How to fix Toram (And solve all MMORPG's biggest grind problem)

Currently, Toram's end game consists of repetitively farming a boss over and over in hopes and prayers to the RNG gods for a specific drop out of a pool of drops. All MMORPGs do this and have done this since the beginning of time. Whilst this works early on in the game's lifespan, it becomes a glaring problem later on just like stat and skill distribution systems are. This is why many people prefer to go towards the battlegrounds games or the FPS games. To fix this, we have to look back at the roots, the single player rpg games (the old ones with minimal RNG in it).

What I mean is that let's say we have a boss like iconos, you're level 200+ yet you still have to farm like crazy just to get one item which when you really look back, wasn't very rewarding to obtain. Same speed, you have ifrid who drops a magic device yea? So what if whilst that magic device was equipped and maybe a few other conditions met, you were able to guarantee that drop item and only that drop item.

^^^^^^^^^^^^
That was just one example. What I'm getting at here is that mmorpgs need to diversify their gameplay itself rather than using this age old mechanic of grinding till your rear turns to ash which may or may not lead to frustration. One such method is diversifying drops and by extension, AI.

Supports use auras, make it so that when a supporter is using an aura, whoever is under those aura effects will by guaranteed that specific drop and as a counter, have the boss Agro lock onto the aura user. Some people love high damage builds, why not make it so that once damage exceeds a certain limit, you can gain a special drop like an xtal. The game seems to hate knuckles disabling effects so why not have those counter effects occur only once and as a special, enable a special drop item.

The reason I mention drops so much is because everything in MMOs are centered around them.
In battlegrounds, they are more of a hide and seek game.
In MMORPGs what they should be is a inclusion of all those features that literally go to dust over time.

Alchemists item use should modify what is available at certain bosses, blacksmiths should be able to imbue skills (or maybe a future job like enchanter?) into their crafted equipment.

The main point of this part is really to remove RNG drops. Toram has over 1000 items with more than half of the database sitting unused or functioning as material points with special names.

How they can work this into toram and still profit?
Well, ultimate gems simply remove all those requirements, Glory gems and legendary gems randomly remove the requirements on items in the drop table. I mean, with guaranteed drops, you are free to make the requirements a bit difficult to obtain (eg: chat 100+ times in chat box).

But how will we retain players?
People will still be 'grinding' items and fighting bosses, the only difference is that these two factors now become fun instead of RNG and biggest damage. You will have try-hards trying to make an all encompassing build only to fall short on damage or some other area. You will have team efforts being required instead of faceroll invinc solo.
Retaining players by RNG only makes them more frustrated in the late game when they simply have to rely on RNG for progression which leads to fast clears being desired for more RNG rolls per unit time which means that more builds become useless by extension.


The more diversity, the more builds players would have to make, the longer players will stay. The only problem is the effort required on the developer's part to spiderweb these drops together.

 

You’re tired already, go take some rest.

Genshin Impact will release at this 28 September, 2020. Before that throw always your Toram and go get other entertainment like watch movie, anime, read book or go eat something nice.

 

Oh im looking forward to it as well as I'm going to be designing a few systems to kill time.

 

I understand the argument you’re posing, however I believe you’re targeting the wrong issue.

RNG works pretty well; it’s the implementation that’s the issue. RNG is a good way of leveling the playing field. Regardless of how skilled you are, you will still face failure. However, I agree that Toram Online’s implementation of RNG is an absolute nightmare. I wish more MMORPGs allowed for RNG to scale with level, therefore the chance of failure lowers, or implement a ceiling effect in which after capping a certain amount of failures, you will receive the item. I don’t believe removing it entirely would be the best solution. Its difficulty is what keeps players engaged, because they know they will be rewarded in the future. It’s the Pareto principle at its finest.

I believe the main issue is unvaried mechanics. The reuse of the same game mechanics gets old rapidly; tier 4 skills are used similarly as tier 3 skills except they do some more damage. There’s no need to devise multiple strategies, as the same one works each time. The only difference between old bosses and new is that their stats are bumped up and the AoE spammery worsens. Introducing new game mechanics would allow for different strategies and builds to be used. Furthermore, bosses should become smarter and be given different abilities (other than AoE spammery).

 

Yes but maxing out RNG is basically the same as giving away the item which is why i said the whole system is a failure. At best, you get something really good for no effort. At worse, your effort towards the item is too great.

RNG can work, it's just that for core gameplay, unless it's a gacha game, no. The RNG system also progressively worsens with a larger drop pool to drop size ratio.

Unvaried mechanics actually stem directly from the drop system. At late game, players like challenging bosses or even farming bosses. Right now, drops are random. You have no guarantee to get any drop even if you break all of a boss's parts, worser yet, if you take too long, the profitability of the run begins to degrade. This means that what matters now is high dps and maybe a part breaker tank.

