Min-Maxers will ruin every server's storyline

I was thinking on the question:

How will Intrepid prevent the min-maxing mentality from ruining the storyline progression?

Once min-maxers find certain classes to be op they'll look for items that unlock from specific storyline progression paths. This will make most servers basically just go through the same storyline just because min-maxing mentality which always overwhelms all multiplayer games and forces even lots of casuals to conform to it in order to have fun in pvp and pve.

This will ruin the whole idea about different storylines on different servers etc. etc.

This is a big big feature of the game and it seems that it'll die quickly as soon as min-maxers make enough progression and wiki sites get filled with information about storyline progression related items.

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daveywavey

You get an army together and you raze their node to the ground.

daveywavey

Happy Birthday, by the way.

Arya_Yeshe

Birthday wrote: »

I was thinking on the question:

How will Intrepid prevent the min-maxing mentality from ruining the storyline progression?

Once min-maxers find certain classes to be op they'll look for items that unlock from specific storyline progression paths. This will make most servers basically just go through the same storyline just because min-maxing mentality which always overwhelms all multiplayer games and forces even lots of casuals to conform to it in order to have fun in pvp and pve.

This will ruin the whole idea about different storylines on different servers etc. etc.

This is a big big feature of the game and it seems that it'll die quickly as soon as min-maxers make enough progression and wiki sites get filled with information about storyline progression related items.

Declare war on them, min their kills and max their deaths

Zainox

I worry about the same thing. If enough players go down the same route, it's gonna be easy to force areas constantly down a certain route, once that route has been discovered. I hope they give enough time to test this to avoid it being too easily manipulated by one side.

Liniker

as a min-maxer, I can confirm we all get together before a new MMO launch and plan how can we ruin the experience for all the filthy casuals, and we have big plans for Ashes of Creation.

Mag7spy

On paper based on what i see from the designs it will be a while before that happens based on node progression and how often you can even destroy those nodes to build new ones over time.

People will try to get the best gear with exact sets but that will be far down the road when a lot of things are tested since there is going to be a lot of discovery in the game and will need a equal amount of time before you can min max all that.

Voxtrium

Every single game I have ever played I have played that hosted a competitive mode I have played extremely competitively. As a result I have learned the "meta" every time and followed it as it changed after each patch.

My experience with a meta is that it is merely a class or synergy design that has the most advantages over the most broad range possible. It is not always the actual best setup, creating a meta will always happen, it is easier to lookup a build than to make one after all. In fact many times the new meta was several patches ago but nobody finds it until a few weeks or sometimes longer have passed. Of course IS should still aim to create as diverse a set of classes as possible that all have important synergies that encourages class differentiation and build differences, but don't worry that there will be a meta or believe that there shouldn't. There will always be a meta, lets just hope IS has designed the classes so that there are appropriate ways to deal with it.

Meta is usually just what is believed as the min/max or " a class or synergy design that has the most advantages over the most broad range possible"

Azherae

I don't think this is guaranteed.

One thing that YouTube is really useful for, in gaming, is making a reference guide for things, not even necessarily for 'clout', but simply for your small group and anyone who wishes to join it.

Basically, if someone makes a 'Mage Build Guide' it is sometimes just because otherwise it will take them hours to explain the same principles over and over to someone who asks them, if they want to be helpful.

For a properly competitive game, those players have no reason to make those videos/guides easily accessible to the public, they have some secrets they want to keep, or maybe they need to break a misconception about something that others have, which is then holding them back.

Diverse game means everyone's min-maxing their own build, and if the best players share it, it's no different than if Average Joe shares it. Anyone who doesn't 'understand on their own' will just look for someone to teach them.

If anything you'd have to worry that the 'masses' are strong enough by sheer numbers and randomness that they shut down other people just by pushing whatever their current belief is, but this isn't really about min-maxers, and therefore it'd probably be different by server.

