The 4 Player Types
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In Bartle's Taxonomy I'm definitely somewhere between a Diamond (Achiever) and Heart (Socializer). Probably more towards the latter.
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I am definitely a killer by the standards of the link.
Though I find no pleasure in killing the weak or abusing my power.
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Probably fall into the achiever spectrum. I like intrigue, back-room deals and backstabbing, not really combat (in nwn at least).
In games like DOS2, I do like combat, so probably killer there.
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There is no option for the Forever Alone player type.
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100% Explorer. The description for that type perfectly explains why I love CoA with its vast server, rich history, and tons of hidden systems and custom stuff to try out.
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As long as its a dog ill play it.
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Im neither of these. :(
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Explorer, with some social and achievement.
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Explorer more than anything else, a bit of everything else on the side.
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Explorer-Socializer. :heart: :spades:
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Killer, I like to click on red things
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Achiever-socializer. Thx Chips.
I too like to click on the red things, but it's not even worth logging on if there aren't PCs to do it with.
I've spent years on this server, and have yet to explore what it has to offer in detail, let alone the sewers beneath the city.
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@deke said in The 4 Player Types:
Killer, I like to click on red things
In Bartle's Taxonomy, the killer is someone who thrives from the feeling of superiority you get from one-upping other players (usually by beating them up), and/or causing grief to others for the sake of schadenfreude. Achiever would be the one who enjoys overcoming challenges. And explorer is someone who likes to discover things that they didn't know and/or figure out how things work, try new things, etc. Socializer's self explanatory.
So I think you might of meant Achiever there if you just liked smashing monsters.
Here's a neat video that explains what Bartle's Taxonomy is
And here's a followup video that explains how to balance a playerbase using that knowledge for those interested. -
Im definitely a killer
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Those are the same two videos in the OP. Anyway, the whole point of this is that COA has had an unbalanced focus on Killers in the past few years, where PVP prowess trumped everything else when push came to shove. CoA has been a numbers game where you crunch your build for maximum efficiency. Rather than create what you want, it's become create what will win.
By policy, we drove away the Sims with 'Adventure and Intrigue', therefore, disenfranchising the Sims, who predictably left in droves, or were unhappy while still playing. "No, you cannot be a waitress or plant a garden or build an orphenage. We don't support that sort of gameplay. We don't want it, but we still want you. Why are you leaving? Actually, we support all types of ga...oh, she's gone"
By making exploration so unrewarding and dangerous, we penalised.... The explorers, who had to resort to very limited types of playstyles to continue to do what they have been doing. Exploration Survival became mechanical, metagame, and cheese requirement. "You should have made a ranger or a druid. You never explore alone, you should have been in a group. Its too bad no one wanted to explore with you because its dangerous and unrewarding."
Achievers also had problems because promotions and progress in-game was a DM monopoly, and with less active DMs and with most DMs concentrated in certain TZ, life for many achievers became hard. "Citadel Council is the highest possible bar for PCs, but none have gotten it in 1 year. Oh, you weren't going to get that promotion because of stuff that happened, we forgot to tell you and its been 3-6 months of trying"
Killers did not have. Problem, because they could quest to their hearts content, then turn around and with all the loot and gold from questing, utterly own the socializers and explorers and achievers, because questing is the ONLY profitable gameplay, everything else is a huge drain on resources. "They spent 3 months to achieve X objective, and then they were all killed in 3 minutes and had everything stolen from them."
We've slowly come out of this horrible zone were players were forced to fight each other to create fake drama and pitted against each other to create fake conflict, rather than let things rise organically, or allow conflicts to be player driven, it became a top-down, NPC-desire based conflict.
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@thune said in The 4 Player Types:
Achievers also had problems because promotions and progress in-game was a DM monopoly, and with less active DMs and with most DMs concentrated in certain TZ, life for many achievers became hard. "Citadel Council is the highest possible bar for PCs, but none have gotten it in 1 year. Oh, you weren't going to get that promotion because of stuff that happened, we forgot to tell you and its been 3-6 months of trying"
+1
It's definitely felt like this, on the server, for a really long time.
Part of what scared me off from really engaging with it, years ago, was the whole ADVENTURE and INTRIGUE shtick. It came off as overly hostile to anything that did conform to some pretty basic gameplay styles (even though I rather like INTRIGUE it often seemed to fall more down to ADVENTURE exclusively, which hardly made it better, because I don't actually like ADVENTURE all that much).
This was also literally the first thing some of my friends commented on when they tried to get into the server (and subsequently gave up on it). Those "ADVENTURE and INTRIGUE versus CoA Sims" posts are really old, but they're still stickied so they obviously still stand out. And they're still turning people off.
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For a lot of gamblers, it isnt the winning that is exciting but the risk itself. I would say the same with most people who enjoy PvP, they enjoy the risk in PvP. Course, this isn't everyone.
But I imagine an achiever to be more for the "winning PvP" than the "taking part in PvP". Whilst a killer enjoys the adrenaline rush
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I think summaries like this are good for making quick and effective assessments of players you are not personally familiar with - but they will never be a substitute for knowledge of a specific player or a specific game.
But that said I did think the second video was really interesting. It highlights certain "problem" player types and gives ideas on not just how to deal with them, but to engage them - something useful for players looking to involve allies and enemies into their plots as much as DMs.
I particularly enjoyed him giving an example of how to make a socialiser and a killer both enjoy a plot despite having opposite interests (let the killer kill, let the socialiser feel he gained some useful information for his efforts)