MMOs

There’s a good blog post and comment discussion about raiders vs casual gamers in World of Warcraft (WoW). While I have never been a paying MMO customer, I have participated in many of the major betas (Anarchy Online, Star Wars Galaxies, WoW, Matrix Online, etc). That, combined with the fact that I think these games are really interesting, means that I’ve been following MMO scuttlebut for quite some time. And of course, like every ignoramous, I have some ideas…

A variety of problems strike me as being common and as being solveable, though obviously the solutions are not easy (or maybe even possible given current time and market constraints)–otherwise, someone would have already solved them. So, what are the problems? A quick list might be: difficulty of achievement, ease of achievement and (the need for) end games, low population sizes

The ease of achievement: most games have level caps and hard core players reach them quite quickly. In some games such as WoW it appears that many players have reached this cap (Though granted, they may just be a vocal minority. However, even a if that’s a few hundred thousand out of the 5 million total players, that’s pretty impressive). Once the cap is reached one of the primary goals of the games is ended for the player, that of leveling up. So now that one reaches the level cap, what goals are there left for the player to do? Presumably not develop more character abilities/skills, since presumably that was the whole appeal of leveling up. Explore the world? Acquire vast riches? Sure, but game worlds tend to be relatively small, meaning that it is quite possible to go everywhere and own everything (at least, everything relevant for your character). Looking at WoW, it appears that many people are doing the highest level instances . While the difficulty may not go away (when you can’t increase in character skill, the challenges don’t have to get harder), the rewards can diminish (the novelty of a new place ends, all the interesting loot has been acquired). There seem to be several ways to address this: new possibilities for character advancement (ie more levels), new rewards, new challenges and recurring challenges. The first three work fine, as they give the player more of the same, but because of that, you know that soon the player will be back where they were, having completed everything. More interesting . For example, in Wow there are instances called Battlegrounds, where groups of players fight each other. However, the same problem remains: the rewards earned are items and eventually the hardcore get them all. And, since the outcome of the battles don’t, to my knowledge, affect the game world, why pay some much when you can play better team-based combat games for less (ie Unreal Tournament and the like)?

People often talk about the possibility of player generated content; that’s nice, but more specifically what games need is player generated goals. There’s only so many goals that developers can specify (especially if). Recurrent goals are good, as there is replayability. However, in many games replayability comes in the form of doing an instance many types, to get lots of experience or loot. It seems to me that the games with a geopolitical game provide replayability of goals without getting bogged down this way. For example, the Lineage games, Dark Age of Camelot, Planetside, etc have territory (often, castles) that can be captured. Once you have the territory, you want to keep it and regain it if you lose it. Thus, rivalry (which should be fun, since it is a game) is the reason for repeatedly achieving a goal, rather than accumulating XP. This is more social, as the motivation comes from the interaction with other players (and NPCs), not from self-aggrandisement. That is not to say that self-aggrandisement is bad, as it is definitely is part of the political option. However, in this case it is a subjective and unquantifiable form (“I held off the enemy attackers and kept control of my castle”), rather than objective (“I got 200 XP and 60 coins from clearing out that dungeon”), which means that the former will not be devalued by the inevitable inflation in MMOs (if someone can figure out how to prevent inflation in MMOs and keep players happy, they’d almost assuredly clean up; a few thoughts on that later), but an enjoyable memory of an event, rather than a (im)material reward.

More to come later…