Angrykiz said:I'd honestly just rather the leveling takes 4x longer than have to progeny 4 times...
Bring me back to the days where getting to max level took the better part of a year and then right about the time I'm max level hit me with a high quality expansion and I'll be around for a long time.
As soon as groups and raids stop accepting people because of how many times they have rerolled it will be a sad day...
I'd even be for hell levels like in EQ1 originally instead of having to reroll my main character. These levels served a purpose of bunching everyone up and I think helped groups form in those level ranges. Especially if there is a nice juicy dungeon right around the same level.
Thanks for reading,
Kiz~
Getting people to relevel is a big part of what makes the feature special, though. You want to continuously cycle veteran players back into the lower tiers of content. It keeps lower level content more relevant, helps the economy, boosts zone population and grouping potential ... there are a ton of benefits. I just think it will be difficult for people to start over. When you get to max level, you usually want to spend quite a bit of time exploring new content, raiding, farming, whatever. Maybe after a few months of doing all of this people might feel more tempted to re-roll ... but there will always be pressure from their friends to not do it. Unless, of course, they all do it together. But imagine if you are in a raiding guild ... you earned your spot on the roster. If you reroll, it's obviously going to take awhile before you can raid again. The raid team needs to find a replacement. Will your spot still be there when you get back to max level? What if you are the main cleric, or only rogue? You are an extremely valuable asset to the raid and they most certainly won't want to lose you for any extended period of time.
My plan
While testing learn more of the world and systems get to know what i think ill go as main start that char first and around midway start my prog char , hopefully ill know what i whant to do along that path then . Keep my main so i can help/play "end game". My wish for now is to be able to unlock a ogre palladin with progeny system some how, just cus its a cool combo, ugly and friendly. But always keep a "main" for guild purpose and to explore as much of Terminus i can, cus i love exploring and finding "hidden" stuff and follow the main intriques of the world.
I'm still wrapping my head around progeny and all that it would entail, but I kinda agree with oneADseven - I think the retirement requirement is going to be tough for people to to swallow, psychologically. People get attached to their main characters.
As an example, right now I play a game that allows you to do everything on one character - you can be every class, etc, if you put in the time to level it up, and switch between them at will. The game also allows us to create 8 characters on a server. 90% of players that I meet (probably more) never really create more than one character.
Why? That's their main. That's the one they want to be on. That's the one they think of themselves as when they think about playing the game. It's a self-image thing, an identity thing. Someone with a degree in psychiatry or psychology could probably explain it better.
So yeah, the idea of retiring the main is a hard pill to swallow - even if we forget social pressures like raiding that oneADseven brings up, it's still tough. Don't get me wrong - the benefits of recycling characters in a level based game are clear. I just question whether many people are actually going to find themselves willing to take that plunge.
oneADseven said: ... You want to continuously cycle veteran players back into the lower tiers of content. It keeps lower level content more relevant, helps the economy, boosts zone population and grouping potential ... there are a ton of benefits. ...
Typically, the only reason a max level char would go to any zone is for loot. Your choices are: make it attractive to go back to any zone, or limit the attractiveness to a few max-level zones.
The mechanism of the attracting is secondary, until we know it's a primary Visionary Realms design goal that all zones are attractive at all levels, and in particular, max level.
Things like mentoring or optional/toggle-able npc & loot scaling (which is what mentoring is) are incredibly artificial. Personally, I don't care, but that artificiality apparently is seen as a negative by some.
I think the concept of colored mana, alone, as a resource for consumables, crafting, repair, and more, is enough of a lore justification for mentoring or optional/toggle-able npc & loot scaling. But without knowing what VR is designing, even the theorycrafting exercise is likely pointless.
oneADseven said:Angrykiz said:I'd honestly just rather the leveling takes 4x longer than have to progeny 4 times...
Bring me back to the days where getting to max level took the better part of a year and then right about the time I'm max level hit me with a high quality expansion and I'll be around for a long time.
As soon as groups and raids stop accepting people because of how many times they have rerolled it will be a sad day...
I'd even be for hell levels like in EQ1 originally instead of having to reroll my main character. These levels served a purpose of bunching everyone up and I think helped groups form in those level ranges. Especially if there is a nice juicy dungeon right around the same level.
