After I read much fussing and whining about Blizzard’s proposed change to WoW allowing players to switch faction (Horde to Alliance or vice versa), a thought coalesced in my mind. (Though maybe I was just hungry.)
I want a different kind of cheese out of the World of Warcraft, or any other MMO, for that matter. (Whether that’s cheese to go with maze running or whining, it works either way.)
The dominant MMO design ethos is one of a drip feed of rewards, where anything and nearly everything is rewarded somehow on the inexorable and execrable slog to conformity at the level cap, when everyone’s Super (with or without purple capes). It’s a great little Pavlovian treadmill that has sucked in a lot of people to the tune of $15/month, so I don’t dispute the success of the model. It’s just not what I’m looking for.
It’s American Cheese when I want something like… Gorgonzola. It’s a highly processed, plastic experience, when I’m looking for something more organic, variable and interesting… and even a little crazy. (Eating mold is a little crazy.)
I want these MMO things to be fun to play, not tightly scripted treadmills that play on my canine Pavlovian tendencies. The current WoW design ethos that focuses on rewards over actually playing is a huge factor in all the whining that comes up when things change in the game. It’s behind Achievements and guild application drama. It’s behind the inane arguments over “nerfing raids” and “devaluing accomplishments”. It’s behind the idiotic PTR culture that is really just a microcosm of the game at large. It’s behind all the preening and posturing that make high level players so annoying. It’s behind the hardcore/casual debate, since obviously people have to be playing it the way X is playing it, or else the rewards don’t mean anything. (Since complaining about how someone else plays is ridiculous, the debate is shifted to the notion of keeping the rewards “fair”… as if that meant anything objective.) It’s behind the complaints about faction shifting (and my proposed ability to change class), since obviously grinding up a new alt is the Only Way to Do it Right. It’s behind those who defend the grind as “The Right Way” to play because it’s how they did it and everyone knows through self-evident reasoning that their own way to play is the only True Enlightened way to play an MMO. (And further, if an MMO doesn’t support that style of play, it’s not a real MMO.)
It’s all just so much… SPAM.
I want an MMO that embodies what Wolfshead is arguing over here: that Players Need to be the Ultimate Content for MMOs. The game will need to be fun to play, and fun to keep playing, without resorting to cheap parlor tricks of drop rates, rep grind and alts. They will need to be organic, dynamic, living worlds to play with friends in when the real world just won’t do for whatever reason. They will let players change the game world and be the content because they are the prime movers of the game world, not a content-creating cube jockey with a Vision for How Things Work. The reward will be the joy derived from playing the game and acting, not reacting.
Tangentially, the whole “group vs solo” debate can largely be solved by shifting the reward to the fun of playing as well. One huge part of the debate is the notion of balancing rewards and how players inevitably optimize the fun out of the game. In a game designed from the ground up to be all about min/maxing, is it really a surprise that there will be those who get offended when their playstyle isn’t the optimal one? The only “incentive” that works to get solo players to group is for it to actually be fun to do so. Luring people into group situations with the promise of better loot is what causes the mercenary PUG nonsense, where loyalty and friendship only last as long as the rewards keep coming.
I’m probably just wishing for unicorns here, but if there are plenty of things to do in a fantasy world that let players simply have fun acting in the world, whether solo or in groups, then the very fluid notion of “fun” and playing can be the reward, rather than trying to quantify and compare via epic loot. If people can get past obsessing about the rewards, they might just find that complaining about someone else’s notion of fun really is as silly as it sounds. (To be fair, griefing is still something that needs to be kept under thumb.)
I know, some people consider the conditioned response set of the DIKUDing treadmill to be “fun”, but it’s just such a shallow experience that I’m not buying it, myself. I’m certainly not paying for it. I can pat myself on the back for free, thanks. Some might argue that their game needs a way to keep score, or else it isn’t a game. Perhaps, but it’s been my experience that setting your own goals makes for a lot more meaning when you get around to achieving them.
The MMO that can truly leverage the notion of playing with other people (directly or indirectly, group or “solo play in the same world as others”) in an interesting, dynamic, Gorgonzlolic virtual world will be the one that can capture my attention. (Ysh, I promise I didn’t swipe Gorgonzola from your article, this one of mine has been in the pipe for two weeks now… funny how that works out.) I haven’t found it yet, and nothing in the pipeline that I’ve seen even hints at coming close. I see prettier treadmills and plenty of American Cheese…
and I’m hungry.
