Time gating was the bane of my existence at my last job. I'd work 14 hour shifts 7 days a week with a long commute, so I had literally zero time to play...but then I'd get a few days off in a row. Since this was my ONLY play time, having everything time gated meant I spent several expansions of WoW completely unable to catch up with anything. Absolute nightmare, zero fun.
Funfact: Aion does inform you each hour on how long you have played nonstop. When I originally started playing Aion I did my quests, travelled the world, progressed my character, enjoyed the visuals and the music (ah, the music) etc when I noticed this line in the chat: "You have been playing for 17 hours. Please have a break". Me: Well, maybe I really should have one :D
Lots of games send you a message every hour. It's required by law in some countries and rather than only enabling that for players in those countries, they usually just send those to everyone. Often they don't even tell you the number, just saying "more than an hour" or something
@@jfast8256 better than ffxiv 1.0 flat out stop giving you exp if you grinded for too long. It was a "anti-bot" mech but also it hid it had no end game.
More games should do that tbh. I mean yeah, some times I do take breaks but other times I wake up and play until dinner (not even cooking, I just order pizza) and then keep playing until I pass out.
This reminds me of an MMORPG called Metin 2 which had enemies as follows Wolves Hungry wolves Alfa wolves hungry alfa wolves Blue wolves blue hungry wolves blue alfa wolves blue hungry alfa wolves grey wolves grey hungry wolves grey alfa wolves grey hungry alfa wolves and they are all totally different enemies according to the game
Played it when i was youg, for me the 3 most infuriating mechanics in the game was: 1 - How slow you level up, i don't know if it get better but as a child with a LOT of free time it takes 1~2 weeks to level up a single level, and if you die, you can lose it all in one go. 2 - The enemies drops are limited by the character level, you can't drop or farm important itens if you are 5 levels above an enemy. 3 - The blacksmith is a son of a B***, i don't know the percanteges but he is desined to break your equipment, unless you pay real money for it not happens. Good lord today when i log in a game i know if it's worth my time just seeying the cash shop, Perfect World and Metin 2 teaches me that.
Another aspect of time gating (also outside of mmorpgs) is limiting the amount of in-game money you can earn per day, or limiting how many matches you can participate in. You start with an "energy limit" and each match you play in takes an amount of energy away, once that's gone, you can no longer play until the next day.
@@mitarc It's that kind of mentality that made me drop the game Let It Die, and it's a shame because Let It Die got me into the Soulsborne-like gaming sphere of brutally difficult action adventure games like Dark Souls, but the way it's designed and the way you play it just gets aggrevating. Which is even worst because the game starts off really damn good, the first two-or-so series of floors are fantastic, fun, and difficult, but once you get to the third series of floors the entire game changed for me. Went from fun and intense, with some frustrations, to straight-up "this is where you pay now."
Unless it's roguelike/survival, there is no excuse for this. Even in those games use of "energy" that is badly monitored to specific mechanics is just infuriating. It's fine if you want me to be a normal hero, not overpowered, not infinite energy, but you'll need to keep in that idea through out the whole game. For instance; I really enjoyed Valheim. Got no issue having an energy and health bar influenced by food and drink, but when it came to building and designing a homestead, the stamina bar there is just frustrating. I shouldn't need to take a breather after every few hammerings or placing of wood. Not when I go out and shoot down a massive stag whose trying to kill me, which energy wise is FAR more taxing than building a home. It's actually immersion breaking. I'm a regular human, building a home is physically taxing, but taking down a massive creature with a long health bar where I need to run around, dodge, shoot/swing all the time, that's just my Monday morning work out. If I'm in say a survival horror and a big element of the game is that I'm a weak human, desperately seeking weapons, making shelters etc, you have to balance my energy usage to reflect that. if I'm shooting and running away from zombies, you need to make sure my energy usage spent to build my shelter isn't of a more taxing requirement than running for my life or punching zombies in the face. In MMO's, given that you are almost ALWAYS a god, the chosen one, special, powerful, energy limits make even less sense. They're generally just a cash grab or way to promote dailies. I get an MMO limiting the money you can make because that's how economy has to work or it will crash. But in single player? It's absolutely superfluous and a way to extend the life of a game through artificial means instead of design choices.
What if they started you in a peaceful forest, while a war was going on from a long distance away? Life is peaceful, but you know it's only that way because of the warriors laying their lives down to keep the enemy at bay? The gameplay could be about supporting or even joining those efforts.
On the one hand, I can see your point. On the other hand, why does it always have to be a forest (or someplace that's roughly "Central European countryside")? Why not slums, or a mining village, or an oasis in the desert? Why not start near the battlefield cause dad's in the army and mum's … cooking for the soldiers, and you're an errand-boy (or -girl) until everyone has to flee from the enemy. By this point _forests are boring._ And if you want ideas for alternative starting areas, just take a look at the different backgrounds in Dragon Age: Origins and how they affect your start into the game.
@@rolfs2165 are forests really that common? Genuine question, I don't play that many mmos, but in rpgs, I think the last one that started in a forest was... Well, twilight Princess, and I'm not sure if that counts.
It's an issue of escalation and worldbuilding. So many games want all the crazy, over-the-top stuff from the get-go because they think their audience has a short attention span due to most not playing for longer than two hours. That's not why. It's because the game itself isn't worth playing longer, but I digress. When you start a player off in the middle of some crazy bullshit, there's no grounding. No comparison. Nothing is there to establish this magical warzone as aberrant in any way due to the player not having been introduced to the world with even a modicum of restraint. Now take that same player and start them off in a small village somewhere and have them ultimately participate in this wacky ass, magical boomshittery in the late game, and you now have context for this escalation. If everything is over-the-top, then nothing is. You need grounding in mundanity in order to appreciate the transmundane.
@@anna-flora999 they are, mostly, because of how peaceful a forest can be and how to get a character started from the bottom before in the late, throwing you to the fortress of impeding doom located in the misty desert of starvation or something cliche like that, you get the point
Back in the 90's, BBS games limited you to ~20 actions per day. Remember Legend of the Red Dragon? Granted, most BBSs could only handle 1 - 3 simultaneous players, so you'd have to log off to give someone else time to play some content.
@@jupiter12345-h genshin sucks so badly. It's a straight up botw rip off but worse, with a pretty good story that they SOMEHOW make playing through boring. Im not even gonna talk about the pay2win, some heroes cant even clear abyss without overpowered 5* artis or a carry. Will I play it again someday? Yes. I hate it though
_Guild Wars 2_ gives you the option of a shire, a couple different spots in a jungle, a frozen forest, or seared Ascalon... which at least _used_ to be a shire-type locale.
"MMORPG players have long been known to have addictive personalities, and we just gosh darn love watching some little numbers get bigger." I'm subscribing right now.
I think reuse of assets is definitely more nuanced rather than inherently bad. There are situations where it may be necessary, such as when the budget is relatively low or the team is small, and it's interesting when something creative can be made out of asset reuse when it allows them to put their focus on other aspects of the content. Done in excess, I can absolutely see how it becomes a problem.
I was thinking about mechanics... if your palette swaps behave in a different way, but otherwise have the same model, that splash of color will help the player realize what they are fighting. This visual clarity will increase their understanding of the encounter because they see the blue goblin and know "this one uses magic" opposed to the standard green one that will just run up to them. The player will instantly be able to tell the difference between the two and react accordingly. I'd also claim palette swaps need to stay within the same general area. Being able to tell the different strength/behavior of similar monsters within the same zone is one thing. Going to a completely different zone to find your "new" enemies are just reskinned old ones... is lazy. Even if it's the same faction in different areas, there needs to be some visual difference in the models. Even if it's just better equipment. The starter area goblins have rags and clubs. The next area has goblins with leather armor and stone weapons. The next goblins have rusted bits of armor scavenged from the nearby battlefield.... so on and so forth until we get to the goblin lords that have enslaved dwarven smiths to make them top of the line magic weapons. These goblins will naturally have better stats because they either A) have better equipment or B) are strong enough to go procure, and keep, better equipment. It's something we can tell at a glance without being so lazy as "the brown goblin has '30' next to it's name Vs the green goblin having '10'" Otherwise, they are the same goblin with the same attacks.
I think it's perfectly fine to have some bosses/mobs be palette swaps or larger/smaller versions. I think when you do more than 3 of the same model, you're being cheap. There are also PLENTY of ways to use the same model with different paint jobs that make it feel genuinely different. IE take a wolf mount or mob. Give it typical grey wolf paint job. Make the while version have different colored eyes, more fur and different abilities/particle affects. It's fine to do that a few times, it's not fine when it becomes a running joke. Also, I think 3 options of colors for any given mount is a healthy variety for people. You can also hit analysis paralysis when you are given too many choices too, so a few color distinctions among say 5-7 different mount choices keeps things easier to figure out what you want. Most people will be able to go "Oh I am totally getting the hippogriff mount, no question, now what color?" Another way to address it, specifically for mounts is to allow the ability to choose the color from a wheel, or buy things with in game earned currency that allow it to look different, like saddles, armor, charms etc. Finding a balance between too much choice, but also wanting each player to feel unique is not an easy task. Best solution I have seen is have variations in armor/accessories, then have dyes or access to a color wheel to nuance the specific color you want for it.
@@m1rac1e If you're referring to my comment, I'm pretty sure I was responding to a similar line of thought he'd had during the video, not agreeing with him. Hard to remember with how long ago the comment was made, but that sounds right.
Wow. "Shin Megami Tensei: Imagine" is a 4/4 so far. They didn't even use palette swapping, they just used different prefixes in enemy names and exact same models, only with different stats and skills. Some variations were scaled down or up, but that was it. :/
Just for the sake of discussion, I'd like to throw out atleast one way that timegating might be an okay thing: to remove progress stress and help keep an MMO community from diverging too heavily between casual and hardcore. FFXIV for example has a weekly cap on the amount of current-tier currency that can be obtained. Despite the content loop for earning this currency being fun by itself, the currency is rewarded in short enough supply that, were there no cap, there would be a much wider variance in expectations regarding the amount of time you'd spend (in a week) doing this content. WoW is an example of how the lack of this cap can be damaging. During BfA, there was no cap on a relevant resource (I forget its name). That MMO's community very nearly killed itself on the absurd length that people would go through to farm for it. If FFXIV didn't have a weekly cap on Revelations (the currency in question), people would likely start to farm the content that rewards it, which would result in a few bad things: 1) People without the reasonable time to do so would fall behind in progression, likely harming their social relevance in the game. 2) The avenues of farming Revelations would become more stressful to do, since the limitless farmability of those bits of content would incur greater pressure on playing optimally. Timegating can, if done correctly, be a way of controlling a community's progress through content for reasons that don't veer into sloth. In my opinion.
The key thing with _FFXIV's_ version is that that gate is weekly timegating, not daily. Admittedly, you get daily bonuses... but you don't get cut off until you hit a weekly cap. And it still has some daily timegating, with the Hunt and Beast Tribes. Of course, those are mostly for deprecated/catchup/cosmetic rewards...
I actually like starting an MMO in a forest or quiet shire... Also, WoW's starting zone is different based on what race you choose, and there's quite a huge variety of starting zones. Forests (humans), red clay deserts (orcs), mesa plains (Tauren), sandy ruined temples (Vulpera), beautiful port city (Kul Tiran), gilded ziggurats and rainforests (Zandalari Trolls), chinese-inspired bamboo forests (Pandaren), the list goes on.
Time-gating is a bit weird. Definitely the "you've played enough go away" style of time-gating is full on obnoxious, but there are some forms of "you've done enough of this particular task" that are not strictly due to laziness - its a balance mechanism. It allows people who only have a few hours a week to play to have a chance of keeping up with those who sit in the game for 14-16 hours every day, particularly as it relates to end game content unlocking each patch. The big difference is whether there are _other_ things to do that aren't directly related to end-game progress but are still relevant, useful and fun. I've seen far too many games that effectively prevent all actions after a certain point (especially when combined with Sin #3: Greed - "just pay us $5 and you can do 3 more actions today!") Whenever I run into that type of time-gating, my next step is the uninstall button.
i heartily disagree on the other kind of time gating not being so bad. i. don't have the energy to play one game every day for an hour, rather I like to log in at the weekend, and play for a solid block of time. So when the game is like 'play an hour and then everything's locked till tommorrow', i fall behind in about two weeks and stop wanting to play. Although i'm happy for them to space out their content over realtime, i.e. 'this content un locks on tuesday, but you can do loads of prep work beforehand' because then i don't feel like i'm being punished for having a real life.
@@saelorasinanardiel8983 Sure but there's people in the exact opposite end of the spectrum - those who have a few minutes every day but not a single huge block. Blizzard (and every other MMO developer) has to try and balance people like you who want to play in one large chunk per week, people like those I just described who want to play in small chunks every day or two, _and_ people who drop 14 hours a day every day, and do so in a way that doesn't let those 14-hours-a-day folk just completely run over the entire rest of the player base and make _everyone_ else feel like they'll never keep up. Its not as easy as it sounds when you're looking at it from the perspective of only trying to fulfill one single person's vision of the game (ie: your own). Telemetry and metrics help direct such things across the larger player base ("last year we saw a 20% increase in weekend-block players and a 15% decrease in 14-hours-per-day players, so let's do more weeklies"), but that only takes you so far unless your player base is _hugely_ skewed to one side or the other. WQs I think is a decent balance. Not perfect - there is no such thing as perfect when you're targeting millions of people who all have different interests, schedules, etc - but they work "kind of" like dailies for people who want to play daily, while also having rollover for people who want to play in time blocks (still doesn't fit your own scenario since they're 3 day rollovers rather than 7, but at least you're only falling behind by ~60% per week rather than ~85% per week - not _great_ but certainly _better_). Sadly, they seem insistent on returning back to dailies. No idea what design decisions is driving that. I can't imagine a huge percentage of players are demanding that they have basically the same system but without the rollover to buffer against. Maybe dailies are just easier to develop due to some weird quirk of their code base, given that they mostly seem to show up in minor patches where less time is typically spent on development? No idea. Annoying nonetheless. The other thing they've attempted (to varying degrees of success) is adding systems where you don't _have_ to "keep up". Dungeon and raid difficulties are the primary thing here. If you don't have time to keep up with any guild's raiding schedule, you can always just stick with LFR. It can be painful but at least you get to experience the content without needing a ridiculously high time investment for gear farming. The mythic+ dungeons scale from "not even fully m0 geared" to "on par with mythic raiding", so you can usually find groups for that if you target an appropriate level for whatever gear you've managed to farm. Of course, its never going to be possible to join the hardcore best-in-the-world teams when you're only able to play for a few hours on the weekend. So you kind of have to create your own definition of what it means to "fall behind". When I'm raiding, I personally look for groups that run on the order of 2 raiding sessions per week and 2-3 hours per session. That's generally enough to push decently into mythic before the end of each raid tier if your group isn't complete garbo. Sometimes can even complete mythic if everyone tries hard enough. But that's "by the end of the raid tier". That kind of schedule won't get you into a world first position by any stretch of the imagination. And I've been in other guilds that were happy to just farm heroic and only ever poked the first couple bosses on mythic each tier if they happened to clear heroic fast enough that week _and_ happened to have 20 people on at the time. Hell there are people out there who never step foot into a raid and are happy just running around picking flowers to sell on the auction house. And keep in mind, everything I've said here applies to every MMO. I'm most familiar with WoW but the same development pressures apply to any such game. Some developers will make different choices than Blizzard has, and their choices may result in a game closer that more closely aligns with your playstyle, but the important thing to remember is that it's a _choice,_ based on whatever telemetry and other data they have available about how their specific player base wants to play - there is no one single "right" answer that exactly applies to more than one single player. There is only ever a balancing act.
