Other MMO Wants

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This morning is going to be pure hell on wheels for me.  Not only is this my last day before our vacation…  but also about 10:30 last night I got a nasty surprise when I checked work email.  Apparently there is a big impromptu meeting going on today, at which I have to represent the department and speak intelligibly about everything we do.  How do you cram a million things into a quick talk that doesn’t bore all the non-technical people.  Also as a result I had to scramble around the house to find a pair of slacks that actually fits me.  Dropping 8-10 pants sizes in a few months tends to deplete the stock of clothing you don’t wear often.

Basically this morning I need to bang out this post as soon as possible so I can get into work and prepare for the event.  As a result I got up and around this morning at 5 am rather than my normal 5:30… here is hoping the time can be spent wisely.  I would normally just skip posting on a morning like this… but I am afraid that if I skip a day my routine will unravel and usher in yet another one of my 4-6 month lapses in posting. 

Other MMO Wants

On Monday I made my Ten MMO Must Haves  post and it kind blew up… as in it seemed to get far more traction than most of my posts do.  The only bad thing about it all… is as soon as I posted I thought of a few more items that I should have put on the list.  Listing Beards in the final slot was maybe not the most well thought out thing I have ever done… but in reality it is a metaphor.  Every player I know has one feature that they look for in the character creator.  My friend for example is always hunting for actual blonde hair… instead of the orange mess that most MMOs have.  That is one of the most important things to her, and just like me and beards… if it is not there she does not feel as close to the character.  Here goes a quick stab at the rest of a list.

1 – Mentoring

This one is huge, and I have no clue why I left it off the list.  I did the list as a whole on the fly Monday morning as I thought of things that I really want in every MMO.  Essentially those who are not familiar with the term, it is the practice of allowing higher level players to drop down to the same level as lower level characters.  The first game I ever experienced in was City of Heroes… and I felt it was absolutely revolutionary.  Eventually Everquest 2 added it in, and now Rift and Guild Wars 2 also have similar systems that have improved upon the base concept.  Essentially I want a way to be able to play with my friends… no matter how high above them I am.  I have a mantra that “anything that keeps you from playing with your friends is bad”.

2 – Single Server / Cross Server Architecture

Back to the mantra of “anything that keeps you from playing with your friends is bad”..  the traditional server structure is way too restricting.  If you have a small group of friends that all organize at exactly the same time… and pick one server ahead of time..  it is no big deal.  However if you have many different pools of friends, that you feel constantly torn between..  servers are pure hell.  This is the case with me… at any given point I have groups of friends playing a dozen or more games and on each roughly a half dozen different servers.  I have to unfairly pick and choose between who I play with.  Stop making me choose.  Let players communicate and group freely with any player who is playing your game.

3 – Single Account ID

This one has been massively controversial, but I have warmed to it over time.  If you scroll back far enough, there are even posts of me rallying against RealID, but again I got used to it.  The thing I want is the ability to create a single account id, like the later BattleTag system that is not connected to your real world identity.  Then let me choose which players to give that ID out to… and in doing so they magically get to see every character I have regardless of where I am playing.  Additionally it would be amazing if the system also allowed for friending single character names… for those individuals you need to have communication with… but don’t want to give them everything.  It is such a pain in the but to send your friends a long list of a dozen alts for them to add to their friends list each time someone new joins the game.

4 – Multiple Paths of Advancement / Endgame

The answer to the endgame should not always be Raid or PVP.  There should be something else… something a player who does not have the time to raid, or does not have the penchant for pvp can do to constantly better their character in game.  This could be something like the Alternate Advancement and Planar Advancement systems in Everquest 2 and Rift… or could be a series of epic quests that allow your character to obtain very slowly raid like gear like TSW has implemented.  There needs to be a way for players to feel like they are constantly evolving their characters.  It is when characters start to feel stagnant that players lose interest with a game and leave.  Help me not get bored with your game, by giving me lots of things to do when I hit maximum level.  Daily Quests are fine… but they are not a solution to anything.

