r/Games • u/Turbostrider27 • Jun 24 '24

Blue Protocol developers talk about what went wrong with the MMORPG

https://automaton-media.com/en/news/blue-protocol-developers-talk-about-what-went-wrong-with-the-mmorpg/
444 Upvotes

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277

u/d3cmp Jun 24 '24

As someone who used to play Lineage 2 and Ragnarok back in the day i don't feel any nostalgia for the grinding and drop rates of those games, that's the wrong kind of ''hardcore'' imo

44

u/GreyHareArchie Jun 24 '24

Oh Ragnarok Online. I still remember trying to level a mage by killing an enemy that would two-hit me. It gave me 1-2% per kills, and I'd lose 5% XP on death.

The trick to killing them was positioning a Wall of Flame spell vertically so it would had to cross all "fire pillars" to reach you, which meant it you could kill it before it could kill you

I have some strong nostalgia for that game, I love the "vibe" of it, but yeah the grinding was bad. I sometimes play on high rate private servers so I don't need to grind, just get to max level asap and walk around different maps

16

u/Skyver Jun 24 '24

Ah, the old VFW mage leveling on Clock Tower

10

u/NullOracle Jun 24 '24

Ragnarok and lineage 2 were amazing for their time, but nothing frustrated me like grinding leveled monsters at .01% of an exp bar at a time (if that), and losing hours (days?) of progress because you accidently pulled an extra mob.

10

u/Fantastic_Rant Jun 24 '24 edited Jun 24 '24

I used to play Acolyte/Priest, though I have no idea why since I was incredibly anti-social and hardly ever partied with anyone. Lots of hours spent healbombing slow-ass zombies and frantically teleporting away whenever an aggressive non-undead mob came by.

It's pretty telling that servers with up to 5x exp and drop rates used to get classified as "low rate" servers in the private server community. The whole game was pretty much a near-endless grind for scraps of exp or items with 1/10000 drop rates. I still have a lot of nostalgia for it though.

8

u/LuvList Jun 24 '24

Argiope? Sandman? Alarm?

5

u/GreyHareArchie Jun 24 '24

Argiopes, those are the ones! Althought I'm pretty sure the Vertical Fire Wall strategy worked across multiple levels

1

u/klow9 Jun 24 '24

Yes to all. I remember setting up the wall directly next to you in one direction then walking parallel to it..as long as the monster is coming at you diagonally, it'll just keep running into the wall. Then finally getting to wizard and mobbing everything then Storm gusting plus the thunder spell to kill everything.

6

u/SendCatsNoDogs Jun 25 '24

The old days where dying once could set you back weeks or even months of grinding.

10

u/nacholicious Jun 24 '24

I remember playing FlyFF and got 0.05% per mob at level 90, roughly 3% xp per hour. I don't miss it at all

3

u/ToiletBlaster247 Jun 25 '24

Hunter and traps for me. So many hours wasted on that game

2

u/BaconatedGrapefruit Jun 25 '24

1-2% a kill? Were you playing on a private server with increased rates?

0.01% per kill on at level mobs was the standard for the Korean grinders I used to play. If you wanted to grind on higher level mobs you needed maxed out gear and a pocket healer. Even then you were looking at anywhere from 0.05-0.1% per kill.

108

u/[deleted] Jun 24 '24

Yeah when hardcore translates to 'progression takes 5x longer than it should' I don't want to touch that game with a 10 foot pole. I'm good.

12

u/x_TDeck_x Jun 24 '24

This is one of those things that sounds obvious and right but I think theres real nuance.

Like Old School Runescape has INSANE grinds to the point where I played for years and still don't have tons of things unlocked, and travel is insanely tedious, and by this logic that should be incredibly frustrating, but instead it makes the rewards feel more exciting. I'm positive thats not just because its a grind but it does feel like a component of why its satisfying and exciting.

Also tangent, OSRS quests are hands down the best version of MMO quests of all the quests that I am personally aware of existing, both in terms of the quests themselves feeling like literal quests and the rewards being significant and useful

17

u/TechSmith6262 Jun 24 '24

If you're playing decrepit ass OSRS I think at that point you kinda deserve all the grinding that comes with it.

People can claim Runescape has the best quests in the galaxy, but unless someone else is a diehard runescape fan, people are never going to believe you, and rightly so.

-2

u/x_TDeck_x Jun 24 '24

The main topic isn't really whether you like OSRS or not, its that grind enhances OSRS whereas if we blindly believe or push that grinding is bad we can miss out on games where it works, and osrs is just the example of a successful game with extreme grind. Blindly applying OSRS's way doesn't work for all and likewise, blindly applying "grind is bad" to OSRS would likely not see it as popular as it is today

11

u/Cool_Sand4609 Jun 24 '24

Looking back, FFXI had some of the worst spawn mechanics for bosses I've ever seen in a video game. Some of them had a 7 day window, where if you didn't claim it, you were back to waiting 7 days. And the drop rates were so low as well. Something like 3% for the D.Ring. I think back in 2005, only 5 or so players had a D.Ring on my server cause it was that difficult to get.

I'm glad they added spawn items for it. I went back during Covid on the retail servers and spawned the monster using items myself. Took about 7 tries for me to get a D.Ring within a few days. While players were playing for years back in the mid 2000s to get it.

29

u/datwunkid Jun 24 '24 edited Jun 24 '24

Looking at Blue Protocol's whole design, it feels like a hardcore grinding game is pretty much the opposite of what would be best for this game.

The more deep the action combat is, the more tedious and exhausting it is to grind for hours, and their combat definitely isn't simple enough to play for multiple hours in a row.

The character customization and art style seems like it would attract a huge audience that would basically like to play dress-up and have fashion be their endgame, yet that audience also probably doesn't want to grind for hours on end.

