[TOR] Somebody please tell me bioware know what they are doin

Nody

TheDoc wrote: »

The point being raised is that older MMO's were more difficult and created a higher level of skill within the players.

As Darupnir kinda points to yes, a large part of the experience is having 10 or 25 guys all up to a high competant level of focus. You could play your role perfect but someone else making a mistake causes a wipe.

Now instead of 10 or 25 who could make a mistake increase that to 72 or 54; which one is harder to coordinate? Which one is harder to get enough quality people for? EQ raids were technically easier then WoW (fewer and simpler mechanics) but they were far harder due to competition and number of people to coordinate and that is by far the harder side (Longest individual raid I recall was Rathe Council, 72 people, 6(!) hours, 6 mobs to be CCed (~10% resist chance on the spell), 6 mobs to be tanked with a detaunt proc on your main tank every 2 minutes with at least 2 healers and all 12 mobs to be killed with in 2 minutes of each other or you'd have to start over and that is a single raid boss ignoring trash clearing to him and thankfully an exception)...

But really I'm trying to get my head around the point that somehow dying more, is more challenging. It is really not, if anything its more frustrating. I'm going around SWTOR finishing simple mob fights with 40% wondering why am I continuing to play a tank class that takes MASSIVE damage,

It's about darwian evolution. There's a classic picture of Eve skill level I'm sure you've seen but it is really the point. A game that makes dying painfull means people either play chicken **** (I knew a ranger, ranged melee class who insisted on only using spells to not pull aggro, that's a poor player) or they are forced to learn how to play better (by being kicked in the balls when making a mistake meaning they either learn or give up the game as they can't progress). Yes, that forces people to become good at the game because if not you're not even talking about doing end game raid content, you're never going to reach max level in the first place because your skill level will not allow you to level up to max level to do the raids!

Is that a good game design to get many people in? No. Is that a good game design to force people to become good at a game? Yes, because the once not sadomachistic and/or skilled enough will quit and drop out (or if they make it to level 50 by killing beetles in the newbie ground they will never do a raid).

Kiith

Nody wrote: »

There's a classic picture of Eve skill level I'm sure you've seen but it is really the point.

Best Eve Screenshot ever :P

DeVore

The argument that if people wanted it there would be more games like that is flawed thinking imho.

The difference between "need" and "want". Most people I know need a kick in the backside, very few are willing to pay for it.

DeV.

Dustaz

Kirby wrote: »

Yes. And those people would be right.

Gamer's today in general are far, far worse than the gamers of the 80' and 90's. The dumbing down for the masses so that even your 4 year old brother can kill space marines with you is there for all to see.

Regenerative health, cover systems, save points every five minutes, multiple difficulty levels, hints, FAQ's, walthroughs, etc.etc.

I have never read such a load of utter and complete elitist condescending ****e.

Are GAMES easier? Maybe, on the whole but its another debate.

Does this have ANY effect on how "good" gamers are ? None at all whatsoever

You are either going to be good or bad at something depending on the amount of innate talent you have, multiplied by the amount of time you spend at it. If you play an easy game and your bad, youll get there. If you play an easy game and your good, youll get there quicker and/or beat the baddies.

Just because a game is easier, doesnt mean that the people playing it are going to be worse as a result. Portal 2 was astonishingly easy and the videos that people post are astonishingly clever. Starcraft 2 is easier than broodwar, but im willing to bet that noone here is actually any good.

The last page of posts reads like everyone posting is just far too amazing at games to even bother playing anymore. The competition just isnt good enough. These youngsters playing these easy games like sc2, getting world firsts in wow, travelling the world playing cs and dota. pfft, luxury....


It wasnt like this in our day.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-eDaSvRO9xA

Swtor may well be easier than everquest, but a lot more people will play it and enjoy it. There will be a lot of people that are terrible at the game and never really improve because they dont have to but you know what? Theres going to be an awful lot of people who will and will go on to play better and achieve more than anyone on this thread.

nesf

TheDoc wrote: »

The point being raised is that older MMO's were more difficult and created a higher level of skill within the players.

