I hear so many comments on the forums advocating faster this or faster that. Everythng from travel to cool downs. In this video, this guy (whoever he is ) seems to lack the exact thing so many MMO and game players lack today... PATIENCE. In this clip he literally acts like 10 seconds is a life time, ten whole seconds. Really? Maybe, just maybe, lighten up on the energy drinks and take a breath. ;)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qyfwDvvk9Yg&feature=youtu.be&t=275
Sadly, this will be one the things that makes players love or hate Pantheon. Its a problem in society in general these days, but it certainly has no place in an MMO like Pantheon, and I wouldn't want to see too much sped up to accommodate this impatience.
So what are your thoughts? Are you a rabbit or a turtle? Do you like things slow and steady or would you like them fast, fast, fast?
Obviously, I like slow and steady.
As long as Pantheon is clear about how they approach the game and what the players will experience, it should work out nicely.
If the message doesn't come across, the players will feel like they sunk in the mud when playing this game. And most likely they will leave the game asap.
Personnally, I favour to treasure the moment of playing a game, experience the game in a broader sense then the normal hack, slash, level up pace.
I look forward to experiencing that with Pantheon. I would go as far as to say, that I would be dissappointed if I would experience a fast pace progression or easy mode killing/crafting spree.
There are a lot of people out there that are accostumed to being the Hare and many games have provided them with such an experience.
It's that difference that makes this game, Pantheon interesting for me. I'll be the turtoise in this story. Bring it on, Pantheon. Let's see what you make of it and make my day! :)
sidenote @ Bronsun; Rabbit and turtle are different animals from Hare and Tortoise ;)
I think at least to some extent, players "wanting" things fast is a learned behavior that happens when experiences in the game aren't compelling and engaging enough on their own.
Some people will never be satisfied no matter what, but I think the majority of people will be perfectly fine if something takes longer, as long as it is engaging and fun. So combat taking two minutes instead of 20 seconds is fine, as long as it brings a much richer combat experience - just as an example.
The general thought process of gamers has changed compared to even a decade ago that I have seen.
I don't currently play any "real" games but I spend some time playing a star wars phone game. On those forums if there isn't some sort of new character or other content update every week people are very vocal about how bored they are and are asking why there hasn't been any communication about what is next and when it will be.
Pantheon is definitely not targeting the current "main stream" audience but I'm guessing many will try it on release.
Bronsun said:I hear so many comments on the forums advocating faster this or faster that. Everythng from travel to cool downs. In this video, this guy (whoever he is ) seems to lack the exact thing so many MMO and game players lack today... PATIENCE. In this clip he literally acts like 10 seconds is a life time, ten whole seconds. Really? Maybe, just maybe, lighten up on the energy drinks and take a breath. ;)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qyfwDvvk9Yg&feature=youtu.be&t=275
Sadly, this will be one the things that makes players love or hate Pantheon. Its a problem in society in general these days, but it certainly has no place in an MMO like Pantheon, and I wouldn't want to see too much sped up to accommodate this impatience.
So what are your thoughts? Are you a rabbit or a turtle? Do you like things slow and steady or would you like them fast, fast, fast?
Obviously, I like slow and steady.
It sounds to me like he got ganked because of it too. He got impatient, gave up his position, and the more patient archer got his BOOM HEADSHOT. Ironically, camping is a tactic used in all PvP games that require a degree of patience and it's always a source of controversy.
As far as patience in general, I think we live in an age of abundance and instant gratification, which is at least partly responsible for a more general societal shift toward lower patience and lack of attention spans. I think games are basically just reacting to this. The conveniences of technology is permeating all aspect of our lives.
Think about cell phones and how we're all glued to them 24/7. We are basically plugged into the interwebz every waking moment of our lives. Do any of you ever go camping, or somewhere abroad that doesn't have cell service, and just really love and appreciate that period of being disconnected? I do. This is how I envision Pantheon. Let's slow down and just appreciate the world and the people around us. :)
I also see this lack of patience getting worse over the years in myself. If my DVR suddenly doesn't work, or if I struggle with some poor UI or software issue, I get annoyed in seconds. Maybe that's part of aging. Maybe I'm turning into my grandparents who didn't want to learn how to 'program' an iPhone. :)
Some people just want "instant gratification", whether it be in RL or in-game. There's not getting past that. I remember playing Ultima Online (yes, I am really that old :) and EverQuest (original) and I enjoyed the "waiting" game. It gave me time to socialize and when I did accomplish something (in days or even weeks) I felt great! I knew the effort I put into it and to me, it was totally worth it. I think that a game like Pantheon should be a marathon and not a sprint. You get what you put into it!
Cheers!
-Anvy
Some common Mischief have grown and made the path a chore and the goal a frenetic need. Long term gaming is not really trendy right now, but that's also what made such a lot of game flawed. By processing throught micropleasure cycles, and short term goals, the player is only catched and interested for short sessions, short term objectives, and will stop if thoses cycles are broken because the feel of disappointment will not be dampened by the numerous pleasure cycles completed.
The greater the suffering, the greater the peace, or reward here.
