Best examples of Action Combat? Starting to Feel Like Tab > Action

We have not received permission from Dygz to share the quoted post.

You've just described L2.

We have not received permission from Dygz to share the quoted post.

Steven's system is definitely closer to PvX, but L2 really wasn't. You won't be able to farm w/o fighting other people (well, in the og version that is. now it's probably an instance fest with no pvp). Even if you stayed at low lvls just gathering mats (which only came from kiling mobs and only by a special class), you'd still have to fight for them. And even if there's no more newbies on the server, the hardcore players most likely made low lvl alts that will also have better gear than you so you won't even win in pvp against them.

I've been on both sides of that interaction and I know for sure that L2 is way closer to being pvp-centric than most mmos (maybe outside of Shadowbane, as you mentioned).

We have not received permission from CROW3 to share the quoted post.

Pretty much. And the higher you went, the harder those people fought over those things.

We have not received permission from Dygz to share the quoted post.

And I, a person who pvped for every single piece of content in that game for over 12 years, am telling you that there was pvp on every corner of that game and there was enough PKing for Steven to add a system where you prevent said PKing in genocidal quantities. And by the same logic of "they wouldn't do this if they weren't trying to make this kind of game", I'd assume Steven wouldn't have added an anti-genocidal feature to L2's karma system if said system had already prevented one-sided genocides. Which it didn't. Yes, they were rare because not everyone enjoys senselessly genociding people, but the possibility was still there, hence the removal of that possibility in Ashes.

Also, Steven decided to go from ffa pvp infinite guild wars that were based on kd ratios to something more objective based, I'd assume, due to L2's GWs being a huge gankfest (as you might've seen in a video I've posted in a recent thread). Now obviously Guilds in L2 were an "opt-in" situation, but considering that you couldn't really clear any meaningful content w/o a party/guild - I couldn't honestly call that pvp opt-in. Your guild could also not accept the war declaration from other guilds, but at that point your social status on the server would be in the shitter and you might get PKd more because of that (my own guilds have done so a few times and it has been done to me several times too).

And as the main point of this post, I'm sure you know that it's not always that the players play the game in exactly the way the devs intended. If anything, the opposite is usually the case. And as a proof to that, with almost every update from a certain point of L2's life, the pvp part of the game was dying more and more, which led to a lot of people leaving, exactly because L2 was always seen as a pvp-centric mmo and yet it was becoming just another failed wow-clone. Or at least that was the experience in my gaming bubble.

We have not received permission from Dygz to share the quoted post.

Yeah, just like the designer of this children's toy wanted its players to put different shapes into different holes. Except he left the possibility of putting everything into the same one.

Like I said, players' preferred playstyle doesn't always match with dev's content goals. And if anything, I'd say that all the people who stopped playing L2 after certain updates voted with their wallets in the same way millions of WoW players left after WoTL. I'm sure if you ask all those millions of players whether the current WoW and the vanilla expansions that they remember are the same game, they'd probably say that it's not even close. And I'd assume that's because the devs made changes in the game's direction that those players didn't like.

And L2's changes hit its playerbase way harder exactly because it went from a pvp game to an instanced mmo. But I get that it's pointless to bring up this point because you don't value player experience as high as dev intentions, so whatever.

We have not received permission from 234Graph to share the quoted post.

Never even heard about that game, but after watching this video I now want an mmo with this kind of system even more it's pretty much what I had in mind, except mine was a bit more granular and based on your stat attribution rather than preexisting cards. And obviously making that kind of system for an mmo would be an absolute balancing and coding hell, but god damn would it be fun as hell and the most unique spell system in the genre.