What I'd like to see in other MMOs

[Worba]

Although this was initially motivated by a post on the wow site, I'm putting this in the "other games" forum because I know these things are 99.9% unlikely to ever happen in wow in any form, so instead it is just musings on what I'd like to see in a future fantasy MMO. I'm not saying that out of pessimism, but simply because (as GC pointed out himself), doing this in wow would be much too disruptive and sweeping and therefore not practical no matter the end result.

Also some / all of this may already be happening in other MMOs - if anyone knows of such instances I'd love to hear them.

That being said...

Class role and specs are something I think about alot, and when I saw this post from Ghostcrawler on the wow site, some of the points resonated.

In particular:

Model Five – Don’t have multiple DPS roles
This is the most controversial model and the one that would require the most change, meaning we are almost certainly never going to do it. For sake of completeness though, you can argue that classes never should have been designed with multiple specs that fill the same role.

Personally I think having 3 specs all devoted to just one role is wasteful, inefficient, and forces an artificial bottleneck in the pug system.

At the same time though I am not a fan of having any class able to cover all 3 specs either - there should be *some* lopsidedness to encourage players to offset eachother.

So imo what's needed is to have every class able to cover 2 roles, e.g. take the general approach used by warriors and death knights, and apply it to everything (in this hypothetical game). So again just framing it in wow terms purely as a springboard template, it would look something like this:

Warriors (1 tank spec, 2 dps specs)
Death knights (1 tank spec, 2 dps specs)
Paladins (1 tank spec, 2 dps specs) - i.e. they'd have enough heals for occasional emergencies but that's it
Rogues (2 dps specs, 1 heals aka bards)
Hunters (2 dps specs, 1 tank spec aka defensive BM)
Warlocks (2 dps specs, 1 drain healer)
Druids (2 dps specs, 1 heals)
Mages (2 dps specs, ice tank)
Priests (2 heals, 1 dps)

Etc

The point being, everyone can function as either DPS OR (one of the two "core" functions - but not both), and DPS is still kept diverse by having 2 "flavors".

That would be the first thing to do.

The next thing would be to have solo content that includes at least some challenging stuff. Back in the day wow used to have outdoor areas full of elites (epl scarlet crusade HQ, death island in Feralas, guard complex outside ZG, etc etc) - now those are almost extinct (Alcaz island is the only one I can think of offhand). Now granted these were placed not so much to provide challenging solo content as to act as living cliff edges, or "Here There Be Dragons" zones where they intended to add future content at some point, but still - if you ever got sick of easy quests and welfare blues, you could always spend some time grinding the elite areas.

Set aside 10-20% of every zone for something like that, but with some quests and storyline - never required, just there for players wishing to push themselves harder. And that would be where you'd get blue quest rewards (outside of dungeons ofc) - running EZmode solo quests would only give green quality gear.

Also give the ability for players to hire a henchman, who would run on the pet AI and act like a less-powerful version of a player, with different versions available in different roles so a healer could have a tank and etc - but only available outdoors. This way there would be no classes "left out" when it comes to tough solos; even heals/dps classes would have an option there. But again, not for dungeons, just solo'ing.

Anyway those are just (very) rough ideas, some/all of which may well have already been done better by existing games.

[Royi]

SWTOR

All classes can spec to either
tank/dps
heal /dps
or tank/heal/dps

[Worba]

Cool. I think being able to play all 3 roles on the same class may be a bit too "all in one", BUT it's still preferable to having classes where all 3 specs are devoted to the same darn role.

[Royi]

Also give the ability for players to hire a henchman, who would run on the pet AI and act like a less-powerful version of a player, with different versions available in different roles so a healer could have a tank and etc - but only available outdoors. This way there would be no classes "left out" when it comes to tough solos; even heals/dps classes would have an option there. But again, not for dungeons, just solo'ing.

