Sleuths, put on your deerstalker hats, tamp your pipes full of the best Turkish blend, and inject yourselves with the seven percent solution and deduct what this means, from Mythic’s Mark Jacobs:
Last and certainly not least is that since the original launch of the game, we have looked at creating a new server type that is geared to players who have less time than others to commit to a MMORPG. This exciting new server will cater to both the casual player as well as address some of the concerns of players about bots and the time commitment necessary to complete ToA. We will be announcing full details about this server type in the coming weeks but I believe that this server will go a long way in making DAoC the leader of the pack in regards to the casual player. As part of this, we will also be looking at the impact of the death penalty and other aspects of the game on the casual player. Additionally, we will be looking at other server types that could come out of this rule set or even different rule sets. Players have continued to ask us to create different server types and we are going to put it to the community to get your feedback.
Interesting… I quit DaoC because of the grind and after many deaths in the game, it was easy for me to give up the game due to cost to nullify all that dying.
I’d be very interested if some of those MMORPGs had a casual gamer server. A catass free server would be a wonderful thing, and probably the only thing that would ever get me into an MMORPG again.
My dream casual server would be just like a regular one with the following changes.
Max play time per week/month. This isn’t per character, it’s per account. I call this the “catass bane” rule.
Levelling at about triple the regular server speeds, difficulty of everything down about 10-15%. Quests are shorter, mobs are easier. This is just because casual players are less likely to be equipped with uber stuff or have the min/max flavor of the month for a character build.
Character trade in allowed once per three-six months. Basically a person could delete a character and roll a new one who got 75% of the xp of the deleted char and all their equipment. This is to allow casual players to experience new classes/factions without all the tedious mess of trying to powerlevel an alternate character.
This was discussed up two years ago, commented directly by Mythic staff and was discussed again before ToA and then ditched because of how went the expansion.
Aside the fact I don’t care about it at all, I think there are two possible ways:
1- They copy WoW and add a boost in experience based on the time passing (it will hardly happen)
2- They’ll cap the progress of the players. Probably a mix of the first and second points of Walter (most likely).
I really cannot remember the exact ruleset they proposed back in the days but it was near to the second point.
From my point of view this is only an attempt to rise more problems. Isn’t this a way for pure “optimizers” players in the case they cap the max time you can stay logged? This is already a reason why they’ll probably cap the progress and not the time directly. But again the catasses can try to farm items and, on the latter levels, ToA.
But again the announce says that this ruleset will address the problem of bots and ToA farming, which hints some work on the content not on the players.
And in this case, why don’t they do this on ALL the servers?
I need to wait the actual plan because for now it doesn’t make sense.
I need to wait the actual plan because for now it doesn’t make sense.
Yeah, that’s a good idea. It’s hard to criticize something that doesn’t exist yet and for which no details have been released, though you gave it a good try.
One fo the more frustrating things for me in Dark Age was only being able to play a few nights a week. After a month I was still working on getting my character to the point where I could join RvR, but a bunch of other people I had played with were on their second or third high level character. I just didn’t have the time to keep up with them.
I can see this being the start of the scramble by all MMOG companies to make their games casual player friendly. Looks like WoW has really stirred up a hornet’s nest.
The question is - will they be able to compete with WoW ?
I can’t see this working out. You’d end up with min/max fetishists who would strive to get the “most” out of the limited play time so their uberness over everyone would be even more impressive.
Also, what happens if a “casual” player decides to go on vacation or something? Do they just get a pop up dialog saying, “you’re playing too much, you’re screwed now?”
The hard part of competing with WoW will be matching the content. WoW has over 2000 quests. I’m sure the content team at Blizzard is larger than what most companies can match, too. They will probably be able to add new content faster than other games – I’d think SOE might be the one company that could match them, but I’ve seen comments from Raph that Blizzard’s content team during WoW development was twice the size of the SWG content team, according to rumors he heard.
The problem with making DAoC friendlier to casual players is…so what? Clearly, questing to level is friendlier and more appealing than any other kind of leveling. DAoC will impress me when they have 1000 quests per realm. Maybe that’s their plan though.
I can’t see this working out. You’d end up with min/max fetishists who would strive to get the “most” out of the limited play time so their uberness over everyone would be even more impressive.
Also, what happens if a “casual” player decides to go on vacation or something? Do they just get a pop up dialog saying, “you’re playing too much, you’re screwed now?”[/quote]
You are too stuck in the hardcore player mindset. I’m the kind of person where if I went on vacation I would probably play a little more, but not 10-12 hours a day just because I could.
People with kids and houses generally don’t use vacations for marathon gaming sessions. They want to squeeze in things like quality time with family or maybe catch up on a few projects around the house. Or maybe take an actual vacation and fly somewhere and do something.
I also don’t mind the min/maxers who would take their limited time and produce the best possible character with that limited amount of time. I can do that too, in fact I probably would do that. I’m not saying the casual server wouldn’t be competitive, I’m saying it would be competitive within sane boundaries instead of the top characters going automatically to the people who have nothing better to do than log 70-80 hours a week into an online game.
Exactly. I get in less gaming time on the weekends and over vacations than I do during the week. I’d love to see a server with those kinds of rules. I’ve found that when playing MMORPGs with my single friends that I quickly end up in situations like this.
Just a reference for who was interested in the discussion. There’s (for the first time) an extremely interesting article+discussion over at Terra Nova.
What if you instead just limited experience for a given period of play, i.e. as your approached your limit you would get less and less and could never surpass it? Someone who played all the time might then end up with 10% more experience than a casual gamer.
This way you could still play with your friends a bunch over holidays if you felt like, without having to worry about accidentally getting kicked out. It also addresses power leveling; such players could level with less time without being able to level more. It would also tend to even out leveling for groups of friends that don’t all play the same amount.
Or would the prospect of playing without being able to get significant experience just turn off too many people (Oh no, I’m not leveling fast enough – my time is wasted!)?
Personally, I’d rather just have a game where the experience curve is flatter. Characters would improve, but not so explosively. Using city of heroes as an example, why not just start everyone at level 14 (when heroes can fly, etc.)? Does this simply bore players too fast, such that they quit earlier?
What if you instead just limited experience for a given period of play, i.e. as your approached your limit you would get less and less and could never surpass it? Someone who played all the time might then end up with 10% more experience than a casual gamer.
This way you could still play with your friends a bunch over holidays if you felt like, without having to worry about accidentally getting kicked out. It also addresses power leveling; such players could level with less time without being able to level more. It would also tend to even out leveling for groups of friends that don’t all play the same amount.
Or would the prospect of playing without being able to get significant experience just turn off too many people (Oh no, I’m not leveling fast enough – my time is wasted!)?
Personally, I’d rather just have a game where the experience curve is flatter. Characters would improve, but not so explosively. Using city of heroes as an example, why not just start everyone at level 14 (when heroes can fly, etc.)? Does this simply bore players too fast, such that they quit earlier?[/quote]
Turning off xp after a certain point would accomplish the same thing as a hard time limit, but it puts some additional complexity into the coding of the game. To make sure you break the catass cycle and prevent people from getting ahead by playing more you’d have to make sure that there was zero profit from playing beyond the xp window time. No way to get more money, items, special events, quests, etc. It’s probably doable I just think the time limit is simpler.
The experience curve flatter thing makes perfect mathematical sense from a game balance perspective and zero sense from a game fun perspective. The key to game balance is to balance it as much as possible without taking out what the customers enjoy and one of the things that customers enjoy is levelling up and getting awesome new powers.
