Is there a way for MMORPG's to not be a meta spreadsheet? I just want to have a journey through a fantasical world with other players not get kicked because I am not running optimal gear and havent watched 5 video guides of the dungeon before running it.
Should skill be more involved in the gameplay instead of just pure stats? I don't see any other way to fix this.
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The issue isn't the game, but who you are playing it with.
Metahomosexualry has taken over any game aside from very casual shit.
It's sad, but it's true. I find myself falling into that metagay mindset sometimes too. Even for single player shit. I think the availability of information makes it easy to just hop onto the best possible builds instead of exploring and having fun with different options. I don't think there's any way to fix this.
You can fix it in singleplayer but it's hopeless for multiplayer, that's where all you can do is find people who are interested into playing around with the game mechanics and use more non-meta builds as long they achieve similar results.
The thing is, most of those people won't achieve similar results with non meta builds so they're just going to default to the safer options. I guess devs could lean into more RNG and trying to find a way to make players play with whatever hand they're dealt, but knowing the video game landscape these days, that would just devolve into gacha mechanics.
An MMO where your characters are given hidden values upon creation that give bonuses to building it a certain way might work if there's a limit to how many characters you can make.
Even when you try to make everything viable, people are still going to pick the most optimal anyway. Metahomosexualry is a prevalent mindset.
Do the opposite then. Play the worst possible build. You'll have a bigger challenge and have to think outside the box.
Just never play multiplayer games if you hate that. The red pill is that ALL people are inherently c**ts. The main reason to playing multiplayer games - and especially ones with memory of achievements - is to show off your pets and your gear and whatever else shit you collected.
>is to show off your pets and your gear and whatever else shit you collected.
Oh shit this is why I liked Warframe. No forced microphone conversations, just make sure you have meta gear. Then after the fight people noticed and laughed at your pet's funny name. (I loved my Doggo Prime)
This is happening because of the reward structure. MMO (and most GaaS) have low drop rate / repetitive loops in place to keep players engaged. What happen when you are forced to repeat a dungeon 25 times before having a chance at getting the piece of loot you want? Well you just want to clear it as quick as possible and rightfully so. Nearly all games are made this way nowadays, content has to be easy to appeal to casuals, at the same time you need it grindy to keep hardcore players engaged.
You could have super hard mode where loot is guaranteed upon 1st completion, but everybody would try and run that and then you're back to square one because difficulty is high the only way to mitigate difficulty is through gear advantage. To solve this you'd need encounters where stats are standardized and only players' skill plays a role. In that case you're going to have a mechanic heavy fight and you still run the issue of "having to watch 5 video guides" and people requiring you to play this or that way to maximize success chances.
No. The MMORPG genre attracts precisely those kind of people.
It's true and unfortunate. If gear is useless people have nothing to grind and work for. if theres nothing to grind and work for theres no ''endgame'' if theres no endgame people will quit and the game dies off because of lack of content.
yes remove the reason to kick. instancing and raids.
What do you get? Black Desert online?
BDO would have a lot more playrs if they made pve servers
fact
Can't wait for Crimson Desert.
I am interested too when is it out?
Was supposed to come out last year but the coof. No idea when its coming out now they said this year but theres no date.
That leaves you with open world bosses like in GW2. That is one of the things that game did right, still feels like the world is alive when you roll around fighting bosses with your dozen random buttholes who happened to be in the area.
Yes but it's not been implemented yet
Yeah, learn to not give a shit about what the meta is for the current optimal min-max raid clear build is, and just play a race/class that interests you. You are getting in the way of your own enjoyment.
But OP is complaining about other people kicking you for doing that.
Oh, my bad for not reading all of it. Yeah, that’s cancer. Just play WoW or something where everybody is complacent except for the highest of high-end Mythic raiding, I guess.
I don’t play MMOs where it’s ever been an issue tbh. Played FF14 to HW and got bored. Played to max and into Mythic Raids on WoW and never had an issue every playing Ret Pali, which has consistently been mediocre in terms of late game potential DPS output because I like the class. Never touched Neverwinter.
What MMOs are (you) playing?
how do you not give a shit about getting kicked out of groups because you didnt min max from a online guide?
I guess don't give people an incentive to run a dungeon often enough that you feel the need to optimise it? Like, have it be a one-and-done.
