You're right. Henrik only listens to streamers. I think these forums only exist to conjure up a sense of nostalgia for legacy MMO gamers.
80% of the players I played with a year ago are playing in Mortal direct or adjacent competitors today. Why Esports and MMOs do not mix.
- Thread starter fartbox
- Start date
More cope.
I am 100% certain Henrik, Farmer and Robmo read the forums.
He built a game for himself, not for gamers. Now he needs to decide if his needs outweigh the benefits of legacy. He’s getting older now, there won’t be many opportunities left at legacy. Does he want Mortal to be here or not when is he gone is the question he is facing now.
Haha,
I think you’ve made a compelling point, correcting for the fact that I’m extremely high right now, I think the information that you presented here is accurate.
1) Agency: To be a good player you need to have really good aim WHILE obscuring your attacks, WHILE tracking parry direction, WHILE managing clunky controls. This in a way represents a really fun challenge but in reality attracts too many cheaters, and exacerbates ping differences to the nth degree. Previous iterations of this game were more accessible combat wise.
Zerging- Hellgates and instances are controversial. I can see both sides. I think it could fit into a well balanced breakfast.
Fluidity- Game is super clunky, ranges on weapons feel bad, movement speed feels bad. I know exactly where you’re coming from on this. It does actually reward hyper focusing on aim in a weird way.
When I say Agency I mean you have no control over your fate in Mortal in many many scenarios. More then any other PVP oriented game on the market. It's actually insane to me that this many players are willing to play this game under these circumstances.
Example of scenarios:
1. New player vs Veteran Footy vs footy 1v1 - 0% win condition for new player
Compare contrast vs other games - New player still has a small-decent chance of winning. In a game like Rust its more likely. In a game like Albion its less likely but still present.
2. Any solo player veteran or not vs 3 veteran players - 0% win condition
In my experience playing a mage there isn't a single footy in the game that could kill me and one footy of my choice in a 1v2 without somehow involving PVE. But im just generalizing here since not every group will not have a mage.
Compare contrast in other games. Rust - 1v3 is a common situation and not difficult to win. Albion - Build dependent. Fire cape/fire pot AOE stun can kill entire groups, Force push builds can kill entire groups by utilizing PVE. OSRS - 1v3 doesn't happen because the game has 1v1 only game code. EVE - Ship dependent, plenty of 1v30+ videos exist.
3. Any 100+ ping player vs >20 ping player same skillcap - 0% win condition
Once you hit a certain level of skillcap in this game you simply cannot win against someone with lower ping then you as long as they are at the same skill cap you are.
This isn't even considering all the other games have utility mechanics to just avoid unfavorable fights like disengage where as Mortal has none unless you are an elf. This is purely speculating that you have a 1v3 and must take it. In other games its possible to win, in Mortal its not.
Last edited:
As I said in my other post, I think that there needs to be the smart people, the skilled people, and the strong willed. Obviously, mixtures exist.
The strong willed are the people who do not give up hope despite facing ridiculous odds, and allowing those players to inflict damage, even in structures, is very important to the game.
I don't think the devs read this forum, but they should. @Robmo
I think it's cool to have the possibility of doing something as a solo if people zerg you, kinda some way to damage. Being able to climb and such would be so huge, though. There is a lot of terrain in MO and climbing (when you can do it) is pretty high skill cap haha. I know I've missed a jump and gotten killed because I was trying to climb something that, if I woulda succeeded, I woulda got away.
You know what might be interesting is a toggle. OO oo check it out. So, instead of a gap closer, give people the option to toggle between normal (normal), x% faster with x% less damage, or x% more damage while x% slower. When you were in speed mode, sprinting would use up more stam. When you were in power mode, swinging would use up more stam. Yooo. haha.
The thing is, though, solutions need to be something they can implement. Like I think they are pretty far from adding cleave mechanics. If you think of how wonk the game is, I can't imagine how that would work out. Imagine standing like 60 feet away from someone and taking splash dmg haha. Over and over until you die... and you're like ?? wat.
The strong willed are the people who do not give up hope despite facing ridiculous odds, and allowing those players to inflict damage, even in structures, is very important to the game.
I don't think the devs read this forum, but they should. @Robmo
I think it's cool to have the possibility of doing something as a solo if people zerg you, kinda some way to damage. Being able to climb and such would be so huge, though. There is a lot of terrain in MO and climbing (when you can do it) is pretty high skill cap haha. I know I've missed a jump and gotten killed because I was trying to climb something that, if I woulda succeeded, I woulda got away.
You know what might be interesting is a toggle. OO oo check it out. So, instead of a gap closer, give people the option to toggle between normal (normal), x% faster with x% less damage, or x% more damage while x% slower. When you were in speed mode, sprinting would use up more stam. When you were in power mode, swinging would use up more stam. Yooo. haha.
The thing is, though, solutions need to be something they can implement. Like I think they are pretty far from adding cleave mechanics. If you think of how wonk the game is, I can't imagine how that would work out. Imagine standing like 60 feet away from someone and taking splash dmg haha. Over and over until you die... and you're like ?? wat.
I am of the opinion that winning should be by one's own merit alone, not by the game giving me some kind of arbitrary advantage because I am an underdog. I do not mind dying every time because I am not as good at PvP than the player who happens to be better at it. If I'm going to win, I want it to be because I spent the time to train (which sadly I do not have the time for) until I am as good, or better, than the next PKer that comes along and tries to gank me.
However...
