Curtailing the Gear Race

Why do developers release higher tiered gear as the game matures?

(1) To give the players that carrot on the stick - keeps them striving for the best and playing.

(2) They add new endgame (A boss or raid) that can only be accomplished via an upgrade in gear.

(3) Its easier to just introduce new gear, instead of introducing new innovative content for your current gear.

(4) Armament plays a major role to many people.

(5) It can be used to give people the perception that their character (if they have the highest tier) is not the same as everyone else. Your character will stand out from the crowd.

Why is the "Gear Race" Mechanic bad for games?

(1) Endless Grind

(2) Higher end gear renders old content obsolete. Lowered tiered areas or planets become a wasteland.

(3) As the game mature, it becomes top-heavy in favor of the top players and leaves new players (less geared) behind. All the new content caters to those that have the top gear.

(4) The game is reduced to finding the easiest methods to acquiring the top gear. Then everyone just follows this path making the game very linear and boring.

What's the end result?

Everyone gets the best gear and has tweaked their skill set to maximize their potential. So, everyone ends up with the same gear, skills, and stats because they have run the numbers. Then its published on sites for people to follow.

How can you diminish the effects of Gear Race?

GW2 scaled down (nerfed) higher level players when they went into lower level zones.

You could set a damage (or combination of attributes) cap on Weapons and Magery. Those caps might take sometime to achieve, but nonetheless, a cap is in place.

Then what you can do is cap hit points on mobs. Say a dragon in a dungeon has 10,000 HPS. You test its difficulty at the selected caps to find that top end. You might need more than one person or a group to defeat it, but it should be achievable with the current gear at max cap.

As a blacksmith improves his skill or gathers the top resources, he/she can make weapons that approach those caps.
Example: A novice smith might make a Longsword with damage range 10-15 but the cap is 20-25 (when he achieves the highest level in skill and resources). These caps may be achieved within a month or 2, but they remain will be the "Gold Standard".

Using the dragon example above, all you need to do is introduce content without having to release new gear. You introduce content based on those caps. You don't introduce a dragon with 20K hps, you introduce a dragon that requires a different approach to defeat. Maybe you have to kill a wizard healing him in the background or you need to find a magical orb that sends out a debuff (every 3 minutes) making him vulnerable to damage. Things along those lines. Your gear won't be the issue if you are defeated, it will be your lack of tactics.

I believe RG mentioned that the difficulty of areas will not be straight forward for you to follow. You may encounter a beast or dungeon in the starter zone that you would have to return to at a later date because your character is not fully developed yet. But it will remain challenging because they won't keep releasing higher end gear in 3 months to make the encounter easy.

All of the locations on the map will remain more relevant. So even when they open up new lands, you won't need new gear to participate. The content will provide new puzzles to solve or add new twists for you to adapt to. The mobs might have different powers or abilities, but with your current gear and skill sets you should be able to figure out a way to defeat them.

I hope you understand what i'm getting at here. I know the crafters might see this as restricting there viability if they meet the caps. I'm trying to think of ways they can remain important without have to come up with better and better gear.

 

Think about this in early UO terms.

The top weapons were Vanquishing and the highest achievable Magery was 100. It was this way for years with the monster's difficulty unchanged.

The only downfall was that the monsters didn't really require much thought to defeat. But today more challenging mechanics could be put into place.

So they could have added a new monsters that required new strategies but still allowed those with Vanquishing and GM Magery to defeat them. Maybe you needed someone with GM poison to poison a monster first so others could achieve max damage or added in some other type of puzzle. You get where i'm going.

 

You don't just want it to come down to DPS.

 

Vanqs were overrated. I generally just carried GM crafted exceptionals. I made a lot of gold selling vanqs I looted on my vendor to people who like that sort of thing.

 

I don't like gear mismatches in PvP. The exception being if it's deliberately part of a mechanic/story. And this would really just be one side or another getting a buff of some kind.

I don't like tiers of content (due to level or gear). Because it locks out both the lower tiers and the upper tiers meaning that your true choices are extremely limited.

Gw2 did have some good ideas. But in the end, having levels at all was pointless and unnecessary. People blew through all the lower level content in a week and were left with a very bottom heavy game. The sPvP (arena) progression was far better than the actual game. The whole progression was for titles and skins.

"Grind" doesn't inherently bother me. Only to the extent that 1) somehow rampant botting drives out real players or 2) there becomes too big a barrier for new players to overcome. (Lineage2 had both of these problems.)

 

Gunga Din

What then do you see as the reason to risk a weapon if not to improve stats?
What does the better material do?
What does the perfect (or brilliant or whatever they call it) sword do that a "crap" sword doesn't?

Not to mention armor

 

It'll be very interesting to see how they balance the game since it'll be single and multiplayer. Maybe they could have it set so the single player game allows for much better gear that isn't available in multiplayer, that way single players can maybe accomplish feats that would otherwise require big groups using standard weapons.