Ya so I thought about that too. Some players can play 20 hours others cant, so time gating does indeed allow players to stay on relatively the same levels. However, there are 2 ways this can be done: Preventing players from progressing is the negative way, while creating catch up mechanics is the positive way. For example, players could get 1 hour a day of double xp, thats the positive way which is really about catching up and not about stretching the content unnecessarily.
@@edumazieri They already have that, but that only gets you to max level. And that's never been time gated anyway - it takes maybe 24 hours for even moderately geared/skilled players to cap out and as low as maybe 10-12 if you're really good and/or get carried through dungeon grinds. Its up to each player whether they spread that 24 hours over 2 months or they suck back a few energy drinks and pound it out in a day. Most people can manage it with a reasonable amount of playtime in their schedule in maybe 1-2 weeks. Certainly not going to be hitting any world firsts at that pace, but you aren't dreadfully far behind either. The parts that are time gated are the end game content (raids, dungeons, rep farming, etc). The stuff that gives you good gear. And Blizz does try to provide catch-up mechanics to some degree - world quests eventually give you gear comparable to LFR or even normal raiding, M+ dungeons can be run at any pace you want and will eventually give you gear similar in quality to raiding, etc. That stuff has all been in the game for a few years now (some of it for many years). The reason for time-gating is to make it so that the people who play 20 hours a day can't have a full set top-tier raiding gear in their first week while you're still working on hitting max level. Of course they have the ability to get _somewhat_ ahead of you, and as those time gates release if you haven't caught up you're just going to get further behind, but there's only so much they can do in that sense - they can't time-gate hard enough to keep the guy who plays for an hour a week on par with the people who want to play 20 hours a day. And that's where the telemetry and metrics comes into play. They'll _know_ what percentage of their player base plays 20 hours a day vs those who play 20 hours a week vs those who play 20 hours a month vs those who play closer to 20 hours a year. They'll take a look at that chart, find the median and set the time gates in such a way that playing 20 hours a day will get you _somewhat_ further ahead relative to someone who plays 20 hours a week (or whatever the median is), but not so far ahead that the latter guy is completely out of his league from day one. The guy who plays 20 hours a month though? Probably below the median. And yep, if you miss that threshold you're simply going to fall behind. There has to be a cut-off point somewhere. Catch-up mechanics won't really help that - if you're not playing enough to make use of the current catch-up mechanics, you're probably also going to fall behind in short order even if a GM flat out gave you a set of gear comparable to the top players one week just to see what you'd do with it.
@@altrag Ya iI know what they do, but the point is some parts of this are done with the intention of players catching up, while other parts of it are done with the intent of stretching out the content and slowing progression. Slowing progression with a time gate is telling players they CANT play the game anymore, its a negative way of doing it. I understand it does also achieve the goal of keeping players relatively on the same level, but just because it does that too doesnt mean its a good way of achieving it. They should use other methods of keeping players relatively at the same level, without necessarily saying "no more game for you today come back tomorrow". I am kind of ok with weekly time gating, for specially hard content, but daily quests and stuff are just boring menial tasks to force players to log in everyday... its just crap.
I like the starting zones being forests. For new players its reckognizable and relatable. It gives the new player a chance to get immersed in the setting with a visual setting they are familiar with from their real life experience. And for the old longtime mmo players its sort of a "Welcome" sign to log in and see the forest Ive seen so many times before in so many games. I wanna see the floating mushroom city or the jumping from cloud to cloud high up in the sky zone. I wanna see all that tomorrow. Today Im happy wity the familiar lush early summer forest with the butterflies and birds chirping while I familiarize myself with the game mechanics and lay down foundations for an emotional attachment to the game.
Genshin Impact on every event . . . I really hate time gating, I work 60-70 hours a week fairly often so daily things are a bit annoying and then when the weekend comes and I have time to play I'm only allowed so much before I'm told to come back later.
This is probably the most infuriating thing. I have a similar schedule to yours. I don't get to play a lot of games, so when I can, I like to actually set down and play, but the time gate stuff if anything demotivates me and always makes me go play something else with my time.
I agree! My days off are sparadic since i work under DoT hours of service so i never have time to play mmos and when i do get a day off i cant make any progress. It ultimately made me stop playing mmos all together.
it's a gacha game. It's designed to fit the student/average adult schedule of working for a day, playing for an hour, probably on the bus. Even when it is on pc, it is still designed so if you play a little bit everyday you would not be left behind in progress comparing to people who play a lot. Most importantly, whatever people claim, it ain't a mmo. Massive? no. multiplayer? not necessarily. Online? yeah only that.
Doesn't help that Genshin Impact's time-gating is just an excuse to get its audience to pay real-world money in order to max out their character and weapons in order to level up their account.
Also lazy design: grinding. It's easy to have hundreds of hours of content when its composed entirely of doing the same thing over and over and over and over and over again just for a shot at a rare loot drop.
if you got your rare drop in one kill then it's not rare and you blast through all the content in an instant and whine there's no content because you no lifed it in one weekend. Yea... devs aren't machines and can't make infinite content. that would be bloat.
@@BladeDevil That's not true at all. It's the question of what does it take to get the opportunity for that one kill. If you take a loot table, look at the drop rates, and compare it to the time it takes to run an instance of that boss, you get an average time to drop. Thus, you have two ways of adjusting this: the lazy way of making a number smaller, or the more difficult way of putting more content between the player and the drop. That is what grind is: it's a way of imposing an average time to drop. It is, shall we say, time gating. With the main difference being that true time gating lets you go to sleep, go to school, go to work, go on a date, and have a life and still keep up in a game that maintains interest for months or years, while grinding doesn't. But time gating is a sin, so grind must also be a sin.
@@jimschuler8830 Okay, devil's advocate here: *Really* think about what you consider "content". It sounds like an absurd question _at first_ but the true difference between games believed to "have lots of content" and games believed to "not have much content" is _NOT_ a higher number of developers/development budget, or some lack of "laziness", or game designer magic, or even necessarily harsh deadlines. If all content is "one and done", it is _PHYSICALLY IMPOSSIBLE_ for a team of developers to make a "big content game" in a genre like MMOs that's so content hungry. *Making players repeat tasks is a necessity, not a sin.* The goal is not to delete grinding, but instead to make the grind feel weightless, as opposed to a burden. Ideally, so people like you and me won't even recognise we're grinding, so we will _happily_ participate in horizontal progression systems instead of avoiding them like the plague, ecetera. *That's* how you get a game with "a lot of content". Monster Hunter is a great example of this dichotomy in action, because MH: Rise *has* been taking the "put content between players and the drop" route, and frankly its endgame hasn't kept my attention as well as MHW: Iceborne did, or some older titles like Generations Ultimate. _(despite IMO Rise having better core gameplay than either of those)_ There are more complicated factors to why I believe its endgame is worse, but the Monster Hunter franchise has "lots of content" thanks to grinding usually being well-implemented, and *I wish* Rise gave me more to grind for like Apex monster armorsets, instead of giving me all the Apex materials I'll ever need within ~2 hunts for each, or if the new Valstrax update was making me live and breathe Valstrax hunts in the same way Rajang's update did. _(seriously, I've hunted Iceborne's version of Rajang over 50 times, the game kept count, I did almost all of them with the same weapontype, I am still not bored of fighting it)_ This isn't an excuse for 0.001% drop rates, but it *IS* to say game design is a whole lot more complicated than "grinding bad, extrinsic motivation bad". Also, if increasing the average time to drop is "effectively time gating", how is putting a bunch of mobs between the boss and the players to deliberately elongate each run not _also_ "effectively time gating" and therefore a bad thing by the same logic?
11:00 - that's why i quit rs3 for osrs, i was spending 6-8 hrs per day doing the same daily tasks in the same order for "maximum efficiency". i wasent directly forced to do those things, but as gamers we do. Now in osrs if i want to efficiently train a skill, i simply sit down and train it. Not 15 mins per day of that skill, i can train the skill for 45 mins if i want, or 5 mins, or 5 hrs, or 15 hrs. i am only limited by that which i want to do, and never by what im "forced" to do by game design. i also felt forced to log in at the same time every day (daily reset) and begin the dailies. i didn't have fun or even want to play at that point, i felt forced to play which is a shitty feeling.
Huh, sounds like how broadcast tv was. I mean, there's a shared experience in watching a show at the same time as everyone else but I prefer having my entertainment fix my schedule.
I think the level of anticipated danger is reflected by the starting zone. A quiet forest that is brightly lit is less threatening than a dark cave hanging upside down with a massive monster nearby.
There's just one thing I would like to add. Time gating is not necessarily something only MMO games do. Gacha games in general do this too. Genshin Impact, Honkai Impact 3 and Arknights are good examples. And while they don't have the other problems mentioned, they have a reason to time gate their content. China (which is where all these games companies are from), has specific laws against addiction to games, so these companies are forced to implement systems like those. I am not sure if those companies (Mihoyo and Hypergyph/Yostar) would still time gate them even if it wasn't for that reason. I suspect that Mihoyo would... But still, it's interesting to see MMO's are still doing this practice. So many years since I've last played an MMO, and so far, I'm surprised that most of them are still having the same (and some even more) problems than in the past...
the anti addiction laws are understandable, but, and im just gonna be talking about genshin here, the fact that resin runs out so fucking fast is bs. im at the point where im constantly grinding for artifacts, ascension mats, and mora and it's irritating to only be able to run 4 domains before all my resin runs out and the rng isnt on my side and hasnt been for weeks.
I've been Beta testing, playing or waiting in eager anticipation for the next big MMO since 1996 up until about 2 years ago when I decided to leave this genre and all of its BS in the dust ... I've discovered decades of games I skipped over the years and have had 10 times more fun now that I've broken my addiction to Skinner box game design
Mind if I ask if you got some examples that helped you "break out", maybe some lesser known ones as well, genuinely curious as I find myself often returning or chasing the next "high".
@@six2make4 There is no next High, .. you'll always be chasing that first MMO / Raid / Group experience ... you'll always be chasing that first piece of raid gear high ... if you get annoyed now trying to get a raid group together, it starts feeling like your herding cats or you find the grind annoying and achievement rewards dull or the end game starts feeling like just the end ... the genera is done with you .. a new MMO isn't going to help. Not in any particular order try... The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt Divinity Original Sin 2 Red Dead Redemption 1 & 2 Horizon Zero Dawn Mass Effect 2 Rise of the Tomb Raider Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey Grand Theft Auto 5 Far Cry 3 Dragon Age series Skyrim Elite Dangerous (Best in 3D) Crysis Half-Life 2 Half-Life Alyx (3D only) Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice Dark Souls 2 Borderlands 2 Monster Hunter: World Baldur's gate 3 Deus Ex Ori Myst Stanley Parable Full Throttle Have Fun
@@logun24x7 Yeah, you are probably right, already played some of those but def. not all of them so there is some I can get into, thanks man, have a nice day
part of the "always start in a forest" thing that I was surprised and pleased to see subverted was final fantasy 14 where you can start in ul'dah or limsa lominsa instead of generic mmo forest gridania if you so desire, it's a little thing but it was nice to be able to start in a place that wasn't just another temperate forest with huge deciduous trees.
Timegating is also used in some other games. I've played a few strategy and build games that limit how many actions you have each day (but you can buy extra turns for real world $). To Say the least, they never got a penny from me for that.
Thank you for this video. This problem alone was what ultimately made me stop playing mmos. Over focus on dailies, login attendance, mission run/entry limits, its all padding and it benefits no one. Not even the devs! After the dailies are done most players just get off and burn out after a few days of doing this anyway so who is this benefiting? I genuinely do not understand why anyone would think this is a good idea or why nearly the entire mmo market started doing this...
6:32 i will never forgive them. Wilfred wasn‘t an adventurer, he was a member of the guard; a brave an honourable man that will never be forgotten! and they removed him from the intro and changed his name to „forgotten“. the gall. you writing his name in the chat earned you my respect and a like.
Doesn't it just half the amount of XP you get after some time? Or as they put it, double the XP when you come back. I mean, you still can make a lot of progress and it doesn't feel like you wasted time when you don't play, because it allows you to have more XP when you come back. I mean, it's still the same principle, but it doesn't really time lock the content. Obviously, unless I'm wrong and there's more time locking, then fuck wow
Have you ever played game where not time gate created pressure on players for degenerated gameplay and ridiculous time spent to being ahead and then making playerbase unhealthy in chase of endless need of being ahead?Then making them disgusted by playing so much and burnt out and instead taking it moderately they start hate it cause game allowed ffor that degenerated gameplay . That is why time gates exist and for fantasy reasons.
@@Swordart2022 The video explained why time gating exists. Obviously you would rather troll in the comment section instead of actually watching and learning something.
You talking about timegating made me realize exactly why I quit playing animal crossing: new horizons, I was sick of waiting a whole day just to take down a bridge, and waiting another for that bridge to be rebuilt in a slightly different location
One reason 3 people I know stopped playing Guild Wars 2 is because they wanted to make this one specific item, which if they buy from player shops cost too much gold they can't get themselves at a normal rate, meaning they either have to spend real money to buy the in-game currency to convert real money to gold, or they have to slowly craft the item where you would need something like 20 of a certain item, and you can only craft one of said item a day. Wonderful time-gating.
So true, I've switched between casual and hardcore play many times, and the time gates so often just makes you quit, if the game developers does not value their players in the design.. why should players value the game..
I think time gating of dailies / weeklies / stamina bars / seasonal caps and resets, is also to get people to play more, since it encourages players to clear all of those every time, which can sometimes take hours every day
palette swap ist not necessarily bad if it is used right. it can be a visual language giving you information about an enemy instead of reading text or numbers. it could mean this enemy is similar to what you already know except for some things. learning what the different color means can then be used in other cases to predict what an enemy can do.
Actually, the resin system is rather fair. I understand it limits how much you can farm each day, but being able to farm everything without limit would certainly destroy the balance of farming. Plus, you can even bank up to 5x40 resin (as of version 1.4, before it was only 3) that you can use for domains and ley lines. Plus plus, events don’t even require resin anymore. And the creators do take criticism to heart. They reduce the resin cost for normal bosses from 40 to 30, which does make a difference, considering how much of the materials you require for even just a single character. Maybe you already quit the game entirely, but it doesn’t matter, it just came to mind.
@@Sherolox A lot of people already quit the game entirely lol. The average PS4 player only spends like 11 hours in this game and then they just screw off to the next of 90 or so games they have in their library. I think I'll come back in Genshin's third anniversary. The game should be as fair as Honkai 3 at that point. Maybe. IDK, it's miHoYo, they suck.
Genshin isn’t that bad. WoW has time gate and other gacha mechanics like M+ and you still pay a sub. I allow myself to spend no more than 20/month on genshin. Yeah, it’s a gotcha game but I dropped $300 dollars boosting alts over three months in wow. In fact I’ve spent the most money on MTX in wow and its one of my least played games. Fuck wow, it’s worse than most gatcha.
