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synaesthetic · **04-01-2014, 12:44 PM**

Such a game would simply be tuned so that you take considerably less damage from enemies. I've played many tabletop and computer RPGs where healing takes too long to be used during combat, so you're stuck with the HP you have while fighting.

It's not really any different, you just get hit for far less. If they took healing during combat away with the current enemy DPS, it would not work out. Tongue

It's all relative. If you're not noticing your HP dropping, either you're only playing easy content or you've got some really good healers.

Ignacius · **04-01-2014, 02:23 PM**

(04-01-2014, 12:44 PM)synaesthetic Wrote: Such a game would simply be tuned so that you take considerably less damage from enemies. I've played many tabletop and computer RPGs where healing takes too long to be used during combat, so you're stuck with the HP you have while fighting.

It's not really any different, you just get hit for far less. If they took healing during combat away with the current enemy DPS, it would not work out.

It's all relative. If you're not noticing your HP dropping, either you're only playing easy content or you've got some really good healers.

Or they just make it less forgiving. Â Or make your armor durability into a sort of HP. Â What I'm saying is that we've gotten a bit too used to games that coddle us and give us ways out. Â I'm saying you could make a game where you fight a dragon and you would have to go into it knowing that a mistake doesn't get fixed, it can only be overcome, and your mistakes are limited.

I think a "healer" is sort of a facet of game design that's been with us without question for so long, especially in fantasy games. Â It's not strictly necessary, though. Â It could be that you only have a limited amount of health and take injuries as in real life, so you need to know how to avoid attacks and manage your own health.

It isn't in the current crop of MMOs not because of viability, but because of creativity. Â The answer game developers come to in the race to erase the class system is to simply homogenize the classes, I.E. make everyone their own healer and tank, not to simply reorganize the structure of the gameplay to make class a non-issue. Â One game that comes to mind, oddly, is Bushido Blade, a PSOne fighting game developed by Light Weight (and ironically published by Squaresoft). Â Unlike all other fighting games, there was no life bar and no health pool. Â They structured the game so that any single hit to a vital area of your body would kill you, and any strike to another part of your body would be debilitating. Â You certainly paid a LOT more attention to what was going on, and the UI was totally clean.

It was ingenious. Â Nobody would have thought to make a fighting game without the traditional health bar and light-medium-heavy attack at that point, but I'd say that Bushido Blade was my favorite fighting game of all time. Â Not only was it idiosyncratic, but it was genuinely more thrilling. Â Most of all, it was intuitive; it wasn't just a fighting game with no HP, it was a completely different animal.

MMO developers, I daresay even modern developers in general, just don't develop that way anymore. Â Originality, today, is to set the same FPS game they released last year in the wild west instead of World War 2 Belgium. Â The problem with MMO design is that everyone's gotten stuck in a rut and essentially tried solving some of the player disaffection with band-aid solutions, e.g. giving us FATE-style quests to keep us from falling into the paragraph-chapter style of leveling or giving us a more "active" style of combat by removing cooldowns or the auto-attack.

As much as I've complained about EVE, it is, to its credit, something different. Â I'm not sure it's necessarily better and certainly not carried to its full potential, but it is structurally and organically different from the rest of the MMO market. Â And it isn't like other companies aren't capable of making something structurally different from the ground up; lots of the old companies that made genre-bending and idiosyncratic games are still around even if the new batch wasn't able to come up with something.

It's just disappointing seeing the new crop and knowing I'll still be playing World of Warcraft when its next expansion comes out. Â I sometimes wonder if I play it not because it's, in and of itself, a great game, but because of all the games trying to do what it does, it is simply the best, and everyone shouldering in to try to take their market share is doing so by adding and subtracting from what WoW did well (though not first, even it wasn't the original).

I guess it's just being in a design profession myself. Â Game design is very similar to architectural design, they just seem to have become somewhat complacent, even with the almost unlimited resources that modern technology gives them. Â Or maybe their failings are like ours, and pedestrian video game design is like pedestrian architecture, generally dictated and organized by business minds that don't understand how design actually works, just what they saw in their hometown.