I read it as leaving a higher skill group of players at the end rather than necessarily creating them from the masses. The older MMOs meant poor skill players who couldn't learn to get better didn't make it to high level.

This is good for PuGing if you're a decent player but bad for the chequebook of the guys making the MMO.

The other side of MMO games (and older games in general) was that because they were hard they weren't played that casually by people unwilling to learn and work to become better. I don't think there were more good players as a % of the population then over now as much as I think the poor players just didn't play most games because of the difficult levels involved before the vast majority of companies started turning out lower difficulty stuff. I mean wargames used to be much harder than the RTSs of today. Competitive multiplayer RTS is as hard as ever it was but the single player stuff is pretty simple for the most part. Older strategy campaigns used to punish you for every unit lost, meaning a bad game meant a reload from a save (or dozens of loads to find a strategy that was efficient in some games I remember) even if you won. Nowadays most wargames just start you with the same units each time so there's little incentive to do more than a pyrrhic victory each time.

Dohnny Jepp

Does anyone else play games to simply have fun? or is that just me?:pac:

Venom

Those older MMO's such as UO and EQ1 which were "so much harder" were only hard due to crap design and being the only games on the market at the time, MMO fans had no options to play anything else.

And lets be honest here, gameplay design such as corpse runs that could take days, hours spent looking for a group due to forced grouping, rare quest mobs that randomly spawned once in a blue moon and death penlites that could de-level you, did in no way make you a better player, only a player with lots of free time on their hands. WoW for all the rubbish being spouted about being an easymode MMO for bad players , has much more involved raid fights than EQ1 every did.

Vanguard while in development claimed it would be a super hardcore MMO just like EQ1 until the dev team wised up that current MMO players just weren't interested in that sort of time wasting crap anymore. How many months was it from launch till the game went belly up and was sold to SOE to pad out there subscription deal offers?

Darkfall was another super hardcore MMO that never took off due to 99.999% of MMO players not giving two ****s about that type of gameplay.

Eve online while a pretty hardcore game is the only space based MMO on the market so can't really compare to the normal sci-fi and fantasy games.

EQ2 when launched it had group experience loss, and if one of the group died XP loss was shared between the whole group so players refused to group up on the journey to the objective in case someone else died and you got hit with the XP loss. Suddenly WoW comes out of the blue with low system specs, polished up EQ1+EQ2 style gameplay but without all the time wasting lark and its subscription base went through the roof.

At the end of the day MMO players just want a good game to play apart from a vocal minority who have so little in there lives they require a game to be more of a second job so they can feel special about themselves.

nesf

Dohnny Jepp wrote: »

Does anyone else play games to simply have fun? or is that just me?:pac:

Sure, the vast majority of my games are stuff to while away a few hours and relax with. I still like to keep a few more mentally challenging games around for when the mood takes me though, same as some other people keep a few really tough FPS games around and so on.

The "Boy and his Game" springs to mind here.

Kirby

Dustaz wrote: »

Are GAMES easier? Maybe, on the whole but its another debate.

Um, no actually. That is the debate. We have been discussing the merrits of harsh or weak penalties contributing towards weaker players. Its the same debate. Don't know what thread you are reading.

Dustaz wrote: »

Does this have ANY effect on how "good" gamers are ? None at all whatsoever

Ofcourse it does. If something is easy to do, you don't have to be good to do it. If something is hard to do, you have to be good.

Its basic logic and for the life of me I don't see where you come up with the idea that games being easier doesn't affect the quality of gamers at all. You are using the argument that top pro's in games like Starcraft2 and Counter-strike somehow back up the argument that "gamers" are just as good now as they were. This is faulty logic. You are always going to have the gaming elite in any context. Just because Idra is as good in SC2 as he was in brood war doesn't mean gamers in general are 'just as good.' You just have to go onto the sc2 ladder and play a few games to see this.