So I keep looking, keep theorizing, keep tinkering. And I keep my money. If nothing else, American Cheese MMOs are good for that; they help me save money and give me grist for the blog mill. I guess I can’t complain too much.
*Yes, the book illustrating job is going again, and I’m still busy without blogging. This just bugged me enough to write about it, consolidating a few thought threads that have been floating about for a while. And yes, it’s an opinion piece with plenty of links rather than anything academic. The irony doesn’t escape me.*
Quite a lot of links! I especially liked the link to Ixobelle’s PTR experience. I always wondered what people where doing on PTR besides, well, testing. And why.
At the moment I am testing Age of Conan and waiting for the Aion Beta Weekend.
After the starter area of Tortage, there is a shortage of fun, be it grouped or solo. Actually, till level 31 there was nothing interesting to do that required a group. The problem was there is not much interesting to do at all, and my armor still looks like muddy rags.
Aion does not deviate much from the DIKU formula, crafting seems to be pure horror but hey, it was >> very fun to play << – I wonder if the rest of the game shows promise, too.
I am about to analyze why it is so enjoyable. I wonder if they got the supposed endgame "PvPvE" right. I especially wonder if one weekend will be enough to level up to 25 and then still have time to enter the "Abyss" and explore it.
Regarding innovation: Copernicus from 38 studios is a big hope, I hope they do not make too much fuss about their diku mud flavor and really do something very new and enjoyable.
Besides that, Blizzard is already working on the secret next generation MMO. Whatever that will be, I am not sure if they share the opinion of Tesh, Wolfshead or Longasc how a cool MMO should be…!
*chuckle*
I highly doubt they are channeling our views. Gordon over at We Fly Spitfires nailed it when he noted that we’re not in the bulge of the bell curve. Outlier notions aren’t all that profitable to the guys who target the bulge (or who *must* target the bulge because they are playing a game of “shoot the moon” rather than finding a profitable, modest niche and scaling their ambitions and design to match).
I’m resigned to being an MMO outlier, either working on my own designs or playing other games. I do think that a savvy company could earn some cash from me if they broke from the stagnant cesspool that is the modern MMO design pit, as King’s Isle did with Wizard 101 or Three Rings with Puzzle Pirates, but it’s not like I’m pining my life away waiting for the Solution to fall from Blizzard’s tainted lips. Similarly, I don’t think any developer is wondering how to earn my money. They want *money* in aggregate, and I’m just a statistic. An unconformist one, no less.
I should just build my own. With all those millions of dollars that I have in my back pocket.
Just cheese? Here I thought you were going to compare the current McMMO’s to fast food burgers when you wanted steak. Oh, but then Age of Conan already tried that one…
I’m with you for the most part, but I’m still of the opinion that we need some strong guided content as well.
Every time I see the “players as content” and worse, the whole “setting your own goals” thing, I think back to my days in original SWG. It was an extremely boring game, all said and done, with very little to actually “do.” In order to set my own goals, I had to know those goals actually existed somewhere in order to go do them first. The only obvious goals were on your character profile: maxing skills. Anything else was relatively hidden so there were many, many times of logging in and just standing around because there was “nothing to do.” If I didn’t know about any certain goal, how could I want it and go achieve it? Plus, in Real Life I have to make Decisions every single day. Sometimes I just want to come home and play a game for simple fun, not a game where I have to continue making every decision. This is also why I don’t play EVE. In fact, of the few EVE blogs I read, none of them seem to “play” EVE either. They pay their monthly fee so they can login, set some skills that will train offline, then they *might* go mine asteroids for a little while before logging off for a week or two while those skills train up on their own. That’s uh… not something I’d pay monthly for.
One thing I notice during my annual visits to that Not A Real MMO you mentioned, is that it seems to start out as a very linear game where we’re pulled through the story chapter by chapter but the “end game” the entire thing turns into a sandbox. All of the “real” content is still valid for XP, etc. and there are still goals to be had in the older areas ranging from capturing Elite skills, to getting “green” (unique) weapons from bosses, to working on titles. Loot isn’t a factor per se because everything has a max. A new weapon is usually only sought for min/max purposes for your specific build, or more commonly, if the new one simply looks awesome. I have set some specific goals in that Not A Real MMO that will absolutely require grouping, which is actually fine by me because it’s such a different experience from using the NPC AI companions.
