Dark Age of Camelot - the reason I stopped playing was because I had been playing quite extensively for 5 years and I got tired of it. I found I was spending more time on the forums getting worked up over upcoming changes.
Forums are actually a catch-22 when playing an MMO. On one hand you get lots of useful information, on the other hand they are overwhelmed by the disgruntled complainers and it gets you down after a while.
MMO Postmortem Project - Player Impressions
Since there are so many I am just going to do a list format and hit some brief pros/cons for each.
Ultima Online: I really enjoyed the ability to develop my character as I saw fit. When I first started the game I just wanted to have a Wilderness Traveler so I picked up lumberjacking, fletching, archery, tactics, swordsmanship and the like. I was able to just venture off from the villages/cities and do what I wanted when I wanted. I mainly lived out of Empath Abbey in the city of Yew where I was able to meet fellow players at the bank. When I first started I saw it as a peaceful game where I wasn't too afraid of going around by myself. I would run into a murderer here and there, but I was generally able to out run them and get hidden via the Hide skill before they could catch me. Upon my travels I eventually ended up near a graveyard south of the city. There I met what would become my first guild. They were a nice kind of folk that had a guild house there and they offered to help teach me the ropes to better defend myself against murderers. That was when the world started to shrink for me. When I was finally becoming a member of the community rather than a lone traveler.
I was able to make friends and foes. I eventually created a thief character of which would haunt Empath Abbey targeting players I may have had a bad encounter with on my other characters, or just for the sake of fun, would steal their stuff and run away to hide until I could bank it. Eventually I bought my own house and became friends with multiple guilds that were generally found at the Abbey. Little did I know there were hundreds of other players doing the same thing out of their own city of choice. It was a world. There was freedom to do what you wanted.
I ended up in Britain on my crafter character, mainly a smith, and I was introduced to the larger part of the game at the time, Order versus Chaos. Many street battles were fought between the sides and I had fun just running around watching them fight. I enjoyed having personal property that you could decorate and even turn into a shop with vendors. I enjoyed being able to collect items and I actually had a decent "semi-rare" collection going before I left the game. I returned several times and though I had fun, I could never get back to the original play once Trammel came around. Playing the economy was a valid play style. You didn't have to hunt to make money.
Cons: Templates became the norm. If you weren't X/Y/Z, then you weren't properly setup and would falter in combat. So much freedom became narrowed down to less freedom than some class based games. Tamers were godly. As the game aged Murderers became more common and less purposeful. They became PKs.
Everquest: Though zones were separated by zonelines they seemed to mesh together well to create the feel of a complete world. Some zones were very large and it added to the feel of an expansive world. I enjoyed getting into groups and playing alongside other players. Sometimes it was a single serving group, but there were occasions where a group introduced you to friends for the future. It starts with Orc Camp groups, then to bandits and groups are a mainstay for focused levelers. You could solo, but some classes weren't as capable as others and grouping was ideal for gaining experience. The worlds provided a sense of exploration as there weren't nice little sandy roadways leading you every where there was to go. Bartering was a very valid way to further yourself economically.
There were items of rarity that were very desirable and if you were able to obtain one it would give you a feeling of great success. One of my greatest gains was when I was trying to trade my stuff around in the East Commons tunnel to get stuff for the monk I wanted to play, twinking was a common occurrence in Everquest, giving low level characters high level gear. I was trying desperately to get a Fungi Tunic, built in health regen, and I was settling on buying a Fungi Robe as I couldn't afford the tunic. When I got to the person selling the robe I placed my platinum in the trade window and they placed a Fungi Tunic, rather than a robe, in the window. I questioned if they were sure they wanted to sell the Fungi Tunic for 3,000 platinum and they assured me that they were okay. I made the trade and ran off with my newly acquired Fungi Tunic. There were many times later that I would try to buy low and sell high, or trade up so to say, playing the market game. I found it to be a game within a game.
Cons: Leveling took a long time. Classes were all identical in the end aside from gear selection/lack of funds to buy rare spells. There wasn't any way to really stand out from the crowd aside from playing your class well, which was fun none the less. I got up to level 54 on my Druid by the time Dark Age of Camelot came out so that is when I left Everquest for a new game. I wasn't a big raider. I didn't want to "key" myself to go do all of these extra things. Once I got high enough the game lost it's openness as I found myself just trying to level to do more dungeons. Not being the raider type it lost it's appeal.
I will add the rest as I have time.
Ultima Online: I really enjoyed the ability to develop my character as I saw fit. When I first started the game I just wanted to have a Wilderness Traveler so I picked up lumberjacking, fletching, archery, tactics, swordsmanship and the like. I was able to just venture off from the villages/cities and do what I wanted when I wanted. I mainly lived out of Empath Abbey in the city of Yew where I was able to meet fellow players at the bank. When I first started I saw it as a peaceful game where I wasn't too afraid of going around by myself. I would run into a murderer here and there, but I was generally able to out run them and get hidden via the Hide skill before they could catch me. Upon my travels I eventually ended up near a graveyard south of the city. There I met what would become my first guild. They were a nice kind of folk that had a guild house there and they offered to help teach me the ropes to better defend myself against murderers. That was when the world started to shrink for me. When I was finally becoming a member of the community rather than a lone traveler.
I was able to make friends and foes. I eventually created a thief character of which would haunt Empath Abbey targeting players I may have had a bad encounter with on my other characters, or just for the sake of fun, would steal their stuff and run away to hide until I could bank it. Eventually I bought my own house and became friends with multiple guilds that were generally found at the Abbey. Little did I know there were hundreds of other players doing the same thing out of their own city of choice. It was a world. There was freedom to do what you wanted.
I ended up in Britain on my crafter character, mainly a smith, and I was introduced to the larger part of the game at the time, Order versus Chaos. Many street battles were fought between the sides and I had fun just running around watching them fight. I enjoyed having personal property that you could decorate and even turn into a shop with vendors. I enjoyed being able to collect items and I actually had a decent "semi-rare" collection going before I left the game. I returned several times and though I had fun, I could never get back to the original play once Trammel came around. Playing the economy was a valid play style. You didn't have to hunt to make money.