Tactical patience is something that twitch based games actually do teach and a skill required to do well. As Parascol mentioned, the youtuber lacked tactical patience, died, and clearly learned a lesson as a result. Even in the twitchiest games you will see the pros waiting tactically for opportunities (like watching a specific angle in CS:GO or waiting at a bush in LoL). Impatience is a clear sign of inexperience.
The patience that I see people lacking these days is downtime patience, but I primarily attribute that to the game developers, not the gamers themselves. If you grew up playing WoW, you have been actively trained to believe that downtime is wasted time. In many games of that sort you are given a steady stream of tasks (some trivial, some challenging) so that your gaming time can be spent doing only the "fun" stuff. VR has acknowledged that in the evolution towards modern railroad MMOs, the baby (socializing, tactical discussion, relaxation, etc.) was tossed out with the bath water (downtime) along the way.
We should all watch out to not assume things about a whole segment of the population. Other games take a different skillset, train a different skillset, and value a different skillset, but that doesn't mean the players of those games lack the capacity to practice, improve, and enjoy other skillsets. It's like we are lookng at speed chess players and saying they don't have patience. They may be trained for speed and some of them may have a tough time adapting to a slower game of chess, but that certainly doesn't mean they can't enjoy and excel at both styles of play.
I may well be wrong but I think the lack of patience is to a large extent a function of how much time the players reasonably expect it to take to get to the "endgame".
Today's MMOs allow us to reach maximum level by playing the game in days or weeks. If I am in a game like that and it takes half an hour to travel from Pantheon City to the Butt Cheek Mountains without seeing anything I haven't seen before or gaining a single experience point I have wasted a measurable percentage of the time it will take to get to the endgame. And, by clear implication, it is only the endgame that is important or else I wouldn't be able to get there in one day to a few weeks.
If I reasonably expect it to take 6 months to a year to get to maximum level (and by then the developers may have added new zones or even new levels):
(1) Spending half an hour getting no experience is far less of a big deal. I will get to level-cap in the same amount of time whether I "waste" that half hour or not - well not literally the exact same amount of time but given statistical rounding the same amount of time. So I might as well relax and actually enjoy the darn game and not focus so much on how much progress I make in a given day.
(2) By clear implication the "endgame" isn't where the game starts and the journey is far more important than the destination. Otherwise it wouldn't take so long to make the journey. This will be reinfoirced if the content at level-cap is not excessive. Enough to keep people reasonably content when they get there but nothing so superior that people are desperate to get there so they can enjoy it.
Poetry, or poetry style, will become the new literature.
New Yorker online magazine is already printing stories as a series of one line sentences, with double spaces betwen them- looks like poetry
However to succeedd I think that would require people having larger, average vocabularies which would mean schools would concentrate on words and word meanings.
Then with increasing short attention span the word definitions would be too long to read, and the learning would be how the word makes you feel, or the feeling behind the word.
Tortoise~
I find it interesting how many people are so worry about end game content when we have yet to begin the game. Let's hurry up and get to the end already! I need not work for anything, "I deserve to have all the best of the best things right away or I will just go stomp off to my room." I don't think it is so much patience as it is gratification.
For me I plan to immerse myself completely, taking my time to explore each and every area completely before moving onward.
I don't think it's new gamers, or young gamers, or any group in particular.
In general society has changed, we are often a product of our training, and there is not much in life that we wait for anymore on a daily basis.
It used to be you would write a letter, and it would be a couple weeks before you got a reply. Or a phone call, if the person wasn't home and you left a message (if you even had that option), you had to wait for them to come home, listen to the messages then call you back. Now people call, text, email, text again, call 2 more times, and get frustrated that the person isn't responding instantly.
Microwaves, cell phones, internet, on-demand television, cars, planes, etc. All these things sped up the time it took to do things when they came around, and we have them all.
it's not until you break away and disconnect from it all and really look around that you start to enjoy the simple life of things just happening in their own due time, that is until the electronic withdrawls set in. *LOL*
Bronsun said: ... So what are your thoughts? Are you a rabbit or a turtle? Do you like things slow and steady or would you like them fast, fast, fast? ...
I enjoy working together in a team where I get to perform my semi-unique role, constantly, far more than I "enjoy" waiting on a 21 minute spawn with a 1% chance to spawn and a 1% chance to drop an item that is useful.
Grouping? Great. Awesome. Do that moar!
Camping? Not great anymore. Absolutely mind crushing dullness. And I got a lot older in the intervening 20 years. :)
I don't think MMO players are any different than any gamer really, on average. In single player RPGs like Skyrim, some people rush through the storya s fast as possible and then gripe on he lack of content. Other people like me have over 500 hours into Skyrim and get so sidetracked with all the content in the game, we forget there is main story with objectives and all that (still have never completed the main story of that game). Some people play a new Mario game and are happy to see the en, and some need 100% completion. Same games, different players.
MMOs arethe same imho. I play calssic Velious era EQ on p99 Blue. Even on that server, there are people who actually race through levels, spend >100k per alt on twinking, powerlevel, the whole nine yards. Then there are people like me who camp every item they have and 4 months later have a level 40 cleric. Same game, different players.
