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New Lazy Peon video, and some thoughts on how MMOs have become lobby based games.
Vhaeyne
Member, Alpha One, Adventurer
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u_2ttuyE1Rg&ab_channel=TheLazyPeonReally good video that got me thinking. So I figured I would be social and bounce some thoughts off the forums. Anyway...
When he says that of our current MMOs, everything feels like a 5 out of 10. Man does that hit home. For me nothing has felt above a 5 or 6 out of 10 for more than a month of play since the Darkfall: New Dawns Alpha/Beta Which was like a 7 for me. The thing that really got me though was when he talked about how WOW and FFXIV could just be lobby based games, and are not massively multiplayer at all. This is true, but he only scratches the surface here.
They could very well be lobby based games, but it is somewhat worst than that. In both FFXIV and WOW it is very common to only raid with your static or guild. Unless you pug, which I do often. You don't really have a reason to meet anyone new. I have numerous people I have met pugging in both FFXIV and WOW. I only pug because I work nights, and my buddy who I tend to pug with works 3 on 4 off nights. Otherwise I would just do what the majority does and raid with only a guild/static.
So in my estimation. The average intended player experience in WOW/FFXIV is that you log in. Do the same content with the same 8 to 24 people once a week. Then do your chores with or without those people. The only opportunity to meet someone new is pug filling a slot or random solo ques, but lets face it. Most people don't meet anyone new doing random dungeons. In fact the only time I have ever thought to make a friend in a random dungeon is if someone's DPS is high for there class.
So yeah, MMOs have mostly become a lobby based game where most people don't even use the whole lobby. Open world content is a joke in most MMOs. That to me is what makes Ashes so compelling. It is not a lobby based game at all. Only 20% of the game is instanced. The open world is looking like it is going to be harsh enough to force people to work together. Guild's will need to be bigger than 8-24 man groups to get things done. Guilds will need to work together to protect and advance their node. This really is big.
As much as I like instanced raiding. I think I have come around to the idea that even if open worlds raids only would be a joke as far as mechanics are concerned. I would gladly give them up to go back to those days of fighting over a world boss in L2. Things were just more social back then. L2 was a primitive game, but it was more social than WOW. You would meet people just because they were in a spot you liked to grind.
Lazy peon said he is done with the genre is Ashes don't deliver. Personally I got my fall games. Dual Universe and Crowfall, but I do think what Ashes is trying to bring back, and advance is really important. We might not all get everything we want out of Ashes. The combat might not be as good as X game, the crafting might not be as good as X game, the economy might not be as good as EVE, but the some of the parts is looking important.
I tried to think of was to make this post shorter, but editing it only makes it longer.
So yeah, do y'all agree that current MMOs are practically lobby based games? Do you think Ashes will help change this?
If I had more time, I would write a shorter post.
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I tell my friends let's go play SCUM (and I hate shooting games) or even coop DS3. Can't be bothered with the current mmo scene.
PS.
Recently I finished playing the witcher 3 again, along with two friends new into the single player games. It was so fun.
The best game for a while, 0 lootboxes 0 cosmetics. 0 shop action. Pure passion from the devs at the time.
(And during November I played the new AC game. So boring... full of ridiculous skins. But the consumers are to blame in the end, make no mistake)
It isn't purely instancing that has caused this, though that was the very top of the slope. It was the ability to immediately travel to that instance and back to town that made MMO's little more than lobby based games.
Rather than the lower amount of instanced content, to me, it is the lack of fast travel that means Ashes doesn't immeriately fall in to this catagory. Having to travel to your content and back home again is - to me - more important than whether or not that content is walled off.
I had not thought about that. I know I am part of the problem. If you give me fast travel I will use it. I will fast if the walk is more than 30 feet in FFXIV. Contrast that to FFXI where walking across town could take like 10 minutes.
You rarely have to walk anywhere in WOW with two hearth stones. The only time it feels like a old MMO is pugging Mythic+ dungeons. You have to make a group, and walk out to the dungeon. The first two people there are already summoning normally and mounts are so fast that this feels like a shadow of the former game.
Things like no fast travel, no flying mounts( for most), local banking/markets. Are really going to help take the lobby feel out of the game.
If I had more time, I would write a shorter post.
The game NEEDS to have a mind of its own so to speak, if it does not react to players actions and change it is basically a road between lobby A and B.
I have been saying it for years, They should make this the default for dungeons and raids in WoW and any other mmo. It builds up a social aspect of the game that is lost when you can just instantly teleport out replacements whenever you want to kick little timmy out for not parsing 10/10.