Reminds me of a project we were working on where a Christian television station in Atlanta asked us to design a new studio in the southern antebellum style from an abandoned grocery store. Â They even gave us a picture of EXACTLY what they wanted it to look like. Â It's the ugliest thing I've ever put together in Revit, and largely because people who don't have any idea how a building will actually work or look in real life are dictating architectural decisions.

Who knows. Â I know CAPCOM hasn't exactly benefited from its horrible business analysts and administration, despite still having a game design studio that can intermittently churn out an amazing game.

Zyrusticae · **04-01-2014, 03:08 PM**

(03-31-2014, 10:31 PM)Naunet Wrote: Blade & Soul loses for the simple fact of being NCSoft and eastern and thus doomed to grind and inevitable F2P shittiness. I learned from TERA that no amount of beautiful graphics or even fun combat can counter the insidious nature of Korean f2p models.

Okay.

What?

Besides the fact that Blade & Soul is not the same game as TERA (or Aion for that matter), even Tera is an extremely tame game relative to old stalwarts like Lineage or, gods forbid, Lineage II (which, I should remind you, are still two of the most popular MMOs on the world stage to this day). We're talking years to hit the level cap in those games. Years of regular play. Tera has some shittiness in its model but most of the shittiness comes in the form of straight-up RNG bullshit, which is something every MMO ever made has in spades - just look at the Atma grind in FFXIV for a very recent example.

Speaking of Blade & Soul specifically, you're talking out of your ass and making an assumption based purely on the location the game was made at (lolwut?). For the record, Blade & Soul NEVER reaches the level of sheer RNG-related asshattery a game like TERA or Aion does. At most you'll get several weapon evo fails at level cap, but those utterly pale in comparison to the absurdity of weapon enchanting in the aforementioned games.

The thing is, Team Bloodlust is remarkably smart about their approach in this - regular weapon leveling cannot fail, except at two break points: the "breakthrough" going from weapon level 5 -> 6, and the "fusion" when going from one tier of weapon to the next. This limits your exposure to the constant and unending "fail fail fail PASS fail fail fail fail fail fail fail PASS" grind you see in other games. They also don't consume your materials on failure and instead merely require you to grind more gold, mitigating the frustration element considerably. I still remember trying to enchant weapons in Aion where you go through tons of evolution stones before finally hitting +10 on a single weapon - and that's assuming you don't also buy the powder to increase the chances of success (shudder).

I'm playing Blade & Soul right now and I don't see any of this "grind" or "inevitable F2P shittiness" you seem so certain is coming - and for that matter, this is the Chinese version, with Tencent as the publisher. Certainly, my progress slows down considerably once when I reach "endgame" status, but that goes for all themepark MMOs - it's an intrinsic element of the genre, and until the genre itself changes that's just something you're going to have to accept and deal with when it comes.

(04-01-2014, 08:30 AM)Ignacius Wrote: I'm waiting for the game so unforgiving that there are no more healers or tanks, just players. Â And you don't get to refill your health until after the fight is over. Â There's just no economy in HP in the trinity system forcing you to adapt and make hard choices, sometimes putting you at a severe disadvantage. Â If anything, games these days refill my HP so quickly that I don't even notice it.

Funny that you should say this, because this is pretty much how Blade & Soul works. There are no healers. There are healing potions but those have 30-second (special potions) or 60-second (normal potions) cooldowns, so you can't rely on them except to help you recover from an occasional mistake. There are lifesteal gems but those only account for a very insignificant fraction of your HP pool. There are lifesteal attacks but they're either really weak or have really long cooldowns like the healing pots.

I quite enjoy it. Actually, it all feels remarkably intuitive. You're responsible for your own well-being, and while your teammates can help mitigate for you with some support abilities and CC effects, there's no situation in the game's later dungeons where you can just sit there, take aggro, and let the healers cover the rest. You have to move, block, dodge, or otherwise avoid taking damage if you want to survive.