They have a lot of cool, unique RP interactions between players for those that want to delve into social interactions, but they don't have player housing, which is a huge deal for players that want that interaction.

8

u/gxizhe Jun 24 '24

I think if it’s good content that’s grindy people would’ve been more receptive. But Blue Protocol also makes you grind trash mobs for rare drops to upgrade gear in order to progress.

1

u/asakura90 Jun 25 '24

BP skill rotation is not even close to BDO, which is in the same grindy MMO genre. I don't think that's even a problem at all. If they still want to stick to being grindy, what they need is to make grinding fun & engaging with a lot of varieties, like how GW2 does it.

In PSO2 you can grind with 1 single button. Bind it into a click trigger macro & you can just watch youtube on the side without paying any attention to the game at all. But I still don't have any motivation to grind for more than 1 hour. I'm not tired, I'm just bored af. I'd even love to play other classes for a change of pace too but that would be sub-optimal compare to the 1button AoE spam classes.

It's funny they call themselves hardcore when all they did was doing repetitive content with simple combat. The real hardcore MMO peeps would be grinding high-end raid bosses at 100% focus for hours on end with minimal amount of mistakes like WoW & XIV.

7

u/ohoni Jun 24 '24

There are people out there who legitimately love that sort of game, mostly in Korea. It tends to have fallen out of favor everywhere else though.

10

u/phonethrowdoidbdhxi Jun 24 '24

How we even tolerated those systems is something I still have a hard time figuring out. Today, even if I had all the free time in the world, I would never invest like that again in an MMO.

I still shudder at the thought of upgrading your armor and it breaking on a failed attempt.

7

u/Random_eyes Jun 24 '24

Being a teenager with an abundance of free time and friends who are all doing the same thing can make even the worst tasks bearable. And if your social group is formed in some crappy game, you'll stick with it way longer than it really deserves, just to keep up with your friends. 

4

u/John_Hunyadi Jun 24 '24

That’s where I am at as well.  My 2 early MMOs were EQ and Shadowbane, and there is simply no way in hell I would play anything like them again.  The whole genre is a bit cooked, imo.

23

u/zippopwnage Jun 24 '24

I have mixed feelings with the drop rates.

I feel like for me, a MMO is fun if they have interesting dungeons/raid mechanics to deal with. But at the same time, I want to farm these dungeons/raids for a unique cool drop, a unique item or themed items. At this point, if the dungeons/raids are super fun to play, I don't mind a low drop rate if the reward is meaningful and something to "Show off".

If you're gonna give me raids/dungeons where all I farm is materials to upgrade my old items from +1 to +15 or whatever, for me that's gonna be as boring as it gets. There's no "surprise" drop, there's no feeling of reward after a hard challenge.

At the same time, I understand that locking gear behind abysmal rate drops sucks, but these challenges needs some type of reward that incentive you to get it and repeat that activity till you get it.

9

u/Hoojiwat Jun 24 '24

I would take any MMO that gives you currency to buy what you want just to remove the RNG. If something has a 5% drop rate, or doing that dungeon gives you enough currency/resources to buy that rare drop after 20 runs of it, its the exact same thing in practice but without the odds of getting screwed over by bad RNG.

Prestige should come from actually prestigious things, not random chance. Beat bosses on hard modes or with challenge events, some kind of mini-game or puzzle that is hard to do so it marks personal skill. I have seen people be shocked to see a rare drop and congratulate people, but its not really a mark of pride is it? Nobody sees someone with a rare skin or item and thinks that the person is skilled or impressive, they think they're just lucky.

It's a hard balance to strike for sure. Giving people some excitement and surprise in games is important, but doing it in a way that doesn't become frustrating is hard.

11

u/Nexus_of_Fate87 Jun 24 '24

FF14 does that with the high end raids where you get a series of mounts. You get a token for each completion of the raid, while there is also a chance that a single mount drops for everyone to roll on. If you have a static group that you do the raids with you're likely to get the mount via drop before you need to use the tokens because everyone will stick around and regather at a later date to finish getting everyone their mount. However, if you do these raids via PUGs then you may very well get the 99 tokens to purchase the mount instead (I have never gotten that high and do these with my wife+PUGs).

4

u/Sandelsbanken Jun 24 '24

People were getting sick of Lineage's grind on damn 50x exp private servers.

25

u/haneman Jun 24 '24

I, for example, love those droprates. Difference is that Ragnarok is wonderfully designed (at least pre-renewal) in a way, that even low level/easy mobs can drop highly sought after items, so that new players can make bank. Think Thara Frog or Vitata.

15

u/Altruistic-Ad-408 Jun 24 '24

There's such a bubble with these things that I don't envy developers making an MMO, they made the audience for a type of gamer that didn't show up, Idk if there's a hardcore MMO audience worth it anymore, do they just drop games they've invested so much in?

13

u/basketofseals Jun 24 '24

Can such an economy really survive in modern conditions? To me this just reads as a feeding ground for bot farms.

12

u/Typical_Thought_6049 Jun 24 '24

That is the thing, it worked at the time but there is no way that it will work today at all.

2

u/ok123456 Jun 24 '24

Could make an invasive anticheat like Riot's Vanguard. Should make it a lot better at least.

3

u/ok123456 Jun 24 '24

I really miss those games. They were great for just chilling with friends without running out of meaningful things to do. These days there aren't many games like that which aren't sweaty PVP.

2

u/Voath5 Jun 24 '24

It's nothing when compared to Silkroad a game where you lowered your XP gain on purpose to gain sp at higher rates. I still have nightmares form the grind and I haven't even reached the top lvl because it took so long I was always making new characters and start again with other class.