Fundamental problem with MMOs I want Ashes to Avoid

I created a video on my thoughts kind of ad-libbing and saying them out loud, but I would like to expand on it.

Referenced video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uqHzf2y4dNY

TL;DW: The main fundamental problem with MMOs can be listed as two things that have one single root cause: Vertical gear progression creates unfair PvP/Easy raiding and kills player retention.

Vertical gear progression is a band-aid fix to keep player retention that has a contradicting theme, which de-stabilizes balance for new/returning players making player retention outside the main player-base impossible.

Pre-50 Issues:

Prior to max-character-level (or what I refer to as "end game content") the balance lies within the absolute chaotic imbalance. Now, I understand that this is more reminiscent to "real life" where you will meet characters who are stronger, more experienced, and wealthier than you and some that you have above them. This can be fun and interactive gameplay, but when you have core mechanical systems like caravans, sieges, etc. you can see the issue of gear/level discrepancies in a video game and can predict how players will react.

"Oh this is complete bull****", "this guy is level 40 attacking a level 10 caravan, what a loser", "This is stupid and not fun.", etc.

In my example it's a bit hyperbolic and I think if a level 40 is attacking a level 10 caravan, then by all means, he probably is going to win that encounter. But I want to at least address one thing: if there are ten level 10s, and one level 40, I think that the level 40 should have a chance to lose that battle. And that's where GEAR progression is really terrible in MMOs. You are essentially Pay2Win even in a non-P2W game because you're paying time and gold in order to get gear that allows you to steal resources from other players that make you unkillable.

So the direction I would like to see from Intrepid is that gear is not king and that skill is king. It should be hard for ten level 10's to kill a level 40 player, but it should be possible. There should be counter-play in the leveling process. Not only in 8v8's and raids, but there should be counter-playability in 1v1s. This means that even if you lose in the triangle of power, you can still survive an encounter if you spec the right abilities and use the right timings, etc. I don't think the "Rock, paper, scizzors" approach is necessarily wrong. I just think sometimes Rock should be able to escape paper when played absolutely skillfully and that paper can avoid scizzors if it's moving through the wind and the person with scizzors has bad hand-eye-coordination.

Post-50 "End Game Content" Issues:

If you were to put a soft-cap or hard-cap on gear progression I think a lot of these issues would at least be quelled a little. An example of a soft-cap would be like item-enchantments, where it could get stronger potentially, but the amount of time and resources it would take would be very costly and it still benefits the players who put a lot of time and resources into the game. That is actually a cool game mechanics that rewards players for hard work. Doing the same dungeon/raid over and over and over again until you get a new raid/dungeon that gives better and better gear creates "gate-keeping." I explain in the video why gate-keeping is natural, but basically it's because the people at the top are maximizing their time and minimizing their pain of teaching new/returning players mechanics or don't want to prog through raids/dungeons and will only pick the best of the best player-base, which again, kills new/returning player retention.

It seems developers run into the issue of "How do we keep player retention? Just give them better shit." and it's a slow cancerous band-aid fix to an infection that won't go away with just a band-aid. Variable progression (Nodes, XP debt, etc.) is a good way to combat this failure of a system in gear vertical progression. However, if you simply just allow gear to be king and make it so positively rare to get end-game items and materials, you will lose the casuals and Nodes will no longer be variable progression, there just won't be any progression with no player-base.

Now, I don't think Ashes is made to be "balanced" but you have to give some semblance of balance to be successful. There needs to be a balance team who looks at all these things and a system designed around this failure of a system. I'm not good at math, otherwise I would sign up. My skill-set is figuring out where problems exist and trying to find ways conceptually resolve these issues. So I have no idea how to fix this issue. But I don't want Ashes of Creation to fall into this pitfall of a trap.

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Comments

Noaani

I find your take to be incorrect.

Gear progression is the core of what MMORPG's are about in terms of mechanics. It isn't a band aid, it is the body other band aids are applied to.

In your example above, the issue is that those level 10 players are trying to run a caravan as level 10 players.

Games shouldn't compensate for players making stupid decisions like this - they should punish those players so they make better decisions next time.

Lloyd

Noaani wrote: »

I find your take to be incorrect.

Gear progression is the core of what MMORPG's are about in terms of mechanics. It isn't a band aid, it is the body other band aids are applied to.

I find this to be the main issue and why MMOs fail. Just because it's been the way forever doesn't mean it's not a problem. Gear score is fundamentally a cop-out for player skill.