Does Michael Schumachers skill have any bearing on the driving quality of the masses? Ofcourse not. To suggest so would be idiotic.

Making games easier is good for gaming and the industry as it helps it grow. Making gaming more accessible is a good thing. But to suggest that the dumbing down of the vast majority of games makes for better gamers its ridiculous. In the 90's a game like dark souls would be seen as standard. Now, most people consider games like these too difficult.

Compare a staple in gaming like Mario. Alot of kids struggled with Super Mario World for quite a while. It wasn't a hard game by any means but it was challenging for a child. Compare that to how most kids blew through Mario Land 3D that came out recently. My cousin had never played a game in his life and had a 3DS gifted to him. He blew through it, his first ever game, in about 3 days. Tells the story really.

As I said, the fact that more kids can have fun with games is a GOOD thing. don't get me wrong. I wouldn't go back to the days of impossible learning curves. But your assertation that gamers, the average joe playing on his couch, are just as good is just so wrong. So, so wrong.

Draupnir

There seems to be a bit of confusion going on, personally I never intended to see WoW or SWTOR was an easy mode, my point was just that there is no real responsiblity placed on the user to stay alive since respawning is so easy and that to me is a negative. In games that I have played, the loss of gear or xp or both caused by a death added a huge amount of excitement, tension and consideration to the experience.

It seems like that discussion somehow makes WoW players in particular get very defensive. There really is no need for that, I am personally not trying to criticise anyone other than the game(s) themselves.

Dustaz

Kirby wrote: »

Um, no actually. That is the debate. We have been discussing the merrits of harsh or weak penalties contributing towards weaker players. Its the same debate. Don't know what thread you are reading.

My point is that the potential skill level of someone is unchanged regardless of how good or bad they need to be to play a certain game.

Ofcourse it does. If something is easy to do, you don't have to be good to do it. If something is hard to do, you have to be good.

But its not a case of simple binary here. Wow, to use an example, is an easy game. You dont have to be very good to level up to level cap. A shaved monkey could probably do it. Bonzo the hairless chimp couldnt do that in eq. So far so good for your theory. But to do a heroic dungeon is a bit harder. Raiding is a bit harder again. Heroic raiding is a bit harder again. Server firsts harder again. World firsts (the gaming elite) hardest.

See what i mean? Just because the game doesnt make you eat your own faeces every time you die, doesn't mean you cannot challenge yourself and improve past multiple plateaus of development.

There are multiple skill levels between "i finished sc2 on easy, whats this battle.net thing" and IM.MVP. Sc2 might be easier than broodwar but that doesnt mean that the guys in masters or grandmasters couldnt have achieved the equivalent rank in broodwar. The only difference now is that bonzo can also play.

Does Michael Schumachers skill have any bearing on the driving quality of the masses? Ofcourse not. To suggest so would be idiotic.

No, but you are suggesting that drivers these days are terrible because there are so many automatic gearboxes around.

Compare a staple in gaming like Mario. Alot of kids struggled with Super Mario World for quite a while. It wasn't a hard game by any means but it was challenging for a child. Compare that to how most kids blew through Mario Land 3D that came out recently. My cousin had never played a game in his life and had a 3DS gifted to him. He blew through it, his first ever game, in about 3 days. Tells the story really.

Sorry but for the purposes of this discussion, saying "im good atsingle player gaming" is like saying "im good at eating". You can eat a lot, or eat fast or slow, but its not any "better" or "worse" than anyone else eating. When you bring up concepts like "weaker gamers", it refers to some sort of competition which doesnt exist in single player.

But your assertation that gamers, the average joe playing on his couch, are just as good is just so wrong. So, so wrong.

