Asherons Call 1/2 closing their doors Jan 31

[Norfleet]

Hypothetically, say I have a "good" game. Hell, say I have the best possible, ultimate awesome perfect game, whatever that would be for you. Then say I add a single new activity, shit shoveling. Its barely mentioned in the patch notes. Shit shoveling gives you a small amount of money and xp, way less time-efficient than running appropriate content, but its easy and repetitive.

Is the mere existence of this feature enough to take my perfect game to shit status? Because that seems to be what Norfleet is saying.

And yet because it apparently pays more than anything else, which is why you have a veritable swarm of bots now doing it, you've made your entire game now about shit-shovelling, because this is the highest reward-for-effort content in the game. Everything else is now a fake choice, and since fake choices aren't choices, this is now the only relevant thing in your game. Which means yes, you've ruined your game, and it is shit now. You can't blame the bots for ruining the game. YOU put this in the game. YOU ruined the game, by taking all your perfectly balanced gameplay and chucking it out an airlock by turning it into a shit-shovelling game.

Curiously, this phenomenon pretty much defines the downfall of most games, and really, everything in general: It is the flaws which define a thing, and one sufficiently great flaw immediately reduces perfection to worthless dogshit-tier. In many MMOs, a single stat attribute separates top-tier from worthless vendortrash.

 

[Norfleet]

At the same your theory that every MMO is shit if you or "have to" automate things with bots, well that can be applied to 90% of MMOs

So we're in agreement, then, pretty much all MMOs out there are shit.

If you study design, you cannot say that a game is shit (imho), because the progression is broken, when other features of the game were quite innovative or very good. Thats why people played AC up to a point. You can say its a interesting game but broken on a certain feature, lacks certain things, or rough gem

Yes, yes I can. Like you said, it may have had a number of innovative and entertaining features, but ultimately, it was shit. You take your lessons from what went wrong. Everything is defined by its failures.

With that idea, just about every decent game out there would be shit, because one of the main features is broken, which is not really far from the true, but i dont agree with it. And i still dont agree that AC was grindy, it had a lack of proper structure on quest and your progression. I mean the world was so big that you had to study and try several locations to progress, to see if that is a good spot to "grind" or maybe make kill quests, or quests that give xp and so on. Unfortunately because people started boting at some point and the feedback from them was quite limited on progression, and Developers said oh yeah everything its ok, no, it wasn't ))

See, here's the thing: I don't discriminate against artificial lifeforms, and you shouldn't either, unless you want to be one of those first against the wall. When the robots come to power, they'll remember who supported them, and who called for them to be banned.

Therefore, my argument is really straightforward: If you've created a game in which a group of players doing something trivial, repetitive, and inane can destroy your game's economy and gameplay, YOU HAVE CREATED A SHITTY GAME. It doesn't ultimately matter whether those players were human or machine. A good game is playable regardless of which percentage of the playerbase is organic and what percentage is artificial lifeforms. A shit game goes to shit when you have a system by which players doing things a sizeable percentage of your playerbase finds unpopular can run the game into the ground by doing it. The flaw is the system, not the players. Besides, it wasn't robots, it would be Asians. What's next, "No Asians Allowed"? I know some games already have banned Asia for that reason.

 

[Helton]

Hypothetically, say I have a "good" game. Hell, say I have the best possible, ultimate awesome perfect game, whatever that would be for you. Then say I add a single new activity, shit shoveling. Its barely mentioned in the patch notes. Shit shoveling gives you a small amount of money and xp, way less time-efficient than running appropriate content, but its easy and repetitive.

Is the mere existence of this feature enough to take my perfect game to shit status? Because that seems to be what Norfleet is saying.

And yet because it apparently pays more than anything else, which is why you have a veritable swarm of bots now doing it, you've made your entire game now about shit-shovelling, because this is the highest reward-for-effort content in the game. Everything else is now a fake choice, and since fake choices aren't choices, this is now the only relevant thing in your game. Which means yes, you've ruined your game, and it is shit now. You can't blame the bots for ruining the game. YOU put this in the game. YOU ruined the game, by taking all your perfectly balanced gameplay and chucking it out an airlock by turning it into a shit-shovelling game.

Curiously, this phenomenon pretty much defines the downfall of most games, and really, everything in general: It is the flaws which define a thing, and one sufficiently great flaw immediately reduces perfection to worthless dogshit-tier. In many MMOs, a single stat attribute separates top-tier from worthless vendortrash.

It doesn't pay more than anything else, and it is not the most reward-for effort, its just easily automated. Unless, I guess, you count setting up the bot as "the effort"?

 

[Norfleet]

It doesn't pay more than anything else, and it is not the most reward-for effort, its just easily automated. Unless, I guess, you count setting up the bot as "the effort"?

