Why Does Everyone Have to Go Fast?

[Fenrisulven7]

It weeds out the bad/slow players.

No, it really doesn't. I'm a bad player and I can zerg with the best of them.


Talking to the OP now: What you're seeing are insecure players showing off - to themselves. For some people, video games are like Accomplishment Porn. This is not entertainment for them, it's their purpose in life. So they take on quests, overpowered and twinked out and rush through it. They need to find something more challenging, but they are afraid of failure, so they settle on "running up the score".

It's like chugging a fine bottle of wine, thinking it makes you look cool.

[Fenrisulven7]

I'm with you 100%.

People who zerg and grind choose to do that and then complain that they hate it. They don't have to play the game that way. IT IS A CHOICE. It actually takes a lot of the fun away from the game. They admit they hate doing it, but they do it anyway. So WHY do they do it is really the big question.

There is a group of elitests who don't really enjoy the game, they simply enjoy being better than everyone else. You can have fun playing at R1 if you aren't overpowered. You can have fun playing at R5 if you aren't overpowered. But there is a group of people that only care about playing at R10 and being able to look down their noses at everyone else. They sit around patting themselves on the back saying how great it is to be the best and complain about people who aren't able to keep up.

They also like playing low level reaper and destroying everything just to make themselves feel better. The fact that it ruins the game for everyone in the group who isn't a zerg freak doesn't matter to them. It makes them feel good to have ALL of the kills, so they do it just to laugh at everyone else.

Then when something comes out like racial tr, they have a choice, to zerg or not to zerg. They could play through normally. Enjoy each life. Try new things. Take their time. But they know their buddies are going to be zerging it. And if their buddies zerg it, then their buddies will be more powerful. They wont be able to play with their buddies, so they HAVE to zerg it to keep up. If they dont zerg and grind they will no longer be in that group of elitists and the game wont be worth playing for them. They never really enjoyed playing anyway, it was just the joy of being better than everyone. And if they don't zerg they wont be better than everyone.

Being in that group of elitists is EVERYTHING to these people so they really don't think they have a choice. That is why many of them will say something along the lines of "This game is just becoming a zerg fest" and quit. Or they will complain about how the hamster wheel of racial tr (or any of the other grindy things) needs to be fixed.

It truly doesn't occur to them that they can simply play without it. It doesn't occur to them that they don't have to have all the racial past lives to enjoy this game. They don't have to have ALL of the best equipment as soon as a new pack comes out. They don't want to zerg anymore, but being the best is ALL they know. So it is zerg or quit for these guys.

Unfortunately, many simply do the zerg, remain in that snobby group, and then whine about grind incessantly in the forums as if it is anything other than their own twisted values that makes them do it.

THIS.

Now, there are some players who zerg for more practical reasons, but they won't talk down to you about "flower sniffing" the way some on this thread have.

[Nebless]

That is why nobody will remember your name.

Oh I don't know. My character in SWG was quite well known on my server because I walked every where in the Cities.

[Hobgoblin]

[NemesisAlien]

I'm with you 100%.

People who zerg and grind choose to do that and then complain that they hate it. They don't have to play the game that way. IT IS A CHOICE. It actually takes a lot of the fun away from the game. They admit they hate doing it, but they do it anyway. So WHY do they do it is really the big question.

There is a group of elitests who don't really enjoy the game, they simply enjoy being better than everyone else. You can have fun playing at R1 if you aren't overpowered. You can have fun playing at R5 if you aren't overpowered. But there is a group of people that only care about playing at R10 and being able to look down their noses at everyone else. They sit around patting themselves on the back saying how great it is to be the best and complain about people who aren't able to keep up.

They also like playing low level reaper and destroying everything just to make themselves feel better. The fact that it ruins the game for everyone in the group who isn't a zerg freak doesn't matter to them. It makes them feel good to have ALL of the kills, so they do it just to laugh at everyone else.

