Comments | rathanel: Navel Contemplation: MMORPGs

rathanel

Navel Contemplation: MMORPGs

Sep 14, 2009 15:44

(I am in a strangely elated mood, likely spawned by a marked lack of sleep - the root cause of which is TV Tropes, that corrupter of souls and harvester of free-time. This mood is marked by gratuitous use of highfalutin words and phrases and a significant spike in my personal evaluation of my own mastery of "humor ( Read more... )

rant, mmorpg, aion, ffxiv, ffxi

Comments 7

scionith September 15 2009, 00:18:05 UTC

1) The ability to solo - 'cause, believe it or not, sometimes I don't feel like PUGging it and my friends aren't always on. Or hell, maybe I just want to get something specific done without worrying about anything else.
I'm always on. :(

And to your FFXI complaints, all valid at some point. Many have been addressed. Not the crafting, but the soloing and grinding and group creation. I had a conversation with Pdac not long ago about the changes they've made and his mind was boggled. If he wasn't so entrenched in WoW, he'd likely play some. But at this point he's just waiting for FFXIV.

shteevie September 17 2009, 17:11:27 UTC

First, I'm honored to be in the group that made the top of your list. We have disbanded, and I still only got 5 items [2 armor] in the whole time, but it was tons of fun and I'd do it again in a heartbeat ( ... )

shteevie September 17 2009, 23:08:41 UTC

rathanel September 17 2009, 23:12:43 UTC

wow that formatted oddly for some reason... let's try that again...

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I was wondering about drop rates, too. Why couldn't a game impose a 'Max 20 kills' system - basically, if you are diligent enough to camp the NM or collect seals for 20 BCNM runs, you get the item you are hoping for. 20 is still a lot, but at least every fight will at least feel like progress, if you don't get the item sooner.

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In regards to drop rates...

Why should I have to kill something 20 times, or 15 times, or 10 times, to get the item it drops? What benefit does this provide the player? If a specific item (call it the Shiny Sword of Shiny +Shiny) drops from the Lord of Shiny and nothing else, exactly how many times should I have to kill him to have "earned" that sword?

Rather than artificially extending the content by requiring me to farm a boss, make it a quest reward, or have it always drop but be BoP (to discourage other farmers) or something like that.

The random drops become especially bothersome when it's an item a lot of people can use, or ( ... )

shteevie September 17 2009, 23:23:28 UTC

Well, if every possible piece of loot dropped from every mob that could drop it, players would rapidly run out of things to go after. In the case of Nyzul, getting all 3 pieces with each successful kill would seriously accelerate the rate at which players would 'complete' the content and would have no reason to return. If you broke the drops up to 1 possible per boss, the random nature of the event could still have you going on multiple runs in hopes of randomly encountering the right boss ( ... )

rathanel September 18 2009, 01:28:21 UTC

The issue you bring up in your first paragraph is why my nebulous "ideal" is moving away from the loot drop system altogether. Monsters can and should drop items, but they should not be unique items, or the only source of the item ( ... )

rathanel September 18 2009, 01:28:31 UTC

Compare loot distribution to experience point distribution. If you had to kill mobs for experience, only you didn't get experience per kill but instead on the basis of a random die roll... I daresay most people would quit in disgust before they ever got close to the "top".

And it all boils down to the perception of progress. With leveling, even if I only get 10k XP out of the 200k I need, I have made progress. The time I spent accomplished something, and I'll never lose that progress (or shouldn't anyway, friggin' death penalty). I can't say the same thing about random loot drops, and, as you point out, camping spawns is even worse. Not only could you spend hours camping something to never see it spawn, you could miss the claim, blink and miss it, and when you leave you're always left feeling "I might have had it if I'd just waited another ten minutes..."

I would consider the Max 20 Kills system superior to the purely random system, but it doesn't fully address my issues.

shteevie September 18 2009, 06:15:51 UTC

[Aside: I love these sorts of conversations. I'm going to attempt to refute many of your points, but not because I think you are't thinking things through ( ... )