Also, the fact that everyone can revive others is something I sincerely miss when playing other games now. As it is, in FFXIV, when the healer goes down, you're fucked, pure and simple. Letting other players get the healer back up would do a lot to mitigate that harsh dependency.

Naunet · **04-01-2014, 03:22 PM**

There's no need to take my comments regarding my thoughts on B&S personally. :p

I simply do not trust Korean developers to maintain the integrity of a subscription MMO. Their business model is almost uniformly "milk box sales and subscriptions for a year or two and then dump it to f2p to work on the next cash cow, where we'll do the same," repeat cycle ad nauseum. It usually comes with extremely underhanded cash shop tactics that I simply cannot support.

I'm glad you're enjoying Blade & Soul. No need to jump down my throat because I decided to express my own opinion in a forum thread talking about MMOs.

Zyrusticae · **04-01-2014, 03:36 PM**

Sorry, but the constant and unending "Korean MMOs are ALL grinders" bullshit that gets tossed around all over the internet just straight-up pisses me off. So much of it is based entirely on the reputation of the Lineage series and nothing else. It's stupid, it's uninformed, and it needs to stop. Like right now.

It especially pisses me off because it intrinsically excludes western MMOs for some unfathomable reason, despite the fact that western MMOs are pretty much exactly the same. It's absurd. Please don't do that.

Now, if you want to talk about business models... that's a whole 'nother ball of wax. There are plenty of arguments to be had both for and against subscription and F2P models. I do not believe for a second that one is intrinsically superior to the other. For that matter, I daresay that a lot of what determines a game's quality is completely irrelevant to the business model. If a game sucks, it'll suck regardless of whether or not it's subscription or F2P, and if a game's developer fails to give good support, how they get their funding is immaterial when their support is lackluster to begin with (just look at World of Warcraft for cryin' out loud, they get no content updates between expansions)!

Zhavi · **04-01-2014, 03:41 PM**

(04-01-2014, 03:36 PM)Zyrusticae Wrote: (just look at World of Warcraft for cryin' out loud, they get no content updates between expansions)!

Errr... I think you might need to define 'content' before making that claim. I think your definition might be different from mine!

synaesthetic · **04-01-2014, 04:22 PM**

It's a difference of business models. The Korean MMO market is incredibly competitive and lucrative. It's all about extracting as much money from the players as quickly as possible before moving on to the next big title. As a result, the developers tend to throw things together in a very slapdash haphazard fashion that looks quite nice and glitzy on the surface, but has very little depth (not to mention lots of bugs that never get fixed).

Most Korean MMOs rarely receive content updates, especially if they are F2P. When they do get them they tend to be in the form of either cash shop additions, typically with those RNG boxes where you have a very low chance of getting what you want, or they add the minimum amount of new areas, enemies and the like just to keep the players going for a little longer. These updates generally bring with them a host of new bugs and glitches that don't ever get fixed, while older bugs are ignored.

Korean MMOs are developed quickly, QA'd without much care and shoved out to market as fast as possible in order to compete with the hundreds of other MMOs they're facing up against. These games are not intended to last longer than a year or two at the most, whereupon they are placed in "maintenance mode" and left with a skeleton crew to keep the lights on and keep the cash shop stocked, while the bulk of the development team moves on to the company's next title.

Korean MMOs rarely have public test servers. They rarely interact with their playerbase directly. They generally prioritize fast profit above all else, because that is the market they exist in. If a Korean MMO developer attempted to create an MMO by Western MMO rules--that is, to create a long-term service with a loyal playerbase that plays for years, even up to a decadeÂ or more--they would go out of business instantly. In Korea, it's all about mass-production, bashing out the shiniest, sparkliest costume-jewelry bauble in as little time as possible, get it on the chopping block and start pulling in revenue before their competitors can.Â

The Korean playerbase has very, very different habits than the Western MMO player. They don't care about lore, about roleplaying, about long-term enjoyment of the game. Part of this is due to their internet-cafe gaming culture versus the West's home-entertainment gaming culture, but most of it is the fault of the industry itself. In their haste to make as much money as fast as possible they've created an incredibly volatile market full of low-budget shovelware. This couldn't possiblyÂ be more different than the Western MMO market, where only big-budget titles using well-known intellectual properties are ever very successful.

