The Magic Man wrote:

Techgamer wrote:

The Magic Man wrote:

There is a word for players like you. Scrubs.

Yep, insult your players when they provide feedback onto why they are not playing the game exactly as you imagined. Brilliant.

The problem here, is that you are getting angry that players don't follow your ideal, when it seems that the incentives for grinding outweighs the incentives for fighting stronger mobs. The problems could be a number of things, such as too small of a playerbase to effectivally group, the scaling of experience not working in favor of stronger mobs, or even just laziness and macroing.

Read the rest of the post first.
I test every enemy that is added to the game in various situations. With different classes, different levels and different situations, such as what a poor player with weak equipment would have and so on.

In most cases, it's not that the game is too hard, it is that people suck at playing at it, and are expecting it to require no skill to play.

Also, there is no GOOD incentive for grinding. It takes 10x longer to make the same progress (actually less, due to the rewards being less), it is much more boring and just not worth the effort. About the only advantage it has is that it is much easier. (I had to put in methods to prevent people from abusing grinding, because they were trying to do things like have the game play it's self while they were sleeping and what not)

The point I have been trying to make it, grinding in the game is just not worth the effort. Sure, by doing things at a lower level (the recommended level), it might be harder, and you might die more often... But there is absolutely no penalty for dying anyway.

The players are just lazy. To the point where they expect the game to practically play it's self.
It is almost like some people don't want to play the game for themselves. They want to know how to make their character strong, they want to know where and how to level up quickly, they want to know how to kill bosses, they want to know how to do quests and what they get for doing quests... Without actually playing the game or doing any of the stuff they want to know.

The problem is that you're in a no win situation. The players are lazy because every MMO on BYOND up to this point has been the kind where you just sit around and press the attack button. Therefore, the only way to stop people from grinding is to make grinding impossible. The issue with that is, people will resist your attempts to do this and will probably not play your game at all. You may say good riddance, but it still means no people. You can either just let it be and hope that some day the community matures, or you can find a more creative solution than just punishing people who do grind.

For example, you could just get rid of all the monsters all together in your overworld so that people will have to go through dungeons and perform quests to gain experience. Another idea would be to have large experience awards for completing a mission or quest, and much smaller rewards for killing any individual monster.

Better yet, why don't you show players right away what they should be doing by having every new player go through a sort of introductory dungeon to give them a taste of what the game will be based around.

Vexonater wrote:

The problem is that you're in a no win situation. The players are lazy because every MMO on BYOND up to this point has been the kind where you just sit around and press the attack button. Therefore, the only way to stop people from grinding is to make grinding impossible. The issue with that is, people will resist your attempts to do this and will probably not play your game at all. You may say good riddance, but it still means no people. You can either just let it be and hope that some day the community matures, or you can find a more creative solution than just punishing people who do grind.

Which is why I originally did not intend on forcing players to do one thing or another.
But it is annoying when you are putting a lot of time and effort into something... Only to have people totally ignore it. What is the point in even going to the effort of trying to make a good game when people aren't even going to play it?

For example, you could just get rid of all the monsters all together in your overworld so that people will have to go through dungeons and perform quests to gain experience. Another idea would be to have large experience awards for completing a mission or quest, and much smaller rewards for killing any individual monster.

Already done those. Monsters for the most part ONLY spawn in dungeons.
Additionally, most normal enemies give low rewards (exp and gold) compared to an equal leveled quest. At level 30, an enemy might give you 1-2% of the exp you need to level up and maybe 100 gold (maybe), a quest of level 30 gives you closer to 40% of the exp needed to level up and 5000+ gold (excluding equipment, which can knock that upto porentially 20,000).
Additionally, normal enemies do not drop much in the way of rewards either. They are only gained from quests and bosses.

Better yet, why don't you show players right away what they should be doing by having every new player go through a sort of introductory dungeon to give them a taste of what the game will be based around.

Which is basically what the tutorial is.

Rawr!

Hate to break it to you, bub, but your game is not as intuitive, interesting, or puzzling as you think it is; it's a grindfest.

When you first log in, you're requested to choose a major and minor class for your character, yet the descriptions given for the classes are vague and nondescript; additionally, the player is told NOTHING about how major/minor works: the player is not informed that they will have access to a majority of the secondary class's skills. Instead, they're just told that your secondary choice affects your stats in a minor way (oh, and the player isn't informed about what the different stats do yet, so that's irrelevant too). This eliminates the possibility of strategic, intelligent decisions of what classes to choose in order to form an effective character. The player simply bases their choice off what seems to be an appropriate combo based on their previous knowledge of RPG formats and the tiny amount of information provided in the game's class descriptions, resulting in a catastrophe of bad choices that leaves the player feeling weak and cheated.

When the player is then going through the tutorial and learning everything, they are given a choice between two scrolls containing skills that they can learn; however, they're only allowed to learn 1 new skill per level, and the player has absolutely no method of learning what the skills do when they're choosing between the two scrolls, so they just have to pick without any prior information and once again risk making a bad decision that is not their fault, regardless of how carefully they approach the situation. Once the player enters the town, they are provided a book with adequate information for how to get around town and where everything is located; why are you so upset that the players need a tiny map in a booklet in order to more effectively navigate the unnecessarily large, badly designed town? If you want people to travel through maps without the need of a minimap, then don't fill the maps with extraordinarily large dead spaces of no interest, forcing the player to spend long amounts of time going from place to place.

Upon reaching the first dungeon, the basement of an inn filled with rats, the player gets to find out if the character they've created is potentially good, or if it is simply a trashy, untested build that will never be able to hold its own against monsters of one's own level. I, personally, had created a necromancer/cleric, with the idea of focusing on strong summons and AoE heals. Guess what: heals damage undead, so my entire build goes down the drain and I have several wasted skills that I will never be able to redeem just because I was not provided adequate information when creating my character. Instead, I decided to just get lots of buff spells, and use those to increase the damage output and defense of my summons. Due to a crippled casting system, I was forced into far too frequently micromanaging all of my undead and their buff spells due to limited durations of buffs, limited durations of summons, the fact that summons die very easily, and the annoying act of clicking on each and every summon to cast on them each and every time I had to buff them. Additionally, increasing the power of your summon skill does not increase the power of your summons-- it only adds a couple seconds of life onto them, which is overall irrelevant anyways considering that summoning costs a perplexingly 0 mana.

It seems as if you specifically went out of your way to make summoning as inconvenient and weird as possible, instead of being an intuitive system where you care about keeping your minions alive and are thus forced to use strategy to do so. Instead, the player can kill anything slightly below their level by just telling their minions to attack it and then spamming the summon skill mindlessly. How does that promote skill and intelligence? Not to mention the fact that summons invariably deal 0 damage to anything slightly higher level than them and assuredly get 1 shotted by aforementioned creature, making it impossible to fight any monster that might prove a challenge.

So, as you said, why do people grind on lower level enemies instead of fighting the challenging ones? They do it because they're FORCED to. The progression in difficulty of enemies in this game is a perpetual "too easy" -> "definitely impossible" format. There is no in between to challenge us. Additionally, the "boss" monsters are only a great pain to low levels attempting to kill enemies in a dungeon because the boss actively seeks out and kills low level players who have no chance of defeating it, yet there are no other players online for you to group up with and defeat this creature because no one ever plays this game; do you know why? (hint: if you don't, try reading everything I just wrote)

Your game has the potential to be a lot of fun, but these enormous gameplay issues keep it from that. I enjoyed writing that, at any rate. Got a lot off my chest. :)