Richard Garriott on MMORPGs - very interesting

~Which Way Should I Go~?'
I'm still trying to find out how to get my pets to follow me past my property lines and how to rez them if I even could get them to follow me into a hunt Which just goes to show how "non-tech savvy" I actually am when it comes to all this techno interfacing that's needed to play our game I don't think I have found even one friend that has not "hopped/jumped" at least once while attempting to use our speech mechanics
I know if I learn it all, I'm then actually shutting off half my brains memory capability to the creative side of my brain

It just leaves me having to make a difficult choice to make, "do I go for immersion or do I go for being an interface jokey?"
It's truly a concern for me because I never wanted to be a jet pilot or a computer programmer just to walk down the street
My mind is quick and my fingers are slow... the Time Lord's confessions...
~Time Lord~

 

What about them? Did it say the cities would be changed forever in those sieges? Add some spawning mobs to a town done there is your siege. If you don't like that answer refer back to the previous one THINGS CHANGE. You certainly are well within your right to not let it go but if you don't I'll be there to remind you you should every time you feel the urge as that is well within mine...

 

At least the cities were burning and RG said that during a siege the houses of players would not be accessible.

As I said, yes things can change but it should be said outright and honestly before release. Announcing a "story-driven basically soloplayer game with the option to play online" as Richard Garriott said about SotA, charging money for this up front and then delivering a MMORPG instead for me isn't ok. "Hey look, we decided to change the game because some players thought it would be cool to have an MMORPG instead of the game we originally announced. Thanks for backing and hey, here is another Kickstarter by us, Episode 2... You still trust us, don't you?"

But ok, we had this discussion many times before, so I will stop here.

 

~Burn it All~
I don't agree with Richard at all on this portion of the game. "If it wasn't purchased through the add-on store, then I think it's the perfect time to have a player karma discussion to be made " I mean, who's to say that we have to be on the side against the cabalists ' Maybe I'm one of them Why should the game make that decision for me? I've also heard some say that POTs will possibly be immune to such attacks and I don't think that's right thinking either.

"Burn or steal it all, or protect your own stuff"! Anything made of fabric or wood should be allowed to burn! I'd only compromise on the house structures themselves being easily repairable. But if a player didn't actually buy it from the add-on store, then those items shouldn't be considered actual personal property and be subject to the gaming environment just as any weapon takes damage to it.

Hard core gaming isn't ever something that is voted for as being supported by the people who could loose it.
Much the same as our off line content, you should expect to get and hold what you paid for and never to be "voted" out of existence.
~Time Lord~

 

I agree. But the problem was instead of 100 / 1,000,000 players getting indestructible stuff through KS, it seems like a large % or the people fit into this bucket.

I'd rather see the vast majority of housing in the game temporary and earned. It's a perk while you're the king of the hill and subject to loss. As of today, a city lot is more or less impossible to get and the ones that have it can't lose it. So there really aren't and mechanics around the part of the game which receives the most attention.

There are hundreds of games out there where there's some way to capture a castle / city and to build it up and defend it.

I'm not really asking for full loot / full destruction. Think about how the xp pools work today. Losing a house might refund you some pile of tokens so that some chuck of your progress is saved. Once you have a new spot, you get back to where you were fast before it's more grindy.

 

Look I understand what you're saying. Heck I don't agree with everything Port does either personally I hate the add-on store "rares" aspect. I feel once developers spent time making items they should always be available to buy in store for cash, even if only seasonally taking them away like they did with the grim reapers mask for instance only to make a very small portion of the community happy so this same small portion of players can bend everyone over a year later I find disgusting.

Rares gained in game are one thing I have absolutely no issue with that, purchased rares post pledges that's totally different it rubs me the wrong way on many levels. But it is what it is I have to accept it and let it go or be willing to be flamed to no end if I post about how I really feel. In a game like this with so many aspects there is no way anyone will get everything they want. If you or I wanted that we would need to literally make our own game. All I'm saying is sometimes it's just best to accept some things for what they are and try to enjoy the game for what it is. My friends and I have a blast playing it as is, we obviously look forward to new features and changes to make the game better but we enjoy it for what it is now as best we can.

Maybe you just need to play with some people a bit to get out of this slump you're in. You're welcome to hit me up in game if you want I'm usually down to do whatever if I have the time. I know you probably won't and that's okay I'm just saying sometimes it's best to make lemonade out of the lemons and be really liberal with the sugar. Hope you can get past these issues and find a way to enjoy the game as it is now not as it was supposedly "promised" many years ago before all aspects of what could or couldn't be feasibly done were truly apparent.

