What is the core of "playing the game", to you?

spoomeister

Dumb observation:

I thought one of the reasons for tweaking a lot of aspects of the game (in addition to needing to do so to manage the economy, stop bots / farmers, etc.) was to reward activities that were 'playing the game'. The change to how getting AD on invoke was one, I think. Some of the tweaks to professions too. Get people earning rewards for going on quests and slaying monsters, not for fidgeting with things in the in-game menus.

So, dumb questions:

What things are the my-hero-being-heroic things that are part of the game?
What sorts of activities are you willing to grind for in the game?
Which modules or events really feel like "yes, this is a D&D MMO to me"?

Yes, this is partially Yet Another Complaint About Fishing. But really, it's called Dungeons & Dragons, not Snowdrifts & Fish....

...I wonder sometimes if some of these aspects of the game are added in to make the variety of experiences make the overall setting closer to a Fable or Skyrim sort of immersive world thing...

destrowod

To me its to do quest and dungeons i would say... Personally in terms of mods, i would say Maze Engine has probably the most enjoyable. Better story for sure at least. The daily quest waiting to pursue the story was a bit annoying but oh well...

I think what peoples want is to be able to play with friends, kill stuff, and have variety doing so.

As for fishing and skyrim-alike task, well the difference in Skyrim you never force to do those task. I will chop wood in skyrim only if i want to make extra gold early in the game. Honestly i may have do it for 5 mins and never did it again. I do enjoy the realism of building a house, storing items in it etc etc but the difference tough is that even if skyrim is a long game, it can't compare to a game like NW. You may kill bandit leaders as mercenary quest here and there but you never force to keep doing so. You do it for fun and to lev up a bit and thats it.

Neverwinter already have you do SO MUCH to build your character and your guild, im sorry but i rather get those thaum stones in sharandar rather than fish...

Im ok with fishing as being a timed activity like winter festival, but not as a thing you will spend hundreds upon hundreds of hours into. Even at the festival, i fished for a couple hours total, managed to get maybe 5-6 linus total. I know i could had spend all my time there and finish both my last boons without having to find queue groups for tiamat etc etc but the reality is ... no THAT WAS TOO BORING. Despite giving decent stuff. I rather wait and play tiamat once in a while to get linus even if it takes me years, if im still playing the game. Even if Tiamat lag and there is a risk of failure, i rather do this than just press A during hours.

Now sure the new fishing is more than press A but its still very boring. I don't mind it for 10 mins but after that i want to do something else.

mordekai

D&D is the oldest, and best loved Fantasy Roleplaying Game in the world.
Its many things to many people.
I've been playing it since 1980 and watched it go through many changes, (5th Ed is, frankly, HAMSTER and a million miles from what it set out to be all those years ago.)
But D&D was the watermark by which all other games were measured. Some games came along with ridiculously simple rules, to focus on playing the story, (Tunnels & Trolls for example) while others focused on selling lots of rule books with tables and charts to argue over, (Rolemaster)
D&D never took itself too seriously though. That happened when Gygax got booted and the game became more about selling rulebooks than the quality of what went into them.

For me, for nearly forty years, the essence of a good Dungeons and Dragons game is simple.
Friends getting together to take on some righteous cause and save the day.
Beat the villain, save the village.
Stop the rise of (insert Demon Lord) save the Kingdom.
Kill the bandits, rescue the mayor/princess/annoying NPC.

Its about being imaginative, daring, and heroic, even when you're playing a CE Thief.
Its about telling a story on which everyone is a major character.
But most importantly, its about walking away saying, "that was fun."

I've DM'd for literally hundreds of players. I've run NWN2 online Persistent World campaigns, and I've run and written half a dozen LRP systems, including being head writer at the UKs first purpose built indoor LRP back in the eighties.
I'm not showing off... I just want to point out that I have written thousands of D&D related quests and campaigns over the years, for hundreds of players and never... not once.. ever ever ever... among the countless feedback I've had... has anyone ever... EVER... said to me...
"It would be better with fishing"

thejawlives

Wow! Best post award ever goes to @mordekai#1901

armadeonx

@nitocris83 please read mordekai's post, it's so true lol.

cscriv79

@mordekai#1901 I would just like to say, GOOD POST.

A fun, enjoyable and rewarding game gets people spending (before mod6), A cash cow greedy game gets people running (mod6 onwards)

Preview shard is their way of finding ways to exploit the player base.

ddem0n888

I always enjoy the introductory questline for each mod. What comes after however....

mordekai

Because of the nature of MMO gaming, every campaign needs to appeal to as many players as possible.
There are several ways to achieve this.

First, you can construct a multi layered narrative, where the players who like to immerse themselves in the plot and characters can do so, but where the players who just want to get on with it can skip the wordy stuff and get stuck into the adventure.

Another way is to simply go for the lowest common denominator, "what's the simplest, easiest thing we can do that will keep the most people playing?"

Third is like that, but aims at the highest common factor, "How intelligent and complex dare we go before the hack and slash players and those only interested in fast advancement lose interest?"

Sadly, the lowest common denominator is often the most appealing, because its easier for writers to dumb down their material than it is to try and pull players up to a higher standard.

I mentioned before that when you get someone like Rob Salvatore to write a mini campaign you get the multi layered narrative approach. The essence of Dungeons & Dragons in one quest based plot line.
Mod 11 is too far to the lowest common denominator end.
Dull characters, banal quests, and padded out with fishing.

It may be the dullest thing to ever hit a fantasy roleplaying game but hey... look at the shiny shiny.

And as long as the shiny shiny is "cool" enough, lowest common denominator is what they will keep doing.

nitocris83

Response to thread sentiment:
Thank you for this insightful post. This may be an obvious statement, but one of the core topics of discussion that is pretty frequent around the office is what makes players want to play. When we do internal playtest we don't just look at performance but also how enjoyable was the experience. That being said, sometimes what's enjoyable to us may not translate as well as we would like when it's released into the wild which is why revisiting the original question is imperative for future game design.

Response as a D&D and NW player:
D&D to me has always been about getting together with my friends, building a world together, building a story, and forging a connection in a fantasy world that was an extension of the connection we had in real life. Neverwinter, to me, re-arranges the order of things where I forge connections with other players in the fantasy setting and then get to know them in real life. It also allows me to visualize and digitally experience a number of events that had typically lived in my mind or on whiteboard drawn maps, and with miniatures.

arabatur

nitocris83 said:

Response to thread sentiment:
. . . . That being said, sometimes what's enjoyable to us may not translate as well as we would like when it's released into the wild which is why revisiting the original question is imperative for future game design.

Mod 6 was the anathema of disconnect between developer's and the playerbase and sadly there has been little improvement. There is to much grind and no way near enough compelling story, just the annoyance of HE's and gated this, gated that. Mod 11 shows some improvement but even this is just 1 huge HE.

We want dungeons to explore and riches we can get without having to build or buy a key.

sundance777

I think the main things that creates a draw to this game is the overall complexity of the game in addition to the content we were drawn to originally. What I mean by that is basically the quest to make your characters good, better or best. There are literally millions of variations on a character and play style that create nearly infinite combinations of complexity to navigate the content.

The PvP aspect is really mainly about who worked the hardest on their character to hyper-tune it for a very specific purpose, the same is very true in PvE as the competition is real to be the highest on the leader boards and run thing faster and faster.

We begin the game with some pretty amazing series of quests, they are fun, they are fresh they take us to new lands and they engage us. Then we learn our characters, level up to a point where we are stronger, and able to do more, and then it falls apart as we are given tasks to go do the same thing over and over and over and over. This is fun once or twice, but becomes boring very quickly. Sharandar, Dread ring, well of dragons (hate linu's favor), icewind dale and storm king's.... etc. Why must we have dailies that repeat over and over and why do we do them? Just to make our characters stronger. Face it, if there were not boons at the end of the rainbow, we would not do them.

Maybe the dailies could be tweaked to not be a repeat repeat task, like string them together sort of like the elemental zone. I'm not suggesting you rework the old zone, but it could be a good idea for newer zones. Currently I will do just about anything in my power to avoid the mundane repeat tasks of grinding out dailies. It is nice to have some shortcuts to bypass content, but if it was fun, we wouldn't want to bypass it....Hopefully that makes sense.

Once we have completed the dailies it leaves us with 'end game content' which is really just a few dungeons and a stronghold to work on. So we end up farming dungeons to make our characters stronger (as this is the design of the game)....or the thrill of getting a good loot drop, which is really to make our characters stronger, we wear or sell the good drops.

I think the treasure map idea is unique, although I could do without the fishing - I actually fell asleep while fishing last night, so boring. How about put the treasure map at the end of something to kill, instead of a snooze fest task?

For me the story-line questing and fresh content is the best, the grinding to get something I probably don't even need is bad. How hard would it be to occasionally add a new quest line, even if through the same zones? Go see Knox and he asks you to go here and there and run through a series of new tasks (Playing the game) instead of the same old stuff grinding and farming trying to get NW rich off RNG's.

mordekai

I think that with Dailies people want short and sweet.
Leveling up through the boon flow chart is tick tock grind and the longer and more complex the daily tasks, the more annoying it is.
We go back when the campaign is done for the rewards.
Which is why the only quest I do in Caer Konig is Biggrins Tomb.
There's so much more to do elsewhere, and the daily rewards involve... going to Caer Konig and collecting your rewards by asking someone for them. (Lowest Common Denominator...)
I'd far rather do dailies in Sharandar and collect the Thaums. When there are so many quest zones that offer rewards for adventuring, why would someone spend their time adventuring for 100 Black Ice?
If I'm not going to waste time digging for 150... etc.

There are no leader boards for dailies and HEs, but there are for queue group content.
That's where people play NWO in the closest style to D&D. Group play on a linear quest.
And for me, that's what needs addressing most.

It's all well and good to dangle shiny new toys to dazzle the eye, while distracting from the fact that the adventure and excitement to earn it is... frankly meh... its the very essence of lowest common denominator thinking. And in games like this the more powerful someone becomes the belief that they deserve more for doing less can become entrenched.
But giving in to that in the name of "hey, we listen and give the players what they want" can be a dangerous precedent which has been the downfall of pretty much every CCG that followed Magic: The Gathering.
Like a booster pack, every chest and lockbox that's opened is done so with, initially the hope that it contains something as good or better than you've got, and when you've not got much it usually does. But subsequently, with diminishong returns, it remains the expectation, and ultimately the demand.
When a game begins to focus on the reward above the content, its in dänger of a downward spiral of quality.

It invites entropy.

Sometimes you need to dare to be creative. Not just "hey, this worked for that game... we'll do that and introduce a new tier of gear."
That's how you lead, rather than follow.