WeGbored

Azherae wrote: »

For a properly competitive game, those players have no reason to make those videos/guides easily accessible to the public, they have some secrets they want to keep, or maybe they need to break a misconception about something that others have, which is then holding them back.

But alas, if it is properly competitive then it can actually be beneficial to purposefully put out misinformation in an effort to maintain an advantage.

A lot of people zonk out before ever even thinking this way, though.

Azherae

WeGbored wrote: »

Azherae wrote: »

For a properly competitive game, those players have no reason to make those videos/guides easily accessible to the public, they have some secrets they want to keep, or maybe they need to break a misconception about something that others have, which is then holding them back.

But alas, if it is properly competitive then it can actually be beneficial to purposefully put out misinformation in an effort to maintain an advantage.

A lot of people zonk out before ever even thinking this way, though.

I think this only helps when you are trying to rise to the top of a pyramid, and even then, it just causes discordance, which would break up much of the 'min-maxer meta' that I think @Birthday is concerned about.

But I haven't played a balanced competitive MMO ... probably ever. So it's just speculation...

McShave

There are many aspects to the design of this game that I think will help prevent meta gamers from ruining the casual experience.

If there are so many choices when it comes to character builds, then there will be so many possible "best" builds depending on the circumstances you face. We know that there will be a rock-paper-scissors design when it comes to 1v1 combat, so no 1 class should be "best". Also, the game will be focused on group-based balancing, so when we talk about "best builds", we should really focus on what is the best team comp builds.

If we don't know how to do everything before release, we can't ruin the progression of servers at release. It's up to Intrepid to test all the game systems without actually just giving us access to the release version of the game during the betas.

Also, combat is the most important part of this game, but there will be a lot of other activities that you can focus on (and you can't do them all, so you have to pick). This system is counter intuitive to meta gaming, because you will need all the parts but wont be able to provide them for yourself. Things in this category include the 3 trees of artisan skills, focusing on trading and building wealth, engaging in politics based gameplay (mayors), to name a few.

Birthday

Honestly all this min-maxing stuff is what ruins the genre in my opinion.

I like the notion of what Azherae said about keeping secrets. Unfortunately it's never like that. Min maxes often get exposed or shared to the public.

Min maxing destroys the "RPG" element of MMORPGs. Minx maxing forces everyone to play the game like it's not an RPG but like it's a MMOExcelSheet. Everyone just looks up formulas and tries to copy paste them on their sheet in hopes that they'll have the most functional and optimal Excel sheet.

Don't get me wrong - it's not that I dislike hardcore gamers and theory crafters. I love them because they add a very fun feel when you play a MMORPGs. They are these walking raid bosses that absolutely shit on you no matter what you try to do. It's quite amazing. However the problem is that nowadays everyone tries to be a min-maxer and min-maxing secrets are very widely and openly shared, so everyone has pretty much the same "most optimal" build. So now there no longer are any of these walking gods. Most battles are most of the time very close and victory mostly boils down to a very slight mechanical skill advantage or very slight gear advantage or just a lucky crit.

This makes the whole PvP aspect of every MMORPG just feel utter trash really because everyone is like a 1%-er. There is no longer that feeling of getting absolutely shit-faced in PvP by someone. Which leaves you wondering what the hell just happened. You get me? There no longer is any spice in the PvP. I'd equate this to "success" in real life. Like success doesn't strike everyone because "success" in the sense of career, financial, glamerous life success, is something that requires a lot of work, energy, devotion and skill to achieve, most of the time. Which is why successful people are rare. This rarity creates a very big awe in you in moment that you meet them in real life. The feeling of star-struck. That's what min-maxing has killed in MMORPGs. There no longer is that feeling of meeting someone with a mad build & skills because everyone is building the same thing and trying to get good at the same playstyle. You are meeting many different players but you are always experiencing the same PvP experience.

