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[General MMO] Immersion vs. Function
Henroid
Mexican kicked from Immigration ThreadCentrism is Racism :3Registered User regular
Mexican kicked from Immigration ThreadCentrism is Racism :3Registered User regular
The character screenshot thread sure has been off topic! But anyhow, a topic has come up in it that I felt warranted a thread so here it is. At its root the whole thing is a matter of immersion vs. function. The specific topic in that line though is player owned and operated shops vs. an auction house system. I want to get the obvious flaw of the player owned shops out of the way:
Holy crap, right?
I see the function of auction houses and how streamlined they are. I don't deny them being a good thing. The thing I wonder is where player run shops fit into things and what it would take for them to be comparable. Or acceptable.
Just to use RO as a stepping stone, since its the easiest referenced, there's lots of ways to do that wrong. The big problem is you can't easily identify what players are offering in their shop (that is, weapons or supplies or armor, that sort of thing). The next big problem is how the shops just appear ugly in massive doses, going up and down the street. Another problem is how clunky that interface is; double click a shop, wait for it to load due to latency, check what is present, click a specific button to close the shop, and repeat that process.
I don't think having shops setup anywhere is a bad thing. It could provide the benefit of having supplies available outside dungeons. Hey, that's cool. The problem is in town. If it were done in a way that wasn't ugly like big bubbles over people's heads, would it be a problem? Aside from having a general marketplace for them to setup in towns or cities.
Being able to identify what shops have weapons so you can browse only them would be great. Or shops with items, whatever.
This obviously isn't a sort of function meant for every MMO. An auction house system obviously localizes and makes searching easier, and that's where you step into function over form and immersion. I'm one of those weird people who, with WoW, didn't mind the layout of Orgrimmar for example, which while still not a great design immersion wise obviously wasn't built just to cater to functionality.
Most of what I have to say about the whole thing is in response to others, so I'll leave it at that for now. The thing I'll immediately point out that having a preference for one or the other doesn't make you RAWR THE ENEMY like a lot of internet boards like to paint of others with differing opinions.
Holy crap, right?
I see the function of auction houses and how streamlined they are. I don't deny them being a good thing. The thing I wonder is where player run shops fit into things and what it would take for them to be comparable. Or acceptable.
Just to use RO as a stepping stone, since its the easiest referenced, there's lots of ways to do that wrong. The big problem is you can't easily identify what players are offering in their shop (that is, weapons or supplies or armor, that sort of thing). The next big problem is how the shops just appear ugly in massive doses, going up and down the street. Another problem is how clunky that interface is; double click a shop, wait for it to load due to latency, check what is present, click a specific button to close the shop, and repeat that process.
I don't think having shops setup anywhere is a bad thing. It could provide the benefit of having supplies available outside dungeons. Hey, that's cool. The problem is in town. If it were done in a way that wasn't ugly like big bubbles over people's heads, would it be a problem? Aside from having a general marketplace for them to setup in towns or cities.
Being able to identify what shops have weapons so you can browse only them would be great. Or shops with items, whatever.
This obviously isn't a sort of function meant for every MMO. An auction house system obviously localizes and makes searching easier, and that's where you step into function over form and immersion. I'm one of those weird people who, with WoW, didn't mind the layout of Orgrimmar for example, which while still not a great design immersion wise obviously wasn't built just to cater to functionality.
Most of what I have to say about the whole thing is in response to others, so I'll leave it at that for now. The thing I'll immediately point out that having a preference for one or the other doesn't make you RAWR THE ENEMY like a lot of internet boards like to paint of others with differing opinions.
Henroid on
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Just no fucking bubbles and locations lagged to all hell because there are 100 people who never log out ever, please. That mechanic needs to die.
Right now I have a quest to make some clothes - the gloves need adhesive, which is crafted with the Science skill. And so on.
I don't want anything to do with these people.
You could advertise your shop and your items on a seperate tab of the auction house, So you would look at either auctions or sales, with sales being player shop sales.
You could also have the option to have your shops name show on the map, and players could have the options obviously to turn that on or off.
SW:Tor - Tao - Kryatt Dragon Server
That sounds rad. I wouldn't mind a system where repairs on equipment and other things are operated in the same manner. Imagine a game with a guild function, and the game requires upkeep on lots of things. So guilds form together, head out to gather supplies to repair a fort they hold or to craft arrows or weapons or other disposables.