@Longasc: Aion does not deviate much from the DIKU formula … but hey, it was >> very fun to play <<
Since Aion is a straight-up Diku game but it has all the awesome animations and effects, is it actually fun to play or is it simply fun to watch? From the various blogs I’ve read and YouTube videos I’ve watched, it seems (at least for myself) that just watching your character fight is all the “fun” and that will wear off when the cool animations become less cool after seeing them a few hundred or few thousand times. Then once you see behind the shiny paint job, you’ve still got a clunky Diku jalopy engine under the hood.
Scott, I’m more of a cheese guy. Steak doesn’t do it for me, AoC style or otherwise.
You’re right in that there probably should be *some* directed content. It can definitely be nice to just sort of “zone out” and follow the script, or a series of breadcrumbs that are a bit looser on the reins. It’s not what I want all the time, but yes, I’m not calling for the absolute omission of such. Good call for clarification.
You’re also right about Guild Wars. The max weapons, early level cap and cosmetic gear options are big parts I like about the game, since they short circuit the loot mentality somewhat, and allow players to go about doing whatever piques their interest.
I’ve wondered about Aion as well. If the 3D aerial combat is so much fun (it may be, I don’t know), would a Team Fortress 2 or Counterstrike in 3D also be fun? Fun enough to carry a game without DIKU treadmills?
Amen.
As for cheese, I’m an equal opportunity cheese-worshipper. I have no problem with you channeling Gorgonzola at the same time as me. If it makes you more comfortable, I can move to Rocquefort — same type of cheese, but French and therefore better.
Ysh, I’m all for shared Gorgonzola love, I just found it very curious (and funny) that we’d both settle (independently) on that particular cheese. Coincidences like that make me look for shared causes, whether it be the Blogger Hive Mind or something that maybe we both read a few weeks ago that tripped the same writing wires. I’m certainly not bothered, it’s just my Spidey Scientist senses tingling.
edit: Or maybe it’s just the mold. Eating weird foods can cause nerve damage, right?
I cut my virtual teeth on MUSHes, which are about as people centric as it’s possible to get. So I’m with you and Wolfshead in wanting that paradigm to make the jump to MMOs (although I’m honestly not sure it would scale).
But I gotta say, if that turns out to be the case, then the reason everyone groups is … because there is practically no solo game. The game IS other people.
I’d love there to be a workable model where people group because it’s more fun. But I think grouping is already more fun …
Spinks, there’s an important distinction that keeps getting glossed over.
When other people *are* the game, it doesn’t mean that’s always grouping up to go kill stuff, and it certainly doesn’t mean that such is the only way to play in the game. There are a LOT of indirect interactions between players in a game where the economy, exploration and politics are all player-driven, and when those aspects of a virtual world are driven by players, they are far more dynamic. That can benefit soloers as well as groupers.
Sure, group combat content is a subset of the player-driven game, but it’s certainly not the only option. It’s not even the biggest option, though it may be one of the most visible. (And because it’s pretty much just combat driven, it’s even a smaller subset of the possibilities in a more dynamic world.)
Edited to add:
OK, looking at it again, and finding some more agreement with you, I did some tabletop gaming with Palladium games (TMNT, Robotech) in my teens, and yes, you just can’t do that solo. (Well, you can spend a lot of time thinking about the game and doing GM stuff solo, but that’s not the same thing.) That doesn’t translate directly to MMOs though because of the persistent world. These MMO things, with their “always on” worlds, can do the sort of complicated economies, ecologies and indirect player interactions that we just couldn’t do with pen and paper. Yes, “adventuring” (really just combat in modern MMOs, not really RPGaming) will tend to be strongest with other players, but being a citizen of a virtual world (and even doing some sneaky politicking or thieving) doesn’t need a constant group at your shoulder any more than being a citizen of the real world does.
Quite a lot of link dropping there!
You’ve made a great point though. If we were more concerned with what is fun then we wouldn’t be too worried about the other stuff.
Just to play the devils advocate though, who decides what is fun? In all honesty fun for me is leveling up with my friends and guild mates, moving on to group content and gearing us all out and then starting into raids. There is no mercenary here, only a leader who wants everyone to win. Everyone in the guild that is. Not that I would wish a bad experience on others. I am not a griefer but I can just help along so many who aren’t interested in staying with us.
