Guild Wars 2

Whats fun to you all in terms of MMORPGs?

Guessing you don’t mean the Dwarf Fortress version of “fun”.

Depends of my focus with a game. Depending on the game, I focus on different things more than others.

1. Achievements – Some games are fun to “achieve” things in, set goals and work towards something in particular in game. Looking back over everything it took to get through to reach the end is pretty satisfying… some of the time. Some days I feel like that’s my sole reason for logging in.

2. Exploration – I run this one out pretty quick my first few passes through a game. By my second 80, I wasn’t hitting this one so hard, but nowadays when I see a little detail off to the side that I never noticed before that connects with other things, or I find a look for my character I never imagined possible, its fun.

3. Social – love hanging out with people, talking with guildies and running dungeons or events together. Its kind of a situational thing, but more times than not I’ve had more fun doing coordinated efforts because of the awesome folks in my guild. This is my normal reason for having fun in this game.

4. RP – Haven’t really gotten into this much with this game. For as much as this game seems to allude to this all being “my story”, it doesn’t have many tools or precedents that put the power of creation in my hands, just the power of choice. As someone who loves to write and come up with stories and characters, there’s not much entertainment in “getting into character” with any of them. Besides, if I want to fully RP, I’ll play Improbable Island.

5. New shinies – Sometimes Anet jingles something and my inner skritt’s ears pop up, but the gating system they have doesn’t work well with my preferred storytelling style. I’d prefer gorging on 5 seasons of something on Netflix to see “what happens next” rather than waiting two weeks to a month for another part of a story, especially when I am not completely certain what I should be looking forward to. There are times when I wish they took a JRR Martin approach to protagonists and everyone we can grow attached to has a very good chance of not making it out alive. I felt like they COULD have done something like that with some of the choices of the personal story like claw island, but even then that part of the story telling aspect didn’t really “work” and I ended up feeling like said sacrifice wasn’t very powerful. In the end, I try not to expect much from them, perhaps for their lack of a solid medium… perhaps for their fear of turning people off or away. I often feel like Anet is trying too hard to make us like them, while better storytellers, even Blizzard, keep up the “kitten you, we’re awesome, you know you’ll be back”. (and for those who hate Bliz, they do have their moments. Entaro Tassadar, kittens)

“F” is for friends that do stuff together
“U” is for you and me
“N” is for anywhere and any time at all…

Fun is challenge and reward. Very long story short.

VOLKON.1290:

“F” is for friends that do stuff together
“U” is for you and me
“N” is for anywhere and any time at all…

DOWN HERE IN THE DEEP BLUE SEAAAAAAA!!!… you beat me to it :/ but back to the OP. Fun I think is challenging content that doesn’t take forever… example of where this went wrong.. they tried to make maw and warm more challenging when there is zero new challenge to them all they did was make them take 10x as long to kill which isn’t challenging its just extremely annoying. Add some new mechanics, skills, whatever must be done just stop making everything take way longer to kill because time != challenge. A better example is fire ele where they added new challenge and didn’t make it into an ungodly long tankfest

My top 3 fun things I want in an MMORPG (in no particular order) are as follows:

- Fun Combat: For me, fun combat is action packed and fast paced. I like tactics and strategy, but if your actions feel static and not very exciting I will generally get bored of it quickly.

- Character Customization: I like to have as many appearance options as possible when it comes to character customization. For me, the best game for this so far is Champions Online. No other game has come close to offering the scale of appearance options as this game has. That said, so long as I can get the look I want I am generally happy.

In terms of build customization, all I care about is being able to create a build that suits my playstyle. And if I can create other builds besides this, then even better. I like to change builds every now and then, so if a game offers enough options I’ll be happy.

- Exploration: To me exploration is a choice and a reward in itself, not a means to an end. I explore because I want to see the world and find its hidden secrets. I do not like it when games put bread crumbs in to guide players in the right direction. I also do not like achievements, rewards and titles that are linked to exploration, as this makes exploration merely something to do to get a reward. So a game that does not encourage exploration, but provides a large and rich enough world to reward those who enjoy it, is a winner as far as I’m concerned.

There are other things that I find fun in MMORPGs that, though not as important, are deciding factors in playing them:

- A Great Story: A great story to me has the following elements: emotion, atmosphere, gripping elements, thrilling/surprising plot, humorous encounters and characters you get attached to. I also feel that your character should feel important to the story in some way.
– Large Scale PvP: While I enjoy the occassional small scale PvP, I tend to get bored with it quickly. Large scale PvP on the other hand tends to have longer lasting objectives and an overall goal that can go on for days. I enjoy WvW in GW2 very much, but it needs some refinements and fine tuning. But overall I think GW2 has created a good large scale PvP system.
– Content Variety: By this I mean a variety of different things to do, such as mini games, dungeons, world events, dueling, etc. If all a game has is dungeons and no open world events, I would quickly get bored. There needs to be a good variety of activities in game, otherwise it will just feel grindy.

I’m sure with more time and thought I could write more things I find fun, but the above is probably my most desired elements in an MMORPG.

1 – social. meeting other people, talk and coop in quests and events and dungeons. idem the forum.

2 – explore, plot, setting: feel part of world portrayed

3 – feel free and on a par with other players, without any “need” to log to do daily money, tokens, karma (because if i wear a worse gear i am behind the others and ruins my gaming experience)

4…until i decide a good skin or miniature to make my avatar look better. and then work for it. even long hours. but in total freedom

Fun to me is:

• Challenging combat
• Siege warfare
• Having the best gear/skins available
• Strategic/hardmode solo/duo content for PvE

Basically what another poster said, challenge and reward.

Intrinsic rewards, kitten yeah!