The idea that Korean MMOs are "grinders" is borne out by historical evidence. It's not justÂ Lineage. It's Ragnarok Online. It's TERA. It's Aion. It's Bless Online. Pick any random Korean MMO and count how many layers of random dice rolling is involved in endgame gearing. We'll use TERA as an example because it's the most recent one I've played.

In TERA, for endgame gear, you have these levels of RNG:

- The boss has to drop the correct item. Many bosses are not guaranteed to drop any useful loot at all. The chance to drop the actually useful items is very, very low.
- Once you obtain the item, you use an expensive consumable to upgrade it to masterwork. This has a 2% chance of success; this is compounded by the masterwork quality bonus, which can either be +1%, +2% or +3%. The chance of successfully masterworking andÂ getting a +3% quality bonus is incredibly small.
- Once you've masterworked your item, you have to use a combination of expensive consumables to randomly re-roll the bonuses on said item. Most of the bonuses are useless. The probability of getting all the useful bonuses on one item in one attempt is <1%.
- Once you've got useful bonuses, then you have to enchant the item. Each level of enchantment has a different chance of succeeding. Once you reach +8, +9 or higher, the success rate drops so incredibly low that it's completely possible to fail hundreds of times before successfully raising the item's level.

Contrast to FFXIV's endgame gearing:

- The boss has to drop the item. Coil bosses drop two items every time, guaranteed. Primals drop one item, guaranteed, every time.

+ There are alternatives to boss drops that have absolutely no chance of failure (EX primal weapons, raid token gear, relic weapons). These alternatives are equivalent or betterÂ than the raid drops from Coil/primals.

There's really no contest here. In XIV, no matter how unlucky you might be in Coil, you can still gear. You can still get i100, eventually i110 if you buy and upgrade weathered gear. Will you be exactly as optimal as if you were lucky with drops? No, but you can be close enough. In TERA, on the other hand, there have been players who have been completely stalledÂ progression-wise because the Random Number God will not smile upon them (I was one of them). Since each attempt to upgrade costs a considerable amount of in-game currency, an unlucky player will be forced to spend an absurd amount of time grinding--and I did. I spent hours and hours and hours, countless hours, grinding the same open-world mobs for money, only to fail again and again and again.

You say that Korean MMOs are not grinders, but by and large they are. It's possible that Blade & Soul isn't, as I haven't been able to play it yet. If that's true, then B&S is a freakish anomaly.

FFXIV may be made by Square-Enix, a Japanese company, but it isÂ a Western MMO. Even FFXI was a Western MMO, as it was essentially an EverQuest clone with Final Fantasy flavor and lore on top. Western MMOs can be grinders, too--they aren't immune. However, since Blizzard instigated a sea change in the MMO industry with World of Warcraft, Western MMOs have focused on accessibility ever since, with a strong development focus on reducing, limiting or hiding the grind, or simply making the grind more fun. The Korean MMO industry was not affected by this; WoW was not quite so transformative in South Korea.

Naunet · **04-01-2014, 04:29 PM**

(04-01-2014, 03:36 PM)Zyrusticae Wrote: (just look at World of Warcraft for cryin' out loud, they get no content updates between expansions)!

Wat. That's about as factually incorrect as one can get. xD

Incidentally, I've never played Lineage. My own perception of Korean MMOs is based entirely around my own experiences with... Korean MMOs. Don't tell me how to think, thanks. ^^ It's my decision to avoid Korean MMOs based on these experiences, and I'm not damning anyone who enjoys them. They are simply not something I am willing to touch anymore.