Heh funny that you mentioned it....

http://www.swtorface.com/p/jedi-knight- ... -list.html


Just as an example

Ranged dps, melee dps, ranged tank, melee tank, and healer companions are your 5 options. Each of the 8 classes gets a unique version of each

[Royi]

The next thing would be to have solo content that includes at least some challenging stuff. Back in the day wow used to have outdoor areas full of elites (epl scarlet crusade HQ, death island in Feralas, guard complex outside ZG, etc etc) - now those are almost extinct (Alcaz island is the only one I can think of offhand). Now granted these were placed not so much to provide challenging solo content as to act as living cliff edges, or "Here There Be Dragons" zones where they intended to add future content at some point, but still - if you ever got sick of easy quests and welfare blues, you could always spend some time grinding the elite areas.

Set aside 10-20% of every zone for something like that, but with some quests and storyline - never required, just there for players wishing to push themselves harder. And that would be where you'd get blue quest rewards (outside of dungeons ofc) - running EZmode solo quests would only give green quality gear.

AND..... funny that you mention this.......

There are several "Heroic areas" on each planet. Where the quests vary from strongly recommending a 2 man group, to recommending 3 or 4 even. The 2 man heroic quests are sometimes soloable, albeit takes downtime inbetween pulls since they're tougher groups of "strong mobs" (inbetween a wow-elite npc and a wow-regular), elite mobs (like wow-elites), and champion mobs (stronger than elites).

I don't bother myself since its a lot of time and effort to try them solo (not that hard to find groups for them), but it might suit your fancy to give it a whirl here and there depending which type of heroic zone it is.

[Worba]

Couple other additions (again bearing in mind this is for inclusion in other MMOs, just using wow as a starting point):

1) Glory Days. Sometimes a feature will be so popular that players will be reluctant to "outlevel" it. So Blizzard added the ability to freeze your XP. In my opinion this was nice, but ofc it forces you to make the rather painful decision of forgoing any potential XP until you lift it, and ofc once you've passed beyond, there is no going back - the door is shut in your face. Instead I would just give players the ability to turn on the "Glory Days" debuff - 10 second cast and cannot be activated (or canceled) during combat or during a BG. Once it casts, you choose what level you want to drop down to, and there you remain until you cancel it. While up it's tooltip says "You are reliving your glory days at a lower ability level", and ofc any gear that is now too high for you, will have no function, just as if it was damaged into the red zone - you'll need to either use heirlooms or keep a second gear set on hand for such occasions (also if your buddy starts playing the game, you can drop down to his level to keep him company rather than being forced to roll a new toon, if you like).

2) Starting level. Imo wow kind of "eats itself" by making you start always at lvl 1 even though the cap is constantly rising. Blizzard's solution was to ever-accelerate XP gain, but ofc this just means you are blasting through old content too fast to even really see it before you have to move to the next zone, constantly having to replace gear, etc etc with the end result being that leveling new toons starts to become increasingly unpleasant. Any given MMO is optimized around the idea of a fixed number of levels progression from start to cap. So instead of XP acceleration, I'd just have new toons start at (cap level - 59); if you really want to experience the earlier content, go ahead and use the above "Glory Days" feature to artificially drop your level all the way to 1 if you like, but otherwise players are able to spend enough time in a given area to actually experience it as it was meant to be experienced.

[Worba]

The next thing would be to have solo content that includes at least some challenging stuff. Back in the day wow used to have outdoor areas full of elites (epl scarlet crusade HQ, death island in Feralas, guard complex outside ZG, etc etc) - now those are almost extinct (Alcaz island is the only one I can think of offhand). Now granted these were placed not so much to provide challenging solo content as to act as living cliff edges, or "Here There Be Dragons" zones where they intended to add future content at some point, but still - if you ever got sick of easy quests and welfare blues, you could always spend some time grinding the elite areas.

Set aside 10-20% of every zone for something like that, but with some quests and storyline - never required, just there for players wishing to push themselves harder. And that would be where you'd get blue quest rewards (outside of dungeons ofc) - running EZmode solo quests would only give green quality gear.

AND..... funny that you mention this.......

There are several "Heroic areas" on each planet. Where the quests vary from strongly recommending a 2 man group, to recommending 3 or 4 even. The 2 man heroic quests are sometimes soloable, albeit takes downtime inbetween pulls since they're tougher groups of "strong mobs" (inbetween a wow-elite npc and a wow-regular), elite mobs (like wow-elites), and champion mobs (stronger than elites).

