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CLAM DOWN posted:I'm curious if this has happened in any MMO, I've been in the beta for far too many to count and playing far too many at launch, and this has never been a thing. It fucks up too many things. There might be a name reservation or something but that's it. Neverwinter did this, I believe. War Thunder, too. As for others... I don't think any P2P has.
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Apr 2, 2014 17:26
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BARONS GAMES WHINER posted:Please go look at the image posted further up the page. Rasmussen posted:I loving hated having to drag new raiding recruits through all the Burning Crusade attunements. It's just a massive bullshit barrier of entry. This is just a matter of implementation. Ridiculous attunement lines like that Mount Hyjal bullshit are obviously terrible, nobody's defending that. But if you take something smaller, more reasonable, and rationally related - like unlocking Cimerora in CoH, or beating the Gatekeeper in TSW - and what exactly is the problem?
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Apr 2, 2014 18:20
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kafziel posted:This is just a matter of implementation. Ridiculous attunement lines like that Mount Hyjal bullshit are obviously terrible, nobody's defending that. But if you take something smaller, more reasonable, and rationally related - like unlocking Cimerora in CoH, or beating the Gatekeeper in TSW - and what exactly is the problem? Attunements are pretty terrible all around. And anyone that supports attunements is more than a bit of a sperg. People want to play the content introduced to a game, not the content they've potentially already done or have no need to do. There's a reason why Blizzard and every other MMO out there that's remotely modern pretty much violently shies away from them nowadays. They're a call back to the old "grindcore" era of MMO gaming. Seriously, gently caress anyone that thinks that forcing 20 to 38 or so people through earlier content just so you can have one or two members ready to do the real content that everyone wants to play in the first place is a good thing. It's another trick developers tried to use to artificially gate access to content and force people to stay subbed longer under the auspices of being a challenge or providing "hardcore" content. In reality all it does is just waste people's time. If you have to gate content that badly at least do it through special gear or something. That way people have something appreciable for what's essentially wasted time. SWTOR has started doing something like this with special equipment drops that unlock brand new bonus boss fights in the current content after you beat the latest raids a few times. At least people come away from that with something other than a wasted night and old loot they can't even loving use. Edit: Also, your examples are terrible compared to what attunements actually are in practice. The Gatekeeper is just a ten minute single player skill checker that ensures you have the two digits of IQ necessary to do nightmare tier instances without wiping your group in The Secret World. Cimerora was a largely single player quest line that involved the progression of a storyline. Neither of these are really attunements. The Gatekeeper is literally a mechanic designed to ensure that you aren't useless to your fellow group members. And in the case of Cimerora it's just an actual storyline that takes place outside group content. If you want an attunement, the fact that you have to replay and complete every dungeon in the game in hard mode to unlock the Gatekeeper would probably count. Coincidentally, most people agree that The Secret World has a terrible end game that is grindy as hell as a result of poo poo like that. Archonex fucked around with this message at 19:00 on Apr 2, 2014 |
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Apr 2, 2014 18:29
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kafziel posted:This is just a matter of implementation. Ridiculous attunement lines like that Mount Hyjal bullshit are obviously terrible, nobody's defending that. But if you take something smaller, more reasonable, and rationally related - like unlocking Cimerora in CoH, or beating the Gatekeeper in TSW - and what exactly is the problem? The hyjal attunement was something happened as a result of small, reasonable, and rationally related attunements. You start playing in BC, and they have a new shiny feature, flying mounts, so they design some instances to be inaccessible to people without flying. Not a huge deal. They also introduce the caverns of time, and in order to make the caverns of time more appealing, they have you do the quest chain to unlock each part, which isn't really huge or unreasonable and is very rationally related, and you can even do each part as you level from 60-70. Not a huge deal. Arcatraz is a prison, so yeah, let's make it a key to get in, makes sense right? Where do we put the key parts? Make it a soloable quest that takes place in that area, where you have to do 2 other dungeons to get the last pieces, because they're in the same set of dungeons. Not