What is endgame/midgame/earlygame - A call for a roadmap

[wonder-ass]

ideally the game shouldnt have a early game mid game endgame everything should be somewhat valuable and useful. something legacy was able to accomplish through not inflated qualities.

That's not possible. Even if the world would not have early/mid/late game the players and their characters will always have, unless there is no progress, no skills, no dependency on ingredients. And last but not least, no knowledge involved.

the progress should be surviving and striving. look at dont starve a game with only 1 goal which is surviving with 10k avg players and 66k peak.

[Colin500]

ideally the game shouldnt have a early game mid game endgame everything should be somewhat valuable and useful. something legacy was able to accomplish through not inflated qualities.

That's not possible. Even if the world would not have early/mid/late game the players and their characters will always have, unless there is no progress, no skills, no dependency on ingredients. And last but not least, no knowledge involved.

the progress should be surviving and striving. look at dont starve a game with only 1 goal which is surviving with 10k avg players and 66k peak.

Don't Starve has more monsters, better AI, appealing 2D graphics, is not competitive, has mods support, the list goes on and on.

[MagicManICT]

ideally the game shouldnt have a early game mid game endgame everything should be somewhat valuable and useful. something legacy was able to accomplish through not inflated qualities.

You have to go clear back to w3 to get this, though. The new mining system was introduced w4, curios w5 (because of w4, but were probably coming, anyway), and w6 was the first world that ran longer than the time it took to spiral metal and clay up high enough to see it really matter in how it impacted foraging. Since then, foraging has been shit for anything other than a few things--pearls, glimmermoss, eidelweiss. Other than pearls, the foraged curios are mid-tier at best because crafted curios exceed the LP/hour and are used despite the horrendous ATTN and XP needs on some of them. Realms don't help the matter, either, because the large realms (HH and AD, not sure about the others) have enough active players in them that their core group don't give a crap about XP costs until "dig deeper" gets outlandish in costs and they're trying to save up all the authority/XP they can to add that +5 to water quality (and I've not a clue what that point is).

[pppp]

the progress should be surviving and striving. look at dont starve a game with only 1 goal which is surviving with 10k avg players and 66k peak.

We are born to learn and adapt. No matter the game, once a player finds a way to deal with one challenge he progresses to the next one. The progress itself defines a direction and that creates the notion of early game and endgame. You can design a system where progress can be pictured as a spiral rather than a straight line but the notion of direction and thus early/endgame will still be there.

The alternative is Wonderland and Red Queen's race, meaning either universal decay or some kind of universal treadmill, an extension to that, to mask the decay. But that is touching another area where meta work is not finished, that is capping or not capping the stats and problems arising from either choice.