RPG’s aren’t the only games that people follow guides on.
For example, i never played Spyro 1 until the very tail end of Reignited Trilogy’s PC port. So i grabbed the Ps1 and start going. Keep in mind, theirs no point to treasure button combo like in the later games. So i had to look up a guide on some of the levels on how to find the missing gems and complete a level.
Theirs nothing wrong with following guides, just as much as creating your own path. Some of us actually do that and it’s ruining nobody’s fun.
You are correct that MMO’s aren’t for everyone, in the same way RPG’s aren’t for everyone. Young old me wouldn’t look past all the complexity and tedium that comes with it and just want to shoot things in the face. in the same token, Third person and First person shooters and platformers aren’t for everybody. Spyro isn’t for everybody, despite how so easy and accessible it is, an unborn fetus can 100% it in 8 hours across all 3 games.
These aren’t the MMORPG’s you were looking for…
…In all seriousness, this is a thing that’s going on in WoW and i just don’t mind cause you are going to have that competitive aspect in … games in general that a subset of players will be that competitive and act like big shots and all that while telling you their “right” way of doing it. You aren’t forced to take those options, even in WoW, you can just find another Pug, create your own group, join a guild and have them take you though it or find friends. MMO does mean “theirs thousands of people at one time playing on the game same as you”, so why not take advantage of that?
actually the players themselves are what kills our creativity. Case in point I decided that I wanted to make survival Hunter and I decided that I wanted to use the butcherie talent. And I decided to make a thread about how much I like playing survival with but The butchery talent. I was immediately chastised derided and ridiculed for playing the spec the way I enjoy playing it. So you’re going to have to understand that if we do something that we enjoy there’s going to be some joker and here that’s going to be insulting and deriding us for making the decisions to personalize our characters in the way that we like it because it’s going to be 2% less DPS at the end of the day. So yeah there’s a problem here that’s more than just about the person creating the character it’s more about the community here as a whole wanting to tell us how to make our characters instead of just letting us do it the way we want
The fact that min maxing or being competitive has existed in FPS games, mobas and hell even in RPGs, Min Maxing in WoW still exists since vanilla to this day and even though you may say you didn’t put thought in his/her character, OP but there is people who want to be at a cutting edge level (PvE) or Climb the ladder in ranked PvP because that person wants the best out of their character and look at whats the meta build for their spec, learn extensively on their spec and sim every piece to get to see if its an upgrade or not. As for people who don’t care about min maxing or the meta, I can say they can play whatever the hell they want.
Aren’t Characters irrelevant tools anyways even if you don’t follow the guide?
I mean, that’s really what characters are in the grand scheme of things, tools. applying this consistently, you are just building a tool.
Plus Ralph, are you implying that people who create characters on their own can’t have builds that has no thought put into it? Guide or Not, nobody wants to be in a bad build that makes them perform worse. Doubly so in MMORPG’s group content, where individuality play has to be sacrificed for team play, cause your playing in a team, and you need to do what’s best what the team wants you to do.
Then they can do that, no problem at all. Yet your the only one that has a huge problem with it.
Winning and Creating a Character aren’t exclusive from one another.
Can you explain that major difference? cause when i take a look at the characters your comparing here, all i see is one has a good build and the other doesn’t.
Why should anybody care if you made that build or followed a guide? Do guides bother you this much Ralphie boy or is this just a take from that “individual” part from previous discussion we had, blown into a full topic, pretending you care about MMO’s and retaining it’s choice and character building but doing the exact opposite of that by saying “Those people who followed the guide are bad people i hate and should be gone”?
If you want to get anywhere with the RPG, by advancing it’s story, you do have to face off challenging monsters as some point and you might also need an optimal competent build to do just fine enough to scrape by.
(I striked that out cause it wasn’t the word i was thinking of, so Mea Culpa. )
And it’s not just RPG’s, but all games, Racing games like Need for Speed Carbon for example. There are 3 kinds of Cars that are tuned for 3 different stats with their strengths and weaknesses: Tuners which are great for handling corners not so much with the acceleration and top speed, Muscle cars for straight up acceleration at the expense of turn speed and top speed, and Exotics for Top Speed but not great acceleration and not as terrible, but not great either handling. And depending on the track and kind of race it is, and the other racers, you can’t just stick to one car for the rest of the game and expect to do well from start to finish. Especially on Canyon Duels where turning and speed are at the forefront here, cause there are barriers you got to avoid to not fall off the cliff while tailing or getting away from your opponent. And these are a two stage race, so if you screw up in one of the stages, you got to start from square one, and you don’t have Nirto or Slo-Mo in those.
