There’s a revolution going on in the video game industry. Each day hundreds of millions of players log on and experience the phenomenon called social gaming in games like Farmville, Frontierville, City of Wonder and others. The numbers of people that play these games makes traditional online games like World of Warcraft seem inconsequential in the grand scheme of things.
This new kind of video game experience exists largely on social networking platforms like Facebook and because of its massive earning potential it has shocked the traditional video game business to its core.
What is it about social gaming that has captured the imagination of gamers around the world?
Reciprocity and Ownership
I believe that the most popular social games like Farmville and Frontierville utilize and capitalize on mechanics that tap into some core underpinnings of the human psyche. The two most important of these are the need for people to cooperate and the need for humans to own things.
At some point in a future article I’d like to delve into the human need to cooperate which Robert Cialdini in his seminal book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion calls reciprocity — where humankind has progressed because of the societal benefits of mutual cooperation. But for now, I’m going to focus on the human need to own things — especially land — and demonstrate how it can be an extremely effective way to give players a stake in your virtual world.
The Pride of Ownership
As humans we’ve always been connected to the land. After all, the land is where we actually live and build our homes. As we progressed from hunter and gatherer societies and started to realize the benefits of farming our homes become permanent fixtures in the human landscape.
The pride of ownership is old as humanity itself. It’s a well-known fact that people take better care of things that they own compared to things that they rent. Compare the condition of slums of inner city public housing to suburban neighborhoods where people actually own their homes and there is a world of difference in the level of upkeep and of course crime.
When people have a stake in something, suddenly they start to care. The same is true about ownership in social games and in virtual worlds. The ability to own something even virtually creates a bond between the player and the world. It is precisely this bond which forms the basis for why social games are so popular.
More on this later but first let’s take a look at a very popular social game that is capitalizing on the pride of ownership: Frontierville…
The Importance of Personal Space in Frontierville
In social gaming worlds the player is essentially managing his or her home, land and belongings. The point of these games is for the player to engage in continual home improvement. This is something that companies in the real world like the Home Depot and Lowes have turned into a multi-billion dollar worldwide industry.
The beginning player in a more advanced social game like Frontierville starts off as a simple pioneer in the wilderness with a covered wagon and a few basic items. The goal of the game is also to overcome the wilderness and other obstacles and to raise a family and improve his lot in life.
Think for a moment about the experience that Zynga is offering to its players around the world; most people who play this social game probably rent and do not own their own homes. By allowing you to have your own virtual home and improve upon it by purchasing accessories like carts, chairs, fountains and anything else you can think of they are allowing millions of people to engage in simulated home ownership. This is a very powerful fantasy that taps into a deeply held human need to be the master of his own castle.
The Magic of Cultivation
As a child one of my favorite fairy tales was Jack and the Beanstalk. I loved that story about those magical beans. Social gaming companies also realize how magic those beans are. The deep seated need for humans to cultivate and plant is also something that Zynga has wisely encouraged players to do in both Frontierville and their original hit Farmville.
Gardening is one of the most popular past times in the world and for good reason; there is something fascinating and rewarding about being able to plant a seed and watch it grow. When we plant, we can be like little gods and watch the miracle of life unfold before our very eyes. Although only virtually, players can do this many social games (and in the Lord of the Rings MMO) and it is no wonder they are so popular.
On Harnessing Creativity
Another important aspect of allowing players to own their own space is that it allows them to be creative and put their own personal stamp on the world.
Every player can customize the colors and materials used in all of the buildings in a social game like Frontierville. They can choose to place buildings, animals and items where they wish. The opportunity for personal expression via customization cannot be underestimated and again gives the player a deep bond with the game world.
Another benefit to consider is that social dynamics of competition and cooperation are created when the player’s neighbors come visiting as they are exposed to different homestead designs and approaches. Zynga the developer of Frontierville is counting on the deep seated human competitive imperative of keeping up with the Jonses as players envy their friend’s accomplishments.
So what does all this mean for MMOs and virtual worlds?