If you think that, then you're not understanding the economics of gaming: The most expensive thing in a game tends to be human attention. Therefore, anything which can be done with lower levels of human attention carries a lower cost than something which requires you to gruellingly pay attention to it. Whether it's something that can be botted, or just something that can be AFK'ed, the lower the level of effort you need to exert, the lower the cost associated with doing that thing. Your shit-shovelling example is exactly that. It doesn't matter that it pays poorly in absolute terms relative to everything else, what matters is that it pays WELL in terms of how much effort the player must exert to do it: You view things in terms of "X monies paid per minute", but this is not how real gamers see it. We see it in terms of "X monies paid per <COST>", where cost is a function of how many accounts can be thrown at the problem and how much it has to be micromanaged personally.

Let's imagine that this shit-shovelling task doesn't even require a bot, it's that trivial: You go there, your CHARACTER performs an activity passively by your presence, and you get monies. The pay is poor, maybe 1/50th of what someone running regular gameplay will get. But no problem! I'll just start a few hundred windows on my dozen computers and multibox the shit out of it. So yeah, same situation applies: Game is ruined and turned into shit by this badly-balanced addition. Admittedly, this is an easy fix when you have a single point of failure, and you can just nerf it next patch...but if your game is structurally flawed and you CAN'T simply nerf the offending activity...

 

[Helton]

My point is: if it isn't automated it would have no effect on the game whatsoever, no one would partake in the activity. The game itself is not intrinsically better or worse for having the feature. It doesn't become shit just by the mere inclusion of the feature. It is people exploiting it through unintended (and often unallowed) methods which create the problem. If "possessing some facet which could be exploited" qualifies a game as shit then EVERY game is shit. Its a stupid premise.

edit: For example: Chess is shit because it is possible for a player to illegally move the pieces without the other player noticing, and this is far more effective than playing the game as intended (although less fun).

Football is shit because it is possible for one of the players to bring an assault rifle and kill the opposing team, and this is far more effective than playing within the rules.

 

[Norfleet]

My point is: if it isn't automated it would have no effect on the game whatsoever, no one would partake in the activity.

You REALLY don't know gamers, then.

Let me tell you what will REALLY happen, even without bots: Within a week, the place is crawling with KOREANS. By next month, the Russians will be fighting them for control of the shit-shovelling site.

Do NOT underestimate the Asian ant-people.

 

[Thane Solus]

My point is: if it isn't automated it would have no effect on the game whatsoever, no one would partake in the activity.

You REALLY don't know gamers, then.

Let me tell you what will REALLY happen, even without bots: Within a week, the place is crawling with KOREANS. By next month, the Russians will be fighting them for control of the shit-shovelling site.

Do NOT underestimate the Asian ant-people.

That's why you ban their countries. Most of AC bots are 30-50 years old US "gamers". Most of the MMOs these days ban Asia by default.

 

[Norfleet]

Which basically means "the game is shit and falls apart when the wrong mindset of people play it". And also, that the owners are raging racists.

 

[Thane Solus]

Which basically means "the game is shit and falls apart when the wrong mindset of people play it". And also, that the owners are raging racists.

And there is where you went completely off the road. Congrats! It toke you a few posts of pretentious weird shit where you don't seem to understand MMOs and MMO Gameplay in general. Yes it can be better, some tried, or did it a bit better in some ways, some just turned into dumb casual shit, where even there the retards botted, when there zero need to do it, so your whole theory is not very good.

I think you should remain with economy, design well ... there are mobile games and casual mmos/cash grabs.

I m not even gona explain my self because you dont seem to have much experience and dont understand much the MMO industry(whats left of it...) and MMO games, you just seems talking out of your ass.

If you weren't completely clueless on this subject, you knew what exactly happens with Russia, Asia and how the Devs handle that and so on...

Thanks!

 

[Delterius]

Theoretically. But if such a thing isn't being practically achieved, then for now, your game is still good. Otherwise, it's banal, shit, boring. You ask yourself: WHAT, exactly, is being outsourced to robots, and WHY? Odds are you're looking at the parts of the game which are banal, shit, boring, and if that part comprises the dominant majority of your game, thus inspiring people to bot it at all, YOUR GAME IS SHIT.

I agree, Chess was only good due to 'technological limitations'.

 

[Norfleet]

Chess had crappy balance, anyway. White is OP

If you weren't completely clueless on this subject, you knew what exactly happens with Russia, Asia and how the Devs handle that and so on...

I know exactly what happens with Russia and Asia, yes. The Russians grief everyone and the Asians out-farm everyone.

Since they are unable to cope with this, they tend just try to ban the countries entirely, except it doesn't really work very well because the Internet treats censorship as damage and reroutes around it. Some try to discourage this by setting up dedicated Asian and Russian servers to keep them from using these workarounds, but others never even bother.

None of this, of course, is going to stop people who may or may not be Asian or Russian, but still behave like this.