You have to ask yourself, this average joe, would he have played any games back in the day? would he have tried to play everquest and given up because it was too hard? Then nothing has changed, he was bad then and hes bad now. the only difference is that he has easier games to enjoy and play. His skill level hasnt changed and neither has yours.

nesf

Dustaz wrote: »

Sorry but for the purposes of this discussion, saying "im good atsingle player gaming" is like saying "im good at eating". You can eat a lot, or eat fast or slow, but its not any "better" or "worse" than anyone else eating. When you bring up concepts like "weaker gamers", it refers to some sort of competition which doesnt exist in single player.

The competition is against yourself and yes, there are definitely good and and weaker players when it comes to single player games in many genres. Or do you consider playing on the hardest setting of turn based strategy games as not being indicative of some kind of skill or some nonsense like that? And no, I'm not arguing that being good at single player turn based games is the same skillset as being good at multiplayer TBS games. Though the skillsets overlap somewhat.

Kirby

Dustaz I fear you are going off on multiple tangents with your latest post. We aren't going to agree so it's best to just leave it there I think. People can read the thread for themselves and make their own minds up.

Shiminay

I'd expand on what Dusty is getting at and say that there are now more gamers in the world and not all of them have the drive to put in the hours of practice to get to a skill level that might have, several years ago, been the difference between "finishing" a game or not. Couple that with the basic needs of <insert game company of choice here> to function as a successful business and make profits, they want to tap into as much of the now much larger potential gamer market that now exists. In a world with so much choice, how do you make sure you get as big a piece of the pie as possible? Well gaming is done for fun primarily, so you make sure your game is more fun than the other company's. How do you do that? Well Story and Mechanics are a big part of it, but making the player feel like they're "winning" is also vital. For all the bitching I've done about the Call of Duty franchise, they've nailed the idea of "constant reward" to keep the player engaged with the game and that's something that was inherited and expanded on from MMOs - levelling up.

So nowadays in MMOs, it seems that basic levelling up has become relatively straight forward (I say this based on what you guys are saying - SWTOR is the first MMO I've ever played). That's just the business side of gaming really and it caters to I'd say 80% of the player base. The other 20% that are interested in things like high level raids and "end game" stuff (I think Doc would fall very much into this category for example). But at the same time, if your level is a status of "how good you are at this game" rather than "how far I've gotten through this game" then that's a flawed model as someone who's a lvl 50 Heroic Raid veteran and potentially top of his server has clearly done more than a numpty like me who's muddled through the story and has, because the game has made it rather handy for me to do so, eventually dinged to 50 through sheer persistence because the 10 times I died trying to kill X didn't punish me in the way that EQ would have done. EQ's "status" was tied to your level, but now that's not a true measure of how good you are at a game.

Are gamers worse at the game? Not really and the reason is there are still more or less the same number/percentage of people who will "click" well enough and practice enough with a game to get to that highest level. But there are more people playing games overall and the reality of the gaming business, now that it's mainstream entertainment rather than more niche like it used to be is that the saturation in the market means you need to have a different approach in how you keep people playing and the metrics for measuring "success" have changed and so two people at lvl 50 could still be worlds apart in terms of skill and ability, so it's unreasonable to suggest that "level" is a measure of skill anymore.

Kirby

Shiminay wrote: »

it's unreasonable to suggest that "level" is a measure of skill anymore.

Nobody ever suggested that. I certainly didn't. The theory behind the discussion is do easier games make for poorer gamers. My argument was a resounding yes. If you don't punish a player for making a mistake he won't learn anything from it and will continue on his merry way without the knowledge that he made a mistake.