I don't bother myself since its a lot of time and effort to try them solo (not that hard to find groups for them), but it might suit your fancy to give it a whirl here and there depending which type of heroic zone it is.

I knew about the henchmen system in SWTOR but did not know about the heroic areas. That sounds really cool...

[Sigrah]

SWTOR

All classes can spec to either
tank/dps
heal /dps
or tank/heal/dps

There are a few exceptions to that, at least on the Sith side: The "Maurader" sub-spec of the Sith Warrior class and the "Sniper" sub-spec of the Imperial Agent class only have access to DPS trees. Still, I like the way SWTOR is going as opposed to WoW when it comes to talent trees. While WoW is going away from having talent trees or forcing you to spend a set number of points in a given tree before branching out, SWTOR currently has the BC style of doing talents where you get one every level and can put it in any tree you like. I don't care if they become "cookie cutter" or not, I just like having them. Of course, the lack of add-ons might make it harder for players to be able to get an idea of how good or bad a given build is, but I haven't visited the SWTOR forums to see if the hard core types are debating it or not. Oh, and "Mercenary" healing (Bounty Hunter sub-spec) has to have the coolest way of healing I've ever seen

[Royi]

SWTOR

All classes can spec to either
tank/dps
heal /dps
or tank/heal/dps

There are a few exceptions to that, at least on the Sith side: The "Maurader" sub-spec of the Sith Warrior class and the "Sniper" sub-spec of the Imperial Agent class only have access to DPS trees.

Thats a sub-class or sub-spec as you put it. For instance, all Sith Warriors do have an option to tank, if they choose to go down the pure dps side of Maurader, then no they do not get an option after that, but still they did have an option to choose to tank by choosing Juggernaut. Regardless of whichever of the 8 classes you choose from when creating your character, you do get a choice at level 10 if you want to do something with that character other than DPS.

[Lisaara]

Worba, just wanted to say I really like the ideas you have in mind for each class. Especially the rogue bard!

[Worba]

Thanks Jess.

I just kind of touched on some rough ideas there; mainly I just wanted to show any "unbelievers" that yes any class can serve more than one group role, with a little creativity.

[Worba]

"Plays well with others"

One thing I think everyone (including myself) tends to take for granted is the idea that you can only learn (anything) about grouping by, well, grouping. On its face this idea seems so obvious as to be a waste to even think about. But if you do take some time to think about it, you start to see this is not actually so cut and dried.

What do you mean Worba? \o/

I mean you could set up small solo instances or similar zones to act as "pug trainers", where essentially you can group with a few NPCs and grind through a mini-dungeon, where you ofc have to perform your role - and the "quests" therein all involve performing certain role-specific functions. E.g. "hold aggro on 5 different mobs through a complete fight", or "prevent a single death during the entire fight, as heals", or "achieve at least X amount of DPS during a given fight", etc etc.

Rewards ofc would have be limited to non-combat items - the point here being to give players a chance to make the most obvious mistakes and get at least a general sense of what it's like to play in a cooperative style, NOT to compete with 5 man content. The actual weapons and armor would only drop in normal dungeons. But at least this way, other players don't have to pay for a newcomer's complete inexperience (and we've all been on both sides of that one...).

Also ofc, this would provide a good way for toons starting above lvl 1 at (cap - 59) to get caught up on class basics.

[Royi]

"Plays well with others"

One thing I think everyone (including myself) tends to take for granted is the idea that you can only learn (anything) about grouping by, well, grouping. On its face this idea seems so obvious as to be a waste to even think about. But if you do take some time to think about it, you start to see this is not actually so cut and dried.

What do you mean Worba? \o/

I mean you could set up small solo instances or similar zones to act as "pug trainers", where essentially you can group with a few NPCs and grind through a mini-dungeon, where you ofc have to perform your role - and the "quests" therein all involve performing certain role-specific functions. E.g. "hold aggro on 5 different mobs through a complete fight", or "prevent a single death during the entire fight, as heals", or "achieve at least X amount of DPS during a given fight", etc etc.