5 – Alternate Leveling Paths

This is something that has mutated over the years, and I really wish there was a way to undo it.  When Everquest launched it had a distinct leveling path for each race in the game.  While some of them quickly merged together once you hit the second or third zone… they still started out as unique experiences.  When World of Warcraft launched, you had roughly three leveling tracks per race… and this still ended up giving you a fresh way to level your alts.  Now in games like Rift and SWTOR… there is a single track for every member of a faction… and as a result by the time you level your alts… you have nothing really to look forward to.  Give us multiple ways to get to the end of your game… do not penalize players for wanting to jump around and try new content paths.  I realize multiple paths of content takes more development time… but it also improves the quality of your game for players in the long run and makes alting far more sticky.

6 – No Faction Wall

This is a concept that needs die in a huge inferno.  This is without a doubt probably the worst seemingly permanent lineage of World of Warcraft.  The concept of setting up a red and a blue faction that are diametrically opposed and can in no way communicate is just a shitty way to create a game.  Again back to the mantra of… “anything that keeps you from playing with your friends is bad”.  If your friend has to sacrifice what he wants to play… for the greater good.. he will always regret at least somewhat the path not taken.  Additionally it is very easy for two friends who joined the game at different times to end up on opposite sides of the battle field. 

Everquest and Everquest 2 had the best faction systems in the game… in that no only could you communicate with any player freely, but if you so chose to… and with copious amounts of work.. you could raise your faction and be able to function as a member of those societies.  Additionally in Everquest 2 they gave the option of betraying your faction through a serious of quests and permanently changing your allegiance.  Faction Walls are just a non-creative solution to the problem of setting up PVP.  Rift probably did the best decision it ever did when it released the “Faction as Fiction” patch, making it so that both Defiant and Guardian could group, communicate, and guild freely.  Additionally they set up 3 new factions that were not connected to either of the original… which recruit players to fight battles for them.  This gave you three way pvp without having to make life restricting to your players.

Wrapping Up

This one is going to be extra short today.  I’ve spent thirty minutes digging into six more items on the cutting room floor that MMOs should have.  I need to finish getting ready and get into work so I can prep for the event.  I hope you all have a great day, and maybe this will jiggle loose some other ideas you have about what a “best of breed” MMO needs to have.  Tomorrow I am off, so my intent is to try and finish up the second part of the “How To Rift” series.

Microsoft’s Turn to Troll

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Last night ended up nothing like I had expected.  Since it was extremely nice out here in Oklahoma, we ended up batching up a bunch of errands we needed running.  As a result I did not end up getting home until well after 8 pm, and when I did get home… I was too out of it to really get into much of anything.  I seem to have acquired a need for sleep over the last few days.  For now I am indulging this insane fancy and going to bed at a decent hour.

Dendrome

rift 2013-07-01 20-44-18-06

I am well behind the curve content wise in Rift, as last night was the first night I really spent roaming around the Dendrome.  I have had this vision quest of sorts and have been hell bent on finishing leveling fishing.  At this point I am around 340 and the rest of the journey is extremely slow and painful.  I have been setting my goal on completing the fish exchange in Tulan each day… which ends up giving me several levels in the process of fishing up 12 rare fish.  Unfortunately I do not yet have the patterns, for the lures that speed up each variety of rare fish.

I have to say I really like Dendrome so far.  It reminds me a lot of Ember Isle… but far less brutal for players to break into.  Everywhere I look there is another piece of a quest, so it feels like it would take me ages just to reach a point where I felt like I could do dailies here.  Once I start a carnage quest… I tend to get distracted and have to complete it while I am in the area.  I would not want to try and do the repeatable quests until I had cleared a good deal of these shiny objects from my view.

While I was out in the zone, I managed to get in on an Air Invasion.  The first stages went by so quickly that I cannot even tell you what the objectives were… but I managed to make it to the final boss fight when it was around 80% health.  It was one of the nastier zone bosses I have encountered… in that it spawned 3 of those flashing red bubbles that have become so ubiquitous with instant death in Rift.  These bubbles then proceeded to path randomly through the group knocking players back and dealing large amounts of damage.