Cons: Templates became the norm. If you weren't X/Y/Z, then you weren't properly setup and would falter in combat. So much freedom became narrowed down to less freedom than some class based games. Tamers were godly. As the game aged Murderers became more common and less purposeful. They became PKs.
Everquest: Though zones were separated by zonelines they seemed to mesh together well to create the feel of a complete world. Some zones were very large and it added to the feel of an expansive world. I enjoyed getting into groups and playing alongside other players. Sometimes it was a single serving group, but there were occasions where a group introduced you to friends for the future. It starts with Orc Camp groups, then to bandits and groups are a mainstay for focused levelers. You could solo, but some classes weren't as capable as others and grouping was ideal for gaining experience. The worlds provided a sense of exploration as there weren't nice little sandy roadways leading you every where there was to go. Bartering was a very valid way to further yourself economically.
There were items of rarity that were very desirable and if you were able to obtain one it would give you a feeling of great success. One of my greatest gains was when I was trying to trade my stuff around in the East Commons tunnel to get stuff for the monk I wanted to play, twinking was a common occurrence in Everquest, giving low level characters high level gear. I was trying desperately to get a Fungi Tunic, built in health regen, and I was settling on buying a Fungi Robe as I couldn't afford the tunic. When I got to the person selling the robe I placed my platinum in the trade window and they placed a Fungi Tunic, rather than a robe, in the window. I questioned if they were sure they wanted to sell the Fungi Tunic for 3,000 platinum and they assured me that they were okay. I made the trade and ran off with my newly acquired Fungi Tunic. There were many times later that I would try to buy low and sell high, or trade up so to say, playing the market game. I found it to be a game within a game.
Cons: Leveling took a long time. Classes were all identical in the end aside from gear selection/lack of funds to buy rare spells. There wasn't any way to really stand out from the crowd aside from playing your class well, which was fun none the less. I got up to level 54 on my Druid by the time Dark Age of Camelot came out so that is when I left Everquest for a new game. I wasn't a big raider. I didn't want to "key" myself to go do all of these extra things. Once I got high enough the game lost it's openness as I found myself just trying to level to do more dungeons. Not being the raider type it lost it's appeal.
I will add the rest as I have time.
Author
[quote name='Acharis' timestamp='1313932786' post='4851883']
I find feedback and impression of designers irrelevant. We all are old geezers who played all the games and are bored of them already. We have seen everything and tried everything. We strive only for originality, not for gameplay and fun. Designers are completely unlike normal player and have not much in common
I can't claim to be a designer, but I like to think about designing games. I am not bored with everything. I am just bored with how it has been presented as of late. When I design I try to compromise to find what is best for the developer and the player alike. Not overly complex so it becomes impossible to balance while also providing options for players to help them retain individuality.
[/quote]
Hardly anybody becomes a game designer, hobbyist or otherwise, without being a gamer first. I play MMOs primarily because I have fun playing MMOs, studying their design is only a secondary benefit. I also play at designing MMOs because I find that fun. The statistically average MMO players gets older every year, although granted the average is probably still five years younger than I am. Boredom is sort of a factor, but not in the sense that I have any interest in originality for originality's sake. Heck I read romance novels and fanfiction, not exactly things known for originality. The things I'm bored of are the ones I didn't like much in the first place, such as high fantasy settings and dark settings and really macho testosterony game stories, because when you don't actually like something you run out of tolerance for it a lot faster. I'm constantly looking for new games to play, so if I'm bored it's usually a direct result of me not being able to find a game I haven't played yet of the type I think would be the most fun to play at the moment. I am most driven to design what I want to play but can't find.
Author
Perfect World - This game is basically a WoW clone except with a Chinese fantasy flavor and payment by cash shop instead of subscription. Being a WoW clone its is quite playable, and some of the more noticeable problems it has are the same ones WoW has, such as the fact that quests get sparser and play more grindy as players get up into the level 50-60 range until the game is just too boring to play unless you really love running dungeons and/or PvP. That's the actual reason I quit playing it. Also the fact that crafting professions are a grindy money pit players can't even break even on is a problem both games, and several others like Dofus, have in common.
So I'll skip over the parts where I don't have anything to say that's different from what I'd be saying about WoW. One of the unique awesome things about Perfect World is that the game's cash shop currency can be sold in the game's auction house for game gold. I personally think this was just a brilliant move, because it allows the game to shut out goldspammers by providing officially the services such people try to provide unofficially; and it does so without the harm to the economy that games do when they sell game gold directly in the cash shop. Allowing the players who would normally never but cash shop items to bribe other players to spend cash on their behalf results in both a happier playerbase and more total income for the game.
Another good point of perfect world is that is has the best integration of flying mounts into the game that I've seen so far, including the ability to fight flying monsters while riding a flying mount. With the exception of elves, who have wings from the beginning, the other races have flight unlocked for them at level 30 (IIRC) and this allows a great double use of the map, because Level 30 and higher monsters are placed in the air and on floating islands above the ground level where the below 30 monsters were. Giving higher level players an excuse to be near lower level players is helpful in encouraging higher level players to teach the lower level ones how to play, help them in dungeons, and invite them into guilds.
On the other hand, Perfect World unfortunately has some of the problems typical of Asian-made games; specifically the enforcing of gender stereotypes through single-gender classes (yuck), gameplay actions only male characters can perform toward female characters like letting a passenger ride with you on your mount (double yuck), and heterosexual-only marriages with gameplay benefits (ew). Besides that I was quite unhappy with the hundreds of player shops strewn like trash all over the major cities and resulting in almost-useless empty auction houses because the use fees on the auction house were higher.
