Why do a lot of games in novels just come off as terrible?

I gave you the link before, but you won't really get to see the full system yet cause it starts showing in volume 3 on wards and due to reasons of work I'm kinda on hiatus but I will get back to it.

At first I was doing all the math manually, then moved to a spreadsheet, then made this calculator:

https://codepen.io/anon/pen/odXQaR/right

This is an old version though as latest one with damage calculations and etc are in my local. All I gotta do is swap names or classes and I can see what it'll look like at certain points.

That isn't true at all. There are things that set aside top players from everyone else. That is why they are there. And many of them have a ton of story to tell, hell I can tell a pretty good story of my WoW days and I'm far from the most skilled. (at best I got #7 in the world in gear score for my class and #1 on my server)

You don't need to resort to making unique classes and skills in an MMO game to make the character awesome or to make a story interesting.

 

Oh right lol, somehow I forgot about it, but now when I saw it I remember it and how I thought it looked a lot like the RRL status screens.

Honestly though, I didn't really get how to use it so that probably has something to do with why I didn't remember it (plus I just got bad memory in general)

 

Yes, after in volume 2 spending more time making a status screen then writing a chapter, and doing all the calculations, I got fed up and created that calculator so I can copy and paste into RRL.

The way to use it is 2 ways, automated mode where you pick a character and then a chapter and it tells you the characters stats in that chapter. You can also toggle things like with or without equipment. And Over+ and Over- is when MC uses the ability that temporary raises stats and the other is when the stats are lowered right after.

Then there is manual mode, where you pick the race and classes and at what level and it'll generate the stats. If you want to add equipment though you need to select latest chapter and add/remove equipment.

My version goes a step further cause I have a damage calculator based off the stat data that is based on a formula:

 

Actually it is average even if you ranked 1st on the server. It's not that exciting. It's just a story you can't really sell.

For example, every war soldier can tell you about his story. A good story teller can probably make it exciting. However, they aren't exactly "good" stories. Most of them are average. 99% of boredom and probably 1% of sheer terror.

Every sports have their champions but you don't see those champions selling bug stories. You might have a book or something but they are never that exciting.

Most of the story you read would be "average people in extra ordinary circumstances" or at least "average" until they got "lucky" then it's a story about running around screwing up everything.

 

The difference between a war solider and a gamer is that for a war solider, how many battles did they participate in? In comparison, for a gamer that participates in dozens of events each day is a different thing. The whole point is you aren't going to go describing daily raiding, you describe the most exciting events where you skill shinned.

Whether it be luck or accumulation of skill, when you put the most exciting stories together, you can make for an interesting story.

Even the boring stuff can be spiced up by adding in comedy. Part of what made raid grinding bearable was ventrillo/teamspeak and people joking around.

 

No, no, no. For sci-fi, it's Quantum Physics.

 

TKA also have a plenty of problems though, for example the custom weapon the mc has that enables his chosen play style throughout the entire story is so damn broken and poorly explained that it is ridiculous.

 

I thought the MC explained that he could only spam low-level skills and not 'class-restricted' one. He also called out that it would get worse and worse as he ranked up ( or when the game expanded the max level limit ), as the class specialized skills are getting stronger than the spammable skills.

OP, yes. Broken, not really. It's his insane APM that's doing the work.

 

Except he did have access to class restricted skills because it was possible to add lvl1 versions of them to weapons, which would have been fine if his umbrella didn't count as multiple weapons that could all hold a skill each, and sure they didn't have the power of leveled versions, but some of the skills didn't need to be leveled to be important.

My main issue really though is that the whole way that custom equipment system worked came off as bullshit, there is no way the developers of the game would have made a system where someone could have combined all the weapons that way without it being made an intentional feature or patched out at some point during the games 10 year history.
And it wasn't much better when they started making weapons above the max level limit later on.

 

Wait, what? Sorry, but I put it on hold for a long time. Is it really become that bad?

 

Yeah, that equipment system is pretty asspulled, but it's much more believable and interesting than the shit in most other mmo novels.

It's not that bad. I'd say that if you're willing to suspend your disbelief for the umbrella, then this would be child's play.

All they do is make it so the weapon has a stat that requires -5 level to equip it, and then use lots of the rare materials to make it 5 levels higher.

The way this works is pretty consistent with the way you see the system work in the past, and I think that it was also pretty limited so that the equipment they made would be low quality for the level it was at.

