Future MMO's: Lessons learned from Wildstar and ESO

[Daethz]

Future Lessons from ESO:
1: Easily Exploitable Combat System for Any and All Players is bad. (The Animation Cancelling Macro Exploit to dramatically decrease time between any attacks)
2: Any leveling content should be accessible via solo playing. (V10-14 is all multi-player/group content).
3: Being Thrown into other factions storylines and having all of your achievements forgotten by your actual, home faction, is bad, and kills re-playability of the entire game.
4: When your beta and PTR testers find and mass-report major issues, you should actually fix them before releasing the game, or the patch.
(Countless bugs not fixed, reported by thousands during the beta, a big example being the summoned protectors in Stonefalls.)

[Tabbycat]

I can't speak about WildStar as I've never played it. All I can gather from it is "Don't cater to the 1%".

As for ESO, my biggest advise would be for developers to communicate to their players on their official forums. For some weird reason ZOS wants to talk about the game everywhere but their official forums.

ZOS has already done a lot with ESO to make it better. The game has significantly improved since launch and more improvements are planned. I see more and more players returning all the time.

So that tells me that the developers at WildStar can do the same thing if they can figure out why their players are leaving and be willing to make the necessary changes to the game to get them to come back.

After all, players were willing to forgive Final Fantasy Copy Pasta and embrace the relaunch of FF as A Realm Reborn.

[Deleted]

What ever future dev should learn from decades of MMOs. Leveling is not the content players are looking forward to. Endgame is. Leveling is a tutorial. So if you spend 5 years on developing the tutorial, you are morons and your game will fail because no endgame. See ESO and whatever other failed MMO you may name.

[smackyslap]

I can't speak about WildStar as I've never played it. All I can gather from it is "Don't cater to the 1%".

As for ESO, my biggest advise would be for developers to communicate to their players on their official forums. For some weird reason ZOS wants to talk about the game everywhere but their official forums.

I love eso but HAAAAAAATE the zos forums such a pain to get around well the entire website is it may not seem like a big deal but having a website layout that is not confusing or counter intuitive helps a lot to get more people posting and gaining more awareness for some issues.Another lesson to be learned? mega servers are cool and more mmos should think about using them as it really helps with the eventual decline of population.

[Deleted]

Frankly?
Lesson learned: Don't bother trying to be WoW.
Every MMO out there tries way too hard to do what WoW does.

Archage is the only one that seems like a fresh take on the genre to me.
You will NEVER do raiding and pve content better then wow.
Stop trying companies! Just focus on something else.

i think thats the best answer int the 22 site thread.
every one wants not to be WoW . they want do have the income of monthly subs like WoW

[Osmeric]

What ever future dev should learn from decades of MMOs. Leveling is not the content players are looking forward to. Endgame is. Leveling is a tutorial. So if you spend 5 years on developing the tutorial, you are morons and your game will fail because no endgame. See ESO and whatever other failed MMO you may name.

I understand there's a new MOBA-like MMO in development called "Gigantic" that ditches leveling entirely.

http://www.mmorpg.com/gamelist.cfm/gameId/1146

[Pejo]

I believe Gigantic is an arena type PvP game with the QWER abilities like most MOBA/ARPG have. I don't believe it has any MMO mechanics from what I played in the game. Played quite a bit of it at PAX. I haven't read that link though.

[Deleted]

Yeah, players have been saying this for years and the developers have pretended not to hear.

I suspect that's because the leveling process makes for a very effective timesink and the questing/etc framework that it is built on makes for easy, quick production of more timesinks down the road.

Compare that to "real" content which might take ten times - or more - the effort to make, test, tune, fix...and which many players might not bother with at all, or if they do they'll finish it in a few days.

Leveling is done once per character. It needs a lot of zones, items ... . I don't think it is a more effective timesink (in terms of time "sunk" per time spent developing) on a systemic level. It's mostly just the fact that (e.g.) raids could be made more "universal", be given more replayability and need way less development effort. Raid design is still in its infancy; there is so much streamlining to do.