I actually got insta-gibbed as I rolled up on the fight as not all of the effects had loaded in for me yet.  The completely insane part was that for killing one zone boss I managed to get 330 Infinity Stones.  Granted at this point I am struggling to find things to spend them on, and I would have far rather had Empyreal Slayers Marks… it was cool nonetheless and would help out someone needing gear badly.  So far I think I am going to like Dendrome as a whole, and I look forward to exploring it in time.

Microsoft’s Turn to Troll

 

Yesterday one of the big stories that caught my attention is that Microsoft Announced the first months title for the XBox Gold free games program.  In the conference that I have linked above… Microsoft said…  to kick off that program I’d like to share just two of the titles we’re going to offer over the next few months – Assassin’s Creed 2, and Halo 3. So obviously… players… media outlets.. essentially everyone was expecting the title announced to be well… either Assassins Creed 2 or Halo 3.  Instead they dropped the bomb on us that it would be Defense Grid:  The Awakening.

This is the equivalent of saying you get a .99 app store title for free.  No offense meant to the makers of the game, I am sure it is a perfectly fine title.  Tower Defense games however are a dime a dozen, they are the new Bejeweled… everyone and their brother has created a “priced to own” clone.  So there is absolutely nothing exciting about this announcement.  Even if you like Tower Defense titles, which I do not… no one in their right mind can put this title in the league of Assassins Creed 2 and Halo 3 as far as player appeal.

What I don’t really understand… is how Microsoft can not think these are bad moves.  They keep doing it over and over again… and then doing the equivalent of standing there with a shocked face as people rage around them.  I am just flabbergasted as to how they could ever think most of the calls they have been making would play well with the gamers.  Essentially Microsoft Gold is a horrible deal… it has always been a horrible deal… and giving away appstore titles is not going to change the fact that it will likely always be a horrible deal.

If Microsoft Gold existed in a vacuum it might be considered a good thing… but when you compare it against Playstation+ it is a phenomenally bad deal. Gold costs roughly $60 per year and Plus costs roughly $50, so pretty comparable what you get there.  However with Plus you end up getting instantly a dozen ps3 titles ready for download… and they cycle in new titles and cycle out old ones on a monthly basis.  Additionally you get the ability to demo the full version of any game in the PS3 library… that means if you purchase it.. your save games still apply.  Additionally you get a significant discount on any games you purchase through PlayStation plus, and they are currently running some crazy steam like sales.  In the first year… they gave away 64 titles through the PlayStation plus subscription.

So as I sit back and look at this… I cannot fathom how Microsoft feels like Gold is a deal… and that they are somehow sweetening the pot by giving away a single game a month.  All the service really does is give you access to features that should have been included in the console in the first place…  like Netflix.  The whole bait and switch over talking about AAA titles and giving players an AppStore title instead only serves to make the deal even worse.  I feel like Microsoft needs to re-evaluate their entire stance on gaming… and collectively “pull their heads out” for lack of a better term.  Feinting ignorance only works as long as you are willing to stop doing stupid things…  at this point they need to completely rethink their strategy.

Wrapping Up

Well today is trash day and I need to finish gathering it.  I hope you all have a great day… and I hope my tone has not been too ranty lately.  I’ve just had various things that I feel passionate about on my mind.  When I start talking about them… I tend to come out a bit more harsh than I intend to.  I am sure that lately I have come off as a PlayStation fanboy…  but I am just supporting what I feel like is the better deal.  I own both an Xbox and a PS3 and have games I play on both regularly.

Ten MMO Must Haves

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This morning I got up roughly 15 minutes before the alarm went off… and decided to that rather than be groggy later… I would go ahead and get up and around.  Right now I am kind of questioning that decision, since the bed seems like a really amazing idea.  I had a really spastic yesterday as I never could really decide on a game to play.  Since Final Fantasy beta was closed by the time I got up and around I ended up cycling through Everquest, Rift, Vanguard, and Defiance never quite sticking in any of them.  As a result I don’t have much excitement to talk about… and I am nowhere near finished with my second part of How To Rift… so I am going off in a completely different direction.

Ten MMO Must Haves

Basically over the years I have noticed several features that I expect most MMOs to have, and when they are not there it greatly harms my enjoyment for the long run.  I keep cycling back to the ones that do have most of the list.  Granted this is in no way a complete list, as I am sure there are things I have omitted for the sake of a clean number, but these are definitely all things I would prefer to see in an upcoming title.  These are not necessarily in order of importance… but more the order in which I thought of them.

