Sep 03 2008
Bad Design: Making Your Own Content Obsolete
Content creation is widely considered the most time consuming and costly area of MMO/MUD development. I agree with this. In graphical MUDs, you have animations, mob AI, scripting, zone design, and all the additional graphics and visual effects that go along with zones, powers, items, etc. These are very expensive. In text MUDs, you have to craft a story, you have tons of writing to do, and all of it has to weave together in a legible, clear, enjoyable way. The creative aspects of all that writing take a lot of time. Then on top of that, you have the minutiae of making all the rooms, linking them, describing the tiny details so they don’t seem ignored or drab, and all that.
So bearing this in mind, why do so many developers deliberately make their own content obsolete? And why do they often do it at such a rapid clip? The trend these days is for games to encourage you to race to the cap and then sit. Then they want you to make alts, or farm gear. Soon enough, the population is top heavy at the level cap, and nobody visits 90% of the game. If someone makes a “real newbie” character, everywhere they go is vacant.
Tish Tosh wrote a long and very good blog post about this over on Tish Tosh Tesh . I read it and commented there, so if you want even more commentary of this sort please read his post and check the comments.
As I noted in response to his post:
The way you preserve your old world is you make it so your entire game is fun and always relevant. You do not put the entire emphasis of your game on being cap level and then raiding till you die. You create fun things to do in the game that are not even connected to level.
This seems so obvious to me. I do not believe I am the wisest and most brilliant game designer out there. There have to be many other developers who understand this as well. Some readers might say, “Well, that’s easier said than done. What exactly do you recommend?” Well, here come some standard recommendations that not only help here, but help with a million other MUD/MMO problems:
1) Player Housing. Once you let people customize their own part of the world, they will invest hundreds upon hundreds of hours on it. It will be a constant project. If you give them things they can find and use from all over the world inside their house, they’ll make use of every inch of your game world. And when they want to change something, or decorate a friend’s house, they’ll be right back again scouring the world for this or that little nick nack.
2) Mini Games. Make them! People will play them with other friends and have a blast. I’ll name a few from Threshold : Trial Arcanus, Quail Hunting, Saber Dueling, Fishing (and make it an actual mini game - not just click a button and then click another button), Chess, Poker, 5 Card Draw, Rock-Paper-Scissors. I am just one guy, not a huge development team. If I can crank out tons of mini games for my MUDs/MMOs, why can’t Blizzard or other big MMO companies?
3) Admin/GM Run Events. As the developer, you have incredible power and tools at your command. Use them! Create fun storyline events that happen all over the world. When you do, you’ll lure people to various locations in your world. You will make people interested in them. Even when the event is over, people might come back and check things out.
Again, those are just a few examples. Yes, it takes a little effort, but it is less effort than the effort wasted when you let 90% of your world rot and die.
I can think of several instances where mini-games prolonged the main game and have turned what should have been a one-shot into a repeatable classic:
Police Quest 2 had two occasions in the story where you had to play 5-card draw poker to advance. I kept save points at the beginning of those episodes so I could play poker when I wanted.
Final Fantasy X had Blitzball. I know you needed to play to unlock certain main-game items, but after my brother did what was necessary to get the items, he kept playing Blitzball. I believe he spent more time playing Blitzball than the actual game, and when he pops FFX back into his console, it’s because he wants to play another season.
Warcraft III had an unlockable game where you built a gauntlet of turrets to prevent creatures from destroying your escape portal. When I discovered it, I spent days (!) playing that game. It’s still one of my favorites.
Food for thought, nice post, Cam. Thanks for the shout out, too.
I’ve been thinking about this this morning. Considering some of the design decisions, I’ve all but decided that WoW is a single player RPG with optional online multiplayer. That in and of itself isn’t necessarily bad, but neither is it realizing the potential of an MMO or a “virtual online world”.
Thing is, it may also be the key to WoW’s success. They may well be banking on being closer in nature to a standard offline RPG. Call it a gateway experience. Heavy role playing just isn’t for everyone, despite D&D having been around for a generation and a half.
Saylah over on Mystic Worlds points out rightfully that not every gamer wants a “revolutionary” experience. Most just want slight riffs on what they already know they like. It’s been pointed out that WoW is more or less just an evolution from EQ. (Or devolution, as some may argue, but still, it’s just a minor deviation, rather than a revolution.)
From a business perspective, then, should the mainstream be aiming to differentiate MMOs from offline RPGs by aiming more for the “virtual world” mentality, or will they be more commercially viable as a sort of middle ground? It’s not as “pure” as ideal design might suggest, but apparently there’s an audience for WoW as it now exists. I’m all for pushing the state of the art of design, but the minstream is notoriously slow at adopting change.
Grog: Those are great examples! Might and Magic 7 had a game called Arcomage. You had cards, and you build up a castle and walls and such, and tried to destroy the other guy’s castle. It ruled. People would keep MM7 installed just to play that game. New World Computing eventually released Arcomage as a stand alone game.
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In Threshold, there are people who will login and do nothing but fish and chat. Our fishing is pretty fun. It is a lot more than just clicking a button, waiting for a sound effect, and clicking another button. There are strategies involved (bait selection, how far to cast, how quickly to reel in, when to tug the line or let out some slack, etc.).