Then when something comes out like racial tr, they have a choice, to zerg or not to zerg. They could play through normally. Enjoy each life. Try new things. Take their time. But they know their buddies are going to be zerging it. And if their buddies zerg it, then their buddies will be more powerful. They wont be able to play with their buddies, so they HAVE to zerg it to keep up. If they dont zerg and grind they will no longer be in that group of elitists and the game wont be worth playing for them. They never really enjoyed playing anyway, it was just the joy of being better than everyone. And if they don't zerg they wont be better than everyone.

Being in that group of elitists is EVERYTHING to these people so they really don't think they have a choice. That is why many of them will say something along the lines of "This game is just becoming a zerg fest" and quit. Or they will complain about how the hamster wheel of racial tr (or any of the other grindy things) needs to be fixed.

It truly doesn't occur to them that they can simply play without it. It doesn't occur to them that they don't have to have all the racial past lives to enjoy this game. They don't have to have ALL of the best equipment as soon as a new pack comes out. They don't want to zerg anymore, but being the best is ALL they know. So it is zerg or quit for these guys.

Unfortunately, many simply do the zerg, remain in that snobby group, and then whine about grind incessantly in the forums as if it is anything other than their own twisted values that makes them do it.

You know this isnt only happening in games, happens in school too, elitist look down on the peons, the geeks, the slobs, etc...

In fact its been happening for thousands of years, look down on those dirty peasants, not even worth mentioning, worth less then the dirt on thy shoe.

[LavidDynch]

I wasn't looking for any specific answer at all, just curious on why people seem to think they need to speed through many (and not just DDO) games.

I'm not on the TR hamster wheel, nor do I ever plan on getting on it so while I understand that as a reason for those, it's not one that speaks to me.

I do value my time and will set anywhere from 1 to 3 hours aside for my gaming, but I don't rate quality, by quantity. If I only get 1 dungeon in and had fun that's good enough for me.

Yes I'm a flower sniffer and think the journey's more important that getting to the end.

I thank everyone for responding, it's given me a new look on the subject.

The first time I baked hard bread it took me a good 30 min to get the batch into the owen. Nowadays, I can do a batch between a commercial break.

[Oliphant]

Opposite of wanting to playing elite groupsies:

People play LFMs, where most reliable meta for current reaper is kill baddies asap before they kill you.

[erethizon]

Seems pretty obvious to me that the root cause is that the producer of the game made a decision to compromise the game's integrity in exchange for cash flow by selling p2w items in the store: boxes, xp pots, raid bypass timers, tomes, trees, etc.

Once the original, carefully designed goals were much more easily attained, they had to replace them with stupid, grindy goals like getting 100+ past lives and counting reaper points. Those take a lot of time (by design), and to the extent they can't be circumvented with p2w items, obtaining them comes down to (r)xp/min. So it's about quest efficiency, of which speed is a big component.

In my mind, the better question is why did the player base accept this? I guess the answer is that many didn't, which is why the active player base is so small and every 3rd topic on this forum is calling for a server merge. Most of those who are left just seem to be trying to keep up with the rat race as it unfolds with each release - the current rat race de jour is 12 new epic lives. Better hurry. Don't want to fall behind.

I can't speak for all players but some of us accepted it because we like it. Not only like it, prefer it. Not only prefer it but the only reason we still play this game is because of the past life system.

I have no interest playing a level capped character. When I get to the level cap in a game, I quit. There is no point in playing a character that cannot improve (gear means nothing to me) and I have no interest in playing an alt. I understand that content is limited and some repetition of content is to be expected, but if I must repeat content at least let my character continue to improve. The past life system allows endless (or close enough to endless for me) character development without having to sit at a level cap playing only 10% (or less) of the total content.

I don't mind going back through a game again, but I at least want to have my character improve when I do so. Alts don't have this effect because they are totally different people. The reincarnation system in this game is great for combining endless character improvement with the ability to play through the entire game again rather than just a small portion of it (which is the way end game grinding works).

Where this causes problems is with the people that feel like they need to be the best. People see 150 past lives and feel like they have to grind them all. When I see 150 past lives I see options. When I do a epic TR for example, I get to choose from a wide variety of new bonuses. When they added 12 new ones just recently all that did was give me even more options to choose from (which was great). It didn't matter that I didn't even have half of the old ones yet. More options for character improvement are wonderful. They could add 1000 more past lives and it would only make the game better from my perspective.