So I'll skip over the parts where I don't have anything to say that's different from what I'd be saying about WoW. One of the unique awesome things about Perfect World is that the game's cash shop currency can be sold in the game's auction house for game gold. I personally think this was just a brilliant move, because it allows the game to shut out goldspammers by providing officially the services such people try to provide unofficially; and it does so without the harm to the economy that games do when they sell game gold directly in the cash shop. Allowing the players who would normally never but cash shop items to bribe other players to spend cash on their behalf results in both a happier playerbase and more total income for the game.
Another good point of perfect world is that is has the best integration of flying mounts into the game that I've seen so far, including the ability to fight flying monsters while riding a flying mount. With the exception of elves, who have wings from the beginning, the other races have flight unlocked for them at level 30 (IIRC) and this allows a great double use of the map, because Level 30 and higher monsters are placed in the air and on floating islands above the ground level where the below 30 monsters were. Giving higher level players an excuse to be near lower level players is helpful in encouraging higher level players to teach the lower level ones how to play, help them in dungeons, and invite them into guilds.
On the other hand, Perfect World unfortunately has some of the problems typical of Asian-made games; specifically the enforcing of gender stereotypes through single-gender classes (yuck), gameplay actions only male characters can perform toward female characters like letting a passenger ride with you on your mount (double yuck), and heterosexual-only marriages with gameplay benefits (ew). Besides that I was quite unhappy with the hundreds of player shops strewn like trash all over the major cities and resulting in almost-useless empty auction houses because the use fees on the auction house were higher.
Dark Age of Camelot:
The first game that actually made me feel like I was a part of something. RVR was a fantastic concept as it provided players the ability to find PVP combat while also providing PVE only areas for those that weren't big fans of PVP. Scouting was a huge bonus for your side so those that took the time and effort to scout with quality were able to stand out. Individuals mattered in a MMORPG.. fantastic.
Gear started off mostly basic, but evolved into a completely different beast as the game developed. Early on crafted armor was great as it provided an extra bonus to the armor of a character in PVP combat that made it compete with high end PVE drops. Eventually they added Spellcrafting and Alchemy to buff up player crafted gear to make it competitive with the newer gear that had been added to the game. Templates became a huge subculture as people spent hours and hours trying to fit specific items into their gear setups while also maximizing all of their stats as much as possible. The release of Trials of Atlantis which brought Artifacts to the game, high end PVE content that required experience grinding to raise in power, which almost became mandatory to compete in PVP. This was a huge pitfall and the beginning of the end for my enjoyment of the game. I played for over 4,000,000 realm points on my ranger, most of it came after New Frontiers released. I didn't earn much in Old Frontiers as I had primarily been a scout and not until late in play well after ToA released did I start doing stealth war games.
The problems: Not many. I had a really great time playing the game and even did end game dungeons quite a bit. I may have been younger and more tolerant, but they seemed to possess a variety in play being one of the first people to experience it with a very active healthy guild. Leveling alts became a drag. I must have worked a lot harder on leveling my ranger than I remember, but I had generally had a duo partner that I would group with when we were both online, otherwise solo. It wasn't until I reached level 40+ before guilds started recognizing me. If you weren't high level you weren't able to help your realm(40+ generally, 50 by the end, 50+RR5 ended up being the minimum to PVP successfully).
The way the game evolved PVE wise, gear wise, and the housing system made me lose interest. Your house was in a small plot with room for about 10-15 houses per clump. Four sizes for houses, all instanced inside, with a small porch/yard to decorate. Customization was rather limited, but it wasn't unbearable. I would have liked a system that promoted socialization more rather than an instanced area filled with instanced houses.
PVP and Class balance were also issues, but that is to be expected in any PVP game. Some of the changes were not well accepted, but they also changed things around a bit for the better.
Biggest failure for me was the revamping of the archery system. You used to draw your shot(with or without a target), be able to hold it for a few seconds, and once you had a target selected you could fire manually or auto release. It was later changed to behave very closely to the magic system and it really took a chunk out of the enjoyment of it all. Archers aren't magicians.
The first game that actually made me feel like I was a part of something. RVR was a fantastic concept as it provided players the ability to find PVP combat while also providing PVE only areas for those that weren't big fans of PVP. Scouting was a huge bonus for your side so those that took the time and effort to scout with quality were able to stand out. Individuals mattered in a MMORPG.. fantastic.
Gear started off mostly basic, but evolved into a completely different beast as the game developed. Early on crafted armor was great as it provided an extra bonus to the armor of a character in PVP combat that made it compete with high end PVE drops. Eventually they added Spellcrafting and Alchemy to buff up player crafted gear to make it competitive with the newer gear that had been added to the game. Templates became a huge subculture as people spent hours and hours trying to fit specific items into their gear setups while also maximizing all of their stats as much as possible. The release of Trials of Atlantis which brought Artifacts to the game, high end PVE content that required experience grinding to raise in power, which almost became mandatory to compete in PVP. This was a huge pitfall and the beginning of the end for my enjoyment of the game. I played for over 4,000,000 realm points on my ranger, most of it came after New Frontiers released. I didn't earn much in Old Frontiers as I had primarily been a scout and not until late in play well after ToA released did I start doing stealth war games.
The problems: Not many. I had a really great time playing the game and even did end game dungeons quite a bit. I may have been younger and more tolerant, but they seemed to possess a variety in play being one of the first people to experience it with a very active healthy guild. Leveling alts became a drag. I must have worked a lot harder on leveling my ranger than I remember, but I had generally had a duo partner that I would group with when we were both online, otherwise solo. It wasn't until I reached level 40+ before guilds started recognizing me. If you weren't high level you weren't able to help your realm(40+ generally, 50 by the end, 50+RR5 ended up being the minimum to PVP successfully).
The way the game evolved PVE wise, gear wise, and the housing system made me lose interest. Your house was in a small plot with room for about 10-15 houses per clump. Four sizes for houses, all instanced inside, with a small porch/yard to decorate. Customization was rather limited, but it wasn't unbearable. I would have liked a system that promoted socialization more rather than an instanced area filled with instanced houses.
