I just wanted to create a thread for things we as players feel where other mmos didn't do so well.
Hopefully this will help make Pantheon better by showing things we as players have not liked in previous mmos. Their already may be a thread about this somewhere that i have not seen if their is please forgive me.
Not trying to be negative torward any particular mmo so i will not mention names.
All these are my opinion.
Loot boxes has been a very questionable creation.
Increased Experience Scrolls- potions or bonus xp times.
Breaking pve skills to attempt to balance pvp this is a major flaw that several big company mmos have made and ruined pve for players. Pvp and Pve skill abilitys and powers should always be seperate if they do not fit into both in a balanced way.
Easy or non profitible crafting system.
Very long content droughts a year or more.
Micros clicking one button to do multiple high damage abilitys in a very quick timeframe takes away choice and player skill.
What are some of you guys thoughts?
I miss the challenge of finding something in a quest. Now with most mmo's out there they have markers and windows explaing and pointing 'This here! This here!' you grab the item and go with those. Anyone that ever did BiC quest in EQ1 know there is a bunch of stuff to gather and it was definitely not easy, i miss that. So something i dislike ? Being hand-fed quests, them being dumbed down to the point of making it ridiculously easy.
Useless timesinks - Waiting 6 hours for a mob to spawn.
Quest bottlenecks - hundreds needing the same item, thats a rare drop off a rare mob. (also a timesink)
Mobs that require gimmicks to win. Example of this would be the musical instruments for Djinn in EQ2. Its not fighting if you have to click flowers or something instead of fighting.
Krakon said:I miss the challenge of finding something in a quest. Now with most mmo's out there they have markers and windows explaing and pointing 'This here! This here!' you grab the item and go with those. Anyone that ever did BiC quest in EQ1 know there is a bunch of stuff to gather and it was definitely not easy, i miss that. So something i dislike ? Being hand-fed quests, them being dumbed down to the point of making it ridiculously easy.
Good one i agree.
In no particular order:
1) Daily quests being used as a gating mechanism.
2) Kronos.
3) Lockouts.
4) Trivial Death Penalty.
5) Groundhog Day.
6) Invalidation of content.
7) Dungeon Finder Tool.
8) Group content that can be multi-boxed by 1-2 players.
9) Add-ons that remove the value of preparation, strategy, or coordination.
10) Lack of punishment and rollback for exploiters.
11) Ideal XP curves that can be achieved without a group.
12) Quarterly Loot Progression Resets.
13) Lack of meaningful content/loot/choice.
14) "Linear Exploration."
First things that come to mind are,
Older things:
Attunement quests. Specifically ones that required you to go back and do old content before you could do new content.
That was never 'hard' it was just needlessly tedious
Newer things:
Leveling purely by quest chains
Buying character boosts
Loot boxes
ZullyZevize said:Useless timesinks - Waiting 6 hours for a mob to spawn.
Quest bottlenecks - hundreds needing the same item, thats a rare drop off a rare mob. (also a timesink)
Good ones
Adding :
- microtransactions ... all, even cosmetics
- jump puzzles like in GW2 or Holocron hunt in SWTOR
- linear solo questlines from lvl 1 to max level
- daily quests, especially solo ones
- meaningless grind (timesink)
- fast travel / automatic travel (not speaking of offline travel)
- flying mounts (as they were implemented)
- crafting based on grind-sell to NPC
Not surprisingly I agree with most of the above thoughts and disagree with some. So much is subjective.
I will throw in one that many will disagree with - competition with other players to complete routine quests.
I find it really annoying to get a quest to kill 10 orcs and have it take 2 hours because there simply aren't enough orcs, they respawn very slowly, there are too many other players around and they refuse to group to speed things up so that we can put the silly quest behind us and get on with our lives.
I consider the ability to share credit for killing mobs even when not grouped a Godsend (not necessarily for everyone to loot the mob but at least to get credit for quest purposes).
In no particular order... except for the first one:
-Microtransactions (for obvious reasons).
-Damage/Healing Meters (promotes poor game aspirations in my opinion).