As far as the UO model goes, one of the interesting things--post T2A--was how certain groups would fight against each other, like Ophidians and Terathans, Savages and Orcs. It's always cool to be "part of a story" while fighting. The beginning of Dragon Age was just about the coolest (Human journey), where you're crossing the bridge and the big battle is going down.

I'm not really sure how epic Shroud will get. Right now it seems like it'll be a lot of town-to-town hopping, and reputation-based questing. It'll be interesting to see what kind of wars or conflicts they'll write up, and how that will affect player choices or how factions will emerge.

I think every post I write will be similar, but I want story to matter the most in this game. That's so hard to do in an online game, because you can code everything to happen one way in a single player game but everything changes when you add another player (or the whole world).

I would prefer Shroud to be a to 100 skill based game, with limited weapons and gear but perhaps flexibility with how that gear ends up looking. Like release new art, and then the grind is just to get new decorated armor or weapons, but the ranks stay the same (I guess kind of like Adventure Quest), they just add more options for different looks, style, and to differentiate regions. And maybe the only way to get certain looking gear is by asking a smith or something. But I figure smiths will be in high demand as long as durability is required, and items need to be repaired.

 

Why are some pushing grind? The devs have stated they dont want grind, and that it is the most mundane thing ever in any game which I totally agree with. As well as the OP:

"Why is the ?Gear Race? Mechanic bad for games?

(1) Endless Grind"

We have to have expectations, while at the beginning of this product launch I may have sought the high level uberweapons of death so I could smack down every silly crafter and RPr in the entire game world. Since game mechanics have limited that to a huge degree, I can't. Thus I need to change my expectations accordingly, what I see in most of the replies to the OP is a nature of not being able to change.

I see a lot of compare to other methods of doing things, I always see a lot of UO references, and of course no help from the Owain as usual. I will think about this for a bit, to see if I can come up with useful input on the actual OT from the OP and not just run off at the mouth on other junk

 

@Sir Asguard :

"What then do you see as the reason to risk a weapon if not to improve stats?"
"What does the better material do?"
"What does the perfect (or brilliant or whatever they call it) sword do that a ?crap? sword doesn?t?"

I was hoping the community might be able to help me with the concerns you address.

Risk weapon to improve stats? Well in the crafting process, I would hope to reach those caps a crafter's success would depend on his skill, the resource used, and the gambling effect Chris spoke about. As you approach the caps it becomes more difficult to Master Craft the item.

The weapons will, for example, have multiple properties beyond damage.

-Durability
-Accuracy
-Malleability (To customize the appearance)
-Range
-Speed

The crafters can manipulate those to some degree based off the resources used.

Maybe then, they could add a special attribute to the weapon. Allow one or 2 slots to be filled with augments the crafters make. The augments could be swiped in and out depending on the encounter. As the game matures, new augment recipes will be discovered.

-Silver (vs undead)
-Slayer
-etc (help me come up with some more!)

Then a crafter could also be responsible for the skin of the item (how it will be displayed).

 

One thought on this: I would agree I don't want a system where you have to grind the highest level dungeons and beat the highest level "boss" to get the best gear (as a usual way to gear up). But there are also dynamics, such in WoW, where in order to craft the best gear you had to obtain materials that you could *only* get if you got a drop off of killing a similar class of "boss" or end game peerless type. This to me is nearly as bad.

I'm somewhat on the fence as to how much (and whether) I want "gear" to significantly impact a player's power. But if it does, the best gear should be crafted, not looted in a "grind" that requires killing an end game boss 100 times and praying you get one drop. One of the worst things the "gear race" as usually implemented can do is make crafters irrelevant, because rarely do the craftable items keep up with the power of the looted gear in instances.

As the OP mentioned, in order to make a less gear-centric game there will need to be other forms of "progression" to keep players interested and in getting fresh new content once and for all. Adding "levels" and ridiculous gear is the easy way out to do it. I'm pretty sure we won't see that here (thankfully), so the design challenge is to find ways to keep innovating and adding new content players want to play without needing to resort to "my mage hit level 321 and has a +43,000 Staff"...

 

Gunga Din

Whatever the benifit is it has to be worth taking the risk of it breaking, otherwise it's not worth the risk. If the increase won't more than pay for all the broken swords then I end up selling "crap" swords because its not worth pushing them

 

@Sir Zigg : Exactly my point.

Do most people still want/need that carrot? After a decade of MMO's using gear progression, can they live without it?

I'm hopeful we can break the mold too.

 

If they have remotely decent graphics and character models, people will do almost anything for better looking gear. This is vastly more meaningful than stats.

I've said this before, but I think all the "progression" in the game in terms of gear, levels, skills, whatever doesn't need to make your character stronger at all. Just look better. Make your reputation grow. Get fancy titles and achievement unlocks, etc.

 

There are some options here, and part of what we don't know is how items will work in the game.

Most MMOs use a level based gear system. UO didn't. I played a mud that didn't because good gear is rare, on server restarts was the only time gear spawned on mobs.

So I'll assume they intend to do a level independent gear system. Gear Grinds why do they exist? To give people something to do.

