Bounty Hunter Archive

My main concern is the lack of loot. Has anyone else used all your skill points? Once you have there is very little reason to play the game. I had a great time acquiring all the skills I have but now there is no point to killing a tough creature. They never drop any good loot, all I can do is harvest some resource off them. There's nothing good to buy in the game except weapons and armor and I have millions of credits with nothing to spend it on. If creatures started dropping uber loot I would have something actually driving me to play. If you're like me you want to improve your character in some ways over time. Nowadays when I login I can't better my skills and my inventory is always the same because I've already bought the best armor and weapons.

And also, the comment about this game "appealing" to the masses is very correct. It takes a certain kind of person to be able to play EQ from level 1-65 and truly explore every inch of Norrath, because you can't be a dumbass to do it. SWG is a game which feels like it was made for the average 13 year old to pick up and play without having to worry about using their brain.

Anyway, as it stands, I'm 16 years old and I play MMORPGs just as much if not more than a lot of you do. It's hard balancing Highschool, having a girlfriend (I've been with her for 2 1/2 years now, hoping to keep that going , and actually having a social life, but I manage it. How do I find a way to manage my time? Because I truly enjoy the MMORPG experience, and it's a shame I'm going to have to wait a year at least before I can get my teeth into anything worthwhile. (I've pretty much played EQ to extinction)

And loot helps the game how?

It isnot the loot that players are after; it is, as others have pointed out, a sense of differentiation and accomplishment, of uniqueness that players desire.

There are other ways to achieve this rather than loot. In fact, I would argue that uber loot is not a good means to an end.

Thesis: Uber loot is not a good way to introduce content.

Argument 1: Uber loot, although it is uber, is still virtual loot. Nobody in the real world really cares beyond the context of the game that Player X fought Y mob and picked up Z piece of loot.

Corollary 1: Uber loot is instead unique differentiation. It is a moniker that broadcasts to the community, "Look at me! I spent the time and effort needed to accomplish a certain feat (Killing boss mob, what have you), and now I can be different (and usually better) than youon account ofmy investment."

Argument 2: Uber loot essentially then is a thinly veiled, yet highly effective way of providing "content" because, unquestionably, human greed for the better, and the invisible yet effective forces of supply and demand are working their "magic."

Corollary 2: There are, therefore, better ways of adding high level content.

Conclusion: There needs to be meaningful goals, though meaningful will forever be limited by the fact that the context in question is a virtual world, an RPG as we all know.

I do not claim to know the answer to this fundamental problem. However, as a gamer who has neither the time nor the desire to assemble a 100 man hunting party to wait for the rights to camp a boss mob that respawns infrequently, I still maintain that loot is not the best solution.

In fact, as an aside:

1) Horror stories of EQ's obsessive-compulsive players are well-known. The suicide of the pizza delivery boy due to being scammed out of loot, the delusional maniac screaming through the street because he spent 36 hours straight trying to get loot, the man who threw his kid in the closet lest his camping session be disturbed (his wife was away, and when he remembered the kid days later, he was dead), the mother suing to get warning labels put on games... Extremely difficult to obtain results spawn obsessive-compulsivism.

2) Casual gamers lose out. Many people simply quit because they feel that they can accomplish nothing with the time they have to play.

Logical follow-up: Provide two kinds of high level content - Casual-gamer-attainable, and massive-raid-type. What kind of content will achieve these qualifications, I do not know.

Final aside: AC2, when I was playing it, had, compared to SW:G, a ton of content. However, it had broken classes, and a lot of exploits - in fact, the popular mindset became, "They don't care about exploiters, so I will too." The lack of enforcement and discipline meant the incentive to cheat and power up the game was high. Couple that with the fact that you only had3 working templates, and now, AC2 has about 300 people spread across 3 servers. At least SW:G tries to, on some degree, provide a wide variety of working classes. That's why, from years of experience (My first game was EQ), SOE's priorities should be as follows:

1) Consistently punish exploiters.

2) Fix classes.

3) Balance classes.

4) Add viable content.

5) Features (AKA: Gravy, eye candy, etc.)

Great Post Melisma!

Seiv

The only problem being that many people want just that, the sense of accomplishment, and when "uber loot" is in the game, you get that.

I hear ya

Most of the reason I keep playing is that I don't want to quit before I get a chance to play a Jedi.

Most other MMOs had smoother releases than this one did. And 3 months in they were adding endgame content, itemizing the game. What is SWG doing? It's still in the first round of nerfing. WAY behind schedule. This game just wasn't ready to be released.