Noaani

Lloyd wrote: »

Noaani wrote: »

I find your take to be incorrect.

Gear progression is the core of what MMORPG's are about in terms of mechanics. It isn't a band aid, it is the body other band aids are applied to.

I find this to be the main issue and why MMOs fail. Just because it's been the way forever doesn't mean it's not a problem. Gear score is fundamentally a cop-out for player skill.

I mean, EQ is still around and it basically invented this.

WoW is still around, and it took this idea and turned it up to 11.

So, I'm not sure what you're talking about here.

Lloyd

Not sure why mentioning games that aren't fun to play (in my opinion) but retain a player base because they have a sunk-cost fallacy addiction to these games disproves anything I said.

Lost Ark has this issue. WoW has this issue as well. People play the expansion and quit. They are disillusioned with horizontal progression and a shiny new dungeon that gives them... what? a higher gear score? And then once they get their gear score to max then they quit? Is that why WoW's PvP scene is in shambles?

Once again, the band-aid fix is that the devs are keeping player retention by "giving more shit" for players to "feel good" and get dopamine of "hehe number went up" instead of fun gameplay.

Individuated Soul

I understand your point but still think your conclusion is slightly wrong. The problem isn't vertical progression but too much vertical progression. I would also diagnose the main problem being that it kills older content. It's ok for a game to reward people who invest more time, use their skill to overcome challenges and be rewarded. It doesn't make it unfair. If the game is good then seeing people decked out in game is motivating as it gives something to aspire to. Ofc that feeling becomes meaningless if the jumps in 'item score' are too much and too often. Then you feel like you're on a loot treadmill where progress and effort is one patch from being garbage (cough WoW). Managing the power creep is critical, and there should be a healthy ratio between horizontal and vertical content creation.

Typing on phone so keeping my points short.

Lloyd

Individuated Soul wrote: »

I understand your point but still think your conclusion is slightly wrong. The problem isn't vertical progression but too much vertical progression. I would also diagnose the main problem being that it kills older content. It's ok for a game to reward people who invest more time, use their skill to overcome challenges and be rewarded. It doesn't make it unfair. If the game is good then seeing people decked out in game is motivating as it gives something to aspire to. Ofc that feeling becomes meaningless if the jumps in 'item score' are too much and too often. Then you feel like you're on a loot treadmill where progress and effort is one patch from being garbage (cough WoW). Managing the power creep is critical, and there should be a healthy ratio between horizontal and vertical content.

Typing on phone so keeping my points short.

I actually agree with you. I just think in the longevity you will lose new player retention if vertical progression keeps jumping passed end-game content and new/returning players are gate-kept from Node sieges, raids, castle sieges, caravans, etc. because of gear score.

Ludullu

As the resident gatekeeper I completely disagree with any caps (except for in instanced arenas).

But I agree that there should be some balancing. And imo a tighter gear scaling achieves that.

As for skill/gear stuff. That's already somehow ~50/50, so I'd say that's a balanced as you gonna get in a tab/hybrid game.

Lloyd

NiKr wrote: »

As the resident gatekeeper I completely disagree with any caps (except for in instanced arenas).

Even soft-caps like item-enchantments? Or infinite leveling, but with minimal stat increases per level?

Diamaht

Lloyd wrote: »

Not sure why mentioning games that aren't fun to play (in my opinion) but retain a player base because they have a sunk-cost fallacy addiction to these games disproves anything I said.

Lost Ark has this issue. WoW has this issue as well. People play the expansion and quit. They are disillusioned with horizontal progression and a shiny new dungeon that gives them... what? a higher gear score? And then once they get their gear score to max then they quit? Is that why WoW's PvP scene is in shambles?

Once again, the band-aid fix is that the devs are keeping player retention by "giving more shit" for players to "feel good" and get dopamine of "hehe number went up" instead of fun gameplay.

The issue is that the games he's mentioning are at the top of the MMO list, and continue to be there after all these years. Where games that focus on horizontal gear progression, like GW2 and Star Wars the Old Republic, tend to be much further down the list.

These are all games that had large budgets, plenty of marketing and many years to iterate. There are sunk costs for all of them. So on an even playing field linear progression games rise and horizontal progression games fall.

I like horizontal progression in games, and hope there is a lot of that in Ashes but your statement that its a fundamental flaw and not popular is disproven by two and a half decades of evidence.

Ludullu

Lloyd wrote: »

Even soft-caps like item-enchantments? Or infinite leveling, but with minimal stat increases per level?

