well. i'm not dead.
in the past year i've gotten married. it's been a delightful experience. it hasn't cut my gaming, though. i just haven't written about it much.
let me tell you, though, what i've been up to, and my latest thoughts.
i've been playing:
wow
eve online
ddo
and eq2
my thoughts are: they're driving me crazy. all of them - and it all boils down to that oxymoron.
which oxymoron? well, my playstyle is often mocked by many an mmo gamer, and it's because i'm not much of a grouper. they keep telling me i should be playing single-player games, like oblivion (which i love). the thing is, i don't like single-player. it's too lonely in there. i like the feeling of others around me who i can say hi to when i'm feeling social and who i can get a hand off when i need one. it's nice, too, to kill some great thing and then chat about it while standing over its corpse.
i play rogues. assassins and stealthers. that's me. i hate pvp, though. i find it boring. when i do group, i like a nice tight team. a team which enjoys the challenge and doesn't find dying to be a negative part of the experience. unfortunately, that's a rare group. most mmo gamers are still kids who expect everything handed to them on a plate. they want their gear. if they're not getting their gear NOW, they throw a tantrum and leave to get their level 1000 friend to hold their widdle hands and spoonfeed them their gear.
me, i love the challenge. i want a dagger it took me BLOOD to get. i want to look at it each time i kill something and REMEMBER where i got it and HOW much i bled for it. i want the sweat, the tears and the hanging on by my fingernails feeling followed by the ecstasy of sudden and unexpected victory over the bad thing.
unfortunately, mmo-developers cater for the masses of 12 year old kids and unemployed uni students.
so we get this thing called raids.
raids have killed every mmo i've played. raids. damn the mongrel game-destroyer who thunk it up.
raids involve getting together as many 12 year old kids into a game and letting them loose. it's an awful experience. if they're not 12, they're all military wannabes and tactical nazis who just turn everything into my high school maths class all over again. they all skip the rpg section of their game and go straight to the mmo - maths maths and oh-more-maths. and if you want a shiny shiny new toy for your character to make him/her look more shiny than others, then you have to endure not a few hours, but a few MONTHS with these people! my god, the pain of just a night is bad enough, let alone enduring entire months.
i can't raid. i just can't. playing games is what i do for fun, not what i do for a living. i'd do it for a living but no one has offered to pay me, yet.
so, what do i do?
i get oh so close to the level cap and give up. i give up because, well, that's it. there's nothing else for me to do. no solo dungeons. no small 2-3 dungeons. everyone wants to do the 1000 man dungeons where kids all pile in and scramble and fight first for control and then for loot. the screaming little hissyfits and crybaby attitudes. the constant bickering and demands you tow the party line. my god, it's like working in politics.
i don't mind grouping, i just don't want it to be groups of thousands. i want small intimate gatherings. not orgies. orgies mean you spend so much time minding your own orifices you can't enjoy the experience.
i'm going out of my mind. speed-levellers, too. my god, doesn't anyone work anymore? speed speed speed.
i don't know why game-developers spend so much time making so much pretty graphics and dungeons when i've never been in a group that actually paused to LOOK at where they were.
me, i love a game where i crest a hill and see a truly remarkable landscape laid out for me. then i always like to write a small email off to the game-developers to say wow. except to blizzard, because their robot emails don't seem to know i've even written to them. i've written about ten emails to blizzard and have yet to get a reply from anything other than a robot. i wonder if anyone really works for blizzard. i always get the feeling on the other end are some computer programmed developers.
that might also explain why most game developers lose me. they are living under this dream that we all want to fight with as many people in our group as possible. they're wrong. the best groups are those which fight together so much they know each other's way.
i used to game with two others. many years ago. it was the best experience because we were friends offline, and so online we had the same mindset. we killed every game we could find, and explored dungeons as much to see what was there as to kill and loot. it was the old d&d style - a small team of adventurers braving the dungeon and coming out alive with something shiny.
the true skill was in our teamwork. and the true enjoyment was in our balance. one of us was sneaky, one of us was brawny, and one of us was brainy and rather good with the magic systems. we worked. as a team. we didn't care about the numbers. i remember using subgrade weapons simply because they look cool. to this day i still wear armour i like the look of over armour which grants a better bonus. i refuse to cave into the pressure and wear the same shiny as anyone else - especially when you end up looking like clones of everyone else in your class. it's called roleplaying, and i miss it.
the other thing which is killing the modern mmo is that thing called balance.