Making games easier allows more people to play them. No problem there. Thats all good. But I take issue with anybody who says the average joe screaming down the mic in halo:reach on his modern 360....... is anywhere near as good as the average joe screaming at his Ninja Gaiden screen played on his NES. Thats all.

witless1

WoW could have gone down the EQ route but was blessed by the timing of its release in that it didn't have to make that choice. It coincided with accessible and affordable broadband and gaming machines for the masses. It had a willing playerbase in that alone so going down a death penalty route for a gaming audience that lived on single player games would have been gaming suicide. If WoW and EQ were released around the same time though, what would have happened? WoW might never have taken off because the core MMO players would dismiss it as too easy or it possible would have delivered true MMO gaming 10 years ahead of schedule. It's an impossible question to answer and a pointless debate! There certainly is some merit in penal gameplaying, Dibalo 3 fans would not be pushing so hard for the famous Hardcore mode to be included otherwise. Each to their own, I know I would give that mode a shot just for the adrenaline of playing it but long term it wouldn't be my cup of tea!

Dustaz

nesf wrote: »

The competition is against yourself and yes, there are definitely good and and weaker players when it comes to single player games in many genres.

Possibly, I can concede there are better and weaker players in single player games (although i cant see how its measured unless you add in another person to the equation).

However, these players are of all ages and do not depend on being brought up on a diet of games that smash your face with a mallet if you make a wrong move. If you concede that a 15 year old can be a "good" gamer, then the argument falls down as he was brought up in an era of "easier" games.

Dustaz

Kirby wrote: »

If you don't punish a player for making a mistake he won't learn anything from it and will continue on his merry way without the knowledge that he made a mistake.

You are completely ignoring peoples capacity and will to improve. It's just those "hidden" mistakes that seperate people who dont really care and people who actually try to improve.

"Hmm, i can press the button and spray this guy with a rifle and he dies... great!

"Hmm, if i burst fire this guy dies and i use a lot less bullets and i dont have to reload at a vital time/run out of ammo and have to use a worse weapon and fail the next boss/other scenario"

But I take issue with anybody who says the average joe screaming down the mic in halo:reach on his modern 360....... is anywhere near as good as the average joe screaming at his Ninja Gaiden screen played on his NES. Thats all.

Jaysus, i was screaming at manic miner and elite played on the spectrum. I must be GODLIKE at games.

DeVore

We should change Chess so that all pieces move like Queens because god forbid any kid should become frustrated that the piece not do what they want, when they want it.

DeV.

Raphael

What I'm taking from what people are saying (and it seems like one of thsoe weird arguments where the disagreement is only perceived), and apologies if this is wrong, as regards skill level:



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. . . . Average . . . Average . . . Good
. . . WoW player . EQ Player . . Player (either)

Which is to say that WoWs easierness doesn't effect the top evel - cutting edge content isn't harder or easier, just diffirent, but it has a negative impact on the ability level of the casual.

End result meaning crappier PuGs while levelling, generally less compentent userbase but no real impact on endgame, because the hardness only comes in then. If levelling's easy, most people will never learn to be good - hard content makes you learn. It's not the only way to learn, but it forces you to.

Now, some people, as you said Dustaz, drive themselves to be the ebst they can be, but those are the people who go on to play the game at its highest level. Most people put in the minimum required effort, and you don't gain as much skill when that level is lower.

No one is saying all gamers now are worse than they were then. Just that the average joe, slap in the disc and start playing gamers are. The ones who push themselves are as good as they ever were, imo, because they mostly push themselves against each other.

DeVore

I think the suggestion as made earlier, that a harshly competitive environment does NOT produce better players, is nonsense.

One can apply that to whatever game, or indeed activity in life, you choose


DeV.

nesf

Dustaz wrote: »

Possibly, I can concede there are better and weaker players in single player games (although i cant see how its measured unless you add in another person to the equation).

However, these players are of all ages and do not depend on being brought up on a diet of games that smash your face with a mallet if you make a wrong move. If you concede that a 15 year old can be a "good" gamer, then the argument falls down as he was brought up in an era of "easier" games.