Personal Space in MMOs
As most MMOs deal almost exclusively in character advancement via combat and completing quests, the notion of personal space is not taken very seriously. Currently in most MMOs the player owns only the clothes on her back, her weapons and some bank slots. While player housing exists in a few MMOs, it is given mere lip service with the exception of SOE’s EverQuest 2 and a few others.
While I understand the need to focus and polish on core mechanics, player housing could be a natural way for MMOs and virtual worlds to take advantage of the explosive social games revolution and broaden the demographic. If done right, it could be a very cohesive mechanic that could include existing professions and new trade-skills such as forestry and woodworking.
Lessons for MMOs and Virtual Worlds
As a person who cares deeply about MMOs and virtual worlds, I believe some MMO developers have been dangerously ignorant and willfully blind to the recent triumph of virtual personal space in social gaming. In fact player housing in virtual worlds was the actual precursor to what we currently see as land/home ownership in social games like Farmville and Frontierville.
Blizzard, the leading MMO company that makes WoW, claims it has 12 million subscribers but still has no plans to implement player housing despite the fact that in 2007 Jeff Kaplan the Lead Game Designer of WoW said the following in an excerpt from an MTV interview:
Another small but potentially profound concept for “WoW” is player-generated housing. Gamers don’t have a room of their own for their characters to live and decorate right now. This matters to Kaplan, who is a big fan of “Animal Crossing,” the Nintendo franchise centered around cultivating a home and sense of unique, personal space. “I think housing can take ‘World of Warcraft’ to the next level,” Kaplan said. “I want to make sure that when we introduce player housing to ‘World of Warcraft’ we do it right and give the feature the credit that it deserves, which is a massive amount of production time on the programming, design and art time. It’s something we actually wanted to do for the original shipping game.” But it’s not coming, he said, until it’s a “Blizzard-quality feature.”
It is now almost 4 years since that interview with still no plans for player housing. While fans of WoW wait for Blizzard to come to their senses the video game industry has changed dramatically with hundreds of millions of people playing Facebook games that are designed with player ownership of virtual space as their core feature.
Investing in MMO Infrastructure
Every MMO company has to invest in seemingly non-important world “infrastructure”. These are elements that you’d probably notice if they were missing.
Blizzard does just that as they have spent countless millions of dollars on non-core aspects of WoW such as cinematics, art, music and sound. If any company can afford to implement player housing it’s certainly Blizzard. Now that they have recently announced that a Dance Studio is coming to WoW they have simply run out of legitimate excuses to keep putting player housing on the back-burner.
Strangely enough, the very same Blizzard that borrowed the idea of achievements and primitively tacked them onto WoW has not found the time, resources or will to capitalize on the biggest trend in gaming: personal virtual space which is more of a natural fit for a MMO like WoW than achievements ever were.
Concluding Thoughts
As someone who is hesitant to get on board the bandwagon du jour, I have been naturally suspicious of social games. But after extensive experience immersing myself in social games like Frontierville and others, I have come to realize that some of these games allow for personal ownership, creativity and expression — all which are dimensions that are sorely absent in most MMOs.
In fact Raph Koster and Tami Barbeau were some of the first people to wake up the MMO community about their importance and I owe them an apology for cavalierly ignoring their warnings. Although social games are far from perfect and have some serious shortcomings, they and their implications are here to stay.
It bears repeating that the benefits of allowing player ownership are numerous. The more game designers give their players a sense of ownership in their virtual world the more those players will bond with that virtual world. Deeper bonding means better subscriber retention. Not only does the developer win but the player also is rewarded with a deeper and more meaningful game experience.
Player ownership also contributes to creating better player communities as players who own nothing are mere guests and tourists and behave as such. Players who are allowed to take ownership care more about the virtual world they live in, generally behave better and provide a more rewarding play experience.
But I’d even take the concept of ownership even further: I’d like to see players actually start owning their own stories and reclaiming their virtual destinies once again. It’s only a matter of time before the video game industry wakes up and starts trusting the players and allows them more autonomy.