1 – Random Events

Nothing breaks up the monotony of questing and killing mobs like a random army invading the countryside.  I have always liked when random things happen in games, I even like random loot so long as it is not something I need to progress forwards.  In the post Rift MMO world, I feel like random things happening in your world is an absolute must have.  When it is missing, the game feels extremely stale to me.  When it is done well, you forget what you are doing and follow along the flow of what is happening in a specific zone.  This should be events chosen from a long list of potential ones… not the same event happening over and over like in Guild Wars 2.  Their implementation did not serve to make the world feel alive, but instead made it feel even more like a carnival ride resetting itself every so often.

2 – Passive Grouping

I should be able to help other players out, and they help me without having to worry about whether or not I tagged the mob first.  Grouping should be something you do to hang out with people, not something you feel obligated to do constantly just to get through game content.  I feel as though simply touching a mob should give me credit for whatever that mob is required for.  Rift and Guild Wars definitely do this extremely well… but when I go back to a game that does not have it… I become a kill stealing asshole.  I just forget that mob tagging is an actual thing that is still in games.  If you do not have passive mob tagging… you are bad and should feel bad.

3 – Puzzles and Collectibles

I have the tendencies in me to power level myself to the cap and then get bored feeling there is nothing left to do.  If your game has little puzzles and collectible bits it helps to make me stop and smell the roses.  I feel for other players this becomes a meta game all in itself.  These systems all seem relatively simple to implement, but it seems like there is a greater return on investment as far as gluing a player to your game.  Rift and GW2 both have amazing examples of puzzles, and EQ2 has probably the most extensive collection system I have seen in a game.  I greatly prefer there to be something for me to always be on the lookout for, that offers interesting gameplay and forces me to stop quest grinding.

4 – Moveable UI Elements

This one is huge to me.  Essentially I will if given the option set my UI to look the same from game to game.  I like certain windows in certain locations because it helps me not have to think about where things are.  When you play lots of different MMOs this becomes something extremely important.  Additionally I find myself setting up all my hotbars the same… 0 is the interrupt key, 7 is my combo point dump, 5 is charge/deathgrip, etc.  As a result I really hate your game when you force me to play with your idea of how the UI should look.  No matter how much research you have put into your UI, it is not ideal for everyone… and as a result you should never force players into your chosen UI design box.  Make the windows unlock able and moveable  either through the default UI like Rift or through Addons like WoW.

5 – Map with User Defined Waypoints

This is another big one for me.  Navigating your world should be easy for the players.  I should be able to open my map, click a point that I want to travel to and then get some kind of directions as to how to get there.  This can be as simple as an Icon on the edge of the mini-map showing you the direction of your destination, or as complex as some sort of golden path or arrow pointing the way.  Additionally it would be really amazing if your system allowed player defined permanent waypoints.  That way we could actively mark whenever we found something cool in your world.  TSW does an amazing job of this.. and I have tons of little markers scattered through all my maps pointing to nifty things I found.  This is definitely something all games should emulate.

6 – Sortable/Searchable Bank and Inventory

First off let me say.. that the concept of physical bags with limited storage is something no one should ever do again.  I greatly prefer one big inventory space because usually with that comes the ability to sort, filter, and search the contents of your inventory.  Rift does an interesting hybrid model, in that they still have physical bags, but they have a sort and search functionality that makes up for the fact of having to juggle multiple containers rather than just one.  Trying to find things in your bags should not be considered a meta game… and you should help players out so they have to spend as little time doing this as possible.  There have been times I have logged into EQ2… looked at the state of my bags and logged out immediately because I did not want to spend the next 30 minutes clearing them out.  That game is the worst case scenario… but I have had similar happen in many other games as well.  Make your inventory system help the player rather than hinder them.

