Paper Street: Article 2

The vicious battle that is High End vs Casual Gaming has been a long standing war. Personally I always favored the High End grind of massive hours of grinding to acheive whatever victory over Computer Intellegence that developers had to throw at their gamers. But through the past 2 years gamers have gone through a change, being that the age of their life has granted them more responsibility in their jobs or roles in their families- they have slowly dwindled their playtime hours and become unable to manage the long hard road that is End Game.

Sure enough game developers introduced a new system to give players a "play as you go" mentality. The instance missioning system came into play as 2 birds with 1 stone ideal method of fixing online gaming. At first high end competition for npcs, where essentially the early bird gets the worm. Although that does not appear more often than not on the levels of Archives. Having a guild of 50 or so have to log off because none of their npcs are up is a bummer. But on the otherside it promoted competition with guilds that created a reason to fight and play (especially on a pvp server). Being able to summon an instance of raid like npcs without competition, where a guild solely focuses on the pvE of the game. The other bird of this is being able to start such a raid at any given time. Essentially players who were on European time frame could be on any server they desired because a Guild of Europeans could raid whenver they wished. The off side of this, is that it has created a lazy mood for players. Players log in slothlike with the "It doesnt start till i get there so i will take my time" attitude. Which for most is a unteam-like attitude that deserves a punt in the pants.

Now what does this have to do with the Matrix Online?

The Matrix Online has been put upon a standard mission system. It has its generalized mission type: Assassination,Courier, Rescue, and so on. These missions have the thinist amount of lore possible with auto generated names. Locked doors blah blah blah and so on.

To quote the Machines. These missions lack purpose. And therefore should be deleted.

Missions should be a progressive quest of lore, whether it be an Arc or Quest. Long extensive fights instead of breaking into buildings through the front door just because i have the Kung Fu Grip.

Deleting of these missions is a step in the right direction. What these are; instance camps that require dungeon crawls. These are stupid, Always on the move? Dare i say grinding is a thing of the past. High End grinding has had its time. It is now time for instancing end game to take over. Instancing to prove a point. Instancing for a one time challenge of endurance, strategy, and sometimes teamwork (Yes i love to solo).

High End grinding is over.

Instancing focusing on group challenges rather than quick xp.

This is Article 2

Next issue will focus on soley Enviroments interacting with players.