Thanks for reading,
Kiz~
Getting people to relevel is a big part of what makes the feature special, though. You want to continuously cycle veteran players back into the lower tiers of content. It keeps lower level content more relevant, helps the economy, boosts zone population and grouping potential ... there are a ton of benefits. I just think it will be difficult for people to start over. When you get to max level, you usually want to spend quite a bit of time exploring new content, raiding, farming, whatever. Maybe after a few months of doing all of this people might feel more tempted to re-roll ... but there will always be pressure from their friends to not do it. Unless, of course, they all do it together. But imagine if you are in a raiding guild ... you earned your spot on the roster. If you reroll, it's obviously going to take awhile before you can raid again. The raid team needs to find a replacement. Will your spot still be there when you get back to max level? What if you are the main cleric, or only rogue? You are an extremely valuable asset to the raid and they most certainly won't want to lose you for any extended period of time.
Mentoring and alts is good enough for me ...
If mentoring is just a snap shot that like a picture taken at any given level just returns you to your status when you dinged that level I think it would avoid being overpowered.
Maybe the exp earned while mentoring could be applied to some form of progeny system that gives you a bonus when you roll an alt with the same last name as your main.
One thing I do not want to do is reroll my main character... this makes me feel like a hamster on a treadmill and I don't like that much.
Thanks for the reply,
Kiz~
We don't have a lot of info on Progeny, and I repeatedly see Brad pull rabies out of hat's when it comes to things like this (things none of us ever thought of) so well just have to wait and see.
But I have a question for all that are saying they don't want to retire there main... how many of you still play your first mmo "main"? Be it from Wow or EQ or FFIV (or whatever) in reality how many mains have you already "retired"
I know I retired my EQ main for over 10 years. Back playing him now on occasion.
Haven't logged into my WOW tune in years.. not even sure I remember the account log in.
Not Progeny, but retired none the less. So would it "really" be that hard to retire one?
There is a big distinction between retiring a character for 10 years and then being able to come back to it, and what has been described as retiring for Pantheon. Retiring means removing the character from the game. Poof, gone. You don't get to come back to it a week from now, year from now, ever. No Michael Jordan (popping in an out of retirement as you please) going on here. It's a permanent sacrifice.
oneADseven said:There is a big distinction between retiring a character for 10 years and then being able to come back to it, and what has been described as retiring for Pantheon. Retiring means removing the character from the game. Poof, gone. You don't get to come back to it a week from now, year from now, ever. No Michael Jordan (popping in an out of retirement as you please) going on here. It's a permanent sacrifice.
Where have you seen this described from an official source? That's my point about Brad pulling rabbits out of his hat.The only description I have seen was just us users giving our opinion of what it means.
Even now " It's a permanent sacrifice" where are you getting this info? I haven't seen this yet and I'd like to read up on it to catch up.
"As with many things we will release more information on this as development progresses but the idea is to allow people to permanently retire their characters and start fresh on a child while retaining some benefits that were inherited from your parent, which will keep content populated and give people new ways of leveling via different paths to gain a small bonus each time, there will be a cap of some sort to stop continuous rerolling and becoming too OPbut that is as much as we can reveal at this time."
Here is a slightly more recent (but still over a year old) bit about it from Aradune:
https://www.pantheonmmo.com/content/forums/topic/3949/-/post-create/quote_id/62748
Aradune said:I think the 'retirement' part is the hardest part of this system to wrap one’s head around and to accept. In fact, having to permanently retire a high level character in order to create alts with progeny bonuses may be asking too much. While we're not putting a lot of time into the progeny system right now (it's something that is planned several months down the road, after we actually have high level characters, have experienced high level combat, etc.), if there's anything that pokes a sizable hole in the system it's the retirement part, and what that truly means or might mean.
We have to first go back to the purpose for such a system -- one of its primary goals is to reward a player who has leveled up a character to max level by encouraging him to create alts and experience the game again, albeit from a different perspective, and ideally in such a way that feels different and new enough that it’s a lot of fun. It's about replayability. It's also about pride -- you could adventure with your augmented alts and people would recognize that you were someone who has already achieved great things in Pantheon. And I think these are great goals -- recognizing and rewarding long time players while also giving them reason to keep playing can't be a bad thing.
