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MMO Veteran - What the Perfect Game Looks Like
ArchivedUser
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Hi everyone. I'll just jump right into it so I don't turn this into a book. I've played every major MMO ever made. I spend thousands of dollars every year on games. I'm looking for a new home where I can hang my hat for at least 5 years. Ashes of Creation has that potential. So while in early development I want to share some things my friends and I are looking for. Incorporating them will mean you get some really awesome customers! I want this game to succeed.
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1. <strong>Customization Housing</strong> - The ability to do 10 million things with my house. Including (in order of priority) farming (major time sinc type of farming!), interior decoration, light and bright colors (EQ2 never really gave me that!), spacious for lots of quested and dropped house items, crafting (I want the option to spend 100 straight hours in my house if I choose), instanced and non-instanced housing, guild houses / halls that are useful tools and vital to endgame gameplay.
2. <strong>AFK gamepla</strong>y. Black Desert incorporated an in game AFK system that makes it so nobody needs or wants a third party cheat program. It's very well balanced. It spoiled us! We see a world that is substantially more populated and occupied than any other game. It feels vibrant and alive! The perfect game will build on this idea and deter cheaters by adding similar content.
3. <strong>Meaningful economic system</strong>. The best economic system I've ever seen was EQ2. It's open, it's easy, it's convenient and most importantly it's profitable. Someone can buy every item and change prices, I like that. The economy effects game morale and makes currency meaningful. Don't do what Korean MMO's do and cap prices (max and min). It's a horrible system. As an additional thought it would be nice to see an auctioneer of some sort for recently dropped items (group option sends it to auction automatically). BDO touched on this but didn't refine it very well.
4. <strong>Horse leveling system</strong>. Black Desert again sorry. But they did an awesome job with their mount system. Time versus reward isn't really there. The time spent leveling horses is never profitable when you list them for sale. But the option to catch wild horses, breed them into a foal and later sell them on a special market is an awesome part of gameplay. If someone built on that system and improved it they would get a huge chunk of customers that do nothing but become horse breeders. Cash cow potential, but within reason please.
5. <strong>Workers</strong> that are kind of a mini game running in the background. This adds another dimension to gameplay. Workers level up while they work on your nodes, farms, houses, horses, whatever. They can be promoted and traded / sold to other players. This could be an entire tradeskill profession (Work Supervisor).
6. <strong>A reason for alts!</strong> Class balance is a pain in the butt for devs, I realize this. But in my opinion a game can only be as successful as their retention of players is. If you want to retain us, our monthly income and our cash shop purchases you gotta keep pumping out new content. But between content we need a time sink that allows us to level an alt to fill a role in groups and raids. Guilds needing specific classes to be competitive keeps alts leveling up. This directly effects player retention and the success of gaming companies. You have to give us tens of thousands of hours of content before the game even hits open beta. The easiest way to keep us here and keep us busy is with alts and class dependency.
7. <strong>Free slow travel, hard to obtain or very expensive fast travel</strong>. We don't want to spend all day getting there. But EQ2 made a tragic mistake when they created fast flying mounts that rendered ground mounts useless. These need to be earned, fought for, achieved from exhaustive gameplay or purchased for the equivalent of a couple hundred hours of gameplay. The world gets empty really fast when you see nobody in the open world because they're flying 1000 feet over your head.
8 <strong>Lag free group and raid content</strong>. Most games that have end game raid content make a huge mistake. Whenever raid guilds start blowing stuff up the servers come to a crawl. This is a game breaker.
9. <strong>Massive end game.</strong> Most MMO's these days launch with an amazing game until you reach a certain level, then it sucks. We need EverQuest 2. We need a massive amount of raid and group content or we'll just get bored and leave to another game. Anticipate everyone will hit the soft and hard cap on the first day. Many of us get excited about new MMOs and take off work for a month lol. I'll play 24/7 until I pass out. Really. The perfect game launches with a thousand hours of more of independent end game content.
10. <strong>Guild systems</strong>. EQ2 did this better than any other MMO ever made. But it still leaves a lot to be desired. We need at least person max guilds (which you've already announced, good job!), a customized promotion system, event logs that are customizable, some kind of point system to show guild participation and guild storage. There needs to be a guild leveling system that is tied into a new players desire to join a guild. It needs to be SO good that noone dare play the game without being in a guild. Higher level guilds need a meaningful reward system. This is a good way to take a typical $15 monthly subscription type of game and convert it into a FTP game (which most games rely on microtransactions anyway). Joining a guild, and more importantly a large or high level guild, has to be THAT meaningful. This directly contributes to friendships being formed and long term player retention. This is where almost all new MMOs go wrong. Guilds and player retention go hand in hand! You have to really incentivize guild participation.