What do you do when you already have the best gear, what incentives are there for people to play? Gold. People need gold to maintain their homes to purchase items since yours get worn down. So we trade a gear grind for a gold grind, and people trying to find the best gold/hour.

A sense of progression, of moving forward, of accomplishment is what people desire. How do you satisfy this desire?

I want to know what you think. I'll post my own answers later.

 

@SIr Mishri : Right, all i'm trying to do is give the DEVS ideas and feedback. What they use is up to them. Also, can you change your profile pic, its starting to freak me out.

But your right, what grind will remain? Gold yes, but thats usually the case. They can add new skills and spells to learn or discover, I don't mind that. Achievements, titles, server first accomplishments etc are all good things to implement.

A virtue system, reputation all things to just improve your character. A bestiary log as you kill things.

 

I honestly want to stay as far away from an MMO style grind fest. How will that work in the overall story they are trying to tell? I guess it is to early to tell at this point.

 

My face is freaking you out? that's pretty mean dude.

I do like the idea they expressed awhile back of achievements netting in game items (cosmetic from the description) That can be a good motivator to continue playing once the story is done.

They have said they like the idea of crafted items being the most desirable ones in the game. So much of the grind may actually be crafters seeking rare components to make some of the best items. And if you are buying them, likely gold or rare item grinding for you as well.

So does the item have to be better, or just cool looking? In either case it's somewhat of the same thing, doing something to get something you like better vs in order to power up. The argument against the power up model is the more linear power progression they hope to achieve, where skill really matters, not that your opponent has all the best gear.

So yes, I do prefer a method of an end to power, but we do need something to motivate us if it isn't more power then it becomes more status. More rare items, more unique things.

New episodes should yield new challenges, new progression. What form? difficult to say without knowing more about the concepts and game play. So other games use higher levels, better gear, more crafting, new areas to explore.

Will this game be different? we know there will be new areas to explore, new skills to be learned, and I'd certainly expect new equipment to be obtained. Better? that is a question... possibly just different, more effective in the new area. But that still leaves the "gear grind" of getting new gear. Why? because without it the game isn't as interesting, there is less to do. I would have been bored out of my mind in WoW if my gear was the same I used at level 60 as 85. On the other hand, it was annoying that I spent months raiding for gear and then got it replaced within minutes of a new expansion for higher level items. There can be a better balance there. My raid gear should have been awesome until I maxed out my level in the new expansion and did the raids there. If i hadn't raided at all then yeah, I'd expect new items to be better than my blue gear.

So what keeps a player playing is a bit of a personal question and there are no wrong/right answers, having systems in place that keep people playing and interested and focused on it while not being boring or causing unsatisfied players is the precious balance most(possibly all) games fail at. Can RG and team find that balance and where does it lie? Progression is a key component for most people though, and some people love that gear progression.

 

Just my 2 cents:

I really enjoy playing a game for years, for this reason I have enjoyed the gear grind not because it is a necessitous but because leveling in these standard new age MMOs has become so easy to do.

Take a step back with me to some games that fix this:

Lineage 2: This literally took 1-2 years of playing 4-6 hours a day to get to the max level, this kept you hooked and less focused on gear. Each new Chronicle (Expansion) added another 8-12 months of leveling.

Runescape: Honestly I never played it but I know you used to be able to play for 6-7 years and still not skill cap.

I think this is more the answer to the issue just make the level grind take 1-2 years minimum for a normal player - slower experience and level gain also lets you slow down the development cycle and release higher quality expansions.

Take care guys that's my 2 cents.

Portalarium is definitely on the right track giving each skill a leveling tree! This is a lot like Runescape in my slim knowledge of that game.

 

@Monkus : Here is my 2 cents....go back to modeling 3d houses. J/K and thx for your input.

What your describing is a level grind. I'd prefer that within a reasonable amount of time, you character is developed enough to just go play the content.

One thing I like about SWG and Early UO, when your skills/skill trees were maxed, you were free to just explore the game and all its content.

I'd like to see what the DEVS come up with, to keep us busy, without a Gear or Level Grind. If they could implement that type of game mechanic, I would be one happy Gunga Din.

 

It took me a long time to completely 100 all the skills I wanted in UO. I was out adventuring and exploring once i got up in the upper 70s. There was still progress for me to make, but I didn't have to in order to kill difficult things.. most of the difficulty once i leveled my skills to a usable level was learning how to fight monsters/avoid pkers.

part of my issue with taking a long time to max out my first character was I kept changing my skills..I started off making a pvp character with magery/eval int/meditation/swords/resist/wrestling/tactics then when trammel came out I changed him into a bard, then eventually a tamer/mage... I had a warrior I was close to full GM on everything, that was easier than my mage.

Anyway, for me the skill grind didn't end, even in early UO.. when i played again about 4 or 5 years ago I did max them all out, but they had upped the skill caps so I had more grinding to do

So what I liked about it was I could really explore the world when i wasn't even close to maxed out (70ish on most of my skills) vs waiting till i was max level to see some of the tougher content the game had to offer.