Dec 30th 2013, 16:44:41
The problem with this game is simply that it is based on a 1990s gaming era mindset. That you profit your country/account/avatar off the misery/abuse of others to come out on top.
All modern games made in the last 5 years have moved on - all the games made nowadays are such that no player can negatively impact the play experience of any other player - or at least, any such negative impact is severely limited, in most cases only to verbal exchanges.
The old gaming era mindsets do not appeal to the younger gamers, and this is why EE doesn't grow.
I like that SAM_DANGER is talking about risk vs reward of game design (since I work in the game industry), but really the problem is that
1. Being suicided on is not fun, particularly if you have not done anything to cause such aggression
2. Being abused by someone 10x larger than you is also not fun.
So how do you reconcile this? It's almost impossible without changing the game significantly, because (1) and (2) are direct counter consequences of each other. You can't mitigate (1) without increasing (2), and likewise you can't mitigate (2) without increasing (1).
Many old era games have "protection" where you become immune after taking X% damage, so wars revolve around knocking players from a higher NW band to a lower NW band from day to day, or achieve similar effects by having a VERY narrow attack range (+-30% NW for example), rather than EE's very generous 1/12x - 12x. These are just some ways of how old text based MMO games used to do mitigate both (1) and (2).
SAM_DANGER's post talks about how all the new generation games tries to cater to the vocal players, and/or making it easier for the newer players to catch up and thus causing homogenization of all the players (that is, less differentiating skills/abilities/etc). This is just how every MMO game evolves. A game that starts out will often have a young adult audience - people that are generally still studying, in high school, university, etc. These players have huge amounts of time to play. Fast forward 4-5 years, they graduate, and find jobs or get married, etc. Amount of free/play times dramatically decreases. If any aging game wants to keep their playerbase, they MUST cater to the aging population by making it more casual friendly. People whine about how World of Warcraft has been dumbed down expansion after expansion (in exactly the same fashion SAM described about having respecs/dual-spec/faster leveling/etc), but it is still hugely successful, still having over twice as much subs than the next biggest MMO. Why? Because the game ages with the players, and new players do not feel like they are starting out behind.
Game design has always been a very interesting topic, but sometimes, hard/difficult decisions have to be made because of the $$ factor. A game cannot operate if it doesn't make money.
All modern games made in the last 5 years have moved on - all the games made nowadays are such that no player can negatively impact the play experience of any other player - or at least, any such negative impact is severely limited, in most cases only to verbal exchanges.
The old gaming era mindsets do not appeal to the younger gamers, and this is why EE doesn't grow.
I like that SAM_DANGER is talking about risk vs reward of game design (since I work in the game industry), but really the problem is that
1. Being suicided on is not fun, particularly if you have not done anything to cause such aggression
2. Being abused by someone 10x larger than you is also not fun.
So how do you reconcile this? It's almost impossible without changing the game significantly, because (1) and (2) are direct counter consequences of each other. You can't mitigate (1) without increasing (2), and likewise you can't mitigate (2) without increasing (1).
Many old era games have "protection" where you become immune after taking X% damage, so wars revolve around knocking players from a higher NW band to a lower NW band from day to day, or achieve similar effects by having a VERY narrow attack range (+-30% NW for example), rather than EE's very generous 1/12x - 12x. These are just some ways of how old text based MMO games used to do mitigate both (1) and (2).
SAM_DANGER's post talks about how all the new generation games tries to cater to the vocal players, and/or making it easier for the newer players to catch up and thus causing homogenization of all the players (that is, less differentiating skills/abilities/etc). This is just how every MMO game evolves. A game that starts out will often have a young adult audience - people that are generally still studying, in high school, university, etc. These players have huge amounts of time to play. Fast forward 4-5 years, they graduate, and find jobs or get married, etc. Amount of free/play times dramatically decreases. If any aging game wants to keep their playerbase, they MUST cater to the aging population by making it more casual friendly. People whine about how World of Warcraft has been dumbed down expansion after expansion (in exactly the same fashion SAM described about having respecs/dual-spec/faster leveling/etc), but it is still hugely successful, still having over twice as much subs than the next biggest MMO. Why? Because the game ages with the players, and new players do not feel like they are starting out behind.
Game design has always been a very interesting topic, but sometimes, hard/difficult decisions have to be made because of the $$ factor. A game cannot operate if it doesn't make money.