PVP and Class balance were also issues, but that is to be expected in any PVP game. Some of the changes were not well accepted, but they also changed things around a bit for the better.
Biggest failure for me was the revamping of the archery system. You used to draw your shot(with or without a target), be able to hold it for a few seconds, and once you had a target selected you could fire manually or auto release. It was later changed to behave very closely to the magic system and it really took a chunk out of the enjoyment of it all. Archers aren't magicians.
Author
Dofus (This post refers to the game before they switched to the current graphic system, which I don't really like as much. The functionality is probably mostly the same though.)
Dofus holds the title of the MMO I have played the longest - probably 6 months. This is because the leveling is slow and there are a LOT of levels. Maybe also because Dofus has basically no quests after the newbie tutorials so it's just a whole different model of motivation than a story-based MMO.
My hands-down favorite feature of Docus is the tactical turn-based combat. As far as I've been able to determine there simply is no other MMO which has the sort of combat where a team of players and their summoned creatures and battlefield effects interact on a chessboard-like field. I really like this kind of combat, and I was impressed that it wasn't too slow unless you had more than 4 or 5 players in group. This is partly achieved by making monster turns much faster than player turns. I do think that making the max group size 8 and gearing dungeons to that size was a mistake. It was quite difficult to recruit more than 6 people for dungeon runs, particularly since every person needs a consumable key to enter a dungeon and several of the dungeons are physically difficult to get to the front door of. However the biggest single problem with dungeons is that they are all designed to have logarithmic difficulty. A typical dungeon is a series of 10 or 12 fights where the final fight is more than 10x the difficulty of the first. So it's obviously disadvantageous to go through the whole dungeon as a party of 8, yet you absolutely need a big party or an over-leveled team to beat the boss room. The result was a very disorganized process where people ran the first third or half of the dungeon alone, then group into twos or threes, then only united at the last or second to last room. But anyone who managed to die while soloing the first part of the dungeon got kicked out an would need a new key to enter, then the teammates would have to wait for them to catch up, and it was impossible to go back to a room you had already beaten to help someone else through it. A big mess.
Most of the time I spent playing I spent trying to become a mount breeder. This is one of the most unique activities within the game, but unfortunately turned out to not actually be all that fun. Capturing a wild mount was extremely difficult, building mount training items was expensive and theyw ore out fast, and training a mount to breedability required fighting with it equipped to donate XP to it to get it to level 5, plus a long period of standing by your paddock alternately beckoning the mounts close and scaring them away to make them interact with the breeding items. Fun value? Almost nothing, and I leveled way slower than usual while devoting my time to mount breeding, while not making boat loads on money to make up for that. The high experience cost of leveling a mount up and high level requirement for using a mount at all also discouraged players from owning more than one mount, meaning there was a very limited marke easily flooded by having more than about 2 active breeders on a server. This was multiplied by the fact that any breeding randomly produced one of 6-10 types of offspring, with a high percentage of unwanted results and a low percentage of the desired result. In other words, mount capturing and breeding was a great idea people should emulate, but all of the gameplay involved should be tossed out and reinvented from scratch.
One of my least favorite features of the game is prospecting lock. This functionally meant that some drops will not occur at all unless there are a minimum number of players in the battle, and this is specifically slanted toward the Enutrof class which has special drop-hunting stat bonuses. Very disheartening for a player who likes to solo and doesn't particularly like the fighting style of the Enu class. Drop-hunting is the single main way of earning money and also obtaining materials to craft gear, and it's just strange to have one class be able to do this twice as well as everyone else. A related issue is the wisdom stat which increases the rate of earning XP. By choosing to spend stat points within the character or in gear on wisdom instead of a combat-useful stat players could create weak characters who would level faster. They then leached off of other players' combat abilities until they got to whatever they wanted to get to. Not really fun to meet up with a guild member to tackle difficult monsters you can't solo, only to be disgusted at the sight of your guildmate wearing wisdom gear, clearly not intending to pull their own weight.
On the other hand, the ability to craft scrolls of bonus stats was interesting, and the spell point system was quite good except for the sheer amount of time that had to be invested to earn higher-end spell levels. I particularly liked the way the combination of stats, spells, and gear chosen could build a character of a class in distinctly different ways. For example the standard Osamodas build was to max out Int and use as the primary attack first Ghostly Claw and later Punch of the Crackler, two spells short-distance spells that are primarily affected by Int. But it was also possible to build an Osa with little personal damage dealing capacity and instead the ability to summon more creatures faster. And I myself built around the spell Crow which was a small long-distance non-line-of-sight attack that could be cast an extra time per turn with +AP gear and could hit fairly hard with +Dmg gear.
Hmm, what else... one thing I love about Dofus is the pervasive goofy sense of humor. It was more obvious in the monster and player graphics before they overhauled them, but remains obvious in the item flavor text and the NPC dialogue of what few quests there are.
Dofus has a fairly complicated system of randomized stats on dropped and crafted gear plus the ability to mage the stats on a piece of gear. But like most parts of Dofus the good is blended inextricably with the bad. Crafting has a nice inventory where a client can put items and money into a dual-player crafting window, allowing the one who has the high crafting level to be guaranteed their payment while also guaranteeing delivery of the crafted item to the client. But the high failure rate of crafting mucks this up by creating situations where a client supplies a lot of expensive ingredients and a fee and gets nothing but a red X. This tended to cause people to be depressed and/or angry; I saw several people quit over losing a lot of money and rare drops at a failed attempt to produce gear they desperately needed to come up to snuff for their level. Then with maging idek what they were thinking but there were a few gear stats or special properties which could be lost by a failed attempt at maging and there was just no method to attempt to repair or improve those types of stats or properties. Really, consistent maging mechanics would have been best, but if they didn't want +damage (for example) to be improvable by maging, they should also have made it immune to being harmed by failed maging.