@@user-fv7jd4xj5n Genshin is a little bit weird for me personally. I played Honkai so I knew exactly what to expect, however, I believe that Genshin feels like it has an identity crisis. You can't farm primogems for LONG enough for it to be a satisfying gacha experience, but you also can't farm materials for LONG enough to get between "I want to play more" and "I had enough for today". You farm primogems by doing the abyss which resets once in what feels an eternity and even though it does give you a pretty good rate f roll per week once you get a good team and good at the game it is at best a 1-hour job. 1 hour every 2 weeks! Again, you do the abyss and you wait for the rotation for 2 weeks. WEEKS. So you would farm materials to get yourself busy, right? Well yes, but even at 160 resin you can kill 4 world bosses OR do 8 artifact/material dungeons. Or any mix of the two, but the fact is that you are LUCKY when you get a day when you are playing the game for more than 1 hour. It is sad and painful bc you grind for things you will not use for a reasonable amount of time and the worst part is that every time you do you make yourself stronger thus decreasing the time you play even less. TL;DR Genshins gacha progression happens once every 2 weeks and resin limits the in-game progression to just 1-2 hours per day. 2 if you are full, but 1 if you aren't full (bc it won't be able to recharge over night). It is not enough to be invested in.
Fr. Some people excuse or "explain" it by saying that it's necessary because players can just blast through content and finish the game that way. Translation: the developers can't be arsed to add anything replayable or long lasting so they prevent you from experiencing the little content they actually have at once.
JSH hit so close to home with the "game experience" vs "growing numbers" analogy its hilarious for me.. im one of those gamers who legit doesnt even watch the numbers i only focus on the healthbars and skill interactions of enemies as well as my own character. say what you will, its actually how i learn mechanics _faster_ and play better than like 90% of ppl i end up in groups with. the reason this statement was so spot on for me was that i never even see or notice when "numbers get bigger", instead i literally _feel_ the changes in game and can tell when i need to adjust (or when adjustments have been made, i.e. shadowbuffs/nerfs). adversely, if i just paid, played, or grinded for hours to get a new piece of gear or weapon or something and cant even tell a difference, i would almost *immediately* start questioning game design. great call, good sir!
Time gating for me is very bad because I have a huge 5-10hrs block on Sundays (usually), but extremely little time on the week days and Saturdays. So A player that can play 1-2 hours a day has a tremendous advantage on me for progression. It may take him 30 days, but it will take me 30 weeks... and I will be very bored that I can't progress into the content that interest me on the only day that I have. I stopped playing Antlantica Online for that in 2010 (they gave you 2 hours of farming per day then DESTROY your drop rate), and I stopped WoW at the Garrisons for the same thing (on top of the Billion factions which become useless next expac). So for me a game must not lock content behind time wall, or I simply can't progress and follow my guildmates in a timely fashion. Then I get left behid, get bored of playing alone to catch-up and quit. Very very bad mechanics, agreed !
Honestly I thing pallet swaps can be really cool, they give a new feel to an enemy. That is, provided you only do it like once at most per enemy and it appears much later after the original. Though I suspect you were saying it was a problem when excessively spammed.
One thing I like about Guild Wars 1 is that the Prophesies Campaign starts off in an idyllic fantasy area with your usual locations, beautiful forests and all. Then they nuke the place once you've become attached and suddenly you're in The Elder Scrolls: Fallout. I remember as kid having a Jon Bernthal's Punisher moment when it happened.
A lot of mobile games have been using time gating as well. Big ones like Madden Mobile and Harry Potter: Hogwarts Mystery do this and its frustrating since they're not terrible games.
Man your serie is scary af XD im watching each episode 1 by 1 and each time Im wondering if youll talk about this or that and it ends up in the next video each time.
I quit DFO because of it forcing how much a day you can play. It felt like a chore to log in and play because I knew I could only do it for x amount of time.
As always, an excellent and quite accurate analysis of all the weaknesses of the mmo genre. The game studios, too often treat they players as mere mindless NPCs.
@Josh This was our favorite so far while big budget (Jim Sterling says Triple AAAAAAA games here) succumbs to this 80% of the time with all the soulless passionless crap they put out, the MMO GENRE suffers from this 95% of the time. An even when executed as well as can be (time gating) I detest it at every turn. I will forever feel make a great game, make the world fun and enjoyable and you will ALWAYS have a player base.... As per usual Mr Hayes THANK YOU and Kudos for remaining in our VERY BIASED point of view the best mmo reviewer/thought discussion piece creator.
Your opinion on the generic setting is absolutely valid but I grew up surrounded by forest as a child so I feel comfortable in those settings. It's familiar. Classic World of Warcraft has three forest starting zones. Tirisfal Glades, Elwynn Forest and Teldrassil but they also have the snowy lands of Dun Morogh, the vast plains of Mulgore and the barren wasteland of Durotar to go too if you want something different.
I don't remember Warframe having time gating. The only time when you don't have anything to do is when you're waiting for the devs to release new content. If something is in the game you can grind forever and get it, right?
@@KethusNadroev Syndicates and Factions have reputation gain limit per day. And you need reputation to unlock good stuff. And the limit is based on your mastery rank. So new players suffer more than veterans. And this does suck when you have, like a life and spending 6 hours in one day getting what you want is just better than 2 hours, 3 days across. Its also affected by your mood, one day i might be interested in long sessions, others i rather not even play. And if you consider the weapon/frame construction time being 1-3 real life days a time gate... then thats another waiting... or payup platinum to get it now.
@@mrvex6695 Right, I'd forgotten about these, as I got everything long time ago. Though the premium currency is tradeable, so I consider it farmable, and you can use that to skip everything and buy the syndicate stuff from other players. The other thing I'm not sure about is taking one mastery test per day. I know you have to wait if you fail, but if you succeed and you're a low rank and gain another rank the same day could you do it?
@@KethusNadroev Only one true attempt per day, but you can practise it without any penalties in Simaris sanctuary. And i am pretty sure its impossible to get two ranks in one day. Given you get MR points for clearning nodes and leveling up equipment. Equipment that takes days to assemble unless you pay up.
Actually, with syndicates, at least right now, you can dump medallions on your syndicate until the standing fills up. It's now only factions that have the wall hitting phase. The most interesting thing to me with wf and time gating is how it's used in quests; the old frame quests required you to build each part with the complete build time to continue the quest, which was really annoying. However, as time went on, quest related builds eventually dropped to 1 minute build times, during which Plot sometimes happens. It demonstrates a shift in philosophy. Too bad that shift didn't happen before equinox...
@@Gnidel I always thought that they could reinvent old content and make raids scaled up properly. I did the Uldar time walking one but it was not scaled up right. They are useless at game design. It's always far too easy or far too hard. If you're clutching it, it's because you have idiots.
@@jumpkicking why do you assume blizzard is making a mistake? Blizzard wants you to stay focus on the current expac. If you scaled up old raid, people would do em even for no loot. That would be too much fun and too much fun makes a game not very addictive. Blizzard needs players to spam M+, which is the core addictive gameplay loop of wow these days. The unpleasantness makes it addictive.
@@Carltoncurtis1 Yeah exactly its not fun. The game design is bad. If you want to be addicted to unpleasant stuff then you have an issue. They are getting your to subscribe anyway, if you find the game super fun even getting no loot people are going to buy every expansion anyway. There is no need to design it so the game is addictive not fun, because if it was fun people would stay and play forever anyways. They would enjoy the leveling and getting to max and enjoy the late game, unlike what happens to the vast majority of players... they get bored leveling and quit or they get into endgame and quit because there's nothing to do but hate playing. Wow is successful, but it's numbers have been below it's peak for forever now. It's losing numbers each generation and nostalgia won't last forever when the generation that was playing at it's peak all die off. It's pretty bad design, they make it so classes are intentionally bad or broken. They do patches but we all know it's intentional, many devs said it is. Games trash. They make mythic world 1st racing impossible despite having teams test it for months lol.
@@jumpkicking you don’t understand. The arbitrary unpleasantness is REQUIRED to make anything addictive. If blizzard didn’t do this, everyone would have fun, feel satisfied and unsub to wait for the next patch. Fun for us = less money for them. That’s why I say it must be unpleasant and random to be addictive. This is behavioral science 101.
Time-gating is not necessarily evil, it can be used to equalize the playing field a little between the kids and the professional streamers that can put 8 hours per day on the game, and the single moms with kids that can spend at most 4 hours per week. The rested XP system pioneered by World of Warcraft is the best example of this. Weekly caps to "badge of valor" systems in MMOs with vertical progression is another example, at least as long as the cap is not too annoyingly low. (Looking at you FF14.) But yeah sometimes it's used for poor or manipulative reasons. Daily login freebies like in GW2 is something I particularly cannot stand. At least give me a quest to get your freebie, it is completely immersion breaking to be handled something for nothing from a calendar UI.
Yeah. Without those time gates, all those grinds would probably have been adjusted into something that takes a ridiculous amount of time that most people simply don't have in order to accomplish.
Level caps, loot with a weekly lockout, resource caps (as long as they stack and cap out at a progression limit instead of daily / weekly) keep things fair without laziness
IT would be if it was the only solution to the actual problem, which is not the case. Take for example the Xp system pioneered by WOW, the first system they tested worked by punishing instead of rewarding, people earned less xp the longer they played it wasn't time gating because your XP was simply halved, but it was somewhat similar, and beta tester hated it. So they reversed the system, instead of halving your XP, after playing for few hours, they doubled your xp the first hours played. After they played with the XP given by monster, they ended up with a system that was mechanically equivalent to halving XP after few hours of gameplay, but it was way better recieved. We human react better to reward than punishment. Any time gate can easily be switched to a more positive system that I will refer as time boost. Instead of of limiting the amount of thing your player can do each day, simply gave them a daily timed boost (don't need to actually be timed) in which they can very easily progress, then when the boost pass, let player be able to play but now the progress they were able to do in two hours boosted, wil require eight hour of gameplay unboosted.
dunno. WoW isn't that bad. A lot of his examples are for more extreme examples. The idea of Archeage: You have 3000 points per day to do anything crafting related. Once that's spent, you either wait or pay for a refill.
You realize weekly tomes is a form of time gating content, right? Or savage raids only allowing you gear for the first clear per week when it is first out? Or Alliance raids only giving you one weekly piece of gear with one token per week? By all means enjoy your game and I'm happy for you, but don't lie to people.
@@CivilChev 1. Haven't gotten to endgame yet. 2. In the original they decreased the amount of xp you got form playing the game, likely to cover for the fact that they had next to no content. And yes they may have limited some of the endgame content apparently, but that's a small portion of the content that's being time gated, and while it could be better if that wasn't the case overall the game has a ton of content you can freely access, and tons of great stuff. To say that i'm lying to people about it being a good game because the endgame content is being time gated seems a little extreme to me, especially since it'll likely be months before most players even reach it. Who knows maybe they'll have a better system by then.
@@sir.mannington You said in its original form they did time-(gating) hardcore, implying that it is no longer the case. I assumed you had already hit end game and understood what the grind was like since you didn't clarify that you hadn't yet and so I apologize if I came off as brash for claiming you were lying to people. I never said the game was a bad game. And the reason I seemed a little aggressive is because I'm tired of people who play the game, complain about the game, yet as soon as the game is criticized in anyway they feel the need to defend it, even if it's something they actually agree with. I enjoyed the game, back in the day, but in my opinion, it's not as good as it used to be and this idea that the game shouldn't be criticized will mean the developers won't realize they are treading down the path of ruin.
@@CivilChev That is very fair. And I mean I would still say that the time gating isn't anywhere near as bad as before realm reborn, or what some other games may do but I can see your point and I am all for healthy doses of criticism. It just did seem a tad aggressive when you told me not to lie to people. But I get your point now that I've heard it in full, and I hope that the game comes to a point where you can enjoy it again. Or at least enjoy it more, and I hope I will continue to enjoy it once I actually make it to the end game.
@@CivilChev 1.0 was so much worse, trust me. You know the leve quest system that is kinda irrelevant now? That was your main method of actually getting experience back then. you got a handful of allowances per day and getting exp elsewhere was severely limited. Thats time-gating the basic process of leveling up your character. Not that it had much of an end-game to speak of either.
Time-gating for me can be a pass or a big nope depending on the game, Genshin Impact? i've seen enough mobile games that time gates with energy (in GI's case : Resin) and time gates events with real hours (I've been playing FGO for 4 years and still counting, to the point that if an event is 100% open i can blow past contents in hours). F2P games have a "sort-of flimsy and arguable" pass for time-gating, the question is where the time-gate is applied. What i don't like is games that i have paid or subbed for but still time-gated for important contents like story, case and point : WOW Shadowlands where the main story is kind of unfinished but time-gated with Anima grinds for renown, and even then the renown grind is 3 per week (and while you can catch up on renown if you say played like far later it's the story-gating that pissed me off. keeping with the grind alongside some menial task is what burned me out of WoW and return to FF14. Incidentally in FF14, the main story for the expansions are not time gated at all, you can blow past story at your leisure be it super fast or molasses slow
Th thing is, if you've played FGO for even a little while you get tons of Apples to the point where AP isn't even an issue. I played Genshin pretty heavily for a month and still only felt like I could do like three things a day.
@@bransonallen2925 oh yeah, i had 300 golden apples and still counting. That is why in F2P games time-gating is sort pf iffy but an acceptable minus according to me at least, time-gating in a subscription game is an absolute minus that is not cool
"They haven't actually designed that much game for you to play" is the exact reality of gameplay right now, and if you can find a game where it's not the reality, I immediately give it a few thumbs up. World of Warcraft is a really good game at the end of an expansion, where you can log in and just do everything, but the most frustrating part is logging in when a whole new expansion came out just to realize that there's somehow fewer things for you to do. If we talk non-MMO genre, you get games like Hades or Returnal, Lightning Returns FF13. I hate bringing these up because I guarantee most people love at least 2 of these games. However, the fact of the matter is that you've designed a game with about 4 hours of gameplay and instead of creating a fun and thought out experience, you're just going to have everything reset every now and then so your players have to do 6x as much work to get just as far. I thoroughly enjoyed all 3 of these games, but hated that you'd start over. Hades had a good combat system, Returnal feels really responsive, Lightning Returns perfected the idea of the combat system that the first 2 games offered. But they added in mechanics that were like "Okay let's start over or limit your time that you can play, because we really don't have much going for us here." It's the one reason I couldn't play Majora's Mask. It just felt like you didn't have enough content to play. You release the game unfinished with minimal story, with the idea that if you die or you take too long to do something, you start all over from the beginning. It's a lazy excuse to not create more game.
world of warcraft: shadowlands, some are kill your 100 to finish quest, it a percentage bar fill bar by killing mobs one mob is worth 1 percent of bar, as long as you kill them 1 at a time if you kill a group of them, then the group counts as 1 percent of the bar, only seen that on one quest though, tedious dull quest and they wonder why people are leaving, that dull quest turned up during a time gated event, and probably wont come across it again as it was a main story line quest.
Its really bad with the covenants right now. I haven't played in a week... of World of Warcraft in case someone doesn't know yet... and the thought of playing and knowing I HAVE to go grind because I missed my daily and weekly progresses to continue the storyline... just makes me not want to do it.