Then you wont have enough people to run a dungeon with. has to be a incentive for players to keep running dungeons.
Yeah, true. I don't think the issue is avoidable then, or if there is a way to avoid it I can't think of it. If the reward is good enough to warrant running the dungeon over and over, people are going to want to make doing so take as little time and effort as possible. This isn't just a thing for videogames, mind you, that's the case for most of human experience. We optimise the fun out of stuff, unless the fun is the point of doing that thing.
perhaps randomized dungeons/raids, so that you can't build for it and have to work with what you've got. I feel like that's probably been done and it doesn't work that simple.
>play obviously not-meta but still functional builds
>talk to people about it, mention that I enjoy the playstyle and the fact it works
>"b-but don't you know that X is the meta???? there is LITERALLY no reason to do that"
Every time.
>Limbo players before the patches
I could make stasis work for every game mode but Black folk get mad they can't shoot in it.
No, it's the fate of any game with spergs, and the people that buy the fundamental dream of MMORPGs of another life in another world are obviously going to be subhumans
One way could be that items break permanently after their durability runs out. That, or the durability is very time-consuming to restore.
That way, there will be specific times where some things should be used, and when they should be saved instead. So people may start saying "we could min-max here, but let's save it for something else". That's one idea that came to me, but I'm sure there are a ton more. There's probably a tandem solution with many aspects.
In my experience, if you are personable and skilled enough, people don't care if you run off-meta. The key is to stick to a core group of people instead of grouping up with different people every time.
Don’t take this the wrong way, anon - but that sounds moronicly fricking stupid. You’re just adding busywork and hurdles for the sake of it, without any actual benefit worth overcoming it.
I think the only way to fix this is to have some sort of stats randomizing on both the starting stats and the items you get. For examples this sword can drop with 16 ak or 20 atk but not below or above those stats. Gotta get dynamic with the numbers game.
>Buy to play
>Limited to one character
>Your character has a random assortment of skills when created
>Everyone will just have to build their characters around what skills they got
Would this work or would people just not play with the ones who got shafted by RNG? I was trying to make it like real life by giving every character different aptitudes and having to play around what they're good at.
>roll a complete trash heap of shit skills
>kek, you paid for this idiort
>meanwhile Juanito and Pajeet who paid $2 USD in their currency, while you pay $30 USD rolls an amazing spread, or can afford to keep rolling
>entire accounts created en mass just for good spreads to sell in aftermarket
Anon, think before you post. This is fricking stupid.
put a permanent ban on dps meters, hide gear stats only show alround gear score.
Congrats, now you don’t know who is underperforming, or potentially ghosting an instance for a free carry. Now you also don’t know what gear the people you play with have, further hampering your progress.
>Congrats, now you don’t know who is underperforming
Yeah that's the point.
>Now you also don’t know what gear the people you play with have, further hampering your progress.
Once again that's the point that's why theres a allround gear score with no specifics. Still if you want to instance for the dungeon you would need to match a certain gear score or youre not getting in.
>Failing a hard dungeon
>You have literally no way to know why
I hate when people are anal about classes that do like 5% less damage but this would be awful
I think 'the meta' comes about when stats or in-game numbers factor into success more than your player's skill. In games like RPGs etc. if a sword is shit, it's going to be shit no matter who wields it.
Whereas in a game where player skill plays more of a part than the stats of a piece, you're more likely to see some variety of builds since it's more up to the players making it work.
I guess with more stat-based games, maybe the equivalent would be making builds with good synergies etc? But that's still something that could be replicated once it's known. You might create a cool build that can one-shot stuff and clear dungeons with ease even with lower-tier gear, but once the build details are known everyone can use it no matter the skill.
Meta also exists in more skill-based games however.
That's true I guess. Hm. I suppose there's no real solution then, other than to play with other like-minded people who want to take stuff less seriously.
Maybe that's all it is - it's a matter of WHO you play with rather than HOW you play. Like even in something like FFXIV, you can frick around if you have the right group for it.
>doing a treasure map event with FC
>notice we have more summoners than normal in our full party
>more and more people switch job to summoner until we run a treasure dungeon as an all-summoner group
>decide to run one of the current EX trials as all summoners
>it's a fricking chaotic mess and everyone is screaming and trying to avoid dying, since the boss keeps switching his target (no tank to draw aggro)
It was hilarious fun.