Perhaps they need to add 1 million more past lives just so people give up this silly idea that they have to have them all. You have as many as you happen to have acquired. No one is obligated to get them all. All they do is make the game easier. Unless you are seeking to minimize challenge there is no need to get all of them. Just enjoy playing through the game and you will be rewarded for doing so. Once you have played everything once in a given life you are done and there really isn't anything to do but start over. Repeating quests in the same life doesn't make any sense. "I just rescued that guy not 5 minutes ago and you are telling me he has been captured once again by the same guys I just killed?" The reincarnation system allows us to start over and play the entire game once again while still feeling like the last time we played had a long term purpose. I wish more games had such a system.

[Alrik_Fassbauer]

Opposite of wanting to playing elite groupsies:

People play LFMs, where most reliable meta for current reaper is kill baddies asap before they kill you.

Do there still exist people *not* playing Reaper anymore ?

I don't - will I be able to find a group at all ?

It weeds out the slow players who contribute nothing to the group.

This is so wrong on so many levels - you need to actually take a few steps back and ask yourself : Why does it has to be fast in the first place ?

I can do a quest / raid slow as well. If everyone else is as slow as I am - and the whole group agrees to doing it slowly - they they ALL are contributing.

You sound as if being slow = not contributing. This is typical zergthink.

Apparingly you have been a close follower of Blizzard's zerg philosophy.
Like so many others.

Zerging has become the norm. Thank Blizzard for that. @Devs : You don't need to craft beautiful landscapes anymore ! All people want is the loot chest !

[erethizon]

Do there still exist people *not* playing Reaper anymore ?

I don't - will I be able to find a group at all ?

New players still post heroic normal and hard rather regularly (though frequently no one joins except other new players). I still see elite quests posted rather regularly for epic quests and people do join them.

The thing about Reaper mode is that it is addictive if you like character advancement. There are 4 main forms of advancement:

1. Loot. This one doesn't do much for me, but some people like to loot chests and get powerful items.
2. Past lives. There is a satisfaction of knowing that each time you play the game you will be rewarded with an additional bonus.
3. Favor. Favor gives DDO store points which lets you buy all the best stuff the game has to offer (including more of the game itself in the form of adventure packs).
4. Reaper points. Reaper points allow you to get additional character advancement between your past lives. If you do like to flower sniff then each life takes a long time. It may be months before you get high enough in level to TR again. But Reaper points allow you to get a little bonus during your life (and this bonus will last forever just like past lives).

All the things I mention above are permanent. I didn't mention gaining levels or new action points and spells because those all disappear once you finish the game and TR again. The 4 things above are permanent. Loot feels the least permanent to me since it gets replaced and thus doesn't motivate me much. Favor isn't permanent, but the stuff you can buy with the DDO store points is often permanent. I wasn't interested in reaper at first, but being able to get additional permanent character bonuses in between TR's is actually very nice. As a result I almost never play anything but reaper.

And reaper has the added bonus that challenge is rewarded. It has gotten to the point where I prefer to go slowly through quests rather than to zerg. But it is not specifically because I am flower sniffing. It is because I like cranking up the reaper difficulty level to the point that the party has to go slow to survive. This only works, of course, if I can find people to party with that don't mind the extra difficulty. There are definitely a lot of people that want the difficulty set only so high so that they can still move quickly through the quest. But more and more frequently I manage to form groups where the difficulty causes people to slow down and use tactics and that is a very nice improvement to the game that only comes from running reaper.

[Loholt-UK]

New players still post heroic normal and hard rather regularly (though frequently no one joins except other new players).

The reason for this is that I don't feel welcome in groups that are doing normal/hard because of threads like this. New players want to experience the game, they don't want to just watch me solo the dungeon while they struggle to keep up and I respect that. On the other side of the coin, why should I slow down just to appease them? It's much better if I just leave them to their game and play mine.