11. <strong>PVE</strong> players should never be forced into <strong>PvP</strong>, instead they should have an incentive to participate. ArcheAge and Black Desert Online lost tens of thousands of customers because of this. I'm all for PvP, I enjoy it sometimes. But when you force me to do it your force me into a different style of gameplay than what I want. It's not fun for me when I'm questing and someone comes along and one shots me. I just want to be left alone and enjoy my solo questing, gathering, AFK leveling (BDO) etc. But, with that said, I also want the option to participate. I want you to encourage me to do so. Offer best in slot currency based rewards for participating in PvP. We need PvPers to have a populated source of victims. Perhaps there's a way to tie some form of energy refil or some kind of time buff that you get while flagged for PvP. Make it optional tho. Either that or launch with both PVE and PvP server. Perhaps even a few that are 50/50.
12. <strong>Rewards for time and money investment.</strong> People that make the game successful with their time and money should be recognized; much in the same way MMO's give titles to Founders. So when I see that reward if I spend another $42 I'll just go ahead and finish it up and see what my next reward for "X" amount will be. This is a great way to keep your flow of money coming in and reward your best customers.
13. <strong>Cool looking gear. </strong>Recently the best gear award goes to Dragon Age Oblivion, Elder Scrolls Online and Black Desert Online. We need cool looking "manly" armor. Not little girl anime crappy stuff like many MMO's launch with these days. We want more "cool factor" and less "cutiepie" factor. The ability to dye every stitch would be nice too. If I pick up a new set of shoulders I hate when they look identical to my old set. The dev team for this needs to be large and you can never, ever, shrink this team. Another spot where most MMO's make a tragic mistake. This is both game morale and your best profit potential. Give us cool outfits and add some to your cash shop. Keep them coming and at reasonable prices (less than $10). Think WalMart and not Nordstrom, you'll make alot more money!
14. <strong>Cash shop</strong> with pay for convenience items, but not pay to win. We need you to make money so you keep pumping out content. So if you give us reasonable priced items that simplify our game play we will buy it. But don't under any circumstances roadblock us or allow pay to win items hit your marketplace / cash shop. Doing so will earn you not only a bad reputation but lose you alot of future business.
15. <strong>I want to try it before I buy it!</strong> Period! I am so tired of wasting my money on games. As a potential customer I want to see what I'm buying. I'll never buy another game, ever, unless I play it first. It's the most desirable aspect of FTP games. I don't care about $30 to buy the game and I certainly don't care about $15 a month. But you have to let me dip my toes in the water first. If I like it I'll buy it, and more!
16.<strong> Discovery experience (disco)!</strong> I love this in games. When you discover a new item or area you get XP or some kind of meaningfull knowledge. I love this and hope to see an EQ2 type of system in Ashes of Creation. Anyone say shinies????? Wink, wink, nudge, nudge.
17. <strong>A player moderated chat.</strong> If "X" amount of players report a player for a racial, rude or sexual comment it gets blocked automatically until a GM can check it out. Let us police our own chat. We also need the ability to filter out words like "www", "powerleveling services" and "plat for sale". This will save you alot of money on manpower moderation if you put it in our hands.
18.<strong> Parsing and data availability! </strong> I'm a hardcore raider and I love to min max. EQ2 has done this better than all MMO's combined! EQ2players has all data we could ever want. This is one of the coolest things about EQ2. I would lLOVE to see this incorporated in more MMOs. I'm sure there is headache and money involved but fan sites with data are game changers, literally. Some players hate seeing their parse linked so the ability to turn this off / on in settings would be fantastic.
19. The perfect game has a built in <strong>voice system, parsing system and guild website</strong> system. This will set an entirely new standard in the MMO industry. If guilds could see all of a raids parsing data on their website and use it to track DKP and recruitment tool it would be amazing. Many of us raid fans would pay an additional monthly subscription amount for something like this.
20. Last but far from least, a <strong>crafting system</strong> that doesn't suck. So many games these days have crafting systems but rarely do they incorporate end game stuff or a general feeling of accomplishment from leveling your crafting. If I spent 10000 hours getting my crafter to level "XXX" I want to be compensated and rewarded for my effort! I also want all future content to build on this and expand on it. The perfect game will design a crafting system that has indefinite gameplay that is only surpassed by best in slot PvP gear and best in slot raid gear.
