Watching MMOs have Changed (and why that's bad) | Xaryu Reacts, at 21:34 out of the hour-long video (original is 36m). Mainly I want to comment on the argument about visual appearance, but before that TheoryWise touched on PvP.
The video noted that getting ganked by higher-level players is not fun. In Aion, it was also getting ganked by same-level players, who could access more rifts and get more Abyss Points for killing low-level players. I think physical damage classes also had some ability to kill higher-level players. Basically, some games will reward players for bullying because of bad game mechanics (in Aion, it was the way that rank would immediately decrease from spending points), while others will simply fail to sufficiently deter bullying that has no extrinsic reward.
(TheoryWise pronounces 'facsimile' and 'scarcity' in ways that differ from what Wiktionary suggests, and at 15:05 seems to be using 'retroactively' wrong.)
Anyway, visual appearances. The argument up to this point in the video is that visual appearance is a form of achievement, and that if visual appearance is meaningless, then players have less to strive for.
An old idea that I had, in 2007 or 2008, on my Guildcafe blog. Basically, level up items the way that hunters in Classic WoW level up their pets. (I have never played a hunter in WoW, maybe because of Mei playing a hunter in the WoW beta in 2004.) There are more details to make the idea make some sense beyond that point: a way for hard-to-obtain items to still feel special, and how to deal with items that are beyond the normal 'level cap'. There was also something about having 'styles' of clothing, and you would sort of level up proficiency in a style, not unlike how weapon skills work in Classic WoW.
But the basic idea: it's like transmogrification, but with more work and not being alt-friendly. (Also, a lot of people seem to think WoW got the word Transmogrification from Calvin and Hobbes, which Gbay99 referenced re 'building character'.)
I do remember when I saw a night elf druid in WoW in the dungeon set, aka Tier 0, Wildheart Raiment. Somewhere in the vicinity of the officer's hall in Stormwind. But I've never really regarded items as something worth going out of my way for, even for appearances. I remember, for example, wanting the Carapace of Tuten'kash on my paladin, making a group to go to a dungeon that Alliance players often didn't go to, and I think being lucky enough to get it, but if I hadn't gotten it on the run that I did for quests, I would not have gone back for it. Just as, after I lost the roll for a Triune Amulet from Whitemane (featured in the 'zip file jpg' on 25 Jan 2013 as Prosecutor Futemaien, and in this event in Old Hillsbrad:
— I'm not trying to change displayed image, but if it doesn't show 1680x1050, can change the image url to use like s2000 —
which nearly mirrors the dialogue that can occur if a player visits the Cathedral wing of the Scarlet Monastery, seven years later, meaning that Renault is 19 years old and Sally is 21), I was sad because I didn't expect to return to that location as I had already completed the quests. (And that experience is one reason that I think gold bid is good for dungeons, as then I could have bid more than a rogue for whom one of the stats was useless, even if it was an upgrade from the rogue's existing necklace.)
So over the years I have focused and talked more about gameplay changes, than this idea that's about visual appearances.
My counter-argument to what TheoryWise has said up to this point would be that with a system like the one I suggested, getting a good-looking set of gear would not be easy. Before transmog, it was always a bit of a joke in WoW how players would look like clowns when wearing the best available gear they obtained while leveling. I unfortunately cannot remember all the details of the system I described, and am too lazy to find open the file that has all my posts from that time, ok here it is:
Actually a little more readable as HTML, since things like list items don't display properly. Well, this is what I wrote, with the paragraphs somehow deleted during the export process (I did not write a 2369-word wall of text for the 'Soloed Chess
Event in Karazhan, 70 Rogue' entry):
I wanted to explain the more important stuff about how this fits into instance design and endgame.. Most significant is the flat raiding endgame. (and note that this is all from an attempt to try to figure out how to present the quality of endgame raid gear so it fit into gear-scaling, if you didn't use WoW-like color-based rarity/absolute power indicators, lol /sigh..) Any and all raid content would be accessible without any kind of tier system! zomg seriously, if I wrote more concisely this blog would be about half as wordy as it is, and I'm not helping by saying this either >.< Anywayyy so people would be able to run whatever instances they wanted (given a skilled group), and they would want to run those instances because the encounter designers would be focusing all of the energy around making CHALLENGING AND FUN ENCOUNTERS instead of having to make bosses that dropped good loot!! >.< So that's when you get to do all the fun stuff. :P Being able to PUG raid slots follows directly from the flat endgame, the story-based progression (mostly noncompetitive) instead of gear progression (ok and gems too, which can tie into the economy), the modular encounter design as a result of the advanced threat mechanics and proper combat system, and all the other things such as good short- and long-term LFG tools to support the whole PUG concept. And what is even better, is that with downleveling of players in old instances and the scaling of gear and story-based emphasis, old instances will not be made obsolete with future content expansions!! This is what happens when you take the spotlight off of gear! WoW focuses all attention at the peak of character progression and what can be achieved at that point... everything else is, and will be, left to rot once newer and better comes out with WotLK and other expansions. It is the way that game is, and the way that game will always be, because the devs are too stubborn or too retarded to change (EQ junkies). But it isn't the only way to make a game.