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We are just scratching the surface. Mini Games are huge. The thing is, combat is just an elaborate mini game at its core. So games that have no mini games are really just fractions of a game.
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Tesh: I agree people aren’t always looking for something revolutionary. But in most respects, WoW is actually DE-volutionary. They removed an enormous amount of things from what had become a “standard” online RPG feature set. I give them full crops for massive accessibility and a pretty, responsive UI. But when it comes to the game and the world, they really disappoint me. The game is just combat, and even the combat is good not great. With all the billions they are making, there is no excuse for the lack of gameplay variety and total lack of mini games and events.
Philosophically, I’ve got to agree that there’s no excuse for their slack attitude towards the “world” of the game. Still, I’ve been wondering lately if the trouble is just as much with the players as with the designers. Part of me thinks that they wouldn’t be doing what they do if there wasn’t a market for it.
Of course, there’s a market for the things that make the world a more vibrant, interesting place. It’s just that their number monkeys might have decided that the ROI isn’t as lucrative as making a better treadmill.
More and more, I question whether it’s a failure of design, or an intentional choice from the business side, partly from both the market (players) and the board room/shareholders.
Personally, I think it is a business decision, but not the type you were alluding to. I think they have seen they can rake the money in hand over fist, and the business people (who have control of the company) have no interest in letting the “game people” (assuming they even have the inclination) reinvest significant funds back into the game.
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I have absolutely no doubt that the development of player housing, mini games, or GM run events/storylines would be met with tremendous interest. The very few TINY little things they do in this direction get overwhelmed with interest. They have millions of customers just gagging for something new and fresh to do. It really is a shame that they make virtually no effort to meet this need.
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It really does remind me so much of AOL. In particular, it reminds me of how AOL had to be dragged kicking and screaming into letting its members have access to the internet. They were so in love with their walled garden that they withheld all the “free” content of the internet from their customers.
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Some of them thought access to that information would make people feel like AOL’s content was pointless. But that was not true. The AOL content had the benefit of being moderated and organized. What killed AOL was the continued disrespect (almost to the point of contempt) with which they treated their customers. That, coupled with their absolute failure to pursue broadband access, really brought AOL down. I have read many industry analyses that seem to believe AOL could easily have persisted as a content provider, rather than an ISP, if they had pursued that earlier. But instead, they tried to “chain” their customers to their service, which did nothing but send them fleeing for the hills once they finally had a chance and an alternative.
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This is so incredibly similar to the way WoW tries to lock you into this endless gear grind death roll. They hold out the lure of raid dungeons and all that pretty gear (that 90% will never see) as a way to lock people in and make them think the “real fun” is just over the horizon if they can figure out a way to access it. They make the players themselves feel like THEY are to blame for not being able to raid. They make players feel inadequate. And they encourage it on their forums by allowing the “raid lifers” to berate and cajole anyone who points out the inherent lack of fun involved in this system. The whole “l2raid n00b” mentality.
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I guarantee you that if anyone tried to take that like of elitist attitude on the forums of Threshold or Primordiax, I’d warn them, then freeze them, then ban them. I would not tolerate that whatsoever.
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You’d let me flame them first, right?
It’s the customer, man. Bartle nailed it, the game is designed by newbies.
I Threshed over ten years ago for about six months, and I never forgot about that game, and even started playing again a couple months back with full memory of game quirks, locations and area layouts. Threshold is a great game, so was Faerun MUD (RIP), and a few others that I still remember well. From the time of Text based MUDs being *it* for multi-player, to WoW today, the PC became much more common, internet access became much more common, and as a result millions of people became online gamers. These people (in my unschooled opinion) were mostly non-gamers before. Not pen&paper types, and definitely not MUDders. Nevertheless they poured cash into the maw of the beast, and became the target demographic of the big companies. That leaves people with an eye for content, a love for fantasy and a very rich gaming background at the kids table, out of sight and out of mind.
It’s been figured out, guys. The boardroom has influenced the developers, and their goal has been realized: Maximum gain from minimum investment. I don’t have any reference to cite, but I’ve read here and there over the years how these graphical MMO development teams fire the majority of their crew at launch. That practice alone should broadcast their values quite well.
My hope for the future of online RPGs is in smaller player bases. For example, I love Warhammer and Warhammer 40K, it’s been a part of my life since I was ten. Because of that love; I hope that Warhammer: Age of Reckoning doesn’t become hugely popular. I hope it stays tight and exciting with a fanbase that is attracted by the RvR and Warhammer IP in the game. I would lament for forty days if that game falls prey to massive bitching, and gets tinkered into another dull, tired and stagnant time-sink.
Great article, I’m looking forward to reading the viewpoints of others.
“Maximum gain from minimum investment.”
Nailed. It’s the mantra for business these days, coupled with “greed is good” from Wall Street. Leveling treadmills are very cheap to construct, and as Cam rightly notes, if the “forward looking” mentality can be fostered, you can squeeze a lot of mileage out of it.
So… what baffles me still is why people don’t look to find ways to reuse existing content. Big Bear Butt’s “dragonflight” parallel questlines in the old world is a fantastic one, and would require far less work than what we’ve seen in TBC and WotLK. The ROI should far outstrip those two expansions, primarily because most of the groundwork is laid already. Yes, it would require some creative writing and clever incentives, but the returns could be well worth it.