-The ability to kill steal (it has been mentioned that the most damage dealt will get credit for a kill. I think this may be a terrible way to grief that will go unpunished by the community in the future... balanced group from "leveling" guild A clears to a boss, group from "raid geared" guild B comes in and takes boss loot and bounces.) I think there should be another factor to contribute to who gets credit for a kill to include some way to determine who has been in the area longer... maybe a campfire timer buff that denotes duration spent in the area actually in combat that resets if you haven't been in combat for X amount of time (comparable to the spawn times).
-No sharing of quest credit for NPC kills in highly populated areas (quest to collect goblin ears would turn into a blood bath on a pvp server... with very few goblins injured).
-Instant travel
-Lack of a way to LFG aside from spamming people (not necessarily a "dungeon finder" that teleports you to an area, but a simple /LFG tag that adds you to a roster that people LFM can view). This saves countless hours if you aren't someone with time to spend staring at your chat window spamming people "Level 24 Rogue LFG" only to find a group 20 mins before you have to log off. There has to be a LFG channel/tab created that will make your eyes cross if there is no system in place... and of course a good amount of people won't even use the proper channel, producing breaks in role play/game immersion, which leads to people not following/ignoring chat, which leads to a breakdown in game community.
-Not dealing with exp/gold spammer bots effectively
-Having 0 item custimization options for many many years (This one isn't a game ender but nothing irked me more than obtaining a beatiful matching set of say... Umbral or Blood Lord Armor (*memory drool*) only to have to put on a pair of neon green legs that looked like a leotard because the stats were amazing. Maybe a way to have a craftsman dismantle/absorb/sawp the stats of found armor into the old raid gear so you don't have to replace the gear you speant a year obtaining with a ballet outfit.)
-Quest gear and keys consuming limited inventory space (In a game that a quest can take several days or weeks to complete, and having limited carry capacity, nothing will frustrate someone faster than having to prioritze which items to destroy in their inventory... just to pick up another quest item that can't be destoryed.)
-Classes being ostrasized due to a design flaw that is not addressed in a reasonable time frame (It was many expansions in EQ before the RNG, PAL, and SHD were viable in pve... and due to the difficulty of leveling a new character, it became a game of waiting and hoping for Verant to address the shortfalls of the classes.)
Damage/Healing/Threat meters: Really have dumbed things down IMO. Managing aggro was once a skill both for DPS and Tanks. These meters have filtered down to the common player these days and they are only ever used to talk trash and/or measure their e-genitals.
Taunt: Not the ability per se but the fact that tanks in modern games can hold aggro almost effortlessly, often with a number of backup taunts/aoe taunts that more or less lock a mob onto the tank. Again: managing aggro should be a group effort where while a great tank might be able to keep focus against a lot of damage, a DPS going heavy into a mob should rip that aggro away.
Add-ons/mods: Tired of all that nonsense and keeping up to date with all of them breaking every patch or two.
Questing: Should be limited/uncommon and not be a source of experience gain but rather faction/items/currency.
Daily Quests: Suck. Suck so bad.
Microtransactions/Cash Shop: Awful. No thank you.
Game story: So tired of MMO games trying to tell me a story as I am playing. That is to say, I dislike there being a progressing story in the world that the player takes a part in as though some plot is advancing directly with and by the player and their actions. Just give me tons of lore setting up the world before I go in, give me lots of lore in-game surrounding current events, and let that be it. Allow me to forge my own destiny/story and not play some preset plot that every other person is in various stages of.
Iksar said:Game story: So tired of MMO games trying to tell me a story as I am playing. That is to say, I dislike there being a progressing story in the world that the player takes a part in as though some plot is advancing directly with and by the player and their actions. Just give me tons of lore setting up the world before I go in, give me lots of lore in-game surrounding current events, and let that be it. Allow me to forge my own destiny/story and not play some preset plot that every other person is in various stages of.
Never thought about this one before, but I agree. They did this in LOTRO, and it was interesting only because it explored the lore of a world I was already immensely interested in - but for any other MMO, I would have found it tedious. The fact that it was also used as a way to keep people away from content (Must complete quest X to enter zone Y) made it even more obnoxious.
Seconded.
Khendall said:ZullyZevize said:Useless timesinks - Waiting 6 hours for a mob to spawn.