Rewards ofc would have be limited to non-combat items - the point here being to give players a chance to make the most obvious mistakes and get at least a general sense of what it's like to play in a cooperative style, NOT to compete with 5 man content. The actual weapons and armor would only drop in normal dungeons. But at least this way, other players don't have to pay for a newcomer's complete inexperience (and we've all been on both sides of that one...).

Also ofc, this would provide a good way for toons starting above lvl 1 at (cap - 59) to get caught up on class basics.

didnt they have something like that in Guild Wars? I never played the game but I watched a friend play it before.

[Silivren]

"Plays well with others"

One thing I think everyone (including myself) tends to take for granted is the idea that you can only learn (anything) about grouping by, well, grouping. On its face this idea seems so obvious as to be a waste to even think about. But if you do take some time to think about it, you start to see this is not actually so cut and dried.

What do you mean Worba? \o/

I mean you could set up small solo instances or similar zones to act as "pug trainers", where essentially you can group with a few NPCs and grind through a mini-dungeon, where you ofc have to perform your role - and the "quests" therein all involve performing certain role-specific functions. E.g. "hold aggro on 5 different mobs through a complete fight", or "prevent a single death during the entire fight, as heals", or "achieve at least X amount of DPS during a given fight", etc etc.

Rewards ofc would have be limited to non-combat items - the point here being to give players a chance to make the most obvious mistakes and get at least a general sense of what it's like to play in a cooperative style, NOT to compete with 5 man content. The actual weapons and armor would only drop in normal dungeons. But at least this way, other players don't have to pay for a newcomer's complete inexperience (and we've all been on both sides of that one...).

Also ofc, this would provide a good way for toons starting above lvl 1 at (cap - 59) to get caught up on class basics.

didnt they have something like that in Guild Wars? I never played the game but I watched a friend play it before.

In Guild Wars you can "hire" npc characters to adventure with you. The roll they play is by their name and based on the part of the world your in you can have anywhere from 3 to 5 of them to make a 4 or 6 person group including yourself. This is because Guild Wars is virtually solo-able. you dont HAVE to group for anything but then again the real players are smarter than the npc's of course but the "hired hands" are pretty smart themselves.

[cowmuflage]

"Plays well with others"

One thing I think everyone (including myself) tends to take for granted is the idea that you can only learn (anything) about grouping by, well, grouping. On its face this idea seems so obvious as to be a waste to even think about. But if you do take some time to think about it, you start to see this is not actually so cut and dried.

What do you mean Worba? \o/

I mean you could set up small solo instances or similar zones to act as "pug trainers", where essentially you can group with a few NPCs and grind through a mini-dungeon, where you ofc have to perform your role - and the "quests" therein all involve performing certain role-specific functions. E.g. "hold aggro on 5 different mobs through a complete fight", or "prevent a single death during the entire fight, as heals", or "achieve at least X amount of DPS during a given fight", etc etc.

Rewards ofc would have be limited to non-combat items - the point here being to give players a chance to make the most obvious mistakes and get at least a general sense of what it's like to play in a cooperative style, NOT to compete with 5 man content. The actual weapons and armor would only drop in normal dungeons. But at least this way, other players don't have to pay for a newcomer's complete inexperience (and we've all been on both sides of that one...).

Also ofc, this would provide a good way for toons starting above lvl 1 at (cap - 59) to get caught up on class basics.

didnt they have something like that in Guild Wars? I never played the game but I watched a friend play it before.

In Guild Wars you can "hire" npc characters to adventure with you. The roll they play is by their name and based on the part of the world your in you can have anywhere from 3 to 5 of them to make a 4 or 6 person group including yourself. This is because Guild Wars is virtually solo-able. you dont HAVE to group for anything but then again the real players are smarter than the npc's of course but the "hired hands" are pretty smart themselves.

