game to join and play casually. At the time the consequences of ship loss where pretty hard.

It has been and seems to always be nearly impossible to keep the PVP (yes the gankers included) crowd and the I just want to do my own thing crowd (yes including the care bears) happy in the same space. Very few PVP based games retain any significant population and PVE only needs to be very well designed to not get dull. So even ignoring the tech hurdles star citizen has a very difficult task keeping the backers happy with so many different wants.

 

[Thugari]

you should list star wars galaxies in this. the fact that the entire fan base told them to not launch the nge but was blatantly ignored causing its downward spiral to failure.

 

[Deroth]

you should list star wars galaxies in this. the fact that the entire fan base told them to not launch the nge but was blatantly ignored causing its downward spiral to failure.

The entire life of SWG, from release to sunset, was a story of blatant disregard of feedback from the player base.

 

[BUTUZ]

1. Ultima Online - I loved that game. I miss it so much and I miss my guild members who took me under their wing and taught me how to play, I lost contact with decades ago.

- PVP (11/10)
- PVE (11/10)
- Crafting (11/10)
- Market (11/10)
- Community (11/10)

 

[SoloFlyer]

you should list star wars galaxies in this. the fact that the entire fan base told them to not launch the nge but was blatantly ignored causing its downward spiral to failure.

SWG was my first MMO. I remember spending almost my entire session on launch day just sitting in a cantina bullshitting with people as some worked on leveling up their entertainer profession by giving buffs and a few ran out to the edge of the city to do a couple quest or gather some resources and then head back for some camaraderie. I loved the crafting system in that game to, bio-engineering was fun.

 

[Bambooza]

I played EVE a long time ago and it was then and always has been a community based game. I enjoyed being part of a community the guild I was in. Doing anything outside that was pretty much impossible, even just moving around the universe. This made it a difficult game to join and play casually. At the time the consequences of ship loss where pretty hard.

It has been and seems to always be nearly impossible to keep the PVP (yes the gankers included) crowd and the I just want to do my own thing crowd (yes including the care bears) happy in the same space. Very few PVP based games retain any significant population and PVE only needs to be very well designed to not get dull. So even ignoring the tech hurdles star citizen has a very difficult task keeping the backers happy with so many different wants.

The issue with the PVE crowd is they need either two things. One an ability to craft and build something, especially bases/houses that can be seen by other players or lots of new content dropped at 6 months maybe 1-year intervals. They hardly have any sort of emergent gameplay beyond the few that role play and are very vocal about content that is to difficult for them to complete. Even if the more difficult content helps to foster a community by driving players together in an attempt to succeed. It is why blizzard changed the way they did raids following Burning Crusade as the vast majority of their community didn't participate in most of the new content and was starting to tapper off the subscription wheel. While Blizzard has mostly been successful in releasing new content it's still has been very expensive with a noticeable decrease return on investment. (it's hard to truly know what WoW's subscriber count is)

As you have said while PVP can create their own emergent gameplay but they tend to be very toxic to those not part of their in-group. While games like Call of Duty and Battlefield offset this by creating matches with limited consequences of being new or losing the match games like Eve make such mistakes painful. At the same time, the high risks in Eve makes it all the more special when you become part of a successful in group and is part of why it continues to have such a strong player base.

Both WoW and Eve have something special. And while Eve is hard to explain and show because of how the game is, Wow is much easier as it has been on both sides. And that is the existence of brutally difficult content that more then likely a few of the community will ever experience or even be successful with. Like all things, if everyone is a campion then no one is. Successful games need reasons for people to form long term groups that last more than an hour (one of the most destructive addition was the pub raids in WoW) and those groups need to be challenged so that if and when they do succeed it is a proud moment. Wow rewarded the first group to succeed in their raids worldwide and server-wide. Moments in Eve like the first corp to successfully completed a titan and the first corp to lose a titan where huge moments. We cheer on our champions and these stories inspire the rest to continue to participate and strive to be champions on their own. As long as you mostly ignore those who complain that its to hard, to difficult and not fair that they can't be victorious too. I say mostly because you do want to make sure you have 5 to 10% of your game population who are successful. If everyone is failing then you might have gone too far.

In Star Citizen, I hope that as you move out from the core worlds the gameplay becomes more brutal and less forgiving. Something that Eve originally promised but only succeeded in creating three zones. Mostly safe (sec), Sort of Safe (NullSec if faction allied) and ganker space (lowSec). And this is what I hope doesn't happen in Star Citizen let it be a gradual gradient from the core worlds to the fringe with the boundary of Vanduul being the brutal PVE raid grounds, undiscovered systems being free space where corporations and alliances rule their areas and wars are common.

