Currency Wallet
It’s not uncommon for an MMORPG to have a nigh-impenetrable currency system that only becomes more bloated and confusing as new reputations and factions are added over time. There are several games that require you to sift through your inventory and bank for faction-based currencies and head to a specific NPC vendor to buy whatever gear or trinket you’ve earned. It’s complicated for experienced players, and must be completely baffling for newbies.
Although simple, a wallet can do wonders for streamlining these different currencies, particularly if it contains explanations for what they’re all good for and to which NPCs they can be redeemed. Taking this a step further, it would be awesome to be able to redeem them from a centralized user interface instead of having to track down a reputation NPC, but that might break some of the implied immersion.
Group Finder
Group finders tend to be polarizing, in that some players to find them to work against community engagement, while others see them as easy solutions to finding other people with which to play. It’s true that being able to click a button and find four other dungeon runners takes out some of the magic of getting to know other players through in-game chat, forums, or by other means. Still, that’s a small price to pay for the ease of use that group finders represent, especially in games that have more diffuse communities. It’s even better if a group finder can allow you to connect with players across servers, essentially ensuring that you’ll have more time partying in a dungeon and less time waiting around for others to show up.
Inventory Sorting
I’m not a designer or developer, and don’t have a sense of how much or little work is required to implement a “sort” button. But for the love of all that is inventory management, this little feature would go a tremendously long way towards streamlining crafting resources, gear, and the hundred other types of items that adventuring tends to accumulate. It seems trivial to ask for the ability to sort by name, item type, or other categories, but it’s such a boon when available. Even the capacity to condense all the scattered items in your inventory to the smallest number of bags would be welcome!
Remote Deposit
Other games may have done it previously, or in other ways, but Guild Wars 2 is the first MMO I’ve played that elegantly and seamlessly allows you to deposit crafting materials to your bank from anywhere in the world. This feature may err on the side of convenience and away from immersion, but it’s well worth it if it results in more simplified inventory and crafting resource management. I’d suggest even taking it a step further and allowing you to access your banks at any time, but I’m an unabashed proponent of streamlining.
Mentoring
Although mentoring is a much larger and more complex system to implement than any of the previous suggestions, it’s one of the most important and largely overlooked features in MMO design. Essentially, if a piece of content has been designed with only a specific level range in mind, that content will have effectively been rendered useless after a character has reached a designated level. There’s no reason to not let players jump back into that content at other levels, either to adventure with lower-level friends or because they themselves missed it along the way. Add to this the elimination of mob tagging, and you’ve got a collaborative gameplay system that rewards you for playing through any content - not just that which has been created specifically for your level.
What are some features you think should be present in every MMO?
Author: Som Pourfarzaneh from http://www.mmorpg.com
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Agreed. At least being able to see them all in one place makes it very useful to keep track of. If you have to flick through several different windows to be able to view ALL your currencies, you have lost the battle.
Guild Wars 2 does a unified window though; but they have too many currencies to keep track of, so it becomes overwhelming there.
No complaints for having them in games. It does help out those players who don't know anyone to find people, and to also make sure that the ones who do play at strange times are able to still group up more easily. Hell I have actually often been the last person to join an unrelated guild in filling out their group for a dungeon in Wildstar. Tis awesome playing like that. Helped in that I knew the content, and what needing doing, but was still awesome seeing different tactics in play.
Global channels can help, but they by they own nature only work if people are paying attention.
No complaints here. Sure, the sorting might not be perfect, but at least it helps. Also having dedicated "crafting"/"inventory"/"common junk" auto loot bags helps out. Wildstar, for example, has a dedicated gathering bag. All players have this. So this means that whenever you gather crafting materials, they end up in THIS bag first of all (pre sorted), until they hit the stack limit and then overflow into your normal bags.
Addon's can also help out here, with their own custom sorting mechanisms/locking items so that they don't get collated when you click the "compress" button etc.
No complaints here. And I understand the worries as well. Horses for courses. If anything, I would say that as long as it doesn't take away the ONLY reason for people to gather in an area (ie city hubs) then I would go for it. Hell, even Guild Wars with its remote deposit still has you go to the town/hub to be able to retrieve stuff; it ensures that people are almost forced to be together, even for a short period of time.
Its the convenience/streamlining argument.