I beaten the game recently and i can tell you right now that i often alternate between my Muscle Car and Tuner whenever a certain race calls for it. There are Checkpoint and Speedtrap races that puts your speed to the test by being the fastest or getting to the next CP before time is up, And theirs Drifts that tests your turning to score the highest score. I’m not even going to begin talking about the police pursuits that require those two things, plus your reflexes and forward thinking on how to lose the police, with increasing levels of heat.
So pardon if i went on a tagent about Need for Speed, but i think it’s appropriate to bring that up as an example of Games requiring you to pass that challenge, and often times, playing competently is bare minimum to see the rest of the game. Putting your Build to see if it will pass or help you is the challenge, cause you are facing off against monsters that are much better in stats then you. You can try to win with pure skill and a bare minimum competent build, but it would be make things easier if you have a build that is above competent.
Has been happening ever since MMORPGs came into existence. Even SWG, a game that had no levels until the combat upgrade, had best builds floating around the internet. Then when jedi was first discovered, guides to unlocking it was also floated around because that was the new alpha class. If it’s a game of any kind, players are going to be looking for that competitive edge. People play for different reasons.
I think the key to consider is that the “optimal” shouldn’t be required.
Does it make things easier? Definitely.
Required? No, it shouldn’t.
When it reaches the point that optimization is actually essential to progress, rather than a recommendation if you’re having difficulty… then things become increasingly problematic very quickly. You start being confined to following the optimal path because not following the recommendations can make it impossible otherwise.
The WoW community in particular has a bad habit of “enforcing” these recommendations when not necessary, and has no qualms about berating or mocking players who choose not to follow them.
“Make your own group” stops seeming like a solution if a disproportionately large portion of the community is blindly following these attitudes. In fact, people throwing out that suggestion often sound more condescending than helpful. Needless to say, it leads into a vicious cycle where struggling players start to feel very much preyed upon by the community at large.
As someone who isn’t a hardcore raider, I get the sentiment. In the end it’s all about having fun. But the content you are reffering to is high end content, not simple dungeons, world quests or island expeditions. If I lose a mythic dungeon because of a healer who can’t heal effectively or a tank that can’t keep agro or a DPS that isn’t hitting hard enough, then you are effecting the fun for me and everyone else in the group .If your poor build could be responsible for me losing a battlground(because too many hunters and not enough mages and warlocks), wiping a dungeon or even an LFR, (dear LORD the LFR players who don’t know their builds or rotations), then I’d rather you stick to the easy stuff. It’s not that I hate you, but I would rather not waste my time going into a battle that I know I’m going to lose. My time is precious, I’d rather not waste it in a two hour session that ends up in a wipe and everyone leaving.
They are for anyone that gets enjoyment out of them, like most games. If someone wants to build their character to perform the best it possibly can because they like tackling the hardest content the game has to offer, there’s nothing wrong with that. If someone wants to build their character as a extension of themselves and roleplay with others and socialize, there’s also nothing wrong with that.
It’s pretty silly to make the assumption that just because someones play style differs from yours that they somehow aren’t suited to the genre of game they are playing.
Maybe i was using the wrong word here and “competent” is what i’m looking for. Mea culpa.
I would imagine in Action RPG games like The Witcher where you can pure Swordplay with your basic sword you start out with and just Ingi your way would just do just fine if you really want to.
You can be, at the bare minimum, be competent to pass a stage in a video game or beat a challenge. Same with WoW retail, where any talent choice will do and theirs seldom a wrong choice to quest and dungeon at an easy level. If we are talking about higher difficultly stuff, you can still just do the bare minimum, but it won’t be easy or often times, won’t be enough to suffice, and this is game has group content. Especially since a group needs outweigh the needs of the individual, and they don’t benefit from people having bad builds.
I do agree that enforcing recommendations to people who may not want to follow guides isn’t a good thing. They should be allowed to choose and pick if you will, even if that choice is not a great one, objectively or subjectively.
I say, just do whatever works for you, guide or no guide.
Then what solution do you propose then? cause trying to change the attitude of the community to be more okay to that kind of stuff is practically impossible. I don’t care too much along your doing fine, but i know that’s not the attitude the community shares. Some really do care if your build is diamond cut perfect or of so one stat is off. Some just don’t care what you do at all. Some exist in the any where between of those two and right now the middle.
Builds can make a difference in whatever group i’m in, whether it be in utility, self sustainability, a way to pass mechanics or even small like a 1% overall group DPS increase. You could make the argument that in easier content, it wouldn’t matter as much, and i would agree with that.