a huge deal? Then you need to get the karazhan key, and where else would you put the key to it but with Medivh himself, who happens to be in one of your shiny new caverns of time dungeons, which is the most rationally related place it could possibly be. Not a big de- wait a minute. In order to gear up for doing this, you've been doing regular dungeons and by now, with dedicated playing, have unlocked a pretty minimal threshold (for this era of mmos) of rep so that you can unlock the other new feature: heroics. So let's show off the heroics by making them necessary in order to unlock the quests for Tier 5 raids. I mean, hell, you're farming heroics for gear anyway, might as well make it where you get the tier 5 raid attunement quests, right? Hold on a seco- And now that you've unlocked the ability to do this, let's go raid tier 4 dungeons! Karazhan and gruul's are super fun, right? And then we can add in a quest to get to the next tier of raiding, because poo poo, you're gonna be farming this place anyway! And you can see how using the metric of "small, reasonable, and rationally related" can lead to a giant loving mess of an attunement monster because you just keep adding to it. Locking content behind a single thing isn't a huge deal, even though it's still also a pain in the rear end for getting your new people up to speed, but these things will multiply to the point where it's an insurmountable pile of utter trash and time wasting that no one wants to do. That was super long, but apparently it needs to be spelled out. Also, to reiterate, having to catch new people up with attunements blows dicks and gets in the way of the entire point of the game: killing mans with buds.
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Apr 2, 2014 20:29
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Archonex posted:They're a call back to the old "grindcore" era of MMO gaming. The amount of rep grinding in WoW right now to get an alt up to par is worse than beating a dungeon once and completing a single quest. You literally have to sit and grind to get rep to unlock things instead, which is way more grindcore than completing a dungeon that you were going to complete anyways a single time before moving on to the next level of content. Attunements are way, way more 'casual' than rep grinding, which encourages large amounts of poopsock sperglord time spent in the game. Bauxite posted:That was super long, but apparently it needs to be spelled out. Also, to reiterate, having to catch new people up with attunements blows dicks and gets in the way of the entire point of the game: killing mans with buds. This is the worst part of attunements/rep grinds of any kind and could be easily remedied by making attunements and rep type things account/guild wide, unlocked by things like achievements or what have you. Like the other dude said its entirely a matter of how its implemented, but there will always be hurdles when progressing from lower level content to higher level content, even if those hurdles are literally your character level. You could easily make the argument that levels themselves are a call back to "grindcore" mmos, why not just start everyone at max level with all their abilities and the ability to do all the content right from the start? Those drat spergs and their "levels". Doorknob Slobber fucked around with this message at 23:03 on Apr 2, 2014 |
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Apr 2, 2014 22:48
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Evil_Greven posted:Neverwinter did this, I believe. War Thunder, too. As for others... I don't think any P2P has. Neverwinter's open beta was more properly a soft launch, so I'm really not convinced it counts.
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Apr 2, 2014 23:17
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Bauxite posted:And you can see how using the metric of "small, reasonable, and rationally related" can lead to a giant loving mess of an attunement monster because you just keep adding to it. Locking content behind a single thing isn't a huge deal, even though it's still also a pain in the rear end for getting your new people up to speed, but these things will multiply to the point where it's an insurmountable pile of utter trash and time wasting that no one wants to do. They could, of course, always remove the necessity of attunement to earlier content when they add later content to prevent the pile from growing or allow your attunement to allow two (so a 20-man raid would only need 10 attuned) with the presumption that players would get their own attunement eventually (to prevent instances where it disrupted plans), but lowering the barrier from joining others if you weren't in on the ground floor. While having a quest lead-in for a raid is nice, it seems better to err on the side of not accidently screwing over most of a raid because a few people aren't attuned yet. I distinctly remember totally breaking the MC attunement in the early goings of WoW (was part of a zerg guild with like 200+ members) when we had a single group run Blackrock Depths and then used Warlocks to summon in and attune over 100 people (think it allowed them to attune down to level 40). It was pretty funny.