I the same line of being the devils advocate, I would say that even if fun was the motivator we would still be divisive. Would it not be in my interest to campaign for my play style so that there is more content? Certainly I would be unconcerned how others played. Nor would I care if they played how I do. The major benefit to me would be that there is more for me and mine to do. Any of us who have ever said “there should be more PvP/PvE/Solo/Raids” are doing this. I am admitting guilt but we are all culpable.
Don’t take this as disagreement though. I think fun, in general, should be the basis. You are right in that we make too many assumptions of what an MMO has to be. The truth is, they don’t have to be anything. They don’t have to offer PvE and PvP. They don’t have to have levels. They just don’t. The real trick is convincing investors of it. Look at Free Realms though. It breaks a lot of assumptions and it is doing quite well.
You answer your own question, Ferrel.
There is no Grand Arbiter of Fun, so these games (“massive”, right?) need to be far more flexible than a vertical combat treadmill. Some players will always have fun with those, and there’s nothing wrong with that. I’m all about options, though, and when the only options in a game or “virtual world” are those that I’d opt out of, I simply don’t play.
Also, as I perhaps didn’t illustrate well enough, when players are the prime movers of the game world, part of the responsibility of making the world fun shifts to the players, whether it’s selfish fun or providing it for others. It’s scary, but it’s the only way to allow for a better variety of definitions of “fun”.
Some questions for you as a guild leader… would you have fun with players who join your guild if they could instantly be at the level cap to be with the rest of you? Would a guild (and by extension, a game) provide better social fabric if it could incorporate those of wildly diverse “levels”, and let any two players play together? Would such a diverse guild be a guild you would be happy to maintain, or would you try to keep things pretty exclusive and just maintain the group you started with at level 1 and stuck with through the level grind? If players could play with anyone else, how would you structure your guild? Would it be built more around what you find fun, rather than what you have to get done?
And yes, MMOs can be FAR more than they have become. (Cue Mufasa scolding… Remember the promise of virtual worlds and what you *thought* an MMO would be, and look at where we are today. “You are more than what you have become”. Remember, and change.)
@Scott: I am going to participate in the next Aion Beta Weekend.
The game is actually no beta, it was out in Korea for 8 months+. They just still work on the localization, or at least they say so.
The TRUE reason is that this beta in “weekend” bits is going to make people hungry for the game. A sly marketing trick!
At the same time players can’t test and properly evaluate the game. The weekend is just too short.
That the first areas have something in common with WoW is no surprise, but this is not necessarily a bad thing. Same for the UI and the general notion of “polish” and some very immersive, albeit asia-style (not my favorite usually) graphics.
I hope to get very far to report a bit about this supposed “PvPvE RvR”. Flight offers a whole new dimension to combat especially (aggro is no problem if you can fly and nuke from above!), also the fact that the engine can handle many players in small areas, much better than WAR or WoW.
It is very hard to dig info about the game, sometimes you get some tidbits from korean sources, but I am sure most players have not even seen a dungeon from the inside or can name ANY dungeon at all. – But many are all pretty sure they want to buy the game, I fear the marketing strategy works…
In the mean time I explore AoC till my free month is over (I bought a new acc for 5,99 EUR – MMO junkies on detox cannot say no to a cheap drug…^^) and regret that a great Conan IP somehow just does not fly.
OK, talk about talking too much…
“OK, talk about talking too much…”
Pshh, since when did we worry about that around here?
@Tesh
Off the cuff I can say it would never just be the people we start at level 1 with. We have our core like any guild but we have to bring in new people to survive. Even with a solid group as a foundation real life makes people unavailable.
Would I want players to be able to max level immediately to play with us? In a game that featured a grind absolutely not. The grind, in general, is to learn your class. If it was an alt, possibly. If it was a new player who just suddenly tried to raid, that would likely be disastrous. One bad raider can waste the time of 23+ others.
Games do need to do a better job of dealing with levels though. I loathe when I out level my friends or if a guild mate is “too low” to come along. I think the better way to handle it would be to allow over leveled players to level down. There would have to be some reward for them other than good will though or I don’t see it happening much. EQ2 almost had this right. The side kick system in CoH is also pretty good but would be rough in a quest-grind game (aka almost every game now).