Ignacius · **04-01-2014, 04:51 PM**

(04-01-2014, 03:08 PM)Ignacius Wrote: [quote pid=82474 dateline=1396355402]
I'm waiting for the game so unforgiving that there are no more healers or tanks, just players. Â And you don't get to refill your health until after the fight is over. Â There's just no economy in HP in the trinity system forcing you to adapt and make hard choices, sometimes putting you at a severe disadvantage. Â If anything, games these days refill my HP so quickly that I don't even notice it.

Funny that you should say this, because this is pretty much how Blade & Soul works. There are no healers. There are healing potions but those have 30-second (special potions) or 60-second (normal potions) cooldowns, so you can't rely on them except to help you recover from an occasional mistake. There are lifesteal gems but those only account for a very insignificant fraction of your HP pool. There are lifesteal attacks but they're either really weak or have really long cooldowns like the healing pots.

I quite enjoy it. Actually, it all feels remarkably intuitive. You're responsible for your own well-being, and while your teammates can help mitigate for you with some support abilities and CC effects, there's no situation in the game's later dungeons where you can just sit there, take aggro, and let the healers cover the rest. You have to move, block, dodge, or otherwise avoid taking damage if you want to survive.

Also, the fact that everyone can revive others is something I sincerely miss when playing other games now. As it is, in FFXIV, when the healer goes down, you're fucked, pure and simple. Letting other players get the healer back up would do a lot to mitigate that harsh dependency.
[/quote]

Actually, that's also how Diablo works. Â It's just not harsh enough for me. Â I mean, complete harshness. Â Get hit too hard and you'll lose movement speed or attack power, as you'll be injured. Â And when I say slowly coming back, I mean your health only will regenerate after a day, so you may have to think about whether you want to risk going somewhere while injured, knowing you are risking becoming more injured. Â It just seems more realistic that way, to have armor actually mitigate damage normally and injury works how it does in real life (-ish). Â So you can only have so much damage you can absorb without retreating from the danger of the game world to town (or whatever).

We just don't have the danger of being low on health. Â It's a temporary warning circumstance. Â We just never have to really make long-term decisions based on our well being. Â It would be nice if that was combined with a game where travel times are significant, so what actually keeps you from traveling isn't that creatures just have arbitrarily larger "level" numbers (or that you don't meet them; you could probably not have a level at all at that point), but that you don't have the skills or equipment necessary to undertake the danger of a long voyage, and a trek deep into the wilderness for people who have no survival or combat skills is essentially suicide.

Just saying that it is a model that would work, but doesn't seem to be explored. Â Most MMOs have you as a globetrotter rather than being at the mercy of a hostile world.

synaesthetic · **04-01-2014, 05:02 PM**

The problem I have with the removal of the trinity and making every player "responsible" for themselves basically removes the cooperative aspect of the game entirely and severely limits the interesting mechanics a raid boss can have.

Your dream game would work fine in a PvP-only context. I just don't see it working very well in a PvE raiding context, not without becoming a mindless, mechanicless zerg.

Actually, you should play DayZ. I think it'd be right up your alley. Permadeath, no healers, a focus on travel and exploration and methodical planning and survival.

Ildur · **04-01-2014, 05:11 PM**

"A mechanicless zerg" is pretty much how I'd sum up Guild Wars 2, the game that doesn't like the Triumvirate. All boss encounters are a tide of characters shoving themselves to the big boss' feet, dying and being revived over and over again because there are no mechanics to it more than dealing damage (and getting knockbacked a whole lot). It used to be like that on instances, too, until they fixed that. Though now it's just a "Find the Glitch" or "Stack in a corner" contest instead.

Ignacius · **04-01-2014, 05:11 PM**

(04-01-2014, 03:36 PM)Zyrusticae Wrote: Sorry, but the constant and unending "Korean MMOs are ALL grinders" bullshit that gets tossed around all over the internet just straight-up pisses me off. So much of it is based entirely on the reputation of the Lineage series and nothing else. It's stupid, it's uninformed, and it needs to stop. Like right now.

It especially pisses me off because it intrinsically excludes western MMOs for some unfathomable reason, despite the fact that western MMOs are pretty much exactly the same. It's absurd. Please don't do that.

