Hateful Gamers

New thread on the AoC forums. Big thread, many replies. The views were up to 65,485 as of last check. Apparently Funcom has decided to reduce the experience for gray quests (quests that are considered below your level, and very easy), substantially, making it not worthwhile to do the quests, except as a means to view questlines and content, not for advancement.

There are a few ways to take this. Knowing you, the reader, which I intimately do, (This has been established now. I know you well! Please play along.) you will probably go cry in a corner. What I suggest you do is find a pillow, maybe one shaped like a monitor screen, and beat the living crap out of it. That, or just don’t buy/cancel your AoC account.

This isn’t going to be a long dirge of the issues with Age of Conan, I’ll save that for another day, but I just wanted to point out an asinine thought process, that can only be the bi-product of being far too close to your game, and thus seeing it from a narrow point of view.

Gray quests, they’re easy, I can understand why they shouldn’t give great benefits. Having a mass of high level characters, doing quests 30 levels below them, only gets in the way of the lower level players. Removing that temptation keeps the content within the level ranges it was intended. I very much understand both of these viewpoints. That is why they made these changes, because, designwise, it was the right thing to do, but here’s the critical point: Making changes in an attempt to make your game perfect and balanced, should never be your goal, if in doing so, it has diminishing returns on the game’s enjoyment.

Elder Game, a fantastic blog, with the equally fantastic writer, Eric Heimburg, who tends to write far more rationally then you’ll ever see my frothing, flailing fisted figure ever put to keyboard, made a great point in a recent article:

“We systems designers need to start balancing for awesome. Traditionally, we balanced for perfection. Older games like EverQuest or Dark Age of Camelot show this most clearly: they have tightly-controlled classes with an extremely limited range of effective verbs. Most classes have a

This entry was posted on Monday, July 14th, 2008 at 11:24 am and is filed under AoC, MMOs.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.