If you made it this far thank you for reading. I look forward to playing Ashes of Creation! Hurry up and get it to open beta! Hire 500 more devs! LOL
_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
1. <strong>Customization Housing</strong> - The ability to do 10 million things with my house. Including (in order of priority) farming (major time sinc type of farming!), interior decoration, light and bright colors (EQ2 never really gave me that!), spacious for lots of quested and dropped house items, crafting (I want the option to spend 100 straight hours in my house if I choose), instanced and non-instanced housing, guild houses / halls that are useful tools and vital to endgame gameplay.
2. <strong>AFK gamepla</strong>y. Black Desert incorporated an in game AFK system that makes it so nobody needs or wants a third party cheat program. It's very well balanced. It spoiled us! We see a world that is substantially more populated and occupied than any other game. It feels vibrant and alive! The perfect game will build on this idea and deter cheaters by adding similar content.
3. <strong>Meaningful economic system</strong>. The best economic system I've ever seen was EQ2. It's open, it's easy, it's convenient and most importantly it's profitable. Someone can buy every item and change prices, I like that. The economy effects game morale and makes currency meaningful. Don't do what Korean MMO's do and cap prices (max and min). It's a horrible system. As an additional thought it would be nice to see an auctioneer of some sort for recently dropped items (group option sends it to auction automatically). BDO touched on this but didn't refine it very well.
4. <strong>Horse leveling system</strong>. Black Desert again sorry. But they did an awesome job with their mount system. Time versus reward isn't really there. The time spent leveling horses is never profitable when you list them for sale. But the option to catch wild horses, breed them into a foal and later sell them on a special market is an awesome part of gameplay. If someone built on that system and improved it they would get a huge chunk of customers that do nothing but become horse breeders. Cash cow potential, but within reason please.
5. <strong>Workers</strong> that are kind of a mini game running in the background. This adds another dimension to gameplay. Workers level up while they work on your nodes, farms, houses, horses, whatever. They can be promoted and traded / sold to other players. This could be an entire tradeskill profession (Work Supervisor).
6. <strong>A reason for alts!</strong> Class balance is a pain in the butt for devs, I realize this. But in my opinion a game can only be as successful as their retention of players is. If you want to retain us, our monthly income and our cash shop purchases you gotta keep pumping out new content. But between content we need a time sink that allows us to level an alt to fill a role in groups and raids. Guilds needing specific classes to be competitive keeps alts leveling up. This directly effects player retention and the success of gaming companies. You have to give us tens of thousands of hours of content before the game even hits open beta. The easiest way to keep us here and keep us busy is with alts and class dependency.
7. <strong>Free slow travel, hard to obtain or very expensive fast travel</strong>. We don't want to spend all day getting there. But EQ2 made a tragic mistake when they created fast flying mounts that rendered ground mounts useless. These need to be earned, fought for, achieved from exhaustive gameplay or purchased for the equivalent of a couple hundred hours of gameplay. The world gets empty really fast when you see nobody in the open world because they're flying 1000 feet over your head.
8 <strong>Lag free group and raid content</strong>. Most games that have end game raid content make a huge mistake. Whenever raid guilds start blowing stuff up the servers come to a crawl. This is a game breaker.
9. <strong>Massive end game.</strong> Most MMO's these days launch with an amazing game until you reach a certain level, then it sucks. We need EverQuest 2. We need a massive amount of raid and group content or we'll just get bored and leave to another game. Anticipate everyone will hit the soft and hard cap on the first day. Many of us get excited about new MMOs and take off work for a month lol. I'll play 24/7 until I pass out. Really. The perfect game launches with a thousand hours of more of independent end game content.
10. <strong>Guild systems</strong>. EQ2 did this better than any other MMO ever made. But it still leaves a lot to be desired. We need at least person max guilds (which you've already announced, good job!), a customized promotion system, event logs that are customizable, some kind of point system to show guild participation and guild storage. There needs to be a guild leveling system that is tied into a new players desire to join a guild. It needs to be SO good that noone dare play the game without being in a guild. Higher level guilds need a meaningful reward system. This is a good way to take a typical $15 monthly subscription type of game and convert it into a FTP game (which most games rely on microtransactions anyway). Joining a guild, and more importantly a large or high level guild, has to be THAT meaningful. This directly contributes to friendships being formed and long term player retention. This is where almost all new MMOs go wrong. Guilds and player retention go hand in hand! You have to really incentivize guild participation.