Stats become less important when you can iframe dodge and block/parry. theres always a optimal meta build but the best is more or less a spectrum when skill is involved. Tera (RIP) was a good example of this before they added attacks you couldnt avoid anymore. You could just dump everything into your weapon and leave the rest suboptimal.
The issue is, you CANT fix the meta issue.
No matter WHAT you do, there will ALWAYS be a meta for that particular game, patch, or update. The only way to prevent meta culture, is to not make the game.
Make all-aspects respec completely trivial so there's zero investment aspect for people to worry about with builds themselves. All aspects as in you have everything you need to play any build 10 minutes from now at the same "level" (broad meaning of level) as your current one.
Let people accrue clout in MMORPGs with non-core-gameplay shit like player buildings, don't wed it to gameplay at all
>just want to have a journey through a fantasical world with other players
Everquest
It's not the genre, it's todays age
Everyone wants meta shit, everyone googles what's the best build, what's the best way to do this, do that
There's no more self discovery it's all meta gay dogshit gay shit
>meta guides come out before the game even releases.
>it's todays age
moronic post
possibly underage
meta guides have existed before "todays age" it's just more evident from the rise of player numbers, and i understand why so many people are looking up meta guides especially in competitive environments. not a lot of people want their chance of winning to be fricked because they didn't choose the right build or load out
>Is there a way for MMORPG's to not be a meta spreadsheet?
Yes, stop making the MMOs focus on the shit that makes it a meta spreadsheet.
1. Raids (highly curated rides that demand specific interaction)
2. Impairments and calculations that force an arbitrary team composition (attrition-based damage and aggro making "the Trinity")
3. A grind towards a maximized number (ie if you don't meet a "gear score" even the best skill won't win)
Skill, tactics, self-sufficiency and higher value placed on non-combat activity must be the focus.
>I am too lazy, stupid, and brown to spend 30 seconds finding out my class' optimal building
>but I am also a certified gosu gamer and when it comes to skill I am second to no one
what is this massive cope lmao
and no, OP
MMO are multiplayer team based games
in such games people will always seek to optimize their performance not to be a burden on others and kick worthless leeches that want to parasite off them
the only way to avoid this is to remove all player choices from the game and make everything uniform
it's simple, there's only one solution
it's impossible for there to not be a meta, or best choice, if you're doing something with a group, the group will ideally prefer anything that improves performance and saves time doing tedious stuff
so the next GOOD mmo has to be a social one, frick mmo gameplay, the best part of mmos is the social aspect
i love erp
Why do they have to be meta? Souls games are RPG's and you dont need the best gear at all you can finish the game naked if youre good enough. why can MMORPG's do the same?
MMORPG gameplay is slop city and skill free by nature, there's literally nothing left if you take away the treadmill and autism part
Play exclusively with a group of real life friends.
Skill doesn't fix it, it just makes it not an RPG. You can't have your cake and eat it too. You can't have the cool gear that gives better stats then not have that gear affect the player's performance in the game. The issue is mainly ramping difficulty, and the real fix is telling hardcore raiders and minmaxers to frick off. RPGs are not supposed to be difficult because they're not player skill games, they're character stat games. RPG difficulty asks, "how well can you max your stats?".
Hardcore raiders and minmaxers will always figure out how to get every percentage point out of their builds, and then blow through all the content. Then they rampage across the internet whining everywhere about how the endgame is trash (read: easily completed with the highest stats -- stats being the primary determinant of performance in an RPG). You might think that they would understand that if the content has to be completable by the players with a wide variety of builds, and they've figured out the build that gives the absolute highest stats, then of course the content will be piss easy for them, but they're moronic. They also then mistake their minmaxed character's ability to have bigger numbers for their own videogame prowess, which leads to the specific phenomenon of MMORPG PVP attracting the dumbest bricks of shit you'll ever talk to, but that's an aside.
New content becomes tailored to those need new content because they completed the last content. Each new content drop exacerbates this problem, harder content for those who completed the last content means content tailored to be more of a challenge for their stats. This necessarily trends toward and eventually necessitates adopting their minmaxed metabuild. This means flagging completion of content by non-optimized builds, and player adoption of the endgame meta out of frustration to try to keep up.