The current philosophy of MMO design philosophy as exemplified by WoW has resulted in subscriber stagnation with no growth and probably eventual decline on the foreseeable horizon. Therefore the failure to acknowledge the mind-boggling success of Facebook games and embrace, promote and expand personal player space within MMOs is perplexing.
Player ownership of virtual space can no longer be marginalized and dismissed as an esoteric gaming feature for a small group of role-players. Player ownership is no longer the future, it is right here and right now for companies with the good sense to realize it.
-Wolfshead
One good example of the power of player ownership is Minecraft. It’s barely in alpha state, riddled with bugs, multiplayer only offers a tiny subset of it’s features.. and it’s already a financial success.
Agreed. Minecraft scratches some deep itches that aren’t being served well elsewhere. People are doing amazing things with the equivalent of “bear skins and knives” and having a blast doing it.
With an alpha version of a visually retro product.
People want ownership and creativity bad enough to go where it’s found.
But not enough to try and learn how to do it in world-sims where they could do infinitely more than Minecraft? Minecraft is nothing special in terms of game design, it’s just so simple, so accessible and so watered-down in terms of features but reasonably well-polished for what it has that it’s a great time waster?
Golly, sounds like something the hardcore sandbox crowd would despise.
Indeed, that’s the paradox. As a game, Minecraft is atrocious. Even such a core concept as Health doesn’t work properly in multiplayer. And even in single player Survival mode, you’ve basically seen everything after you’ve made your first set of diamond tools. If it didn’t offer unbridled creativity in the form of completely modifiable game worlds, it wouldn’t ever have risen from obscurity.
I agree you can modify, but to what? Advanced circuitry or different blocks in different places? You can’t even really build a “useful” town, since you only need a house for your daily dose of downtime wherein you do bugger all if you’ve finished crafting, and since you can’t really share your creations that easily at present it gets fairly tedious after a while.
Or it could be my deep love affair with city/world-building RP that makes Minecraft fun, but very very short for me. :/
Personally, I think the real key to success for these games hasn’t been in the design but in the business model and “virality”. These games are completely free, and only a tiny fraction of people actually generate any revenue for the company. Consider that Zynga is poised to make $500 million this year from hundreds of millions of players over a handful of games, which is about 40% of what Activision will make off of a lot less people playing only one game, WoW.
“Virality”, on the other hand, mostly means “spam your friends”. Take a look at what happened to one game from LOLApps, accused of sharing unique Facebook IDs with a third party, when the “virality” was shut off: http://www.insidesocialgames.com/2010/11/05/what-happens-to-a-facebook-game-without-viral-channels/ Essentially they lost 80% of their users from peak because Facebook put a penalty on them. The company would be finished if not for the fact that one of their newest games is escaping the penalty. But, this is what happens when a game that can otherwise be played if you visit it directly can’t spam “Soandso just got a horse!” or “Soandso wants to send you a golden statue!” over social network communications.
I do agree that creativity and social spaces are nice to have, and they’re certainly something I enjoy in games; this is one of the features I remember fondly from Everquest 2, but I think the business aspects have driven the success of these games more than giving everyone a private sandbox has.
Hi Brian, that’s a very good point. The viral aspect of these games with the incessant nudging to let your friends know of your every minor achievement is a big part of the success. For me the continual intrusion of the game whether it be Frontier Jack or another official mascot gets very old. After a while I just ignore the constant badgering of these popup windows and they have no effect.
Facebook recently clamped down on some of this which has seen a drop in monthly actives for most Facebook games but I think this is a temporary drop.
Like I said in my article, social games still have many fundamental problems but I believe that the general gameplay that focuses on player ownership is sound and something that other “world” video games that are interested in immersion and player retention should seriously consider.
I don’t think the drops are temporary. The trends have been downward for a while since Facebook has been trying to address user complaints about spam. The link I have above shows that after being shut down initially, the number of daily users dropped by 40% for the second half of October.