Are you referring to the Guild Wars 2 style of mentoring where everyone gets levelled down to the zone cap if they are above the level there, or the CoX style where it is a choice?
Both routes have their pro's and cons. I am all for it, and as long as it keeps people in the zones cycling through (Guild Wars 2 style) or easier to team up (CoX/Wildstar for example) then I don't see a downside.
But the main thing is giving people a reason to return to old zones. And the removal of mob tagging is good, because that means that High levle and low level characters are able to work together even if you don't have "auto downlevelling" in the game.
Currency wallet and inventory sorter I'm totally all for
Group finder doesn't matter to me as long as I can hide my characters from it.
Don't really like remote deposit because filling up your inventory and not being able to get more stuff is the best and easiest IGC sink possible. In fact I suggested smaller inventories on the IGC sink thread for that very reason.
Mentoring as far as I'm concerned falls under "the problem of levels" I wish we didn't need it, but since we do, is there a way to automatically lower my level so I can play any content solo?
Or better yet just raise the level of the mission to match me,
so I don't have to gimp myself to do certain missions?
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GW2's auto-exemplar system does not change your earned powers, except by scaling them to the area content. And the level of that content is quite variable within the zone, where one might go from operating at level 5 to operating at level 15, just walking down the road. It's pretty seamless - IF you are over-level for the area.
There is no consequent auto-Sidekicking level-up system in GW2 and younger characters, traveling with elders, are terrible aggro-magnets. They Can earn experience and higher-level loot, but they are often ineffectual in terms of actually hitting/damaging the higher-level enemies.
There were times in CoH when I wished I could stop at a convenient ATM and clean out my inventory. However, bear in mind that CoT and GW2 have completely different approaches to Gear and Loot. CoT should not need quite as extensive a set of inventory management tools, or Inventory, for that matter.
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Fireheart
There is an auto level up though for jumping to the borderland zones. This will bump you up to level 80 so that everyone is one a "relatively" equal footing. Well more equal than a new player Vs a level capped character at least.
But for the main open world PvE map, I can understand why they wouldn't necessarily do that.
Agreed on the inventory, it is dependant on how they all do it.
For the auto depositing, there is nothing to say that you CANNOT also charge for larger/more storage on your person. In fact Guild Wars 2 does that anyway via larger bags[1]
But if there are several different inventory item groups, then it could be handy for them all to be managed via the same interface window, instead of the multitude of windows that you could open accidentally/on purpose looking for something in City of Heroes.
So even just collating the Incarnate stuff/Salvage/inspirations/recipes etc under one "main window" just each category with a separate tab to look at would be nice/an improvement.
[1] They have several types of bags ranging not only in size but also other "special" effects. These effects could be "hiding stuff from the vendor" so that you don't accidentally sell stuff, to "keeps items IN the bag, so that when you compress your storage, the items STAY in that bag".
Something that I've been missing in several of the other games I've tried is:
[b]Auto-Follow[/b]
It's not only useful for turning your character/camera towards the enemy you've selected, but allows melee artists to stay close to their target and allows teams to continue to work together, even if someone needs to step AFK.
Be Well!
Fireheart
CoX had it. /follow
Downside is that it's a useful tool for gold farming bots.
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Heh, yes, I remember that CoX had it. It was also useful to my friend who multi-boxed a 'Hydra' of 5-6 characters simultaneously. They said that playing only one character at a time had become... boring.
My main use for it was keeping my Tanker locked on to the enemy. No Widows ever back-stabbed me. That and towing an 'afk-bio' teammate to the mission-door.
Be Well!
Fireheart
I greatly dislike /follow for the obvious /target issues and also for the obvious combat parity reasons. Combat should be simple but simple doesn't mean automatic
Crowd Control Enthusiast
More playstyles and team strategies than just healer/tank/damage dealer + holy trinity. But more-so enough of a variety that it'd be difficult to make the game a trinity and to further harden it against that being forced by stop having fun guys;
A tutorial explicitely explaining how support works and that it's not just healing but everything else is more important. I could not get over how many players litterally assumed city of heroes was a clone of whatever mmorpg they came from without even trying to learn the game.
Edit: Another thing though, and I think I may have mentioned, maybe I had not long ago but, it'd be nice to see powers being used to solve a quest through means other than just clearing the whole map or destroying the one guy that needs to go down. Like sneaking into the place to destabilize a power generator, or if the bad guys base had to be destroyed maybe trigger an explosion from some kind of reactor or something. I miss games that let you do things like that to solve a problem.