[SuperNiCd]

Where this causes problems is with the people that feel like they need to be the best. People see 150 past lives and feel like they have to grind them all. When I see 150 past lives I see options. When I do a epic TR for example, I get to choose from a wide variety of new bonuses. When they added 12 new ones just recently all that did was give me even more options to choose from (which was great). It didn't matter that I didn't even have half of the old ones yet. More options for character improvement are wonderful. They could add 1000 more past lives and it would only make the game better from my perspective.

Perhaps they need to add 1 million more past lives just so people give up this silly idea that they have to have them all. You have as many as you happen to have acquired. No one is obligated to get them all.

Another solution would be to heavily front load the permanent character power grind so that sitting in front of your computer grinding DDO 24x7 had decreasing marginal returns. Heroic TR is kind of that way but more recently they've done the exact opposite.

Another solution would be to limit the number of these things that could be active at one time. So you've run off 75 past lives - pick the 12 to be active during this life that will benefit your current build the most. Just like you have to choose your standard feats. Being the best should not equal grinding or paying the most. But that's the direction the game has gone.

When two different characters at the same character level have vastly different power levels, what value does that add to the game?
When a character reaches a power level that trivializes the content, what value does that add to the game?

Oh I don't know. My character in SWG was quite well known on my server because I walked every where in the Cities.

Ha! I totally forgot that you can, in fact, walk in DDO. I did that for a while when I started because I thought it looked stupid that everyone was running full speed in town. Needless to say I've abandoned it.

[HungarianRhapsody]

Do there still exist people *not* playing Reaper anymore ?

I don't - will I be able to find a group at all ?




This is so wrong on so many levels - you need to actually take a few steps back and ask yourself : Why does it has to be fast in the first place ?

I can do a quest / raid slow as well. If everyone else is as slow as I am - and the whole group agrees to doing it slowly - they they ALL are contributing.

You sound as if being slow = not contributing. This is typical zergthink.

Apparingly you have been a close follower of Blizzard's zerg philosophy.
Like so many others.

Zerging has become the norm. Thank Blizzard for that. @Devs : You don't need to craft beautiful landscapes anymore ! All people want is the loot chest !

If you’re five rooms behind the rest of the group, you’re not contributing anything to the party unless you’re doing something like breaking boxes or disabling traps for the extra xp.

Mid you’re not doing something like that, then what are you contributing if you’re that far behind the rest of the party?

[arkonas]

The reason for this is that I don't feel welcome in groups that are doing normal/hard because of threads like this. New players want to experience the game, they don't want to just watch me solo the dungeon while they struggle to keep up and I respect that. On the other side of the coin, why should I slow down just to appease them? It's much better if I just leave them to their game and play mine.

ok let's remember one thing. not every new person is wanting it slow either. you have to understand there are 3 general types of people who play games casual/zerger/neutral. most people fit into one of these types. sure there are a few that can bounce or are just different. they seek different things. none of those playstyles are wrong. people need to remember this. not everyone wants to go slow. as some people say they only have so much time and fun for them is blasting through content.

i'm the type of person that can go with the flow but i do prefer efficient fast. i can also sit on the game for hours waiting for someone to get back just to do 15 mins then get off. point being there will always be people with different thought process and reasoning for doing what they do. its also the reason why you can make your own groups. yes people might not join but that is the choices given.

[erethizon]

Another solution would be to heavily front load the permanent character power grind so that sitting in front of your computer grinding DDO 24x7 had decreasing marginal returns. Heroic TR is kind of that way but more recently they've done the exact opposite.

Another solution would be to limit the number of these things that could be active at one time. So you've run off 75 past lives - pick the 12 to be active during this life that will benefit your current build the most. Just like you have to choose your standard feats. Being the best should not equal grinding or paying the most. But that's the direction the game has gone.

When two different characters at the same character level have vastly different power levels, what value does that add to the game?
When a character reaches a power level that trivializes the content, what value does that add to the game?

I fully support front-loading the past life system. When I designed my ideal system for end game content it was all about constant progression (you continue to get another bonus you can spend for roughly every hour you play), but diminishing returns (the more points you spend upgrading the same ability the less improvement each point gives). The armor class, PRR, and MRR systems are well designed when it comes to diminishing returns.