Hopefully Intrepid builds AoC to be a MMO with very nice rock-paper-scissor type of mechanic which they promised to do. This is really the only hope to dampen the effect on the game that min-maxers have. Because they can build their class min-maxed to the max but as long as you counter them you'll have a good fighting. So this will basically make min-maxing viable only in cases where it's same class vs same class or class vs class which are not hard-counters to each other.

However saying this doesn't give me much hope cuz when I think about rock-paper-scissor games - I think of League of Legends. Where Riot has been trying to make LoL a rock-paper-scissor game since the beginning but has never really succeeded in doing so because some champs they release just have over-whelmingly over-loaded kits which always skews the balance towards playing them.

I think something that should be removed is the ability to inspect other player's gear & talent builds. This aids min-maxing culture a lot, makes it very hard to keep secrets from people. To top it all of it destroys the social part of MMORPGs because this is a mechanic which makes it so you don't have to socialize with people in order to find their secrets - you just have to click inspect on them & screenshot.

@Azherae My biggest worry is that we wont see different storyline progressions on different servers because everyone will be min-maxing the one and the same world-story progression path because they know it unlocks the best stat items for the current meta. This is a big turn off for me because I really like the idea that Steven is pitching about the choices that players make that will impact the world and storyline and ultimately there will be multiple possible endings and multiple storylines, each being good, bad or somewhere in between. I really love this idea because it really brings the RPG back in the MMORPG genre and I'd like to be able to experience this to the max by casually playing AoC with many alts on many servers in order to see and experience all the different choices and storylines and endings. Min-maxing can easily ruin this - every server might end up following the same or mostly similar choice-path and storyline path because of min-maxing.

Azherae

@Birthday - I definitely agree that 'inspecting' other players is a problem.

I guess I'm not likely to understand your feelings as much since I'm a fighting game analyst/tryhard and those games are entirely 'small mechanical skills and such'.

I do get the feeling you're talking about in Predecessor but... well that's a long story that's only slightly related.

I have faith that Intrepid can make diverse and varied builds and classes. I've played and poked and 'built' enough games to know the principles of it and there's nothing obviously concerning about what we've seen so far other than 'lack of more of it'.

They also have many other options for moving the min-max 'part' of it out of the Server story. What I mean to say is, it seems to me that it would be more likely that someone would build a playstyle they really like and then do their best to find the Nodes/bosses where that playstyle is effective, not the other way around.

I think the stronger players on a server will determine what the server looks like, unless 'an army of carbon copy YouTube Knights' is enough to stop that. And if that's the case, it won't matter, popularity will win.

Noaani

Birthday wrote: »

Honestly all this min-maxing stuff is what ruins the genre in my opinion.

I like the notion of what Azherae said about keeping secrets. Unfortunately it's never like that. Min maxes often get exposed or shared to the public.

EQ2 had a lot of secrets.

The game had inspection of gear, so your gear waws never much of a secret. We also used to talk a lot about builds, sharing and giving each other suggestions and stuff. So that part was never a secret.

The secrets came in to it with content, even today you can't find complete information on raid bosses from almost 20 years ago. This is what was kept secret simply because this is what mattered the most in that game. The way you opted to take on a specific encounter would determine whether you had a chance at killing it, or just thought you had a chance at killing it.

Since the game had some raid encounters that were a competition between guilds on the server, we didn't want to assist other guilds with their raiding strategies, as that would lead to them potentially being able to beat us on one of these encounters.

If a game is properly competitive, and there are rewards to be had for succeeding in that competitive aspect of it, then there will be some secrets in regards to that specific aspect.

On the other hand, in a game like WoW where your guild is literally functioning in a vacuum in regards to any other guild, there is no real reason to keep secrets. People are more inclined to share everything - because there is no reason to not share everything.

All of this is applied more to PvE than PvP, but that is because in PvP the thing that matters the most is how many players you bring along - not what their gear or build is.