But then how does it actually work? Well first, we haven't said much, again because this system is not even close to being set in stone, and, as mentioned, one that doesn't have to be fully fleshed out in the near term. So I'm going to speculate and theory-craft a bit -- yes, that means I'm not announcing anything officially.
First, does such a system really require that the older character be permanently retired? I remember my earlier characters and how proud I was of them -- I didn't log them in very often because I was more interested in leveling up my newer characters -- but I did log them in occasionally to show them off and perhaps even participate in some adventure. If I couldn't do this because my character was inaccessible, how would that make me feel? Probably not so good.
But if the higher level player isn't retired, is it fair to allow that person to create alts with some added benefits? I honestly don’t see where it’s not – if you do, please speak up. So for the sake of this discussion, I'm willing to remove the retirement part and think about it for a while -- is there something I'm missing?
One of the other questions that comes up is will there be any restrictions as to who these augmented alts can be? If, for example, they are the offspring of a mighty human warrior and a beautiful ashen elf wizard, then it wouldn't make any sense if that alt could be any race or class, especially race. Does this restriction add to the system? Perhaps it does -- if you want all sorts of augmented alts that are a variety of races and classes, then perhaps you need to bring multiple characters up to this level necessary to use the Progeny system. Maybe that's good and encourages even more replayability.
And the last big question that keeps coming up is 'just what are these augmentations, these advantages?' And will they create an imbalance? Will these alts be crazy powerful and damage the balance and fun of the lower level game? Well, that's the easiest one to answer: no, of course we couldn't let that happen. I'm confident that whatever these advantages might be that they could be measurably beneficial, truly noticeable, yet not so powerful that balance is harmed or that nobody will want to group with regular characters.
Anyway, that's pretty much what I wanted to bring up in hopes that people keep talking about this proposed system and how it might work (or how it might not). The big question being, of course, is retirement really a necessary part of the system? It's certainly a big negative to many people and I have to ask, what is the positive? What does the system lose or what breaks or what doesn't make sense if the original character is still around and playable? Or, if a sacrifice must be made, perhaps it’s not about retiring a high level character but rather sacrificing powerful items in a ritual that results in their alts (offspring) having special advantages. This could be a great item sink, and while it would sting to lose some great items, you still get to play your old character if you want to.
It is interesting that this system is brought up as often as it is. I didn’t expect it to be. It’s an old MUD concept that I’ve wanted to bring to MMOs for some time as I’m always thinking about ways to encourage and reward long term play, about ways to keep people playing an MMO even years later. Really, that’s all the system is: a way to reward players who've put a lot of time into the game and who might want to experience the game again, as an alt, but would be even further incentivized to do so if that alt had some small but noticeable advantages. It's like a rite of passage and a recognition and a measure of respect shown to older players. Everything else is just detail, context, and flavor.
Thoughts?
Zorkon said:...I repeatedly see Brad pull rabies out of hat...
Yikes.... :)
I think it would be interesting to hear from the devs what the functional purpose of retiring a character is. What are the downsides to having a progeny system where characters are not retired? What are the benefits that come out of retiring a character? We can be sure they know how important a mechanic of this nature would be to the livelihood of the game and that they've done a LOT of thinking about these issues (based on that quote from Aradune, maybe they haven't yet thought it through fully, but I'm sure they will). With our limited info we can barely scratch the surface of what they've planned, but I still think it could be helpful to express our hopes and fears for the progeny system.
I would like to see a system where retirement of the character is more nuanced than a delete button. I hope the VR devs determine what is required from "retirement" to produce the results they want and implement a mechanic targeted to that effect. Could a retired character still craft in town without hampering the benefits of progeny? Could a retired character still mentor others (maybe up to a max level)? I would like to see a purpose given to the lives of "retired" characters where they fulfill a secondary, but vital role in the community. Even if you only have cause to play the character a couple of times a year, something to keep their spirit alive in your mind would be much appreciated (at least for me). Maybe retired character who mentors long enough can spend "mentor points" to craft spell/ability scrolls. Maybe retired characters who are given enough research materials and time can learn to open gateways (like plane of hate/fear type stuff). These ideas are pretty bad, but you get the idea.
Perhaps there could be two options, you could retire a character or sacrifice a bunch of powerful items etc. If you retire an entire character the benefits of the new would be noticeably greater, but you can still have a lesser (yet greater than a normal brand new) enhanced starting character if you choose to retain your original.