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atimes wrote:

It amazes me how people keep saying "well i guess i'll have to wait on EQ2"

Ok verant made EQ and SWG. Given the track records of these 2 games do you really think they will change anything when EQ2 comes out?

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The devs who made SWG are from UO, not EQ.

And the similarities between UO and SWG are striking to say the least. They even made all the same mistakes over again, including resource duping and creature taming.

Doesn't SWG, today, sort of remind you of Diablo2 when everyone had an amazon with Shaft, 2 duped duel leech rings, windforce (or ith), and vamp gaze? Well that said: SWG is a game in progress, unlike D2, so the game will be drastically different in 6months - 1years time if there is a reasonable amount of players remaining, which everyone will be master with best items available. But you have to admit, they've come a long way in 3 months with core gameplay issuesbeing fixed andneweditions every day. So my advice to you 3 year vet MMORPG players, go back to EQ for a while and come back when I'm through post-beta beta testing SWG (I want my money back, though LOL). The game should be free as is.

That's a viable solution, however if I were to quit now, I'd have little incentive to reactivate my account even if the game was overhauled. I find myself getting so bored with the game that even if Jedi's were made selectable even at the start I don't think it'd be enough to bring me back. I've wasted too many hours playing a BETA and not a game.

This game has problems no doubt, but jeez its only been 3 months. Things are going slow no doubt, but if youre not gonna give it a chance then why do you play mmorpgs? I keep hearing that mmorpgs are a test of patience and 3 months in some ppl say this game is crap, has no content, is loaded with bugs blah blah blah.

If you dont have the patience to give this game time to get fixed, which many have said is the most casual-friendly mmorpg out there, then I dont really know what to say...

Correction: When uber loot is in the game, you get a sense of accomplishment.

And then... then what?

Players clamor for more loot, and instead of becoming a leveling treadmill/grind, it becomes a grind/treadmill for uber loot.

A game should have a plethora of unique content, where uber loot is not the end-all, but a part of the high end game. Otherwise, we return to the fundamental problem of rpgs - treadmill, grind, what have you.

That was a great post melisma and I agree that loot isn't the end all solution but if you want uniqueness, you need some sort of uber loot. How am I different than any other Creature Handler or Bounty Hunter? We all have the same weapons, same armor, and can buy anything in the game. Now if there was a 1% chance that a Krayt dragon could drop some weapon that a weaponsmith can't make, now we're talking. It doesn't even have to be a weapon, it could be a powerup which doubles the effectiveness of your weapon. I don't propose the camp for a week to fight a dragon scenario, i'm thinking more along the lines of Diablo 2 drops. There was a very small chance that one of the tougher creatures in the game might drop uber loot. There was no camping, you just fight the tough stuff and hope you're lucky. This is what kept me playing that game so long. I know not everybody feels the same way I do about loot but is there anyone out there who is out of skill points and still doesn't think loot should be introduced? These monthly stories are not giving us uniqueness. Everyone is shouting "selling imp disk 3" at the starports. If they made some nice quests with nice rewards everyone would do them and again you would not have uniqueness or even accomplishment. I still say give me something different, something very few other players have. This is purely my opinion and I'm sure many of you disagree with me.

I'm sorry if I came across as not wanting uber loot at all in my first post - that's not what I had in mind.

In my second post, I finished what I meant to include in my first post, but forgot to (Lack of edit button): Namely that loot is part of the solution, but not the whole.

In regards to your comparison to D2: Player run economies (SW:G has done it the best so far, though still far from perfect), are at odds with loot insofar as people use the term loot to mean "gear." For instance, if all combat classes eventually (or, miraculously) get all the loot there is to get, then either A) Nobody is unique or B) SOE is forced to add more and the grind begins anew. It is my opinion that perhaps the best way to use loot with player run economies would be to drop rare, limited use schematics. In this way, combat classes would have an incentive to hunt or mission or quest or what not, while crafters would not be left out of the overall scheme of things. Combat classes might have to negotiate deals with smiths, for instance, and it is not so far-fetched to imagine a dark, corporate style atmosphere evolving from this, with shady deals and player bounties even (to keep this thread even slightly on topic for BHs).

Essentially, my point is this: that loot insofar as equipment is bad as the solution. Rare loot that utliizes crafters would be better, and loot should not be the only content. There should also be casual gamer oriented content, and power gamer content.