Quest bottlenecks - hundreds needing the same item, thats a rare drop off a rare mob. (also a timesink)
Good ones
Adding :
- microtransactions ... all, even cosmetics
- jump puzzles like in GW2 or Holocron hunt in SWTOR
- linear solo questlines from lvl 1 to max level
- daily quests, especially solo ones
- meaningless grind (timesink)
- fast travel / automatic travel (not speaking of offline travel)
- flying mounts (as they were implemented)
- crafting based on grind-sell to NPC
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Most i agree with why Jumping puzzles? I really thought they were awesome in gw2.
I had more fun doing the jumping puzzles then any other part of gw2.
One thing I've yet to see people post:
- lack of polish and/or optimization.
This can make a game DoA, especially in a time where we have games with almost perfect polish and optimization as alternatives. Case in point. Vanguard.
Outside of that, then I would like to discuss story and attunements. First up, story: I definitely agree that an overarching narrative or plotline is bad for an MMORPG. But it's not bad to have some narrative in places. It really depends how it's implemented and wether or not it's forced on you. The original story of The Defias Brotherhood in Westfall in vanilla WoW was actually pretty good. You generally got the gist of what was happening just by reading the quest titles and doing the quests. The problem arises when the game feels the need to shove story in your face constantly. And an overarching story is even worse. I like having some exposition once in a while, telling me the story of a zone.
And now: Attunements.
Attunements aren't all bad. The bad way to implement an attunement is by telling you to do a questline before you can enter an entire expansion. The good way to do it, is to use the content leading up to a raid (in terms of difficulty and rewards) as a means to both gear you up, and teach you the difficulty you need to overcome, in order to be able to do the raid. I think all attunements in Classic WoW and Burning Crusade were well done, and also made use of the good way to tell a story within the game, that got you invested in clearing the bosses in the raid (with a few exceptions: Naxx attunement was bad, and MC/BWL attunements weren't all that interesting (unless you soloed the MC attunement), but at least they were short).
Tralyan said:Iksar said:Game story: So tired of MMO games trying to tell me a story as I am playing. That is to say, I dislike there being a progressing story in the world that the player takes a part in as though some plot is advancing directly with and by the player and their actions. Just give me tons of lore setting up the world before I go in, give me lots of lore in-game surrounding current events, and let that be it. Allow me to forge my own destiny/story and not play some preset plot that every other person is in various stages of.
Never thought about this one before, but I agree. They did this in LOTRO, and it was interesting only because it explored the lore of a world I was already immensely interested in - but for any other MMO, I would have found it tedious. The fact that it was also used as a way to keep people away from content (Must complete quest X to enter zone Y) made it even more obnoxious.
Seconded.
While I can understand not wanting a "story on rails" MMOs are very much about the setting. Good settings have history, politics, art, conflict, commerce, peoples, and even romance. When making zones and quests tying them into an overarching narrative is critical for a game to have a finished, polished, feel. I get bored with and detest zones with random aggressive NPC camps and wandering animals. I want to know who I am killing and why. What will be the consequences of me murding these sentient NPCs. Making a world where your choices have consequence is also a function of overarching narratives. Cutting the narrative out of a game just turns a game into loot and grind rather than experiencing the world.
So my dislike list would include:
1) Killing NPCs without consequence outside of a single faction hit
2) Undervalued Crafting (crafting using difficult to acquire materials should be the backbone of the equipment system not a minor additive)
3) Daily quests (hate feeling like I need to log in every single day or I will fall behind)
4) Chat spam trade systems (emergent game play is cool and all but staring at a screen reading text flying by and adding my own lines to that text tires my eyes and rots my brain)
5) PVP progression having any effect on PVE. (I don’t play MOBAs because they stress me out and make me aggressive, I don’t want a PVE game to be influenced by the same mentality)
6) Sacred Cow class abilities (there should always be multiple paths to the same goal, having one class have a corner on a specific critical game function limits flexibility of play and game design. All functions should have at least 2 if not 3 options thought the combinations vary)
Factions
EQ Started out with meaningful factions in the starting cities, then ended up with a central "hub" called the Plane of Knowledge.
The starting cities essentially became ghost towns because you never needed to go back to them. You could get everything you "needed" in PoK.
I was one of those that wanted to be friendly (at least non KoS) in all cities. As a Gnome-Necro, it was no easy task, but I did it (max ally in most).