Our structure would largely be the same in all honesty. Our guild focuses on end game. We’re “Microcore.” We like hard group instances and two group raids. A lifetime ago we were competitive top tier raiders but kids, jobs and growing up make that hard. That is still at our core though so we follow the traditional hierarchy model of guilds. There is a whole lot about that on our guild site (Sodalityguild.org) and on Epic Slant under guild science.
Thanks, Ferrel. Further questions afoot:
What constitutes a “bad raider”? Is it the unpreparedness? (And if so, is gear or in personal skills?) Is it the player or the avatar? Also, are there ways to make “learning” raids to ease that transition?
Big Bear Butt has lamented about the transition from the leveling grind to the raiding game. There are some things that just don’t translate. At some point, people still have to learn how to raid, and the “extended class tutorial” of the leveling game doesn’t always teach that.
So, how do you teach people to raid, especially if they didn’t learn with you in the first place? How can they learn if nobody teaches them? You can’t raid solo in an environment where you’re not blowing up the experience for other players.
What could be done to raiding to make a “transitional state” of raiding that helps people through that catch 22? Is it important to do so, getting vets and newbies (even if they are friends) to play and raid together? (I tend to think so, since the much-vaunted “game” starts at the endgame, which is to say, “raiding” is the ‘real game”.) Could there be sidekicky raids? Could there be freestyle raids that let people be a bit pathetic?
And, not to put too fine a point on it, but is raiding itself fun to actually *play*? If so, how do you share that with people who want to jump in and start having fun playing without a couple of months “learning” their class (not learning raiding) through the leveling grind?
You can always make people group up and learn “preraid” dynamics like the trinity and Threat (artificial constructs, but still “them’s the breaks” in our WoW example) as players level, and even block them from progress to force the issue, but that’s silly. If people don’t want to raid, they will be annoyed with such a block to their progress. So what do you do with the people who *want* to learn this whole “raiding” thing, but who don’t want to slog through the leveling grind solo, only to find that the raiding game isn’t what they thought, for better or worse? This is especially relevant in something like WoW, where the bulk of players are indeed at the level cap, slogging through dailies and raids.
Put another way, when you’re offering the best play experience at the end of a grueling grind (that thankfully keeps getting shorter, to be fair), but that play experience is socially and technically awkward for new players to pick up, what do you do with them? To my mind, players of all levels should be able to pick up “raiding” at any time, with any other players. Those who want to ignore it will (so long as they aren’t blocked from progress), and those who want to take that “leveling grind” as a time to learn how to raid can do so because they are actually learning how to raid as they “learn their class”.
Of course, this is all assuming that we’re using levels, classes and raiding in the first place. Part of my questioning is to challenge the assumption that levels and classes are ideal, and that “raiding” as the “real game” or the epitome of fun is something that has to be reserved for those who have “paid their dues” through the leveling grind. If raiding is all someone wants to do, why not get them up and running in a matter of hours or days instead of months?
Tesh, I am pretty sure that over 50% if not more of the WoW players actually HATE raiding. There are even fewer raiders or even hardcore raiders who really dig this kind of game in the game.
People raid for the gear carrot, achievements and “because there is nothing else to do”, IMO!
But people loved levelling from 1-60 for sure. Player surveys show what people remembered fondly. The part that we tend to make as short as possible to go to the “endgame”, levelling in TBC and WOTLK, is actually the best of WoW.
The early game and the raid endgame are two totally different beasts. It is like turning a loner into a party animal!
The core problem here is finding an audience that is profitable enough. People say they want something different, but they keep playing WoW. This sends a message loud and clear: what WoW offers is good enough. People just aren’t willing to make the compromises necessary to see something different take hold. Consider the issue of “polish”: a lot of people say they just can’t stand other games that don’t have WoW’s level of polish. WoW got its polish by spending a stupid amount of money. “Big budget niche game” isn’t going to happen.
Of course, I agree with a lot of what you say here. I’ve written quite a few blog articles espousing novel ideas and presenting concepts like eliminating levels from games. I’m even an experienced MMO developer, but people aren’t knocking down my door to get me to work on such a game. So, I have to really wonder if the desire is truly there for a really new type of game.
Longasc wrote:
I am pretty sure that over 50% if not more of the WoW players actually HATE raiding.
I doubt that’s true. I’m sure that more than half of WoW players don’t care about raiding, but to say they HATE doesn’t seem accurate.