As to your concern - you say min-maxers will ruin the story of a given server. What you seem to think is that we will pick a node state and attempt to stay there. It would be bad game design if Intrepid had a single node state as being optimal. Rather, there will be many different node states a server could be in, and min-maxers will want to hit each of them, in time.

As such, min-maxers will be a part of the mix that is causing node state change on a server - in other words, we are a part of the servers story.

Voxtrium

[quote="Birthday;c-395179"My biggest worry is that we wont see different storyline progressions on different servers because everyone will be min-maxing the one and the same world-story progression path because they know it unlocks the best stat items for the current meta. This is a big turn off for me because I really like the idea that Steven is pitching about the choices that players make that will impact the world and storyline and ultimately there will be multiple possible endings and multiple storylines, each being good, bad or somewhere in between. I really love this idea because it really brings the RPG back in the MMORPG genre and I'd like to be able to experience this to the max by casually playing AoC with many alts on many servers in order to see and experience all the different choices and storylines and endings. Min-maxing can easily ruin this - every server might end up following the same or mostly similar choice-path and storyline path because of min-maxing.[/quote]

I would doubt that servers will go after the optimal nodes.
One because most people will care about their builds but if legendary items are truly rare than any 1 player getting them is unlikely and thus which node hits level 6 or not barely matters to the average player and thus will not be the target of their efforts in terms of min/maxing.
Second because I will not do that on my server unless the system is HORRIBLY balanced and I am a standard player when it comes to desires for in game.

Fantmx

If the servers don't start the same how will they progress the same?

And there is no stopping min/max lovers.

Solvryn

Birthday wrote: »

I was thinking on the question:

How will Intrepid prevent the min-maxing mentality from ruining the storyline progression?

Once min-maxers find certain classes to be op they'll look for items that unlock from specific storyline progression paths. This will make most servers basically just go through the same storyline just because min-maxing mentality which always overwhelms all multiplayer games and forces even lots of casuals to conform to it in order to have fun in pvp and pve.

This will ruin the whole idea about different storylines on different servers etc. etc.

This is a big big feature of the game and it seems that it'll die quickly as soon as min-maxers make enough progression and wiki sites get filled with information about storyline progression related items.

Disclaimer: I didn't bother with the rest of the conversation.

Metas will disproportionately affect games where they are statistics heavy than not, comes with the territory. If you want to soften the affect of metas. Then embrace more angles, movement, aiming, precision in the combat. Where a skill doesn't matter if the player doesn't have the talent to apply it.

Kilion

Birthday wrote: »

I was thinking on the question:

How will Intrepid prevent the min-maxing mentality from ruining the storyline progression?

Once min-maxers find certain classes to be op they'll look for items that unlock from specific storyline progression paths. This will make most servers basically just go through the same storyline just because min-maxing mentality which always overwhelms all multiplayer games and forces even lots of casuals to conform to it in order to have fun in pvp and pve.

This will ruin the whole idea about different storylines on different servers etc. etc.

This is a big big feature of the game and it seems that it'll die quickly as soon as min-maxers make enough progression and wiki sites get filled with information about storyline progression related items.

The whole concern is based on the premise that there will be one or a few quite similar "OP" classes.

And if you think that Intrepid is unable to ensure that this is not the case, withhold your dollars until the Beta. Because if that turns out to be as unbalanced as NWs gauntlets were... well GG.

Me personally, I believe that there is a good chance that the offensive equipment such an "OP" class would need will be found in a different spot than the protective gear to protect from their natural enemies (see Game Balance & Rock-Paper-Scissors on the Wiki) so that the "meta" will not be able to hold up simply due to economic reasons.

Birthday

Cool info.

Easier said than done I'd say. But considering this game has been "coming out" for a decade now I'd hope that they at least dont fuck it up. Ya know

Noaani

Birthday wrote: »

But considering this game has been "coming out" for a decade now I'd hope that they at least dont fuck it up. Ya know

6 years - not a decade.

And further, it has been "in development" for 6 years, not "coming out". They are very different statements.

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