Dec 26 2008
Holiday Events on MMOs: Your Opinion
It has become standard fare for MMOs to have some kind of special event around holiday time. Most have something at Christmas and all other major holidays, but some will run special events even for minor stuff (including Hallmark Day… oops, I mean Valentine’s Day.) The current trend is to create some kind of faux-In Character name for the event (All Hallows Eve, Feast of Winter Veil, Keg End, etc.) that dimly creates a lore reason for the event. This is often a very weak excuse, since in-game time rarely relates to real life time.
Before you assume I am down on the idea, I think these events are good and interesting things. I think they are an example of developers giving something fun to their community, and they create a bit of an emotional connection from the game world to the real world. When you are celebrating something special in real life you are also celebrating something special in the game. If anything, the only negative thing I have to say about the idea is the fact that all too often this is the ONLY type of special event developers run. That’s a shame. Events directly related to the game world itself are far more interesting and should be a bigger priority.
What Do Players Think About Holiday MMO Events?
As players (or visiting developers), what do you think about these holiday events? I will get you started with a few specific questions:
1) Are these kinds of events fun?
2) Are they worth the time developers put into them?
3) Do you have a problem with developers trotting out the same event each year, or mostly the same with a few things added?
4) Do events like this break immersion, add to it, or neither?
Feel free to also share examples of good or bad holiday MMO events you have experienced.
Merry Christmas!
In Navyfield, ships fire christmas baubles instead of shells, and dive bombers look like Santa Claus on a reindeer sled. WoW has a very nice Winter Veil festival, but just like the headless horseman it becomes achievement grind for most players. Do not miss the event, unless you have to wait till next year to get it. In Guild Wars, there are some special items that drop very rarely and randomly during a quest only available during Wintersday. They are cosmetic, but this actually encourages people to grind during christmas.
I would prefer less grind and less rewards, but rather giving people a nice atmosphere and a real in-game festival than the mentioned examples. In Navyfield I used the patch to turn shells back to normal after a few battles anyways.
Especially Guild Wars offers too much beneficial festival grind, often with rare rewards. Many people who prefer to spend time with friends and family did not like that overly much. Nothing wrong with some xmas decoration, I would like even more of that for various holidays. But all those special rewards urge people to log in to their favorite MMO, or else feel like they lost something.
WoW was okay as long as they did not add achievement title grind to the game. Now the creed is “do not miss a holiday achievement grind!”
Hirvox, thanks for the link. I read Veblen, but I would have liked to have Greedy Goblin sum it up for me. Veblen was a really smart guy that could not communicate his ideas, this is how people would (or actually do) describe him nowadays.
There is some truth about it. I still have problems to relate it to me: I am pretty sure that I did/do the achievements in various to show off to others. At the same time I often did things nobody could see, so could not be showed off, e.g. I had cartographer (explore all spots of the map) in Guild Wars before the fancy title “Explorer” was added. So did I do it for myself or why did I do it…
For example: “The point is to throw away our expensive cloths. The richest people have such an “elaborate sense of beauty” that they don’t wear the same cloths twice.The point is to throw away our expensive cloths. The richest people have such an “elaborate sense of beauty” that they don’t wear the same cloths twice.”
This is very true for stars and starlets. I still cannot swallow or believe that I am mainly driven by the fact to show others that I can waste time for this or that.
OK, the issue is more complex than that…
In Guild Wars, I had already played the game for years. I knew the mechanics, tricks of the trade, had practice at doing anything possible and had some “secret knowledge”. BTW, according to Bartle I am ESA or EAS type.
Explorer-Achiever-Socializer-(Killer). Achievements kept me going, gave me a reason to play. I was already quite done with the game otherwise! Not because it was bad, I just had enough of it and saw the flaws while I did not appreciate the fun aspects as much as before.
But this achievement grind, many of my friends fell victim to it, too, always annoyed me. We were doing often outright silly things to meet the requirements for this or that really useless title, because it added to the maximum titles achieved title track… ouch!
At this point, I asked myself “why am I doing this?” and joined some friends who quit GW earlier and were playing WoW for quite some time by now. I also played EVE for a while, but while I liked it a lot, the immense amount of time involved to really play this game totally put me off!
I guess I still have not totally understood the principles and ideas of Veblen and Greedy Goblin, but some ideas are right on spot. The love-hate-relationship of players for grind elements in a game for example is a fascinating topic.
I absolutely adore Guild Wars, too. Right now I do not play it anymore, I got bored. I have played it from start till a few months after the release of Eye of the North. Now that my system can run it in gazillion x gazillion pixels with 128x AA and whatever, I do not play it anymore… this is just wrong…!
ArenaNet always has cool new ideas. I think the flaw is that the implementation often backfires. I hope they learnt something for Guild Wars 2. Sometimes I think they used the game as a testbed for new ideas from start to finish, and that it is really a wonder and speaking for the core game design that they ran it subscription free up to now.
I have high hopes for GW2, at the same time I always fear they miss to introduce this hard to define appeal of Guild Wars 1 that kept me playing for years.
If you start out in GW from scratch, you are either in the fast level up “chapters”, stand alone expansions (not more than a day to max level, then you have only max level content for the rest of the game) like Factions or Nightfall, or you start out in Tyria as low level where levelling takes much more time. And nobody will be there to play and group with you, but rather quickly level you up so that you can trivialize the low level “missions” and areas before you.
I am not sure if I would have played Guild Wars if I had started later. The coolest thing they ever introduced was hard mode and vanquishing IMO.
And then they added those dreaded cheat items and uber skills! 