balance shmalance.
i don't think it matters if a mage can't kill a rogue or a warrior isn't as fast as a rogue when running. who cares? this pvp thing has made games stupid. no class should be balanced against another. balance is designed simply to induce those horrid arena things wow loves so much. want balance? go play quake or whatever the flavour of the month in that genre is.
pvp is all well and good in an mmo, i just think pvp should be just like pve - if i see a big red bad guy, i don't attack it. if i were a rogue, i would like to feel i wouldn't want to attack that rather firebally mage unless i was behind him, stealthed, and got to kill him before he hit me with a fireball. and i'm happy with one-hit kills. what's wrong with one-hit kills? all this 2d platformer badguy nonsense is ridiculous! it's like playing a 3d version of mario brothers. each badguy you can hear the bip bip bip bip bipbipbipbip on.
if i'm walking along and i get to stab something in the back, i really hope i'm good enough and my dagger's good enough, to actually spike it's heart or something. or if i've slashed its throat, i really don't think it'd be attacking me for another five minutes while i slash its throat a few more times. i mean, i only have so much neck i can rip out.
i like to think of a good fight as something from a martial arts movie. if you get swamped, you should be one-hitting them, but the skill should come in which order you do it. and how you use your defence.
i also don't think i shouldn't be allowed, as a rogue, to sneak through a dungeon and actually ASSASSINATE the boss at the end. that's the whole point of the class in the first place. to actually assassinate it. not sneak through only to be splattered with one punch because the devs have decided bosses can't be sneaked up on and spiked on the end of a good poisoned dagger. hell, if it was good enough for caeser, then it should be good enough for the demon hiding in the back of the cave with his big scaly back begging for being turned into a pincushion.
the skill then should be in the sneaking, there. i like games where the creatures are sensitive to sneaking. they can hear you if you go too fast and see you if you step in the light etc. make it fun, if you have to.
and barbarians. warriors. what's with this tank class? tank class is the WORST logic of any class in existence.
my rogue has a knife. sure, he's pretty good with it, but i remember watching a movie years ago. i think it was deathstalker (don't laugh - i just remember this scene), and this giant guy was fighting this weenie halfling-guy who has a dagger. giant guy has a big two-hand mallet sledgehammer thing. halfling weaves in and out fast and quick. stab stab.
giant guy gets real peeved.
swings.
thwack.
lots of meat on the hammer - no little halfling left at all.
see what i mean? a barbarian has a wicked two-hand axe, and you're telling me he can't do any damage on anything with it? man, that axe would go THROUGH armour. tanking is a ridiculous class. it's annoying and boring.
and healers, too. i hate healers. do we really have to have them? tweak the fighting. turn every fight into a fight to the death. quick, hard and fast, and you wouldn't need them. bandage yourself at the end of a fight and move on. healers are the worst additions to the mmo ever.
i like mages, but i wish to god a game would be released which actually did something new with it, or at least had more fun. necromancers are all so wince-worthy. raising skeletons and using either poison or ice? i mean, really. why are these characters so weak, too? mages should be striding through the battle, splatting things. i don't remember gandalf getting all worried about actually being noticed in battle. or raistlin thinking he couldn't take on an army. or pug asking around for a good barbarian and a few fighters to stand in front of him and protect him while he cast off little weenie fireballs here and there. a mage is a MASSIVE class. it deserves some more respect. the mage should be the number one death-dealing class of all time. users of this class should be walking tall, and arrogantly through everything. they should only be vulnerable when their defences are down and they don't see the little rogue hiding behind the curtains until they feel a little wetness on their neck and wonder why it is they can't breathe anymore.
and now to the rogues. what's with game developers being so scared of actually making a good rogue? why can't rogues be uber stealthy? that's what they are. they're also damn good at looting pockets. and so they should be. i don't see why they can't steal the goods off other players and from banks and from shops and pretty much everywhere they can. it shouldn't be automatic that they get caught, either. if you want your goods safe, you damn well should've looked after them.
but "everyone" would play x class if they did that.
well, no, they wouldn't. they might dabble. but the goal of rpg is to have fun. if the game is made to be the BEST each class can be, then the game would work. instead of catering for carebears and 12 year olds, i think it's time to cater for those of us who work and pay the credit card fees.
i want to see some improvements. the genre is so stale right now it's just BEGGING for something different. sometime respectable. something MASSIVE. that's the point, you see. it's supposed to be massive. at the moment the games are so balanced that everyone has the same skills anyway.