11. <strong>PVE</strong> players should never be forced into <strong>PvP</strong>, instead they should have an incentive to participate. ArcheAge and Black Desert Online lost tens of thousands of customers because of this. I'm all for PvP, I enjoy it sometimes. But when you force me to do it your force me into a different style of gameplay than what I want. It's not fun for me when I'm questing and someone comes along and one shots me. I just want to be left alone and enjoy my solo questing, gathering, AFK leveling (BDO) etc. But, with that said, I also want the option to participate. I want you to encourage me to do so. Offer best in slot currency based rewards for participating in PvP. We need PvPers to have a populated source of victims. Perhaps there's a way to tie some form of energy refil or some kind of time buff that you get while flagged for PvP. Make it optional tho. Either that or launch with both PVE and PvP server. Perhaps even a few that are 50/50.
12. <strong>Rewards for time and money investment.</strong> People that make the game successful with their time and money should be recognized; much in the same way MMO's give titles to Founders. So when I see that reward if I spend another $42 I'll just go ahead and finish it up and see what my next reward for "X" amount will be. This is a great way to keep your flow of money coming in and reward your best customers.
13. <strong>Cool looking gear. </strong>Recently the best gear award goes to Dragon Age Oblivion, Elder Scrolls Online and Black Desert Online. We need cool looking "manly" armor. Not little girl anime crappy stuff like many MMO's launch with these days. We want more "cool factor" and less "cutiepie" factor. The ability to dye every stitch would be nice too. If I pick up a new set of shoulders I hate when they look identical to my old set. The dev team for this needs to be large and you can never, ever, shrink this team. Another spot where most MMO's make a tragic mistake. This is both game morale and your best profit potential. Give us cool outfits and add some to your cash shop. Keep them coming and at reasonable prices (less than $10). Think WalMart and not Nordstrom, you'll make alot more money!
14. <strong>Cash shop</strong> with pay for convenience items, but not pay to win. We need you to make money so you keep pumping out content. So if you give us reasonable priced items that simplify our game play we will buy it. But don't under any circumstances roadblock us or allow pay to win items hit your marketplace / cash shop. Doing so will earn you not only a bad reputation but lose you alot of future business.
15. <strong>I want to try it before I buy it!</strong> Period! I am so tired of wasting my money on games. As a potential customer I want to see what I'm buying. I'll never buy another game, ever, unless I play it first. It's the most desirable aspect of FTP games. I don't care about $30 to buy the game and I certainly don't care about $15 a month. But you have to let me dip my toes in the water first. If I like it I'll buy it, and more!
16.<strong> Discovery experience (disco)!</strong> I love this in games. When you discover a new item or area you get XP or some kind of meaningfull knowledge. I love this and hope to see an EQ2 type of system in Ashes of Creation. Anyone say shinies????? Wink, wink, nudge, nudge.
17. <strong>A player moderated chat.</strong> If "X" amount of players report a player for a racial, rude or sexual comment it gets blocked automatically until a GM can check it out. Let us police our own chat. We also need the ability to filter out words like "www", "powerleveling services" and "plat for sale". This will save you alot of money on manpower moderation if you put it in our hands.
18.<strong> Parsing and data availability! </strong> I'm a hardcore raider and I love to min max. EQ2 has done this better than all MMO's combined! EQ2players has all data we could ever want. This is one of the coolest things about EQ2. I would lLOVE to see this incorporated in more MMOs. I'm sure there is headache and money involved but fan sites with data are game changers, literally. Some players hate seeing their parse linked so the ability to turn this off / on in settings would be fantastic.
19. The perfect game has a built in <strong>voice system, parsing system and guild website</strong> system. This will set an entirely new standard in the MMO industry. If guilds could see all of a raids parsing data on their website and use it to track DKP and recruitment tool it would be amazing. Many of us raid fans would pay an additional monthly subscription amount for something like this.
20. Last but far from least, a <strong>crafting system</strong> that doesn't suck. So many games these days have crafting systems but rarely do they incorporate end game stuff or a general feeling of accomplishment from leveling your crafting. If I spent 10000 hours getting my crafter to level "XXX" I want to be compensated and rewarded for my effort! I also want all future content to build on this and expand on it. The perfect game will design a crafting system that has indefinite gameplay that is only surpassed by best in slot PvP gear and best in slot raid gear.
If you made it this far thank you for reading. I look forward to playing Ashes of Creation! Hurry up and get it to open beta! Hire 500 more devs! LOL
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