If we’re going to lean in the direction of players being content in MMOs, and if we’re going to try to incentivize that with kickbacks, discounts or perks, we should probably get rid of levels and other barriers to playing together… and actually let the players generate content in a dynamic world, in addition to facilitating their ability to play together.
Incidentally, Whirled does this pretty well, though under a *gasp* free-to-play system that lets players generate their own content that can then generate revenue. Weird, I know… but another illustration of how the fantasy-steeped level-then-raid two-game paradigm isn’t the One True Path to MMO design.
Of course, since people can also sometimes be the worst part of MMOs, and many aren’t all that interested in good game design, there are dark sides to opening the floodgates. Still, if the goal is to encourage player interaction, even going so far as to bribe them, that would probably work best if the moment to moment play of the game supported such a goal.
Oh, and this is a good excuse to bring out one of my favorite MMO developer quotes again.
Daniel James of Three Rings (Puzzle Pirates being their incredible flagship) as quoted by the Penny Arcade guys:
Every player, free or paid, adds value to the community and excitement for other players. Free players are the content, context and society that encourages a small fraction of the audience to willingly pay more than enough to subsidize the rest.
Edited to add:
Incidentally, there’s an interesting discussion raging over on the Escapist forums about Valve’s theorizing that kicked this discussion off.
This comment stuck out to me:
I kinda like the idea, maybe I’m a little impartial because I have a really magnetic personality and general can get a dead silent server to chatting like best friends in 10 minutes. But I would definitely love to get benefits for just being myself in games.
What about the intangibles of being social and liking what you’re doing? As in so many other things, if you try to engineer good behavior with extrinsic rewards, you might get it, but the rewards have to keep coming and even get better. The gravy train can’t stop or you get withdrawal and bad behavior. People aren’t doing the right thing because it’s right, they are doing it because it benefits them. Once again, it’s a selfish motivation, not a selfless one, a completely mercenary approach to socializing. That’s one of the big problems with forced grouping in MMOs, by the way.
Syp wrote nicely about this over thisaway:
Too many MMOs go out of their way to punish people playing together if it is not within a rather rigid set of rules for how people are going to interact.
A case in point is the new mentoring system in Aion which I read about in a post in Massively. It provides some good things, but also a number of restrictions (10 level difference, only 1-1 between mentor and mentee, no XP or normal rewards for the mentor etc) which only seems to stop a lot of potential player constellations.
One of the grand old men in terms of mentoring features (City of Heroes) got rid of pretty much all such restrictions that may discourage people from playing together and made it dead simple also to work – to the point that it can be pretty much transparent.
But to also comment on the headline – I think this is something that is very obvious if you think about it. Many people rather play MMOs than many single-player games even if they would solo all the time. Players provide content just by being present in the same game as other players – explicit grouping mechanic is not necessary.
But it is a delicate piece and it can easily be ruined by imposing restrictions that discourage anything but strictly utilitarian interactions between people.
“Players provide content just by being present in the same game as other players – explicit grouping mechanic is not necessary.”
Agreed, and that reminded me of a Daniel James quote that I subsequently spliced into the original post. Thanks for reminding me!
I wonder what the logical extension of this is. Do developers build a world, a giant sandbox, and then step back and see what players do? That could make for a pretty interesting world. But I don’t think that would be especially popular. Sure EVE does well, but let’s face it, most people don’t play games to be ruthlessly backstabbed, betrayed, and taken for everything they have. After all, we have real life if we need that. In that case, the devs might take a regulatory role, setting some boundaries, reserving the right to intervene if things get messy (something they’d have to make very clear from the start), but don’t do a lot of content generation in terms of plot or specific dungeon/boss mechanics.
It would indeed be very interesting. The potential for emergent play and player-driven stories could be incredible. Of course, so could the potential for abuse by the jerks of the community.
Freedom requires self-restraint, it seems, but that’s something that doesn’t come easily to a lot of people, especially online.
Still, even in the “nobody is happy with the compromise” world of modern MMO design, devs could do a lot more to make playing with others possible and fun, and that’s just on the game design side. I’d rather they focus on how to make the play the draw, not in-game perks or subscription discounts.
I think in addition, if the paid currency of a game can be bought by free players from players who buy currency, that will increase the amount of currency those buying players will buy. Thus a free player can almost directly increase revenue. As I understand it puzzle pirates works that way.
Free players are assets – and the free players shouldn’t forget that and start to dismiss themselves.
Indeed. Not only do they populate the world, influence the economy and community, but they also spread word of mouth in the real world. Cultural penetration of a game is also something that shouldn’t be underestimated… just like how bad word of mouth can kill a game.
Puzzle Pirates does a great job in making everyone welcome, and in the day to day play, every player can have a significant impact. Sure, high end players with great skill contribute more to a group, but everyone can help and be welcome. It’s also trivially easy to switch between soloing and grouping if you feel like it.
And yes, their economy is a marvelous thing. Free players are an important part of the business and the sociality.
