Blizzard breaks the game, fun

Games
21

Supposedly the increase in XP value for dungeon (instance) mobs above level 30 compensates for the XP requirement increase (or vice versa), but yeah that sounds icky to me too. After all a lot of your exp gain comes from non-instance fighting, for a few reasons. One, instances take too damn long, and require a significant comittment of time in uninterrupted blocs. Two, there is no PvP in instances, and on the PvP server, you are there mostly because you WANT some PvP. Three, once you’ve done an instance, it’s appeal lessens dramatically. Unless you’re farming it, you generally want to go do something new, and there just aren’t that many instances.

I still will be getting this because my guild is heading there en masse, but I’m not letting my DAOC stuff lapse. I’ve been trying to tell folks in my guild that they should not burn any bridges before testing out WoW in full, because I share the feeling that the game in beta has progressively worsened in some respects, even while it’s gotten technically more robust.

22

I have never played an instance properly. Only times I go in is when I have a high level with me who can walk me through it for an item.

I’m a casual gamer nowadays, at least in time allocation. I cannot dedicated 2-4 hours to doing an instance. Requiring me to do so is ridiculous. And what do they do? Punish me for not being able to catass. Well, fuck you blizzard. I have a life, and luckily WoW used to be structured in a way which allowed me to play and have fun without sacrificing so much of my time. Obviously, though, they want nothing but the catass power gamers. Well, they can have em. I don’t like playing with those people anyway.

23

Charles, no offence but good luck playing any MMO in small bits and pieces. These games just aren’t amenable to that kind of play style.

I think you’re probably an unusual kind of player if you’re willing to pay a monthly fee and not play that often.

24

Why can’t you let your DAoC account lapse? They save the characters and items, don’t they?

I agree about the instances, though I do think there are enough for players to get to level 60.

They really need the instanced PvP though. I know this was planned. I can only assume it’s not ready yet.

25

It was working with WoW. I was able to play 30 minutes here, 45 minutes there, all the way to level 46. WoW was great for it, I could do a single quest in 30 minutes to an hour, which is a reasonable amount of progress.

I liked the game, and was able to have fun even while crunching at work and spending evenings/weekends with my girlfriend. But with the increase in the grind and the increasing requirement to do instances, that’s just not realistic anymore.

I thought WoW was great because it didn’t require you to invest absurd amounts of time to a single play session.

edit: And just to make it clear, I was playing at least once every two days, usually I could manage an hour or so in a day. I was playing more than enough to justify the cost.

26

Well, if nothing else, I hope that the death issue is resolved in a timely manner. I never really saw WoW as more than just another MMO, although there are some nice innovations here and there. I was going to move there with a guild of buddies mainly because they were, but that whole 30 min res sick thing, and then the death tax… ugh, count me out.

27

I don’t get the problem. They are making death hurt a bit more. I actually like that; I often feel like I play too “cowboy” style and just rush into fights without thought. Things like this make me thing a bit more, and make the game less of a thoughtless button clicker.

You may disagree that additional death penalties are good, but to act as though there is no possible merit to them is strange to me.

28

Some of the art for high end plate for females has always been skank wear.

I have some screens of my human female warrior here http://www.gamerifts.com/previews/worldwarcraft_p5.shtml that illustrate what I am talking about. Even though they have redone stats since those screens, those two items look the same when worn. Some of the high end legs have a garter and stockings look and perhaps the best plate tank BP in the game looks very similar to the one depicted in my screens above, except its gold. I cant say that it really bothers me too much, this is the first time I have played a female in an MMO and I like looking at her. Still, its almost over the top.

I was disappointed in the patch, which continues a trend for me going back a long way now. They seem to make the game more tedious and less fun with each patch.

The durability stuff…ugh. It was almost universally panned across dozens and dozens of pages of threads when it was introduced, and they ignored almost all of those complaints. Even though the rate of combat decay has slowed down a hair, the overall rate has increased with this death decay bullshit. As a warrior I carry a bag full of weapon/armor to swap out as the situation dictates. We are talking big time gold if all of that plus my equipped stuff breaks when I spirit heal, 10G or more…maybe I will test it out.