The "cap" would already be there due to ever-decreasing chances of success. Will someone at some point get an insanely high OE on some low-mid item? Sure. But imo that simply makes for a better game history. Singular highly OEd don't have that much of an impact in a game that's meant to be balanced around party gameplay.

Individuated Soul

I've semi posted a solution to this problem in the item drop thread. Here is part of my answer

Individuated Soul wrote: »

If I was to design the system, I would create a crafting system that will eventually be overlayed on to the world. Simply put, merging Factorio (the mods not base game) crafting systems in to a MMORGP world. Here is a link for "The Full Pyanodon's Space Science Flowchart" : https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/12w2w3i/the_full_pyanodons_space_science_flowchart/

This essentially creates a pyramid like system that will drive long term gameplay. Basic materials will always in some way feed higher tier crafting so that there is a place for all gameplay focuses. Additionally, adding horizontal or higher tier recipes through the lifecycle of the game should be simpler as well since all the interdependencies are clearly defined.

In this system, all tiers of content would always matter and continuous vertical content can be accommodated. The game must be viewed through the lens of material and upper recipes must require lower recipes that eventually gets back to the basic materials in some way. This allows newer players completing older content to always have a place since the materials still hold value. It also keeps older content relevant, solving a main problem of vertical content.

Lloyd

Individuated Soul wrote: »

This essentially creates a pyramid like system that will drive long term gameplay. Basic materials will always in some way feed higher tier crafting so that there is a place for all gameplay focuses. Additionally, adding horizontal or higher tier recipes through the lifecycle of the game should be simpler as well since all the interdependencies are clearly defined.

I love this idea.

Noaani

Lloyd wrote: »

Not sure why mentioning games that aren't fun to play (in my opinion) but retain a player base because they have a sunk-cost fallacy addiction to these games disproves anything I said.

I always call out bullshit on these forums when I see it, and you need to stop making up bullshit. This is the second piece of absolute bullshit from you in two posts.

If EQ or WoW were retaining their playerbase due to sunk-cost fallacy, why are WoW classic and EQ TLP servers so popular? Both are literally servers where you have to drop any cost you may have sunk in to the game and you start again.

Fact is, you are objectively wrong that vertical progression is what kills MMORPG's, and the above games are examples. Your claim that those games are only still alive due to sunk-cost is objectively incorrect, as is evidenced by the classic/TLP servers for each game.

Yes, people often start playing WoW, progress their character until they can't progress any more, and then stop playing that game. This is perhaps the only thing you have said in your two posts in reply to me that is actually correct.

However, think about what you are saying. People are coming to WoW, playing WoW, progressing in WoW, and then leaving WoW when they can't progress any longer.

The issue isn't that vertical progress exists, the issue is when players hit the end of vertical progression and have nothing else left to do.

Mag7spy

Caravan point is interesting with level difference. Makes me wonder at what point would a player be needing to run caravans as a crafter. Not so much for launch but after for new players and if that thing will be viable for them.

I don't really want to get too deep in this though, but something i hadn't really thought about.

Noaani

Mag7spy wrote: »

Caravan point is interesting with level difference. Makes me wonder at what point would a player be needing to run caravans as a crafter. Not so much for launch but after for new players and if that thing will be viable for them.

I don't really want to get too deep in this though, but something i hadn't really thought about.

I would be surprised if there was a need to run caravans as a crafter at all.

Obviously someone will need to run them - just not the crafter, or at least not necessarily the crafter.

Mag7spy

Noaani wrote: »

Mag7spy wrote: »

Caravan point is interesting with level difference. Makes me wonder at what point would a player be needing to run caravans as a crafter. Not so much for launch but after for new players and if that thing will be viable for them.

I don't really want to get too deep in this though, but something i hadn't really thought about.

I would be surprised if there was a need to run caravans as a crafter at all.

Obviously someone will need to run them - just not the crafter, or at least not necessarily the crafter.

There is too much idk at the moment. I guess we will find out together in A2

HybridSR

Lloyd wrote: »

TL;DW: The main fundamental problem with MMOs can be listed as two things that have one single root cause: Vertical gear progression creates unfair PvP/Easy raiding and kills player retention.

No. PvP is unfair. It should be unfair.

If we have a REALLY good player that has amazing skills but can't play the game much vs a terrible player that has 2x better gear because he has 24 hours a day to play the game, what's going to happen MOST of the times is that the good player will have to severely outplay the terrible player many MANY times or he will lose in 5 seconds. Is that fair? No, it's not.

