RPC has moved! These pages have been kept for historical purposes

Naunet · **04-21-2014, 03:23 PM**

Playing the need vs. want game is a bit silly. We're talking about video games. We don't needÂ anything, but there's a lot we want. And there is absolutely nothing wrong with wanting things.

I just love being able to go inside buildings. I get a thrill every time I find an enterable building. One more potential setting for rp! FFXIV has a lot of enterable buildings, but not in their cities. Two of the three cities in XIV don't feel like cities so much as... a cluster of market places and pathways. I mean, where the heck to people live in Limsa? There's not a single place where you could conceivably point and be all, "Yup, that's a home."

Obviously we don't needÂ enterable buildings. I've used the balcony outside Ruby Road Exchange numerous times as a pretend stage for an inn room. We've used the building out in Highbridge as a stage for a Brass Blades office that's supposed to be in Pearl Lane. There's a little hermit house in La Noscea that we've used as a stage for a character's home in Limsa. In TERA, one of our characters owned a medical clinic, and frequently we just stood at the corner at the edge of the street where we'd decided the clinic would be and just rp in party chat (or sometimes /say, which got entertaining results). We've pretended the empty, probably never-to-be-used "housing" areas in Velika were jail cells, and psychotherapy rooms, and multistoried mansions, and inn rooms.

Obviously pretend is a powerful thing. It's still nice to be able to go inside buildings, and it is frustrating when you're walking around in a city but all the doors (if there are any) are impenetrable.

Zyrusticae · **04-21-2014, 04:03 PM**

FYI a lot of those buildings can be owned by players as housing (and converted into shops). So yeah, enterable.

Also just saw this on Facebook and had to share it:
[Image: WNTc8il.png]

Ildur · **04-21-2014, 04:12 PM**

That sounds awesome and incredibly tiresome. Then again, I think that's a sandboxy game, so things might not be as terrible as they'd be in a themepark.

Maybe they'll be more terrible...

Naunet · **04-21-2014, 04:33 PM**

Haha yea. On the one hand, points for realism. On the other hand, minus a whole lotta points for massiveÂ inconvenience. xD

Clover · **04-21-2014, 04:51 PM**

I'm not sure I like that system, unless armour isn't too stat dependent. As if farming a single set of good armour wasn't enough, will we have to farm for several sets just so that we can be well dressed at any area of the map? ;

Game still looks very interesting and I'm definitely playing it, in any case.

Ignacius · **04-21-2014, 05:06 PM**

(04-21-2014, 03:23 PM)Naunet Wrote: Playing the need vs. want game is a bit silly. We're talking about video games. We don't needÂ anything, but there's a lot we want. And there is absolutely nothing wrong with wanting things.

I just love being able to go inside buildings. I get a thrill every time I find an enterable building. One more potential setting for rp! FFXIV has a lot of enterable buildings, but not in their cities. Two of the three cities in XIV don't feel like cities so much as... a cluster of market places and pathways. I mean, where the heck to people live in Limsa? There's not a single place where you could conceivably point and be all, "Yup, that's a home."

Obviously we don't needÂ enterable buildings. I've used the balcony outside Ruby Road Exchange numerous times as a pretend stage for an inn room. We've used the building out in Highbridge as a stage for a Brass Blades office that's supposed to be in Pearl Lane. There's a little hermit house in La Noscea that we've used as a stage for a character's home in Limsa. In TERA, one of our characters owned a medical clinic, and frequently we just stood at the corner at the edge of the street where we'd decided the clinic would be and just rp in party chat (or sometimes /say, which got entertaining results). We've pretended the empty, probably never-to-be-used "housing" areas in Velika were jail cells, and psychotherapy rooms, and multistoried mansions, and inn rooms.

Obviously pretend is a powerful thing. It's still nice to be able to go inside buildings, and it is frustrating when you're walking around in a city but all the doors (if there are any) are impenetrable.