This makes the following useless: Katana, Halberd, Knuckles, Mage. All because they are not the highest damaging builds in the game.

With the spider-web system, with all drops being guaranteed if requirements are met, you have natural diversity occuring rather than trying to force it with ailments reducing boss resistance.

 

I guess grind is just a part of MMORPG genre. FPS, MOBA, or whatever games are designed to be competitive and do not need to grind. You are fighting with other players. That is why even tho most of the times the maps are just pretty much the same, every game feel diffferent since the randomness of human players are enough. It is just a matter of who has greater skill. In FPS, better reflex and hand-eye coordination. In MOBA, quick and good decision making, hero mastery, teamwork, and so on. For MMORPG, I can understand why some ppl dont like the grind since some ppl just dont have enough time and patience to do the grind just to be able to beat the boss. Not to mention, grinding for equipment to be just decent enough. Even after all this, the feel of achievement defeating AI over human players are not that sastifying for them. Grind has always been the thing going for MMORPG. Just my opinion haha. Dont take it seriously.

 

It's a fact for me.

 

B2P.
Thats what work for me.
Weeded out toxic player. In app purchase ? Pure cosmetic. No zero point zero zero zero .... Drop rate.
Mobile b2p suck tho. And my pc just went kaboom one day so Iam stuck here.

 

It isn't. It rewards for the effort the player has made thus far as well as their advancement. I believe your hypothetical system's requirements are far too easy to fulfill and far too predictable. What I mean by unvaried mechanics is that players no longer care to experience boss battles, as they've come terribly tedious, thus all they look forward to is the drops. That is lazy game design. The lack of variety is very much apparent when all you can do is grind in a similar environment with similar monsters using the same skills. Again, RNG isn't the issue, it's the reused mechanics. This may be an oxymoron, however grinding doesn't necessarily have to be tedious.

That and, if you despise RNG so much, quests should be able to reward a player with rare drops as well. Granted, they should be puzzles, like in Runescape.

 

It's not easy to fulfill because you have to rework all drops to have dependence on the other.

Conditions such as requiring an aura user wont exactly work for close ranged builds as it does for ranged builds. For example.

Boss battles are tedious because the patterns are reused continuously throughout the battle with no new mechanics unless the boss is reacting to an ailment.

Reason i say changing rng rolls to 100% is giving away the item is because it is literally just that. Especially with no prerequisite for the item, nothing is truly earned and most of the game is not utilized. It's just go wack boss and claim item. With RNG, it's go wack boss repetitively until you get item.

With the right setup, you can make all aspects of the game useful which is what the game is suffering from now because:
- Special Equipment relies on drops
- Crafting relies on drops
- Xtals relies on drops

^ Those are the only things you really aim towards other than optimizing stat and skill points in build.

Equips and xtals are the end game for toram right now which means that it all boils down to RNG which leads to fixed reliance on highest damage teams.

 

RNG rewards Luck not Effort. If Player A can defeat the boss 1 time and get the Xtal within their first week of playing the game, and Player B can defeat the boss 500 times without getting the Xtal over the course of several months of playing the game, then Effort has not been rewarded. The closest the game gets to rewarding effort is farming gold because at least then you can use that gold to buy equipment/xtals/etc. You could argue that that, the ingame economy, is dependent on RNG but that isn't a defense in my eyes. An insanely flawed ingame economy, built on top of an insanely flawed reward system.

Also realize, what you said applies to the current system, which is caused by and built on RNG. No one cares to experience boss battles now because everyone wants to damn near 1-shot the boss to get it over with. When was the last time you experienced Minotaur, for example? Probably not for a while because you need to collect 3 stacks of 99 skins for Anti-Deg, which means killing it as quickly and efficiently as possible in less than 10 seconds. And as the OP points out, it only gets worse the rarer the drop is because the drop isn't guaranteed, which means there's no set number of times you have to kill the boss

What if to get a full 99 stack of minotaur skins, you had to actually experience a mechanically in-depth boss fight? Like trick the minotaur into ramming several pillars, which causes the pillars to fall on top of it and triggering an "enraged," state where it starts chunking pillars, gets faster attacks/animations and new attack patterns? And once enraged, you have the options of:

>reaching a high dps check to obtain 99 minotaur skins

>Surviving an increasingly powerful boss to obtain the Xtal (giving some purpose to support builds and giving tanks more spotlight)

>Hitting the boss with different elements to obtain different weapons depending on the element.

>or hell, even make it, survive against the boss for x amount of time, have all your teammates drop to 0 hp, and deal fifty percent of the boss's HP in damage while the boss is enraged to recieve an exclusive drop

Just something to engage players in the boss fight. So yeah, Im in agreement with the OP on this. But I will say, RNG is a fine system but only if it can be hidden through engaging gameplay. Toram doesn't hide it's RNG at all. Most games don't hide their RNG too well, which is why I'm inclined to dislike RNG as a system and advocate for it to die off.