Sure these tools helped you get to content faster, but it costs the very soul of the game. The players social interactions.
If you got a warlock in a WOW pug, it is a revolving door.
If I had more time, I would write a shorter post.
He seems so in love with this project.
Absolutely, and on the point of FFXIV, they do one better by banning the talking of DPS meters totally. If you bring up damage you can get banned, but are still allowed to have said dps meters if you wish. Basically this reduces the toxicity within pug groups and makes the players focus more on doing the mechanics correctly and that is much easier to teach someone to do through text than telling them how to do their dps rotations.
If I had more time, I would write a shorter post.
No pressure Intrepid
I actually miss the days where we had to run to a dungeon or someone had to go summon everyone. Meeting up in a town going through some very challenging areas to get to that dungeon. People actually communicated. Now people queue up, fly through a dungeon because it's all way too easy and the only thing they say is "GG" and leave the group xD
I honestly do not believe that someone who played Everquest, lotro, Asherons call, etc can say that they are enjoying the current popular MMO's (Wow, ff14, ESO, etc) as much as they loved the older ones.
MMO's and their devs/leadership lacks passion these days, this is why Ashes is attracting so many "seasoned MMO players" many of us miss playing a good MMO.
Now, when it comes to MMO's in general, the rise of the lobby goes hand in hand with themepark MMO's. People can't be bothered adventuring anymore, they just want the benefits of doing it, same goes for finding people worthy of adventuring with, they'd rather have the game do it for them. The blame lies with both the community and the developers.
We're all somewhat to blame for the change in direction for MMO's over the years, but in reality, "Given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of a game.".
Games have tried to get rid of some of them. I remember Elder Scrolls Online for example being called "walking simulator"
Or Star Wars The Old Republic people endlessly whining about there not being a dungeon finder tool.
It's not just the devs fault. We players are to blame for a lot of it too.
The decline, for me, started with World of Warcraft. A game which I absolutely adored, it was my first 3D mmo, the others I had played up until that point were sprite based. Oh, and as a side note. Ragnarok Online is the sprite based MMO I refer to here. They had no real fast travel to certain parts. You could memorise the teleportation network. Which I did at the time. So you could teleport (for in-game money) to different cities, and from there you had to traverse maps a dangerous undertaking for some classes. All private servers of that game now offer teleportation to the most popular levelling dungeons...
Anyway, why do I say that it started with WoW for me? Well, WoW sort of made MMOs popular. Which is why it so often comes up. But it's insidious. At first, you had to travel everywhere. Want to queue for Alterac Valley? Well, you better head on up to Hillsbrad Foothills and head North into the mountains. Warsong Gulch? Yea, go to the area in the North of the Barrens that borders with Ashenvale Forest.
You had to go out in the world with all the dangers that came with it. Of course later on they put the battlemasters in the main cities, allowing you to queue from there. So PvP suddenly mostly got done from in there. This also incorporated arenas in the expansion that came after (TBC). Oh, did I mention they destroyed sever communities practically over night by introducing crossrealm stuff? Oh, and they also made raid sizes smaller, and they made it so that gearsets now dropped in the form of tokens (a small change, but I didn't like it
Luckily, at this point you still had to travel to instances and raids to do content. However, they introduced flying. Essentially making that a non-issue, as you can fly over all dangers in your way. And all of the people who might've otherwise engaged you in PvP or not. (Flying, was a huge mistake because of these things)
Of course, several years later, during the end of the Lich King they added a tool that completely destroyed the mmo aspect.
They introduced dungeon finder. So now, you only venture out of the safe zones (cities) for levelling, daily quests and raids. Of course, it resulted into the new dungeons having to be nerfed, because you are now with random people, not friends whom you know well and have great teamwork with. And they just kept adding little quality of life changes.
But that's all well and good, we know the things that make an MMO stop feeling like an MMO. But the problem is the MMO crowd in general. Not anyone of you personally, but we as a collective. We expect, and even demand these things in our games now. Imagine having to travel to a dungeon in Ashes which might take say thirty minutes. Then you'd have to clear the dungeon, let's say it's a quick one. Forty minutes. People will already start to complain. (I don't want to have to travel all the way there, I have a job you know, I can't bring six hours a day anymore.)
We need to normalise time investment again. In FFXIV today I heard someone complain that their DPS queue had taken 20 minutes. I remember having to whisper people for two hours sometimes to try and get a group going. In fact, I did a dungeon less then an hour ago. I couldn't tell you who was on my team. I didn't remember or interact with a single one. They might have been bots for all I know.