I don't like that that much. If a MMO is solo-able then why make it an online game in the first place? Part of MMOs is that it's Multiplayer. I mean if your going to do that you could just make an offline game with online elements to it instead of an MMO (I'm not talking about like being a high lvl and going back to old content kind of solo-able here)

[Worba]

The section quoted above was just a way for players to train themselves on the basics before they grouped - not as a replacement for grouping nor as a competitor.

That's why the solo dungeons I outlined above would drop strictly non-combat items. That way you still have the exact same motivation to run 5 man, 10 man etc with other players - because that's where you get the actual weapons and armor.

Whereas the solo dungeons in my outline would only drop things like vanity pets, mounts, shirts, silly items like the pony keg and so on. But never swords, platemail, wands or any of that.

Just to be clear.

[cowmuflage]

ah that's alot clearer now

[Worba]

/nod

It's an easy assumption to make - when I go on and on about solo play, people tend to think that's *all* I like to do lol

[Worba]

Dungeon Karma.

We've all had the experience of running specific dungeons and having nothing to show for it, and ofc this is (basically) what JPs, VPs are for - a little incremental something so that even the unluckiest player eventually *will* have something to show for his time.

But what about boss drops that just... never drop? Just because something has say a 10% chance of dropping, does not mean you will ever see it. Even if you run the same dungeon 50 times. Usually we all just have faith that we'll get what we're after, and if it doesn't drop after a bunch of runs? Well by then you've probably outleveled the "need" for it anyway - problem solved!

But seriously - to me (again just using wow as my case template) that remains a lack in fantasy MMOs. So what I propose is two things.

1) Need means need. Ensure only players who are the right class *and group role* get to roll need. No more paladins getting to roll need on daggers or staves, etc, no more DPS getting to roll need on items with +dodge "for off spec", none of that (and yes I realize this is what they're trying to do in the new wow loot system).

2) Dungeon Karma. Dungeon karma is specific to each dungeon, and is accrued by completing a dungeon that's high enough to award XP (4 karma pts), or by passing on a boss loot roll (1 pt), and when a loot roll comes up for players with karma in that dungeon, instead of:

need > greed

They get the choice of :

need > karma > greed

In addition, a list of the boss drops is displayed. These would only include "tier 1" items for the given dungeon - e.g. blues from normal mode, low epics from a 10 man, etc - but the high end epics, and (needless to say) legendaries and such could not be bought with dungeon karma - after all luck can and should only be able to get you so far.

Players who chose need compete roll against eachother.

If no one chose need, then players who chose karma roll against eachother - the winner then gets to trade in the current item for one on the above list, at the cost of 60 dungeon karma. Essentially he has cashed in his luck.

If no one chose karma, then players who chose greed roll against eachother.

And lastly - for those who rack up a bunch of dungeon karma and discover they have no use for it (maybe they found something better, decided to move on to other areas, etc), there would be the option to trade in karma points for JPs (or whatever equivalent is being used in our hypothetical MMO - possibly at a reduced conversion rate, after all these *are* intended first and foremost for use within specific dungeons...).

The point of this is that even the unluckiest player should be able to collect basic boss sets if he's willing to run the dungeon enough times.

I'll say it again in case anyone missed it - this is not to guarantee everything to everyone, just to ensure that the more basic boss rewards are treated as they deserve and not as if they were mega awesome phat lewtz.

EDIT: one more benefit of dungeon karma - no more players leaving group after the first boss fails to drop the item they've got their heart set on.

[Meggers]

Also give the ability for players to hire a henchman, who would run on the pet AI and act like a less-powerful version of a player, with different versions available in different roles so a healer could have a tank and etc - but only available outdoors. This way there would be no classes "left out" when it comes to tough solos; even heals/dps classes would have an option there. But again, not for dungeons, just solo'ing.

Heh funny that you mentioned it....

http://www.swtorface.com/p/jedi-knight- ... -list.html


Just as an example

Ranged dps, melee dps, ranged tank, melee tank, and healer companions are your 5 options. Each of the 8 classes gets a unique version of each

Makes me think of the Mercenaries (and later heroes) that guild wars has in place. They've had that system forever...bout time other games caught on to it.