I meant more that the cost/benefit analysis in game company's heads isn't going to pan out for us at this particular moment. Â I used to love the Park district in Stormwind in WoW because that's what it was. Â Just a bunch of buildings based on the templates for an inn and a couple shops. Â That place was RP central. Â I was a bouncer twice a week at an inn in the Park for a year on Thorium Brotherhood. Â And we actually made money doing it! Â I got paid 50 gold a night back when 50 gold was worth something.

The Cataclysm destroyed the Park. Â It was a great idea though. Â God only knows why Blizz felt the need to get rid of it. Â Maybe it was the feeling that they'd have to either provide those areas in all major cities or get rid of Stormwind's, and RPers just aren't a big enough chunk of the playerbase.

As far as games go, though, there's a difference between having a few enterable buildings (as there have been) and having EVERY building in a massive city be enterable and often have something in it. Â It'd be great to have if we could afford it in terms of system resources, but the reason we don't have many games like that is that there's not much payoff in terms of gameplay that you don't get out of creating a mass and bump mapping a few doors in.

I can think of a few, though. Â You could get a Fable/Assassin's Creed thing going on where the people who work in shops need somewhere to live and often their families stay home. Â You could break into those buildings and steal from them or even perhaps purchase property (although hard-coding the livable spaces in a city might be a bit counterproductive at a point when the lack of player housing is becoming a relatively major issue even for non-RPers).

Another issue might be that most buildings in a major city aren't residences and aren't entertaining, they're just boring. Â A populated building in your city might be a local office park. Â While IT consultants are an important part of any city and you'll find their office spaces in a great many buildings, in the game world, what buildings will see frequent use? Â Weapons, armor, et cetera. Â We don't need a great variety of food choices, but (speaking as a man living in Columbus, OH) probably 1/4 of all the places I see on the roadside are restaurants. Â Carson St. in my birth city of Pittsburgh is the most amazing place in town, seriously just block after block of knocked out bars.

There can be times where you might need those things, though. Â I could think of a way to have shifting stock float around so that when you go shopping, you get, say, all the "auction house" items in shops and have to literally shop around for good deals. Â You wouldn't know where they were. Â Or, you could have a game with a lot more going on in it. Â Or you could also give players supply quotas from those places, meaning you could be getting your "quests" from those stores and thus it would be better to have them exist. Â Mimicking a real supply chain, in a way.

In the end, I think you'd definitely see that more except for one major problem: MMORPGs, so far, have been very country-centric. Â In essence, town is a safe place to get gear and relax before you go back into the "game-world", meaning outside town. Â Real towns at the scale you're talking aren't meant to be stopping stations, they're meant to be lived in, worked in, and relaxed in. Â I think you'd get a lot more mileage out of cities that size if they were more the setting rather than a stopping shop. Â We're thinking like Midgard or New Seattle size metroplexes where having every building be habitable and useful would be a distinct advantage.

Which, in the end, doesn't sound like a bad idea. Â I'd love to see the game where city is setting. Â Any MMOs like that around or are they all doing the windswept vista thing?

Zyrusticae · **04-21-2014, 05:16 PM**

(04-21-2014, 04:12 PM)Ildur Wrote: That sounds awesome and incredibly tiresome. Then again, I think that's a sandboxy game, so things might not be as terrible as they'd be in a themepark.

Maybe they'll be more terrible...

(04-21-2014, 04:33 PM)Naunet Wrote: Haha yea. On the one hand, points for realism. On the other hand, minus a whole lotta points for massiveÂ inconvenience. xD

(04-21-2014, 04:51 PM)Clover Wrote: I'm not sure I like that system, unless armour isn't too stat dependent. As if farming a single set of good armour wasn't enough, will we have to farm for several sets just so that we can be well dressed at any area of the map? ;

Game still looks very interesting and I'm definitely playing it, in any case.

The thing you have to understand is that gear is not intended to be permanent in this game. It cribs off of EVE Online where everything is designed to be easily made and easily replaced (and most of it is player-made goods, too).