Heck, that’s one of the points of a persistent online world; a large portion of the world can stay more or less static. Change is ideal, sure, but both devs and players benefit from some consistent content.
That last Anonymous was me. Perhaps obviously. Don’t post sleep deprived, eh?
It’s always annoyed me to no end at how cavalier Blizzard is when it comes to making their own content so readily obselete. They pride themselves in taking lyears to finish of masterpieces like Karazhan and Naxxaramas only to relegate them to the MMO dumpster all in the name of the “endgame”.
The problem is that Blizzard has created the endgame paradigm. All roads lead there. Every mechanic in WoW has become subservient to getting players to the endgame as fast as possible. The easy leveling is the true culprit because the game progresses so fast that players lose respect for their gear upgrades along the way that could be gotten in dungeons. As I mentioned in Tesh’s article, players always go for the path of least resistance.
The thing is, you can’t have it both ways. You can’t have a game that literally encourages soloing to the level cap and then complain about how content is obsolete and that most of the MMO gameworld is empty.
Riddle me this:
Why is it acceptable to reach the level cap and be content to be there for 2 years (till the next expansion is released), yet it is not acceptable to spend any appreciable length of time in any of the levels before the level cap?
There’s the rub…
The answer is what I mentioned in a previous article:
http://www.wolfsheadonline.com/?p=316
“Removing leveling is not the answer. Making content at all levels fresh, fun, dynamic and exciting is the answer. This is precisely what I have been fighting for on this blog for many years. Maybe when enough people are totally fed up things will change.”
As far as other solutions, I’ve been campaigning Blizzard for years on adding GM events to WoW. I posted extensively in replay to one of their official world event employees on the Blizzard forums in rebuttal to their statements. I’m going to repost them on my blog soon. (I will debate anyone, anytime in defense of GM events including Blizzard employees on this issue.)
To be honest there are many things they could be doing to improve the longevity and sustainability of their world but they adamantly refuse to do implement them. The prefer to waste resources experimenting on e-sports, voice chat — things that nobody ever asked for. Yet they do not implement features that many have asked for such as guildhalls.
Check out some of the threads at the official forums asking for more role-playing support and features. They have hundreds of posts yet they are completely ignored by Blizzard. However, they certainly had the time to implement “Achievements” a very unoriginal and dubious feature to WoW.
It’s great to finally see people other then myself starting to question many of the design decisions in MMOs today!
I agree quite a lot about the money / greed aspect as well as the point that so many of the players of EverQuest and WoW were never gamers before flooding on to the internet so they have little experience or perspective on virtual worlds. They’re often into it via the game mechanics to “beat” the game and be “better” than other players.
I do also wonder if the WoW folks haven’t been able to figure out HOW to run a more roleplaying-centric game. As Witchkiller pointed out, the best MUDS and other online games are made that way not only by the game creators / administrators but also by the players. How exactly do you get millions of players to play cooperatively? None of the current big MMO games rely upon cooperative play, they enforce everything via code to make things “fair” for everyone.
Even on some MUDs where many players usually know better, I can roleplay my character as having baked cookies and go around posing/emoting giving them out to folks and there are STILL some who would act like, “You didn’t give me anything.” because there was no code to back it up. This is a fairly mild example, but I think it’d be even worse with millions of non-roleplaying-centric players.
In some ways, It feels as though the more innovative of Blizzard’s employee’s might be working on another project. It seems like they would be wise enough to know that the money in the future lies not with WoW, but whatever is next. Even after 1 year of WoW, I would imagine they were already starting their new MMO, if just in a design phase. Perhaps they’ve hit a wall in what can be done with thier current code. Expansions add features, but mostly they refine what already exists. If you played Pre-BC and then started a new Dranaei / BE you noticed a much better starting area that dropped / rewarded more quest items and kept you geared and in a 20 level arching storyline. It was actually a huge improvement on the original 1-20.
I think Blizzard is locked into “end-game” at this point. They’ve set up a gear chase / max level game that most playing will now expect. They’ve made it more accessible with each expansion to the point where I believe at least 50% of players wil experience it come Wrath. I’m starting to firmly believe that the 10% rule is misinformed recently. The numbers of raiders and Kara goers has gone up considerably. They used to say “You can’t PuG Kara” but there are Kara pug almost every day, and they have some success. In the end, I can’t blame Blizzard for keeping the game going as is, because that’s what people want that have subs.
I am firmly against arena; I hate it and find it to be an affront to the game. But as long as it doesn’t affect my gameplay I don’t care. The problem is that it DOES affect my gameplay by forcing me to get gear from it, and buffs/nerfs as a side effect of it. WoW was meant to be PvE and I believe that Arena will, ultimately, be it’s downfall. It’ll take a couple more years, but other MMOs will get more and more WoW players to try them.
My point is this: WoW exists largely the way it was implemented. The point is to level to max, then start a raid progression. Before, it was based more on EQ, in that it required 40 people. They’ve since realized that it ain’t gonna happen. They went down to 25 man, and will soon have a 10 man progression. But, the game hasn’t drastically changed from the founding formula, if nothing else, that’s admirable. There have been many tweaks, but nothing I would consider an overhaul to the game in that respect. There’s a lot about it that drew in so many players who had no idea about raiding, but there are certainly a lot more raiders than there ever were. I believe a good portion of players are finding raiding to work for them. Even if it’s just at the Kara level. There is a lot of fun to be had with defeating content, and even a couple months afterward on farming it as you see your friends get better stuff.