I personally was quite frustrated by the sheer number of professions and the inability to have more than one profession under level thirty or more than three professions total. Seriously, why would sword smithing and axe smithing be two different professions, not to mention staff carving, etc. for every type of weapon? Not to mention that hats, boots, accessories, etc. were each their own profession. And farming, mining, lumberlacking, alchemy, baking, fishing, hunting, butchering... Professions in Dofus are imo over-diversified and overly-limited per character, on top of being overly failure-prone, overly grindy to level up, and containing no fun gameplay whatsoever. Professions in WoW struck me as quite irritatingly designed, but Dofus's are worse.
Dofus holds the title of the MMO I have played the longest - probably 6 months. This is because the leveling is slow and there are a LOT of levels. Maybe also because Dofus has basically no quests after the newbie tutorials so it's just a whole different model of motivation than a story-based MMO.
My hands-down favorite feature of Docus is the tactical turn-based combat. As far as I've been able to determine there simply is no other MMO which has the sort of combat where a team of players and their summoned creatures and battlefield effects interact on a chessboard-like field. I really like this kind of combat, and I was impressed that it wasn't too slow unless you had more than 4 or 5 players in group. This is partly achieved by making monster turns much faster than player turns. I do think that making the max group size 8 and gearing dungeons to that size was a mistake. It was quite difficult to recruit more than 6 people for dungeon runs, particularly since every person needs a consumable key to enter a dungeon and several of the dungeons are physically difficult to get to the front door of. However the biggest single problem with dungeons is that they are all designed to have logarithmic difficulty. A typical dungeon is a series of 10 or 12 fights where the final fight is more than 10x the difficulty of the first. So it's obviously disadvantageous to go through the whole dungeon as a party of 8, yet you absolutely need a big party or an over-leveled team to beat the boss room. The result was a very disorganized process where people ran the first third or half of the dungeon alone, then group into twos or threes, then only united at the last or second to last room. But anyone who managed to die while soloing the first part of the dungeon got kicked out an would need a new key to enter, then the teammates would have to wait for them to catch up, and it was impossible to go back to a room you had already beaten to help someone else through it. A big mess.
Most of the time I spent playing I spent trying to become a mount breeder. This is one of the most unique activities within the game, but unfortunately turned out to not actually be all that fun. Capturing a wild mount was extremely difficult, building mount training items was expensive and theyw ore out fast, and training a mount to breedability required fighting with it equipped to donate XP to it to get it to level 5, plus a long period of standing by your paddock alternately beckoning the mounts close and scaring them away to make them interact with the breeding items. Fun value? Almost nothing, and I leveled way slower than usual while devoting my time to mount breeding, while not making boat loads on money to make up for that. The high experience cost of leveling a mount up and high level requirement for using a mount at all also discouraged players from owning more than one mount, meaning there was a very limited marke easily flooded by having more than about 2 active breeders on a server. This was multiplied by the fact that any breeding randomly produced one of 6-10 types of offspring, with a high percentage of unwanted results and a low percentage of the desired result. In other words, mount capturing and breeding was a great idea people should emulate, but all of the gameplay involved should be tossed out and reinvented from scratch.
One of my least favorite features of the game is prospecting lock. This functionally meant that some drops will not occur at all unless there are a minimum number of players in the battle, and this is specifically slanted toward the Enutrof class which has special drop-hunting stat bonuses. Very disheartening for a player who likes to solo and doesn't particularly like the fighting style of the Enu class. Drop-hunting is the single main way of earning money and also obtaining materials to craft gear, and it's just strange to have one class be able to do this twice as well as everyone else. A related issue is the wisdom stat which increases the rate of earning XP. By choosing to spend stat points within the character or in gear on wisdom instead of a combat-useful stat players could create weak characters who would level faster. They then leached off of other players' combat abilities until they got to whatever they wanted to get to. Not really fun to meet up with a guild member to tackle difficult monsters you can't solo, only to be disgusted at the sight of your guildmate wearing wisdom gear, clearly not intending to pull their own weight.
On the other hand, the ability to craft scrolls of bonus stats was interesting, and the spell point system was quite good except for the sheer amount of time that had to be invested to earn higher-end spell levels. I particularly liked the way the combination of stats, spells, and gear chosen could build a character of a class in distinctly different ways. For example the standard Osamodas build was to max out Int and use as the primary attack first Ghostly Claw and later Punch of the Crackler, two spells short-distance spells that are primarily affected by Int. But it was also possible to build an Osa with little personal damage dealing capacity and instead the ability to summon more creatures faster. And I myself built around the spell Crow which was a small long-distance non-line-of-sight attack that could be cast an extra time per turn with +AP gear and could hit fairly hard with +Dmg gear.
Hmm, what else... one thing I love about Dofus is the pervasive goofy sense of humor. It was more obvious in the monster and player graphics before they overhauled them, but remains obvious in the item flavor text and the NPC dialogue of what few quests there are.
Dofus has a fairly complicated system of randomized stats on dropped and crafted gear plus the ability to mage the stats on a piece of gear. But like most parts of Dofus the good is blended inextricably with the bad. Crafting has a nice inventory where a client can put items and money into a dual-player crafting window, allowing the one who has the high crafting level to be guaranteed their payment while also guaranteeing delivery of the crafted item to the client. But the high failure rate of crafting mucks this up by creating situations where a client supplies a lot of expensive ingredients and a fee and gets nothing but a red X. This tended to cause people to be depressed and/or angry; I saw several people quit over losing a lot of money and rare drops at a failed attempt to produce gear they desperately needed to come up to snuff for their level. Then with maging idek what they were thinking but there were a few gear stats or special properties which could be lost by a failed attempt at maging and there was just no method to attempt to repair or improve those types of stats or properties. Really, consistent maging mechanics would have been best, but if they didn't want +damage (for example) to be improvable by maging, they should also have made it immune to being harmed by failed maging.