[Vargas]

Nobody wants to play games like that. Takes way too much time. The average MMO gamer of today plays in sessions of 15 to 30 minutes a day, solo. That is the kind of gameplay that MMOs should cater to if they want to have millions of players. Basically "World of FlappyBird".

Just like no one wants Vanilla/TBC WoW; if they did games like WildStar would have been successful.

[Deleted]

Eh, quest creation doesn't require too much effort once you've got the framework set up. Especially in your "typical" MMO right now where almost every quest is a copy-paste gather/kill sort of thing and the mobs involved don't get much in the way of tuning or scripts complex enough to break/bug.

For many players, even leveling one character ends up taking a significant amount of time. Combine that with alts, and leveling alone probably makes up a huge chunk of time spent in-game for the combined playerbase. Plus once you have that questing framework set up, it's easy to just keep churning out "content" in the form of dailies, rep grinds, and so on to keep people plugging away.

Yeah, maybe it's not less effective, but still: The gap between gates and real content could be made much smaller, especially when you consider quality. I could just copy-paste your first part and adapt it:

Eh, raid creation doesn't require too much effort once you've got the framework set up. Especially in your "typical" MMO right now where almost every raid is a copy-paste nuke/heal/tank/... sort of thing and the mobs involved don't get much in the way of tuning or scripts complex enough to break/bug.

Do you see what I did there?

[Deleted]

It seems much easier now, but what I'm getting at is that the gap could be considerably smaller.

"Amount" of players: Different content modes (like in WoW but more fleshed out), "self-tuning" encounters (see below).
Length: See above, also the possibility to keep old content relevant.
Ease of tuning etc.: Carefully laid out roles and classes (btw, they should correspond directly to each other), "self-tuning" encounters (think Challenge Mode encounters - the difficulty scales "automatically" by means of secondary objectives). Also, better reward structure.

[Deleted]

Seems most players don't like change, GW2 found that out in early alpha, at the start they intended to have nothing to indicate a quest giver, leaving it up to the player to find and sort! But found lots of players could not accept or enjoy having no bread crumb or easy reference points.

[Edge-]

Seems most players don't like change, GW2 found that out in early alpha, at the start they intended to have nothing to indicate a quest giver, leaving it up to the player to find and sort! But found lots of players could not accept or enjoy having no bread crumb or easy reference points.

There's a difference between "not liking change" and "wanting to have some kind of direction".

[Ryme]

What ever future dev should learn from decades of MMOs. Leveling is not the content players are looking forward to. Endgame is. Leveling is a tutorial. So if you spend 5 years on developing the tutorial, you are morons and your game will fail because no endgame. See ESO and whatever other failed MMO you may name.

This is pretty much the only game I would leave WoW for. Levelling fucking sucks, no MMO has ever given me a fun levelling experience, I don't want them to try any more. I want to raid, dungeon and have the option for questing if I feel like it.

[Okacz]

Just like no one wants Vanilla/TBC WoW; if they did games like WildStar would have been successful.

Wildstar completly missed the point of Vanilla WoW. Instead of having a long, journey-like leveling experiance, they made a linear "road to max level". Instead of giving varied content for everybody as endgame, they designed it around only a small % of players. Instead of letting players choose their own pace, they gated a lot of things with no particular reason.

[Deleted]

This is pretty much the only game I would leave WoW for. Levelling fucking sucks, no MMO has ever given me a fun levelling experience, I don't want them to try any more. I want to raid, dungeon and have the option for questing if I feel like it.

The thing is, they aren't even trying. As Bovinity Divinity put it, it's meant to be an easily created timesink. Many MMO developers seem to be content (oh the irony) with altering small parts or cycling through popular concepts. I guess that's the reason most of the games they create wither away. For a game to be the "next big thing", it would need to address fundamental problems with today's systems (power progression; "protecting players from themselves" - e.g. lockouts; encounters having a set difficulty level; gating; ...). Oh well, as long as they still make money, it's not going to change.

There are, of course, a few games that innovate somewhat (GW2, lots of smaller MMOs), but they barely scratch the surface of this mess.