For me it is the modern definition of a Dungeon. A dungeon used to be a place you would have to navigate, deal with traps, getting lost, deal with threats and be in for awhile. Now days it is a linear journey from boss room to boss room as fast as possible with no real thought or interest. A Loot Acquisition Location.. not a dungeon.
This is why I give FFXIV's weekly/daily time-gates a pass: 1) the Producer/Director Naoki Yoshida has explicitly stated that he *wants* people to feel free to take breaks from the game; to unsub if they feel like it and enjoy other titles they love. This makes it clear the man is confident that the game is *so* good, he's certain you *will* come back. Ballsy, but the game has the numbers to justify that confidence. And the time gates ensure that, when you come back, you are never too far behind to be irrelevant or unable to enjoy new content in very short order. Unlike some MMOs, unsubbing from XIV for a few months doesn't leave you impossibly far behind because you missed 60 to 90 days of hardcore grinding. Instead, you're more likely to just be a handful of items and a questline or two behind being able to do the newest stuff, and the time gates (along with other very smart and player-respectful choices) ensure those who no-life the game, and those who hop in and out, are never so far apart in terms of gear and content access that they are effectively playing two separate games; as is the case with many MMO endgames. 2) the time gates give players the opportunity to look around and *find* all the mountains of not-timegated content the game has. Do your weekly raids and turn-ins, your daily content roulettes and reputation quests, then go do... anything else the game lets you do infinitely, which is not at all a short list, and which people tunnel-visioned on the kind of content that is gated would miss or ignore if the game didn't give breathing room and lift the pressure of trying to stay 'current'. Or just... stop playing for the day/week and go play other things, because there's no immense pressure to play constantly. That said, FFXIV is the exception that proves the rule. Most games that have time gating also have hardcore grinds that will put daily grinders so far ahead, if RNG favors them, that the time gated stuff is only an obstacle to the midcore and casual players who can't grind their fingertips off. This creates a growing disparity between player groups that some games *literally layer in entire bloated temporary catch-up systems* every few patches to forcibly close the gap, if they bother to address the gap at all. TL;DR While there are games that do use time gating effectively and ethically as a means to improve playerbase cohesion and relieve 'end game' pressure to explore other parts of the game or just *not* play for a while, most do not do this, and as a result, fall into the category of stretching content for the sake of padding, or, worse, end up creating a rift in the player base by time gating those who already have limited playtime.
long live Yoshi-P, FF14 never make me feel like i'm doing a "desk job". WoW did for the brief time i played it and i burned out faster and should i return i have this sinking feeling that my progress will be so far behind that i might as well never return
Well, something that does bother me about sub-based MMOs, is feeling like I should be playing to get use out of a subscription. GW2 fills in that casual gap nicely. I could miss a day or a whole week and it won't matter since it's buy-to-play. With the exception of having horizontal instead of vertical progression, I legit don't know why more people don't play GW2. But considering that's the most major difference, I assume that's why WoW and FF XIV still have the numbers they do. Well, also, the former has a huge community still, and the latter is part of a popular franchise and is known to have a great story.
@@hoshi314 That's not the feeling I've been getting with Shadowbringers... just because the expansion has the FFXIV brand doesn't mean it will sell well if the hype doesn't carry it... and so far what info we did get about Endwalker sounds like history repeating itself; not in the lore but in the game development since FFXIV from what I've been watching so far is just as susceptible to the 7 dealdy sins of MMO design...
@@drakeway981 The devs are doubling down on the homogenization of healers when Sage got announced as a barrier healer (there's more than 2 types of healers btw)and are probably going to double down on homogenizing on tanks even further(also more than 2 types), and I would not be surprised if they made every DPS play exactly like healers with no oGCD of any kind...
While its also a form of time gating, I like GW2's Event shedule. By making Events happen only at certain times it promotes people to gather around those times and result in having enough people to actually finish the group event without having to resort to automatic group finders and their annoying queues
I rank re-using assets on the same level as time-gating. ESPECIALLY when they boast "new monsters!" and then showcase a re-colored, or ever-so-slightly altered existing model. You make BILLIONS, you can afford to make new models instead of being lazy.
i think its a bit more forgivable if its a smaller scale game that doesnt make a boat load and if theres at least another unique model or two as well as the recolours, big problem i have with recolours personally is getting them alone in a new update when id be more understanding of it if they were an extra alongside some new model since i get the resource reason for why they exist in the first place
Re using assets can be good. For example, reusing bears to get polar bears. Yeah, it's lazy but it may fit the environment well and why make a new model if a reskin is good enough. That said. I don't think it should be the main point of an update or expansion. But some re using is fine with me
Dragon Age 2 was the biggest abuse of reusing artwork the warehouses were the same warehouse used infinitely just through a different door chosen out of the only two doors devs had used, it was an insult to dragon age and the fans who wasted their money buying it
Interestingly Warframe time gates with its crafting system. However for my personal experience it's actually added to the experience because of how excited I get when I know in a couple days I'm going to use this awesome new Warframe
@V W I don't think games should encourage that. It's bad for the basement-dwellers, as it encourages them to continue that lifestyle, and bad for the people with jobs who have to then compete on an uneven field.
But at the same time it puts those people who have one free day in their week that they can play and no time otherwise, at a disadvantage. If you have a daily limit on stuff, allow players to accumulate, idk, up to 10 days' worth of that limit to blow through when they have time.
But if caps exist, why does it matter? I hate not being able to progress significantly on the one day I week I can really sink all of my time in. It holds people back more than anything imo. I do my dailies and log off because there is nothing else to do. That isn't fun. I'd rather be behind the hardcore grinders than be behind in general. Having to play every day to enjoy a game is garbage.
Time gating is why I quit playing current expansions in wow and why I play old content. I want to play as much as I want, not as much as some game company wants me to play.
I see EVE Online's skill system as a really good example for time-gating - especially since it is tied to an subscription monetization model. I would happily throw my money at them if it wasn't for that stupid immersion breaking system.
Simce ghe rest of the game is very much cash focused they need some way to give players an advantage against the many alts that people make for that game.
Im really liking this series so far, got to know your channel recently and im watching pretty much all of your videos! The only real thing i could nitpick here is the pallete choice. While it does sound lazy, imo it helps alot in passing important information to the user withouth massive changes. A small goblin in yellow shirt is introduced first, you'll fight it, kill it and move one. Eventually you'll see the same goblin in red shirt. Its an immediate observation that he is different therefore stronger. It may sound lazy and might have better ways to do it, but it can be well done to create an ecossystem where multiple goblins can have varying degrees of power. Not trying to defend the games that does that, but i can be helpfull to both players and companies if well made. :D
Classic Warcraft has created a unique example of Sloth, and I was surprised it wasn't showcased here. Activision (Not Blizzard, they're long gone) finally releasing Classic, and now Burning Crusade Classic, there was a massive #NoChanges demand, because of a complete lack of trust towards Activision. Well, we got changes, and lots of them. Not for quality design purposes, but laziness. WoW Classic released with the final patch balances for talents, itemization, and skill changes. Ability queueing from the engine dramatically buffs player's damage and healing capability. These made Classic substantially different from the original release we hoped to replicate, and it was because fixing it would cost money - and Activision can't have that. That leads into laying off people. Oh man, the stories on that one. I played Vanilla at release, and I remember being so damn impressed with the GM support. There was a bug with the Paladin Verigan's Fist quest, where if Daphne Stillwell - an important NPC to protect during an attack - died, she would not respawn. This got fixed shortly in, but there was a GM on Thunderhorn who reset the NPC for people who had that problem. The GM support came in minutes for all sorts of issues. Now? Typical response is automated garbage that takes several days to a week. Pagle had a problem with someone on the Horde griefing the Defias messenger NPC, by killing him in one shot while people escorted him. Ticket put in, and my response was "You shouldn't have rolled on a PVP server". Are you fist-fucking kidding me? This GM thought the server was PVP (Spoilers, it was a PVE server), and that was totally irrelevant, since it was someone one-shotting an NPC that took so long to respawn/escort, that the Horde player's PVP flag would wear off, leaving absolutely zero way to do anything, there was no player solution whatsoever. With the TBC launch, we of course have ability queueing, final patch talents/itemization/skills, but we even have access to epic gems which aren't supposed to be available until the second to last content phase. Content has come pre-nerfed, so that we don't get the harder versions, because that was the easiest way to go. Activision is definitely the King of Sloth when it comes to WoW Classic.
WoW does a shit ton of time-gating and is the most popular MMORPG of all time. While you and I may both feel that time-gating is bad, WoW has been doing this since the beginning and it has not really paid any price for it. Sadly, time-gating is a part of the game and is not going to change. They do it to limit the amount of gear you can obtain so you keep playing and paying the monthly subscription.
Timegating isn't in and of itself a problem. For example, WoW in the old days used timegating to prevent people from nolifing the best gear from raids week one. The problem is when you start timegating endless or near-endless progression systems. Modern WoW has a problem of trying to inspire FOMO in the playerbase by timegating progression in a way that makes it so taking a break is severely punished in terms of player power. FFXIV has timegating but you'll seldom see anyone complain about it because there's a straightforward BiS you can reach and there's far less RNG involved in getting that gear, to the point where you can accurately predict how long it'll take you to reach BiS (usually 8-10 weeks) even if you have the absolute worst luck imaginable.
While time gating certainly has slothful elements, it's a lot more on the greedy side than the slothful side, and from your rant on the subject I'd hazard you agree with me on this. While it's certainly lazy or slothful to not make a lot of content and instead use time gating, the idea behind time gating and the reason it's used is not because of laziness but pure greed. As you said addicts make the best customers thus turning your players into addicts is simply more profitable. On top of that, as per your greed video, time gating is a manufactured problem for which the solution can, and often is, than sold in the cash shop. So it's a double whammy, turn customers into addicts to make them more profitable and sell the solution to this manufactured problem for even more money. At the end of the day the laziness aspect is much more pronounced in your other 3 examples where it's pure laziness. Time gating on the other hand is significantly more about greed than laziness. I'd hazard it's 10% or less about laziness and 90% or more about greed.
I remember back in Guild Wars during the Guild Wars Beyond period, where they added The War in Kryta in installments. Everybody hated it. Thankfully with the Winds of Change addition, Anet learnt their lessons and simply added the whole content in one go.
One game comes to my mind when you speak of Time-gateing hehe Final Fantasy XIV 1.0....I'm so glad they changed that, easily one of the dumbest features a Final Fantasy title could have.
You seemed to have missed that time gating is perfectly valid in a competitive scene. It's stupid for old content or anything that doesn't have overt rewards/accolades for being one of the first few to complete the content but especially in something like wow, where there are massive communities around pushing for/or watching others push for world firsts/server firsts, it would be stupid not to have them. Otherwise you commit financial suicide by immediately alienating the majority of players just to stroke the egos of a small percentage of your players. I knew I would probably never be server first but knowing I had a chance was the only reason I stayed subbed as long as I did.
I have no reason to play WoW honestly. The time gating ensures I only have 1 day I can play the game. I do 1 +14 mythic or higher key for the vault, 2 runs through torghast solo, and whatever 3 covenant quests are available. I then have no other content that I (a solo player) can do that is actual progress (unless I devote myself to a guild of some sort).
I have played ff14 for over 3000 hours, and although there's always something else to do, it has many "daily" and "weekly" features: There's a late game currency that has an upper limit on how much you're allowed to earn; There are reputation grinds which make you want to play a little bit every day or you'll feel you missed time, same goes for the daily "roulettes" as those are the most efficient for leveling; Your city-state faction lets you send out an npc squad on missions once every 18 hours, and so too for your retainers which are this game's version of the bank. It tries to make the player feel as though they HAVE to come by every day to do this stuff, because the reward you're working toward will be further away for every day you miss, and that feeling has interfered with my personal life and caused a lot of stress, as though it's a second job rather than entertainment.
Endgame Tomestones are the worst. Especially with how little you get and how you can't even get a single gear piece (ShB) or a gear set (EW) with the weekly limit. There is no excuse.
Time gating was the bane of my existence at my last job. I'd work 14 hour shifts 7 days a week with a long commute, so I had literally zero time to play...but then I'd get a few days off in a row. Since this was my ONLY play time, having everything time gated meant I spent several expansions of WoW completely unable to catch up with anything. Absolute nightmare, zero fun.
Bruh... Story of my latest experience on BfA and Shadowlands... Screw their dragonfligth pre purchase
what even wow did this?
Funfact: Aion does inform you each hour on how long you have played nonstop. When I originally started playing Aion I did my quests, travelled the world, progressed my character, enjoyed the visuals and the music (ah, the music) etc when I noticed this line in the chat: "You have been playing for 17 hours. Please have a break".
Me: Well, maybe I really should have one :D
Wait, are you saying when playing games, you don't afk for hours at a time throwing "game time played" off by an extremely large amount?
Lots of games send you a message every hour. It's required by law in some countries and rather than only enabling that for players in those countries, they usually just send those to everyone.
Often they don't even tell you the number, just saying "more than an hour" or something
@@jfast8256 better than ffxiv 1.0 flat out stop giving you exp if you grinded for too long. It was a "anti-bot" mech but also it hid it had no end game.
@@FearDatD Lol,
More games should do that tbh. I mean yeah, some times I do take breaks but other times I wake up and play until dinner (not even cooking, I just order pizza) and then keep playing until I pass out.
This reminds me of an MMORPG called Metin 2 which had enemies as follows
Wolves
Hungry wolves
Alfa wolves
hungry alfa wolves
Blue wolves
blue hungry wolves
blue alfa wolves
blue hungry alfa wolves
grey wolves
grey hungry wolves
grey alfa wolves
grey hungry alfa wolves
and they are all totally different enemies according to the game
God I played that game through out my childhood. As grindy as it was, its what got me into gaming and mmo/mmorpg's.
@@RavagerNick Same here :D
Played it when i was youg, for me the 3 most infuriating mechanics in the game was:
1 - How slow you level up, i don't know if it get better but as a child with a LOT of free time it takes 1~2 weeks to level up a single level, and if you die, you can lose it all in one go.
2 - The enemies drops are limited by the character level, you can't drop or farm important itens if you are 5 levels above an enemy.
3 - The blacksmith is a son of a B***, i don't know the percanteges but he is desined to break your equipment, unless you pay real money for it not happens.
Good lord today when i log in a game i know if it's worth my time just seeying the cash shop, Perfect World and Metin 2 teaches me that.
Having played old games where they used palette swapping for every enemy/boss due to memory limitations I just can't hate it.
Late but he did a whole video on Metin2
Another aspect of time gating (also outside of mmorpgs) is limiting the amount of in-game money you can earn per day, or limiting how many matches you can participate in. You start with an "energy limit" and each match you play in takes an amount of energy away, once that's gone, you can no longer play until the next day.
Exactly my point, thats why I skip those type of game, and men do i like the design but known whats best for me. I drop a like.
"you can no longer play until the next day"
Or until you pay.
@@mitarc It's that kind of mentality that made me drop the game Let It Die, and it's a shame because Let It Die got me into the Soulsborne-like gaming sphere of brutally difficult action adventure games like Dark Souls, but the way it's designed and the way you play it just gets aggrevating. Which is even worst because the game starts off really damn good, the first two-or-so series of floors are fantastic, fun, and difficult, but once you get to the third series of floors the entire game changed for me. Went from fun and intense, with some frustrations, to straight-up "this is where you pay now."