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Apr 2, 2014 23:49
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bUm posted:I distinctly remember totally breaking the MC attunement in the early goings of WoW (was part of a zerg guild with like 200+ members) when we had a single group run Blackrock Depths and then used Warlocks to summon in and attune over 100 people (think it allowed them to attune down to level 40). It was pretty funny. Before they put limits on the dungeons you could easily just run BRD with 40 people and walk into the instance, thats how my guild got their main raiding group attuned.
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Apr 2, 2014 23:52
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Attunements in theory aren't necessarily bad, as they can be useful for saying "if you can't do this, you won't be able to do the thing you're trying to unlock." The problems with them occur when they're either out of the way or so obtuse that doing them on multiple different characters becomes a chore, which is what usually happens and as such renders them merely a method to squeeze out more playtime out of players. Rep grinds in most of their modern and original contexts are literally methods to force players to spend more time doing things so that they don't complete all the content and burn out too quickly, in order to keep subscriptions up. I can't think of a single time where a rep grind wasn't this.
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Apr 3, 2014 00:15
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Reason posted:The amount of rep grinding in WoW right now to get an alt up to par is worse than beating a dungeon once and completing a single quest. You literally have to sit and grind to get rep to unlock things instead, which is way more grindcore than completing a dungeon that you were going to complete anyways a single time before moving on to the next level of content. Attunements are way, way more 'casual' than rep grinding, which encourages large amounts of poopsock sperglord time spent in the game. Actually, there is currently no rep grinding involved in gearing up an alt in WoW. Just a Timeless Isle and LFR grind. Debatable on which is better.
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Apr 3, 2014 00:41
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Shadowlyger posted:Actually, there is currently no rep grinding involved in gearing up an alt in WoW. Just a Timeless Isle and LFR grind. Debatable on which is better. Timeless is a piece of cake. It's basically GW2's gameplay but lighter with all the events (In a boss rush format.) too, and with a ridiculously fast rate to gear up to boot. I was geared just from the intro quests to do raiding in like two hours with it. Definitely not a grind at all. The only way it is if you think you're supposed to randomly kill mobs instead of hook up with a kill train and hunt treasure chests. Archonex fucked around with this message at 02:07 on Apr 3, 2014 |
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Apr 3, 2014 02:03
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kafziel posted:This is just a matter of implementation. Ridiculous attunement lines like that Mount Hyjal bullshit are obviously terrible, nobody's defending that. But if you take something smaller, more reasonable, and rationally related - like unlocking Cimerora in CoH, or beating the Gatekeeper in TSW - and what exactly is the problem? If the attunements were all soloable and had lots of neat story and exploration I would be fine with that, but forcing a group of people to drag someone through several hours and several dungeons just so you can actually get to the content you want to play together is the worst. And then you have to do it all again the next week and the next week because you will always have raiders coming and going when you are dealing with 40 man groups. Having said that, I am not mad at this game. I guess I'm a real sucker for theme parks because I raided WoW from vanilla to the end of Firelands and I also loved SWTOR although I didn't raid in that. clone on the phone fucked around with this message at 02:33 on Apr 3, 2014 |
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Apr 3, 2014 02:31
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Rasmussen posted:If the attunements were all soloable and had lots of neat story and exploration I would be fine with that, but forcing a group of people to drag someone through several hours and several dungeons just so you can actually get to the content you want to play together is the worst. And then you have to do it all again the next week and the next week because you will always have raiders coming and going when you are dealing with 40 man groups. I wholeheartedly agree. Which is why I'd like to know more about the sort of attunements they have in mind before passing judgment.
