I see this a lot in MMOs recently. You are given the choice to use a multitude of different combinations of powers, weapons, etc. but the only ones that get used are the ones seen at the time as the best ones. I played an MMO recently where this was the reason I had to stop. I had a person in my group explain to me the “proper” combo to use with my cooldown attacks.
I personally find this absurd and far too common. This breaks immersion for any creative individuals, and feels very restrictive. Part of the fun of an MMO is creating your own unique character, and I personally enjoy choosing the strengths I want to utilize.
The problem likely stems from the system itself, as every system is bound to have a “best” path to follow. I was thinking that this may be possible to fix with the use of some randomly generated perk, or maybe a way to obtain a unique weapon/item generated in some way to always be different.
What are your thoughts? Have you noticed this at all? Is it something you think is bad? Any ideas on a system that would discourage this uniformity?
Sounds to me like the classic problem of solvability in game design. See if these articles seem relevant to you (and please post your thoughts here, as it’s a very interesting topic!).
Of course MMO RPGs are quite complex; it makes me wonder whether they’ve really been solved, or whether some players just think they’ve found the optimal solution, and are bullying other players to adopt it whether it’s actually optimal or not.
That was a really good read, learned some things I’ve been wondering about for a while now. It answers the question I proposed to an extent, but I’m still left with the same problem more or less. I still don’t quite understand why players flock to such specific combinations (likely they assume them to be the best) and still wonder if there’s a way to discourage it.
As for solvability, I never expected to get so much in depth explanation on one web page. I agree with everything I read. I see some randomness factors in these MMOs but they only serve to sway the results from time to time and if the game isn’t PvP then players still end up falling into systems that are most likely to succeed.
I’m curious, I had considered a system where it was possible to get an advantage in a specific stat as a “reward” of some type when first typing this question. If say for example there were a randomly occurring event within the game happening relatively often that gave any players present a unique item with a combination of weighted stats weighed to be equal to the other generated items but different, would this help to add randomness or just unbalance the game. Better yet, would you enjoy seeing this implemented, or would you think of it as unfair?
I find this topic interesting as well. I relate ‘optimal solutions’ to real life solutions to problems. A simplified example to complex mmo systems - If you are fighting a fire monster the optimal solution is to use water based attacks to defeat it.
I do not play MMO’s because grinding raids aren’t fun to me but I think it would be interesting to add (easy to do - just add it) a layer of intelligence to monsters where - this monster is a fire based monster - has been attacked and injured by water based attacks - the fire monster has enough knowledge to temporarily shield/protect itself from water based attacks so the optimal solution has changed based on the conditions presented by the monster.
The monster has optional defenses which are randomly triggered and not linearly scripted which would diversify the encounters.
Not a perfect answer… but Asheron’s Call (back in the day) had an interesting twist on something like this. Their magic system had a spell learning system… you can learn any spell as long as your skill level in the magic type was close enough and you know the components used in the spell… anyway the system was the less people who knew/used the spell the stronger it was. As more people learned it… it became weaker(as the magic was spread thinner).
Could use something similar such as… more people are playing sword and shield users… a bonus to using those skills gets lower but the bonuses are less used skills gets higher… in the end everything balances. Just an idea though.
Borrow a mechanic from Golem Arcana. The more often an ability is used the more it costs. Essentially what you are asking for is a more sophisticated cool down system.
Yeah it worked pretty well. The way they did it was kinda like this:
Say a level 1 fireball spell had a damage rating of 15. If not a lot of people were using level 1 fireball your damage may be 15(+10) so 25… as more people started using it the bonus goes down 15(+8)… and so on everyone is casting it…everyone does the base 15 damage. It never hurt you to be like everyone else, but helped to play a bit different.