League of MMOs, classes or class-less?
Okay, a few weeks ago Tryndamere hinted riot is doing an MMO and today Ghostcrawler mentioned that he's off to do "other things" at riot. So a League based MMO is pretty much guaranteed at this point. So I'd like to ask if it is going to be a class based game like most MMOs or a class-less MMO like Eve-Online and a few others.
Classes are pretty familiar and well defined. So they are easy for people to get and pick up. Most games pretty much have a class doing one thing and that's that. The cons are it takes quite a while to level up in order to max out so you can go on raids and raids pretty much tend to be the only real endgame content. Considering League is a MOBA I think the worst thing riot could do is make a largely PvE game focused around raiding darkin bosses, hoping they'll drop that one item you need that's a .1% drop.
On class system I really loved, and if Ghostcrawler reads this is going to hate me for bringing up, is the original Guild Wars game. You picked a pretty focused main class. Then you would pick a single sub class for added variety or flavor. For instance there weren't any paladins or spell blades, but your warrior could sub monk or elementalist and essentially fill the role.
Four other things I liked about the OG Guild Wars were as follows. First the levels were capped at 20 and never increased, so you could get to the max level for PvP right away. In the two proper expansions you got to level 20 by the end of the tutorial area. Secondly, in the second half of the first game around the time you hit level 20, you were stuck in the desert. They did something very smart in that they made the story missions in that area a tutorial for the PvP modes the game had. So when you got to end game PvP levels, the game was teaching you the basic skills you needed to PvP. Thirdly, I really love it that your skill bar was capped at 8 skills, so you really had to focus on the skills you picked and what you were going to do. It also made collecting the best skills in the game a bit of a side quest for completionists as you had to go find the bosses with the skills you wanted to learn and kill them. This was also cool because since the game was hard capped and kept there, progress meant you had to learn the game and refine your build instead of grind for weapons/armor/exp. Finally the armors in the game were all crafted and you could buy the materials and craft them. That means you didn't have to bother with grinding dungeons for that rare drop to get the armor pieces you wanted. You just saved up and eventually you were able to buy anything. That was really, really convenient.
Then you've got a game like Eve online. It's completely classless so you have to train up skills individually. So things aren't as familiar or well defined as you kind of have to have an idea what you want to do and then go around and train up the various things that let you do that one thing. The best thing I can say about Eve-online and ultima before it is they had their PvP as a big focus of the game. IDK about anyone else but I'd love to see 2000 people fighting in a battle of demancia vs noxus at the same time with commanders on both sides holding people in reserve in case they need to crash the servers and call it a night. One cool thing about Eve is if you want to get into PvP right now, it's pretty easy to train up for the quickest PvP role: the tackler (that's the CC role).
If there's any take away from this, I think the League MMO needs to be PvP focused and it needs to get people into the real action ASAP, whichever role riot chooses.