For the MMO genre to grow again, we must first undo and repair the damage done by games like WoW
Yesterday I listened to a Frogpants podcast featuring an interview with Chris Metzen, who talked about his time at Blizzard, his retirement, and the rebirth of his passion and creativity in recent years. It really hit home for me and I recommend it to all. Passion is what makes great games. It's why I am hella excited for what Intrepid, Bonfire, Dreamhaven, Frost Giant and Warchief are working on. These guys are building worlds out of pure passion rather than for the money.
We may be in a poor spot right now with the MMO industry, and the gaming industry as a whole really, but I believe these companies will bring back heart and soul into games again, and set an example. It's really just a waiting game. It can't come soon enough.
Ashes has a lot of rails for the PvP crowd too, Open World PvP on rails. Node progression on rails, hunting certificates instead of gold drops, family teleport, no defined zones and long levelling processes.
It is true I am stoked about the game, but, the game will not be a saviour for a vast amount of people. I'm still not sure of the 50,000 Accounts per server with 10,000 active at a time. I think it will cause frustration and will drive players away.
I haven't even touched the current state of combat or the current state of the engine. I hope the game launches in 2024 because the devs need masses of time to create a saviour. I personally don't even believe games can be a saviour though, WoW rectifies some mistakes with their 'Classic Products'. I hope Ashes of Creation launches in UE5. The game looks old gen in UE4 and backward tracked than next gen or revolutionary.
I'll see if I can find the podcast you refer to. I might have seen it. I've seen the "Warchief" announcement anyway, and that was a boardgame or something, right?
Anyway, I am quoting you for the final part of your post. I don't think it is just the gaming industry, players are too used to these conveniences. If you have never had something, not having it doesn't matter. It is when someone takes away such creature comforts that you begin to feel like this game is missing something.
I do not have a ready solution for this, other than let the playerbase quit these things cold turkey style.
I suppose you could also make down-time an interesting thing.
Not touching the monetization aspect, what drove me away from the genre was how theme-parky most games are. Virtual worlds don't feel like coherent worlds and more like dressing for incremental rewards mechanics. My world exploration needs were much more satisfied in open world single player or survival games.
I fancy the big revolution for MMOs will come from either a game on one world server or something in VR. I don't think we're there yet and both ideas come with difficulties aside from the technical problems of having so many people connected. Languages barriers come to mind for the former and physical discomfort for the latter.
So, what's in the realm of the possible? Having a dynamic world in which everything except the most basics is done by the players. AoC does this with the nods and the crafting, but for a virtual world to be fully dynamic, NPCs should have their own conquest/propagation agendas. Imagine if mobs are raiding PCs cities and strongholds, what if, when left unchecked, they begin to build their own fortress or dungeon: a monster nod. (underwater mob nods would become OP AF hehe) Monsters getting better equipped as their own "crafters" progress. No static mobs waiting to be killed, but resources gatherers of their own, caravan raiders of their own. What if, when a dungeon is cleared by the players, nothing respawn in it and it crumble to ruins? Unless something else crawls in and begin to slowly get strong..?
I don't know to what scale this is possible at the moment or how desirable it is, but that would be immersive.
Not sure if many people remember, but on the old forums, threads that this game needs a dungeon finder were as prolific as "change this classes name" threads are now.
The community building aspect of having to form a group and take them to your dungeon through a PvX hostile area means people are not going to easily give up on another player. This was always one of my arguments for not having a dungeon finder, and was also one of my points against the family summons.
Basically, the less of a lobby a game is, the stronger the community can be.
It instantly reminded me of release of Hellbound in Lineage 2, hundreds of players grinding, fighting and doing hidden quests and objectives to unlock the 11 Stages of the big Hellbound island which took months to reach the final stage and for a clan to kill its final boss Beleth for the first time.
Ashes of creation shows to have alot of focus and emphasis in it's world progression node mechanics, which requires community effort, and with it's lack of fast travel, makes it feel way more socially interactive, rejecting the lobby based style.
Aren't we all sinners?
I think it largely depends on each of our experiences though. I've played MMO's for 15 years since high school and to me he has a point about the genre. MMO's are trying to be too single player friendly when the whole point was to make a community driven game where playing with others to get stuff done (for the most part) was the better way to play. As someone who plays FFXIV I feel like I am in a solo game; no emphasis to encourage group play, too many instance loading screens, and general lack of excitement. The game heavily focuses on story, which is another solo content. I don't think paying $13 a month to play alone a lot of the time is worth my time when I think the game should be free to play in that regard.