As for vastly different power levels at the same level, that is a travesty. And that travesty starts with gear. Gear is a serious problem in this game. The strongest gear is way too powerful compared to the weakest gear. I have always said that at least 80% of the power should come from the character itself. That means an naked spell caster with no past lives should have at least 80% of the power of a perfectly geared spell caster with 147 past lives. The power that comes from the trees that we spend AP in needs to be drastically increased until the affect of gear and past lives is mostly drowned out.

The answer isn't to neuter past lives so that once you get 75 of them you may as well quit the game because, effectively, all future play is a complete waste of time. The answer is to design the game around first life characters with randomly found gear (which means greatly increasing the power of AP trees and making random gear nearly as powerful as raid gear) so that past lives and farmed gear is a much smaller percentage of total character power.

[erethizon]

If you’re five rooms behind the rest of the group, you’re not contributing anything to the party unless you’re doing something like breaking boxes or disabling traps for the extra xp.

Mid you’re not doing something like that, then what are you contributing if you’re that far behind the rest of the party?

Yes, you are right about that. The point he was making in the post you quoted is that you won't be 5 rooms behind the rest of the party if everyone is going slow. If no one zergs then non-zergers are still contributing because everyone is a non-zerger.

People do like to progress quickly and so zerging is hard to get rid of. They added dungeon alert and neutered invisibility both of which helped slow people down. They added other mechanics as well like what happed to Amber Temple. Normally, when I run Amber Temple, I get both chests of named loot. Yesterday, because I was not the leader, we got zero. Since Amber Temple cannot be effectively zerged people just skip as much of it as possible (which is unfortunate).

Under the current game, the most effective way to have a party that prevents zerging is to up the reaper level until it is high enough that your party isn't strong enough to zerg. When you get 5+ deaths in the first 2 encounters people start to slow down. Sadly, they also start to quit since in this game, more than any other I have ever played, people respond to challenge by dropping the group. Raids are notorious for this. It is extremely difficult to keep a party together if your raid doesn't go smoothly.

[krimsonrane]

I'm a power flower sniffer and solo player. I could go fast but don't. Nor am i interested in reaper. I'm trying to make cap and being a hero taking risks I don't need to take isn't on my list of things to do.

I'm Luckee. lvl 8, on the HC server if you're looking for someone to run with.

[Oliphant]

Another solution would be to heavily front load the permanent character power grind so that sitting in front of your computer grinding DDO 24x7 had decreasing marginal returns...

I'd say only solution. For starters, frontload racial PL AP, then stats, then skills, so people can be at least playing the same game without person-year time wasting tragedies.

[Deslen]

There is a group of elitests who don't really enjoy the game, they simply enjoy being better than everyone else. You can have fun playing at R1 if you aren't overpowered. You can have fun playing at R5 if you aren't overpowered. But there is a group of people that only care about playing at R10 and being able to look down their noses at everyone else. They sit around patting themselves on the back saying how great it is to be the best and complain about people who aren't able to keep up.

They also like playing low level reaper and destroying everything just to make themselves feel better. The fact that it ruins the game for everyone in the group who isn't a zerg freak doesn't matter to them. It makes them feel good to have ALL of the kills, so they do it just to laugh at everyone else.

LOL um... No.

As someone in a guild with players who have all PL's, tons of reaper points, etc... No, I do believe you are 100% incorrect here. If we didn't enjoy the game, we wouldn't play. We don't look down on casual and new players... Quite the contrary, we understand they are essential to the continued health of the game.

If you don't like the way we play, don't join our groups. If you don't want us in your groupd, put "No Zerging" in your LFM's. We are reasonable human beings who move at a different speed. Are there the occasional griefers? Sure, but @$$es can be found in all parts of the game.

If you ask nicely, many of us are even willing to offer time and help... When not in a quest running a 50 pot.

[Deslen]

When two different characters at the same character level have vastly different power levels, what value does that add to the game?
When a character reaches a power level that trivializes the content, what value does that add to the game?

Even with my oodles of past lives, I find the game easier with pretty much anyone running with me. Obviously R3 might not be the way to go in such circumstances.

Not sure how to capitalize on this from the perspective of the other players. You do have a point; running with that completionist with w/o any past lives can be intimidating.