Wednesday, March 22, 2006

A Comment on the Difficulty of MMOs

Gitr posts a comment:

Yes, and that's what is so amazing about the people that suck so incredibly bad at an instance as easy as Deadmines.

Can they even tie their shoes? Have they ever played a computer game that requires using a mouse AND keyboard at the same time?


I think a lot of veteran MMO players underestimate or forget how unique the aggro mechanism is. Most non-MMO games (and real life, for that matter) use positioning instead of aggro to determine how fights work. I cannot think of a single-player game which really has the same concepts.

Most games: The dragon does not attack the priest because the warrior is blocking the way.
MMORPGs: The dragon does not attack the priest because the warrior has more 'threat'.

The first time you do Deadmines is often the first time you are really exposed to the tank-healer-dps trinity that is at the heart of current MMORPGs. Previously, you've been soloing, or fighting mobs where straight-out dps is a solid tactic.

I know that it took me a great while to truely understand it. WoW is the first game I've played that used aggro-based mechanisms. I played a warrior first, and the concept that 'threat' is different than--but linked to--'damage' was hard to really grasp.

4 comments:

  1. Hello! I just discovered your Blog and I am really impressed with it. Agree with your post on the MMORPG and it's unique way of Threat and Aggro management... I discovered this aspect early as a with my warrior. But I digress..

    I've tagged your blog and would like to add you to my links list if it's quite alright. You can find me at deagen.blogspot.com

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  2. deagen: Thanks! Feel free to add me to your links.

    thoma: you are correct, but I was primarily looking at new people who have even less knowledge of the system. People who don't understand what threat is. Or think that threat=damage, and as soon as you do more damage than the other guy, the mob comes after you. That's a very simple way of looking at threat, and it is dangerous because it's often right.

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  3. As a fury warrior, I never had to battle over-nuking mages too often. If I lost aggro, I taunted, and then DPS'd myself.

    Correct me if I'm wrong, but I had a slight aggro advantage by being high-threat using Heroic Strike, SU's, AND damage. In MC, I can rip agg off our GM as MT in about 5 seconds using Heroic Strikes alone, so if I'm playing tank in a mid-50 instance and doing my tanking tactics, it takes quite a bit of nuking. The Molten Giants and Core Hounds come after ME, not the squishies.

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  4. I can forgive new players going thru deadmines, but when I see reckless lvl 60 players that haven't learned how to play in instances, I have to admit that's kinda lame.

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