If any RPG advertises new harder content for endgame, you can start writing its eulogy.
that's bullshit, you could obviously end up with a culture where people compete to make youtube videos of handling the raid boss with the newbie starting set if skill was allowed to matter in MMORPGs
it's just a matter of how to get from here to there with a MMORPG fanbase of depressed sow shutins
Dark souls/Elden Ring is a RPG and stats and gears do make you stronger and are helpful but not deciding depending on your skill. So yes you can have your cake and eat it too.
>Is there a way for MMORPG's to not be a meta spreadsheet?
1. Add randomness, make certain loot unfarmable.
2. Make gear more skill-based and flatten gain from gear. Player with +8 Sword should have a chance to win against player with +15 Sword.
3. Make people suffer on death. For example - when you die you have 20% chance to lose a piece of equipment.
So yeah, it's not happening.
I think a better action to 3 is have a 20% chance for gear to break, broken gear is unequippable and requires a fee or certain items to repair and requip. This way you don't lose the gear permanently but it forces the player to take action.
>your gear breaks and requires periodically grinding for more gear to repair it
This kills the F2P casual
I had a concept that you could algorithmically adjust the numbers on skills based on their popularity.
i.e. stuff that's meta-popular gets brought down in values, stuff that isn't popular has their values brought up.
and every major content patch, you shuffle them randomly (within reason).
but this kind of programmatic balancing can't affect the things outside of raw numbers, like synergies or behavior (over-time vs. instant DD vs. projectiles vs. pets, etc)
and in the end the problem is because of the userbase. gamers today are simply unable to play a game without datamining and metagaming it to oblivion
so
>Is there a way for MMORPG's to not be a meta spreadsheet?
no
Every game ever made is a spreadsheet with some code to make it run.
PSO2 is so easy that nobody cares about gear as long as you meet the minimum requirement, but also its dead enough you wont have anybody around to kick you at least.
XIV is the same way as long as you aren't trying to do endgame raiding
>I just want to have a journey through a fantasical world
play Ragnarok
PSO2 become a brainless time attack game, Minimum gear(or even Even mid gear) but you have to keep dealt damage and can't waste any fricking millisecond.
You're trying to solo a 12 man EQ so that's not surprising
It's Solo not EQ, this's same as 4-man raid, every action is DPS you can't waste your time.
Before late EP4 was a true friendly casual game that nobody cares about gear but at least please not Nox+10. And then they add a hero shit and force is fricking died.
>depth 100
oh
Either you make challenges require optimized sets and player love it but you don't get what you talk about, or you make challenges work with basically everything, you get what you want but only a few people like it because it got no challenge/everything work so there is no strategy
MAYBE there is a fine, little line between those, but it's not exactly easy
Nuke youtube, twitch and every site that actively datamine any game.
This will fix not only MMOs, but gaming in general.
City of Heroes is largely free of this I've found.
Random crits for non meta builds
You have to take the bdo approach back before they changed their mind
Have hidden stats out the ass, people had crack theories on every bit of gear due to their lore description, just go all in on that shit and dont explain frick all and make it impossible to datamine anything except models from the game
>Is there a way for MMORPG's to not be a meta spreadsheet?
As long as there's PVP, no. If there's no PVP then it becomes a boring idle game a la Maplestory though.
There's no way to win.
High levels of rng make chasing a meta challenging if not impossible. Obfuscate obtaining rare items, randomize bosses and shit. It's not hard to break a meta, but it will have players seething a lot about not being able to play the meta and rarely do the players who claim to hate meta chasing come out to defend against changes for the metagays
Take a look at limited MTG (or any card game with draft I guess). While sets aren't perfectly balanced since WoTC is both moronic and greedy ontop of designing for non limited play as well, you can't just just try to force the same deck forever and do well. In the end the decks end up with more variance than a constructed format
It wouldn't even be hard to apply this to an rpg. Give a wizard player a random staff that focuses on one element of magic. You get fire staff you play a fire build even if the "best" is water because you'll simply perform badly trying to play water without water staff. But like I said, you'll be blasted with meta players b***hing they got locked out of the water BiS
people would definitely b***h about not getting what they want
i like the idea of randomizing everything though, now i just want a game where you drop into a completely randomized big dungeon as 1-4 in multi with your own progression like monster hunter
wait for a new mmo launch and enjoy first week then quit before metagays come up with one correct build and items
metahomosexualry is a people problem and there's no real way to balance around it
Just add randomness to dungeon and raid bosses instead so players don't memorize the fight and see how all metagamers fail because their numbers game asks then to be good
Even single player games are reduced to spreadsheets on day one. The mindset surrounding games changed a few years ago and will never go back.