For me AoC is similar to what I want based on everything I've seen so far. I want a large open world game I can explore with friends, or meet ppl along the way, fight stuff, or fight them lol, and have this general sense of exploration on my awesome mount. As I get older, I want a game that lets me chill out, and exploring a world is just what I want to kill time.
He's burnt out on bad MMOs that don't evolve and take the genre further.
His analogy describes it perfectly, we get the same type of products with little effort to change things because that is taking a risk which companies don't like doing.
The current state of MMOs are static and are not affected or impacted by player decisions and actions which it should be if it wants to be a living breathing world. Ashes is by no means perfect but it certainly is trying to do change for the better by letting the game have more of a mind of its own as well as giving player actions meaning.
Saying to remove lobbies from an mmo ignores alot of the changes to peoples ability to communicate and gather online compared to the past. Discord exists now, you can't go back from that. If a game does not make creating or finding groups easy enough in game, it will be done outside of the game.
For example, ff14 added a new large-scale dungeon/raid in its last patch. It requires 48 people. You could just put up a listing that you are forming a party, but it will never form. The only method the community uses is pre-forming parties outside the game in discord, sometimes a day ahead of time.
I, personally, hate the idea that to play a game well or to use my time efficiently I need to join X discord to play the game. And in that viewpoint, ashes needs to have some functionality that will not encourage people to play ashes on a discord forming party server. If that means a global chat channel, or a global party finder system like ff14, ill be fine with that.
Also on the point of an mmo should be an mmo and not a lobby simulator. What is an mmo to you? Is it a long walk to a dungeon, is it meeting new people and not playing with the same people, or is it doing content with people outside of a dungeon/raid setting? I think of an mmo as a theme-park, what someone said they hated about current mmos, in that there are different things to do for different people. Bored of the raid area, go to the pvp area or the explore area. Mmos are mmos because of the size of things to do that aren't in a straight line of progression.
I did not realize that. I would have been arguing against dungeon finder myself for the same reasons. I am glad the community seems to have let that one go. I ain't seen it in the time I have been here.
Sounds sweet. I mostly played L2 in C4-C5, and a little on the start of chaotic throne, but not up till hellhound. I kind of wish I would have stuck with it, but that was kind of during a age of discovery for MMOs, and there was so much my friends wanted to try that we jumped around a lot back then. Lineage 2 always had that looming question. If you did not recognize someone's clan or name, you felt the need to talk to them out in the open world just to get a feel for if they are friend or foe. You would meet knew people just trying to feel out if they were a threat. I think AOC will have this.
If I had more time, I would write a shorter post.
He does come off as flustered sure, but he makes some good points that I think everyone in the MMO space should be considering if they are unhappy with the big three. I think it is worth the time to sit through it.
I could see how someone who likes what MMOs are today would be put off by his tone. If that is or is not you that is fine. All opinions are valid. Sometimes my friends ask me to watch stupid videos, and I have to break them up into chunks to stay current. Maybe give the rest of the video a shot in a day or so?
If I had more time, I would write a shorter post.
When playing in the mountains, it can be very difficult, but rewarding, to build a secret base by yourself.
Or you can ask a friend or a stranger child in the area. "Would you like to build a secret base with me?"
With the interaction of many people, new dramas are created.🥰
And to be honest, I don't want to actively apply words like PVP or PVE to Ashes.
Because I think those are just aspects of an MMO, a game system with infinite possibilities.
Being able to simulate social life in a fantasy world is what I want in an MMO.
For me, there is no need for so-called end contents.
I want to be an expert in crafting, so I ignore them and keep building armor.💪
End content in life is just one simple answer to doing what I want to do until the end of my life.😉
There is a fixated idea of what a mmorpg is and should be and there is no moving forth with that.
Like people trying to be revolutionary with 2000 years old tactics.
There is nothing naive in wanting a good mmo, in which the game is not revolved around instanced content.
Did you know that before ff14 there were mmos that didnt have 48man raids, or 4man dungeons, but instead they had an open world with ruins, caves, mountains, towers, volcanos, forests, glaciers etc etc that people would go into in any number of players in a group?
There was ZERO NEED for group finder tools.
If all you are used to is sitting in town end game, quickly using the group finder to port to the next instanced raid or bg, and if you are not aware that AoC intents to have mostly non instanced content, then you are the naive one to think that the issues raised are about "I can't find a group quickly enough".
Why dont you join a guild, instead of advising AoC to become another wow clone?