There will be no mega-uber max-item level gear in this game, it simply isn't that type of game. Or rather, even if there are such items you have to weigh the risk that comes with it (if you lose such an item obviously it'll cost you a lot more than if you just used something standard and replaceable). Again, using EVE Online as an example, there are officer and deadspace modules which have a very high 'meta level', but using such items only gives you a marginal benefit and makes you an absolutely massive target for PKers.

Themepark MMOs (of which FFXIV is one) have driven into players this idea that all gear will stay with you until you find the next great piece, but it wasn't always this way and, honestly, I don't think it should be this way. In the real world a lot of what we have is disposable - it only makes sense that our games should mimick this in some fashion as well.

Naunet · **04-21-2014, 08:39 PM**

So wait, is Black Desert doing the whole "someone PKs you and takes your stuff" and/or the whole "if you die, you can lose your stuff" dealio? Interest gone. xD

Lost River · **04-21-2014, 08:43 PM**

(04-21-2014, 08:39 PM)Naunet Wrote: So wait, is Black Desert doing the whole "someone PKs you and takes your stuff" and/or the whole "if you die, you can lose your stuff" dealio? Interest gone. xD

The game still looks awesome; but sadly, idiots (of this MMO generation) tend to ruin PvP open games due to "lolfag, die" and such. :/

synaesthetic · **04-21-2014, 10:11 PM**

I've always said the best way to make an MMO with a vibrant, thriving economy is to make equipment fairly easy to come by, but make sure that when it breaks, it actually breaksÂ and can't be "fixed."

The best idea that I've had to solve the usual gear grind vs. consequences argument in any MMO (though this applies to themeparks in particular) is to disjoin equipment from "stats."

Take this hypothetical: you have clothes, armor and weapons that you can equip and use, and these may allow you to do something and give a logical bonus. The big bonuses, though, would come from intangible things like setting talents and skills or acquiring "mods" which stand in for the idea of "gear" as a themepark MMO views it.

This way you wouldn't ever need a vanity system because the concept would be superfluous and irrelevant; your clothes are mostly cosmetic. You'd get a suit of chain armor and all it'd have is a defense modifier. To get bonuses to your raw stats and derived stats you'd need to take passive skills or find mods that you can link to your character.

You get a sword, and it lets you do sword attacks. You can set active sword skills and use the sword to perform those attacks. You can set sword mods to make yourself more deadly with a sword (for damage-dealers) or more defensive (for tanks). But all the actual sword, on its own, lets you do is hit people with a sword and use sword skills. Then you get into incomparables--i.e. the weapons are all zero-sum, balancing speed, accuracy and power together to cancel out. You use mods (rather than gear) to "get positive."

Rambly post is rambly, but the idea is that you could make a system in which gear is bothÂ desirable and easy to obtain, and a world where everything is essentially a consumable item. There's a real easy way to do this, too; simply give all items hitpoints and whenever the hitpoints reach 0, the item is broken and suffers penalties, and if the hitpoints reach some negative number, the item is destroyed and can't be repaired. The more damaged an item is when it is repaired, the more maximum HP it loses. Eventually the item can't be repaired further and can be discarded, sold as junk or recycled for raw materials to build something else.

You could even "have your cake and eat it too" by creating legendary weapons that can't lose maximum HP, but cost a lotÂ to repair (as they're magical, exceptionally-crafted artifacts that only a few master artisans could possibly maintain) and make these drop from some big fuck-off dragon. Then you'd have both the whole "get loot and feel good about it" bit. You'd save your legendary sword for fighting those big fuck-off dragons, but use your normal sword for dispatching random highwaymen.

Ignacius · **04-21-2014, 11:46 PM**

(04-21-2014, 10:11 PM)synaesthetic Wrote: I've always said the best way to make an MMO with a vibrant, thriving economy is to make equipment fairly easy to come by, but make sure that when it breaks, it actually breaksÂ and can't be "fixed."

The best idea that I've had to solve the usual gear grind vs. consequences argument in any MMO (though this applies to themeparks in particular) is to disjoin equipment from "stats."