The raiding I did in WoW was initially out of curiosity as a developer since I hadn’t raided in a previous game; Meridian 59 had no raid gameplay. After I learned the basics, I enjoyed the different challenges to my character. Gear was nice, but it was a means to an end of doing better in the raid to advance to new content. Eventually I grew tired of it. I miss the social opportunities, but I’m having a lot more fun duoing in LotRO with my better half lately.
So, careful with those generalizations.
Longasc, my favorite part of the game is the leveling content; I like puttering around exploring. I’m weird, though.
Brian, indeed, there’s always the question of profitability. I think that there is money to be made from people like me, but you’re right, it’s not going to be a big budget game. Niches aren’t *that* profitable.
Of course, I’m hardly opposed to indie work, as I’ve noted on more than one occasion. I’ve played Puzzle Pirates and Wizard 101 for a while now, and I consider them indie MMOs. The cost threshold for an indie MMO is higher than something like World of Goo, to be sure, but it’s not impossible.
But again, I’m not in the bulge of the bell curve. So it goes.
Thanks for the comments, all!
I just wonder why endgame content has become similar to raiding nowadays. The idea of the endgame in general being this or that.
There is a whole world outside of the instead hole/cave people crawl into to raid for some extras. It is a total waste to ignore this world, or is it really “used up” once you levelled through.
Raph Koster mentioned a learning experience as a huge part of the fun. What do raiders learn that already downed Ragnaros and C’thun. They can compare the new raids to old raid encounters.
MMO hopping is the logical consequence, and then we sometimes or even quite often experience that we know the basic DikuMUD already.
Very important for subscription based MMOs is to find out what might keep people playing the game – Tesh already wrote quite a lot about “keeplayability”.
I wonder how looking for replayability/”keeplayability” in Aion’s “Abyss” zone will turn out this weekend. But can gazing into the Abyss actually result into anything else but a letdown…? :p
Been reading Nietzsche again, Longasc?
Aye, I’m all for challenging the notion of what the “endgame” is or should be, as well as the “game” itself. Learning is a key part of fun in my world, which is why I don’t feel the appeal of the treadmill.
Good call on the MMO hopping. It does seem like a natural consequence of repetitive design.
@Tesh
I can try to define a “bad raider” but, in all honesty, the truth is I know it when I see it. I’ve raided and lead raids for so long I know who is good and bad. The simplest thing I can say is “trainable” and “not trainable.” If you continue to make the same mistakes in a raid or cannot accept constructive criticism you’re a bad raider. If you have an issue with authority or think you always know best without compromise you’re a bad raider. If you don’t understand that your poor performance wastes the time of 23+ other people you’re a bad raider. Gear has nothing to do with it though. I can get a player gear.
There are indeed learning or “test” raids. Generally once we’ve moved to harder content we’d take recruits and potentials on trivial raids. These are raids for 24 players that we could do with 18 or less. We would watch, listen and evaluate. It eases people in. Some people still can’t make the transition however.
We heavily mentored recruits. I honestly assigned a mentor to each one so they would have a one to one relationship. They also had a junior officer in charge of their arch-type and the senior officers were approachable. The truth is everyone says you can’t learn raiding without raiding but that is only true to a point.
Grouping teaches raiding skills. It teaches cooperation, class interdependency, dealing with complex encounters and following a leader. Those are the basics you need. You then just increase those virtues by the amount of groups necessary. If you’ve lone wolfed from one to max you don’t usually develop those skills. It is no surprise that people get into hard mode groups or raids and break down.
One of the biggest barriers to breaking in however is on the developer’s side. Developers focus so heavily (at least in the last few MMOs) on every member performing their task at roughly 110% efficiency. If any member fails to do so you lose. EQ2 was guilty of this just before we retired and felt more like a spread sheet than tactics. Tactical planning was irrelevant. It was just x dps + y hps + z AC on tank x # of brigands = win.
Raids should be a bit more like EQ1 was. In EQ1 you could have a solid core group, an average base and one or two absolutely horrible players. In my eyes, the modern MMO should be balanced around 22 people playing 100% and the last two playing at about 80%. This would allow people to bring their less than “A team” in a small amount at a time. There should also be full sized starting raids with varying degrees of difficulty and reward.