 

[Lexx2k]

SWG
- PVP (15/10)
- PVE (15/10)
- Crafting (15/10)
- Market (15/10)
- Community (15/10)
- Content (0/10) if you didn't make it you didn't have it

 

[maynard]

In Star Citizen, I hope that as you move out from the core worlds the gameplay becomes more brutal and less forgiving. Something that Eve originally promised but only succeeded in creating three zones. Mostly safe (sec), Sort of Safe (NullSec if faction allied) and ganker space (lowSec). And this is what I hope doesn't happen in Star Citizen let it be a gradual gradient from the core worlds to the fringe with the boundary of Vanduul being the brutal PVE raid grounds, undiscovered systems being free space where corporations and alliances rule their areas and wars are common.

Eve Online's longevity is due its appeal to two primal traits of human nature - our tribalism and our territoriality

corporations are tribal units and the sovereignty mechanic allows them to make war for territorial control and the wealth that derives from it

Star Citizen will have property ownership, but not on a system-wide level

if my org utterly defeats yours, we don't take ownership of your holdings

so what will motivate us to organize and fight one another?

so far SC just looks like mining, missioning, and Kumbaya in Space

I want epic battles for conquest

 

[Lexx2k]

Space Stations? Destroyed ground bases? Stolen all your stuff from Warehouse? Capital miners and Research ships destroyed. Thats some motivation. And no one said you cannot control space sector. It might be not same as EVE, but you can grab piece of space and call it yours, kill everyone who does not belongs to Org.

 

[maynard]

Space Stations? Destroyed ground bases? Stolen all your stuff from Warehouse? Capital miners and Research ships destroyed. Thats some motivation. And no one said you cannot control space sector. It might be not same as EVE, but you can grab piece of space and call it yours, kill everyone who does not belongs to Org.

[WALL O'TEXT]

what happened in Eve before the sovereignty mechanic was introduced was what became known as 'time zone ping-pong'

Russians would take over a rich territory, log off and go to bed

Euros would log on, take over the territory, log off and go to bed

then the Americans would log on, take over the territory, log off and go to bed

then the Asians and Aussies, and finally the Russians again

ad infinitum

nobody could develop the infrastructure to generate real wealth

it was like Groundhog Day in space

every time you logged on you started from scratch, it was too frustrating

there's every reason to believe the same thing will happen in Star Citizen as things stand now

no org is strong enough across all time zones to defend what they've taken and build on it

sure, we can be petty thieves in space, like the old Scottish cattle raiders

but not epic conquerors, like Alexander the Great

[/WALL O'TEXT]

 

[Thalstan]

1. Ultima Online - I loved that game. I miss it so much and I miss my guild members who took me under their wing and taught me how to play, I lost contact with decades ago.

- PVP (11/10)
- PVE (11/10)
- Crafting (11/10)
- Market (11/10)
- Community (11/10)

It’s still up and some people still play. That said, the crafting was not nearly as good...or at least as interdependent as the first run of Everquest II. In that one, you had to buy stuff made by others to make stuff yourself. That was changes sometime after I moved to WoW.

My reason for moving to WoW from EQ and EQ II is that I was living in a hotel at the time due to my job and they reset their routers every hour (damn Marriott). This meant waiting 5 minutes for my toon to go link dead and get back into the game. With WoW, you just logged right back in.

 

[Cugino83]

[WALL O'TEXT]


no org is strong enough across all time zones to defend what they've taken and build on it

[/WALL O'TEXT]

I think we are working on that... an there are olso NPC you cold hire for being low level grunt...

Not only but SC will have some sort of low system: if an org manage to buy on entire planet or system (you know, those reclamation beacon they sell while ago), that terrotory is lowfully your by the game rule.
If you are not there to defent it I suppose there will be a law enforced system that take care of the problem in some way, be either by deploing military forces, or by the bounty system (I think they say you could pay UEE forces to provide security to your outpost...).

 

[maynard]

I think we are working on that... an there are olso NPC you cold hire for being low level grunt...

Not only but SC will have some sort of low system: if an org manage to buy on entire planet or system (you know, those reclamation beacon they sell while ago), that terrotory is lowfully your by the game rule.
If you are not there to defent it I suppose there will be a law enforced system that take care of the problem in some way, be either by deploing military forces, or by the bounty system (I think they say you could pay UEE forces to provide security to your outpost...).

when I go to conquer a system, I want to fight other players, not NPCs

if I want to shoot NPCs I'll run missions

 

[Deroth]

when I go to conquer a system, I want to fight other players, not NPCs

if I want to shoot NPCs I'll run missions

What about Vanduul systems?

 

[maynard]

What about Vanduul systems?

you might not get paid for killing them, but they're still NPCs, we'll figure them out, and it will get old

the real action will always be PVP