What we should be focusing on, is how to make the next MMO better. WoW is ancient in terms of the technology world. Talking about how to make it better with large overhauls is just unrealistic. And by doing so, you are encouraging the next MMOs to be wow with a few changes. We need to talk about how to add sweeping changes to the genre, not as it relates to WoW, but all games. Adding guild halls, if even technically possible, is a see-through band-aid on a bullet hole. That has to be brought in on the ground level with ways to customize it. Adding it in 4 years later is just not going to work right. They could have GM run events, and I don’t know why they don’t.
Also, levelling WAS a fun and awesome experience. I played for a few months while levelling and pursued gear with my guild. I had a blast going through each levelling area and hitting many dungeons. But once you’ve hit cap and have seen what’s there, it’s hard to go back. And when you convince your friends to play, your not talking about those first levels, you are experiencing the raiding at that point. That’s why there is a level rush. And frankly, it’s hard to argue with it; this is a 4 year old game, most people have capped. You have to join a new MMO to get that awesome levelling experience (the way they are now). The only way to recapture it is to start with a group of friends, not by yourself. The major problem with WoW is its age, and nothing more. There are fewer and fewer new players. These games, as of now, do have a lifespan, they aren’t meant to go on forever. If they are designed from the get go to last forever, potentially, we will see more things to do than just kill and gear. I think it just comes down to the design phase; add all of these ideas at the beginning, and lay the foundation even if you can’t visit it before launch. All this comes down to bad design, but it’s bad design at the beginning, and now it bites you in the arse. This was their first game with little experience and it’s successful in so many ways. Let’s just see what they’ve truly learned from it with their new mmo. I don’t believe they are perfect, or faultless, but they do work hard on their games. It’s pointless to bitch about what’s wrong with the game now fundamentaly, other than to fix it in a new game. Try to give feedback to them on what’s wrong with WoW, but not to fix WoW, it’s too late. And frankly I don’t want to play WoW forever. It’s actually nice to switch games every couple of years ;).
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No doubt. And if it really did take them years to make Karazhan, they need to fire some people. That place was a hell hole of misery. It was a vortex of anti-fun.
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That’s because e-sports and voice chat are the “hot topics” technology wise. They care more about getting media press than they do about giving customers the features they actually want.
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Wow. People are still trying? You would think after 2-3 years of being totally ignored they would have given up by now. Those are some persistent folks.
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It is imporant to keep in mind that while Blizzard boasts millions of players, each server is really no bigger than a single server on previous general MMOs. Most servers still peak at about 4000 people online. They just have a crapton of servers.
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So this challenge is not unique to WoW. People played a lot more cooperatively in UO, EQ, and DAoC because there were systems that supported teamwork (like RvR). They also had world events, roleplay-ish features, housing, and all sorts of non-combat, non-advancement features. Those are the types of things that get people hanging out together socially rather than just borging for the next drop.
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I have been thinking this for years as well. I think we might be right. Now it looks like they might have already sent their real creative minds to work on Diablo III and Starcraft II. They just left behind the sophomotic, immature twits like “Tigole” (never forget how he came up with that name) who pander to the “l2raid n00b” crowd from whence they were themselves recruited.
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I think the real truth is Karazhan is simply no longer a raid dungeon. It is the UBRS of Burning Crusade. It used to be a raid dungeon, but after a year or so of nerfs and other gear inflation, Karazhan is no longer truly a raid dungeon. But even counting Karazhan, analysis of all the data we are able to obtain still points to somewhat around that 10% number (sometimes as low as 7%, sometimes as high as 14%). But then when you look to Gruul’s and beyond, it plummets right back to that 5% number, and for Black Temple/Sunwell its 1-2%.
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Agreed. And that is my main goal in discussing game design. The fact that my company has a game coming out later this year that is nothing like WoW is evidence that I’m not just tilting at windmills here. I am putting my money and my time where my mouth is.
In my opinion Blizzard is doing a great job, both with providing new content and with listening to its customers. They implement most things that people ask for, if they are fun, make sense and fit into the game. But this process takes time, and people tend to forget that it takes a long time to design, implement, test, tweak things until they are in a finished and presentable state.
Also people forget that there are 10 million people playing the game, so a few hundred demanding something on the forums aren’t the majority of players, as they often like to think. You want player housing and guild halls, Blizzard hasn’t implemented this, and your logical thinking is that Blizzard doesn’t listen to its customers. I don’t agree with that train of thought.
Talking about player housing and guild halls, to me neither of these has a place in a game like WoW. Because that’s what it is, a game, and not a second life. My guild had a guild hall in SWG, I’ve never been there, what would I do there? Guild chat is WoW’s guild hall. And player housing, how would that ever make sense? In UO the “wilderness” was full with player’s houses, I don’t think there’s a real possibility to implement player housing into a MMO in a fun way.