Now, to answer the “is raiding even fun” question. The answer is yes and no. High end raiding is tough. It involved us dying over and over again for hours against the same mob. That isn’t fun. It is necessary though. It creates a challenge and builds anticipation or drama. In all honesty, and as sad as this sounds, I have never yet in my life experienced the same high as I did when I would lead a team of 24 to defeat an incredibly difficult raid target. When everyone works together and all your training and tactics pay off it was literally magical. When we beat Brutal Acts of War in EQ2 legitimately (a lot of guilds used a dubious tactic) and ended as like the 4th guild world wide to do so I felt more pride than when I graduated college. I’m not even making that up. My guild mates gave me the same feeling of pride that I see when my father looks at me. Some may think that is sad but to me it was a testimony to my leadership, my teams leadership and my members skill and commitment. We did something that not a lot of people had done or could do and we did it without exploiting or using less than fair tactics.
People think raiding is about the loot and the carrot. With us, it never was. It was about pride and, in truth, love. Our core was then and always will be a family. When our newest members started caring more about the loot than the win is when the senior officers and I retired the guild. We were about camaraderie, integrity, and superior tactics. When that disappeared it stopped being fun.
I realize not everyone sees it that way and recognize that putting the very best stuff at the end is also somewhat of a waste. To me that is just where it logically goes. If you put raids before max level they are just transient. They can be cheapened via over levels or missed due to level locks. I truly follow the old adage: if you add mid level content it is a waste for everyone above it and only temporarily fun for those before it. If you put in end game content every player has the opportunity to see it. In raids, that can be untrue but it can also be true. Raid does not have to be a synonym for hard. There should always be the kind of raids I used to run. At the same time there should be raids of above average difficulty. Most importantly though, there should be easy raids with rewards slightly better than those of a group. That will help people train and let the most people see that content.
Sorry about the wall of text. I’m actually pretty passionate about the subject.
I like walls of text around here. Many thanks for your comments!
Another question or three, then… considering that it’s easyish to trivialize midlevel raids by outleveling them, what form would raids take in a level-free game? Could they be designed based on player skill, and just let players self-sort themselves into raids? Does “harder” in raiding necessarily equate to “more formulaic”?
I’m obviously not a raider, but I’ve heard it cited more than once as the epitome of grouping in these MMO things. I’m pretty sure it’s not what I want out of them, but neither am I opposed to raiding. If I were to get into raiding as a core activity of my MMO play, though, I’d want it to be dynamic, tactical, and sporting a full range of difficulty, with the difficulty coming not from compensating for incompetent raidmates or poor UI, but from dealing with tactical fluctuations in the content. I’d want to be able to jump into it on day one, and contribute during the inevitable learning curve, probably with “forgiving” dynamic raids. If I wanted to be at the top of my game, I’d probably want raids that rewarded strategic planning and tactical flexibility. (Though not of the strict “bring X DPS” sort, that seems unsatisfying.)
I just don’t see that in modern MMO design, and I think it’s unfortunate.
The old EQ2 metric when we left was very unsatisfying and a huge departure from what had been. Classic EQ2 raids were exceptional. I’ve always wanted to ask Ryan, Scott or Steve about what happened. We couldn’t figure it. DoF and KoS were just so different from classic it is almost like two different teams.
Without levels you could have raids based on gear progression or you could truly make it all about skill. That could only go so far though. Gear at least lets you set the barrier of entry at a certain level. Otherwise you can just add complexity and/or gimmicks.
I truly loathe gimmicks due to the fact that before you know them the raid is impossible. Once you know them it is easy mode. I never saw anything in between. There was no real tacical work, just looking for the gimmick.
Complexity can only grow so much too before it gets out of hand. Google “Djinn Masters Prism.” It was a raid that Lyndro designed that was so complex it was unbeatable. Less than 1 month before the second expansion they made it “easier” but even then less than 10 guilds defeated it. Ultimately I look at that as failed content. Every server should be able to produce at least one guild that can beat every encounter. If you have servers with too low population they need to go.
Ferrel, I think the old cameraderie and friendship that MMO veterans know from their raiding guilds got quite lost nowadays.
You know how Guilds recruit their players nowadays. They are looking for a player of a certain class they are missing. Then they check the armory if someone applies. Then they check if he shows some signs of experience and already knows the raid encounter. If he is okay on Teamspeak or at least keeps his mouth shut, voila, a new guild and raid member.