in wow (as an example, but the others are the same), every rogue has the same skills to a majority degree. especially the raiding ones. if you want into the content, you have to strictly adhere to some generally accepted mathematical formula. the numbers are too defined. in pvp, you have to conform, or you can't succeed. there's no rpg. there's no variety. no evolutionary feel in the development of mmos at the moment.
i'm looking at the newies as they come out, and they're all focussing so much on pvp and balance and raids that there's a squeezing out of the original intent of mmos: that they WERE once roleplay games, designed to bring a WORLD into existence.
i'm looking forward to seeing what eve online's creators do with the world of darkness. though i enjoyed eve online, i find myself in the unusual situation of not actually playing it. you can set your skills training, but because you want to fly x ship, you just wait til your skills are there. as this can take months, you just tend not to play the game. seems weird. there's just not much to do, though i do like the freedom potential it gives you.
the world of darkness is white wolf's baby, and it believed not so much in balance at all. even among the vampire games, i remember there wasn't much balance there. but everyone contributes in their own way.
back to the standard archetypes, if each character were allowed to be big and beefy and let free without balance, you could solve the "everyone would play x class" quite simply by designing smarter dungeons that REQUIRED each class. lockpicking - that vastly underused skill, is needed to open most doors and trap-spotting should be more important. beefy barbarians should be slaughtering the big things which are mage proof, and mages should be dazzling their companions with sudden explosive exhibitions of amazing power - and knowledge. mages should be holding all the cards with identification of items, knowledge of dungeon contents, opening of magical doors and deactivation of magical barriers. they should be tearing apart magically created beings, and using their powers of head-explodey.
barbarians should be wading through blood, ripping down the badguys and merging from an army of enemies unscathed. i remember a scene in dungeonsiege1 where a BILLION spiders suddenly begin emerging into a room you're standing in. the first time i saw it, the hairs on the back of my neck stood up and i was on the phone to a friend going "oh my god oh my god!" the feeling of battling a thousand foes (each ended up being a one-hit kill but so many of them you felt like you were fighting an uphill battle). that's how a warrior wants to feel. swish swish swish. not feel like his standing there being useless. the warrior should be the strong arm. removing physical barriers and intimidating shopkeepers.
rogues? well. they're simple. they should have all the maps. all the stealth, all the poisoned weapons. they should be quite simply edging around the room while the badguy's hurling lightning at his friends. the rogue should be walking up behind the bad guy, tapping him on the shoulder and with a polite "excuse me" burying a knife deep in his guts. then he should be picking his pockets. a rogue should be unlocking every lock, untrapping every trap, and is the most skilled in the traditional dungeon crawl and yet sneakily efficient in the tavern brawl. he also shouldn't be paying for a damn thing.
any other archetypes should merely be mixes and subgroups. priests? who needs them? they're a pain in the backside.
and there's something else that occurs to me which is ruining the genre. that horrible thing called professions.
i don't want to be a blacksmith or a leatherworker. i don't want to be any of that. i'm an adventurer! being forced to take up a profession diminishes the time i can spend in my dungeons and increases the time i have to be spending doing that other bane of the genre - grinding. why grind? what's the point of grinding? it's boring, and no one on the planet enjoys it. it's too much like work. i play games to escape the monotony of my day job. not to embrace it.
leave professions to the npcs. they do it well.
i want to be able to walk up to my blacksmith npc, and say, "dude, i want a nice black dagger with a really sharp edge. i'll give you 20 gold, so make it snappy."
and i want to hear, "yes sir!"
then i'll pick up the dagger in the morning and go stab some stuff with it. yay!
spending your day building up gold is boring and annoying. i fail to see why they implement such a thing. a market's a great place to get rid of unwanted dungeon-found items, sure. but why they take that concept to the nth degree and turn it into a way of life is beyond me. i hate feeling i can't play the game anymore because i don't have any in-game gold. it just makes the whole gold-selling business on ebay more viable. it ruins my game. i shouldn't need gold to jump into a dungeon and reap the whirlwind of badguys.
this brings me to items and loot quality.
i love new loot. i love it. but i hate that it always looks so dumb. why the freaky colours and stupid fashion sense? as a rogue, why am i subjected to wearing glowing red stuff? how can i hide in the shadows when i'm glowing? i don't see why i can't get that stupid pink cload dyed black. or green as is my wont. why not give me a choice of outfits and let me enchant them as i see fit? why can't i find a good mage friend who can just enchant my cloak? perhaps, to get the enchantment, i'll need the bones of a certain type of dragon which exists ONLY in this one graveyard. woot. reason for doing a dungeon.