I always have 1 main. I might create some alts or buff boxes, but I can't think of a single game in which my main wasn't my main. My secondary characters always served as a service to my main.
Iksar said:As a general rule, almost no particulars of any mechanics are "confirmed" or otherwise locked in this early.
They're 3+ years in. They're waaaaay past "early".
Changing the particulars of mechanics at this late stage in development would cause more harm than good. And it's been stated repeatedly by Kilsin that they're not taking on new mechanics, nor significantly changing existing ones, from this point forward. All they're doing now is content creation, because the mechanics are done. Otherwise they would be iterating through, with all the fans, regarding all the incredibly good ideas posted on these forums in the past 2 years.
It would be -insane-, literally, crazy-in-the-head, to create all the content in Terminus WITHOUT having all the client/server/combat/interaction mechanics logically defined, locked in, and at the very least, QA tested on the server.
Otherwise, you would be setting yourself up to have to re-create, re-place, re-set, and/or re-dialogue every interactive, interaction, location, NPC, or non-world dynamic object. As a designer? Great for job security, but you might as well throw any attempt at milestones or timelines out the window. Design goals -> mechanics -> content. If you change the order of those? You're looking at adding hundreds or thousands of hours back into the pre-launch queue.
I don't know, most of the time I see Aradune talking about things in the game he seems to leave the mechanics somewhat open ended. Often saying that the specifics of how things will work will be figured out in alpha/beta testing when players can throw themselves at various versions of things.
I'm not talking so much things like locations, NPCs, world objects, cities but rather things like death penalties, npc behaviors, how progeny works, what item sacrifices do, how auction houses will work, etc. Things that can be tweaked without tearing down the house/walls.
Why not make new characters harder instead of easier? I think you can get far more miles out of a fresh sense of pain, than a cheat code. And if you assign some beneficial reductions to that pain through grouping with new players, you got two birds and one stone.
If it were me I would give each new character slot you open up an additive handicap. To the point where starting a new character becomes a new version of the game that is so hard that the tutorial quest rats are like raid trash. Then I would add a ranked mode and perma death to the hardest possible setting, and create something new out of the some old crap. Only people who unlock max level on the last character slot will have access to this mode. Then I would market this game mode as, Hardestcore.
The real hook though, would be that while these Hardestcore enabled players are raiding a sewer rat, new players can come along and help them for a massive boost to themselves, that is relative to the handicap. So the people on this mode competing for the leader boards will have to actively engage everyone they encounter for months on end to make even a modest attempt at ranking. Then down the road I would enable audience interaction from people watching the streams. Maybe allow them to buy temporary bonuses for their favorite players that reduce the handicap or protect them from perma-death.
If it takes 100 hours to unlock a new character slot, hardestcore mode would take 1000 to reach the same progression. And achievements earned in hardestcore would all be ranked on the leaderboards.
I would also make every account flag a "Main" character, and that character would be persistent in the game world, and if you were hardestmode enabled, would talk about your rankings while wandering around an interacting with players.
Why make new characters easier at all when you could have so much fun making them the nightmare no one ever knew they desperately wanted?
Leaderboards -- No.
Elitist BS with people talking smack all the time.
"Unlocking" character slots -- No.
Many (most?) people like to dabble in multiple characters, even if they have a main they concentrate on.
Making the game harder with iterative character developement -- No.
Encouraging replayability is a plus. Punishing for it is counterproductive at best, and self-destructive to the game at worst.
Without knowing what the Progeny system all had to offer, or how it is even implemented this is very hard to make a comment on, i like what the progeny system has to offer as in replaying content, but maybe they could limit some of the grindy feeling they get from making it to where you start at the half way mark instead of lvl 1, either way it doesn't matter to me im going to use the system, becuase it is something they have to offer and i want to do it simply becuase it is there, but i can say your idea doesn't sound bad, and a sound alternative, but again without knowing everything about the progeny system it going to be hard to make a alternative system to something we know so little about, and is subject to change at any moment, not only before the game comes out but also far in the future. We will see what they come out with and than we can voice an opinion about what is brings, instead of grasping at straws assuming what it is.
ZennExile said:Why not make new characters harder instead of easier? I think you can get far more miles out of a fresh sense of pain, than a cheat code. And if you assign some beneficial reductions to that pain through grouping with new players, you got two birds and one stone.
