The psychology of gaming
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@gothix said in The psychology of gaming:
- skill should be more important than gear and SKILL CEILING should be placed extremely high (offers long term progression that is not limited by other game content)
Another point to go along with this is that, while most people may reference there being 400 skills. With how information travels these days, it is only a matter of time before something becomes way more used than something else. Before, you may see different things because everyone believes their way is the best but now there are so many intense theorycrafters that the ultimate way of playing will be found eventually.
I think what they need to focus on is incorporating different skill from the player in order to fully clear something. Puzzles, reaction timing, memorization, knowledge (both in game skill system and knowledge of how new encounters work). There needs to be more emphasis on the player and less on the character that exists in the game. The character in the game is just an extension of ourselves.
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@mrchipps said in The psychology of gaming:
@gothix said in The psychology of gaming:
- skill should be more important than gear and SKILL CEILING should be placed extremely high (offers long term progression that is not limited by other game content)
Another point to go along with this is that, while most people may reference there being 400 skills. With how information travels these days, it is only a matter of time before something becomes way more used than something else. Before, you may see different things because everyone believes their way is the best but now there are so many intense theorycrafters that the ultimate way of playing will be found eventually.
I think what they need to focus on is incorporating different skill from the player in order to fully clear something. Puzzles, reaction timing, memorization, knowledge (both in game skill system and knowledge of how new encounters work). There needs to be more emphasis on the player and less on the character that exists in the game. The character in the game is just an extension of ourselves.
I think this is one thing Secret World did pretty well. Player skill mattered quite a bit since you had to know your skills, the skills of your group (and how they work together), and all the mechanics of each encounter. Anyone messing up any one part of that could sink a group pretty fast provided you're doing content near your gear level.
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I think these things should be constantly improving and working against the player base. We as players will always find the answer and publish those things for others to go after at some point. I think the thing that works against developers is this. They may develop something that is overall challenging, but once it is solved, it becomes absolutely easy. I think randomization so that one answer is not the ONLY or overarching answer is the goal.
If you randomize even parts of the game like they do the map, then one answer can't be used by everyone and there will need to be some skill involved. Now how they implement that is up to them, but overall if you have a static encounter, there will always be a static answer.
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@mrchipps I completely agree. It's really hard to combat this, but other games have addressed this in pretty unique ways. For example, using the approach of making "information" an in game item that is needed for certain things. Therefore if you - the player - knows something, your character can't utilize it.
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where are heading quiz of fate? where are we should post unique questions?
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@esoba I would not mind this. It would force you to go do things and not just read them on the internet or watch videos. Maybe it would help deter people from doing it because they know regardless they will have to go back and actually get before they can go on
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@mrchipps said in The psychology of gaming:
I think these things should be constantly improving and working against the player base. We as players will always find the answer and publish those things for others to go after at some point. I think the thing that works against developers is this. They may develop something that is overall challenging, but once it is solved, it becomes absolutely easy. I think randomization so that one answer is not the ONLY or overarching answer is the goal.
If you randomize even parts of the game like they do the map, then one answer can't be used by everyone and there will need to be some skill involved. Now how they implement that is up to them, but overall if you have a static encounter, there will always be a static answer.
I think some randomness might help, but too much and players will just get frustrated. Think if every night someone came and moved your car to some random location - would get old pretty quick.
A wolf is a wolf and will have a finite set of attacks and where it can be found. There can be different types of wolves, but generally they will be found in a biome that matches their (sub) species. This will all get cataloged on the Internet - it's the nature of games. There likely won't be any single coordinates for you to find a type of wolf, but you'll likely know which biome and since those will be cataloged you'll have a general idea where to go to accomplish whatever knowledge tasks require wolves.
Unless the locations of the various biomes is random, which I doubt since this would add to the frustration of players, this will happen for pretty much everything in game. Now the layout of a biome could be somewhat randomly generated - PoE does this a bit - so that camp locations of goblins and mobs aren't in the same exact location each time.
The part of the game that might add a lot of "randomness" is the open world PvP since each encounter could be different - this really depends on how gear, biomes, talents, etc all interact.
Finding knowledge could as well if there's luck involved in finding some specific knowledge so doing the same thing 5 times might not yield any results, but the 6th time does but I think generally some piece of knowledge will have a finite set of triggers and those will get found and cataloged.