I personally was quite frustrated by the sheer number of professions and the inability to have more than one profession under level thirty or more than three professions total. Seriously, why would sword smithing and axe smithing be two different professions, not to mention staff carving, etc. for every type of weapon? Not to mention that hats, boots, accessories, etc. were each their own profession. And farming, mining, lumberlacking, alchemy, baking, fishing, hunting, butchering... Professions in Dofus are imo over-diversified and overly-limited per character, on top of being overly failure-prone, overly grindy to level up, and containing no fun gameplay whatsoever. Professions in WoW struck me as quite irritatingly designed, but Dofus's are worse.
Sunandshadow, it sounds like you would really enjoy the game I'm working on. It doesn't have any pet type system yet, but maybe you could throw me some ideas for that and I could work it in. 
I've never actually played Dofus, though I've known about it for a while and know what it's about... But it sounds like it could have been really fun if not for some of its downsides.
I've never actually played Dofus, though I've known about it for a while and know what it's about... But it sounds like it could have been really fun if not for some of its downsides.
Author
Wizard 101 - I almost didn't play this game, but I'm really glad that a friend asked me to give it a second shot.
Why did I almost not play it? First, I don't like the sales model. Both subscription AND cash shop? Seems a bit gouging. Second, because it's aimed at 12 year olds it's got a hardcore chat filtering system and some players running around who can't speak freely at all, can only use a limited menu chat system. It's pretty crippling to try to either discuss strategy or socialize with someone you can't speak freely with, and I'm not all that fond of trying to play alongside under-16 year olds to begin with. It would be nice to have two servers, one the heavily filtered child-friendly one and one with fewer restrictions.
Why am I glad I played it? Well, I like the card/deck/element based combat system. There was actual strategy involved in the combat. There was also actual variety in the monster tactics, due to different abilities being allocated to different elements. For example ice monsters were challenging because they shielded regularly, storm monsters did extra high damage but had low hp, and death monsters drained your life to heal themselves. As a player you have to specialize in one element but then you have several more spell points to spend on off-element spells. I really really like the low numbers of monsters required to be killed per average quest (rarely more than 5 and you kill 2 per typical battle). I really really like the fact that there are a lot of bosses relative to the numbers of average monsters, and that most of those bosses can be soloed by an appropriate-level player; they are like Final Fantasy bosses, they take a longer fight with a more carefully chosen deck, but they don't deal damage so fast you just can't fight them alone. It is lovely to play a game where I for the most part I am actually supposed to avoid monsters I don't want to fight, because the quests alone provide plenty of XP to get to the max level. The quests and story have a nice sense of humor including punny names and classic YA wish fulfillment like exploring Egyptian pyramids and hatching a dragon egg. The voice acting is some of the best I've ever encountered in a game, with a fun range of accents. The game also includes fun mounts, personal castles one can decorate with a lot of options, the ability to stitch a custom appearance over clothing, a plant-growing system, a pet monster breeding system, and a pvp arena and ranking system.
Minor minuses - I don't actually like the breeding system because it penalizes solo players and has a high chance of a costly failure. Most of the pets are really rare boss drops, although at least most of the bosses are instanced for convenient farming without getting in the way of people questing. The minigames one plays to mature pets and refill potions are all pretty bad (and do not have the option to turn off music within the minigame, even though you can turn off the main game's music.) The number of plants you can grow without constantly spending cash shop money is very limited. There are a few group-mandatory parts in the game, but that's a flaw of almost all MMOs. And the last world of the game, Celestia, has that irritating feeling of being bonus content that plays slower than usual and has no relation to the main plot because it was added afterwards to stretch the game out by ten more levels. The gear-crafting system is mediocre due to the fact that crafted gear is generally worse than boss drops, there is a general shortage of high level gatherables especially those required for the crafting leveling quests, and the game suffers from a common problem in MMOs: that you cannot obtain recipes several levels higher than you, which might actually give you time to gather the materials to craft them before you grew past them.
Why did I almost not play it? First, I don't like the sales model. Both subscription AND cash shop? Seems a bit gouging. Second, because it's aimed at 12 year olds it's got a hardcore chat filtering system and some players running around who can't speak freely at all, can only use a limited menu chat system. It's pretty crippling to try to either discuss strategy or socialize with someone you can't speak freely with, and I'm not all that fond of trying to play alongside under-16 year olds to begin with. It would be nice to have two servers, one the heavily filtered child-friendly one and one with fewer restrictions.
Why am I glad I played it? Well, I like the card/deck/element based combat system. There was actual strategy involved in the combat. There was also actual variety in the monster tactics, due to different abilities being allocated to different elements. For example ice monsters were challenging because they shielded regularly, storm monsters did extra high damage but had low hp, and death monsters drained your life to heal themselves. As a player you have to specialize in one element but then you have several more spell points to spend on off-element spells. I really really like the low numbers of monsters required to be killed per average quest (rarely more than 5 and you kill 2 per typical battle). I really really like the fact that there are a lot of bosses relative to the numbers of average monsters, and that most of those bosses can be soloed by an appropriate-level player; they are like Final Fantasy bosses, they take a longer fight with a more carefully chosen deck, but they don't deal damage so fast you just can't fight them alone. It is lovely to play a game where I for the most part I am actually supposed to avoid monsters I don't want to fight, because the quests alone provide plenty of XP to get to the max level. The quests and story have a nice sense of humor including punny names and classic YA wish fulfillment like exploring Egyptian pyramids and hatching a dragon egg. The voice acting is some of the best I've ever encountered in a game, with a fun range of accents. The game also includes fun mounts, personal castles one can decorate with a lot of options, the ability to stitch a custom appearance over clothing, a plant-growing system, a pet monster breeding system, and a pvp arena and ranking system.
Minor minuses - I don't actually like the breeding system because it penalizes solo players and has a high chance of a costly failure. Most of the pets are really rare boss drops, although at least most of the bosses are instanced for convenient farming without getting in the way of people questing. The minigames one plays to mature pets and refill potions are all pretty bad (and do not have the option to turn off music within the minigame, even though you can turn off the main game's music.) The number of plants you can grow without constantly spending cash shop money is very limited. There are a few group-mandatory parts in the game, but that's a flaw of almost all MMOs. And the last world of the game, Celestia, has that irritating feeling of being bonus content that plays slower than usual and has no relation to the main plot because it was added afterwards to stretch the game out by ten more levels. The gear-crafting system is mediocre due to the fact that crafted gear is generally worse than boss drops, there is a general shortage of high level gatherables especially those required for the crafting leveling quests, and the game suffers from a common problem in MMOs: that you cannot obtain recipes several levels higher than you, which might actually give you time to gather the materials to craft them before you grew past them.