Now, if you want to talk about business models... that's a whole 'nother ball of wax. There are plenty of arguments to be had both for and against subscription and F2P models. I do not believe for a second that one is intrinsically superior to the other. For that matter, I daresay that a lot of what determines a game's quality is completely irrelevant to the business model. If a game sucks, it'll suck regardless of whether or not it's subscription or F2P, and if a game's developer fails to give good support, how they get their funding is immaterial when their support is lackluster to begin with (just look at World of Warcraft for cryin' out loud, they get no content updates between expansions)!

A couple things about this, some that other people have touched on. Â I don't play any Korean MMOs, but I wasn't actually aware that the games I wasn't playing were Korean. Â I just haven't been impressed by them. Â I wasn't aware it was a cultural thing. Â However, having read through their endgame content guides, they do seem a lot "grindier" than I'm used to. Â Hell, western MMOs are damn near throwing new gear at you these days. Â WoW is literally giving you a roll on gear that works for your class and spec at this point instead of making you RNG completely for the entire party. Â It's one of the things I like about WoW nowadays as compared to the vanilla days. Â No ninja looting hunters.

Second, there is actually an economic disparity between F2P games and subscription games, namely their focus. Â A F2P game makes, generally, initial money off the sale of the game and then all the rest of their money is made on little microtransactions. Â It then behooves them, like facebook games, to get you hooked early and then make sure you find advancement difficult without the microtransactions. Â Then, you'll either leave (which they won't worry about, since the customer is just a financial liability at that point) or you'll spend money in their store, at which point they make sure you need to spend more money there.

I think the only possible way that would be mitigated is with in-game advertising, and people are already adblocking the free content on YouTube, which means few have any faith in that anymore. Â It might work if Blizzard does it, but it doesn't seem like it would work unless you could really make sure people were paying attention.

If you could, your game becomes like a subscription game, where the focus is to keep people playing the game as long as possible. Â That means walking a tightrope of not pissing them off enough to quit but keeping them fed with content that keeps them interested. Â So content is a lot more important.

Contrary to your assertion, World of Warcraft drops new areas, dungeons, and raids at least on every patch, which is every few months. Â In the last expansion, Mists of Pandaria, WoW players did get four further free patches that contained major content changes and advancements (you can argue about the relative merit of then having to pay again for the expansion, but they tend to make it worth the money).

I'd say WoW players aren't wont for content; after so long being the top dog via content drops, I'd say it's probably the most extensive MMO in the world. Â If anything, I'd say their biggest problem is that they're too extensive. Â Having to balance high end PVP and PVE, along with making all the deviations and distractions along the way relevant and interesting, means they're constantly having to fix things that cause problems elsewhere. Â I guess that's a better problem to have than "no-content".

Melkire · **04-01-2014, 05:19 PM**

(04-01-2014, 05:02 PM)synaesthetic Wrote: The problem I have with the removal of the trinity and making every player "responsible" for themselves basically removes the cooperative aspect of the game entirely and severely limits the interesting mechanics a raid boss can have.

Your dream game would work fine in a PvP-only context. I just don't see it working very well in a PvE raiding context, not without becoming a mindless, mechanicless zerg.

Most of the interesting mechanics I've come across over the years have little or nothing to do with the presence - or lack thereof - of the trinity model. Take XIV's recent instancesÂ for examples: neither Diabolos' doors nor Gobmachine's bombsÂ require any of the three archetypal roles to deal with.

When I think "trinity-based mechanics", I think of things like stacking debuffs that need to be cleansed (or not, hello Arioch), AoEs that need to be positioned clear of the party, DPS checks... you know, the mind-numbingly boring fare that has come to pass for MMO design.

All the trinity system does is impose cooperation on players by pigeon-holing them into certain tasks based on the class they chose when they started. Lack of trinity doesn't mean lack of cooperation, it just means that instead of Joe Schmoe performing task X every time, maybe he swaps out with Mary Sue for a particular encounter because Mary Sue's player happens to excel at said task for that particular encounter.