I’m certainly looking forward to wotlk and trying to tackle 10man raids with the nice people I’ve met in the game. What I don’t want to do is content that I have already done too many times, so I’m quite happy that old content is just that, old content and thus obsolete to end game. I don’t see how that is bad design, to me it is excellent design. Of course they will bring back Naxxramas, which I am not entirely happy about, but apparently they are hereby doing just what you are suggesting with this post.
Here’s a link to an inteview with Blizzard’s Frank Pearce courtesy of Random Battle where he complains that the current WoW dev team of 130 people is apparently exhausted due to the fact they have to pump out content to player who consuming content voraciously.
Hello? Houston to Irvine? Why then is Blizzard so intent on making their content so readily disposable and obsolete if they can’t even satisfy the demand for it? And as I mentioned in another article at Random Battle: why on earth are they allowing players to skip so much of that precious content with their easy leveling schemes, Recruit a Friend and hero classes starting at level 55?
Also let’s not forget Blizzards staggering economies of scale advantage with WoW over previous MMOs.
http://random-battle.com/2008/09/02/world-of-warcraft-is-tuckering-blizz-out/
http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/blizzard-s-frank-pearce
Q: How interesting has it been for you to watch the success of World of Warcraft?
Frank Pearce: I don’t know if I’d describe it as “interesting” as much as exhausting. We’ve got almost 3000 employees worldwide now, and the majority of that growth is due to the success of World of Warcraft.
As a company we’ve found ourselves spread very, very thin - because the World of Warcraft community has a voracious appetite for content. That development team is 130 people, they’re working on content patches, they’re working on an expansion set, they’ve got their hands full - and then we’ve got the other development teams that we need to continue to support as well.
So it’s great, it’s a great problem to have, but it is a lot of work. We’ve learned a lot, made a lot of mistakes along the way. It’s been good experience for us, I wouldn’t say that we’ve regretted it… but “interesting” isn’t how we’d describe it necessarily.
What? They implement almost NOTHING people ask for. People have been asking for player housing and guild halls since BETA. And I don’t just mean a few hundred people. I mean millions of people.
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And people by the millions have been begging for more to do than just combat. And yet this is routinely ignored. The role players are totally ignored. The people into Warcraft lore are incensed that they seem to repeatedly throw the world’s lore under the buss just to pump out another Uber Raid Boss.
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WoW is many things, but responsive to its players is definitely not one of them.
So nobody in WoW actually lives anywhere? Therefore it doesn’t fit in the game? That’s nuts. Housing and Guild Halls are not about simulating a life like Second Life. They are about owning a PIECE of the game world. They are about having something you can work on and customize that is a little bigger and more varied than just your character.
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They are a way to express your creativity a bit. There is currently no way to express one’s creativty in WoW. Heck, they don’t even have armor dye for cripes sakes.
That is very true. And it is a scathing indictment of what a sucktastic guild system WoW has.
Except how it was done in every MMO besides UO. DAoC, EQ2, ATITD, Threshold, Primordiax, and many others have amazing housing and guild hall systems. They are so much fun, some people spend huge percentages of their time simply working on their house, decorating it, customizing it, showing it off, etc.
But the thing is, you haven’t done most of it. In fact, you have probably not even done 20% of all that “old content.” That represents enormous waste on the part of the developer.
What is excellent about wasting millions of dollars worth of developer resources? That’s bad not only from a game design standpoint, but also a business standpoint.
And there’s further proof that even Blizzard is confronting the fact of what a stupid method they have. I take two things from that:
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1) Only 130 people on content design? Are you serious? They only have 1 content developer for every 8000 subscribers?
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2) Of course they are overworked. There are not nearly enough of them, and they keep designing things that make more and more of their content obsolete and worthless.
From the perspective of having designed pen & paper and live action games, I have to say, designing out of your own content is ridiculous. If you have mobs that are higher level than others, and they are pretty much cookie cutter to lower level mobs in other earlier instances…
…why not make it so you can play the dungeon again, but at a higher difficulty?
Wailing Caverns was a blast, and you could go into it to explore only part of it, or to get a particular boss you needed, or you could go into it to clear the whole darn thing and defeat the very last boss in there, and then the one that needed to be summoned.
Or, you could go in with a higher level character or two and try soloing, duoing, or so on, the dungeon, depending on how much higher level you were.
I mean, how hard is it to do things based on a percentage of health/mana?
And, if there’s some balancing issues… well, just don’t let it break a precious end-game loot plan, and let people have fun playing through the level.
The Druids of the Fang set, can’t remember the name off-hand, was a favorite of more than a few druids just for it’s look. You know, having a set of casually obtainable gear that actually looked like a cohesive set rather than a mish mash of scraps. And if the equipment does something nifty, like summon a special little pet, you might even be able to find a few otherwise hard-core folks to join you on your endeavor.
And on a sideier note, something that I think set City of Heroes apart from every other MMO out there has got to be the Side-Kick/Paragon system, and probably warrants a whole ‘nother post just about that. Being able to play with your buddy even though he’s not playing with you as often, or letting your buddy experience the high-end awesome content even though he’s low level so he decides to stick with the game… those are good ideas not just from a player’s view, but from the company’s perspective of the bottom line as well.
And let’s hard-core and casual gamers actually have fun together, while still rewarding the one who’s put in more time.
