🚀 go-pugleaf

David Lamb <dal...@cs.queensu.ca> looked up from reading the entrails of
the porn spammer to utter  "The Augury is good, the signs say:

>On 31/07/2013 8:24 AM, Markus Sch�fer wrote:
>> Second, the introduction of the Raid Finder seems to undermine even
>> further the sense of Instances as places within a simulated continuous
>> landscape (note, however, that I see the navigation INSIDE the Instances
>> as a separate topic).
>
>That's true of my only MMO, LotRO, as well. The Instance Finder totally 
>disconnects the instances from the landscape. It's not just instances. A 
>lot of the time people just want to get someplace fast, and get annoyed 
>when there's no "fast travel" option available. They put their character 
>on a "slow horse" to the appropriate town and go make a cup of coffee.

This was partially true of City of Heroes.
It had a train system to transport you to difference zones, BUT, there
were 2 different lines and zones that weren't on either AND missions
were often crafted to force you to cross multiple zones, then return to
the contact that gave it to you, who then sent you right back.

Later more stations were added and the two lines combined.


Loads of people left the game fairly early because of all the excess
travel.  You could spend 10+ minutes running to an instanced mission
that took you 5 minutes to complete, then 10 minutes getting back, then
get sent right back to the same location.
Example: A contact in Founder's Falls sends you to Crey's Folly for a
mission, you ...
Cross FF to the zone transition point, cross to Talos Island zone, cross
half the zone to the train station, take train to Brickstown, cross
about a third of the zone to the transition to Crey's Folly, cross
however much of the zone required to reach the mission entrance -
usually at least 80%.  Every zone transition has a loading time which
could be a couple minutes long on a slower computer.
Do the mission, then retrace your steps, only to get sent right back to
the exact same location.  
You spent more time traveling than you did playing.

Most MMOs try to slow down player leveling because once you max out a
characters level there's not much to do - you're no longer making any
progress so further play seems pointless.
The more grindy the game is the less likely people want to start a new
character and do it all over again.
Yes some games have raiding, but again, since you're not actually
gaining anything...
Some games have special gear that's only available at max level, but
again, since there's no actual point in playing the character further
since you're no longer leveling at all, why bother?

Go raiding to get the special stuff only available through raiding to
make you marginally stronger for ... raiding.
It's an end-game people only play because they can't face the
horrendous, monotonous slog of walking around between things that will
actually level another character.

CoH was different in that there were multiple classes and powersets and
the feel of them was very different and doing the same old missions on a
different class or powerset made for a different experience and you
could successfully solo ANY class/powerset combo.

Can you think of another MMO where people might (and some people did)
have 50 or 60 or more characters?
There were people at the end who had dozens of max level characters.

I made _hundreds_ of characters over the years and had dozens when CoH
shut down.

>> Afterwards, Instances seem to rapidly lose their meaning as
>> parts of the geography of the world. They are increasingly treated as
>> acts which are performed repeatedly in the service of improving the
>> character, helping the guild etc.
>
>I'd agree with this. I was slow to level my characters; by the time I 
>got to the point of doing repeatable instances, most of my fellow 
>players seem to have adopted this attitude.

Where's the fun in walking long distances?

Yeah it would make for a short book or movie if the heroes could jump
directly to the end, but would you actually want to play all the endless
walking in Lord of the Rings or something like David Eddings Belgariad
(which had lots of action and also _Months_ of encounterless travel.)

I used to play D&D back in the day, and actually roleplaying travel was
boring as hell if there were no random encounters (which since they were
random sometimes you got none - you could play for a couple hours and
have NOTHING HAPPEN.)
Hardcore players who followed every rule could have entire play sessions
where nothing happened.  
My High School actually had a very short lived D&D club that did this -
the first session was people making characters since a lot of them had
no exposure whatsoever to the game, the second session was travelling to
the destination...we didn't get there and nothing happened;  Walk, roll
for random encounter - nothing, set up camp, set watches, roll for
encounters - nothing happens, walk some more roll for encounter -
nothing happens... for 2 hours.

There was no third session as the consensus was that watching paint dry
would be far more exciting.
That was my first try at D&D, I didn't play again until years later when
new friends got me into it and they had to talk mighty fast to convince
me to try it again.

This got translated into CRPGs and then MMOs and thankfully is going the
fuck away, because pointless travel IS. NOT. FUN.

Bottom line, people who are paying a fee to play, want to actually play
something other than a walking simulator.


If you were a tourist wanting to go see something on another continent,
wouldn't you like to skip the many hours long plane ride where nothing
happens?

Lord of the Rings would be far less EPIC and far more boring if they
traveled over the same ground again and again and again and...
It's only an EPIC story because it's a one time trip and that doesn't
work in MMOs because they don't want to craft a landscape and such that
you'll only see once.

Xocyll