To me, this demonstrates that without the constant reminder to play the game, people generally aren’t interested. The lesson I’m taking away is that spamming is much more of a factor than any design strength in these games. Ultimately people play Facebook games because they’re easy to get into and free for the most part. Put up any sort of barriers, and the “hundreds of millions of players!” aspect dries up quick.
Not to say we can’t possibly see interesting social network games, but I’m still hesitant to say that these games will dominate as completely as the investment literature might hope.
I still don’t understand your need for housing in WoW. I’ve said it a great many times and I’ll say it again: nothing in an MMORPG is going to beat Second Life. Housing is such a pointless side-accessory in MMORPGs that not only depopulated the world if it’s too useful, but also sucks up creative development time to create more and more pointless accessories for housing people to populate their mansion with. What WoW should have is an outfit (i.e. cosmetic) system, since that’s both visible to a lot of people and heavily personalised, but that’s not for here.
Not to mention that “click door here and enter generihouse #9999999” totally breaks any sense of personalisation immediately. Housing is not something a MMORPG can focus on; only something like Second Life can do it justice. And that’s a whole bloody game you’ve got there.
Regarding the question of player housing sucking up valuable development time and resources let me ask these questions:
What about the various forms of PVP experimentation that Blizzard and Tom Chilton have been indulging in over there years? How much did that cost?
What about all of the resources that Blizzard spends on promoting e-sports and tournaments?
What about the fool’s errand of endless class balancing perpetrated by Greg “Ghostcrawler” Street and his team of class designers? How much is that costing?
What about the proposed Dance Studio for WoW? How much time, energy and treasure will that end up costing?
How much time and effort went in to creating the Mobile armory and the mobile auction house apps for the iPhone?
What about the time and energy spent on upgrading the water effects for Cataclsym? Is that really necessary? To using J. Allen Brack’s logic: are we now playing World of Watercraft?
There are many features currently in WoW that probably could be removed without affecting the core gameplay. Yet all those features contribute to the level of immersion that is essential to creating a believable world where the participant suspends their disbelief.
How about we remove banks, class trainers, mailboxes and just give players buttons they can press to access these features. How about getting rid of flight paths as well and make travel instant.
Taken to its logical conclusion at what point do you say STOP?
Not everyone wants to do 25 man raids. So should we get rid of raids because of that? Not everyone wants player housing. So should we not bother to investigate adding that to WoW?
I can’t believe the negativity of WoW players that feel that player housing is some kind of threat to them. So much time and effort is expended on the hardcore types that enjoy raiding and PVP and it frustrates me to no end to see such this kind of intolerance.
Player housing would be HUGE and it would not affect the development of other things. You are making it seem like Blizzard is some downtrodden “mom and pop” operation with scare resources to do anything. Hardly! Blizzard is the most successful and profitable MMO in the world. They can certainly afford it.
If SOE can implement player housing for Free Realms then surely Blizzard can.
And what about Jeff Kaplan one of the former Lead Designers of WoW? Do you disagree with him as well that player housing has the potential to take WoW to the next level?
Implementing personal virtual space for every character would not be a problem that Blizzard could not solve. They have the best and brightest minds in the industry. All that is lacking here is vision and will.
I would really like player “space” – a guild hall would be of least interest to me, next is player housing. Of more interest to me is player bank/vendor stall.
Like many people, I tend to solo far more than the “it’s an MMO” crowd expect. However, the objection I always heard is that game designers want density in the “towns.” 500 people walking the streets of Stormwind is a different experience than a couple of dozen people in a guild hall or just myself in my home in my gated community.
It sure would be nice if my MMOs would allow even a tiny portion of the Second Life customization.
I think you are both right. As it is, personal housing doesn’t do much, and it wont for WoW either.
But I think Wolfshead has a point so long as the things you own are connected. Something like Farmville connects them weakly through the spam. Maybe something stronger might work while still retaining a goal.
Something like Rune Factory for the DS but online.