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Apr 3, 2014 02:52
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edit: wrong thread
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Apr 3, 2014 03:00
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Reason posted:This is the worst part of attunements/rep grinds of any kind and could be easily remedied by making attunements and rep type things account/guild wide, unlocked by things like achievements or what have you. Basically heirloom gear, but for attunements. Hell, I would have thrown X Badges at a spare Karazhan key for my alt. I had lots of fun doing attunements on my main, when I was sorta caught up with the main guild group. That's exciting. You run off and do the solo parts of the quest chain. They're usually dripping with flavor and lore connected to the endgame stuff, so you're getting pumped up. Gonna go raid Karazhan. Go through these quests. Okay, in the Dark Portal instance. Just got handed the key to Karazhan by Medivh himself! Awesome! People pipe up, when you're asking in /g about getting this or that group together, so you can do your dungeon quests. "Oh I need that." "Me too. I'll heal." Everyone's kinda doing it together, and it's exciting, warming you up for the bigger group endeavors of actually raiding. Attunements are really fun and a great way to get players invested in the raid instance, before they've even stepped foot in it. They're great...in that 1-2 week window, when everyone's doing them. After that, they're a roadblock, and you dread them, because you're the slow rear end in a top hat begging for a group for an instance everyone's done to death, has all the pre-raid gear from, and hates. Even worse, if you're trying to get an alt geared up. That's what BC was like. Especially bad before Heroics and Badges came into being, giving people some small reason to run Dark Portal yet again. Attunements might have worked in WotLK. BC and Vanilla instances could be godawful slogs. I think my first SLab run was something like 3 hours, and that was a guild group. In LK, even the Heroics were manageable with pugs, and they were short enough that a run wasn't basically the rest of your night. Group Finder made a huge difference, as well. Badges could buy you lots of stuff that was useful to even purped out raiders, so you usually had a good gear cushion too. There was dual-speccing, so even if you tanked in raids, it didn't hurt to get a DPS suit together. There was also the Disenchant option for loot, and you always needed enchant mats. Everyone had a decent reason to run an instance in addition to dragging your undergeared rear end through it. Getting those group quests done. Those godawful 'gently caress you, and your tank alt' brick walls that came up in every attunement chain prior to WotLK were basically solved in WotLK, but there were no elaborate attunements to prove that point. These solutions are part of the MMO vocabulary now. A WoW style MMO without dual-specs, scaled dungeon rewards, and group-finders is just a quaint idea, these days. Attunements are cool. I like them, and the big plate of lore they serve up. They're a great opportunity for epic questlines, and the main problems with them can be mitigated by modern MMO features.
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Apr 3, 2014 09:11
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I personally think that the TSW attunement process got it right. 1. Finish every dungeon on the elite version - shows that you'll probably have a decent amount of blue gear and know the fights and mechanics 2. Defeat the gatekeeper - a SOLO fight with AIs that mimic other players to try and prepare you for what's ahead (AI who do stupid poo poo like "stand in the red" on purpose). This shows that you have an ability set that you'll need to do the nightmare dungeons, and also means you don't need to drag everyone along to "get you attuned" What I'd like to see is the attunement quest being something I think the Karazhan attunement had it right, a solo quest with a few dungeon requirements. The only thing I'd like to see different is have it be achievement based (like TSW dungeon completion is) rather than quest based, or at least "unmissable" - it allows people to get what they need the first time they do the dungeon, rather than having to wade through something they've done 6 times because they missed a quest earlier on and the guy you need to talk to is in the bowels of the dungeon
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Apr 3, 2014 14:05
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Curse has started giving out those beta keys, for those of you interested. I finally managed to nab one for myself and see this game firsthand.
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Apr 3, 2014 17:56
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Zakmonster posted:Curse has started giving out those beta keys, for those of you interested. I finally managed to nab one for myself and see this game firsthand. Thanks for the tip, I finally got one myself.
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Apr 3, 2014 18:10
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Zakmonster posted:Curse has started giving out those beta keys, for those of you interested. I finally managed to nab one for myself and see this game firsthand. I also want to say thanks, managed to nab a key!
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Apr 3, 2014 23:25
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Zakmonster posted:Curse has started giving out those beta keys, for those of you interested. I finally managed to nab one for myself and see this game firsthand. Cheers for this, I always prefer trying before buying!
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Apr 4, 2014 15:43
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Even if the attunement processes are fun, account bound, and achievable through solo game play you are still going to have tons of guilds experience tons of annoying nights because at least one person that they cannot replace has not been attuned. It sucks. There is nothing fun about that. You can have all of the fun aspects of well designed content that normally gets associated with attunement without there actually being any content gating associated with it. You just have to exchange the attunement carrot with a different carrot. There are also plenty of ways to design your MMO's end game content so that players understand the path of progression without including an attunement. With that said, what else does an attunement's role serve other than simply being a poorly design old idea to solve old problems which was used only because no one else decided to design something better in its stead at the time? I cannot think of a single reason.