all the excess rewards are a waste of time. i've never played a game where the rewards from a dungeon are actually useful. they're usually three levels under what i'm currently using, and have absolutely no point whatsoever.
is xp also the only motivating factor for doing anything? i like advancing my character as anyone else, but how about advancing in realtime? i like eve online's system. perhaps your character advances in the same way. regardless of play time. i mean, we're all paying the same amount anyway. i hate that some 12 year old kid gets more game time than i do because he's got more holidays. i work harder. i want the fun, too!
and i can't stress customisation enough. i don't want to look the same, or fight the same as everyone else in my class. my god, it's just crazy. might as well play diablo and be done with it.
i have, naturally, digressed.
the whole point was that i'm meeting these new mmos with a great deal of dissatisfaction. perhaps i demand too much. i just feel they're grasping the wrong end of the word "massive". it's not "massive" groups we're looking to join. sure, i like the pool of players to choose from, but i like solo playing when my few favourite groups aren't online. i don't want to be forced to put up with a group of 12 year olds - one of whom will quit after the first boss because that's as far as he wants to go because the other bosses don't drop his shiny thing or any other shiny thing his character can use.
i want to be able to casually or professionally choose my group. to play when it's convenient, and enjoy ALL the content without having to find a hundred other people who play at the exact time i doand whom i can get along with - an impossible task for most. it's commonly accepted that most gamers never see the raid content, or even see the endgame dungeons. in fact, in most mmos i've played, i've never seen the instances in the last ten levels of gaming, because everyone's so hardcore playing to make the endgame they ignore all the content leading up to it where possible - unless they can zerg through.
a message to developers - please please PLEASE relax. we'll love you just as much if you keep the dungeon requirements lower. by all means make the dungeons harder. but not necessarily the amount of players needed. if you want to force anything, then force the actual archetypes to work together in a unique way rather than just the old cliche of tank, dps and heals. that's become a quick yawnathon. up the rpg and people will love you for it.
we're not all 12 years old.
in the past year i've gotten married. it's been a delightful experience. it hasn't cut my gaming, though. i just haven't written about it much.
let me tell you, though, what i've been up to, and my latest thoughts.
i've been playing:
wow
eve online
ddo
and eq2
my thoughts are: they're driving me crazy. all of them - and it all boils down to that oxymoron.
which oxymoron? well, my playstyle is often mocked by many an mmo gamer, and it's because i'm not much of a grouper. they keep telling me i should be playing single-player games, like oblivion (which i love). the thing is, i don't like single-player. it's too lonely in there. i like the feeling of others around me who i can say hi to when i'm feeling social and who i can get a hand off when i need one. it's nice, too, to kill some great thing and then chat about it while standing over its corpse.
i play rogues. assassins and stealthers. that's me. i hate pvp, though. i find it boring. when i do group, i like a nice tight team. a team which enjoys the challenge and doesn't find dying to be a negative part of the experience. unfortunately, that's a rare group. most mmo gamers are still kids who expect everything handed to them on a plate. they want their gear. if they're not getting their gear NOW, they throw a tantrum and leave to get their level 1000 friend to hold their widdle hands and spoonfeed them their gear.
me, i love the challenge. i want a dagger it took me BLOOD to get. i want to look at it each time i kill something and REMEMBER where i got it and HOW much i bled for it. i want the sweat, the tears and the hanging on by my fingernails feeling followed by the ecstasy of sudden and unexpected victory over the bad thing.
unfortunately, mmo-developers cater for the masses of 12 year old kids and unemployed uni students.
so we get this thing called raids.
raids have killed every mmo i've played. raids. damn the mongrel game-destroyer who thunk it up.
raids involve getting together as many 12 year old kids into a game and letting them loose. it's an awful experience. if they're not 12, they're all military wannabes and tactical nazis who just turn everything into my high school maths class all over again. they all skip the rpg section of their game and go straight to the mmo - maths maths and oh-more-maths. and if you want a shiny shiny new toy for your character to make him/her look more shiny than others, then you have to endure not a few hours, but a few MONTHS with these people! my god, the pain of just a night is bad enough, let alone enduring entire months.