So I did not actually make it work with a WoW-type tier system, with jumps in power with each tier.
But my point: suppose this system did not, in fact, work with a tier system, only up to 'basic gear at the level cap'. And let's say that, due to mismatched sets or just sets like Ahn'Qiraj that differed substantially in style which some players might not like, the 'best' gear that a player can get would often look bad. They can either get good gear, which looks bad, or they can wear good-looking gear, which has worse stats.
If the best-looking item that matches an outfit is a lvl 20 green item (for a lvl 60 player), it's a big penalty to use that item: it might literally provide 1/10 of the stats of the best item. But if it can be 'leveled up' in a reasonable timeframe to be similar to a lvl 60 green, and then slowly improve beyond that to be equal to a lvl 58 or 60 blue, the gap is smaller. Or just say there is no performance gap, the 'flat endgame' that I talked about in that post. Then there are four possibilities:
1) a player is wearing gear that drops from difficult content and immediately has good stats, but might be ugly.
2) a player is wearing lower-level gear chosen for its looks, which does not yet have good stats.
3) a player is wearing lower-level gear which, through much work (I think I suggested at some point that higher gear levels could only be reached by defeating difficult bosses, like how killing gray mobs in WoW doesn't give XP), has become as powerful as the ugly gear.
4) a player is wearing lower-level gear which is still ugly, despite all the options they have to choose from when wearing lower-level gear.
Options 1 and 3, a player is impressive because they progressed through difficult content. Option 2, a player could be seen as impressive because finding good-looking gear is not always easy. Option 4 would not impress anyone.
Anyway, I will found out whether the arguments that TheoryWise uses in this video after 21:34 are effective against this. Basically, he is saying that a game is better if players can impress others based on one metric: how they look, or possession of the items that grant a particular appearance. I am saying that it can work using additional metrics. A player who chooses Option 2 listed above, for example, could be impressive if they have not been kicked from a raid for using non-optimal gear.
This is sort of like a PvP system with skill-based ranks. A player with terrible gear who has a medium rank is impressive, but a player with incredibly good gear who has the same medium rank is probably bad at PvP. The theory that motivated me to write the second part of the first pastebin is that people avoid designing systems that require complex evaluation like this, and so useful solutions to problems go unnoticed and unused.
In a long-running game like retail WoW, where there are many impressive items: that post excerpt was me saying in 2008 that players should not be able to easily complete old content (after the stat squishes in WoW, old mobs take up to 500x damage, note different content older versions of the article). The problem that TheoryWise is sort of sidestepping here is that every raid tier is designed to have items that look impressive, but none are hard to obtain except for the most recent raid tier. I wouldn't be surprised if typical players are not even really sure what the most recent raid gear looks like. They might see it when they loot it, but that's just the appearance of one class's armor out of many classes.
If artists try 30 times to design a cool-looking set of armor for each class, then unless they are deliberately withholding cool designs, the set that a new player would find most impressive will probably not be the final one. If a player is actually playing the game, then because of things like the mere-exposure effect (which I mentioned to Autumn on Chirp Club in a message which she didn't reply to, of course), it's even more likely that a player will prefer a set that isn't the last one.
I made a comparison to hunter pets and I think it's a good one. It seemed to me that the worst thing about hunter pets is that they often shrink after taming, to a standardized size. But if you accept that, as all hunters in WoW presumably do, then there are many players who use one pet for their entire leveling experience. I was going to mention Rav as an example of raiding with non-optimal gear, when he told his chat to be serious as he was going to try hard to 'parse' on his second kill of Ragnaros and then switched his ranged weapon to throwing knives as a hunter, and he only used one pet for the entire game on his first character.
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