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Apr 4, 2014 16:45
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I got a curse beta key and started playing, it's pretty neat so far. The UI feels really busy.
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Apr 4, 2014 16:47
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^^Edit: I felt like the UI was put together with a weird priority of what needed to be easily accessible. Like, you can access the in game store with two clicks, but it takes 5 to get to the quest journal for some reason. Being able to move things around yourself is something that should absolutely be in it. Just make it like an apple interface and let me decide what should be categorized where (and then have a legal team ready for the inevitable lawsuits  )The only way I've seen attunements done that I liked was when it's completely optional but gives a decent reward when you finish it. You don't need to do it to get in, but eventually it's a good idea to do it. And when you do that, it's not an attunement. It's just a good quest that can fill out lore and will give decent rewards to supplement your lovely dice rolls for loot. So yeah, no good way to do attunements for the simple fact that the entire purpose of an attunement is to cockblock you from killing mans with buds and brews on friday nights until you do your homework. LITERALLY MY FETISH fucked around with this message at 16:51 on Apr 4, 2014 |
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Apr 4, 2014 16:48
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Xavier434 posted:Even if the attunement processes are fun, account bound, and achievable through solo game play you are still going to have tons of guilds experience tons of annoying nights because at least one person that they cannot replace has not been attuned. It sucks. I disagree on this point because that moron that wasn't attuned should get his act together and know what's required to run the freaking dungeon. He's the same guy that's stacking deflect gear as a DPS. My point was that the attunement process should come naturally through the flow of the game and shouldn't be a hassle to people that are progressing in a normal way. In reality, all of the dungeons in this game have an attunement process - you need to visit the entrance before you are able to queue for it (except for STL and KV - which it was removed). In my opinion, it's nice to have attunement quests for the purposes of lore, but they need to come with minimal additional effort other than "completing quests you normally would have completed anyway as progression through the game"
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Apr 4, 2014 16:57
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Attunement processes are exclusionary by their very nature, which in my eyes means there is absolutely no valid reason for having them. I guess my whole idea of what makes MMOs worthwhile has changed over the years.
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Apr 4, 2014 17:05
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The same thing is true for levels or meaningful power progression at all, yet they seem to be inseparable from the MMO recipe.
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Apr 4, 2014 17:13
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pun pundit posted:The same thing is true for levels or meaningful power progression at all, yet they seem to be inseparable from the MMO recipe. You're exactly correct, probably why I'm so into GW2 and can't see myself playing a traditional MMO again. GW2 is many things and sure has many faults which I'm sure the spergs itching for 40 man raiding here will be quick to point out, but it's an extremely inclusive games that takes away many traditional barriers.
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Apr 4, 2014 17:16
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CLAM DOWN posted:I guess my whole idea of what makes MMOs worthwhile has changed over the years. This is true for me and I think probably a lot of people too. I'm going to give Wildstar a shot because I like their humor and art style, but if I end up getting bored or not liking it I think I'm likely going to be done with MMOs for a good long time. They're just too samey. Of course contradicting that is the fact that while GW2 did things differently, I didn't like how that turned out either. I think I'm just really loving picky these days. Probably because I have a job and don't have 16 hours of free time every day like I used to.
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Apr 4, 2014 17:23
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Deceptive Thinker posted:I disagree on this point because that moron that wasn't attuned should get his act together and know what's required to run the freaking dungeon. He's the same guy that's stacking deflect gear as a DPS. The thing for me is that "moron" is with me playing video games because he/she likes playing video games and so do I. There should be nothing stopping us from playing together at that point. I don't like playing with spergy try hards or people whose panties get tied in a knot just because one of their team members offers a little advice. Basically what I am saying is that I really dislike the idea of adding in an annoying feature like attunements just so that some players can use them as a tool to filter out other people. Not only are there more efficient ways to accomplish the same thing, the annoying side effects that attunements cause upon the player base as a whole completely defeats the purpose of trying to save time and headaches by weeding out other players. Not to mention that weeding out people for those kinds of reasons puts a real sour taste in my mouth in general. It is a crappy solution to a crappy problem designed to satisfy those with crappy attitudes.