To anyone who would defend RNG as a system: Imagine if your paycheck was RNG but the bills still come due at the end of the month regardless of if your check dropped or not.

 

you can't compare real life to video game dude, nobody would work a job with an RNG based paycheck, they have binding contracts for that, you would get x amount of $ per x amount of hour, toram is video game and not a job, if you feel like "I have played this game for this amount of time and so I SHOULD HAVE ALL THESE ITEMS! REEEEEE", such entitlement.

 

Agreed. I think tenryu for example was a good way to introduce a different dps playstyle. I personally would also like to see manual charge skills. Just an example:
Imagine your character holding up a sword as long as you press the skill button. While you are holding the skill button the skill charges power which will be released once you let go of the button.
I also think combos make for really stale gameplay. Get rid of them alltogether for dps skills imo and leave them just for casting stuff like decoy or buffs.

 

Uh, I can. And I am. If I said, "If rare items dropped easily and frequently, that would devalue their worth," or "If spina was easy to get, prices would go up," would you tell me I can't say those things? Those are real world economic principles that are factors in Toram's economy. Just like how a bug in WoW helped form a model which helps predict pandemic outbreak spread. Just like when a country's economoy can collapse and the most financially stable regular people are the ones who make their livings grinding items in mmos. If people can use games for that, I see no reason why I can't make a simple analogy.

But yes, exactly, nobody would work a job where their paycheck is RNG. When people do a job, they agree that their time is worth x amount. When people play Toram, that agreement is not there. The time they spend on Toram becomes worth whatever they manage to get done in Toram, which can range from nothing to a lot (in game). That variation in time-value turns a lot of people away from the game.

Case point, my friend and I use to grind for an Xtal, but he got fed up with it and quit. He quit, so I quit. All our time became worth nothing because we didn't want to invest more. And I can't even convince him to look at the game anymore because he doesn't want to make a similar, wasted investment.

Your, "entitlement," shot does nothing to undermine anything I'm saying. No one has advocated for a system where they get, "ALL THESE ITEMS! REEEEE," by virtue of just logging into the game for some hours. Only a system where, if you put the time and work in, you're guaranteed to get something out of it, where your time is guaranteed to be worth something.

That you can say what you've said implies that your time isn't worth much and/or that you believe everyone values their time the same as you, and/or everyone has the same time allocation/allotment as you, ergo they should be fine with the time wasting system you're fine with. I wonder what that qualifies as...? Entitlement or elitist? Regardless of what it is, it isn't a good look.

 

Exactly, you already get that theres no guarantee to get "ALL THESE ITEMS, REEE". The contract is not there. No matter how long you played theres no guarantee to get what you want, hence you cant compare it to real life jobs. And yeah I guess I dont value my time as much as you or anyone's.

 

I should point out that there are games with the so called 100% RNG, idle rpgs. You get everything and minimal time is used personally, gameplay wise, the time to get anything is astronomical.

There are also games with a stupid amount of dailies that you can auto through, no difference from idle rpgs tho.

RNG isn't the solution. It works early but with bigger drop tables, they begin to fail.

 

I can compare the two and I have. I'm not comparing contracts, I'm comparing time-value investment within the context of "Fixing the Grind Problem". You disliking the comparison won't change that reality. If it helps you, I suggest you stop looking at it as a comparison and view it more as a "What-If" scenario.

What if your paycheck was RNG based? Would you be okay with it? If not, why? And why are you okay with an RNG-based sytem in a game that also requires a significant time investment?

 

Even for me, I cannot even imagine comparing a game into a real life job. That's because of the difference of the reason why I invest my time in game or my job. I don't even think that I'm investing my time in this game becoz I just play it just to enjoy. Unlike using my time in my real life job that makes me get paid.

I think maybe it was the same for him. I can't compare the two, becoz the game & real life job has a different use.

 

Yes, you can say whatever the hell you want, but that doesn’t mean it’s sound. You may have forgotten, however Toram Online is in the fantasy genre. Fantasy is defined by crafting unrealistic or improbable things, such as the existence of magic and monsters. What makes MMORPGs, and video games in general, as enchanting as they are is because they don’t attempt to replicate real life scenarios. In fact, many see video games as an escape from reality. RNG definitely works in its favor; I am not arguing it’s realistic, because it isn’t, nor is it meant to be.

 

People play games for different reasons. Some people have time that they don't value and don't care if it gets wasted. Some people value their time and want to spend it on progression. Some people value their time and just want to spend it playing a game with friends. It's important to remember, not everyone is you, has your life and/or shares your views on things.