CNN.com – More colleges offer gaming theory courses — Two catches that I can see with getting your degree in game theory or design: 1. you cannot convert your playing time to college credit and 2. YOU WILL HAVE TO GRADUATE.
Here’s how I’ve seen it.
A new game goes live, everyone rushes in, and we all pick the class that either sounds good or that we’ve typically enjoyed in other games. Bottom line, this means there’s a whole lot of rangers/hunters, monks/martial artist-types, rogues, paladins (unless the word is out that they are the suck beyond suck), wizards/mages and necromancers/warlocks/the life suckers.
Everybody likes to do big damage and everybody likes to keep their solo’ing options open. There’s always a few diehards that choose warriors or priests/clerics/doctors/whateverthehell they call the badass healers in the game. I mean, they choose tank or healer because they WANT to play that class. *boggle* The game may be tuned so that tanks and healers can solo, but CMON, a defense class takes longer to kill stuff because that’s the way of the world, ERGO, the tanks and healers take longer to max out.
Naturally, there’s situations where a guild will … let’s say, encourage … some of its members to make tanks and healers in the new game, but for the most part, in the initial rush of the new game, most of us are choosing the hardcore DPS or solo classes.
We all race through the levels and the zones, sometimes there’s a few bad levels when the living isn’t so easy anymore, but most will work through the rough levels to arrive at better skills, better equipment and better spells.
A week or three after the first max levels start appearing in game, it’s reality time. For a myriad of reasons, we’ll have to group up to advance further: either the best spells or equipment are hidden away in group/raid dungeons, tougher quests require a group or more, the mobs start hitting like a truck or AE’ing the shit out of anyone that approaches, or, in a PVP situation, players need to group for everyone’s mutual protection, e t c.
Enter the first wave of the character remakes. Some will recognize the necessity earlier than others, some later — we all arrive at the same realization that we’re going to need more tanks and A LOT more healers. Deja vu is never so bitter than at this point.
My short list of game dealbreakers, those “features”, quirks, bugs, (ahem) design choices which will send me to the logout screen on DAY ONE and I’m not looking back.
1. Gross server problems. (well duh) I’ll allow a few weeks for the proverbial shit to be gotten together with a new release, but repeated server crashes, freeze frame lag in crowded areas, the hated rollbacks, frequent or excessively long login queues, corrupted databases … all no good.
2. Stupid character movement design. No, I’m not going to click on the ground to move my toon around and I’m not using the W, A, D, etc. keys. I want to use my arrow keys and hold down the mouse buttons. The End. Those are the only choices. Oh ya, I also want need an autorun option.
3. Customizable key bindings. Somewhat related to #2, but frankly the default movement keys should be the arrows and the mouse buttons. The End. Mess with that, and I promise, I’m out. Anyways, back to key bindings: there are so many variables and choices here, I will need to customize. I’m used to the autoattack as “A” or “1”. (Yes, I died many times in EQ talking to Quest NPCs when I’d accidentally attack them. So??) I don’t want to use F1, long reach from the home row on the keyboard, donchaknow. In fact, just to put an end to the madness, offer a choice of key binding sets: EQ, WoW, and whatever else. Problem solved.
Also: don’t forget to add a Hail key binding. It’s sentimental for a lot of us hags. No, I don’t want to macro it and I don’t want to install a Hail mod for crissakes.
4. Ground speed increase. No matter how a game is tuned between amount of land and character movement speed, we will want to go faster. We are humans after all — more is better, faster is better. This could be in the form of traditional transportation (mounts, bikes, cars), spells (the much beloved EQ Spirit of Wolf) or earned/purchased talent or ability. I can wait a few levels to get this increased speed, but each level of delay is a nuisance.
5. Too few spawns in noob areas. Actually, if there’s too few spawns in the big level areas, I’ll hate the game too, but it will take at least a few days to discover this. Probably the first few weeks after release, additional noob monsters should be available but I realize that’s Advanced Game Polishing 502. I’ll tell you what too few spawns says to me: it says “We didn’t finish the game, but thanks for buying it anyways, loser!” See? The game and I are starting off on the wrong foot already. That never turns out well.
Also rans (I’ll stick around in the game, but it’s not love):
Jump — one of the commenters here (forget who) wrote that having a jump ability was a dealbreaker for him. I’m warming up to that idea, especially as I’ve noted that without jump, moving around the game is like running a rat maze.
Killable Quest NPCs — if an NPC sends me out for hours of work and rewards my effort with a lameass item or only a few coins, I want to kill him/her/it. If I can’t kill him/her/it yet, I want to return later and exact my revenge.
(You probably could see this one coming) An AFK and /anon system — we gaming celebrities need some sort of system to fend off the adoring masses. /anonymous takes care of the would-be stalkers and /afk turns away the beggars and other undesirables. The /afk needs to autoreply with the AFK status, too. Man, nothing more annoying than some zealous fan who gets increasingly shrill because they think I’m intentionally ignoring their tells.
Well, I AM ignoring their tells, but I don’t want them to know that.