Play any Total War game on the hardest setting without knowing what you're doing, especially the early ones, and you'll see what I mean about skill (and knowledge). Ditto most every turn based strategy that I've come across. In Civilisation circles your single player "skill" is judged by what's the hardest difficulty you've won, how quickly you did it and which civ you used (some being more overpowered than others) (also the strategy you used matters, some are insta-wins and considered useless as a measure of skill). In all of these if someone doubts you did it/could do it, you put a save game up from the end of the game showing you got there (though few people hang onto their save games for this purpose except forum boasting).

The point is that strategy games used to start around the level now considered hard to very hard in difficulty setting. They used to come with one difficulty setting, today's very hard pretty much and you sank or swam. You'll find most good/experienced strategy players start these games on a hard setting without knowing much of anything about the game. The ability to get good at these games and show it is still there but the average strategy player is weaker because of all these easy modes in these games now. I don't mind this because it means more games are sold (so more games are made) and so long as hard modes are included (or can be modded in) I'm happy enough. Ditto RPG games. Ever play Baldur's Gate? You really don't want to spec your character badly in that one on any of the harder difficulty settings.


Of course, I'm quite happy that games aren't like Rogue games of old. Where death was permanent. For a style of RPG that takes quite a long time to complete that's a pretty nasty condition...

DeVore

Starcraft. Nuff said...


DeV.

nesf

DeVore wrote: »

Starcraft. Nuff said...


DeV.

Like I said earlier, the boy and his game.

Edit: For the uninitiated: http://day9fan.com/~/boy-and-his-game-day9

Dustaz

DeVore wrote: »

We should change Chess so that all pieces move like Queens because god forbid any kid should become frustrated that the piece not do what they want, when they want it.

DeV.

So what exactly is the harsh penalty that makes chess players so good? Is the fact that when you lose a game, you start the next game with 5 less pawns?

Dustaz

You know what? Im going to agree with Kirbys statement.

Yes, the "Average gamer today is 'worse' than the 80s" is true.

Purely down to numbers though.

Raphael wrote: »

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. . . . Average . . . Average . . . Good
. . . WoW player . EQ Player . . Player (either).

Im going to go out and say it. Eq was terrible. It was boring, and it made you do cartwheels for no good reason. A LOT of people, including myself, didnt play it for that very reason. A LOT of people played wow. Including bad gamers, medium gamers and ones that might be good if they cared or liked the game.

Same goes for gaming in general, Theres FAR more people playing games now and as a result the average skill level has dropped. This is a function of numbers as games have become more acceptable, and embraced the mainstream and yes, maybe easier. This has NO effect whatsoever on peoples ability to be good or bad at them.

Dev mentioned starcraft which is a classic example. Its FAR easier to play than broodwar. Loads more people play it than played broodwar. It hasnt made a jot of a difference as to who can become good at it.

Kirby

There are very harsh penalties in chess, not least of which is that if you let a pawn bypass your defenses he gets his queen back. One mistake can cause you the game.

You might even say your queen gets a respawn

Dustaz

Kirby wrote: »

There are very harsh penalties in chess, not least of which is that if you let a pawn bypass your defenses he gets his queen back. One mistake can cause you the game.

You might even say your queen gets a respawn

Thats not a penalty. Thats just losing, You can respawn instantly and try again. If chess was like eq, as i said, your next game would start with 3 less pieces.

nesf

Dustaz wrote: »

Same goes for gaming in general, Theres FAR more people playing games now and as a result the average skill level has dropped. This is a function of numbers as games have become more acceptable, and embraced the mainstream and yes, maybe easier. This has NO effect whatsoever on peoples ability to be good or bad at them.

Which is pretty much exactly what we've been arguing.

nesf

Dustaz wrote: »

Thats not a penalty. Thats just losing, You can respawn instantly and try again. If chess was like eq, as i said, your next game would start with 3 less pieces.

Your rating will get murdered though if your opponent was far lower in rating than you. You cannot afford to be making mistakes in competitive chess at all. To an extent mirroring hardcore progression raiding where you only get one chance at each boss per lockout period.