Like, the more involved with other people things get, the more the whole idea of working together is enforced, the more interested I am.
Dude, what makes you think people aren't doing that at the auction houses or banks?
It's different. With the player store, you're clicking on the player's character and browsing it directly. With an auction house, not so much.
Also, any time I have to interact with another player rather directly than a cold, dead bit of code, I hate it.
So your imagination is running wild about how people are. Just because someone talks liek dis, lolz, doesn't mean they are incapable of making me a good offer.
And if you hate interacting with people, are you playing the right genre of game I wonder?
The AH makes a good offer too.
And I enjoy the massivity(?) of MMOs. I just wish there were more "press button, do thing" manner of activities. In WoW, battlegrounds work like that and in the next patch, LFG will work like that: you press a button, you're in the queue and soon enough, off you go to adventure! AH is basically that: type in what you want, press button, it's yours. No dealing with some random asshat.
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Tell me more. Unless you don't know. In which case, someone else tell us more.
I haven't played FFXI in years, but I remember players being able to set up something called a "bazaar", which functioned much like the Merchant shops in RO do without the screen-clogging window. The only thing it changed, visually, was put a little money bag next to your player name, where your linkshell icon/LFG icon normally went.
This was on top of the game's normal AH system. But like I said, I haven't played in years, so maybe I'm hallucinating this whole thing... anyone wanna come in and fact-check me?
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Although I thought it was fun to see this huge group of people milling about trying to find each other to do trades and hawlking their ware on the virtual street it quickly turned to frustration
Yep... the one (and i think the only) thing I liked about SWG was the crafting and shop system it had. If you just wanted a generic item, you could get it from an auction in one of the cities. But if you wanted something like a great weapon with high stats, you really needed to track down a specific crafter and go to his shop... and hope that he had what you wanted in stock. :?
-- Gnome mage enchantress and inscriptionologist... er scribbler --
just a shot in the dark here
maybe MMOs aren't for you
So if you had a house in a heavily populated or trafficked area, you could make some reasonable dollars that way, but you couldn't just make a store anywhere you wanted, and your avatar and your store weren't linked directly (you didn't have to AFK around to sell stuff.)
The problem with Bazaars in FFXI is pretty much the same thing as the player shop system in Ragnarok Online, which Henroid summed up quite well in the OP pic. You have dozens upon dozens of perma-afk bazaar mules in the most heavily-trafficked areas in the world, usually all crammed into the same space, in a game that has a fairly low hard-coded limit of the maximum amount of players that are able to be displayed at once. So instead of having a screen filled with competing shop bubbles, you have massive lag and trouble finding anybody in your area.
Many bazaar mules never even load on your screen until you've been in the same area for tens of minutes, and the game finally cycles to loading them in after so many people come and go. It's a horrible system that only exists because of the criminally low amount of auction house space and the fact that some high-end items are arbitrarily bazaar-tradeable only.
- The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (2017, colorized)
Besides those text bubblies, I'm not really sure how it can be considered terribly immersion breaking. If you removed the bubbles they'd be just like any of the couple dozen NPC's in a town.
The really nice part about the FFXI system (if I recall correctly) is that your shop would be up and running even if you were running around questing.
If your "bazaar" was run out of your mog house or something, for example (and a separate bazaar board set up to let you see what people are selling), I could see it working fine and dandy. But as it stands, it's just kind of a nuisance.
- The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (2017, colorized)
Then the Shadow Wars were upon us and Arwic got nuked. Nothing left but a smoldering crater in the ground.
So the traders moved to a nearby dungeon, which happened to be a transport hub that contained portals to a number of major cities. People would spam the front entryway with trade chat.
Then, since third party apps were A-OK with Turbine, the next thing to pop up was the tradebot. Set up your tradebot program and it would keep your character standing there ready to sell.
Eventually Turbine decided to move everyone out of the dungeon by creating a specialized marketplace dungeon that everyone got a free teleport to just by typing a command. So that became the central trade hub.
Seemed to work OK there. Without tradebots of some kind it never would have worked though.
Personally, I missed the old way of trading out in the open in town. Made it feel like a real "living" place. (before the nuke of course)
On Wintersebb, which was released after they nuked Arwic Q'Alabar became the trade center of choice. (Subway/Hub were fairly empty.)