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Apr 4, 2014 18:21
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Xavier434 posted:The thing for me is that "moron" is with me playing video games because he/she likes playing video games and so do I. There should be nothing stopping us from playing together at that point. I don't like playing with spergy try hards or people whose panties get tied in a knot just because one of their team members offers a little advice. Basically what I am saying is that I really dislike the idea of adding in an annoying feature like attunements just so that some players can use them as a tool to filter out other people. Not only are there more efficient ways to accomplish the same thing, the annoying side effects that attunements cause upon the player base as a whole completely defeats the purpose of trying to save time and headaches by weeding out other players. Not to mention that weeding out people for those kinds of reasons puts a real sour taste in my mouth in general. I completely agree with you, but it sounds like this isn't gonna be the game for us if we have that attitude. Even this thread shows that so far.
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Apr 4, 2014 18:25
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CLAM DOWN posted:I completely agree with you, but it sounds like this isn't gonna be the game for us if we have that attitude. Even this thread shows that so far. I know. I'll let it go because even just after a few posts it is already starting to feel like thread making GBS threads on my part. In the end, what I really want is for more MMOs to have the guts and financial backing to try to break away from the old rules and just try different formulas. This genre needs more risk takers.
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Apr 4, 2014 18:28
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I have a bunch of keys for this beta weekend. PM me if you need one.
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Apr 4, 2014 18:56
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Is there someone I can PM in game for a guild invite? I'm on Exile. If there's any way to make this more enjoyable, it's probably with goons. phourniner fucked around with this message at 19:02 on Apr 4, 2014 |
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Apr 4, 2014 18:59
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If this thread is evident of anything, it's that goons make nothing better.
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Apr 4, 2014 21:37
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Yeah looking for a invite too, ingame as Qtbb
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Apr 4, 2014 23:37
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CLAM DOWN posted:I completely agree with you, but it sounds like this isn't gonna be the game for us if we have that attitude. Even this thread shows that so far. Xavier434 posted:The thing for me is that "moron" is with me playing video games because he/she likes playing video games and so do I. There should be nothing stopping us from playing together at that point. This point is poised at the extreme, but it's a very tangible problem (especially for MMOs) that pulls at the market viability part of you wanting "more risk takers." MuffinMan posted:If this thread is evident of anything, it's that goons make nothing better.  .
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Apr 4, 2014 23:55
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I'm not sure if it's just me but it feels like the closer we get to launch the more hype is dying down. Is this actually a thing that's happening or is my own little circle of friends just for some reason not caring as much anymore? There's even rumblings among people I know after playing the Wildstar beta going "hm, why don't we reactivate our WoW toons?".
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Apr 5, 2014 00:12
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the one thing i'll give wildstar credit for is the character models were designed by someone with a soul
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Apr 5, 2014 00:12
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RiffRoff posted:I'm not sure if it's just me but it feels like the closer we get to launch the more hype is dying down. Is this actually a thing that's happening or is my own little circle of friends just for some reason not caring as much anymore? There's even rumblings among people I know after playing the Wildstar beta going "hm, why don't we reactivate our WoW toons?". There's plenty of time for hype to build up, they just need to fix some poo poo and have some open beta weekends leading up to launch. The TESO shine will be worn off and Archeage will probably still be in early access alpha.
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Apr 5, 2014 00:17
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RiffRoff posted:I'm not sure if it's just me but it feels like the closer we get to launch the more hype is dying down. Is this actually a thing that's happening or is my own little circle of friends just for some reason not caring as much anymore? There's even rumblings among people I know after playing the Wildstar beta going "hm, why don't we reactivate our WoW toons?". Prelaunch lull, happens with nearly every game. Once it gets closer to June you'll see more people talking about it.
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Apr 5, 2014 00:20
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