What is your MMO PvE experience like?

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

But sometimes people don't get the message even if you outfarm them. And while it doesn't necessarily prevent me from farming, I do find presence of other people in my farming room annoying, so having the opportunity to remove someone from the premises is great. And I'm completely fine with someone else trying to do the same to me if they feel the same way.

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

But they can bring their friends to outfarm you? Or did I misunderstand smth?

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

So if you don't mind, what games have you actually played, that had such boring NPC enemies?

Mostly I'm trying to get some data because if someone says 'I played X game but got bored of the PvE', it may not be 'PvE in general' that they find boring, and so far my data is leaning more toward 'confirming' that people who 'don't like PvE or don't care about it' only seem to play games with poor PvE.

So I'm looking for counterexamples of that, or clearer confirmations.

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

Noted, thank you much for data. As a final followup pair of questions:

Just Everquest, not EQ2, correct?
and
Did you find the PvE to be better in Guild Wars 1, or 2? Assuming you cared for either.

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

Data is noted. If there's anything you could/want to add about the Events in GW2 PvE, it's appreciated, but not necessary. Can assume I'll just throw it into the cruncher even if I don't respond to it.

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

They don't even need to keep farming that place. They just needed to remove you from that location. And unless this was happening in an open field and you saw that the friends left, or if you were after those particular mobs' drop and will keep coming back to that exact location - friends coming there and removing you would achieve the same goal as they would've in pvp.

Except with pvp on top of pve (in an RPS system) you have more variables. A warrior might be slow at farming than a mage, but he could be the class that beats mage in pvp so now he has more ways to compete with a player for a location. With only PvE as the main competitive tool, you don't have that kind of variety because your class will always suck in particular pvp against some other particular class.

And because of that kind of limitation, devs gotta make class-specific locations where some classes would be completely useless so the whole location is filled with the same people. And now you've achieved peak segregation in your game. Not only are people farming instances w/o interacting with other people, but they're even farming separate class-based locations and don't interact with a lot of people in the open world.

L2 went this way once it started casualizing its content. It was quite sad to see.

NiKr wrote: »

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

They don't even need to keep farming that place. They just needed to remove you from that location. And unless this was happening in an open field and you saw that the friends left, or if you were after those particular mobs' drop and will keep coming back to that exact location - friends coming there and removing you would achieve the same goal as they would've in pvp.

Except with pvp on top of pve (in an RPS system) you have more variables. A warrior might be slow at farming than a mage, but he could be the class that beats mage in pvp so now he has more ways to compete with a player for a location. With only PvE as the main competitive tool, you don't have that kind of variety because your class will always suck in particular pvp against some other particular class.

And because of that kind of limitation, devs gotta make class-specific locations where some classes would be completely useless so the whole location is filled with the same people. And now you've achieved peak segregation in your game. Not only are people farming instances w/o interacting with other people, but they're even farming separate class-based locations and don't interact with a lot of people in the open world.

L2 went this way once it started casualizing its content. It was quite sad to see.

I'm now interested to hear if anyone has an experience with a game (either Flag PvP or PvE only) that doesn't match this. Elite can get close to this but the reasons for that are based on the core design of what 'farming' is there, so I don't feel it can be added to that discussion.

I'm used to this being handled by 'using subclass or build options to get an advantage at a location' or 'tuning down some of your unnecessary advantage to have a bigger advantage against a competitor, either in combat or 'methods of farming that are less efficient but more Versus. The devs usually still 'design areas where some mobs are the best target for your class.

This in itself seems moreso emergent from having basic pyramidal ecosystems for their areas and therefore having more of the bottom tier mobs than any other, but even if implementing an even split, seems like it could cause this. Anyone seen it?

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

I'm not a WoW player, but I thought people just cleared its story and were mainly done with the game until the next expansion (same with ff14 afaik), while L2 people play on older updates exactly because we couldn't give 2 shits about the story, but we care about the social/pvp part of the game and that part is way better on the earlier versions. So unless I'm missing smth, these 2 are quite different reasonings.