Uh-oh. It seems that you’ve angered the most uninformed drama queen in the whole blogosphere with your fancy thoughts and ideas.
http://tobolds.blogspot.com/2010/11/living-contradiction.html
Watch out.
Thanks for the heads up. Tobold is the biggest WoW fanboy in the world right now. And I’m probably the biggest WoW detractor. Both of us are on extreme ends of the spectrum.
However, when you become a drooling fanboy you risk losing all sense of perspective and objectivity and you become a cheerleader for the status quo.
He doesn’t like me because I don’t like WoW and I can accept that. Truth be told, I don’t particularly like him either. We’ve had a long running feud for many years. I stopped reading Tobold a few years ago, although he does send this blog a lot of traffic when he runs out of original ideas to blog about.
Back to the issue at hand, I figured I’d get some heat for this article. In months past I blasted social games in their entirety without doing any substantial actual research. I was wrong and I admitted it.
But in my current article I never said that social games were the solution or that they are any substitute for MMOs. What I did warn was that social games are far from perfect as I indicated in my article. So I decided to actually play these games for a couple of months and what I noticed is how well they utilize the ownership of virtual space mechanic. That’s all.
The video game industry is always evolving. Every game we see today is a result of that process. There are good things and bad things that come from this evolution. There’s nothing wrong with taking the good things from a genre of video games and using or modifying them for use in new games and existing MMOs.
What a drama queen the T is.
Anyone who believes there is ‘Something rotten in the state of Azeroth’ is a WoW hater. It is a world of extremes for T, you love and fantasise about the game or you want Blizzard to tits-up and crash financially.
This tiff has demonstrated to me the tabloid style of blogging he now indulges in. Thanks for the heads-up Wolfshead.
Rather lame response, anyone who doesn’t agree with you is a fanboy, even if a short look on my front page would reveal that I don’t even have a “WoW blog”.
Well, it wasn’t the drooling fanboi who wrote SIX posts about Blizzcon, and ranted about not getting a beta invite. If you hate the game so much, why do you keep spending so much time banging at its door demanding to be let in and being listened to by Blizzard? And how can you expect them to listen if you only compare them to Farmville instead of doing some more constructive criticism?
It may come as a bit of a surprise but despite a blog being about X, Y, or Z, if the main interest to people WoW then it is probably ok to call it a WoW blog.
@Alice: Ah, because you, personally, have conducted a survey categorising the main reason why peiple visit his blog? If we’re going to be persnickety (not a word according to Chrome :O) I’m more than happy to jump on the bandwagon.
Yep I’ve run into that quite a bit as well, actually its really annoyed me until I noticed the Add to Dictionary option. It’s so weird I went the longest time without seeing it so I thought perhaps I would post this here just in case you hadn’t noticed it like I hadn’t. Ends up saving time for the future~
I’m with Tobold on this one. I’m not too familiar with Wolfshead’s blog, but the bias is pretty clear to see just from reading this post.
I agree that ownership and cultivation is a powerful type of gameplay. I’ve found this is as true in WoW as any other video game. I often find a lot of fun in doing things I know to be fairly menial tasks but that create a sense of progression and status for me, and this extends to social status once you add other people.
I don’t for a minute believe this type of thing is anything to hold up as an example of good game design. For one thing, it’s completely irrelevant to the actual gameplay and may actually encourage the player to “play” in a way they don’t enjoy for the sake of social status, and for another things it already exists naturally in just about every video game ever made — what did you think the High Score table was invented for?
The only thing Farmville does that is in any way unique is the way it markets itself.
The accusation of “bias” is a little misplaced. This is a blog, it is an expression of opinion, which is pretty close – if not quite – a synonym for bias. Let’s drop that from our vocabulary unless the author has a professional obligation to be objective.