7 – Sell All Junk Button

If your game drops junk items from mobs aka “Greys” and you do not have a sell all junk button… you are a horrible person and should be drug out into the street and shot.  Nothing is more frustrating than going through your inventory and having to manually sell a bunch of trash items that have no real purpose for existing other than to give you some cash.  Better yet, don’t even drop the trash items and give us additional gold instead.  I think the running theme of the last two should be that Inventory Maintenance is not a fun meta game.  No one enjoys it, and all it does is make the player feel like they have just completely wasted their time.  I am completely fine with getting additional cash in lieu of junk, but if you do have junk… for the love of god make a sell all crap button.

8 – AOE Looting

Thank you Rift for creating this construct… and thank you modern MMO developers for having the common sense to say “damn, why didn’t we have this” and adding it to your games.  Nothing is more annoying than trying to select that one corpse from a pile of corpses that still has loot on it.  My OCD will not let me go without searching all the bodies… it is like I knew that if I missed one… that would be the one that dropped some rare epic item.  Again this is a cousin of the whole inventory maintenance is not a fun meta game…  neither is looting.  Better yet… all corpse interactions should be AOE as well… where the hell is my AOE skinning.  The first company to give me AOE skinning, herbing, and mining of corpses… will be a god in my eyes.

9 – Full Character Appearance System

Now when I say this… I am not talking about Transmogrification.  I could go on an hour long rant about how horrible that system is and how it is a half assed version of the good appearance systems.  What I am talking about is additional sets of character doll slots that allow you to directly override the appearance of an item with another item.  Rift has probably the best implementation overall right now, since you can have something like 12 wardrobe slots with ready to switch to outfits on the fly.  The only gotcha there is due to their own constraints they had to implement a shitty “transmog” like system for doing the weapons.  Players should never have to run back to a vendor to change their appearance…  stop making them do busy work.  I would love to see developers emulate the way the system works in EQ2, because you can literally change your appearance to anything in the game… no class restrictions.

10 – Facial Hair

I had a few other items I considered putting on the list… but honestly to me personally this one has to be here.  If your game does not have the ability for me to give my character a nice beard, especially a moustache and goatee combo…  I will hate your character creator and likely not play your game.  I have no clue why this is so important to me… but it is.  Namely I have seen the lack of facial hair in the Asian MMOs… but I struggled to find a look I could stomach in Guild Wars 2 as well.  Additionally I cannot stand the “pretty boy” appearance that some games have…  but I won’t go into that right now.  Please for the love of god when you design your character creator… make Facial Hair a slider…  not something that is attached to another attribute like hairstyle.

Wrapping Up

So there you have it… my ten must haves for a modern MMO.  Like I said, I am sure that it is not a complete list at all… and as soon as I post this… I will think of another 10 things that should have been on the list.  These however are the things that immediately came to mind when being frustrated with MMOs that do not have them.  I would be curious to hear about what your list is, and whether or not I have hit your key frustration points.  I hope you all have a great day, and I hope I manage to stay fully conscious all day long since I got up so early.

Sense of Humor

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Be warned… this is one of those mornings when I just don’t really feel like doing a blog post.  It isn’t necessarily that I don’t want to write… it is that I don’t feel like I have anything really exciting to share with the world.  But several months ago I made a commitment to blog every morning or evening, and I have not dropped that promise yet.  Though quite honestly the timing of the evening posts has been a bit odd and something I need to work on.

Searching for Something

Most of yesterday was spent in some fashion roaming around town.  At first I was on a mission to hit a bunch of used bookstores, namely the largest ones here in town looking for something I could not quite describe.  Essentially I am doing a lot of pre-writing for my attempt on NaNoWriMo this year.  I am one of those people that I don’t feel like I can write about something, without knowing more about the world itself.  The world I have built in my head is extremely intricate and as a result I am having to do quite a bit of research.

The only problem is I cannot put my finger on exactly what I am looking for.  I have been searching for ethnic folk tales, lore, and even role-playing game books that are set in non-European/American settings.  I feel like in those two realms I have a fairly firm grasp on the classical lore, mythology and cast of creatures.  Where I am really lacking is China and the countries of the former USSR.  Additionally I could definitely use some more information on the creatures of the African continent.  I know some of it, but not nearly the clarity I would like.