@Iron Chef Carnage - EvE is such a unique game - I've always wondered what makes people enjoy playing it despite the fact that, as you say, it does seem to spit in the face of what we generally consider good game design. I've never personally been tempted to play it but I hear it mentioned regularly, it's undeniably popular. Could you comment a little more on exactly how what you were doing in the game scratched your videogame itch and was satisfying?
Sure. Here's how it worked: I was able, over the course of about two years, to learn the fundamental mechanics of a game. It's a dense one, and I'd compare EvE competence to learning one of the more hardcore flight simulators. Figuring out the non-euclidean physics of the game, gaining an intuitive understanding of battlefield situations, knowing at a glance how a given weapon or ship or fleet will excel, mastering the game's interface so you can use keyboard shortcuts and in-game utilities well, all these thing require study and experience.
I love that kind of crap. I don't know how many hours I spent learning how the AI and bullet penetration worked in Goldeneye for the N64, but I nailed that down, and was able to humiliate and entertain my friends in multiplayer. Dozens or hundreds of hours of work, distilled into a parlor trick akin to a juggling maneuver or culinary creation, is the spirit of EvE ability. The satisfaction I derive from EvE is rooted in moments--times when I join a player-run corporation, volunteer as a scout, and then hop my cheap interceptor through a stargate, outmaneuver a dozen powerful ships, ascertain--at a glance--their capabilities, and report the situation to a fleet of twenty ships--each worth ten or a hundred times what mine cost in in-game currency--that are waiting to engage according to my intel. Maybe two or three of those guys have the skill and savvy to do the job that I did, so I can use a relatively small investment of my real-world time, combined with a relatively small investment of in-game resources, to provide a genuinely invaluable service to a bunch of guys from all over the world, and then they do the heavy lifting and they all have something nice to say about me after the operation.
That's deeply satisfying to me. I can contribute meaningfully to an operation that involves dozens or hundreds of people from several different countries, and I'll lose less, in terms of both real-world and in-game resources, than any of them. To paraphrase Robert Blake, I have that brown suit, and that stetson hat, and the badge that says, "Boy, you're getting paid to think, not to get callouses on your ass."
And that's why I love EvE Online.
Here's my experience with the only 3 MMOs I've played, all high budget titles:
Starwars Galaxies: This game was a pretty big let down to me for some reason. I had played both versions of the pen and paper RPG, and the idea of doing it in 3D on a computer was very inviting. I read up on it some and the game looked very interesting, so I snapped it up almost as soon as it came out. Unfortunately, it was a bug ridden mess. I couldn't play it for more than about 10 minutes before the game would crash. I gave up on it the first night I installed it and decided to try again the next day. Same story, no matter what I did, so I put it away and promptly forgot about it. A shame that buginess (something that is mostly preventable) kept me from playing the game in the first place. I know now that I'd have probably given up eventually anyway, given some of the gameplay changes, but I never even got that far.
World of Warcraft: I played this game for close to a year I reckon, and still subscribe although I haven't actually logged in in quite some time. The game had definite improvements over the other MMOs I'd played, and the entire experience felt smooth, polished and refined. The game continuously gave me something to do. I don't think my quest log was ever empty, so I always felt like I was taking steps toward getting to the "end" of level 80.
I eventually got to level 80, and quit the game for a few weeks because I had nothing to do. I don't care about playing alts much, so once I "beat" the game, I felt like I was done. I later learned about the dungeon finder and the idea of gearing up, so I spent some time doing that before Cataclysm came out. I bought Cataclysm the day it came out, raced to 85 and quit. I felt like I'd beaten it again, had nothing engaging to do, and so I quit. There was more to see and do, such as max my tradeskills, but it just didn't engage me anymore for some reason. Burnout, perhaps.
Everquest: This is the big daddy of MMOs in my opinion and is one I still play, although I've started and dropped it several times.
Everquest is mostly nostalgia for me, which I freely admit. As an MMO, it is badly balanced, low on content, has a low population and is quirky. But I can't seem to give it up. Having a goal dangling in front of me is a good way to keep me engaged, and EQ does this better than WoW ever did because the goal is so freaking difficult to reach, but it still feels close enough to keep going.
When I quit WoW, the level cap was 85, and I managed to get there in what amounted to maybe 3 months of play time (ignoring time spent doing WotLK dungeons for gear). I've played EQ off and on for 7 years, and it took me until a few months ago to get to its level cap of 90. The game made me work very hard for what I got, so I felt like I really accomplished something when I leveled up.
On the other hand, that difficulty is what caused me to quit three times. The first time, I was new to the game and had no friends. I managed to get to level 12 after a few weeks of playing alone. I got bored and quickly realized it would take me years to get to 60 (the cap at the time), so I quit. A year or so later I gave it another shot. I played hard for about two years and got to level 63, at which point the level cap jumped from 65 to 70. I felt like I'd never reach that goal... and quit. Rinse and repeat a couple years later. I started back anew, got to 73 in about a year, then the cap jumped from 80 to 85. I felt liked I'd never win and quit.
The last time I started back, I was determined to not let the game beat me. I started back from where I left off the last time at 73 and powered my way to 90 (the cap). Strangely, I didn't feel like I really accomplished anything when I finally beat the game that had both haunted and filled my childhood with joy. Instead, I had a new problem: AAs. A couple of years after the game was released, they introduced the concept of alternate advancement points, or AAs. The idea is still pretty cool in my idea: you can earn alternate experience to get new abilities that not everyone will likely have. Everyone can eventually get them all, but it takes a very long time.