They also added in components to all? high level buff and travel spells. Another bad move if you ask me. I dont understand why they dont try and deal with the economy on the supply side, by reducing coin drops from monsters.

The taunt changes also suck. Basically taunt went from having no cool down to having a 10 second cooldown. Game breaking unless every other class adjusts accordingly, ie. heal more efficiently, nuke less, rogues turn off attack (lol). etc. How did this get out of internal testing? Not sure. Not to mention that when the patch first went live, taunt was missing entirely.

Oh and their BT client still blows. It is getting better, I guess…but it still uses all available upstream bandwidth, which is a no-no for many folks as it pretty much kills internet access for other apps.

olaf

29

You can play City of Heroes this way. Apart from task forces and trials, which are clearly billed as optional epic-length team-oriented endeavours, most of the door missions in CoH take less than an hour to complete. Now, CoH may not be your cup of tea for various reasons, but it is and remains very casual-friendly.

30

It was working with WoW. I was able to play 30 minutes here, 45 minutes there, all the way to level 46. WoW was great for it, I could do a single quest in 30 minutes to an hour, which is a reasonable amount of progress.

Well, level progression is the same up to level 30. That hasn’t changed. It will take you 30% longer after level 30 if you never do any instances. I doubt that equates to a huge amount of time. If going from 30 to 60 took 200 hours, it would now take 260. That’s probably not a gamebreaker for most players.

31

Two words… Guild Wars. Seemed very friendly to small chunks of playing time… although admitedly it’s not a traditional MMORPG.

32

I thought you could only prepay rent for a couple of weeks max. Sure he’s not planning to Ebay it? :wink:

33

Olaf, I don’t think messing with the supply side would do any good if the amount of cash players have is still relative to one another. It just sets initial prices lower, but high level players will still drive up prices until they are out of reach for all but high level players.

They just have to have money drains. I don’t think there’s any other solution, other than to design a game so there is no player economy. The problem with money drains is that no one will ever like them.

34

EDIT: Blizzard has announced that the item decay loss will NOT apply to PvP deaths. That removes a huge chunk of the aggravation. It also seems that, from what one person who usually is right on this sort of thing told me that rez sickness doesn’t apply to player rezzes. If so, then the situation is much much better than previously thought :D

Mark, I won’t let my DAOC stuff lapse because I’ll still be playing it :) Catacombs looks quite good. And I like the battlegrounds in DAOC. So while my cooperative MMO time (evenings, weekends) will often be WoW with my wife and our guild, any other time I have (as a teacher my schedule gets kinda weird sometimes) will be in DAOC.

Sparky, I don’ think they’re ebaying the guild house, no :)

35

When you play an hour a day, that equates to two more months. It is a game breaker to me. Mostly because it’s not needed. They added it in to slow progress. I am against that because slowing my progress makes the game less fun. I like knowing I am making progress, the more of a grind there is, the less chance of making real progress.

36

Just wanted to chime in with my experiment results.

The cost for my level 21 warrior to -fully- repair equipment post spirit revive was ~23 silver(double what most of the “yellow” quest rewards offer right now in my journal).

The resurrection disease only lasts 11 minutes(still completely stupid, but my guess is that 30-minute stuff is only for -real- high level heroes)

I have also noticed that durability now RARELY goes down if at all during combat. This offsets the 10% loss almost entirely for death, and considering most of my equipment has durability ratios nearing 80 or more, that 10% really isn’t such a devastating tax. In the 21 levels I have spent playing this game over the past week, I have probably spirit rezzed only 3 times, including the test I performed last night for this post. Of course I am less likely to bother with it now, but it was pretty much emergency use only anyway(why not offer an XP or durability loss to the gamer though?)