i can't raid. i just can't. playing games is what i do for fun, not what i do for a living. i'd do it for a living but no one has offered to pay me, yet.
so, what do i do?
i get oh so close to the level cap and give up. i give up because, well, that's it. there's nothing else for me to do. no solo dungeons. no small 2-3 dungeons. everyone wants to do the 1000 man dungeons where kids all pile in and scramble and fight first for control and then for loot. the screaming little hissyfits and crybaby attitudes. the constant bickering and demands you tow the party line. my god, it's like working in politics.
i don't mind grouping, i just don't want it to be groups of thousands. i want small intimate gatherings. not orgies. orgies mean you spend so much time minding your own orifices you can't enjoy the experience.
i'm going out of my mind. speed-levellers, too. my god, doesn't anyone work anymore? speed speed speed.
i don't know why game-developers spend so much time making so much pretty graphics and dungeons when i've never been in a group that actually paused to LOOK at where they were.
me, i love a game where i crest a hill and see a truly remarkable landscape laid out for me. then i always like to write a small email off to the game-developers to say wow. except to blizzard, because their robot emails don't seem to know i've even written to them. i've written about ten emails to blizzard and have yet to get a reply from anything other than a robot. i wonder if anyone really works for blizzard. i always get the feeling on the other end are some computer programmed developers.
that might also explain why most game developers lose me. they are living under this dream that we all want to fight with as many people in our group as possible. they're wrong. the best groups are those which fight together so much they know each other's way.
i used to game with two others. many years ago. it was the best experience because we were friends offline, and so online we had the same mindset. we killed every game we could find, and explored dungeons as much to see what was there as to kill and loot. it was the old d&d style - a small team of adventurers braving the dungeon and coming out alive with something shiny.
the true skill was in our teamwork. and the true enjoyment was in our balance. one of us was sneaky, one of us was brawny, and one of us was brainy and rather good with the magic systems. we worked. as a team. we didn't care about the numbers. i remember using subgrade weapons simply because they look cool. to this day i still wear armour i like the look of over armour which grants a better bonus. i refuse to cave into the pressure and wear the same shiny as anyone else - especially when you end up looking like clones of everyone else in your class. it's called roleplaying, and i miss it.
the other thing which is killing the modern mmo is that thing called balance.
balance shmalance.
i don't think it matters if a mage can't kill a rogue or a warrior isn't as fast as a rogue when running. who cares? this pvp thing has made games stupid. no class should be balanced against another. balance is designed simply to induce those horrid arena things wow loves so much. want balance? go play quake or whatever the flavour of the month in that genre is.
pvp is all well and good in an mmo, i just think pvp should be just like pve - if i see a big red bad guy, i don't attack it. if i were a rogue, i would like to feel i wouldn't want to attack that rather firebally mage unless i was behind him, stealthed, and got to kill him before he hit me with a fireball. and i'm happy with one-hit kills. what's wrong with one-hit kills? all this 2d platformer badguy nonsense is ridiculous! it's like playing a 3d version of mario brothers. each badguy you can hear the bip bip bip bip bipbipbipbip on.
if i'm walking along and i get to stab something in the back, i really hope i'm good enough and my dagger's good enough, to actually spike it's heart or something. or if i've slashed its throat, i really don't think it'd be attacking me for another five minutes while i slash its throat a few more times. i mean, i only have so much neck i can rip out.
i like to think of a good fight as something from a martial arts movie. if you get swamped, you should be one-hitting them, but the skill should come in which order you do it. and how you use your defence.
i also don't think i shouldn't be allowed, as a rogue, to sneak through a dungeon and actually ASSASSINATE the boss at the end. that's the whole point of the class in the first place. to actually assassinate it. not sneak through only to be splattered with one punch because the devs have decided bosses can't be sneaked up on and spiked on the end of a good poisoned dagger. hell, if it was good enough for caeser, then it should be good enough for the demon hiding in the back of the cave with his big scaly back begging for being turned into a pincushion.
the skill then should be in the sneaking, there. i like games where the creatures are sensitive to sneaking. they can hear you if you go too fast and see you if you step in the light etc. make it fun, if you have to.
and barbarians. warriors. what's with this tank class? tank class is the WORST logic of any class in existence.
my rogue has a knife. sure, he's pretty good with it, but i remember watching a movie years ago. i think it was deathstalker (don't laugh - i just remember this scene), and this giant guy was fighting this weenie halfling-guy who has a dagger. giant guy has a big two-hand mallet sledgehammer thing. halfling weaves in and out fast and quick. stab stab.