Take this hypothetical: you have clothes, armor and weapons that you can equip and use, and these may allow you to do something and give a logical bonus. The big bonuses, though, would come from intangible things like setting talents and skills or acquiring "mods" which stand in for the idea of "gear" as a themepark MMO views it.

This way you wouldn't ever need a vanity system because the concept would be superfluous and irrelevant; your clothes are mostly cosmetic. You'd get a suit of chain armor and all it'd have is a defense modifier. To get bonuses to your raw stats and derived stats you'd need to take passive skills or find mods that you can link to your character.

You get a sword, and it lets you do sword attacks. You can set active sword skills and use the sword to perform those attacks. You can set sword mods to make yourself more deadly with a sword (for damage-dealers) or more defensive (for tanks). But all the actual sword, on its own, lets you do is hit people with a sword and use sword skills. Then you get into incomparables--i.e. the weapons are all zero-sum, balancing speed, accuracy and power together to cancel out. You use mods (rather than gear) to "get positive."

Rambly post is rambly, but the idea is that you could make a system in which gear is bothÂ desirable and easy to obtain, and a world where everything is essentially a consumable item. There's a real easy way to do this, too; simply give all items hitpoints and whenever the hitpoints reach 0, the item is broken and suffers penalties, and if the hitpoints reach some negative number, the item is destroyed and can't be repaired. The more damaged an item is when it is repaired, the more maximum HP it loses. Eventually the item can't be repaired further and can be discarded, sold as junk or recycled for raw materials to build something else.

You could even "have your cake and eat it too" by creating legendary weapons that can't lose maximum HP, but cost a lotÂ to repair (as they're magical, exceptionally-crafted artifacts that only a few master artisans could possibly maintain) and make these drop from some big fuck-off dragon. Then you'd have both the whole "get loot and feel good about it" bit. You'd save your legendary sword for fighting those big fuck-off dragons, but use your normal sword for dispatching random highwaymen.

Ironically, Square's already had better ideas themselves (not that they'd remember, the dumbasses). Â A few incredible advancements in gear/stats/grind they've come up with and then completely forgotten...

1. Â Vagrant Story - The game where you didn't get weapons, you got parts. Â Combining different parts created different weapons with different ranges, damages, and damage types. Â Essentially, you get a part, but that doesn't mean you've gotten Min-Max sword A, you could use it to make all manner of other weapons. Â Then mix and match.

2. Â Final Fantasy VII - Materia. Â Our materia system is a joke compared to what we had in FFVII. Â Essentially, Square could have completely eliminated the class system with materia. Â Remember back in the day (just in case anyone here hasn't played FFVII... it's marginally possible) that materia wasn't just an add-on, it was a complex system by which you could increase or decrease weapon damage, equip spells, and alter stats and abilities. Â Essentially, while FFXIV's materia system is a sort of WoW-style gem system, the slot arrangement was a lot more important in FFVII. Â And you had to level the materia up to get the better effects out of some. Â It was awesome having a discussion about the best party/materia setup and what spells you stick that important All materia on. Â And who had Ultima. Â And KotR. Â Imagine if Square installed that as a gear/class mechanic in an MMORPG instead of copying other games.

Bushido Blade - Probably less well known (and not technically developed by Square, though I still count it), but a fighting game with the cleanest UI I've ever seen. Â Nothing on screen except the fighters, you select a character and a weapon and you end up somewhere in an explorable castle against another character and weapon. Â How no health bar, charge bars, or other stats? Â Because any strike to one leg would drop you to one knee, limiting your mobility and often your attack variety. Â Get hit in the other, any you were crawling or rolling. Â Get hit in the offhand, and you were fielding the weapon one-handed, which was okay for one-handed weapons like a rapier but was horrible fielding something heavy like a hammer or naginata. Â Get hit once, anytime, in the head, torso, or sword arm and you died. Â That was completely unforgiving. Â Being disabled sucked, but even if you disabled someone completely, every enemy was a threat. Â That might be hard in the real world with lag online, but if all the computers timed individually, you might be able to get away with something like that. Â Nowadays, you could calculate speed vs. ability to glance blows with armor, something that really happens.