Essentially I am trying to build political struggles, kingdoms and relationships between various groups of magical creatures.  I have a lot of things in place, but I want more resolution and granularity of who lives where and  controls what.  The irony about this whole thing is… that the story I will likely weave through this world will only touch a tiny tiny bit of it.  But I feel like I need to know what the topography of the world is like before i can populate any part of it with characters. 

This is also why I am getting started this far ahead of November, trying to weave together a world that makes sense to me.  One of the things I hate about a novel is when it feels like there was no master plan to the world, or that when a big reveal happens. it is a massive let down because it doesn’t make much sense.  Since this is a hang-up of mine… I feel like I have to build the world first and then write about it.  I thought that maybe I might stumble onto a collected book of folklore or something like that, but at the end of the day I pretty much came up empty.  I got one very thin children’s book that collected some non-traditional mythology… that will mostly be a point of reference as I look up all of the tales it mentions online.

Sense of Humor

ffxiv 2013-06-29 09-23-50-26 The one overarching thing about Final Fantasy is that at no point can you really take yourself too seriously.  For a good chunk of yesterday when I was not out and about searching for whatever I was looking for…  I ran around looking like this.  This is one of the few times I wished I was colorblind…  this was all bought off the same vendor mind you.  Not sure how a red horned helm, green hauberk, pink gloves and white/yellow pants go together…  but man is it colorful.  That is the thing that makes  Final Fantasy so different that most of western games, is that it is over the top absurd at times… in the character designs, the bosses and monsters, and even the dialog.

To some extent this makes the game play more enjoyable because you are unable to get completely focused in on the mission at hand.  I find I have done a lot of “stopping to smell the roses” in this game so far as I haphazardly roam around the countryside looking for whatever I happen to need for a quest.  There are a ton of intricate systems in this game, and most of them are not well explained to the player.  I stumbled onto a hunting system that seems to involve you killing a certain number of mobs with a “cheese wheel” icon on their head.  These are lumped into ranges and there is some kind of reward for completing a difficulty tier.

Additionally I figured out that the “Golden Pretzel” Icon I kept seeing is actually anytime you are gaining experience.  This is no lie… I seriously kept trying to figure out how I could spend all those pretzels I was gaining.  Upon second look… I am guessing it is probably a golden cherry blossom or something of the sort.  But to me it looks like a pretzel.. and the advance dialog icon still looks like an ice cream cone.  I can tell this game as a whole was not designed for western eyes.  Like I am sure not everyone sees a pretzel when they look at that icon, that for someone else it would make a lot more sense.

Story Quests

ffxiv 2013-06-29 14-33-37-24 One of the other cool things I stumbled onto was what I am calling Story Quests for lack of a proper term.  Essentially every so often you will get a quest that involves you going to investigate something.  When you do it will launch into a short cut scene, and then usually a pretty epic battle that is sometimes assisted by NPCs joining your fight.  From what I understand these are unique to your class, so that the ones I am getting are for marauders alone.  They remind me a lot of the SWTOR class storyline in that you have an opening cinematic/dialog the fight itself and then a resolution cinematic/dialog after it is over.

ffxiv 2013-06-29 14-32-33-13 Some of the battles like the one above are just absolutely insane.  Essentially me and the party of NPCs had to deal with wave after wave of giant crabs, each wave including smaller mobs and big boss mobs.  From what I can tell the secret seems to be.. focus on the smaller adds and let the NPCs deal with the big guys for you.  Once they have solid aggro and you have finished off the trash waves, you can help them burn down the big guys.  I’ve done three of these so far, and that seems to be the rule for each.  How you can generally tell is if the boss type mob is a significant number of levels higher than the trash mobs.

Wrapping Up

So far I am still enjoying myself playing the beta.  I still feel like there is a ton that I just do not quite understand yet… but overall that has not prevented me from enjoying the game as a whole.  This is one of those games that is deceptively simple at face value, but seems to have a ton of different and intricate systems once you get engaged with it.  This should help to keep players hooked on the title for the long haul.  I did not experience the 1.0 version of Final Fantasy XIV but the 2.0 version seems like it is something that western audiences will really enjoy.  I hope you all have a great weekend, as right now I am cutting this off and going to go play some more.