giant guy gets real peeved.
swings.
thwack.
lots of meat on the hammer - no little halfling left at all.
see what i mean? a barbarian has a wicked two-hand axe, and you're telling me he can't do any damage on anything with it? man, that axe would go THROUGH armour. tanking is a ridiculous class. it's annoying and boring.
and healers, too. i hate healers. do we really have to have them? tweak the fighting. turn every fight into a fight to the death. quick, hard and fast, and you wouldn't need them. bandage yourself at the end of a fight and move on. healers are the worst additions to the mmo ever.
i like mages, but i wish to god a game would be released which actually did something new with it, or at least had more fun. necromancers are all so wince-worthy. raising skeletons and using either poison or ice? i mean, really. why are these characters so weak, too? mages should be striding through the battle, splatting things. i don't remember gandalf getting all worried about actually being noticed in battle. or raistlin thinking he couldn't take on an army. or pug asking around for a good barbarian and a few fighters to stand in front of him and protect him while he cast off little weenie fireballs here and there. a mage is a MASSIVE class. it deserves some more respect. the mage should be the number one death-dealing class of all time. users of this class should be walking tall, and arrogantly through everything. they should only be vulnerable when their defences are down and they don't see the little rogue hiding behind the curtains until they feel a little wetness on their neck and wonder why it is they can't breathe anymore.
and now to the rogues. what's with game developers being so scared of actually making a good rogue? why can't rogues be uber stealthy? that's what they are. they're also damn good at looting pockets. and so they should be. i don't see why they can't steal the goods off other players and from banks and from shops and pretty much everywhere they can. it shouldn't be automatic that they get caught, either. if you want your goods safe, you damn well should've looked after them.
but "everyone" would play x class if they did that.
well, no, they wouldn't. they might dabble. but the goal of rpg is to have fun. if the game is made to be the BEST each class can be, then the game would work. instead of catering for carebears and 12 year olds, i think it's time to cater for those of us who work and pay the credit card fees.
i want to see some improvements. the genre is so stale right now it's just BEGGING for something different. sometime respectable. something MASSIVE. that's the point, you see. it's supposed to be massive. at the moment the games are so balanced that everyone has the same skills anyway.
in wow (as an example, but the others are the same), every rogue has the same skills to a majority degree. especially the raiding ones. if you want into the content, you have to strictly adhere to some generally accepted mathematical formula. the numbers are too defined. in pvp, you have to conform, or you can't succeed. there's no rpg. there's no variety. no evolutionary feel in the development of mmos at the moment.
i'm looking at the newies as they come out, and they're all focussing so much on pvp and balance and raids that there's a squeezing out of the original intent of mmos: that they WERE once roleplay games, designed to bring a WORLD into existence.
i'm looking forward to seeing what eve online's creators do with the world of darkness. though i enjoyed eve online, i find myself in the unusual situation of not actually playing it. you can set your skills training, but because you want to fly x ship, you just wait til your skills are there. as this can take months, you just tend not to play the game. seems weird. there's just not much to do, though i do like the freedom potential it gives you.
the world of darkness is white wolf's baby, and it believed not so much in balance at all. even among the vampire games, i remember there wasn't much balance there. but everyone contributes in their own way.
back to the standard archetypes, if each character were allowed to be big and beefy and let free without balance, you could solve the "everyone would play x class" quite simply by designing smarter dungeons that REQUIRED each class. lockpicking - that vastly underused skill, is needed to open most doors and trap-spotting should be more important. beefy barbarians should be slaughtering the big things which are mage proof, and mages should be dazzling their companions with sudden explosive exhibitions of amazing power - and knowledge. mages should be holding all the cards with identification of items, knowledge of dungeon contents, opening of magical doors and deactivation of magical barriers. they should be tearing apart magically created beings, and using their powers of head-explodey.
barbarians should be wading through blood, ripping down the badguys and merging from an army of enemies unscathed. i remember a scene in dungeonsiege1 where a BILLION spiders suddenly begin emerging into a room you're standing in. the first time i saw it, the hairs on the back of my neck stood up and i was on the phone to a friend going "oh my god oh my god!" the feeling of battling a thousand foes (each ended up being a one-hit kill but so many of them you felt like you were fighting an uphill battle). that's how a warrior wants to feel. swish swish swish. not feel like his standing there being useless. the warrior should be the strong arm. removing physical barriers and intimidating shopkeepers.
