In your face, or subtle gameplay?

[Hemisphere]

How do you prefer to have your game content delivered to you?

This will be a poll but I'd like to get a bit of discussion going too. I'm personally a big fan of having as much information withheld as possible, leaving it entirely up to the players to work out how stuff works, and how to play the game.

Of course the downside of this is a steep learning curve for new players, but in the long term I think it makes for a much more rich and interesting game.

 

[Old Man of UO]

Not pushing one client over another (keep that for another thread), but one of the reasons that I like the KR client with the User mods is that we have timers for buffs to see when they end, hot bars to drag in all stats, weights, luck, etc. VERY handy.

 

[Maplestone]

I worry that hiding stats makes it harder for players to spot/prove bugs. RNG already adds a lot of mythology to the game that likely has the devs tracking down phantom bugs ... I worry that it would be harder to prove broken systems without being able to provide numbers in bug reports.

 

[Morgana LeFay (PoV)]

I always thought that things like "of Ruin" and "of Vanquishing" were more appropriate to the immersion aspect of the game.

 

[Dermott of LS]

...

In between Full On and Only important stats.

Keep the numbers but only show them in the totals (i.e. the KR character sheet and stat mod icons) while the ingame descriptions of the items are given their "titles" (Ruin, Vanq, Invuln, etc). Get rid of the point by point item mod system and return to the 5 tiered system but retain the new mods added with AOS, just convert and balance them within the 5 tier system accordingly.

 

[Stupid Miner]

I always thought that things like "of Ruin" and "of Vanquishing" were more appropriate to the immersion aspect of the game.

Perhaps an option choice to turn "RP names" for items on/off?
Convert percentages to appropriate adjectives and such.

I prefer knowing the numbers behind *every* thing.

 

[Sir_Bolo]

I want as much information as possible available in-game. What's the point of hiding it anyway?
It will be eventually inferred and collected on websites like Stratics and people will simply go back and forth from their browser. They might as well have it all available directly in the game client where they need it...
It doesn't need to be *displayed* in the AoS "in your face" style though. Descriptions of items in the game world could still be "descriptive", leaving the exact numbers to separate summary gumps - kinda like the KR gumps for stats and properties.

 

[Hemisphere]

Interesting results so far!

While I agree it is kind of nice to find out the numbers, I think it's arguable whether we REALLY need to know them, and how it detracts from the overall magic and mystery of the game.

When damage increase was measured as ruin/might/force/power/vanquishing, what it REALLY meant was "base weapon damage +1/+2/+3/+4/+5", and you know what, in all my years of playing I NEVER knew that - not until sometime after these properties were removed, and I happened to stumble across some old information on uo.com

But, what I did know, and what was important, was that might would do more damage than ruin, force would do more damage than might, and Vanquishing was super ultra mega awesome!

If I'd known from the start that the numerical difference between ruin and and vanquishing could be described as "1 to 5", all my fantasies about finding vanquishing weapons would have been spoiled.

If we talk about genres, I guess I'm more a fan of "fantasy roleplaying games", rather than "strategy games".

 

[Farsight]

Those numbers did change several times during the course of the first few years. At the end, the might weapons and GM crafted weapons were about equal in effectiveness.

Me, I'm a numbers junkie. If I don't know the numbers from official sources, I experiment until I find out what those numbers are. So for people like me, having that information available in-game saves me a lot of time and effort.

Other people, on the other hand, couldn't care less about the numbers. Even if they're displayed in plain view, they'll ask me what they should do.

So I like having the numbers, but understand if other people want them either hidden or ignorable.

 

[Hemisphere]

Me, I'm a numbers junkie. If I don't know the numbers from official sources, I experiment until I find out what those numbers are. So for people like me, having that information available in-game saves me a lot of time and effort.

Do you not get a sense of fun and achievement from working out those numbers yourself though?

Considering the majority of MMO gameplay is grind based anyway, anything that takes time and effort that deviates from the standard monster bash/menu clicking routine should be a refreshing change

 

[Warpig Inc]

A weapon and armor titling that was three tier may be more to date. Names based off the items value for unravelling. Save sitting there doing fast adding while looting if items had a name based off its point value at a glance. So many plp have there duped hammer weapons and armor they just grab the gold and move on. Only plp taking time to look at loot are those brethern that never cheated or run vendors. And today that number is very few.

 

[Tina Small]

As a long-standing dues-paying member of Packrats Anonymous, I find that I need as much information as possible to assist me in weeding out the less desirable items in my collections.

I need to keep these chests full! (And that is a look at my Sonoma house. All the rest of my houses also have a room or two with labeled chests for storing loot. I'm one of those rare people that enjoys looking at loot while I hunt.)

 

[TheScoundrelRico]

I'd love to see the item id skill and id wands brought back to a legitimate use. Eliminate all of the item properties being shown until the item has been identified to by a player, but then the properties would only show to that specific players, not everyone...la

 

[deadite]

Hide the numbers altogether. I am still waiting for that MMO to come out... all the stats break immersion and lead to item based gameplay.

It's much easier when you just knew that leather was better than cloth and metal was better than leather at absorbing damage. It felt way more immersive with the ruin, vanquishing, exceptional, etc descriptors. Told you what you basically needed to know without opening the door to huge variations in item quality and the need for a calculator to put together gear. Bleh.

Min/maxing is a plague.

 

[Hemisphere]

I think an MMO like that would be a LOT of fun (that's the poll option I picked, btw).