I would play WoW if it were a single player game. Apart from the dungeons, the VAST majority of the game can be played completely sans-players. And hell, set some NPC mercenaries and every non-raid instance can be done completely without the benefit of other players.
Why would you make an MMO like that? I mean, I understand the flipside, for those who can’t play during peak hours or the aforementioned lowbie drought it’s good that it’s a level or two before you can solo something anyway… But we come right back to cambios’s problem.
Why would they make such a GLUT of obsolete content that people can walk through an entire ‘city’ without so much as seeing one ‘real person’?
And as far as timezones go, it’s not like a midnight wow-er in the states can’t log onto an oceania server.
No excuse. Blizzard’s losing players because so much of their game is merely a single player RPG with an attatched chat window.
Which is NOT worth the subscription.
Maliseraph: Yeah, the sidekick thing was started by City of Heroes, but a few other games have been tinkering with it lately as well. EQ2 has a mentoring system where you drop your level to the lower level friend. It works ok, but going DOWN is never that fun (and the system is overpowered, since the guy going down doesn’t lose any powers).
And yeah, it is really a shame how much cool WoW content is wasted, when all it needs is a level bump or a level scaling to still be fun.
If they did loot more via tokens or gold (like gee, I dunno, getting rid of the brain dead Bind on Pickup system) then ANY dungeon would have value as long as you were making some gold or earning some tokens. I’d love to do a level 70 Scarlet Monastery run.
Tim: I really don’t understand it. An interesting experiment is to download one of the “private” servers and experience the game with literally no players. You learn two things:
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1) The gameplay experience is barely different.
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2) The end game content is even more boring and crappy than you already thought it was. Once you can create the gear on your own, and have thus removed the ONLY reason to raid, you are immediately aware of how boring and not fun the raid dungeons are.
I’ve said more than once I’d buy and play a single player offline version of WoW. I’m tempted by private servers, but I’d much prefer to play legally, so I won’t go that route. Sometimes I like me a good grind through some pretty territory. There were times I’d grind in a Final Fantasy game just for fun, for instance.
So… I don’t mind that WoW is pretty much just a single player grindy pretty treadmill. The trouble I have with it is that I don’t think that it warrants a subscription fee, nor do I think that it really lives up to the concept of a virtual online world. Even the raiding that requires groups could be handled via an “instance” interface, where people play offline solo, but if they want to play with others, they go online, find someone via a matching service, and go to town, playing online only when they feel a need for other players.
That sort of solo offline, multiplayer online game has been done before, and it works well. The game we know as “World of Warcraft” fits that model very well, in my little mind.
Now, if there were to be a “World of World of Warcraft” sort of game, where the Warcraft lore moves to something more closely approximating an online virtual world, complete with player-affected content, and dynamic world changing events, that might be worth the subscription fee… but it may well be a very different game.
Where you want to put your emphasis really depends on the type of player you are catering to. For a game like WOW, I agree they have a ton to gain by adding in level-independent mini-games. Likewise by encouraging people to experience content slowly…hell they should add in a feature that lets you drop your level to group and do say level 40 dungeons with your level 70.
Situation really becomes different if a game’s focus is RvR/PVP/Competitive or role playing based. In that case, you really are better off doing what shadowbane for example did which is minimizing the amount of “levelling/PVE” content and focusing on battle/endgame content. Players aren’t going to stop and appreciate a long or content heavy leveling curve if they need to hit max level to compete. And really unless you severely reduce the importance of levels, there’s no way NOT to make a competitive game not be about getting to maximum.
Speaking with regards to Threshold in particular, I enjoyed it back in the day but with the long leveling curve it’s probably not something I”d play again. Role playing your way slowly to power and influence can be fun the first time around. I find after you’ve played a great number of RP games, especially if you gained a great measure of power in many of those games, low levels are something to be plowed through as soon as possible.
Making the leveling curve optional or eliminating it might seem heretical in the RPG world. But when you’re looking at people who have played the “green squire” a hundred times and really want to concentrate on influence/power RP and PVP…why put them through that? Said people are often major political drivers in any world they play on, why encourage them to stay on a possibly dying game because of a huge leveling curve to reach the same point in a new world?
If you want to see a game that rendered itself useless and obsolete, look no further than Star Wars Galaxies. That game had a lot of subscribers, their fanbase was huge, and then they went and tried to make it more like World of Warcraft. They released patches that gave and took away content like most people change their shirt. Subscribers would log on to find that their entire class had been removed and they were forced to chose a new one. They released several expansions that didn’t mesh with the current storyline of the game, the game mechanics were stiff and overly difficult. The game killed itself more successfully than any MMO I’ve ever known. On the topic of Blizzard and WoW, I’ll refrain from commenting because I’m a huge fan and therefore am incapable of forming a completely objective opinion. My experiences with the game, both good and bad, have seasoned my opinion to my tastes, but often leaves much to be desired to others.
Serith,
Regarding the PvP high end, it seems to me that the Guild Wars method is optimal. Now, I’m not an “endgame PvP” player or GW junkie, but as I understand it, you can jump in and fire up a max level player and just go to town, or you can play through the leveling content, either mode right out of the box. It always seemed like a good idea to me. Give different players what they want, and all that.