Okay, some of these were times-wasters: let’s use them as an example and not waste more resources and time on more useless crap that doesn’t help the game in any way whatsoever. Apps, esports and dance studios contribute nothing to immersion, and neither does housing: they detract from immersion in almost every way, and reinforce the “mememe, instant PvP, Gearscore-y, achievement-lol-please” mentality that Blizzard seems so intent on enforcing upon the “community” (if such a word can be used for the shattered, realm-communityless existence that WoW has become.)
What do banks have to do with anything? They’re an example of why player housing wouldn’t work, since they exist in the game world: player-housing, chock full of easily accessible features, would destroy all of these things you listed overnight. I’d rather try and hold onto the few remaining “community” elements, shattered as they are, and communal gathering spots are a reason for that.
You would call me intolerant? Really? For fighting against a pointless feature? What about e-sporters then? They are, after all, a pointless time-waster by both our admissions; at least I respect that they have skills far beyond mine. I may not like their gameplay style, the system they use or indeed the very ideas they embody, but I don’t actively hate them, I’m only disappointed in Blizzard for catering too much to them.
I don’t feel “threatened” at all (again, I’m trying to avoid a waste of time and resources on something that is never going to work), but what’s more, as the new expansion shows, the hardcore are even less catered for. Levelling, levelling, levelling. Stories. Achievements! Fantastic.
Raids, and their composition? Oh, it’s okay guys, that doesn’t matter anymore: every healer is the same and every tank has the same strengths and weaknesses that we might as well just have one class that can do everything, since, after all, the hardcore long-time players aren’t imporant, are they?
You know what frustrates me? People arguing for things that make no impact and wouldn’t be well done anyway. Dance studio? Pathetic. New hairstyles? What a burning issue! Why not totally ignore the dire state of the dungeon finder and its destruction of the community and the downfall of actually working to achieve any gear? After all, when you can change the colour of your rug everything else pales into insignificance.
What “level” would it take to at all? Current WoW is one of the worst “mainstream” MMOs I can think of for housing to be a viable part of; it would add NOTHING at all, it wouldn’t be customisable and it wouldn’t be a part of the world.
The nail in the coffin, though, is your sudden belief that Blizzard the best and brightest. What about all those prior rants against them? Blizzard copy, improve and polish. If I was Blizzard, I would look at the current housing solutions in MMORPGs (*not* MMOs) and go: damn, they’re appalling. Then I’d look at WoW, see that it wouldn’t fit in, and instead put it on the new MMO as something to work in from the ground up.
Damn, I REALLY hate arguing by text 😛
AND my reply didn’t pop up in the right place. /facedesk
First off with games like Farmville, it felt like work for me. I HAD to log on, and HAD to water my crops.
That being said…Not all of us want a little house to live in, I remember guild houses in DAOC, at first I thought they were cool, but after a while the effect wore off real quick. I feel the same with WoW, if they had player housing in the game, at first it would be awesome, then after a bit it would be boring, and just a gold sink.
What I want is uniqueness which WoW lacks at times, I applaud games like Warhammer that allow you to dye your armor, so you are a little more unique, though I’m still waiting when I could put a trophy skull on my spikes in Warhammer:Online.
As for your tiff with Tobold, Your hate makes you powerful.
Housing again?! Really?
Dude why not buy a dolls house if you are so obsessed with housing, or try out Sims.
Well, I can play that game too. I could say that those tough guys who are obsessed with raiding in WoW should join the military and go to the front lines and experience some real combat. But I’m not opposed to raiding, it doesn’t threaten me like having player housing seems to be a threat to some WoW players.
Thanks all for the comments. I’ve been sick this week and haven’t had as much time to spend on the computer as I’d like.
Let me address one issue that keeps coming up and it’s the theory that if Blizzard introduces player that somehow towns and cities will become empty.
First let’s talk about what players do in cities in WoW. They do banking, they visit class trainers, they visit vendors, they do tradeskills, they do some questing and some just like to hang out after a hard day of adventuring or raiding.
Now for the purposes of discussion, let’s assume that Blizzard will create instanced housing. Most of those activities that I just listed would not be available within a player’s instanced house. They’d still have to exit their home and interact with all those various NPCs. So I’m not really seeing how implementing player housing would contribute to cities being empty.