I currently have 3422 out of about 6750 AAs, after many months of grinding them mindlessly. I can get about 10 per day in 30 minutes of playing (about all I can afford to play these days), so I feel like I'm constantly getting something, but I did the math and that'll be another year or so before I can possibly finish them. And there's another expansion coming out that promises to add another 5 levels (joy...) and many AAs (likely over 1000). It's feeling like old times again, and I may quit if I feel like what I'm doing is pointless and I'll never finish.
To sum it up, I suppose basically I like to have things to work toward, and I get bored and quit when there's nothing more to do. I'm not sure how you can really work around that. You can add new content or ways to play, but not all players will engage in them and some will get bored. I've never really cared for player housing, free market trading between players, trade skilling, or anything like that. When I can't get better at killing things, I feel like I'm done. This is aimed at traditional MMOs, of course and something that introduced a different spin on things would likely keep me engaged longer (i.e. a Sim City like MMO where there is never a real end).
That, and dangling a carrot (level cap / AA cap / gear sets) in front of me and suddenly yanking it out further (new expansion adding new levels and gear that trivializes what you have) will tick me off. WoW did a decent job by making it easy enough to get that you didn't feel like you were racing against time like EQ, but then it drifts into the boredom territory.
I suspect this is a fundamental problem of level based games, so if you find a solution, then an award winning MMO might be your next game.
Starwars Galaxies: This game was a pretty big let down to me for some reason. I had played both versions of the pen and paper RPG, and the idea of doing it in 3D on a computer was very inviting. I read up on it some and the game looked very interesting, so I snapped it up almost as soon as it came out. Unfortunately, it was a bug ridden mess. I couldn't play it for more than about 10 minutes before the game would crash. I gave up on it the first night I installed it and decided to try again the next day. Same story, no matter what I did, so I put it away and promptly forgot about it. A shame that buginess (something that is mostly preventable) kept me from playing the game in the first place. I know now that I'd have probably given up eventually anyway, given some of the gameplay changes, but I never even got that far.
World of Warcraft: I played this game for close to a year I reckon, and still subscribe although I haven't actually logged in in quite some time. The game had definite improvements over the other MMOs I'd played, and the entire experience felt smooth, polished and refined. The game continuously gave me something to do. I don't think my quest log was ever empty, so I always felt like I was taking steps toward getting to the "end" of level 80.
I eventually got to level 80, and quit the game for a few weeks because I had nothing to do. I don't care about playing alts much, so once I "beat" the game, I felt like I was done. I later learned about the dungeon finder and the idea of gearing up, so I spent some time doing that before Cataclysm came out. I bought Cataclysm the day it came out, raced to 85 and quit. I felt like I'd beaten it again, had nothing engaging to do, and so I quit. There was more to see and do, such as max my tradeskills, but it just didn't engage me anymore for some reason. Burnout, perhaps.
Everquest: This is the big daddy of MMOs in my opinion and is one I still play, although I've started and dropped it several times.
Everquest is mostly nostalgia for me, which I freely admit. As an MMO, it is badly balanced, low on content, has a low population and is quirky. But I can't seem to give it up. Having a goal dangling in front of me is a good way to keep me engaged, and EQ does this better than WoW ever did because the goal is so freaking difficult to reach, but it still feels close enough to keep going.
When I quit WoW, the level cap was 85, and I managed to get there in what amounted to maybe 3 months of play time (ignoring time spent doing WotLK dungeons for gear). I've played EQ off and on for 7 years, and it took me until a few months ago to get to its level cap of 90. The game made me work very hard for what I got, so I felt like I really accomplished something when I leveled up.
On the other hand, that difficulty is what caused me to quit three times. The first time, I was new to the game and had no friends. I managed to get to level 12 after a few weeks of playing alone. I got bored and quickly realized it would take me years to get to 60 (the cap at the time), so I quit. A year or so later I gave it another shot. I played hard for about two years and got to level 63, at which point the level cap jumped from 65 to 70. I felt like I'd never reach that goal... and quit. Rinse and repeat a couple years later. I started back anew, got to 73 in about a year, then the cap jumped from 80 to 85. I felt liked I'd never win and quit.
The last time I started back, I was determined to not let the game beat me. I started back from where I left off the last time at 73 and powered my way to 90 (the cap). Strangely, I didn't feel like I really accomplished anything when I finally beat the game that had both haunted and filled my childhood with joy. Instead, I had a new problem: AAs. A couple of years after the game was released, they introduced the concept of alternate advancement points, or AAs. The idea is still pretty cool in my idea: you can earn alternate experience to get new abilities that not everyone will likely have. Everyone can eventually get them all, but it takes a very long time.
I currently have 3422 out of about 6750 AAs, after many months of grinding them mindlessly. I can get about 10 per day in 30 minutes of playing (about all I can afford to play these days), so I feel like I'm constantly getting something, but I did the math and that'll be another year or so before I can possibly finish them. And there's another expansion coming out that promises to add another 5 levels (joy...) and many AAs (likely over 1000). It's feeling like old times again, and I may quit if I feel like what I'm doing is pointless and I'll never finish.
To sum it up, I suppose basically I like to have things to work toward, and I get bored and quit when there's nothing more to do. I'm not sure how you can really work around that. You can add new content or ways to play, but not all players will engage in them and some will get bored. I've never really cared for player housing, free market trading between players, trade skilling, or anything like that. When I can't get better at killing things, I feel like I'm done. This is aimed at traditional MMOs, of course and something that introduced a different spin on things would likely keep me engaged longer (i.e. a Sim City like MMO where there is never a real end).
That, and dangling a carrot (level cap / AA cap / gear sets) in front of me and suddenly yanking it out further (new expansion adding new levels and gear that trivializes what you have) will tick me off. WoW did a decent job by making it easy enough to get that you didn't feel like you were racing against time like EQ, but then it drifts into the boredom territory.
I suspect this is a fundamental problem of level based games, so if you find a solution, then an award winning MMO might be your next game.
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