Bottom line: I dig the 10% loss, which is hardly such a devastating move by Blizzard(From the getgo I found death to be nothing more than an irritating diversion, this somewhat fixes that, and I really did wanted it to be punishing to my character in some sense, and not just to my wasted time running back to corpse)

37

This was a joke. Now in the PvP this is REAL. PvP now directly cost a fee if you want to take part.

Aside this. There were three big issues that where reported over and over by the players during the previous beta:

1- The experience in instances was too low
2- The item decay forced players to interrupt the gameplay to go back to towns, becoming the second cause of “group breaking” after the quick quests
3- The PvP need a different death system to address the various issues

Now. FOR ALL THREE, Rob Pardo came on the boards to type three answers. The answers were basically the same:

1a- Don’t worry, we are fixing the exp in instances next patch
2a- Don’t worry, the item decay is indeed a moneysink but it isn’t suppose to interrupt the gameplay and become annoying, we’ll retune it properly next patch
3a- Don’t worry, the PvP system isn’t finished and it will adjusted to address the problems

The patch arrived and we had three new anwers:

1b- Fantastic! We have increased the exp in the instances as we said. Woot! But we also increased the exp requirements! Teehee!
2b- Superb! Not only we didn’t change the item decay system, but we have consolidated it, now you take a 10% durability hit each time you die!
3b- Awesome! The death system for PvP is unchanged, but we added the item decay to it as well. Want PvP? No money? No party.

Now the fun part is that all these three changes not only break the previous problems that were reported, But they CREATED A BUNCH OF NEW SERIOUS ISSUES:

1- The increase in experience in the instances comes with an increase of the experience requirements, making any change at all. The fun part is that solo players are, by definition, out of instances and so for them the “present” is a +20-25% for each level. Fun!
2- The decay system wasn’t broken because it was a (perhaps needed) moneysink. It was broken because it broke the gameplay, forced you to stop in a middle of an instance or a quest to return to a town. It was broken as a boring timesink. Now they even improved this by adding another 10% for each death. As a consequence this becomes a major game breaking for new players that use to die often since they need to get use to a new genre.
3- The PvP was broken, who cares? Instead of implementing a different death system to address the issues, they broke it even more, adding problems. Now it’s the grief paradise. Normal players will have to avoid PvP if they don’t want to loose money, while organized grief guild can have way more fun because now not only they can corpse-camping, but they can also inflict money penalties to their victims, forcing, at best, a res at the spirit healer and a 100% item decay.

Want solutions to have fun, not-broken PvP? Here:

The “incentive”, about which you write, shouldn’t be “excused” by a penalty. But it should involve a purpose. Give the players and groups objectives to achieve, give them reasons to fight for. This will make the combat meaningful because there will be a structure that tells you what you should achieve and why.

If the reward is about the rejoice for the winning group because they made the other group face a downtime and a moneyloss, well, the game is really weak.

A better idea, spawning from your graveyard solution, could be about building a very simple CTF (Capture The Flag) system. I agree that both Horde and Alliance should respawn at their own graveyard (no corpse run if you die in PvP, just a respawn at your graveyard. No choice.). But we also build a system so that EVERY contested zone has “generic” graveyards that can be “conquered” and flagged. Once the Horde (for example) own the graveyard, they’ll be able to respawn there, while the Alliance will only able to respawn at their nearest “owned” graveyard (which can be in a zone nearby).

In this way we start to offer something to fight for and with a purpose.

I also DO NOT accept this. It’s a PLATE armor.

38

You’re all welcome to come play DarkLife on SecondLife… no real grind, lots of fun haha :)

Peter

39

The top on display has been in the game for months, or least that was the look of the Warrior’s Embrace on my Human female Warrior when I first looted it way back when, and still is the look as of last night. The pants are a new look though, I think. Still, there were things almost as revealing that have been in the game for just as long.

I really dont see this as an issue of any import compared to things like nerfing xp requirements, adding money sinks and generally making the game more work and less fun.

olaf

40

Update:

  • They announced that they’ll take away the durability hit from PvP. So we go back at the previous, still broken, issue.

  • The release policy to respec talents is a new moneysink. Each time you respec the cost goes up.