😀 How to make people happy 😀

[fecono]

I’m making this thread in an attempt to tone down the fighting within the community and I hope that IMC reads it and then makes a decision of their own based on everyones feedback

I’ve spend a lot of time reading opinions of other people, here in the forums and ingame. And I think we can all agree when the most discussed “problem” was the exp rate in this CBT.
Some people don’t even see it as a problem while it is enough reason to quit for others. Wether you see it as a problem or not, it’s the hot topic right now.
Nobody knows how the future might be like, if the rates might stay like this or if they might get increased or lowered.
But that’s a bit besides the point because the real meat of this whole discussion is whether the entire game should be “grindy” or not.

Now, grindy is a kinda loosely defined word. I’m pretty sure that most people just think of killing the same monster over and over in order to gain exp,
but generally it refers to the act of “doing the same task over and over”. So saying that this game is too grindy is not quite appropiate, since every MMO is inheritly grindy.
Some games simply wrap it up nicely in a way to make it less noteable.

And this is where I’d like to make a distinction between the two groups of people who have been discussing back and forth for this last week.
Group one would be commonly reffered to as “the casuals”, people who get bored very fast of killing the same monsters over and over and who are not willing to spend most of their days playing a videogame.
Group number two would be known as “the hardcores”, those who are willing to spend a lot of time for a game and who do not mind killing the same monsters over and over in order to advance.

To both of these 2 groups I’d like to say: Shut the f*** up, and stop being silly.
It’s been mostly nothing but accusations from both sides in this whole argument.
The casuals look down on the hardcores because they supposely have no life outside of their hobby, enabling them to spend a lot of time on videogames.
Then we have the hardcores looking down on the casuals, because they make them responsible for videogames nowadays being of low quality, in order to cater to the needs of people who get easily frustrated when facing failure.

These 2 accusations are competly baseless, you can have a person with a job and family love the process of grinding, while there are also people without a job who would rather do something other than grinding in their overly average high amounts of free time.

Let me get something out of the way.
You people might think that this discussion is about the amount of time you are able to spend on a MMO, but it is not.

We will all more or less spend the same amount of time on these kind of games until they run out of content, some people do it faster and others not so fast.
But ultimately it doesn’t matter.

In my opinion this whole discussion is about motivation and the feelings of reward the individual person gets out of playing a game .
So from now on I will use the following defintions for these 2 groups

1. The frequent reward type
That would be these who hate what they call “grindy” gameplay. They do not like having to kill the same monsters in order to get a reward in the form of a level up.
Typically they prefer modern MMOs where the reward is offered in rapid succesion, sometimes in the form of levels, sometimes in the form of equipments. But typically this kind of reward is achieved through large amounts of available quests,
making it possible to kill the same monsters over and over while actually not feeling like you are grinding all the way until max level.

2. Slow reward type
These are the kind of people who absolutely don’t mind killing the same monster. They see it as a hardship they overcome in order to gain a feeling of reward that is much greater than the feeling of reward you get after spending 5 minutes on a quest.
They rather take their time trying to figure out things rather than being told what exactly to do and expect a feeling of adventure from a MMO.
And every adventure comes with hardship and failure too.

Both of these types are perfectly acceptable, they are simply different people that are clashing together now in a beta for a game with high expectations
Now, I will say again THIS IS NOT ABOUT THE TIME YOU ARE WILLING TO SPEND ON A VIDEOGAME.

So the way I see it the problem is that IMC stands in the middle of these 2 groups, not being sure who they should listen to in order to create their vision of a great game.

What can be done to find a solution that satisfies both parties?
The way I see it we will simply have to find a way to make the progress of killing monsters over and over more rewarding for everyone involved.
I hope that everyone who reads this will post their opinions and ideas too, but I would like to emphasize that I want to find potential solutions and NOT endless argument about who has the bigger E-peen or more real life.
So please, keep it as constructive as you can.

How to make the killing of monsters more appealing?

I have some ideas, some good in my eyes, some not so good. But I just want to throw everything I can out there, in order to brainstorm and discuss with everyone

1. Make every monster a piñata filled with dreams
   Right now we have these rare blue monsters which give a huge amount of exp.
   The problem is that they don’t feel very rewarding due to the fact that they are very rare and many people end up never even seeing one.
   I would like to suggest that every normal monster gets a 2-3% chance to drop a Exp card, similar to these that we get from quests right now.
   This way everyone is bound to find one sooner or later, making them feel good when their efforts get a little boost.
   Addtionally it would also be a boost to their motivation for many people if there was a chance for every monster to drop a incredibly rare item, with a chance close to 0,1%.
   Personally I’d feel much more inclined to randomly kills monsters, because you never know, today might be my lucky day!
   Trickster Online had another addtional interesting system. There was a very very low chance that a monster would drop a item which was part of a unique equip set.
   This equip was very powerful and unique in the literal sense, since only ever one could exist on the server at a time. If a person died with any of these equip pieces they would lose them, giving another player the chance to find it somewhere.
   And of course there would be a serverwide announcement everytime these things happened

2. Make monsters much much stronger
   I’m talking about about 20 seconds for each monster you kill, with the constant danger of a gang up or dying to some cheesy high power attack.
   This way the players would have to play very careful, which prevents them from going into the autopilot mode that comes with grinding. This would also highly encourage party play, however it might be problematic for some classes when there simply are no people to party with around or if they prefer solo play.
   In return the monsters themself could grant much more experience, I’m talking about 3-5% per monster. This way players will have a very visible progress everytime something dies.
   I believe that this is pretty important, because staring at our exp bars is what everyone does while leveling. I believe in a good MMO leveling means that you try to use your classes strenghts to your full extend while also trying to figure out the enemies weakness and abusing it to progess more efficiently.
   Having strong monsters would make it possible to have a wide array of different strenghts and weaknesses rather than just blasting your skills at them to 1 shot them whenever they are ready.

3. Combine the act of monster killing with quests
   Everyone who has played this game already probably also gathered a whole bunch of materials from all kind of monsters. These are used for crafting, which in return requires a recipe.
   That’s great and all, but while leveling I rarely ever found a recipe. On the bright side, when I did I already had all the ingredients ready to craft a equippiece…Which would get replaced 10 levels later.
   What I’m getting at is that I had many material items that ended up being of no use to me.
   How about implementing a quest which would require certain materials? And how about making them repeatable, maybe even with random little rewards?
   Of course these repeatable quests wouldn’t give huge amounts of experience.
   This way people will feel more rewarded upon having gathered 100 of the same material after a long grinding session.
   It would also make for a interesting market, since people would try to sell and buy these materials in order to speed up their leveling progress. It would offer a nice alternative for people who are not very strong fighters too.
   There even could be the same kind of quests for classes that focus on crafting. I’m not sure how the crafting system works later on yet, but in many games you end up crafting a whole lot of stuff just to bring it to the vendor. Not very rewarding if you ask me.

That’s all I can come up with right now, but I will definetly add more if I can think of anything.
And PLEASE post your ideas for a better leveling system too.

[tike36]

This is a beta half of the stuff you said is not needed