I'd say the best way to have a vibrant, thriving economy in a game is to make sure that, instead of making gear more temporary, make it more upgradable and more dependent on upkeep. Â Imagine applying a system above, particularly Vagrant Story weapon construction and FFVII Materia slotting, to an MMORPG gear system. Â You may change weapons once in a blue moon to experiment with new range, damage type, or skills, but you can easily hot-swap in and out pieces, spells, et cetera that changes the weapon. Â The best part about that is, parts and materia you'd gather at the beginning of the game, like All or Weapon Empower, would still be just as useful later in the game, and thus you might still be buying, selling, and servicing things a level 1 crafter could do even in the endgame. Â At present, it's just working a certain metal until that's completely outmoded, and gear is so bountiful in so many games (as the main reward from quests, dungeons, PVP, and so on) that it's not even necessary to buy it.

I'd say the best way to REALLY keep an economy fired up wouldn't be the EVE way, but to really make people fine-tune their weapons, armor, equipment, spells, and so on to suit themselves specifically. Â Sort of the Diablo 3 method of customization, just throw so many spells, modifications of those spells, and passives at people that they're never bored, they're all trying different combinations of things just to see what works for them.

Blazing Corpse spiders > Ghost Firebomb, IMO.

synaesthetic · **04-24-2014, 02:23 AM**

The problem with that is it would incorporate a great deal of horizontal progression which is something Square seems to dislike (despite loving it in FFXI for years). I think part of the reason is it's much easier to keep the game "balanced" if every time a new tier of content comes out, all the old gear becomes obsolete.

It also tends to limit the amount of worthwhile content you have at any given point, which I feel is problematic. Square is trying to have their cake and eat it too by utilizing linear vertical progression andÂ gate new content behind old content. This is not smart at all. I am really personally annoyed that I cannot attempt Turn 6 without completing Turn 5 first, or that people have to kill Titan and Ifrit EX to attempt Leviathan EX.

No, Square, this is not the way to do it. They should not have made the new tier i100-115. Linear vertical progression only results in two things: disposable content and power creep.

Honestly I would throw away the entire idea of "item level" in the first place. The whole "gearscore" situation is a stupid one to begin with. I know it's more difficult to design and handle, but the loot that drops from The Binding Coil of Bahamut, which is launch content as you know, should still be relevant... five years from now. When I played FFXI in 2007, where the current content tier was Wings of the Goddess, people stillÂ raided in Sky, Rise of the Zilart content that came out several years earlier.

I don't understand why MMO developers insist upon spending thousands and thousands of dollars and labor-hours on developing content they fully intend to "throw away" within three to six months.

Ignacius · **04-24-2014, 08:48 AM**

(04-24-2014, 02:23 AM)synaesthetic Wrote: The problem with that is it would incorporate a great deal of horizontal progression which is something Square seems to dislike (despite loving it in FFXI for years). I think part of the reason is it's much easier to keep the game "balanced" if every time a new tier of content comes out, all the old gear becomes obsolete.

It also tends to limit the amount of worthwhile content you have at any given point, which I feel is problematic. Square is trying to have their cake and eat it too by utilizing linear vertical progression andÂ gate new content behind old content. This is not smart at all. I am really personally annoyed that I cannot attempt Turn 6 without completing Turn 5 first, or that people have to kill Titan and Ifrit EX to attempt Leviathan EX.

No, Square, this is not the way to do it. They should not have made the new tier i100-115. Linear vertical progression only results in two things: disposable content and power creep.

Honestly I would throw away the entire idea of "item level" in the first place. The whole "gearscore" situation is a stupid one to begin with. I know it's more difficult to design and handle, but the loot that drops from The Binding Coil of Bahamut, which is launch content as you know, should still be relevant... five years from now. When I played FFXI in 2007, where the current content tier was Wings of the Goddess, people stillÂ raided in Sky, Rise of the Zilart content that came out several years earlier.