What if the good player wins? The no life terrible player is going to be like "what's the point in farming this amazing gear if this random who barely logs in can run circles around me, dodge everything I throw at him and beat me?"

Being beaten by someone a lot worse than you isn't fair. Being beaten by someone who dedicates 1/20th of the time you do to the game doesn't seem very fair either.

Now think about that but with 200+ players, entire alliances of that. Is that fair? Obviously not... and it's fine. It shoudn't be fair. If someone spends 400 more hours than me playing this game and improving their gear, they absolutely should have an advantage over me. There's nothing wrong with that. if you're mad about it, then play more or find more efficient ways of farming, or take more risks.

I really want to gouge my eyes out reading some of these posts, with the most TERRIBLE takes just because "MUH UNFAIRNESS, PEOPLE MIGHT LEAVE IF THEY DON'T INSTANTLY SUCCEED AT EVERYTHING, THINK OF THE LOW LEVELS". Lil bro, if you're so worried about low level caravans being attacked by high levels, then just suggest that maybe comodities should have a specific level, and make low level caravans from low level player carry ONLY low level comodities. Then make players unable to attack those caravans if there's a big level difference, you don't have to freaking ruin the game and gear progression system just cause god forbid, a low level MIGHT rage over being killed IN A OPEN WORLD PVP GAME. And honestly, even having that safeguard makes little sense to me. If you're a low level trying to move a caravan, you should have a group of people higher level than you helping you. It's a SOCIAL game. Talk to people, make friends. It's not hard.

Safeguards aren't necessary.

Steven's vision has always been not everyone can be a winner, yet here we have random OP#456 trying to screw gear progression just cause some players might quit if they don't win. Doesn't sound like you've been listening to Steven very well.

Jesus christ. I hope Intrepid stick to their vision and literally ignore 90% of these threads, because these forums are PLAGUED by players who want safeguards on top of safeguards while being safeguarded from being safeguarded.

Lloyd wrote: »

You are essentially Pay2Win even in a non-P2W game

I honestly lost braincells reading this. Consider not posting anymore unless you leave some of the bullshit out. Seriously. Effort and time dedicated to farm and improve gear (which by the way might include overenchanting gear which can fail and BREAK, so there's even a lot of risk in doing so) isn't in any way, shape or form comparable to "Pay2Win" and the fact that you suggest that literally hurts my brain. The amount of mental gymnastics that went into typing that must've been impressive.

Also, how TF do you know that better gear leads to "easy raiding"? We literally have ZERO idea how strong or not strong gear will be. Where did you pull that out from?.

In L2 what made Raid Bosses easier wasn't being max geared, it was having a bunch of Titans + the correct party composition with ideal buffs and an appropiate debuffer (Hex) + competent healers. Gear was a fraction of it. Most of the difficulty didn't even come from bosses (which were mostly damage sponges) it came from having enough DPS to kill the boss before getting absolutely destroyed by the enemy alliance which wants the same loot you want. So the difficulty of the RB is usually going to come down to: "Do I have 4 people targeting my healer cause they want to steal the boss?" Yes// No. That's the difficulty. Cause it's a PvP game.

So this notion that "better gear = bosses are too easy" is just you making random shit up just because you want to make the game easier for everyone, cause you're afraid a few casuals might not like it. In which case, I'll remind you once again that Steven said, around 300 times by now: AoC isn't a game for everyone.

Kilion

I can see why you would be concerned about these things, but I am quite confident that these are things that will not be all that likely to occur in the designed gameplay loop of the game.

Regarding "pre 50 content" VS "Post 50 content":
I think the first thing to note here is that this is not the (apply terms losely) "proper"/"right" way to categorize content in Ashes. Content doesn't suddenly change to a challenge system for players once they hit max level, it will be like that from the very beginning. Let's go through the list of points worth considering when talking about "level independent player contribution":

The taxes and maintenance work of lower level characters for their Node is essential to its survival
Equipment to attack or defend a Node has stats that are independent of the one using it
Lower level crafting products are essential for higher level crafting products
A caravan has its own stats, the coachmans stats (from what I've seen in the livestreams) is not a target an enemy can take out

Furthermore there are a few things to be said about incentives:

While not completely separated, limited bag sizes, regional differences between mob levels based on the adjacent Node Tier and bigger targets being accessible with higher level; all that contributes to the fact that high level players may not be interested in bonking some lower level players for their drops at all
The Mentor system rewards higher level players for helping out lower level players so mixed level groups can be much more frequent that most would think, especially once guilds have established themselves across the level range.