rogues? well. they're simple. they should have all the maps. all the stealth, all the poisoned weapons. they should be quite simply edging around the room while the badguy's hurling lightning at his friends. the rogue should be walking up behind the bad guy, tapping him on the shoulder and with a polite "excuse me" burying a knife deep in his guts. then he should be picking his pockets. a rogue should be unlocking every lock, untrapping every trap, and is the most skilled in the traditional dungeon crawl and yet sneakily efficient in the tavern brawl. he also shouldn't be paying for a damn thing.
any other archetypes should merely be mixes and subgroups. priests? who needs them? they're a pain in the backside.
and there's something else that occurs to me which is ruining the genre. that horrible thing called professions.
i don't want to be a blacksmith or a leatherworker. i don't want to be any of that. i'm an adventurer! being forced to take up a profession diminishes the time i can spend in my dungeons and increases the time i have to be spending doing that other bane of the genre - grinding. why grind? what's the point of grinding? it's boring, and no one on the planet enjoys it. it's too much like work. i play games to escape the monotony of my day job. not to embrace it.
leave professions to the npcs. they do it well.
i want to be able to walk up to my blacksmith npc, and say, "dude, i want a nice black dagger with a really sharp edge. i'll give you 20 gold, so make it snappy."
and i want to hear, "yes sir!"
then i'll pick up the dagger in the morning and go stab some stuff with it. yay!
spending your day building up gold is boring and annoying. i fail to see why they implement such a thing. a market's a great place to get rid of unwanted dungeon-found items, sure. but why they take that concept to the nth degree and turn it into a way of life is beyond me. i hate feeling i can't play the game anymore because i don't have any in-game gold. it just makes the whole gold-selling business on ebay more viable. it ruins my game. i shouldn't need gold to jump into a dungeon and reap the whirlwind of badguys.
this brings me to items and loot quality.
i love new loot. i love it. but i hate that it always looks so dumb. why the freaky colours and stupid fashion sense? as a rogue, why am i subjected to wearing glowing red stuff? how can i hide in the shadows when i'm glowing? i don't see why i can't get that stupid pink cload dyed black. or green as is my wont. why not give me a choice of outfits and let me enchant them as i see fit? why can't i find a good mage friend who can just enchant my cloak? perhaps, to get the enchantment, i'll need the bones of a certain type of dragon which exists ONLY in this one graveyard. woot. reason for doing a dungeon.
all the excess rewards are a waste of time. i've never played a game where the rewards from a dungeon are actually useful. they're usually three levels under what i'm currently using, and have absolutely no point whatsoever.
is xp also the only motivating factor for doing anything? i like advancing my character as anyone else, but how about advancing in realtime? i like eve online's system. perhaps your character advances in the same way. regardless of play time. i mean, we're all paying the same amount anyway. i hate that some 12 year old kid gets more game time than i do because he's got more holidays. i work harder. i want the fun, too!
and i can't stress customisation enough. i don't want to look the same, or fight the same as everyone else in my class. my god, it's just crazy. might as well play diablo and be done with it.
i have, naturally, digressed.
the whole point was that i'm meeting these new mmos with a great deal of dissatisfaction. perhaps i demand too much. i just feel they're grasping the wrong end of the word "massive". it's not "massive" groups we're looking to join. sure, i like the pool of players to choose from, but i like solo playing when my few favourite groups aren't online. i don't want to be forced to put up with a group of 12 year olds - one of whom will quit after the first boss because that's as far as he wants to go because the other bosses don't drop his shiny thing or any other shiny thing his character can use.
i want to be able to casually or professionally choose my group. to play when it's convenient, and enjoy ALL the content without having to find a hundred other people who play at the exact time i doand whom i can get along with - an impossible task for most. it's commonly accepted that most gamers never see the raid content, or even see the endgame dungeons. in fact, in most mmos i've played, i've never seen the instances in the last ten levels of gaming, because everyone's so hardcore playing to make the endgame they ignore all the content leading up to it where possible - unless they can zerg through.
a message to developers - please please PLEASE relax. we'll love you just as much if you keep the dungeon requirements lower. by all means make the dungeons harder. but not necessarily the amount of players needed. if you want to force anything, then force the actual archetypes to work together in a unique way rather than just the old cliche of tank, dps and heals. that's become a quick yawnathon. up the rpg and people will love you for it.
we're not all 12 years old.