Well, i was talking about video games overall.
And i agree, theirs nothing wrong with that. Infact, that’s pretty much the challenge of RPG’s at the higher levels; as you go on, you have to find a build that works best for you and take you pretty far if you want to do the harder stuff and get better loot. As for the Challenge of the MMO’s, in a group, a group has to be… well good.
Heck, even CoD, which does have right and wrong ways to “build” your character, by picking a pretty low damage pistol instead of a rifle that does way more damage for instance, where you have to take the stats of the gun like reload speed, fire speed, ammo count and damage per shot (if your not landing headshots that is), and other things like that. But i digress cause i’m going to ramble on here.
I’m rambling on for too long so i’l just say this: If whatever you do works for you, it works for the group too, if your playing an MMO. And if you are just wanting to follow a guide, have at it, cause it harms nobody, keyword being want.
While you have a good point here, the underlying issues are very difficult to address. To just rattle off a few:
The leveling experience in WoW does an awful job of teaching players how to play. The total lack of a difficulty curve and easy access to overpowered gear, along with a general lack of progression of enemy complexity, has pretty much made the whole experience a mindlessly easy chore. As a result, players fail to learn the basics of the gameplay; playing “optimally” is out of the question. For a long time, this aspect was at least partially handled by class quests you did while leveling to earn various skills… and use them. But now, there’s nothing. If anything, all they learn is that with enough gear they can power through ANY obstacle the game throws at you… and using gear to steamroll content is a strongly favoured tactic of this playerbase.
The game’s designers have a fixation on the endgame, quite often only particular facets of it (the current trend being for Mythic+ dungeons and raiding) and have designed the game to push players of all skill levels towards it… possibly under the assumption that they’ll gravitate towards the difficulty setting that is best suited to their abilities. Ignoring the detail that not every player actually wants to do this content… coupled with the complete lack of adequate training in the leveling process, they’re woefully unprepared and it’s a disaster waiting to happen.
No game should require having to look up outside sources to reach the basic levels of competency… but WoW has those outside sources so ingrained in the community’s culture and has pretty much devolved the leveling experience into a completely lacking challenge that the developers have become incredibly lazy about how to convey the basics of the gameplay.
To say new players run into a wall upon reaching the level cap is an understatement. They’re lost and clueless… something which the WoW community seems to take sadistic pleasure in tormenting them for.
I’ve got a few ideas about how to address the issue… but in the end, it almost invariably comes down to decimating the current structure of the endgame and getting rid of huge chunks of the top-end of the difficulty curve. A “cutting the head off the snake” approach, and mostly making the need for optimization irrelevant.
Things like removing mythic raiding, mythic+ dungeons, and other stuff favoured by the hardcore crowd. If not, as a bare minimum I’d reduce the rewards for such content to being PURELY cosmetic… or at least no better than what you could get from other, more conventional sources.
That being said, I wouldn’t actually be looking at making content easier… probably the most I would do there is making the mechanics easier to understand and ensure the game itself provides all the information required (in other words, make DBM and other such add-ons irrelevant).
It goes back to the competency point, and the idea of “training” players to reach a basic level of competence by just playing the game itself. To put it mildly, this would require a substantial overhaul of the entire leveling experience; adding in class quests is not enough, we’d have to rework the game world itself to ensure a proper difficulty curve.
I think the “Party Sync” system should also be used extensively in solo scenarios for players, scaling them down (with both character level and item level) so that they have to complete the content as intended; heck, I wouldn’t mind raising item level to the intended target to remove the issue from the other side.
There’s plenty more to add, but the whole idea is to ensure there’s a consistent difficulty curve which will help players get better at the game as they progress through it. Competence isn’t an inherent trait, it needs to be taught; and right now WoW is one of the worst teachers out there.
But yes… the real question is not so much what needs to be done.
It’s how do you do so without burning down the game in the process?
Or should we actually just go straight to the burning down so we can rebuild it?
There are quite a few Single player games that punish you harshly or make going back to fix a mistake costly. Xenoblade chronicles 2 with its blade summoning is one such example, you screw up a blade bind your options for fixing it are as follows.
Pay $8 for Nintendo online to use the cloud service and save scum.
Use a overdrive protocol :which there only a small handful avalible and once you use them all you dont get anymore.
Release the blade and accept that rng may screw you over multiple times when trying to get said blade back later.
Yea most often that’s what happens. Race changes, factions changes,character boost. When a company creates a problem nowadays they sell the solution. It’s kinda bad.
These aren’t the MMORPG’s you were looking for…
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