A game doesn't need to operate in that way exclusively of course, it would be enough to have seperate servers - servers with statistics, and servers with a more immersive roleplay slant.

 

[Maplestone]

Min/maxing is a plague.

I think it would be a mistake to believe min/maxing would disappear if the stats weren't listed - there would just be a wider gulf between players who knew how to reverse-engineer out the numbers and those who were left wondering if they had a good sword or a good run of RNG.

 

[Aboo]

How do you prefer to have your game content delivered to you?

This will be a poll but I'd like to get a bit of discussion going too. I'm personally a big fan of having as much information withheld as possible, leaving it entirely up to the players to work out how stuff works, and how to play the game.

Of course the downside of this is a steep learning curve for new players, but in the long term I think it makes for a much more rich and interesting game.

I've played UO for 11+ years and I still get slightly confused with all the new ways they display information. Used to you knew a vanquishing weapon was awesome, now I don't know.

 

[Hemisphere]

It should always be possible to find out, roughly, if a sword is good or not, with some sort of identification skill, otherwise nobody would know what to loot and what to leave

But if, for example, you couldn't see what level your swordsmanship skill was, you probably wouldn't worry so much about getting it to "max", you'd measure your skill by finding your own limits (ie can I kill a dragon or not)

There will always be powergamers, but perhaps if people couldn't actually see in numbers how "powerful" they were, then they'd worry about it less, and just get on with playing.

If you join a game and you have 50 skill points, and everybody else around you is saying "HEY LOL I HAVE A BAJILLION SKILL POINTS" it can be kind of disheartening, especially as you see how excrutiatingly slowly your own skill points are rising. If you start a game and everyone is killing dragons but you can only kill skeletons, that's not going to bother you much, because you know it'll only be a few days before you can kill ettins!

Personally I don't see why an RPG - especially an online one - couldn't do without statistics. Platform games like Mario never relied on Statistics to be fun, and what I remember of the Zelda series tells me they kept statistics to a bare minimum. Of course these games are slightly more reflex based than your average RPG, but the cliché of "reaching the next level" is something I tired of long ago, which is why I enjoy UO's gameplay in the first place.

 

[deadite]

I think it would be a mistake to believe min/maxing would disappear if the stats weren't listed - there would just be a wider gulf between players who knew how to reverse-engineer out the numbers and those who were left wondering if they had a good sword or a good run of RNG.

I don't know much about reverse-engineering, but I would assume that in a client/server system, the game could be designed to prevent that from happening. Does the client do the math or does the server? I would guess the server does... otherwise, people would be able to modify the packets being sent and really wreak havoc. Isn't that what happened with Diablo 1? Too much trust put into the client?

Of course, you know what they say about assuming.

 

[Hemisphere]

Of course all the calculations are done by the server

But you can still reverse engineer most systems through extensive playtesting. If you want to find out what Vanquishing means compared to Ruin, all you need to do is hit something like 100 times and take an average of the amount of damage it does.

Although.. saying that, if there were no statistics at all (and health was measured simply in the form of a health bar), then such testing would be REALLY difficult, if not impossible. I mean you'd have to use an accepted reference point like "on average, 1/4 of the health bar of an ettin for ruin, compared to roughly a half of an ettin health bar for vanq", and at this stage most people would just stop listening to you and get back to having fun

 

[Maplestone]

Too much trust put into the client?

ah, you misunderstood my comment - as Hemisphere pointed out, I meant figuring out the math through trial and error, not actually decoding the program. I feel any numberless naming system will quickly decay into a "look the numbers up on the web" system.

Also, for Aboo I would point out that the desire to have a "best" item to aim for is a different discussion than hiding the numbers on the system we still have. If you didn't have any numbers (skills or item stats) to read, how would determine which of two swords you just looted was better? Going back to a simplified ruleset is a different discussion than hiding the stats of items.

I'm definitely not unsympathetic towards the information overload that can happen in UO ... I started playing without doing any real research and it took me forever to figure out that physical was really the only important resist for a new player. I was very frustrated over trying to get my head around dps until I found stratics' calculators. I also enjoyed the mystic/power/vanquishing weapon system from the ophidian invasion - although I would point out that even as 3 tiers of a single property, it caused a lot of confusion and frustration on the boards.

 

[Aboo]

. . . Also, for Aboo I would point out that the desire to have a "best" item to aim for is a different discussion than hiding the numbers on the system we still have. If you didn't have any numbers (skills or item stats) to read, how would determine which of two swords you just looted was better? Going back to a simplified ruleset is a different discussion than hiding the stats of items. . .

Since I seem to be terribly confused I will just thank you for your response and bow out of this thread.

 

[Maplestone]

Since I seem to be terribly confused I will just thank you for your response and bow out of this thread.

Please don't let me drive you away
*bows out*

 

[deadite]

Well to an extent, knowing that some weapons and armor are better than others is natural and normal, right?

I mean, we all know that a Mustang is faster than a Prius. And we know that a Caravan is safer in a wreck than a Mini Cooper... Even if we don't know a thing about horsepower or engines or airbags or crumple zones...

The point is knowing exactly what the CAP is, and then getting the items with the right statistics to specifically achieve that cap and not be a single point under is the kind of gaming that I am talking about.

To me, that style of gaming is not appealing... Obviously, I'm going to play what we have now but I hope for a numberless system one day in some MMO!

 

[uoBuoY]

Back in the good old days, UO was easier to play. Put on your armor, grab a wep or 2 & off you go. Tame a pet, train it and have fun with it. Today's game needs a new player skill: Stat Hunting.