 

Don't get me wrong, I still consider it among the better MMO stories, just that the game itself doesn't make all that much sense once you actually start thinking about it.
The equipment level part sounds worse than it actually is because the author at least put a limit to how far he would take that, it just didn't make sense that they could do it in the first place.

 

The King's Avatar is pretty cool, but "Glory" has a lot of design choice that make it a bad game. One of the most obvious is that you'd never have a professional competitive game where players have to grind up their characters on their own time and where equipment is based off of random drops. Also, I believe it's possible for your equipment to break or have it be stolen by other players. These make sense narratively, but they're terrible features in a game that you'd want to play. The same goes for Overlord: the book itself is pretty good but "Yggdrasil" would have all sorts of problems.

 

With that series, it always felt to me that the writer was having the game devs trolling the standard hard core character mentality, all the manuals were locked behind a skill they were not taking considering it a waste of a slot (and from a couple volumes you see the hard core were afraid to level skills to much because to potions would start having weaker effects). All named hard cores were basically playing min-maxed toons, with nothing not directly related to their playstyle, but so many things depend on other skills they ignored to the point it half feels like it is supposed to be a game that more rewards making full characters then the standard murder hobo but they never told anyone.

I know the hard cores are all portrayed horribly but in some ways it is not to far from how I would expect people to adapt to a game where there was no official stats or skill descriptions available, and no ability to data mine the details since the nature of the game means everything important would have to be server side as opposed to client side due to the level of AI, relying entirely on experiences and gossip. Meaning once something gets a bad rep it stays bad in their collective view regardless of the other information available, and the MC is basically ignoring this and chose a mix that worked together really well, by accidentally selecting the skill that compensates for the weaknesses that caused another of his/her skills to be deemed useless (but should have been obvious in some cases like like bows and the skills that make arrows would be the ones that improve accuracy, or the one that increases vision would affect targeting range).

 

You forgot the fact that these MMOs have no goals and main story. If there's one , the author won't give a shit about it and focus only on which guild who finish it first.

Also why the fvck are people willingly lift heavy bricks on Legendary Moonlight Sculptor? Ffs there's a whole world full of content and these mofos would suffer from these slavery rather than enjoy an exciting 2nd life.

Also why would these companies inject billion of dollars to this shit? It's a really boring game full of grinding. I couldn't stand that shit even when I just have to sit my ass of, imagine having to move your whole body to grind everyday for a max profit of a few silvers. Fvck that! Ain't nobody got time for that.

 

it interesting game imo
life skill complement battle skill kinda fun idea
yeah hardcore tend to ignore life skill on mmo, as long as have money and max battle skill who care about craft mentality is real thing

 

Yes, LMS is terrible game with snowflake class and an MC who can spend 1 week crafting things outside of sculpting to reach what others spent months/years on.

Not sure what you are talking about, but no real gamer skimps on crafting skills. Crafting is usually the best way to go for money. So leveling at least 1 profession no matter the pain is always common sense. If you are in a guild, you usually split responsibility to power level a few people with crafting skills and they will service the guild.

 

In the story in question, leveling crafting skills was expensive, time consuming, slow to grow, and reduced the characters combat potential. Plus there was no real alts (No one had reached the end game yet in the content that has been translated, which is several months into the game). Most games I have played crafting is separate from combat, this one they were connected by a shared resource (skill slots), so the more you dedicated to crafting the less you had for combat, and for most combat players the crafting skills boosted stats other then the ones they used in fights. The "hard core" were completely focused on being a "top player" through combat and getting better drop items to sell or equip. The only time I remember seeing any of them taking a non-combat buffing skill was climbing because there was an unexplored cave you needed climbing to get to (there was a casual player who loved mountain climbing and just played for that experience, he knew of the cave by did not go in due to a mob at the entrance). It was a game with "no guides" and so crafting anything took a lot of time and experimentation before if would work because you had to try different combinations, and the order and steps involved could change things.
there were some issues with the player description, since the "common knowledge" was almost entirely derived from the beta, and no one went back to re-test things after the beta testers deemed then traps skills (which lead to entire systems not being discovered), The MC was not a beta tester, and ignored their findings, deliberately choosing some less popular skills.

 

it on story
irl case to case if there no specific crafting job then player tend to take one crafting skill
if there specific job on crafting you can bet top player dominated by fighter class
example of game have specific job on crafting is Rising Force Online, I forget it class name it mainly deal crafting with be it weapon, armour, ammunition ect~ it battle power is crap but really important for economy
these day it rare to see game with such class most mmo game tend to use crafting skill as hmm secondary job or something