Unless it's roguelike/survival, there is no excuse for this. Even in those games use of "energy" that is badly monitored to specific mechanics is just infuriating.
It's fine if you want me to be a normal hero, not overpowered, not infinite energy, but you'll need to keep in that idea through out the whole game.
For instance; I really enjoyed Valheim. Got no issue having an energy and health bar influenced by food and drink, but when it came to building and designing a homestead, the stamina bar there is just frustrating. I shouldn't need to take a breather after every few hammerings or placing of wood. Not when I go out and shoot down a massive stag whose trying to kill me, which energy wise is FAR more taxing than building a home. It's actually immersion breaking. I'm a regular human, building a home is physically taxing, but taking down a massive creature with a long health bar where I need to run around, dodge, shoot/swing all the time, that's just my Monday morning work out.
If I'm in say a survival horror and a big element of the game is that I'm a weak human, desperately seeking weapons, making shelters etc, you have to balance my energy usage to reflect that. if I'm shooting and running away from zombies, you need to make sure my energy usage spent to build my shelter isn't of a more taxing requirement than running for my life or punching zombies in the face.
In MMO's, given that you are almost ALWAYS a god, the chosen one, special, powerful, energy limits make even less sense. They're generally just a cash grab or way to promote dailies.
I get an MMO limiting the money you can make because that's how economy has to work or it will crash. But in single player? It's absolutely superfluous and a way to extend the life of a game through artificial means instead of design choices.
the bane of mobile gaming.
I love slow starts in forests, with low numbers etc., it also makes sense to me.
I really hate spawning / starting in those forced "wars" or events
What if they started you in a peaceful forest, while a war was going on from a long distance away? Life is peaceful, but you know it's only that way because of the warriors laying their lives down to keep the enemy at bay? The gameplay could be about supporting or even joining those efforts.
On the one hand, I can see your point. On the other hand, why does it always have to be a forest (or someplace that's roughly "Central European countryside")? Why not slums, or a mining village, or an oasis in the desert? Why not start near the battlefield cause dad's in the army and mum's … cooking for the soldiers, and you're an errand-boy (or -girl) until everyone has to flee from the enemy. By this point _forests are boring._ And if you want ideas for alternative starting areas, just take a look at the different backgrounds in Dragon Age: Origins and how they affect your start into the game.
@@rolfs2165 are forests really that common? Genuine question, I don't play that many mmos, but in rpgs, I think the last one that started in a forest was... Well, twilight Princess, and I'm not sure if that counts.
It's an issue of escalation and worldbuilding. So many games want all the crazy, over-the-top stuff from the get-go because they think their audience has a short attention span due to most not playing for longer than two hours. That's not why. It's because the game itself isn't worth playing longer, but I digress. When you start a player off in the middle of some crazy bullshit, there's no grounding. No comparison. Nothing is there to establish this magical warzone as aberrant in any way due to the player not having been introduced to the world with even a modicum of restraint. Now take that same player and start them off in a small village somewhere and have them ultimately participate in this wacky ass, magical boomshittery in the late game, and you now have context for this escalation. If everything is over-the-top, then nothing is. You need grounding in mundanity in order to appreciate the transmundane.
@@anna-flora999 they are, mostly, because of how peaceful a forest can be and how to get a character started from the bottom before in the late, throwing you to the fortress of impeding doom located in the misty desert of starvation or something cliche like that, you get the point
“Something only the MMO genre does”
Meanwhile gacha games have done this tactic along with a multitude of other ways to get money from players.
We go into Gatcha games knowing what we’re walking in to. You chose the life of paying for PNGs: The game
I think he meant only good games
Back in the 90's, BBS games limited you to ~20 actions per day. Remember Legend of the Red Dragon?
Granted, most BBSs could only handle 1 - 3 simultaneous players, so you'd have to log off to give someone else time to play some content.
fucking energy system
and fucking resin
@@jupiter12345-h genshin sucks so badly. It's a straight up botw rip off but worse, with a pretty good story that they SOMEHOW make playing through boring. Im not even gonna talk about the pay2win, some heroes cant even clear abyss without overpowered 5* artis or a carry. Will I play it again someday? Yes. I hate it though
Strife: Did you immediately think of a forest, or an outside natural area with some trees...?
GW2 Sylvari: -_-
our people already form a forest itself
At the same time, how about the Charr?
Lol Sylvari master race. Dream Leaf People ftw.
_Guild Wars 2_ gives you the option of a shire, a couple different spots in a jungle, a frozen forest, or seared Ascalon... which at least _used_ to be a shire-type locale.
Time-Gating is often used for greed too. Paying to 'skip the grind', etc
Stamina systems ... bane of my gaming life
It's just a nice way of saying "Time Gate."
"MMORPG players have long been known to have addictive personalities, and we just gosh darn love watching some little numbers get bigger."
I'm subscribing right now.
I think reuse of assets is definitely more nuanced rather than inherently bad. There are situations where it may be necessary, such as when the budget is relatively low or the team is small, and it's interesting when something creative can be made out of asset reuse when it allows them to put their focus on other aspects of the content. Done in excess, I can absolutely see how it becomes a problem.
Like, how many unique trees does a zone actually need?
I was thinking about mechanics... if your palette swaps behave in a different way, but otherwise have the same model, that splash of color will help the player realize what they are fighting.
This visual clarity will increase their understanding of the encounter because they see the blue goblin and know "this one uses magic" opposed to the standard green one that will just run up to them. The player will instantly be able to tell the difference between the two and react accordingly.
I'd also claim palette swaps need to stay within the same general area. Being able to tell the different strength/behavior of similar monsters within the same zone is one thing. Going to a completely different zone to find your "new" enemies are just reskinned old ones... is lazy.
Even if it's the same faction in different areas, there needs to be some visual difference in the models. Even if it's just better equipment. The starter area goblins have rags and clubs. The next area has goblins with leather armor and stone weapons. The next goblins have rusted bits of armor scavenged from the nearby battlefield.... so on and so forth until we get to the goblin lords that have enslaved dwarven smiths to make them top of the line magic weapons.
These goblins will naturally have better stats because they either A) have better equipment or B) are strong enough to go procure, and keep, better equipment. It's something we can tell at a glance without being so lazy as "the brown goblin has '30' next to it's name Vs the green goblin having '10'" Otherwise, they are the same goblin with the same attacks.
I think it's perfectly fine to have some bosses/mobs be palette swaps or larger/smaller versions. I think when you do more than 3 of the same model, you're being cheap.
There are also PLENTY of ways to use the same model with different paint jobs that make it feel genuinely different.
IE take a wolf mount or mob. Give it typical grey wolf paint job. Make the while version have different colored eyes, more fur and different abilities/particle affects. It's fine to do that a few times, it's not fine when it becomes a running joke.
Also, I think 3 options of colors for any given mount is a healthy variety for people. You can also hit analysis paralysis when you are given too many choices too, so a few color distinctions among say 5-7 different mount choices keeps things easier to figure out what you want. Most people will be able to go "Oh I am totally getting the hippogriff mount, no question, now what color?"
Another way to address it, specifically for mounts is to allow the ability to choose the color from a wheel, or buy things with in game earned currency that allow it to look different, like saddles, armor, charms etc. Finding a balance between too much choice, but also wanting each player to feel unique is not an easy task. Best solution I have seen is have variations in armor/accessories, then have dyes or access to a color wheel to nuance the specific color you want for it.
he mentions this in the video
@@m1rac1e If you're referring to my comment, I'm pretty sure I was responding to a similar line of thought he'd had during the video, not agreeing with him. Hard to remember with how long ago the comment was made, but that sounds right.
Wow. "Shin Megami Tensei: Imagine" is a 4/4 so far.
They didn't even use palette swapping, they just used different prefixes in enemy names and exact same models, only with different stats and skills. Some variations were scaled down or up, but that was it. :/
Just for the sake of discussion, I'd like to throw out atleast one way that timegating might be an okay thing: to remove progress stress and help keep an MMO community from diverging too heavily between casual and hardcore.
FFXIV for example has a weekly cap on the amount of current-tier currency that can be obtained. Despite the content loop for earning this currency being fun by itself, the currency is rewarded in short enough supply that, were there no cap, there would be a much wider variance in expectations regarding the amount of time you'd spend (in a week) doing this content. WoW is an example of how the lack of this cap can be damaging. During BfA, there was no cap on a relevant resource (I forget its name). That MMO's community very nearly killed itself on the absurd length that people would go through to farm for it.
If FFXIV didn't have a weekly cap on Revelations (the currency in question), people would likely start to farm the content that rewards it, which would result in a few bad things:
1) People without the reasonable time to do so would fall behind in progression, likely harming their social relevance in the game.
2) The avenues of farming Revelations would become more stressful to do, since the limitless farmability of those bits of content would incur greater pressure on playing optimally.
Timegating can, if done correctly, be a way of controlling a community's progress through content for reasons that don't veer into sloth. In my opinion.
The key thing with _FFXIV's_ version is that that gate is weekly timegating, not daily. Admittedly, you get daily bonuses... but you don't get cut off until you hit a weekly cap. And it still has some daily timegating, with the Hunt and Beast Tribes. Of course, those are mostly for deprecated/catchup/cosmetic rewards...
I actually like starting an MMO in a forest or quiet shire...
Also, WoW's starting zone is different based on what race you choose, and there's quite a huge variety of starting zones. Forests (humans), red clay deserts (orcs), mesa plains (Tauren), sandy ruined temples (Vulpera), beautiful port city (Kul Tiran), gilded ziggurats and rainforests (Zandalari Trolls), chinese-inspired bamboo forests (Pandaren), the list goes on.
Polluted, industrialized, slave-exploiting, mechanized island that turns into a King Kong jungle island (Goblins)
Time-gating is a bit weird. Definitely the "you've played enough go away" style of time-gating is full on obnoxious, but there are some forms of "you've done enough of this particular task" that are not strictly due to laziness - its a balance mechanism. It allows people who only have a few hours a week to play to have a chance of keeping up with those who sit in the game for 14-16 hours every day, particularly as it relates to end game content unlocking each patch.
The big difference is whether there are _other_ things to do that aren't directly related to end-game progress but are still relevant, useful and fun. I've seen far too many games that effectively prevent all actions after a certain point (especially when combined with Sin #3: Greed - "just pay us $5 and you can do 3 more actions today!")
Whenever I run into that type of time-gating, my next step is the uninstall button.
i heartily disagree on the other kind of time gating not being so bad. i. don't have the energy to play one game every day for an hour, rather I like to log in at the weekend, and play for a solid block of time. So when the game is like 'play an hour and then everything's locked till tommorrow', i fall behind in about two weeks and stop wanting to play.
Although i'm happy for them to space out their content over realtime, i.e. 'this content un locks on tuesday, but you can do loads of prep work beforehand' because then i don't feel like i'm being punished for having a real life.
@@saelorasinanardiel8983 Sure but there's people in the exact opposite end of the spectrum - those who have a few minutes every day but not a single huge block.
Blizzard (and every other MMO developer) has to try and balance people like you who want to play in one large chunk per week, people like those I just described who want to play in small chunks every day or two, _and_ people who drop 14 hours a day every day, and do so in a way that doesn't let those 14-hours-a-day folk just completely run over the entire rest of the player base and make _everyone_ else feel like they'll never keep up.
Its not as easy as it sounds when you're looking at it from the perspective of only trying to fulfill one single person's vision of the game (ie: your own). Telemetry and metrics help direct such things across the larger player base ("last year we saw a 20% increase in weekend-block players and a 15% decrease in 14-hours-per-day players, so let's do more weeklies"), but that only takes you so far unless your player base is _hugely_ skewed to one side or the other.
WQs I think is a decent balance. Not perfect - there is no such thing as perfect when you're targeting millions of people who all have different interests, schedules, etc - but they work "kind of" like dailies for people who want to play daily, while also having rollover for people who want to play in time blocks (still doesn't fit your own scenario since they're 3 day rollovers rather than 7, but at least you're only falling behind by ~60% per week rather than ~85% per week - not _great_ but certainly _better_).
Sadly, they seem insistent on returning back to dailies. No idea what design decisions is driving that. I can't imagine a huge percentage of players are demanding that they have basically the same system but without the rollover to buffer against. Maybe dailies are just easier to develop due to some weird quirk of their code base, given that they mostly seem to show up in minor patches where less time is typically spent on development? No idea. Annoying nonetheless.
The other thing they've attempted (to varying degrees of success) is adding systems where you don't _have_ to "keep up". Dungeon and raid difficulties are the primary thing here. If you don't have time to keep up with any guild's raiding schedule, you can always just stick with LFR. It can be painful but at least you get to experience the content without needing a ridiculously high time investment for gear farming. The mythic+ dungeons scale from "not even fully m0 geared" to "on par with mythic raiding", so you can usually find groups for that if you target an appropriate level for whatever gear you've managed to farm.
Of course, its never going to be possible to join the hardcore best-in-the-world teams when you're only able to play for a few hours on the weekend. So you kind of have to create your own definition of what it means to "fall behind". When I'm raiding, I personally look for groups that run on the order of 2 raiding sessions per week and 2-3 hours per session. That's generally enough to push decently into mythic before the end of each raid tier if your group isn't complete garbo. Sometimes can even complete mythic if everyone tries hard enough.
But that's "by the end of the raid tier". That kind of schedule won't get you into a world first position by any stretch of the imagination. And I've been in other guilds that were happy to just farm heroic and only ever poked the first couple bosses on mythic each tier if they happened to clear heroic fast enough that week _and_ happened to have 20 people on at the time. Hell there are people out there who never step foot into a raid and are happy just running around picking flowers to sell on the auction house.
And keep in mind, everything I've said here applies to every MMO. I'm most familiar with WoW but the same development pressures apply to any such game. Some developers will make different choices than Blizzard has, and their choices may result in a game closer that more closely aligns with your playstyle, but the important thing to remember is that it's a _choice,_ based on whatever telemetry and other data they have available about how their specific player base wants to play - there is no one single "right" answer that exactly applies to more than one single player. There is only ever a balancing act.
Ya so I thought about that too. Some players can play 20 hours others cant, so time gating does indeed allow players to stay on relatively the same levels. However, there are 2 ways this can be done: Preventing players from progressing is the negative way, while creating catch up mechanics is the positive way. For example, players could get 1 hour a day of double xp, thats the positive way which is really about catching up and not about stretching the content unnecessarily.
@@edumazieri They already have that, but that only gets you to max level. And that's never been time gated anyway - it takes maybe 24 hours for even moderately geared/skilled players to cap out and as low as maybe 10-12 if you're really good and/or get carried through dungeon grinds. Its up to each player whether they spread that 24 hours over 2 months or they suck back a few energy drinks and pound it out in a day.
Most people can manage it with a reasonable amount of playtime in their schedule in maybe 1-2 weeks. Certainly not going to be hitting any world firsts at that pace, but you aren't dreadfully far behind either.
The parts that are time gated are the end game content (raids, dungeons, rep farming, etc). The stuff that gives you good gear. And Blizz does try to provide catch-up mechanics to some degree - world quests eventually give you gear comparable to LFR or even normal raiding, M+ dungeons can be run at any pace you want and will eventually give you gear similar in quality to raiding, etc. That stuff has all been in the game for a few years now (some of it for many years).