People usually tell me players raided for loot and gear all the time, but you just stated the opposite, and I totally agree. Raiding was different, nowadays they are a pure loot acquisition orgy!
I know some smaller guilds lead by older players who keep a small core of friends together, but these guilds are quite rare and even more exclusive to get in than in the old EQ times. Guild hopping was a social stigma in this time, today it is quite normal.
P.S. I think raiding in EQ created even stronger social bonds than Ultima Online could, maybe this is the reason why this system and not UO’s became the standard.
Baby steps!
I’m all for a dynamic world but I think smaller, less drastic changes towards that goal is the way to go. That is the way WoW got easier and easier. When players are introduced to change gradually it is much better accepted. Suddenly, what one would consider niche is now the accepted norm.
I wrote a piece long ago called the 6 wheeled car that touched upon a solution to many a current mmo-naysayers problem. Relative power curves between levels. Currently a max level character in any MMO is invincible compare to a level 1. Adjust that so at any time the max level of a character is only 4x that of a new character and the design philosophy can change for the good.
More content : instead of designing content only useful for a specific level range (planned obsolesence) now a max level character would still get 25% xp for a first level quest – incentifying explorers and completionists to examine lore and participate in more content. And while the content would certainly be easier for that max level character it wouldn’t be as much of a joke as it is now. Designers can focus on conger development that all players CAN use – they may not, but at least it presents the choice.
You retain the dings and the level achievements but just make them less disparingly so. Heck, that 40 man designed level raid for level 60′s is still viable and challenging for 30 level 80s.
You would have to make loot dynamic to group size and level composition but I still have no clue why that hasn’t happened already. Added bonus to all of this is that new players can join in with their friends immediately, and content doesn’t have to be gated by zone/levels. That top level roaming mob can show up in the starting area. Sure, it takes 2 max level chars to kill it – or only 8 newbies. All of your world is now a stage.
The genre itself needs baby steps to train the masses that different us not only “ok”, it’s actually “good”. Once the McMMO player buys into that the riskier design decisions are suddenly less risky, and the niche is now mainstream – and hopefully the corresponding budgets floweth.
Sorry, I donwant to flesh this out more but I typed this whole thing on my iPhone and my hands are starting to cramp
Beautifully written! This is sheer poetry for me on how virtual worlds and MMOs should be.
Great point about how the obscene focus on achievement orientated gameplay and the reward mentality are at the root of many of the problems today.
One of the best articles I’ve seen on what is missing in MMOs in a while!
*cheers*
ChrisF, I think the idea that everyone can contribute and help is extremely important for on-the-fly grouping and such things and I really like it. I also like the idea of the not so linear zones or no zones at all.
You will soon come to the “take away levels” idea if you explore your idea further, that is quite common. I guess why it still has not been implemented is that levels provide some “progression” and that people get bored if they play and “do not get stronger” or new abilities.
I think it is about time to find some models and ideas for horizontal progression, Guild Wars already proved that a quick to reach level 20 cap does not necessarily end the game once you reach it.
[...] Tesh from Tish Tosh Tesh is also quite a good read. We disagree from time to time (or frequently, whichever) but always politely! Most recently Tesh demanded more! [...]
@Longasc
Perhaps that sort of social dynamic doesn’t exist anymore. Lord knows we have ten new players who don’t fit in for every one that does. I don’t know how we got here though.
Truthfully, I think WoW is the root of the problem. Not by anything it did on its own. More just in the fact that it made MMOs known to the world and brought in a different sort of player (aka everyone).
If you really think about it old MMO players are almost an aristocracy. We follow the old rules and ways. Most of which just don’t seem to apply anymore.
Great post! Count me among those who would love to see a dynamic world in which players can have a real impact.
The question, of course, is how to do it. I think a lot of the attraction of the WoW model is that it’s easy to design and maintain. Once you allow people to have an impact on the world, you potentially open up balancing issues and problems with exploits and griefing.
There was an interesting discussion at Tobold’s blog a while back about ways in which players could have a meaningful effect on the world, and most of the ideas involved either putting people in separate versions of the world (not a good idea IMHO), or else making effects temporary (like keep swapping in RvR).
So here’s the question: How do you allow people to have a real impact on the world in a way that’s fun? So far, EVE has done the best job of any MMO I’ve played, but it’s fairly hard core. Is it possible in a more casual game?