The thing with FFXI auction houses is that they weren't linked. You had the 3 starter towns and then the central hub. Kind of a pain in the ass, but I did make a lot of gil buying stuff that was common around one town for cheap and selling it in another town where it didn't drop nearby. I never set up shop unless I had to hang around town for some other reason because I didn't like having to stay logged in if I wasn't playing.
The game was a lot more consumable driven, too. I was always buying food, arrows, bolts, ninja powders, etc. The crafting was pretty decent. In WoW I figured out that I could make a lot more money selling mats on the AH than I ever could crafting stuff. I'm playing WAR now, and the AH isn't super stocked and I don't see how a player shop would be worthwhile. But, it might be that I came in on the tail of this game and the whole economy is pretty dead.
Portal storms meant that even though I played from the beginning up to and past the nuking I never actually ended up visiting Arwic while it was an actual city.
Fun times
My wife has a story about being in Ayan Baqur in her 40s, getting stormed out dying and then pulling half a dozen higher level friends to try and find it. After a few hours they gave up and some of them spent the next few months getting her new gear. (Yes, before she discovered the joy of death items.)
Nothing like getting corpse camped by a creature like 40 levels higher than you (my first trip to the direlands!) or going exploring and getting lost and then dying and having no clue where you were.
Bye bye wonderful wand, or badass piece of armor.
EQ2 has one of the best auction systems around. Every time I start a new MMO I compare it to this. The fact that you're not limited (just buy a bigger house or more boxes) to how much you can put up to sell and the fact that you have the choice of paying the auction fee or getting it cheaper at someones flat was brilliant.
It's a shame the crafting system in that game made me want to /wrists.
One of the greatest things about player stores was going into someones house and seeing how they decorated it, some damn creative people out there (building fireplaces by stacking random furniture) making 2nd floors to the appartments out of rugs and slats of wood by abusing the lack of of physics (you could place a chest and then a board on top of the chest, remove chest and boom magically suspended board, do this enough for spiral stair cases)
The pathing system for EQ2 worked pretty well too.
Too bad they tried (and failed) to keep some sort of continuity with the eq universe they would have been better off calling it something else and freeing themselves of the lore.
"Go up, thou bald head." -2 Kings 2:23
I suppose it has changed much since when I played (around release).
Back in the early days of SWG you had to literally travel from world to world, city to city, player home to player home. Player homes house their shops. You would walk in and see all the weapons for sale on the wall, you would see what were effectively mannequins wearing the armor that was for sale, or even display furniture for sale! Hell, even for something as simple as a haircut you would still (not always) drive out to a "barber shop" or "hair salon".
Even though going to the different shops and comparing prices "wasted" a bit of my time I still really enjoyed the experience.
Auction Houses simplifies things and makes it really convenient and easy to buy/compare gear. Despite enjoying the "bargain hunting" in SWG, I would be hard pressed to say that Auction Houses are not a superior system.
If I was Blizzard, I would probably not allow any kind of mods that automatically search the AH for bargains, show you trends in sales, automatically price your items, or others that automatically undercut your competitors. I mean IMHO, you should have to do at least a little work.
Heh, when I saw the thread title I thought this was about first person view vs. third person in MMOs. In which case I am a fan of first person. Everything is so much more cooler. Seriously, try walking around Stormwind in first person. It's amazing. I wish devs would add first person combat animations to their games. Sadly, I think people who enjoy the first person view in MMOs are even more rare then RP PvPers :P.
A fun side effect of this sytem that in time, certain players became well known for their shops and goods, earning name recognition. Also, you had players that devoted ALL of their game time to running their businesses, ending up insanely weathy. Also, you had merchents competing against each other, at one point on my server a few different groups of smugglers were involved in a drug war over the sale of spice.
@ Decomposey: Hell, I myself ran a surprisingly successful pawn shop, of all things, in SWG. People would drop of wares to be bought by me at my shop and then I would turn around and sell those things for a profit. The craziest thing is that it worked. I mean I would buy all kinds of stuff; baskets, crappy guns, furniture, armor pieces, crafting supplies, and pretty much any random junk you could think of!
I know what you mean about players making a name for themselves. I had a list of players I went to for top quality guns, armor, and what-have-you. In the early days some even made names for themselves as interior decorators of sorts. Only because they knew the trick to sticking items on your wall. You would pay them so many credits and in return you had a wall full of trophies from your adventures.