The reason for time-gating is to make it so that the people who play 20 hours a day can't have a full set top-tier raiding gear in their first week while you're still working on hitting max level. Of course they have the ability to get _somewhat_ ahead of you, and as those time gates release if you haven't caught up you're just going to get further behind, but there's only so much they can do in that sense - they can't time-gate hard enough to keep the guy who plays for an hour a week on par with the people who want to play 20 hours a day.
And that's where the telemetry and metrics comes into play. They'll _know_ what percentage of their player base plays 20 hours a day vs those who play 20 hours a week vs those who play 20 hours a month vs those who play closer to 20 hours a year. They'll take a look at that chart, find the median and set the time gates in such a way that playing 20 hours a day will get you _somewhat_ further ahead relative to someone who plays 20 hours a week (or whatever the median is), but not so far ahead that the latter guy is completely out of his league from day one.
The guy who plays 20 hours a month though? Probably below the median. And yep, if you miss that threshold you're simply going to fall behind. There has to be a cut-off point somewhere. Catch-up mechanics won't really help that - if you're not playing enough to make use of the current catch-up mechanics, you're probably also going to fall behind in short order even if a GM flat out gave you a set of gear comparable to the top players one week just to see what you'd do with it.
@@altrag Ya iI know what they do, but the point is some parts of this are done with the intention of players catching up, while other parts of it are done with the intent of stretching out the content and slowing progression.
Slowing progression with a time gate is telling players they CANT play the game anymore, its a negative way of doing it. I understand it does also achieve the goal of keeping players relatively on the same level, but just because it does that too doesnt mean its a good way of achieving it. They should use other methods of keeping players relatively at the same level, without necessarily saying "no more game for you today come back tomorrow".
I am kind of ok with weekly time gating, for specially hard content, but daily quests and stuff are just boring menial tasks to force players to log in everyday... its just crap.
I like the starting zones being forests.
For new players its reckognizable and relatable. It gives the new player a chance to get immersed in the setting with a visual setting they are familiar with from their real life experience.
And for the old longtime mmo players its sort of a "Welcome" sign to log in and see the forest Ive seen so many times before in so many games. I wanna see the floating mushroom city or the jumping from cloud to cloud high up in the sky zone. I wanna see all that tomorrow. Today Im happy wity the familiar lush early summer forest with the butterflies and birds chirping while I familiarize myself with the game mechanics and lay down foundations for an emotional attachment to the game.
Genshin Impact on every event . . . I really hate time gating, I work 60-70 hours a week fairly often so daily things are a bit annoying and then when the weekend comes and I have time to play I'm only allowed so much before I'm told to come back later.
This is probably the most infuriating thing. I have a similar schedule to yours. I don't get to play a lot of games, so when I can, I like to actually set down and play, but the time gate stuff if anything demotivates me and always makes me go play something else with my time.
I agree! My days off are sparadic since i work under DoT hours of service so i never have time to play mmos and when i do get a day off i cant make any progress. It ultimately made me stop playing mmos all together.
THat's because it's a mobile gacha game. They need players to become daily addict because they don't have much contents to do.
it's a gacha game. It's designed to fit the student/average adult schedule of working for a day, playing for an hour, probably on the bus. Even when it is on pc, it is still designed so if you play a little bit everyday you would not be left behind in progress comparing to people who play a lot. Most importantly, whatever people claim, it ain't a mmo. Massive? no. multiplayer? not necessarily. Online? yeah only that.
Doesn't help that Genshin Impact's time-gating is just an excuse to get its audience to pay real-world money in order to max out their character and weapons in order to level up their account.
Also lazy design: grinding. It's easy to have hundreds of hours of content when its composed entirely of doing the same thing over and over and over and over and over again just for a shot at a rare loot drop.
Or just getting enough experience to get to the next level if there are no more quests available for your level.
if you got your rare drop in one kill then it's not rare and you blast through all the content in an instant and whine there's no content because you no lifed it in one weekend. Yea... devs aren't machines and can't make infinite content. that would be bloat.
@@BladeDevil That's not true at all. It's the question of what does it take to get the opportunity for that one kill.
If you take a loot table, look at the drop rates, and compare it to the time it takes to run an instance of that boss, you get an average time to drop. Thus, you have two ways of adjusting this: the lazy way of making a number smaller, or the more difficult way of putting more content between the player and the drop. That is what grind is: it's a way of imposing an average time to drop. It is, shall we say, time gating. With the main difference being that true time gating lets you go to sleep, go to school, go to work, go on a date, and have a life and still keep up in a game that maintains interest for months or years, while grinding doesn't.
But time gating is a sin, so grind must also be a sin.
@@jimschuler8830 That was really great conclusion...
@@jimschuler8830 Okay, devil's advocate here: *Really* think about what you consider "content".
It sounds like an absurd question _at first_ but the true difference between games believed to "have lots of content" and games believed to "not have much content" is _NOT_ a higher number of developers/development budget, or some lack of "laziness", or game designer magic, or even necessarily harsh deadlines.
If all content is "one and done", it is _PHYSICALLY IMPOSSIBLE_ for a team of developers to make a "big content game" in a genre like MMOs that's so content hungry. *Making players repeat tasks is a necessity, not a sin.* The goal is not to delete grinding, but instead to make the grind feel weightless, as opposed to a burden. Ideally, so people like you and me won't even recognise we're grinding, so we will _happily_ participate in horizontal progression systems instead of avoiding them like the plague, ecetera. *That's* how you get a game with "a lot of content".
Monster Hunter is a great example of this dichotomy in action, because MH: Rise *has* been taking the "put content between players and the drop" route, and frankly its endgame hasn't kept my attention as well as MHW: Iceborne did, or some older titles like Generations Ultimate. _(despite IMO Rise having better core gameplay than either of those)_
There are more complicated factors to why I believe its endgame is worse, but the Monster Hunter franchise has "lots of content" thanks to grinding usually being well-implemented, and *I wish* Rise gave me more to grind for like Apex monster armorsets, instead of giving me all the Apex materials I'll ever need within ~2 hunts for each, or if the new Valstrax update was making me live and breathe Valstrax hunts in the same way Rajang's update did. _(seriously, I've hunted Iceborne's version of Rajang over 50 times, the game kept count, I did almost all of them with the same weapontype, I am still not bored of fighting it)_
This isn't an excuse for 0.001% drop rates, but it *IS* to say game design is a whole lot more complicated than "grinding bad, extrinsic motivation bad".
Also, if increasing the average time to drop is "effectively time gating", how is putting a bunch of mobs between the boss and the players to deliberately elongate each run not _also_ "effectively time gating" and therefore a bad thing by the same logic?
11:00 - that's why i quit rs3 for osrs, i was spending 6-8 hrs per day doing the same daily tasks in the same order for "maximum efficiency". i wasent directly forced to do those things, but as gamers we do. Now in osrs if i want to efficiently train a skill, i simply sit down and train it. Not 15 mins per day of that skill, i can train the skill for 45 mins if i want, or 5 mins, or 5 hrs, or 15 hrs. i am only limited by that which i want to do, and never by what im "forced" to do by game design. i also felt forced to log in at the same time every day (daily reset) and begin the dailies. i didn't have fun or even want to play at that point, i felt forced to play which is a shitty feeling.
To be fair, even tough there's the generic forest(norn, or sylvari) and shire(human) in GW2, the Asuran and Charr starting zones are far from generic.
Imagine if Netflix didn't allow people to binge watch an entire series and would only allow you to watch one episode per day.
I've literally seen people argue that this would be better
Huh, sounds like how broadcast tv was. I mean, there's a shared experience in watching a show at the same time as everyone else but I prefer having my entertainment fix my schedule.
I just want something that allows you to queue up episodes of several different shows so you're not just watching one thing for hours
Apps do that exact thing with web comics and it is absolutely infuriating
They have some shows with weekly episode releases just like cable.
I think the level of anticipated danger is reflected by the starting zone. A quiet forest that is brightly lit is less threatening than a dark cave hanging upside down with a massive monster nearby.
There's just one thing I would like to add. Time gating is not necessarily something only MMO games do. Gacha games in general do this too.
Genshin Impact, Honkai Impact 3 and Arknights are good examples.
And while they don't have the other problems mentioned, they have a reason to time gate their content.
China (which is where all these games companies are from), has specific laws against addiction to games, so these companies are forced to implement systems like those.
I am not sure if those companies (Mihoyo and Hypergyph/Yostar) would still time gate them even if it wasn't for that reason. I suspect that Mihoyo would...
But still, it's interesting to see MMO's are still doing this practice. So many years since I've last played an MMO, and so far, I'm surprised that most of them are still having the same (and some even more) problems than in the past...
the anti addiction laws are understandable, but, and im just gonna be talking about genshin here, the fact that resin runs out so fucking fast is bs. im at the point where im constantly grinding for artifacts, ascension mats, and mora and it's irritating to only be able to run 4 domains before all my resin runs out and the rng isnt on my side and hasnt been for weeks.
I've been Beta testing, playing or waiting in eager anticipation for the next big MMO since 1996 up until about 2 years ago when I decided to leave this genre and all of its BS in the dust ... I've discovered decades of games I skipped over the years and have had 10 times more fun now that I've broken my addiction to Skinner box game design
Mind if I ask if you got some examples that helped you "break out", maybe some lesser known ones as well, genuinely curious as I find myself often returning or chasing the next "high".
@@six2make4 There is no next High, .. you'll always be chasing that first MMO / Raid / Group experience ... you'll always be chasing that first piece of raid gear high ... if you get annoyed now trying to get a raid group together, it starts feeling like your herding cats or you find the grind annoying and achievement rewards dull or the end game starts feeling like just the end ... the genera is done with you .. a new MMO isn't going to help. Not in any particular order try...
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt
Divinity Original Sin 2
Red Dead Redemption 1 & 2
Horizon Zero Dawn
Mass Effect 2
Rise of the Tomb Raider
Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey
Grand Theft Auto 5
Far Cry 3
Dragon Age series
Skyrim
Elite Dangerous (Best in 3D)
Crysis
Half-Life 2
Half-Life Alyx (3D only)
Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice
Dark Souls 2
Borderlands 2
Monster Hunter: World
Baldur's gate 3
Deus Ex
Ori
Myst
Stanley Parable
Full Throttle
Have Fun
@@logun24x7 Yeah, you are probably right, already played some of those but def. not all of them so there is some I can get into, thanks man, have a nice day
part of the "always start in a forest" thing that I was surprised and pleased to see subverted was final fantasy 14 where you can start in ul'dah or limsa lominsa instead of generic mmo forest gridania if you so desire, it's a little thing but it was nice to be able to start in a place that wasn't just another temperate forest with huge deciduous trees.
Timegating is also used in some other games. I've played a few strategy and build games that limit how many actions you have each day (but you can buy extra turns for real world $). To Say the least, they never got a penny from me for that.
Thank you for this video. This problem alone was what ultimately made me stop playing mmos. Over focus on dailies, login attendance, mission run/entry limits, its all padding and it benefits no one. Not even the devs! After the dailies are done most players just get off and burn out after a few days of doing this anyway so who is this benefiting? I genuinely do not understand why anyone would think this is a good idea or why nearly the entire mmo market started doing this...
6:32 i will never forgive them. Wilfred wasn‘t an adventurer, he was a member of the guard; a brave an honourable man that will never be forgotten!
and they removed him from the intro and changed his name to „forgotten“. the gall.
you writing his name in the chat earned you my respect and a like.
Time-Gating. I'm looking at you, World of Warcraft!
and gw2
Doesn't it just half the amount of XP you get after some time? Or as they put it, double the XP when you come back. I mean, you still can make a lot of progress and it doesn't feel like you wasted time when you don't play, because it allows you to have more XP when you come back. I mean, it's still the same principle, but it doesn't really time lock the content. Obviously, unless I'm wrong and there's more time locking, then fuck wow
Got time gate for you !
Doing something and getting reward after it /achieving something is time gate ,i know mind blowing!
Have you ever played game where not time gate created pressure on players for degenerated gameplay and ridiculous time spent to being ahead and then making playerbase unhealthy in chase of endless need of being ahead?Then making them disgusted by playing so much and burnt out and instead taking it moderately they start hate it cause game allowed ffor that degenerated gameplay .
That is why time gates exist and for fantasy reasons.
@@Swordart2022 The video explained why time gating exists. Obviously you would rather troll in the comment section instead of actually watching and learning something.
You talking about timegating made me realize exactly why I quit playing animal crossing: new horizons, I was sick of waiting a whole day just to take down a bridge, and waiting another for that bridge to be rebuilt in a slightly different location
I like how informative you can be. And how these vids could apply both virtually and in reality. Pretty cool.
One reason 3 people I know stopped playing Guild Wars 2 is because they wanted to make this one specific item, which if they buy from player shops cost too much gold they can't get themselves at a normal rate, meaning they either have to spend real money to buy the in-game currency to convert real money to gold, or they have to slowly craft the item where you would need something like 20 of a certain item, and you can only craft one of said item a day.
Wonderful time-gating.
So true, I've switched between casual and hardcore play many times, and the time gates so often just makes you quit, if the game developers does not value their players in the design.. why should players value the game..
I think time gating of dailies / weeklies / stamina bars / seasonal caps and resets, is also to get people to play more, since it encourages players to clear all of those every time, which can sometimes take hours every day
palette swap ist not necessarily bad if it is used right. it can be a visual language giving you information about an enemy instead of reading text or numbers. it could mean this enemy is similar to what you already know except for some things. learning what the different color means can then be used in other cases to predict what an enemy can do.
This is basically why I quick Hearthstone - once you run out of quests, progress is basically done for the next 24 hours.
this is where Genshin Impact definitely belongs even tho it's not a MMO.
Fuck resin system man
Its' a mobile gasha game on PC. And sadly will set it as a precedent for the future. >
Actually, the resin system is rather fair.
I understand it limits how much you can farm each day, but being able to farm everything without limit would certainly destroy the balance of farming.
Plus, you can even bank up to 5x40 resin (as of version 1.4, before it was only 3) that you can use for domains and ley lines.
Plus plus, events don’t even require resin anymore.
And the creators do take criticism to heart.
They reduce the resin cost for normal bosses from 40 to 30, which does make a difference, considering how much of the materials you require for even just a single character.
Maybe you already quit the game entirely, but it doesn’t matter, it just came to mind.
@@Sherolox A lot of people already quit the game entirely lol. The average PS4 player only spends like 11 hours in this game and then they just screw off to the next of 90 or so games they have in their library.
I think I'll come back in Genshin's third anniversary. The game should be as fair as Honkai 3 at that point. Maybe. IDK, it's miHoYo, they suck.
You're literally explaining Genshin Impact in a nutshell lol
Yeah resin is a huge time gate.
yea and the whole you need to do dailies to get further in the story is really dumb
thats a gacha design. I wouldnt call it a game.
Genshin isn’t that bad. WoW has time gate and other gacha mechanics like M+ and you still pay a sub. I allow myself to spend no more than 20/month on genshin. Yeah, it’s a gotcha game but I dropped $300 dollars boosting alts over three months in wow. In fact I’ve spent the most money on MTX in wow and its one of my least played games. Fuck wow, it’s worse than most gatcha.