I don't understand why MMO developers insist upon spending thousands and thousands of dollars and labor-hours on developing content they fully intend to "throw away" within three to six months.

Honestly, I think it's one of those old standbys that runs the RPG genre as a whole. Â It's been with us since the very first JRPGs that I remember, and even Zelda did have you slowly replacing a few pieces of gear. Â It's just burned into the corneas of game developers that your characters need to get stuff when they advance. Â What do they get? Â New gear to replace the old.

*fanfare* Â This is one of those times that I'll say how good the core game of EVE is! Â They have that same sort of progression, but it's a bit more nebulous. Â Obviously, you try to get to T2 ships and otherwise you don't get many advantages trying to take your cruiser 1 v 1 with someone else's equally equipped battleship. Â However, advancing in "level" if such a thing exists, generally just adds capabilities and responsibilities. Â You aren't always getting more powerful versions of the same weapon, suddenly you're talking about having drones and you have to have countermeasures for drones in what you fly.

I'll be forever disappointed that a game designed so well at a technical level applied it the way they did.

In any case, that's possible in any game including a fantasy game. Â Let's imagine you start with a sword and a shield. Â As you advance in the game, you can start picking up other weapons and adding skills. Â As you add them, you start adding situations where you need those skills. Â Maybe enemies start becoming larger or more numerous, and you need skillsets to deal with both. Â Maybe they start circling for position or the area you're accessing means you're having to learn ancillary skills like scaling palace walls, using disguises, and so on.

I may have played too much Shadowrun in my youth. Â I think games are maybe too objective-based? Â The concept of min-max gear has been in RPGs since the dawn of time, but that's because, in the broader scheme of the universe, damage is damage. Â When push comes to shove and all the math and modifiers are applied, it's just a number. Â Games seem to be fixated on changing the way that number is generated in as many different ways as possible rather than making that number less of a concern.

Imagine not being able to quickly heal in a game, so suddenly it isn't just about racing damage, it's about knowing how to avoid combat at times or how to generate a killing blow without taking any damage yourself, since you won't get it back. Â Maybe you could add more infiltration, siege breaking, or traveling so that getting to the objective (and needing the skills to get to that objective) are more important than what you do when you actually get there. Â Or maybe you can go the other way, making combat much more realistic by making more decisions about defense, position, terrain, and tactics rather than our current system. Â I'd love a game where you defend a castle with slings, arrows, oil, and catapults, the enemy breaks through and you need to form a ring around spellcasters with your melee or pin them at the bottom of a set of stairs. Â Very old-school Warcraft or C&C stuff, only it's played out by people playing a single player and focusing very much on the economy of combat.

That's just a few examples, but it would change things significantly so that gear isn't even really important. Â That way, there could be a lot more lateral progression by essentially customizing gear not to max damage (which would be dictated by skill and how the skill was applies), but to changing more interesting concepts such as weapon handling speed, attack range, elemental affinities, and so on. Â That way, the player could manually tweak stats individually in a zero-sum game to make a weapon "feel" right rather than having to use something predetermined by the developers.

Zyrusticae · **04-24-2014, 01:05 PM**

(04-21-2014, 08:43 PM)Lost River Wrote:
(04-21-2014, 08:39 PM)Naunet Wrote: So wait, is Black Desert doing the whole "someone PKs you and takes your stuff" and/or the whole "if you die, you can lose your stuff" dealio? Interest gone. xD

The game still looks awesome; but sadly, idiots (of this MMO generation) tend to ruin PvP open games due to "lolfag, die" and such. :/

Well I have news for you guys: All the PvP is strictly opt-in. The FFA PvP was a result of a bug in the first closed beta (which subsequently ruined their reputation, lolwut).

I'm actually curious how this will work now, especially with caravans. Is there going to be a reason to hire bodyguards for caravan work? Are NPCs going to waylay travelers at random? These are some important questions that need answering, I think.

synaesthetic · **04-25-2014, 06:58 PM**

You're talking about incomparables, but that sort of system takes a lot of work to keep fair and balanced. It's easier to just make the numbers go higher.

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