If it were me I would give each new character slot you open up an additive handicap. To the point where starting a new character becomes a new version of the game that is so hard that the tutorial quest rats are like raid trash. Then I would add a ranked mode and perma death to the hardest possible setting, and create something new out of the some old crap. Only people who unlock max level on the last character slot will have access to this mode. Then I would market this game mode as, Hardestcore.
The real hook though, would be that while these Hardestcore enabled players are raiding a sewer rat, new players can come along and help them for a massive boost to themselves, that is relative to the handicap. So the people on this mode competing for the leader boards will have to actively engage everyone they encounter for months on end to make even a modest attempt at ranking. Then down the road I would enable audience interaction from people watching the streams. Maybe allow them to buy temporary bonuses for their favorite players that reduce the handicap or protect them from perma-death.
If it takes 100 hours to unlock a new character slot, hardestcore mode would take 1000 to reach the same progression. And achievements earned in hardestcore would all be ranked on the leaderboards.
I would also make every account flag a "Main" character, and that character would be persistent in the game world, and if you were hardestmode enabled, would talk about your rankings while wandering around an interacting with players.
Why make new characters easier at all when you could have so much fun making them the nightmare no one ever knew they desperately wanted?
For one this wouldn't work, people could simply make this hardest core charcter and than have friends buy new accounts and make new charcters to have "easy mode", while being powerleveled by other friends and simply level up by basically doing nothing, simply eliminateing the whole hardest core feeling your talking about, and also it would be a needless implementation of the game, becuase people like making alts and leveling them up for their own purposes, they shouldnt be punished for trying to see if they might like a bard more their main but have to worry about the mobs they are killing are 2, 3, 5x harder than it was when their main went through their so they would have a unfair comparsion to see how effective they are when to keep raising the bar on difficulty on new characters, especially if it a player who doesn't know how to play the character.
If you really want to implement something this you do it from the beginning and be like these mobs arent hard enough and add abilties and more AI to them to make them harder frm the beginning so when you see them you are like okay these ARE a single pull mob, if we get more than that we wipe period. im down for being hardcore, not the whole you die once you start over, this isnt diablo, which is extreemly easy and if you know what your doing it is basically impossible to die, cept maybe on the elite that has a unlucky roll of summon and arcane enchantment, this is a game built around grping together, mistakes are going to be made, accomplishments are going to be cherished. i want the mobs to be tough, i want them to be smart, and i want them to challenge us, and make us play smarter than we have on any other MMO.
Feyshtey said:Leaderboards -- No.
Elitist BS with people talking smack all the time. Already a fact of online gaming life. Players will create their own."Unlocking" character slots -- No.
Many (most?) people like to dabble in multiple characters, even if they have a main they concentrate on. Nothing would stop them.Making the game harder with iterative character developement -- No.
Encouraging replayability is a plus. Punishing for it is counterproductive at best, and self-destructive to the game at worst. Every new character is easier than the first just because you are on round 2, so technically, a handicap should decrease boredom, and increase replayability, as does the Elitist Leaderboard.
I think you might be a little out of your element Donny. Everything you state is exactly how additive difficulty and unlocking slots would work. It would give Elitists a realm of smack, in which to talk that is actually tracked by the game, allow for a more interesting repeat of the new character tutorial experience, and in doing so drastically increase replayability for the Elitist upper crust, and the alternate character junky.
And even give people who truly enjoy roleplaying many characters, a sort of psuedo end game, just for them. One that can't even be accessed until you have maxed out a pile of characters.
The model mirrors MOBA mechanics for new players, where learning new characters unlocks access to more challenging game modes.
Also, just to make this as clear as possible, there are millions of gamers who love ultra-hard games. And absolutely love ultra-hard game modes. An extreme perma-death mode with leader boards you can unlock, would put this MMORPG on the hardcore map, for ALL of those millions of players. Even the ones who only play platformers, or tripple A industry titles.
The point is, you are supposed to think it is painful. Only people who want that hardcore challenge would seek out the self-hating additive handicap. People who just like alts, would still be able to buy new accounts, or just delete a character if the additive handicap gets too high for comfort.
The only reason you technically give for not doing this, is that you personally would not like it. And it annoys you when other people have a score or ranking that you cannot achieve. And to that I say. No.