@@user-fv7jd4xj5n Genshin is a little bit weird for me personally. I played Honkai so I knew exactly what to expect, however, I believe that Genshin feels like it has an identity crisis. You can't farm primogems for LONG enough for it to be a satisfying gacha experience, but you also can't farm materials for LONG enough to get between "I want to play more" and "I had enough for today". You farm primogems by doing the abyss which resets once in what feels an eternity and even though it does give you a pretty good rate f roll per week once you get a good team and good at the game it is at best a 1-hour job. 1 hour every 2 weeks! Again, you do the abyss and you wait for the rotation for 2 weeks. WEEKS. So you would farm materials to get yourself busy, right? Well yes, but even at 160 resin you can kill 4 world bosses OR do 8 artifact/material dungeons. Or any mix of the two, but the fact is that you are LUCKY when you get a day when you are playing the game for more than 1 hour. It is sad and painful bc you grind for things you will not use for a reasonable amount of time and the worst part is that every time you do you make yourself stronger thus decreasing the time you play even less.
TL;DR
Genshins gacha progression happens once every 2 weeks and resin limits the in-game progression to just 1-2 hours per day. 2 if you are full, but 1 if you aren't full (bc it won't be able to recharge over night). It is not enough to be invested in.
"Time-gating is a tool." ...And so are the sorts of people who think it's a good way to design.
Amen
They're mostly highly egocentric people
once read a review from some game journalist praising time gating in wow.. i agree that he or she is a tool
Fr. Some people excuse or "explain" it by saying that it's necessary because players can just blast through content and finish the game that way. Translation: the developers can't be arsed to add anything replayable or long lasting so they prevent you from experiencing the little content they actually have at once.
Time-gating is there to kneecap gold farmers in most MMOs. Gatcha games... is more for padding out the game.
JSH hit so close to home with the "game experience" vs "growing numbers" analogy its hilarious for me.. im one of those gamers who legit doesnt even watch the numbers i only focus on the healthbars and skill interactions of enemies as well as my own character. say what you will, its actually how i learn mechanics _faster_ and play better than like 90% of ppl i end up in groups with. the reason this statement was so spot on for me was that i never even see or notice when "numbers get bigger", instead i literally _feel_ the changes in game and can tell when i need to adjust (or when adjustments have been made, i.e. shadowbuffs/nerfs). adversely, if i just paid, played, or grinded for hours to get a new piece of gear or weapon or something and cant even tell a difference, i would almost *immediately* start questioning game design. great call, good sir!
I love this series
And I love how you love it
Awesome video. Keep up the good work.
Time gating for me is very bad because I have a huge 5-10hrs block on Sundays (usually), but extremely little time on the week days and Saturdays. So A player that can play 1-2 hours a day has a tremendous advantage on me for progression. It may take him 30 days, but it will take me 30 weeks... and I will be very bored that I can't progress into the content that interest me on the only day that I have. I stopped playing Antlantica Online for that in 2010 (they gave you 2 hours of farming per day then DESTROY your drop rate), and I stopped WoW at the Garrisons for the same thing (on top of the Billion factions which become useless next expac).
So for me a game must not lock content behind time wall, or I simply can't progress and follow my guildmates in a timely fashion.
Then I get left behid, get bored of playing alone to catch-up and quit.
Very very bad mechanics, agreed !
3:54
Objection: Neverwinter's starting zone is the titular city. WarCraft has several starting zones that are all different (one of them is a desert)!
i like goblin mails from old school runescape :D
One thing you can say about League of Angels: It does not start out in a forest.
Honestly I thing pallet swaps can be really cool, they give a new feel to an enemy. That is, provided you only do it like once at most per enemy and it appears much later after the original. Though I suspect you were saying it was a problem when excessively spammed.
pallet swaps are ok if the enemy behaves differently (different attacks/effects)
One thing I like about Guild Wars 1 is that the Prophesies Campaign starts off in an idyllic fantasy area with your usual locations, beautiful forests and all.
Then they nuke the place once you've become attached and suddenly you're in The Elder Scrolls: Fallout. I remember as kid having a Jon Bernthal's Punisher moment when it happened.
A lot of mobile games have been using time gating as well. Big ones like Madden Mobile and Harry Potter: Hogwarts Mystery do this and its frustrating since they're not terrible games.
This video described Shadowlands very well.
Man your serie is scary af XD im watching each episode 1 by 1 and each time Im wondering if youll talk about this or that and it ends up in the next video each time.
I hate boring starting zones, it really got old very very fast.
Amazing video senpai, always a bullseye
I quit DFO because of it forcing how much a day you can play. It felt like a chore to log in and play because I knew I could only do it for x amount of time.
As always, an excellent and quite accurate analysis of all the weaknesses of the mmo genre. The game studios, too often treat they players as mere mindless NPCs.
@Josh This was our favorite so far while big budget (Jim Sterling says Triple AAAAAAA games here) succumbs to this 80% of the time with all the soulless passionless crap they put out, the MMO GENRE suffers from this 95% of the time. An even when executed as well as can be (time gating) I detest it at every turn. I will forever feel make a great game, make the world fun and enjoyable and you will ALWAYS have a player base.... As per usual Mr Hayes THANK YOU and Kudos for remaining in our VERY BIASED point of view the best mmo reviewer/thought discussion piece creator.
Your opinion on the generic setting is absolutely valid but I grew up surrounded by forest as a child so I feel comfortable in those settings. It's familiar. Classic World of Warcraft has three forest starting zones. Tirisfal Glades, Elwynn Forest and Teldrassil but they also have the snowy lands of Dun Morogh, the vast plains of Mulgore and the barren wasteland of Durotar to go too if you want something different.
Time gating
Warframe was the first game that i remember with this phrase.
I don't remember Warframe having time gating. The only time when you don't have anything to do is when you're waiting for the devs to release new content. If something is in the game you can grind forever and get it, right?
@@KethusNadroev
Syndicates and Factions have reputation gain limit per day. And you need reputation to unlock good stuff.
And the limit is based on your mastery rank.
So new players suffer more than veterans.
And this does suck when you have, like a life and spending 6 hours in one day getting what you want is just better than 2 hours, 3 days across. Its also affected by your mood, one day i might be interested in long sessions, others i rather not even play.
And if you consider the weapon/frame construction time being 1-3 real life days a time gate... then thats another waiting... or payup platinum to get it now.
@@mrvex6695 Right, I'd forgotten about these, as I got everything long time ago. Though the premium currency is tradeable, so I consider it farmable, and you can use that to skip everything and buy the syndicate stuff from other players.
The other thing I'm not sure about is taking one mastery test per day. I know you have to wait if you fail, but if you succeed and you're a low rank and gain another rank the same day could you do it?
@@KethusNadroev Only one true attempt per day, but you can practise it without any penalties in Simaris sanctuary.
And i am pretty sure its impossible to get two ranks in one day. Given you get MR points for clearning nodes and leveling up equipment. Equipment that takes days to assemble unless you pay up.
Actually, with syndicates, at least right now, you can dump medallions on your syndicate until the standing fills up. It's now only factions that have the wall hitting phase.
The most interesting thing to me with wf and time gating is how it's used in quests; the old frame quests required you to build each part with the complete build time to continue the quest, which was really annoying. However, as time went on, quest related builds eventually dropped to 1 minute build times, during which Plot sometimes happens. It demonstrates a shift in philosophy.
Too bad that shift didn't happen before equinox...
"Time Gating is exclusive to MMOs"
Mobile games with that terrible energy system: Allow us to introduce ourselves.
WoW is the guilty one. Instead of making a fun game with replay value they artificially milk the 15/month.
And that's despite having dozens of dungeons accumulated over the years. But only few are relevant.
@@Gnidel I always thought that they could reinvent old content and make raids scaled up properly. I did the Uldar time walking one but it was not scaled up right. They are useless at game design. It's always far too easy or far too hard. If you're clutching it, it's because you have idiots.
@@jumpkicking why do you assume blizzard is making a mistake? Blizzard wants you to stay focus on the current expac. If you scaled up old raid, people would do em even for no loot.
That would be too much fun and too much fun makes a game not very addictive.
Blizzard needs players to spam M+, which is the core addictive gameplay loop of wow these days. The unpleasantness makes it addictive.
@@Carltoncurtis1 Yeah exactly its not fun. The game design is bad. If you want to be addicted to unpleasant stuff then you have an issue.
They are getting your to subscribe anyway, if you find the game super fun even getting no loot people are going to buy every expansion anyway.
There is no need to design it so the game is addictive not fun, because if it was fun people would stay and play forever anyways.
They would enjoy the leveling and getting to max and enjoy the late game, unlike what happens to the vast majority of players... they get bored leveling and quit or they get into endgame and quit because there's nothing to do but hate playing.
Wow is successful, but it's numbers have been below it's peak for forever now. It's losing numbers each generation and nostalgia won't last forever when the generation that was playing at it's peak all die off.
It's pretty bad design, they make it so classes are intentionally bad or broken. They do patches but we all know it's intentional, many devs said it is. Games trash. They make mythic world 1st racing impossible despite having teams test it for months lol.
@@jumpkicking you don’t understand. The arbitrary unpleasantness is REQUIRED to make anything addictive.
If blizzard didn’t do this, everyone would have fun, feel satisfied and unsub to wait for the next patch. Fun for us = less money for them.
That’s why I say it must be unpleasant and random to be addictive. This is behavioral science 101.
this series has helped me quantify why I got fed up with Destiny 2.
Time-gating is not necessarily evil, it can be used to equalize the playing field a little between the kids and the professional streamers that can put 8 hours per day on the game, and the single moms with kids that can spend at most 4 hours per week. The rested XP system pioneered by World of Warcraft is the best example of this. Weekly caps to "badge of valor" systems in MMOs with vertical progression is another example, at least as long as the cap is not too annoyingly low. (Looking at you FF14.)
But yeah sometimes it's used for poor or manipulative reasons. Daily login freebies like in GW2 is something I particularly cannot stand. At least give me a quest to get your freebie, it is completely immersion breaking to be handled something for nothing from a calendar UI.
Yeah. Without those time gates, all those grinds would probably have been adjusted into something that takes a ridiculous amount of time that most people simply don't have in order to accomplish.
Level caps, loot with a weekly lockout, resource caps (as long as they stack and cap out at a progression limit instead of daily / weekly) keep things fair without laziness
Better question: Why the fuck should a housewife try to compete in the first place?
IT would be if it was the only solution to the actual problem, which is not the case. Take for example the Xp system pioneered by WOW, the first system they tested worked by punishing instead of rewarding, people earned less xp the longer they played it wasn't time gating because your XP was simply halved, but it was somewhat similar, and beta tester hated it. So they reversed the system, instead of halving your XP, after playing for few hours, they doubled your xp the first hours played. After they played with the XP given by monster, they ended up with a system that was mechanically equivalent to halving XP after few hours of gameplay, but it was way better recieved. We human react better to reward than punishment.
Any time gate can easily be switched to a more positive system that I will refer as time boost. Instead of of limiting the amount of thing your player can do each day, simply gave them a daily timed boost (don't need to actually be timed) in which they can very easily progress, then when the boost pass, let player be able to play but now the progress they were able to do in two hours boosted, wil require eight hour of gameplay unboosted.
The full Metal alchemist would be proud^^ Nice video as Always!
Poor Wilfred....how they masacred my boy
7:58 _"The one single element of sloth design I cannot forgive is time gating"_
*Glares at World of Warcraft*
dunno. WoW isn't that bad. A lot of his examples are for more extreme examples.
The idea of Archeage: You have 3000 points per day to do anything crafting related. Once that's spent, you either wait or pay for a refill.
@@Wyzai hm, the case of Archeage is one of greed. They just want your money so you're not locked out as much
Ff14 is good now, but in its original form they did time going hardcore. Thank goodness for Realm Reborn.
You realize weekly tomes is a form of time gating content, right? Or savage raids only allowing you gear for the first clear per week when it is first out? Or Alliance raids only giving you one weekly piece of gear with one token per week?
By all means enjoy your game and I'm happy for you, but don't lie to people.
@@CivilChev 1. Haven't gotten to endgame yet. 2. In the original they decreased the amount of xp you got form playing the game, likely to cover for the fact that they had next to no content.
And yes they may have limited some of the endgame content apparently, but that's a small portion of the content that's being time gated, and while it could be better if that wasn't the case overall the game has a ton of content you can freely access, and tons of great stuff.
To say that i'm lying to people about it being a good game because the endgame content is being time gated seems a little extreme to me, especially since it'll likely be months before most players even reach it. Who knows maybe they'll have a better system by then.
@@sir.mannington You said in its original form they did time-(gating) hardcore, implying that it is no longer the case. I assumed you had already hit end game and understood what the grind was like since you didn't clarify that you hadn't yet and so I apologize if I came off as brash for claiming you were lying to people.
I never said the game was a bad game. And the reason I seemed a little aggressive is because I'm tired of people who play the game, complain about the game, yet as soon as the game is criticized in anyway they feel the need to defend it, even if it's something they actually agree with. I enjoyed the game, back in the day, but in my opinion, it's not as good as it used to be and this idea that the game shouldn't be criticized will mean the developers won't realize they are treading down the path of ruin.
@@CivilChev That is very fair. And I mean I would still say that the time gating isn't anywhere near as bad as before realm reborn, or what some other games may do but I can see your point and I am all for healthy doses of criticism. It just did seem a tad aggressive when you told me not to lie to people. But I get your point now that I've heard it in full, and I hope that the game comes to a point where you can enjoy it again. Or at least enjoy it more, and I hope I will continue to enjoy it once I actually make it to the end game.
@@CivilChev 1.0 was so much worse, trust me. You know the leve quest system that is kinda irrelevant now? That was your main method of actually getting experience back then. you got a handful of allowances per day and getting exp elsewhere was severely limited. Thats time-gating the basic process of leveling up your character. Not that it had much of an end-game to speak of either.
That AQW gameplay made me feel so old that i used to think THOSE where awesome graphics
Time-gating for me can be a pass or a big nope depending on the game, Genshin Impact? i've seen enough mobile games that time gates with energy (in GI's case : Resin) and time gates events with real hours (I've been playing FGO for 4 years and still counting, to the point that if an event is 100% open i can blow past contents in hours). F2P games have a "sort-of flimsy and arguable" pass for time-gating, the question is where the time-gate is applied.
What i don't like is games that i have paid or subbed for but still time-gated for important contents like story, case and point : WOW Shadowlands where the main story is kind of unfinished but time-gated with Anima grinds for renown, and even then the renown grind is 3 per week (and while you can catch up on renown if you say played like far later it's the story-gating that pissed me off. keeping with the grind alongside some menial task is what burned me out of WoW and return to FF14. Incidentally in FF14, the main story for the expansions are not time gated at all, you can blow past story at your leisure be it super fast or molasses slow
Th thing is, if you've played FGO for even a little while you get tons of Apples to the point where AP isn't even an issue. I played Genshin pretty heavily for a month and still only felt like I could do like three things a day.
@@bransonallen2925 oh yeah, i had 300 golden apples and still counting. That is why in F2P games time-gating is sort pf iffy but an acceptable minus according to me at least, time-gating in a subscription game is an absolute minus that is not cool
Loving this series! This is some top quality content mate!