Another edit: Like, for instance everyone thinks of it; super strength, rip door off hinges instead of wasting time battle the guy with the key. Or character is a sneaker, let him pick the lock or hack the door panel. Or maybe there is a gap in the wall above such anyone with a travel power that gives them virtical movement could slip through for example. Not because it's "easier" but because you just happened to have had the powers to do so.
Or lets say a quest can be solved diplomatically, one could let power of the character be a factor; character significantly more powerful? Let the guy be easier to intimidate. Character a telepath? We can think of where to go from there. Destroyed most bad guys already? Could even let that be used to intimidate the bad guy into giving up for example, in a few cases.
I realized something today(5/8/2014) that many MMORPG players, are not like us who enjoyed CoX. They enjoy repetitiveness and predictability, rather then unpredictability. We on the other hand enjoy unpredictability and variety.
But without /follow, it'll be harder for healers to do their job if they can't /follow the tank with their healing aura on auto. </sarcasm>
For the record, I never used /follow. Ever. I manually moved towards my targets, melee or otherwise. I can understand how it could be useful, especially for melee combat, but it wasn't in my playbook.
But if others find it useful, I don't see why it shouldn't be included. Other than the aforementioned faux pas, I don't remember it being an actual problem. I guess it could be a step closer to automated gameplay which could enable bots, but if it's trivial to implement, I think it should get the benefit of the doubt. They can always remove it at a later time if it becomes a real problem in practice.
...
In a related vein, what do we think about automatically turning to face your target? For instance, if you tried to shoot a ranged blast at a target standing behind you, your character would automatically swivel around to take the shot. Other games have required players to be facing their target in order to make an attack.
Should auto-swivel be included in City of Titans?
CoX had a /follow command?
News to me. Never had a need for it, I guess.
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Yep. It had it both as a slash command, and as a keybind you could set (IIRC). Was very handy when Group Fly was involved.
I also used it for the "lazy travel" route, where I had to quickly go AFK between missions, and I would /follow the leader so that we would all be at the mission entrance at about the same time.
Sure, it didn't work 100% of the time properly (following someone who moved faster than your top speed typically left you stuck in the middle of nowhere) or you could get stuck on scenery, but for the long trips it helped out a little bit.
Pretty sure you could just right click on the target as well - no need for keybinds and slash commands.
I routinely used the "Jackie Chan Keybind" on my melee characters.
"target_enemy_near$$follow"
It was basically REQUIRED to achieve Scrapperlock simply because of the performance it enabled.
Needless to say, I'm less than pleased by the fact that Star Trek Online has disabled this functionality even though the game has melee weapons (Bat'leths, et al.).
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City of Heroes had approximately 4 tiers of villians
1-14
15-30
31-50
51+ for the Incarnate
the later groups followed this pattern.
The earlier groups did not really follow this pattern.
There was some issues when planning the scaling of the damage of some powers.
Some powers the scale was too high or scaled to low to be a challenge.
However with a tier progression that allows the mob to spawn access to powers
could result in a single mob generated with powers and defenses based on its level
then there would have to be a default entry of general recharge and boost to damage
if something was not appropriate to attack power of the tier. and some sort of generic
defense benefit as well. City of Heroes never had a place holder and assigned powers
open endedly. City of heroes did also have data that allowed any power to be used at any level
but did not really make use of the situation.
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In CoX I only used the \Follow option (via right-click) for travelling and not for combat and would like to see \Follow in CoT. If there is an issue with \Follow being too much of an aid in combat then allow \Follow only when not in combat and when you attack (not are attacked) \Follow drops.
Plexius:
"Should auto-swivel be included in City of Titans?"
I liked it in CoH so yes :)
The Phoenix Rising Initiative Rules Lawyer
If you're using a Tab Select Target UI system, why WOULDN'T you auto-slew "forward" towards your target?
In a hybridized action combat system like Tabula Rasa had, and which TERA has, there are very solid reasons for not slewing either facing or camera orientation around absent positive Player input commands. But in a Tab Target system? There's no good reason for preventing the functionality.
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I found just hitting tab and then F key (for follow) worked well enough and I attacked non stop on my scrapper :)