Then again, I’m the sort that played through Titan Quest once, then used the Defiler to make myself some high level characters to test out other builds. I saw no reason to level through the game again, but I wanted to see other gameplay options. (Which is why paying to respec in WoW seems dumb to me, gold sink or no.) It bugged me that I had to find a hack to do what really should have been a game option.
Some will call that dumbing down the game or some other uppity argument, but to be blunt, as a player, if I’m paying for a game, I want those options. As a designer, giving people reasons to play your game and experiment with it is to keep people playing it, rather than moving on to a different game.
Yes, hacks are trouble for multiplayer games, as unfair advantages can be created, but realistically, giving people options without punishing them is rarely a bad design choice.
Specifically as it pertains to the topic at hand, giving people reasons to play through old content would be an extremely good thing. Even the “insta-55″ that Wolfshead rightly complains about is a step in the right direction that might allow people to test out new things. In the WoW context, it’s only a problem precisely because of the unholy focus on leveling, but the idea of letting people play with high-end tools to give them a proper taste of the game (rather than puttering around in lowbie zones with vanilla characters with light class distinction) may well help people get a sense of whether or not they can like your game. The WoW Arena is a step in the right direction in that regard. The alternative is to force people through a leveling treadmill, and that can generate as much ennui or hostility as it generates addiction.
Yes, allowing people to skip the “old world” can be a problem, but it’s not the skipping that’s the problem. No, the trouble is an unsupported, boring old world. If the designers can make the old world interesting to play for characters of all skills and levels, it’s going to get played. That’s the key; don’t complain about skipping content, complain that the content is “worth” skipping.
Cambios wrote: “It is imporant to keep in mind that while Blizzard boasts millions of players, each server is really no bigger than a single server on previous general MMOs. Most servers still peak at about 4000 people online. They just have a crapton of servers.”
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No doubt! But, you still have to get those 4,000ish people on each server to play cooperatively and that could a whole lot of admins to accomplish across all the servers.
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Tesh wrote: “…you can jump in and fire up a max level player and just go to town, or you can play through the leveling content, either mode right out of the box.”
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I think where the end game *is* the “real” game, then this would work. It wouldn’t work well in games where actually earning your way into the top levels means something.
Definitely, Ducky… it’s just that “earning your way to the top” is more a measure of time than skill in most leveling treadmill games. The whole point of GW insta-cap characters is to test skill between players, rather than to focus on the endless loot grinding treadmill.
That, to me, is why the “pay to advance” method gains traction; there are those who have more time than money, and vice versa; catering solely to those with an overabundance of time not only encourages addictive behavior, but it also means your player base is going to be inordinately shifted to the teenage/otaku demographic. (Complete with the complaints that generates, such as immature behavior and imbalanced personalities.)
It also underlines the treadmill nature of the bulk of “content”, since it’s just something to be leveled through in an attempt to justify spending inordinate amounts of time in the game. To me, an online world should be celebrating skill and creativity, not mindless grinding and time investment.
When I see someone at the level cap in WoW, completely outfitted in purples, I don’t think that he’s a skilled player, I think that he’s spent an inordinate amount of time in the game, and has little to show for it but some fancy shoulderpads. He’s probably spend hundreds of dollars in sub money getting there, too. That doesn’t invoke hero worship or aspirations to “be like Mike”, it invokes pity.
Contrast that to Puzzle Pirates. If I see a pirate there with an Ultimate rank, I know he has skill in that puzzle. If he has multiple Ultimates, I know he’s extremely skilled. He’s still probably spent way too much time in-game to get there, but at least the rank is a measure of skill, rather than grind tolerance, tenure and money down the Blizzard rabbit hole.
Tesh wrote: “It also underlines the treadmill nature of the bulk of “content”, since it’s just something to be leveled through in an attempt to justify spending inordinate amounts of time in the game. To me, an online world should be celebrating skill and creativity, not mindless grinding and time investment.”
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Tesh, I have to agree with this one hundred percent.
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With the ease of leveling in MMOs they have to make the grid last a long time to keep people playing even though the “real game” doesn’t start until the end game kicks in. Even with some MUDs you can sail through level 100, remort 4 times, and move on to level 200+ all in a month so you can start to play the “real game”. What’s the point in having those levels if they don’t mean anything?
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On the flip side, if you have to kill 300 of MobX (or the equivalent of it) to get to the next level, well that sounds very boring as well.
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Rewarding creativity is pretty hard to do via code, especially with the large number of walk-thrus available on the internet. Is part of the future going to be smaller games with more admins who can watch what’s going on and reward creative folks for what their characters do that can’t possibly be monitored by code?
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On some MUDs there are characters that are fairly famous for things they’ve done very well, but suck on the level-o-meter because they don’t spend much time griding away to earn that next level.
I am extremely perplexed by the nature of this topic. Frankly, the only setting in which content does not become obsolete is a leveless roleplaying system. And even then, given previous mentions of players being “content,” previous story arcs become obsolete. *ALL* games with any progressive gameplay system will suffer from content becoming obsolete. Even Threshold RPG has this (you don’t see Hegemons returning to the Tower of Alignment to interact with first floor NPCs for any reason, for example).
In the end, a very large portion of the issue with regards to content becoming obsolete so quickly is player attitudes and culture. More and more people have friends or higher level characters power level them through content. Do they have to? No. But they do anyway.