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Nowadays I see that players get bored too easily. Personaly I don't care to play the most powerfull build for 10 years. Moba has a meta for example and if you want be on top you are forced to play that. On wow was the same every hard core players played the best class/build. that's going ot happen eveywhere. Balancing everyinthing means that all spells are similar. It's nearly impossible to balance 400 totally different spells, especially if you can combine them like you wish 400^8. Accept It.
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@mrchipps said in The psychology of gaming:
(...)I'll start and say that my favorite memories of games of old was the need to find other players to accomplish almost impossible tasks. The feeling of spending days working on something to finally see it through was a rush that kept me motivated. That coupled with the myth of items that I may have seen a few times, achievements, areas that most people couldn't get to, keep me going. I love to step ahead of other people and do things most people say are impossible. I would gladly smash my head on something 1000 times if one of those times I learned one small thing and progressed.
I'm very much the same there. In my first MMORPG ever, I had a group of dedicated friends and we managed to get to spots that nobody else had ever seen. Amusingly enough, not even the developers had seen one of the spots we reached (one teleported to us once and asked where we were and how we'd been getting there
).@finland said in The psychology of gaming:
(...)Balancing everyinthing means that all spells are similar. It's nearly impossible to balance 400 totally different spells, especially if you can combine them like you wish 400^8. Accept It.
It depends if you want to go for symmetric or asymmetric balance. Since skills are supposed to be highly situational in Fractured, you don't need symmetric balance (and Prometheus even mentioned that in the Q&A video, by stating that one build could easily beat another under certain circumstances), it is enough if they balance out in the great scheme.
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It's not about individual spells, it's about schools.
Schools need to be (generally) balanced between each other so we would not end up all going warfare cause it's OP compared to other schools (for example).
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@logain Thank you for bringing that to my attention. I didn't notice that talk in the Q&A and I think with how the game may feel this is appropriate to do asymmetric balancing too.
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Balancing a game with different classes and builds is very hard to do. That is why you mostly see rock-paper-scissors balancing in games these days.
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@evolgrinz said in The psychology of gaming:
That is why you mostly see rock-paper-scissors balancing in games these days.
"That is why you mostly see rock-paper-scissors balancing in BAD games these days."
Fixed it for you.
Good MMOs make sure that balance exists, even if it's challenging to accomplish it.
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@gothix the design is abit different from classic mmo here you can mix up every and will be really hard to balace 400^8 builds.
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@finland said in The psychology of gaming:
@gothix the design is abit different from classic mmo here you can mix up every and will be really hard to balace 400^8 builds.
No need to balance 400^8 builds.
Just need to balance few schools, so each school is approximately equally powerful compared to each other. This is enough.
People who will mix up schools that rely on different attributes are nerfing themselves like that anyway. So as long as schools are balanced so they are all equally effective, all is good.
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@gothix schools have abilities if you want balance you have to modify the abilities. The school is just a name of a group of spells.
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I think ... for me a mmo is really interresting for he's backstory , it never end and evolved again and again ! And years later you're like " i remember this time who this country was full of this people and a war coming and now this people was disapear ..etc etc "
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@demlone Yeah you see this a lot in EVE. even though the game is starting to fade away a little bit. There is still always talk within communities of gamers and even outside the game that talk about the great wars and the crazy stuff that is happened in the game.
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EVE is good. I played it for 5 years and have so many good stories to tell
Haven't played it for a long time until recently and tried it out again as a free account, but without my friends and the alliance I used to be in. It was pretty boring.
EVE is only a good game if you have people to play with, but flying solo is boring and will probably get you killed too.So the "perfect" game needs to have options for both. Like GW2, you can play with friends doing fractals, raids, dungeons, world bosses, map meta's etc., but there is also a lot of content you can do solo, like map completion, exploring, story missions, farming.
I love playing MMO's, but sometimes I just don't want to deal with other people.
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@finland said in The psychology of gaming:
@gothix schools have abilities if you want balance you have to modify the abilities. The school is just a name of a group of spells.
But you don't have to balance ALL the abilities to balance 2 schools.
If you see one particular school is more OP than others and people overwhelmingly using it, you just need to nerf a few of more used abilities to bring the "school" in line. Not all of them.