 

~Rare Pollution~
I'm not a rare supporter because they clog up the game with useless stuff, but some people like them. I would rather our game sell things in the Add-On Store because then it helps pay for the space it take up in the game. Other than some stuff I got from the telethons, I don't have any rares and probably won't have any. OK, I do have a Virtue Cabinet that was given to me, but I wish everyone could have or make their own if they wanted one. If something is useful I like it in the game but as a common thing. I don't see anything that helps fund our game as rubbing me the wrong way, but I don't think a limited number of certain things helps our game. Rares that have no specific number are not my hate list, but every time I see something that is a limited number of then that's finite... "that rubs me the wrong way"... but rares as a whole rub me the wrong way. ... because of the pollution problem without funds going back into the game to help deal with the lag that collecting things can have.
It's a strange problem and I don't have any solutions, yet without funds going back into the game to deal with all this collected stuff does create a problem. Collecting is fun, but it's also lag pollution


I just think our unlimited rares should have usefulness within the game, or they are just taking up space.

"Maybe even finding rare components that could make a useful item could be another way of causing our rare things to be more sought after by the collector".
What do ya think ?'
~Time Lord~

 

Richard Garriott said:

@Lord_Darkmoon Lets be clear that you completely disagree with Richard Garriott on that front whenever it's even technical feasible or not.

This "us vs them" attitude is getting really ridiculous. Why the hell wouldn't anyone want a compelling characters, thought-provoking story-line, engaging combat with meaningful choices in their games? Multi-player or single-player?

No one is repressing "you". So keep pushing for it; we all want it! If you're shooting your shotgun in a crowd, you're bound to make even your allies into enemies... just not the same reasons as you'd think.

 

I'll just have to disagree. There are currently posts on the forums advocating forcing single-players into mutliplayer scenes so the multiplayer experience will be better, disallowing moving between single-player and multiplayer to preserve the multi-player economy, and doing away with single-player online entirely to make multiplayer feel more populated. I am not advocating harm to the multiplayer game. I just want the single-player game to be good. However, I continue to see multiplayer fans advocating harm to the selective multiplayer idea this game is supposed to be based on, in favor of making a pure MMO.

It is us vs. them, and I wish it were not.

When I hear Richard talk about the story, I get excited. That's the game I want to play. And I want the selective multiplayer functionality that was promised. I want single players to get the story driven RPG that was promised, and I want the multiplayer fans to get the sandbox they want.

 

While I think that SotA has made a good effort at being 'different' - some of the points mentioned kind of made me think.

I mean sure, we don't have NPCs with exclamation points over their heads. And I don't particularly want them.
However what we do have is poorly implemented / nigh unusable task log / journal thing. We have many NPCs who may have a quest but unless you guess the magic word you can't progress it. Don't get me wrong, I want a more engaging, more interesting quest system - but we don't have that yet. What we have is a frustrating, clunky, awkward, immersion breaking system in which nearly every quest I've done to date has required going on the forums and/or wiki to figure out what the secret word is that will make things progress.

And the bit about everyone's a combatant - yeah, couldn't be more true here. Everything is behind a wall of cash sinks and the only cash faucet is killing things. Attempting to fund crafting - even harvesting your own materials - you're still caught up on fuels and tools and the rest of it, and everything you actually craft is next to worthless. If the crafting system was actually self-fundable, i.e. if you went and farmed the ore to make a sword, and could sell that sword to an npc for fuel cost + a bit of profit - then maybe it would be doable. Far less rewarding than grinding soltown catacombs, but doable. We don't even have that.

So while I agree with the philosophy wholeheartedly the implementation leaves a lot to be desired. I'd love to see a true playable "crafting element" of the game where you could learn a trade and make profit doing it without having to kill anything, but we're a far, far way from it. Crafters have no way to make income to buy resource from other players, they must gather, and the trend to date has been to make gathering more and more dangerous requiring higher and higher adventure levels.

Some things are done in other games because they work. Its great to be different, but that doesn't mean you have to do the opposite of everything other games have done.

 

I think the biggest real divide I've seen on the forums is between people who may come from a single-player background and expect some level of immersion and little hand holding like we saw in the Ultima games, and people who may come from a multi-player background and put socialization and sandbox elements at the top of the list and expect grinding for mats, xp, and gold to be relatively convenient, and make up most of the PvE gameplay.

I agree with you I don't think this is ultimately a SPO vs. MMO issue, because I always agreed with the vision RG laid out that you could bring together these two different gaming experiences. People have to remember the original game was pitched not as SP or MMO, but SPO. It was intended to be a new type of game experience.