Even in that Blizzard game we all like to bash, you can go tortoise or hare, and plenty of people are in each camp. If Pantheon goes straight old school EQ1 hardcore, there will be impatient people who will figure out how to zoom pat you in levels, gear, etc. If you're anything like me, you won't notice or care if you did.
Venjenz said:I don't think MMO players are any different than any gamer really, on average. In single player RPGs like Skyrim, some people rush through the storya s fast as possible and then gripe on he lack of content. Other people like me have over 500 hours into Skyrim and get so sidetracked with all the content in the game, we forget there is main story with objectives and all that (still have never completed the main story of that game). Some people play a new Mario game and are happy to see the en, and some need 100% completion. Same games, different players.
I agree, especially as I am that "tortoise" person and a huge completionist in pretty much every MMO I play. xD The people who rush just happen to be extremely vocal.
Bronsun said:So what are your thoughts? Are you a rabbit or a turtle? Do you like things slow and steady or would you like them fast, fast, fast?
I'm 50 and have been playing video games since Pong was all the rage. My reflexes are measured in geologic timescales. I don't do twitchy, jumpy, spinny, shooty games. MMOs, though, offer the pace that I enjoy so yes, I lean more towards the turtle than the rabbit. That isn't to say plodding and methodical are good. There still needs to be excitement, danger, risks and rewards, opportunities for growth and the evolution of your character from a pathetic and weak newbie to a near god-like being. So perhaps more turtle-who-drinks-RedBull?
I can understand completly why many gamers are so impatient: It is a result of our technological age. Everything is instantanous these days. Instant access to any TV show or movie (at any time too); to any and all news and information around the world; to any friend or family anywhere. (funny aside: an old Steven Wright joke "I put instant coffee in the microwave and almost went back in time.")
Given that so much of our world is available instantly it quickly becomes difficult to understand why anything takes any time. These days we hear about a game pretty much when the first design documents are penned. I've been following Pantheon for 5 years now. I'm the 84th person (there abouts) to sign up for these forums. I heard about Visionary Realms before Pantheon even had a full title. With so much of the rest of our world happening so quickly it stands to reason why someone would complain about a game taking so long. Look back at the early years of games. We didn't hear about them until just before they hit the shelves at your local electronics store (CompUSA anyone? hehe) or GameStop. To us these games were instant. It all kinda makes sense in a way.
I don't believe humans have shorter attention spans now compared to other times and as far as I can tell there is no evidence of human attention spans shrinking (aside from a sham report that circulated all over in 2015). People are more selective with their attention if anything but otherwise humans have just as much as ever. Also it doesn't seem like something that can even be measured as attention is extremely task dependent.
bobwinner said:WoW has ruined the MMO genre by making it fast-food style.
It's time to go back to the roots.
Not picking on You Bob, but I see this crap everywhere in these boards. WoW is a killer game. it just isn't made to make the grind the highlight of the game. WoW STARTS at END GAME.
5 mans. raids. Mythic raids are Not easy. People love to say wow is EZ. Leveling is easy, you are basically using leveling as a tutorial for How to play your character.
Just because a game is designed to Not be EQ or Vanguard doesn't automatically make it a bad game. WoW did have 13 million subs at one time. How many do you think this game will have after this initial launch? I would bet money this game starts with about 90K subs and is down to 30K subs 90 days after release. Does THAT mean it's a bad game?
GW2 is awesome. Elder Scrolls Online is UP to 11 million subs. Killer game. Star Wars: The Old Republic is an awesome game. etc. etc. In other words, just because a game isn't the same "formula" as Eq1, doesn't mean the game sucks, or is easy, or is made for children.
Heck, if I had my way, we'd have AH, Flying, and Land mounts just like WoW, but we wouldn't have an instanced 5 man and raid LFR. Kind of a best of both worlds. Want me to group with you, but you are 6 miles away in the game. Take a flight path and GET there so we can group and have fun. You can mix old and new and still have something awesome.
Some of you that still have a nostalgia hang-over will regret having Nothing from modern games. wait and see. Shouting for a group for two hours and getting nothing isn't fun any more. One a game with so few people and guilds, that Will happen. a Lot. and in a game were solo and quests are shunned as being a wow clone, you will have nothing to do.
I look for this game to never see it's first expansion. Unless the game can be sustained with a 10,000 player base because that's where it will be 1 year into the game.
Flapp said:
I look for this game to never see it's first expansion. Unless the game can be sustained with a 10,000 player base because that's where it will be 1 year into the game.
Why are you here then ? Hopefully you will find somewhere you can be happy.
After a fair few forum arguments about this subject and others... I'll sum it up.
Most players don't want instant gratification (even I've used this term too in the past); what it's about is.. about convience mainly.
Make of it what you will. But there are some elements to people wanting instant gratification too.
If the Pantheon crowd were impatient, we wouldn’t still be here. Pantheon is taking its sweet time in development, but most of us are still here. It’s still over a year until release, yet new people are still joining the community.
So, MMO players may be impatient, but Pantheon players are here for the long haul.