In summary:
Trasak said:Tralyan said:Iksar said:Game story: So tired of MMO games trying to tell me a story as I am playing. That is to say, I dislike there being a progressing story in the world that the player takes a part in as though some plot is advancing directly with and by the player and their actions. Just give me tons of lore setting up the world before I go in, give me lots of lore in-game surrounding current events, and let that be it. Allow me to forge my own destiny/story and not play some preset plot that every other person is in various stages of.
Never thought about this one before, but I agree. They did this in LOTRO, and it was interesting only because it explored the lore of a world I was already immensely interested in - but for any other MMO, I would have found it tedious. The fact that it was also used as a way to keep people away from content (Must complete quest X to enter zone Y) made it even more obnoxious.
Seconded.
While I can understand not wanting a "story on rails" MMOs are very much about the setting. Good settings have history, politics, art, conflict, commerce, peoples, and even romance. When making zones and quests tying them into an overarching narrative is critical for a game to have a finished, polished, feel. I get bored with and detest zones with random aggressive NPC camps and wandering animals. I want to know who I am killing and why. What will be the consequences of me murding these sentient NPCs. Making a world where your choices have consequence is also a function of overarching narratives. Cutting the narrative out of a game just turns a game into loot and grind rather than experiencing the world.
So my dislike list would include:
1) Killing NPCs without consequence outside of a single faction hit
2) Undervalued Crafting (crafting using difficult to acquire materials should be the backbone of the equipment system not a minor additive)
3) Daily quests (hate feeling like I need to log in every single day or I will fall behind)
4) Chat spam trade systems (emergent game play is cool and all but staring at a screen reading text flying by and adding my own lines to that text tires my eyes and rots my brain)
5) PVP progression having any effect on PVE. (I don’t play MOBAs because they stress me out and make me aggressive, I don’t want a PVE game to be influenced by the same mentality)
6) Sacred Cow class abilities (there should always be multiple paths to the same goal, having one class have a corner on a specific critical game function limits flexibility of play and game design. All functions should have at least 2 if not 3 options thought the combinations vary)
While I absolutely understand wanting things to mean something within the game world, what I'm not a fan of is being forced to learn, having only one path to learning, or being unable to progress without learning. What if I just want to be a big dumb brute who isn't interested about the lore of the creatures I'm slaying?
The situation I want to avoid is as follows. In LOTRO, the main quest line started from level 1 and never stopped. Most of these quests were small, and some of them were even fun! But if you neglected to follow this story-line of quests, suddenly you'd find yourself at lvl 60 and unable to progress to such and such dungeon, simply because you didn't complete the requisite storyline quest. So then you'd have to go aaaaaaaaaall the way back, and complete all these tiny little quests as a wildly overpowered 60 lvl character - and you would have to do this for every subsequent alt you created.
I believe later they made it so you didn't have to start completely at the beginning - some jumping off points in between were implemented (someone feel free to correct me if I'm wrong here. Been a while). But even with that change, being forced to play along in the main story line just sat wrong with me. And that's coming from someone who is absolutely in love with Tolkien lore. I can't imagine how upset I'd be if forced to do this in a story that I'm not as invested in, such as Pantheon.
Make the world, and the creatures within it, mean something. But don't force others to learn that meaning. Or make it more of an organic learning, somehow. That's what I'd like to see.
Kiera said:Khendall said:ZullyZevize said:Useless timesinks - Waiting 6 hours for a mob to spawn.
Quest bottlenecks - hundreds needing the same item, thats a rare drop off a rare mob. (also a timesink)
Good ones
Adding :
- microtransactions ... all, even cosmetics
- jump puzzles like in GW2 or Holocron hunt in SWTOR
- linear solo questlines from lvl 1 to max level
- daily quests, especially solo ones
- meaningless grind (timesink)
- fast travel / automatic travel (not speaking of offline travel)
- flying mounts (as they were implemented)
- crafting based on grind-sell to NPC
Most i agree with why Jumping puzzles? I really thought they were awesome in gw2.
I had more fun doing the jumping puzzles then any other part of gw2.
Pantheon is going to be more strategic and tactical than action based, and jump puzzles are pure action based gameplay. Another thing is that jump puzzles also involves much fail-retry process and much gravity damages / deaths and I'm not sure it would be so fun than in other MMOs in which death means nearly nothing.