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

I feel like your EQ bias is showing, cause I don't think any other game is giving their players as much content as EQ(2) does/did. FF14 and WoW are considered the hugest PvE-based content mmos. Both of those take quite a while in-between their content updates. GW2 is also a pve content game and afaik that shit takes even longer (correct me if I'm wrong, those who know). I think ESO is the same? What other big name pve mmos are out there that have insane content update pace?

And I wasn't even saying that the whole genre is the same or whatever. It's just that I've heard from FF14 and WoW players (who are not collectors) that they mainly do story stuff and usually can even stop their subs for a while. Obviously that's not all the players in the game, especially with FF14 and its in-depth social gameplay, but purely from the standpoint of pve content I haven't heard about games that have EQ-type pace of updates.

If there are other mmos that do that - cool, happy for those players and hope Intrepid can keep the same pace for years and years. But those still feel like exceptions to the rule.

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

It shows the bias in the context of the argument. You're enamored with EQ (understandably so) and think that a lot of other games do thinks like they do, but from what I've heard - they don't. So your example of "just constantly add a ton of content into the game" is not as widespread as you want it to be.

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

Yeah, which just proves that EQ is an outlier for one reason or the other. If other games can't keep making a shitton of content for their game, while EQ's team can - there's gotta be a reason for that. Maybe it's management, maybe it's money, maybe it's both or smth else completely. But the fact remains the same, EQ is a good example of what an mmo's content release schedule should be, but not an example of the norm in the industry.

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

And I hope they'll implement underlying systemic features that allow them to keep pumping out all kinds of content within record times. And I even think that UE5 will help them with that. But we'll only know that for sure several months after release.

NiKr wrote: »

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

It shows the bias in the context of the argument. You're enamored with EQ (understandably so) and think that a lot of other games do thinks like they do, but from what I've heard - they don't. So your example of "just constantly add a ton of content into the game" is not as widespread as you want it to be.

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

Yeah, which just proves that EQ is an outlier for one reason or the other. If other games can't keep making a shitton of content for their game, while EQ's team can - there's gotta be a reason for that. Maybe it's management, maybe it's money, maybe it's both or smth else completely. But the fact remains the same, EQ is a good example of what an mmo's content release schedule should be, but not an example of the norm in the industry.

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

And I hope they'll implement underlying systemic features that allow them to keep pumping out all kinds of content within record times. And I even think that UE5 will help them with that. But we'll only know that for sure several months after release.

It's probably not an outlier, @NiKr , the problem is something different and unfortunately much more emergent.

Ashes is meant to be a challenging game, right?

People don't like challenging MMOs. They consider them 'too hardcore' and the games suffer, often quite quickly. The oldest ones manage, and of course nothing stands up to WoW's numbers, but in terms of 'overall engagement and enjoyment of the players', there are many many old MMOs, even really basic stuff that no one would play in this era, that people loved that added content or shifted their content around in much the same way.

Some of them closed down because they could no longer afford to output that content due to lack of subs or other monetization. Others are still going but have newer or 'easier' versions that get all the attention.

This is another situation where I find it hard to relate.

FFXI's amount of content is literally staggering, I don't know if it is on the EQ2 level but I've had people talk about 'nah there's no way that 300 PvE bosses/encounters are a thing' and I find myself thinking 'wait but I come from a game where I literally have a choice of two thousand things to do (and by this you can assume 80% are miniboss/Elite fights where we could lose) for fun and even potential 'progression' with my not-at-cap group' and another 2000 things to do for progression if we wanted to actually level to cap (long story, just consider it the equivalent of playing on a Private Server but not actually bothering to do even that).

I'm pretty sure I'm lowballing that 2000+2000 btw.

The problem is that FFXI was (note WAS) punishingly hard. To me, Ashes sounds like a candy store and I keep hoping it'll be harder (systems, not individual things to do).

I know four other games like this, though not on this level.
I ain't saying they're definitely not outliers, I'm saying that it sounds like there are 7-10 outliers.

I'm glad to know there's more examples of this kind of content output. To me this only means that Ashes has more chances at succeeding, and at the end of the day that's the only thing I want. Hope it all works out and we can enjoy a great mmo for many years to come.