Challenge shame this game revolves around casuals

First priority: Lore. Expand on established stuff or make new stuff that’s actually entertaining.

Best example for me: Bazaar of the Four Winds, I love the Zephyrites and I loved how they mourned Glint’s death.

Second Priority: Discovering something new. Be it new skill combos, a mob I never fought, a part of the map I don’t remember seeing I enjoy this all. If I get that little “oh neat” feeling then I’m happy.

Best example: I’ve discovered I like Lornar’s Pass so much more in GW2 because I stopped to look at it instead of blazing through for leveling’s sake.

Third Priority: Low stress value. I don’t game on my schedule. I have no schedule. I game on the few minutes at home when people leave me alone. With that said I don’t group up mostly because I don’t want to tie up others by having them wait for me.

Example: This is why I don’t run fractals or dungeons as much as I’d want.

Last Priority: Treasure. Yes I run champ train from time to time because I get the occasional Exotic.

Example: The occasional Exotic I get from champ train or from crafting.

That’s my cut and dried list of “Fun” for me in this game and others.

Anything that helps me escape reality for a while. Some days it is as simple as running around doing hearts or just harvesting.

I might be the only person to say this is fun – Southsun Cove. Can be challenging or relaxing depending on how you feel that day. Nuke some skelk for an easy day or go fight the champ skelk on the boat near the beach for more challenge.

Somehow collecting an entire 5 piece set of the Settler’s Keepsake/Ring/Amulet drops from Southsun was heaps of fun, even though they’re typically less than 1g/ea on the TP. I have nearly two entire sets now, even though I’m not sure of what build to use them with. Birthday booster FTW. I really miss exciting drops in this game and even the “near miss” feeling from GW1 where you’d get a q9 tac Echovald or something and it would end up with something stupid like +10 armor vs plants.

Karka queen is a well done “advanced” event that requires player cooperation, but not to the extent of Teq where 2 dopes can wreck it for everyone.

Toss in (IMO) the best open world JP and some hidden things (how many even know about the shipwreck treasure?).

So I guess it boils down to – Combat that is flexible enough to adapt to how focused I feel like being that day, loot rewards that are different from just another guaranteed yellow to salvage, exploration nooks and crannies with interesting stuff. And crabs.

Grinding, farming, chasing carrots. Best time ever.

Rin’s top 3 sum up most of what I enjoy in MMOs. Could not have said it better at all. Game play, character customization and exploring make it all worthwhile.

I’ll add a fourth – Immersion. I don’t expect phenomenal story telling, but I enjoy games where the lore, setting, art style and overall game design help bring the world to life.

Hmmm… things I find fun…

Story. The whole reason I tend to play a game is for the lore, the story, the adventure. One of the reasons I couldn’t get into ‘traditional’ MMOs was the walls of text. My first game was GW1, and I loved it. Sure, the stories needed some work, but it was still good. Other MMOs just gave me walls of text to read… I have books for that.

Exploration. I enjoy poking around and finding things, probably why I’m such a graphics kitten. Graphics are very important to me. If I can’t enjoy my scenery, I am not a happy player. I digress though. I like feeling like I can go anywhere, do anything, anytime I want. This also helps me feel like my character is getting stronger…if I stray too far and get trounced, I know I’m not strong enough. Eventually , I will get strong enough though, I just have to get there.

Progression. I’m not just talking bigger numbers here either. I like being able to “work up” to new areas. I like discovering new skills to add to my repertoire. I like collecting ‘things’ to show off my growth (GWAMM anyone? FoW Armor? Dhuum’s Scythe? I know some of you are nodding your heads with me here)

That said, I don’t mind grinding for a [side] goal. It was an integral part of earning titles, collecting armor, and building HoM in general, in gw1. Such things are taken on ‘at will’ and I have the option to discontinue at any time.

Why hasn’t anyone said the obvious yet? “Fun” in MMORPG’s if whatever you enjoy doing. Anyone can tell you what they enjoy doing but that won’t neccessarily be what YOU enjoy doing. Do a bit of everything and, if you find nothing enjoyable, find something that you DO find “fun”. I personally find almost all aspects of GW2 to be pretty enticing. While they could all be tweaked to be better, again in my opinion. I am not the grandmaster of fun and fun is interpreted differently by different people. And that is the most difficult balancing problem.

VOLKON.1290:

“F” is for friends that do stuff together
“U” is for you and me
“N” is for anywhere and any time at all…

Jokes aside, this is a pretty clear representation of why I would deem fun in an MMO. I love being able to organize stuff with friends, and making sure that they all get to be part of the action. It’s especially true when it isn’t restricted to certain areas of the game.

In other words, I love doing group content be it Dungeons, World Bosses, Meta Events. I loved the Tower of Nightmares because it was a borderline dungeon that could be done by groups larger than 5. It was perfect for my style of play, and I dearly hope that ArenaNet continues with this style of content in the future!!

RoRo.8270:

Challenge shame this game revolves around casuals

Actually it revolves around Korean grind philosophy not casual philosophy.

OP it’s prolly safer to ask what’s not fun. You’ll find that what people list as not fun, you’ll find in many areas of the game already mostly in the fundamentals like progression/rewards.

I find minidungeons/housing/fishing/crafting that doesn’t require RNG for mats, doing mini activities for cosmetics/decor that aren’t sold in the store, all of these activities tying together to include automatic reputation advancement for even more rewards later so that gameplay is seemless.

tigirius.9014:

RoRo.8270:

Challenge shame this game revolves around casuals

Actually it revolves around Korean grind philosophy not casual philosophy.

+1
there’s nothing left for casuals.
maybe just the leveling part of the game.
done with that, there is only grind

Swimming with my mini-pets and enjoying how I run! :p