Ages ago when I tried puzzle pirates, it almost seemed to have a dungeon finder in a sense, already. I’d look at a list of ships seeking more crew, and IIRC click on one or two, get a call back from one usually in thirty seconds or so and teleport there. Then I’d be dragging down their efforts with my poor puzzling in moments! (joking). Generally didn’t have a problem with rewards either – only one ship in all I did seem to keep any rewards from me for doing a fair stint with them.
*cough* if that’s not too tangental to mention – the service does mix free players with payers (heh, ‘payers’ – ged it!?). Or maybe I rambled…
*chuckle*
No worries, it’s perfectly relevant, and you’re right, it’s *very* easy to get a group of players together and play in PP. The “finder” tool is clean and effective, and yes, there’s a mix of both paying and “free” players because both can contribute to the play; the “power band” is pretty narrow, and newbies can contribute reasonably to most ventures. (There are elite areas and contests, but day-to-day play is pretty inclusive… and the biggest ships that are the most inclusive are the most profitable for the elite players that run the things.) You can even lose or gain other players midsession and the “dynamic spawn” system compensates pretty well by adjusting the strength of your next opponents.
PP is puzzle based, so it’s not going to be everyone’s style of game (I love it, but I’m weird… Rumble, Shipwrighting and Carpentry are my specialties), but their MMO mechanics and economy are rock solid. The community, as is inevitable, has its troublemakers, but for the most part, it’s stuffed with good people, too.
The devs are certainly a good bunch. They even run events on the forums that lead to player-created elements being added to the game, all the way from little trophy (achievement) art to furniture (the Easter Egg contest, which I was a winner of one year) to minigames (Blacksmithing was designed in large part by a player).
PP is a “little game that could”, and it’s still a game I use as a measuring stick for other MMOs.
Thanks for this article and the mention Tesh! Very nicely done and lots of food for thought.
Somewhere along the line MMO developer forgot that people are the real reason we play MMOs (I’m not even sure I like the world “play” anymore but I digress). While it’s great to have wonderful worlds to explore, the social side was always one of the big draws for me about MMOs.
As we’ve moved into the quest/storyline paradigm the importance of the player has gotten lost in the grand scheme of things. Players have become followers instead of leaders. We follow incentives and reward mechanics as if that is all there is in a virtual world. Other players have become more sophisticated versions of NPCs.
I think good behavior should be incentivized just as bad behavior should be penalized. We need a bonus/malice system. Too often MMO developers have adopted a laissez faire hands off attitude about enforcing social norms. With no checks and balances, is it any wonder that MMO communities have fallen into the gutter?
Thanks for the link to Syps post. That was a classic! Players indeed are selfish these days. Much of that comes from the ways children and teens are coddled in our society. Since people are having fewer children, the remaining ones are more likely to be spoiled by their parents.
We see selfish behavior in video games because the goal of the designer is to “entertain” the single-game player. So rewards and false praise are constantly awarded to these players — most of undeserved.
These players bring their selfish attitudes into MMOs and companies like Blizzard are only too happy to enable their grasping, self-centered behavior.
In the final analysis, being a good person in your MMO of choice brings joy and happiness to yourself and other players far more than a piece of purple loot. We just need to encourage MMO developers to wake up and start realizing this and design accordingly. It’s such a shame that bad players are allowed to go wild and unpunished and good players are rarely if ever acknowledged or rewarded.
Some people genuinely do provide content to others. I’m thinking of people who organise roleplaying events, or social events in game. (I went to a kinship quiznight in LOTRO this week, for example.)
Wolfshead, I’ve really been bothered over the mercenary attitude of players over the years. I’ve seen a lot of players who really do add to the community (especially in PP), but far too many in the DIKU strain of MMO games are extraordinarily selfish, as Syp chronicles well. I think a fair dose of that is rooted in the DIKU design, but it’s also a part of society at large.
A “system reputation” mechanic might be a good thing to rein in the community, but they tend to be easily gamed unless you’re trusting it entirely to GMs with good judgment instead of player ratings.
That said, I don’t think that Second Life is the solution, and that players benefit from dev-inspired initiation of events, at least as a way to kick start conflict and interaction. I maintain that dynamic, living MMO worlds should be a direction to explore for developers. They are risky, though, especially if they are going to attract the bitter, selfish DIKU veterans. I tend to think that a horizontal progress living MMO world will be a good thing, but it likely won’t get a huge following, at least, not from current MMO gamers. That’s probably a good thing, but it will make it a hard sell to financiers.
Spinks, oh, definitely. I’ve seen a lot of that in PP, and the biggest reason I went ahead and bought into WoW was to have a bit of fun with BigBearButt for his Raid from the Heart event and keep my foot in the door for future things of that nature. If we’re going to institutionalize that sort of social effort with dev-granted boons, though, I think players need more effective tools to organize and offer content with, and that they may well have a better legacy with in-game rewards like Phaelia’s robes rather than just a sub discount.
Phaelia’s Robes
Also, as I noted at your place, the sub discount might cause some friction among players, further splintering attitudes between the haves and have-nots. I, for one, don’t care how others pay for their subs, but I know there are people who will have trouble with it, as evidenced by some of the comments in the thread over at the Escapist.
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That’s a good point actually. Players who enjoy organising events would probably be more easily lured by a game that supports that mechanically than simply by lower subs.