There is. The MMO itself should focus on Levels and Stats instead of gear.
Gear should only give perks instead of extra stats.
The second you eliminate gear score, you kill off a huge chunk of the meta.
Afterwards, focus on rock-paper-scissors mechanics so that no one spec dominates everything.
Players can then either focus into specialties, balanced specs and so on to the point that most of it is diluted.
Diablo 2 for the longest time had that where you could be balanced or specialize and the gear wasn't as relevant as the skills or the levels.
When people say stuff like this I get the impression they just don’t like that gear makes it 100% mandatory to do the difficult content instead of being able to substitute 200 hours of killing boars solo and hit the max power level
THe question isn't "how do you make MMORPGs appealing to full human beings" it's "how to not make them meta spreadsheets" you stupid fricking incel MMORPG c**t
You *clap* cannot *clap* prevent *clap* a meta
Yes you can, look at warframe.
You can try to get "meta weapons" or "meta mods" but at the end of the day, the damage system nullifies it anyways and it's a skills matchup.
what? of course it has a meta
It really doesn't.
The damage system makes it so that you may have an edge against certain mobs or factions but even those mobs have enemies that present abnormal resistances or weaknesses. So you can use impact damage all day on corpus, it doesn't matter when you fight non-robotics.
The greatest part of it is that any weapon can get modded to work as you want against what you want but there are very few un-usable weapons. Everything can be used.
And you're right, I really don't like the idea that Gear = progression.
It's stupid. And I've done enough raids to know that people can have the best gear in the world, but if they stand in the fire, they are useless. So what's the point? Why make it a filter for selection for dungeons or raids when the skill of the fight is what is needed most.
The other egregious issue was DPS. As if standing in one spot is what makes DPS count as opposed to what most fights are all about: moving around and dodging shit.
The problem with gear in all instances of MMOs is that it becomes a sole number's game with no context whatsoever.
You can never make it a non meta spreadsheet if you stick to the "gear = power" mechanic since you will always need more and better gear.
WoW made that mistake a while ago where a piece of leather with +13 Agi was better than another piece of leather with +12 Agi, even though the benefit is barely 1 more damage. I would understand if there were tiered daggers or something but even armor made it a spreadsheet.
And by daggers I'd imagine something like this:
>blood dagger: deals 10 puncture damage and inflicts bleeding
>venom dagger: deals 10 puncture damage and inflicts poison
>serrated dagger: deals 10 cut damage and inflicts bleeding
See my point?
Been saying this for years with WoW, but with the addition of item level, there's no excuse to shut off old set bonuses and features, and instead offer a way to just straight boost the ilevel for stats, keeping any item with a unique effect relevent. Sure, a meta will inevitably form, but WoW in particular has almost 2 decades of strange bonuses that could be exploited. I remember striding into battlegrounds in LK dual wielding Earthshakers and wearing bits from various sets, I never did any real damage, but everything procced so much that whoever I was trained on was pretty much removed from the equation with all the cc and stuns I dished out. With shit like Legion's legendaries, the Heart of Azeroth, and Torghast's roguelike upgrades, the sky is really the limit when it comes to bending the mechanics.
This does nothing but force the encounter design to warp around it
As if I want to fight a sub rogue in permanent shadow dance
just stop playing MMORPGS already lol theyre all shit
please show this happened literally ever, outside of WoW
please
i keep hearing you homosexuals saying this shit happens but you never show any proof and keep on spouting it like it's real
yeah invent a time machine and go play old maplestory
mmos have no social aspects anymore, all that's left is grinding and optimizing dps
Blame LFG, social media, and cancer such as Discuck. Back in the day people played on their own and cooperated with other players.
These days you'd be hard-pressed to find anyone who isn't playing with their homosexual group of stuck-up tech-illiterate IRL friends.
Not true, a lot of fan sites created the gear score systems and when that got traction, it was over. I remember when what used to matter was the amount of purples. Now it's "you have to have a purple of this or that value" regardless.
What’s going on in ESO right now?