As for the suggestions to make current MMO’s better:
1. Player Housing: Player customizeable housing is a great idea in a small game, generally with a roleplaying nature. It is not feasible in a large, graphical MMO. SWG is a great example of placing this in a game. Abandoned house after abandoned house littered the game. SWG? Dead. There are great games that already have house building feature. They are called the Sims and Animal Crossing.
From my experience, this is not a feature that is wanted by the majority of gamers who play MMOs, but rather a very, very, very vocal minority of players.
2. Mini-games: I have yet to play a game with mini-games in which mini-games became more than a passing activity. If I was in the area with the mini-game and sufficiently bored, I’d do it. Especially if there was zero reward. At least in WoW, “Daily Quests” can be viewed as mini-games, with bombing missions, timed events, etc. And you are rewarded in each one.
Again, if my focus was mini-games or I derived more entertainment from them with little reward, I would play Mario Party or Raving Rabids( or whatever the heck that Ray-Man spin-off was called.)
3. GM/Admin Run Events: As I said with player housing, this is a fantastic idea, in a small game, generally with a roleplaying nature. In a game where you have more than a handful of servers, the issue becomes what to do with so many potential plot-lines. Which player ideas get support? Do you support all of them or do you have to whittle down to a small number? Is that fair? Then, what happens when you decide on a plot-line to run and half your servers go one way, and the other goes another. Then, you have players who ended up on the “losing” side of an idea, switching servers to go to where their idea won out.
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I am not against these ideas, (except for mini-games, yuck) I just do not believe they are feasible in a game larger than a few thousand people where admin/developer/GM attention is not overwhelmed and quality drops. There are some great examples of smaller games in which this was successful. Asheron’s Call and Eve Online come to mind, both with variations of housing and gm/admin events.
It is really funny you would say that. This is the current mindset, and it couldn’t be more wrong. For decades, MUDs (and even early MMOs) have used a variety of tactics to ensure that older content does not become obsolete. I believe I listed some examples already. But there are others as well. You can put things in other zones that people might want. You can create story line events that involve those areas. There are tons of things you can do (and that HAVE BEEN DONE) to make content not become obsolete.
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WoW is one of the first games to so aggressive just flush their own content down the crapper. It makes no sense really.
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Again, it is clear you must not play many games. This is simply not the case.
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Great example. Hegemons (in Threshold) don’t go to the Tower of Alignment? What about Vishnavs and Settites or people who want to speak to them? What about all the other NPCs in there for various level ranges. What about the fact that people use the Tower for various role play events? You proved my point, and I thank you for it. The Tower of Alignment (an area that is over 12 years old) is still incredibly popular and heavily trafficked.
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Except for the fact that it thrives in EQ2, FFXI, and other MMOs, and is practically the entire focus of Habbo Hotel - an online game with as many or more users as WoW.
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Sorry, but only die hard WoW fanboys try and argue against player housing. Player housing is a gigantic success everywhere it is implemented. It is a killer app. The fact that Blizzard is too miserly to invest in this feature is really an affront to its customers.
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Bad implementation. You don’t have to put the actual physical houses right in the middle of the game world. But this also proves the point. It was so popular, it grey WAY beyond the estimated usage of SWG’s developers (the same thing happened to UO). This was a problem BECAUSE OF the enormous popularity of the feature.
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From your experience with WoW and SWG. There are a lot more games out there. DAoC once released estimates that their housing system alone was retaining about 15-20% of their customers. As I said, there are games out there with millions of customers whose main focus is this type of customization. On Threshold, they are massively popular and successful.
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Your experience doesn’t jibe with actual industry numbers.
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Really? You’ve never played a game where combat was more than a passing activity?
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Oops. Yeah, that’s right. Combat is just an elaborate mini game. That’s all it is. It feels like more because so many games put their entire focus on this one mini game.
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What do you think the Auction House is in WoW? It is just an economic mini game.
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Mini games are the little activities inside a game world that make it more than a chat room, and they are crucial to long term, varied enjoyment. The fact that WoW, AoC, and other current generation MMOs give you nothing but the Auction House and combat mini games is a damn shame.
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It is very true that these are all challenges and difficulties that take effort to resolve. It is a shame WoW barely makes any money and therefore can’t afford to invest money to solve such issues. Oh wait, they make $150 million a month. That’s right. So they have more than enough money to address such questions and provide a little interesting, non-combat content to their players. If you are making $150 million bucks a month, you owe it to your customers to spend a little money back on the game.
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Ok. So no more combat or auction houses in your MMOs. Got it!
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This is completely backward logic. The more successful a game gets, and the more money they make, does not LOWER their responsibility to add content and provide interesting activities for their players.
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By their own numbers, Blizzard makes $150 million a month off of WoW. With that freakish amount of income, they employ a paltry 130 people to make content, 2 or 3 to run events, and approximately 500 customer service staff. Bandwidth and server costs are at historic lows, so they are only dropping a couple million a month TOPS to keep the game running (including IT support staff). So that leaves $140+ million…. PER MONTH.
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With all that money, they couldn’t be doing more? They can’t even do as much as games that make 1/1000th as much money as they do? They love bragging about the size of their subscriber base. They should be ashamed of the fact that with all those subscribers, they provide LESS game play variety than their competitors.
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Outrageous. I call shenanigans.