Unfortunately, that's not how and will likely never be how MMOs are designed due to developers being caught up in delivering the familiar to the consumer base for safe returns.

EDIT:

Mind you, 1. I've never played GW or GW2, and 2. By all accounts Arenanet failed miserably in doing away with the trinity system, and it sounds like a lack of innovative mechanics had a lot to do with that.

Ignacius · **04-01-2014, 05:22 PM**

(04-01-2014, 05:02 PM)synaesthetic Wrote: The problem I have with the removal of the trinity and making every player "responsible" for themselves basically removes the cooperative aspect of the game entirely and severely limits the interesting mechanics a raid boss can have.

Your dream game would work fine in a PvP-only context. I just don't see it working very well in a PvE raiding context, not without becoming a mindless, mechanicless zerg.

Actually, you should play DayZ. I think it'd be right up your alley. Permadeath, no healers, a focus on travel and exploration and methodical planning and survival.

Actually, I was kind of thinking of something right up Monster Hunter's alley. Â You can have mechanics, just that you have to be good enough to dodge them, because everyone is a potential target. Â Lose enough people, and you can't contain what you're fighting at best, can't survive what you're fighting at worst.

Like I said, we're just spoiled. Â We watch our cooldowns, watch our healthbars, watch for our raid warnings. Â I remember the first time I fought the Kut-ku and being completely awed by the size. Â Not the comparitive size, obviously every MMO will throw a large boss at you. Â It was how big the Kut-ku was and the sword I was trying to kill it with. Â You were constantly looking to see if the tail was coming in your direction, to see if it was preparing to charge, watching for it to rear up for a small fireball.

That was the first and smallest drake in the game.

Monster Hunter isn't like what I'm describing, but then again it's also not an MMO. Â It could be, and the idea of having to get to where you're going over a day or two of travel, making sure you're prepared, then finally hunting, trapping, and killing the raid boss rather than queuing and doing it automatically does seem refreshing.

What would be great fighting a raid boss is getting thrown halfway across a briar and wondering if you should rejoin the fight and risk death, change tactics and try attacking a less dangerous side of what you're fighting, do you stand out and try to crawl behind a rock to stay safe? Â That's if whatever you're fighting gives you a chance. Â It might start hunting you, and you might have to desperately get away and get back to some kind of camp or hiding place.

Again, just ideas of how a non-trinity PVE MMORPG would work. Â I bet if you were hurt and trying to escape a howling wolf pack that was following your blood trail, you'd pray that someone, ANYONE would be around and would find you.

Ildur · **04-01-2014, 05:38 PM**

(04-01-2014, 05:19 PM)Melkire Wrote: All the trinity system does is impose cooperation on players by pigeon-holing them into certain tasks based on the class they chose when they started. Lack of trinity doesn't mean lack of cooperation, it just means that instead of Joe Schmoe performing task X every time, maybe he swaps out with Mary Sue for a particular encounter because Mary Sue's player happens to excel at said task for that particular encounter.

But sometimes Jow Schmoe really likes performing task X, a task that Mary Sue wouild hate to do and feels uncomfortable doing. If you take away the trinity, what you'll get is that Mary will have to perform task X, the task she hates and that Joe would prefer doing anyway.

I don't know how a game without the trinity would perform. Taking it away pretty much means leaving only one role in. You can't take away dealing damage, as most MMOs are based around the murdering of mobs. That leaves you taking away tanking (no ways to reliably alter the mob's aggro lists) and healing (maybe by giving the players unreliable healing skills, with long cooldowns or that don't heal much or that heal only when outside of combat or whatever). Which means Joe Schmoe, who really likes tanking, can't tank, and Mary Sue, who really likes healing, can't heal.
The trinity doesn't force people into roles. No game (that I know of, anyway) will force a player into being a tank class if he doesn't want to: he can always choose the rogue or the priest. It gives distinct combat roles so that people may specialize in them and pick the one they like the most.
The only problem I see with it is that healers and tanks are always on higher demand, meaning getting parties is always on the "let's wait half an hour or more" side of things for damage dealers.

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