"They haven't actually designed that much game for you to play" is the exact reality of gameplay right now, and if you can find a game where it's not the reality, I immediately give it a few thumbs up. World of Warcraft is a really good game at the end of an expansion, where you can log in and just do everything, but the most frustrating part is logging in when a whole new expansion came out just to realize that there's somehow fewer things for you to do.
If we talk non-MMO genre, you get games like Hades or Returnal, Lightning Returns FF13. I hate bringing these up because I guarantee most people love at least 2 of these games. However, the fact of the matter is that you've designed a game with about 4 hours of gameplay and instead of creating a fun and thought out experience, you're just going to have everything reset every now and then so your players have to do 6x as much work to get just as far. I thoroughly enjoyed all 3 of these games, but hated that you'd start over.
Hades had a good combat system, Returnal feels really responsive, Lightning Returns perfected the idea of the combat system that the first 2 games offered. But they added in mechanics that were like "Okay let's start over or limit your time that you can play, because we really don't have much going for us here." It's the one reason I couldn't play Majora's Mask. It just felt like you didn't have enough content to play. You release the game unfinished with minimal story, with the idea that if you die or you take too long to do something, you start all over from the beginning. It's a lazy excuse to not create more game.
world of warcraft: shadowlands, some are kill your 100 to finish quest, it a percentage bar fill bar by killing mobs one mob is worth 1 percent of bar, as long as you kill them 1 at a time if you kill a group of them, then the group counts as 1 percent of the bar, only seen that on one quest though, tedious dull quest and they wonder why people are leaving, that dull quest turned up during a time gated event, and probably wont come across it again as it was a main story line quest.
"Level 52 Jesus.Why"
reapers start the game at level 50
Every MMORPG developer needs to watch this playlist before making anything! Please..
Destiny 2 has been doing literally every sin possible lately lol
Its really bad with the covenants right now. I haven't played in a week... of World of Warcraft in case someone doesn't know yet... and the thought of playing and knowing I HAVE to go grind because I missed my daily and weekly progresses to continue the storyline... just makes me not want to do it.
For me it is the modern definition of a Dungeon. A dungeon used to be a place you would have to navigate, deal with traps, getting lost, deal with threats and be in for awhile. Now days it is a linear journey from boss room to boss room as fast as possible with no real thought or interest. A Loot Acquisition Location.. not a dungeon.
I like how he rants about Time-Gating for basically half the video
This is why I give FFXIV's weekly/daily time-gates a pass:
1) the Producer/Director Naoki Yoshida has explicitly stated that he *wants* people to feel free to take breaks from the game; to unsub if they feel like it and enjoy other titles they love. This makes it clear the man is confident that the game is *so* good, he's certain you *will* come back. Ballsy, but the game has the numbers to justify that confidence. And the time gates ensure that, when you come back, you are never too far behind to be irrelevant or unable to enjoy new content in very short order. Unlike some MMOs, unsubbing from XIV for a few months doesn't leave you impossibly far behind because you missed 60 to 90 days of hardcore grinding. Instead, you're more likely to just be a handful of items and a questline or two behind being able to do the newest stuff, and the time gates (along with other very smart and player-respectful choices) ensure those who no-life the game, and those who hop in and out, are never so far apart in terms of gear and content access that they are effectively playing two separate games; as is the case with many MMO endgames.
2) the time gates give players the opportunity to look around and *find* all the mountains of not-timegated content the game has. Do your weekly raids and turn-ins, your daily content roulettes and reputation quests, then go do... anything else the game lets you do infinitely, which is not at all a short list, and which people tunnel-visioned on the kind of content that is gated would miss or ignore if the game didn't give breathing room and lift the pressure of trying to stay 'current'. Or just... stop playing for the day/week and go play other things, because there's no immense pressure to play constantly.
That said, FFXIV is the exception that proves the rule. Most games that have time gating also have hardcore grinds that will put daily grinders so far ahead, if RNG favors them, that the time gated stuff is only an obstacle to the midcore and casual players who can't grind their fingertips off. This creates a growing disparity between player groups that some games *literally layer in entire bloated temporary catch-up systems* every few patches to forcibly close the gap, if they bother to address the gap at all.
TL;DR While there are games that do use time gating effectively and ethically as a means to improve playerbase cohesion and relieve 'end game' pressure to explore other parts of the game or just *not* play for a while, most do not do this, and as a result, fall into the category of stretching content for the sake of padding, or, worse, end up creating a rift in the player base by time gating those who already have limited playtime.
long live Yoshi-P, FF14 never make me feel like i'm doing a "desk job". WoW did for the brief time i played it and i burned out faster and should i return i have this sinking feeling that my progress will be so far behind that i might as well never return
Well, something that does bother me about sub-based MMOs, is feeling like I should be playing to get use out of a subscription. GW2 fills in that casual gap nicely. I could miss a day or a whole week and it won't matter since it's buy-to-play.
With the exception of having horizontal instead of vertical progression, I legit don't know why more people don't play GW2. But considering that's the most major difference, I assume that's why WoW and FF XIV still have the numbers they do. Well, also, the former has a huge community still, and the latter is part of a popular franchise and is known to have a great story.
@@hoshi314 That's not the feeling I've been getting with Shadowbringers... just because the expansion has the FFXIV brand doesn't mean it will sell well if the hype doesn't carry it... and so far what info we did get about Endwalker sounds like history repeating itself; not in the lore but in the game development since FFXIV from what I've been watching so far is just as susceptible to the 7 dealdy sins of MMO design...
@@theazuredemon4854 I'd be interested in what information you think you have about Endwalker that everyone else doesn't
@@drakeway981 The devs are doubling down on the homogenization of healers when Sage got announced as a barrier healer (there's more than 2 types of healers btw)and are probably going to double down on homogenizing on tanks even further(also more than 2 types), and I would not be surprised if they made every DPS play exactly like healers with no oGCD of any kind...
While its also a form of time gating, I like GW2's Event shedule. By making Events happen only at certain times it promotes people to gather around those times and result in having enough people to actually finish the group event without having to resort to automatic group finders and their annoying queues
> It's something only the MMO genre does
> Begins listing totally different forms of media, conveniently leaving off network television
That "Turn off the numbers" test is actually kind of brilliant.
I rank re-using assets on the same level as time-gating. ESPECIALLY when they boast "new monsters!" and then showcase a re-colored, or ever-so-slightly altered existing model. You make BILLIONS, you can afford to make new models instead of being lazy.
i think its a bit more forgivable if its a smaller scale game that doesnt make a boat load and if theres at least another unique model or two as well as the recolours, big problem i have with recolours personally is getting them alone in a new update when id be more understanding of it if they were an extra alongside some new model since i get the resource reason for why they exist in the first place
Re using assets can be good. For example, reusing bears to get polar bears. Yeah, it's lazy but it may fit the environment well and why make a new model if a reskin is good enough. That said. I don't think it should be the main point of an update or expansion. But some re using is fine with me
Dragon Age 2 was the biggest abuse of reusing artwork the warehouses were the same warehouse used infinitely just through a different door chosen out of the only two doors devs had used, it was an insult to dragon age and the fans who wasted their money buying it
Neverwinter "new content" in a nutshell. Recycled shit from mods released aeons ago.
Me sitting here with afkarena on my phone
Island of Kesmai/ Legends of Kesmai! Hell yah Josh, not many people know about those old school MUDs
Shadowlands sounding pretty damn sinful
Interestingly Warframe time gates with its crafting system. However for my personal experience it's actually added to the experience because of how excited I get when I know in a couple days I'm going to use this awesome new Warframe
Agreed. Time Gating in Warframe let's you savour the game and adds to the enjoyment.
There's a good thing about time-gating you missed: It helps prevent basement-dwellers from having too much advantage over people with jobs.
@V W I don't think games should encourage that. It's bad for the basement-dwellers, as it encourages them to continue that lifestyle, and bad for the people with jobs who have to then compete on an uneven field.
But at the same time it puts those people who have one free day in their week that they can play and no time otherwise, at a disadvantage. If you have a daily limit on stuff, allow players to accumulate, idk, up to 10 days' worth of that limit to blow through when they have time.
@@rolfs2165 Sure, that sounds even better. I don't like daily chores either. Something like the way rested XP works in WoW sounds great to me.
But if caps exist, why does it matter? I hate not being able to progress significantly on the one day I week I can really sink all of my time in. It holds people back more than anything imo. I do my dailies and log off because there is nothing else to do. That isn't fun. I'd rather be behind the hardcore grinders than be behind in general. Having to play every day to enjoy a game is garbage.
@@BasedChadman See previous replies for a solution.
Time gating is why I quit playing current expansions in wow and why I play old content. I want to play as much as I want, not as much as some game company wants me to play.
I see EVE Online's skill system as a really good example for time-gating - especially since it is tied to an subscription monetization model. I would happily throw my money at them if it wasn't for that stupid immersion breaking system.
Simce ghe rest of the game is very much cash focused they need some way to give players an advantage against the many alts that people make for that game.
Im really liking this series so far, got to know your channel recently and im watching pretty much all of your videos!
The only real thing i could nitpick here is the pallete choice. While it does sound lazy, imo it helps alot in passing important information to the user withouth massive changes.
A small goblin in yellow shirt is introduced first, you'll fight it, kill it and move one. Eventually you'll see the same goblin in red shirt. Its an immediate observation that he is different therefore stronger. It may sound lazy and might have better ways to do it, but it can be well done to create an ecossystem where multiple goblins can have varying degrees of power.
Not trying to defend the games that does that, but i can be helpfull to both players and companies if well made. :D
Hey you leave forests out of this! Forests are great! :-)
Classic Warcraft has created a unique example of Sloth, and I was surprised it wasn't showcased here.
Activision (Not Blizzard, they're long gone) finally releasing Classic, and now Burning Crusade Classic, there was a massive #NoChanges demand, because of a complete lack of trust towards Activision. Well, we got changes, and lots of them. Not for quality design purposes, but laziness. WoW Classic released with the final patch balances for talents, itemization, and skill changes. Ability queueing from the engine dramatically buffs player's damage and healing capability. These made Classic substantially different from the original release we hoped to replicate, and it was because fixing it would cost money - and Activision can't have that.
That leads into laying off people. Oh man, the stories on that one. I played Vanilla at release, and I remember being so damn impressed with the GM support. There was a bug with the Paladin Verigan's Fist quest, where if Daphne Stillwell - an important NPC to protect during an attack - died, she would not respawn. This got fixed shortly in, but there was a GM on Thunderhorn who reset the NPC for people who had that problem. The GM support came in minutes for all sorts of issues. Now? Typical response is automated garbage that takes several days to a week. Pagle had a problem with someone on the Horde griefing the Defias messenger NPC, by killing him in one shot while people escorted him. Ticket put in, and my response was "You shouldn't have rolled on a PVP server". Are you fist-fucking kidding me? This GM thought the server was PVP (Spoilers, it was a PVE server), and that was totally irrelevant, since it was someone one-shotting an NPC that took so long to respawn/escort, that the Horde player's PVP flag would wear off, leaving absolutely zero way to do anything, there was no player solution whatsoever.
With the TBC launch, we of course have ability queueing, final patch talents/itemization/skills, but we even have access to epic gems which aren't supposed to be available until the second to last content phase. Content has come pre-nerfed, so that we don't get the harder versions, because that was the easiest way to go.
Activision is definitely the King of Sloth when it comes to WoW Classic.
WoW does a shit ton of time-gating and is the most popular MMORPG of all time. While you and I may both feel that time-gating is bad, WoW has been doing this since the beginning and it has not really paid any price for it. Sadly, time-gating is a part of the game and is not going to change. They do it to limit the amount of gear you can obtain so you keep playing and paying the monthly subscription.
Timegating isn't in and of itself a problem. For example, WoW in the old days used timegating to prevent people from nolifing the best gear from raids week one. The problem is when you start timegating endless or near-endless progression systems. Modern WoW has a problem of trying to inspire FOMO in the playerbase by timegating progression in a way that makes it so taking a break is severely punished in terms of player power.
FFXIV has timegating but you'll seldom see anyone complain about it because there's a straightforward BiS you can reach and there's far less RNG involved in getting that gear, to the point where you can accurately predict how long it'll take you to reach BiS (usually 8-10 weeks) even if you have the absolute worst luck imaginable.
While time gating certainly has slothful elements, it's a lot more on the greedy side than the slothful side, and from your rant on the subject I'd hazard you agree with me on this. While it's certainly lazy or slothful to not make a lot of content and instead use time gating, the idea behind time gating and the reason it's used is not because of laziness but pure greed. As you said addicts make the best customers thus turning your players into addicts is simply more profitable. On top of that, as per your greed video, time gating is a manufactured problem for which the solution can, and often is, than sold in the cash shop. So it's a double whammy, turn customers into addicts to make them more profitable and sell the solution to this manufactured problem for even more money. At the end of the day the laziness aspect is much more pronounced in your other 3 examples where it's pure laziness. Time gating on the other hand is significantly more about greed than laziness. I'd hazard it's 10% or less about laziness and 90% or more about greed.
wow, those perfectly describe Destiny 2, someone should get Bungie on the phone lol.
It's why I stopped playing, I don't need 16 hours of gameplay stretched over a few months, and repetitive missions you have to do 100 times.
That friend group comment. I felt that.
Naaah, time gating is great! Especially when they have the option to pay to increase the amount of time you can play!!
I remember back in Guild Wars during the Guild Wars Beyond period, where they added The War in Kryta in installments. Everybody hated it. Thankfully with the Winds of Change addition, Anet learnt their lessons and simply added the whole content in one go.
You say palette swaps are bad, but WHAT IF IT WAS PUUURPLEEE?
Then there is FFXI. They don't even pallet swap.
One game comes to my mind when you speak of Time-gateing hehe Final Fantasy XIV 1.0....I'm so glad they changed that, easily one of the dumbest features a Final Fantasy title could have.
You seemed to have missed that time gating is perfectly valid in a competitive scene. It's stupid for old content or anything that doesn't have overt rewards/accolades for being one of the first few to complete the content but especially in something like wow, where there are massive communities around pushing for/or watching others push for world firsts/server firsts, it would be stupid not to have them. Otherwise you commit financial suicide by immediately alienating the majority of players just to stroke the egos of a small percentage of your players. I knew I would probably never be server first but knowing I had a chance was the only reason I stayed subbed as long as I did.
I have no reason to play WoW honestly. The time gating ensures I only have 1 day I can play the game. I do 1 +14 mythic or higher key for the vault, 2 runs through torghast solo, and whatever 3 covenant quests are available. I then have no other content that I (a solo player) can do that is actual progress (unless I devote myself to a guild of some sort).
I have played ff14 for over 3000 hours, and although there's always something else to do, it has many "daily" and "weekly" features:
There's a late game currency that has an upper limit on how much you're allowed to earn;
There are reputation grinds which make you want to play a little bit every day or you'll feel you missed time, same goes for the daily "roulettes" as those are the most efficient for leveling;
Your city-state faction lets you send out an npc squad on missions once every 18 hours, and so too for your retainers which are this game's version of the bank.
It tries to make the player feel as though they HAVE to come by every day to do this stuff, because the reward you're working toward will be further away for every day you miss, and that feeling has interfered with my personal life and caused a lot of stress, as though it's a second job rather than entertainment.
Endgame Tomestones are the worst. Especially with how little you get and how you can't even get a single gear piece (ShB) or a gear set (EW) with the weekly limit. There is no excuse.