This brings me to the subject of the adrenaline system which is coming in the next major patch. I've not yet seen the system, but from what I remember from previous streams where Henrik talked about it, it may help solve problems one and two in your post that I quoted, without resorting to some kind of arbitary advantage to win. The third problem may involve tweaking and refining of the game's existing combat system to get it to a state that will be more fluid and engaging. Even if Henrik doesn't appear to visit the forums, it would seem that he has other ways to get a grasp of the pulse of what the players in the community want and what the problems are. Who knows, he might even be lurking here on an anonymous alt account.
You brought up a good point about cheaters and exploiters, and I am not sure if SV will be able to completely eliminate such behaviour, though I would say they are trying. With EAC, and monitoring of the game by SV, hopefully this will be reduced to a very small percentage. But understand that cheating and exploiting is likely a problem in practically every online game, from casual mainstream titles like Counterstrike and Call of Duty, to the very niche ones like Mortal Online 2. At least with MO2, SV does try to combat it rather than let it be.
Last edited:
Its not a matter of it being cool its a matter of being pragmatic.
Group play/Organization takes precious time. What % of the MMO demographic do you think has under 20 hours a week to game? Spoiler: Most of it
Solo play is the most accessible format, its the least time consuming format. We can't exclude the demographic that only has time to play solo for most of the days of the week and occasionally group. The game currently excludes that group for meaningful content, until that changes the game cannot grow.
The last 6 months of patches have come directly from Odinseed. You know, the streamer guild.
I wish I could say that players fully designing the game was a stretch but I’ve seen things that would make your balls shrivel and your women barren.
I remember slasher talking about meteors when he was still in Nightfall. Alot of different people from different guilds were pushing for that content, thinking it would drum up action for the game.
Meteors are a good feature. Dev intensive, but still a good feature. It's not a bonified gameloop though and its not going to drive up the population in the ways that changes I fight for would. I want the population to increase so that the revenue will increase for Starvault so that they can have resources to develop faster and resources to survive low sub count content droughts which are commonplace in all sandbox MMO's because whether your team is big or small, new or old, making content for these types of games is challenging and time consuming.
I've played exclusively risk vs reward games, mostly MMO's for the last 20 years. Nearly every MMO i've played has ended up shutting down. Wurm online still stands (with no population), OSRS/Albion and EVE. That's about it. Even games that people thought would never die, ended up dying like Archeage.
I know through observation and experience what it takes for these games to last long term. The changes I push for in my threads I feel are necessary to the survival of the game, and the survival of the genre as a whole. Devs have to take a step back and stop designing games around large groups, around the top, we have enough examples of zerg oriented PVEXPVP dead/dying games and why/what mistakes were made; TnL, Archeage, New world, Darkfall, etc.
When you are the creative director of a Sandbox MMO you are essentially playing God. It is the pinnacle of human creativity; the design of a living breathing world with a ecosystem be it good or bad. Possibly the most complex thing a human can design is a world for other humans. But remember it's not a mandatory world like Earth where you have no choice in being born or not, it's a voluntary world, and it's one where you often pay to participate in it.
If you are a bad God, your ecosystem will decay, your people die out, they will curse your name and the leave you for a different God. If you are a good God your world will thrive, your people will cheer your name and you and your world will live on for generations in the hearts of it's inhabitants.
Mortal has enough content for the top of foodchain to last a decade. No new gatekept content should be a new mantra for this studio. Fill the bottom of the ecosystem with meaningful gameplay loops because the top is already saturated or allow the the bottom of ecosystem to compete with zergs and professional gamers in the same ways other games have. Make a choice between what route you wish to take; Low TTK or Instancing/ruleset protections and start right now.
Last edited:
Funny thing is i left because of the meteor patch. Not exactly the meteors themselves (a good idea that i was actually excited for), but the fact that it brought people back (naturally) and obviously escalated conflicts (exactly what it was supposed to do) which in turn completely broke the server once again. Every single meteor fight become a complete lag fest, which made it impossible to enjoy the new content.
Every. Single. Damn. Time.
Good ideas always poorly implemented that fall flat on their faces. They are fully aware of how shit their code is. How shit their server is. How shit their fixing time is. And how much the game is in need of just bug fixing and optimization. And yet, here comes one other broken ass, unbalanced, laggy mess of a content patch….
Every. Single. Damn. Time.
Last edited:
Farmers code is actually insane. The fact that this game works at all is a testament to his skill. There's a reason you don't see status'd player controlled buildings open world in other MMO's and that's because its impossibly hard to deal with and scale. Each structure in this game is nearly as expensive to track from the servers perspective as a NPC (nearly) and there are thousands of structures.
The only other game that isn't server caped that has this is EVE but the entire game is an instance. Mortal is concurrent...no instance. It's actually amazing FarmerJoe made this work. The design choices were poor but the code supporting them is grand.
It doesnt matter how insane it is if it doesn't work for what’s intended. It “works” only when a handful of people play the game. When the newest patch forces hundreds of people together its a shit show.
If this is how you want to run your game, then cap the server at 500 people and open additional servers. Otherwise the “insane” coding is for nothing.
Doesn't matter how amazing your card stacking house is if you try and use it to play tumble tower. It just doesn't work.
The point of the whole meteor content patch was to get more people playing, and fighting over meteor, knowing full well how poorely the server will hand this. These kinds of decisions is whats ridiculous. This is whats always held MO back. Consistently terrible decisions.
Last edited:
