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Quality Vs Quantity

Submitted by Abalieno on March 21, 2006 - 04:18.

Who would have expected this? Complains about the levelling speed in Shadowbane?

Haemish:
I'm not even sure it was the lack of people. It was that PVE is a flat-out grind, with no trappings, or gravy or anything. It's GODAWFUL. It always was, but it was bearable because I was coming off of EQ and DAoC. Having playing CoH and WoW and EQ2 now, it's SO FUCKING SLOW. It isn't even about how fast you gain experience, but how boring is the actions which must be done in order to gain exp.

Spoiled by the little improvements of the genre.

As I always repeated, a problem of quality, not quantity.

Shadowbane and DAoC have now probably the faster treadmills out there. And they both still feel as painful grinds.

This is what I complain about when I say that these games are observed and then designed superficially. The problems are always seconded or dodged instead of solved directly.

Filed in: Ravings

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Re: Quality Vs Quantity

Grouchy Gnome on March 21, 2006 - 08:00.

Interesting comment on Shadowbane being a grind... Unless they significantly slowed leveling down, it's one of the faster "grinds" out there. I had a number of high level characters in SB. Perhaps it's that evil "perception" again. This player may want to hit max level and start killing people. If that's all you want to do in the game, the couple weeks it takes to max yourself out (or at least get to a respectable level) may seem slow.

GG, Nerfbat

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Re: Quality Vs Quantity

Innsmouth on March 21, 2006 - 12:23.

Even DAoC takes around two weeks, but they dumbed down the game to the point that the grind is painful.

A quote from the link:

This CANNOT be tolerated. It cannot be tolerated for weeks or months as it cannot be tolerated for ten minutes. It's one of those things that give you epiphanies: what the fuck am I doing? The game cannot be THAT dumb.

The speed at which you level up, as I repeated along the whole WoW beta, is an element you deduce from the game, not an element you set beforehand. It's the content of the game and its variance that tells you how long can be the treadmill.

In both SB and DAoC the PvE sucks to the point that it cannot be tolerated even for a short while. It's not how "quick" it can be, it's the value it has to offer. It needs value BACK, not value removed.

In four years that DAoC has been out NOTHING has been done to make the PvE more interesting and meaningful. Instead they did a lot of work to "speed it up" or even "cut out" entire portions of the game via the /level command.

It didn't work. It was a stupid idea and it's still stupid.

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Re: Quality Vs Quantity

Ketzup on March 22, 2006 - 10:24.

Here's an idea...not a great one but perhaps better than the current system, and easy to implement.

In games where the fun begins at higher levels like in DAoC, all characters start at a few levels from max, but they lose xp as they PvP. Now they can gain the xp they lost and only as much as they lost (with the second option) by ethier going out and PvE'ing/questing or by resting (read: logging off).

The lower level monster will become useless but just tweaking their stats in the database shouldn't be that hard. With the increase in areas to PvE/quest they could probably just throw the dullest areas away or maybe even REDO these areas with their new freedom. This would have to work with items as well which would ALSO increase the variance in the equipment area... that's not really the point though.. arg!

For the record: I don't play DaoC anymore and i've never tried ShadowBane.

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