However, I have to side with Lord Darkmoon in that I'm disappointed about how much focus there has been so far at putting grinding and socialization at the center of gameplay. It would be one thing if that just reflected the current state of the game, but some choices of the devs in terms of game mechanics seem like they're in for the long haul. Remember when the devs said that level wouldn't matter that much and the game wouldn't be built around numbers and min/maxing? Well all the game mechanics seem designed around numbers to me. Whether its paying attention to how close you are to the next number in a skill, or balancing % values between your equipment, or the spreadsheet inventory, or keeping an eye out for skull markers. The game feels like its too much designed by an engineer for engineers. And there's way too much sacrifice of the sense that we're in a real world for basically socialization and for selling add-on items. So I would agree with Lord Darkmoon that not everything about the current state of the game matches what I thought the vision was or what I thought the game's potential was.

 

Don't get me wrong I have absolutely no issue with add-on store items or "rares". The issue I have is with them being removed from the store in an attempt to make a pixel item seem rare. I buy plenty of add-on store items I just don't think any of them should be removed "forever". Seasonally sure thing even makes sense maybe even label them or color them for the year but to remove them completely so some dudes can horde a bunch and resell at gross profits a year later that's what rubs me wrong. It just shouldn't be done in a community based game like this IMO. If you want REAL "rares" they should be earned in game not bought in an add-on store but that's just my opinion and like I was trying to explain to the OP by bringing it up in the first place sometimes you have to just let things go even if you don't agree with them.

 

I'm totally good with the offline version just the way it is. From my understanding, the mechanics in the offline version are updated with patches for the online version.

This of course coming from somebody who used to resort to playing the UO demo anytime the internet was down..

Also take into account that I wasn't able to play online mode since May, merely because my processor is AMD, and it took me 4 months to find the proper information to fix it .... So the offline mode gave me a good idea of what to expect from online mode.

 

I never disagreed with that sentiment.

I have to point out that there shouldn't be any single-player or multi-player specific scenes in the first place; it should just be "the game". So, yeah, every scene should allow multi-player; does that mean that I'm advocating harm to the single-player game? No.

For the game to be selective multi-player as it was promised, the multi-player components need to be built into the game... that's where we're at, currently.

 

Fine, but Chris has previously said that they'll have to limit some parts of the game to single player (as some are now), so they aren't aiming for what you describe, with every scene allowing multiplayer.
I am trying to wait patiently for what Richard said, to bring many elements of a single-player game into the multiplayer world.
Maybe you aren't wanting to harm the single-player game, but others are.
And yes. The multiplayer components need to be built into the game, and that is where we currently are. I just don't see much of a foundation for the single-player components, which also need to be built into the game.
So I'll continue to wait.
I think @Lord_Darkmoon 's concern is that the single-player elements will be haphazardly bolted on later, because there is a weak foundation for them.

 

Indeed... As you can see, even after studying the subject I just really don't know what to think of rare items.



They're a left over from my UO'ness with deep running memories of the demonic lag all the things cause.
"All I do know is that I so much hope they will be useful instead of stagnate items".

As for the online vs off line issues, I've always felt that the off line should become the standard of what is to come because I believe it's much easier for an off line experience to be more rich than anything that can be built into the online.
Online quests and structures of added depth I feel are much more easy to build than online. UO for instance attempted and failed every time to transition that game into anything more than an MMO.
If our online can match what our off line will be, "or could be" I would think that to be quite an accomplishment.
"One thing I do have confidence in, is that they all seem drunk enough to make it work"

One thing about making a game is that game creation isn't like karaoke where you just think you sound OK ' but I'm not really sure of that fact either because we've all heard them sing '
~Time Lord~

 

The whales all hail from the MMO side, which isn't too much of a surprise seeing how all the high tier pledges were MMO rewards. It's the golden rule, those pumping the gold into Port get to make the rules.

 

You see this rumour about the UO whales steering the game into the MMO direction by giving much money hurts the game and the development studio. By showing the dedication to the single player (offline) mode and creating a real offline RPG they could show that this rumour is just false. But as of now this is not happening - unfortunately...

 

My point is that I'm seeing more aggressiveness towards multiplayer from those advocating single-player; not the other way around. You guys are fighting on the premise of being victims of something.

I share @Lord_Darkmoon 's concerns as well, the difference is that I know that the game barely has its systems in place and no developer worth their salt would ever build something without a foundation...

... oh and I also don't go around pointing fingers at a particular crowd...

 

I agree but we are reaching the release date very fast and I am very concerned if everything can be put together in mere six months... let alone create a great and real single player experience... single player offline features get pushed back more and more so when will they finally start to create the single player offline game?