Play MMORPG's? Got a second?

Hey guys, my name is George Davies, and I am a foundation degree counselling student at Truro College in Cornwall. As part of my course, I am required to undertake a piece of research on a subject of my choice, as long as it relates to my course. I have thus chosen to study MMORPGs (Massive Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games), and would appreciate your time on my questionnaire.

ALL of your details and answers are confidential, and none of your details are going to be shared with 3rd party resources (I have no need to) Please feel free to leave any questions that you are not comfortable answering, and thank you for your time.

To the admins: my intention is not to take people away from your site in any way or pollute your site with unnecessary rubbish: this is a totally valid piece of research and a authentic investigation into people and the world of MMORPGs. All websites that assist will be given due accreditation.

Heres the questionnaire

http://freeonlinesurveys.com/rendersurvey.asp?sid=gxkft9p4ri1325s385302

 

Isn't a symptom of addiction that you lose the ability to objectively assess the effect your chosen drug has on your life?

Eye opener, that this is the kind of data that politicians pull out everytime there is a school shooting.........

 

I dont think there are many MMORPG players in a fighting game forum /forums/images/%%GRAEMLIN_URL%%/confused.gif

 

hard to combine both at hardcore level since they both sink insane amounts of time.
But at least you can play fighting games when you want


an ex-MMORPG user

 

I love me some mehmorpehguhs.

 

just completed it.
sry if i was too honest

 

Done.

Makes me want to load up Ultima 6 online or Runescape right now.

 

MMORPGs are the scourge of the video game landscape. All they do is waste your time by tricking your mind into believing you are accomplishing something useful, when in reality all you are doing is making the numbers stored on some distant computer server get bigger. Something that the people who own the server could do in virtually no time at all, by the way. The "skill" your character gains in an MMORPG doesn't even belong to you. The server admins could take it all away at any time if they felt like it. At least with a game like VF5, I know my skill belongs to me and me alone, and there's nothing Sega could do to take it away from me.

MMORPGs are not so much fun, as they are obssessive compulsive. I've played a few in the past, but I really didn't like them. The only online RPG that I ever had fun playing was PSO on the Dreamcast. But back then they didn't charge server fees so you didn't have to spend 8 hours a day playing the damn game just to feel like you were getting you money's worth. I fail to see the appeal in that.

 

It costs $0.50 per day to play. So even if you "only" play 1 hour per day that hour cost you less than a buck. Find me a source of entertainment cheaper than $0.50/hour.

 

Crack, if you're a pimp with many bitches........

 

Xbox live service averages out to $0.14 a day, and it let's you play online with a whole library of games rather than just one.

 

That's so true. A while ago (prior to VF5 release) I had some spare time and tried to get into WOW, to see what the big deal was. And for a while, it was fun - I managed to believe that it was a fantasy world with stories and people and things to do. But after a while(60 levels in), I realized that I was just wasting my time on a virtual treadmill - there was no end or point to the game, and I'm just doing the same thing over and over and over again. There's no real skill involved, it's just how long you're willing to sit in front of a computer and punch in time, and you're basically trading that time for some numbers on the screen.

And that's when I realized that that's exactly what I do at work, except at work I get paid for it with real money, instead of stat numbers or virtual gold. I put the game away and never had the urge to play it ever again.

 

In mmorpgs there is skill, especially in pvp. What you referred to as "skill" is just character data, which to apply it correctly in VF is like your character outfits, which Sega could take away from you. If you take a person who has never played Lineage 2, or WoW for example, give them a max level character, and tell them to help fight this boss, or fight these people, they will fail. If you give someone who has played, and leveled a character to max level, they will do much better in those same situations.

 

I'm waiting for the next best MMORPG to pop up on 360

 

Having a cool costume for your character has absolutely nothing to do with skill.

I'm willing to bet pretty much any person with a fair degree of RPG experience could figure out how to play any given MMORPG character data well in an insignificant amount of time compared to what it would take to "earn" that character. I will admit there are places where strategy comes in to play in MMORPGs, but I think it does very little to take away from the fact the vast majority of your time playing will be spent doing mindless reptetive tasks.

 

Experienced MMORPG's players will master a totally new class in no time flat. I'd say I could play fairly well a new class in 1hour of play, and almost master it in 3-4 days. There are actually very little personnal skills involved.

 

isn't that a bad sign if someone can master a new character in such a short amount of time? Think of how long it takes to master a character in VF5, imagine if it only took 3-4 days to master a character if you were really experienced with i.e. wolf and wanted to master eileen, it's gonna take more than 4 days to do that.

Basic understandings of a game should transfer from one class to the next but mastery of a class should not be a trival mater even for a master of their own prefered class. That's a sign of not enough diversity between classes as far as I'm concerned.

Mind you I also like MMRPGs

 

Yup that's exactly what i'm thinking.
It take ages to master ONE character in almost all fighting games ... 2 months with Akira for me and I'm still a SCRUBB.
That's why the fighting games are good, cause it's all about skill and training.
MMORPG's are games with an "economic" model, that means that all the game can be converted into numbers and functions (ie damage, hit points, armor factor, mana pool etc..) and the whole interest of the game is to have the optimal mathematic function for your char. That means drop new items to raise stats, raise level, etc ... So personnal skill is secondary.
Sorry for the shitty explanation but well it's hard to explain in english for me

 

So what you're saying is that job needs no skill to do? /forums/images/%%GRAEMLIN_URL%%/wink.gif

Personally I'm a big fan of playing with numbers. I love trying to figure out the mathematical equations behind my characters damage output. And then trying to find the best way to max it out. I can understand that doing math might not be everyone's favourite pass time.

So while VF is great for seeing how bad my reflexs or manual dexterity has gotten, it doesn't exactly test how much of my math classes have been for not.

 

Actually you are right.
On of the point of the game is to learn how the mechanics works to take benefit of them. Like what stats are going to help me to do more damage, what resistance is optimal in this situation, what item template must I have to fit my specializations etc ...
But you don't need math, more "logic" I think. And a lot of player on MMORPG's don't even bother to study game mechanics, that's sad btw.