Feedback: Improving Online Social Aspects

Feedback and Suggestions
1

Hey there,
This post is intended to help the dev team significantly improve social aspects in the game. From face value, we play online games to socialize so having mechanics that significantly or totally invalidate them is destructive to the purpose. The logic basically is that when someone buys a game (for example on steam) and see’s the genre tabs “mmo” or “multiplayer” There is an expectation entering that game to socialize. It can be strongly argued that this is the specific and main reason we have such games, and so doing things to invalidate those aspects invalidates the intention of the purpose.

As designers we need to be aware and sensitive to this topic. It makes or breaks any game that are in these genre’s. Lets look at some changes.

Dungeon Keys
I would like to suggest the removal of keys. This single mechanic, while you may think is good, is extremely destructive to the social aspects of the game. Lets look into this deeper

Argument: “But keys are easy to get”.
Counter Argument: At high level, yes. How ever they come at the cost of being used with each resurrection (if in a group), if not then it’s one key per a try. What this does it makes keys a chore for everyone to have in addition to destroying the potential of grouping with anyone at a low level. This all sounds like genius at face value, but when you dive deeper into the nature of players in games “always seeking to do the most efficient thing”, you quickly find out the logical thought process of players quickly invalidates the genius in that. So the net end result is that we destroy grouping.

Social Structures and features
Another major destruction point of socialization in lost epoch is the lack of a clan/guild system. Clans/Guilds are the heart, brain and spirit of a game. Without them all forms of competition and cooperation nearly cease to exist. We are in an age where such relationships are more important than ever, and people are seeking ways of filling these holes via video games.

This is not just an important thing. It is the most important thing in any online game. Clans must be needed like air, like life itself (from the players perspective).

2

Why is that? You mention that you think it’s destructive to grouping but never actually explain why. Did they change it so that everyone in the party requires a key now?

So player A opens the dungeon with their key, player B dies & in order to rejoin/get resurrected they need to “pay” a key but the party can still carry on & everyone gets the full benefit of the dungeon? Why is that a bad thing? Compared to doing it solo when you have to restart from scratch this sounds like quite a hefty upside to partying up to doing the dungeon tbh. As you can probably tell, I’ve not done a dungeon in a very long time & never in a party.

No, pretty sure competition still exists without guilds, especially since there’s no pvp.

I agree though that some form of guild system is important & while I laud the devs desire to have them be more than just a glorified chat channel, that’s pretty much what people generally want them to be. Though the guild stash as a potential way to circumvent the restrictions on trade does prevent problems, though it could “just” be used as a guild-only AH, guild members could put items in it with a favour cost & anyone who wanted an item would have to pay a favour cost (& potentially gold as well) to take it out.

3

The requirement of “a key” prevents instant forming. This requires farming, which reduces the overall rate of grouping. It also works against the native desire of many players who 1) want to group in dungeons to level AND 2) Who want to play support classes (healers) but are not effective at leveling. The Above in return, invalidates the early gameplay expectations of doing dungeons and engaging in social interaction, which further destroys the population rates and the drive for social interaction.

No, A single member can open the door but if you die in a non-boss area, you can re-enter that instance by using a key for yourself. Which means that you need extra keys to secure the completion.

Also, depending on high levels for carries is not a good gameplay experience (imo).

“nearly” was the word used. If I was to quantify it, 99% of the mass majority of the games competitive and cooperative nature comes as a result of clans. They are absolutely the driving force.

A better way of doing that is to simply enable direct trade without the requirements / resource to clan members, or to make clan members pool resource into the clan when they group with clan members and use that universally as a “clan wide” resource to transfer those items.

However, the gear is the “breadcrumb” that leads to the bread loaf, not the other way around. The real reason for social systems in games is that people fundamentally as a species are social. They seek out that interaction and when they fail to get the quality interaction in it, they get bored and leave the game.

4

Gotcha, that’s still a massive buff for partying which I’d have assumed would be a significant driver towards partying for dungeons.

99% is not “nearly”, it’s “completely”. Also, got anything to back that up?

Which entirely negates the barriers to trade that the devs have deliberately put up (favour cost) to not make trade the absolutely best way to get gear. Your suggestion forces players to group up into guilds for the free & unrestricted trade whilst the other scrubs that don’t/can’t get into a mega-trade-guild are left out in the cold.

Absolutely, and that’s why SP games died back in the 90s/2000s as broadband became more common & less bad than dial up.

5

Well This is a bit tricky. So around ~13% of population of a game will play alone (ie does not group with people) roughly about 5-5.5% of males and 6-6.5% of females (some variance on game/season).

This begs the question why are solo players playing games alone in an mmo/online setting? There are various answers to this from because they enjoy the trading/economic aspects of a game to schedules.

If we take this at face value, around 87% of the population is exclusively playing the game with one or more individuals. This number rises due to the fact that some of the above are still engaging in social dynamics. Granted, the statement 99% was an expressive statement (which is why i said imo), but the metrics are well known and hold true.

If we back up the above statement i made was very good at logically addressing this issue. People look at a genre and buy a game because of that genre. This is why genre tags work on steam (at selling games).

So fundamentally we search and made choices about playing an mmo/multiplayer game because of the population (exclusively). Which is why we know logically the games primary focus should be social in nature. Simple.

This is a bit of a long, off topic conversational point. Players these days and age are not like us who love work > reward relationships. They want instant gratification. The entire industries financials have been built around that (actually more than just the gaming industry).

People will negate those gameplay issues if they want to, and more often than not they will do so. If the limitation of gear is only gold away, they will buy the gold. Which means that the entire purpose of trade resource is an interesting idea but fundamentally destined to failure (subject to being proven wrong with time).

The entire point of clans, mega-clans and so on is to come together to not be lonely. The content the way that bonding takes place, and the gear is the motivator to stick around and develop those relationships, even though the desire for it exists before people even enter the game. You can think of the gear as being a way to help a lazy person be less lazy. It means they want to be productive but lack the motivation, and so gear fundamentally provides that motivation, and clans facilitate it. Its a win/win situation for the player, and a win for the community (and game). Hope you are following.

So if the trading is an issue, it can be addressed accordingly. Clans dont need to make gearing easy and in fact with some good examples (like lfg/lfr in wow) that proves to actually be a self-destructive thing, none the less, people gravitate for that “easy route”. Trading and how its conducted is a separate issue and should be addressed as such.

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6

Yeah, I’d accept all that.

Hence the comment about the guild stash functioning as the AH but limited to the build. Doesn’t need any new functionality developed, other than being able to limit access to it to the guild members.

It’s also why I think EHG are overthinking it in trying to re-invent the wheel & do something awesome/special/different with guilds.

7

Oh boy! I could give them some idea’s. I have a massive clan system in the mmo I am building. There are so many massive ways this can be done. An example is simply allowing different types of governments in a clan.

For example, all clans fundamentally work with the logic “a clan leader forms, a clan leader promotes, a clan leader is the absolute power”. What if that is not the case? What if the logic was changed to "a clan leader forms, a clan leader has 30 days to promote 2 or 4 more people (so total of 3/5) and they collectively “vote” via in game mechanics on all clan related choices (kick, taxes, wars, etc). This could be expanded to another type where everyone in clan votes, or even votes for a new leaders every 3,6 or x months.

This area of development is very heavy work, which is why things are generally not done this way.

What i will say is that “the clan, profession, and lore systems are ripe for massive innovation”.

As for “ah” well i will make another post about factions soon to chat about that in a deeper way.

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