Regarding the "Post 50 gameplay":
Reaching max level is from what I have seen not all that significant. The only things that this really changes are that there is no longer anyone above you when it comes to Archetype based stats and you have removed all level limitations that may have been in the game.
But beyond that there is TONS for you to do, that you would also have to do beforehand. Maintaining the Node, maintaining your position in the Node or progressing your influence to e.g. become a patron guild of the Node, leveling up your Node by sieging another, participate in PvP & PvE events, run caravans for your own (and your guilds) gear progression and wealth, get and run a Freehold, rebuild after your Node got taken down, raid dungeons, breed your mounts, upgrade your caravans, build/improve a ship, become a major, master your artisan class, try new classes and so on and so forth.

There is so much to do that I don't think that anyone will be able to do all that unless they are playing at least 40 hours a week, if not more. Reaching max level therefore is in all likelihood not a point at which Intrepid has to worry about "do players have enough to do" but ask themselves if the different systems are cross linked enough that the more PvP or PvE adjusted crowds will have fun using the giant amount of options they have.

Noaani

Mag7spy wrote: »

Noaani wrote: »

Mag7spy wrote: »

Caravan point is interesting with level difference. Makes me wonder at what point would a player be needing to run caravans as a crafter. Not so much for launch but after for new players and if that thing will be viable for them.

I don't really want to get too deep in this though, but something i hadn't really thought about.

I would be surprised if there was a need to run caravans as a crafter at all.

Obviously someone will need to run them - just not the crafter, or at least not necessarily the crafter.

There is too much idk at the moment. I guess we will find out together in A2

While I agree that we don't know, I'm not sure if this is something we will really be able to test in A2.

I wouldn't be surprised if Intrepid just spawn materials in to the game ready to use, or add in an NPC where we can buy them purely so we can test systems that require them.

Lloyd

HybridSR wrote: »

No. PvP is unfair. It should be unfair.

If we have a REALLY good player that has amazing skills but can't play the game much vs a terrible player that has 2x better gear because he has 24 hours a day to play the game, what's going to happen MOST of the times is that the good player will have to severely outplay the terrible player many MANY times or he will lose in 5 seconds. Is that fair? No, it's not.

Lol, so aggressive and triggered. I was saying to keep these things in mind when scaling gear level and character progression scaling. Not to make it "perfectly balanced and skilled". I want a much tighter gap between gear level and character level for the leveling process. Not for a level 10 to beat a level 30 on a 200+ person scale. I even stated that there is balance in the imbalance of things. One side might have a level 30 and a level 23 but the other side might have two level 28s and it would be relatively fair. This scales proportionately as well. I think that's fine for gameplay.

I'm struggling to read through your tantrum so I'll just pick out certain points that I find:

> Steven's vision has always been not everyone can be a winner, yet here we have random OP#456 trying to screw gear progression just cause some players might quit if they don't win. Doesn't sound like you've been listening to Steven very well.

I agree.

> I honestly lost braincells reading this. Consider not posting anymore unless you leave some of the bullshit out. Seriously. Effort and time dedicated to farm and improve gear (which by the way might include overenchanting gear which can fail and BREAK, so there's even a lot of risk in doing so) isn't in any way, shape or form comparable to "Pay2Win" and the fact that you suggest that literally hurts my brain. The amount of mental gymnastics that went into typing that must've been impressive.

Idk what lil bro going on about. When gear score is too high it doesn't matter abilities, levels, skill, etc. it's just better gear and that feels like shit to play against.

> Also, how TF do you know that better gear leads to "easy raiding"? We literally have ZERO idea how strong or not strong gear will be. Where did you pull that out from?.

The stronger the gear = the easier the raid. How do you not track that?

> So this notion that "better gear = bosses are too easy" is just you making random shit up just because you want to make the game easier for everyone, cause you're afraid a few casuals might not like it. In which case, I'll remind you once again that Steven said, around 300 times by now: AoC isn't a game for everyone.

Making assumptions I see. My goal is for Ashes to be successful and PvX and semi-hardcore gameplay is not for everyone and I'm fine with that. But I want a playerbase to interact with. I am aiming to be one of the top in Ashes. Most of my points don't even apply to me. They apply to the new/returning players 6 months to year into the game. I'm literally advocating against systems that help players like me.

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