Many cities are already pretty dead in WoW without the implementation of player housing. Player housing might actually give players *more* of a reason to go to a city and give the appearance of a hustling and bustling city.
Interestingly enough with WoW, Blizzard has created a MMO that purposely isolates players from other players by putting all their prime time content in instances. Dungeons in past MMOs used to be communal experiences. The very thing that the detractors of player housing claim it would do — make the world seem empty –is already being done by Blizzard but somehow that is all fine and well.
I don’t want to rehash all of the arguments in favor of player housing. All I was trying to do with this article is to show that the concept of personal virtual space has become a very popular core gameplay mechanic in other games. Of WoW will always be first and foremost a MMO that focuses on character advancement via adventuring and to put it bluntly — killing monsters and taking their stuff.
I agree with Jeff Kaplan the Lead Designer of WoW — probably one of the most hardcore MMO gamers ever to exist — that the addition of player housing has the potential to take WoW to the next level. Blizzard what are you waiting for?
The towns being empty was always a stupid argument. We have plenty of games existing with player housing and instanced too, and the towns are not empty because of it. FFXI and EQ2 both show that.
Towns become empty for other reasons. Lack of an auction house is a huge killer. New area with better rewards for solo and group play is another.
No need to be apologetic Wolf – hope you are feeling better.
I read this blog because it offers Vision beyond the typical topics in the blogosphere. There is nothing wrong with ever asking “why not”, typical tobloid type blogs aside. I enjoy thinking about these games.
On the topic at hand I’m really surprised that Blizzard hasn’t yet as well. Every step they have taken over the years has been to minimize player natural relations – that is, to automate it. That in part is why the vocal in game community is such a cesspool. As a PUG type player in that game I need the general community to play for the mist part, and Blizzard has done a lot of good things for players like me – dungeon finder, raid finder, etc. Part of the reason why I unsubscribed was from sitting in general trade waiting for those features to kick in – if I had chatlogged my last day in WoW, the last chunk of lines of general chat would have looked like this:
12 lines of racial slurring
23 lines of anal ‘jokes’ (I actually counted this one)
7 ‘join my guild we have a tabard and bank slots’
9 lines of someone yelling gibberish in orcish
15 lines of ‘where is X’
10 lines advertising X item is for sale on the AH
20 lines of bots advertising gold sale sites
I sat there wondering why I wanted to be a part of the community. When I hit unsubscribe and Blizzard wanted to know why I was, I typed in thanking them for making the game accessible, but I needed more insulation from the ‘community’ they created.
If I had my own space in the game where I could have something to do (AH access, crafting anvils, mailbox, etc) – even just cool decorating – it would give me downtime to wait for their systems to kick in so I could get those groups I wanted without being exposed to the trash.
Would it make me resubscribe? Possibly. As of
Now I am not going back for the Cataclysm, that’s
for sure.
When Blizzard states things like ‘we want the cities to feel
vibrant’ then why do their design decisions counter their own argument?
I just wanted to thank you for this post. It’s not that often that I get compliments but when I do I really treasure them. Writing about MMOs is a thankless task at times and it’s very encouraging to read a post like yours to help give me the motivation to keep on sharing my thoughts. Your post has inspired me to get a few things off my chest — not that anything’s stopped me before but here goes…
All I want is for MMOs to live up to their potential and to be better than they are. That is why I don’t waste my time writing articles about the DPS of my rogue or warrior. I’m not knocking the passion of those who engage in that sort of writing but it’s not my cup of tea.
I genuinely feel that this genre is on a downward spiral in the past few years. Much of the problem is that the community has stopped caring and taking an active role in the future of their MMOs.
It’s a real shame that few existing players seem to care compared to the MMO community of 5- 10 years ago that seemed more passionate, intelligent, vibrant and eloquent. Perhaps I’m looking at the past with rose colored glasses but honestly I feel things have gotten worse.
Part of the problem is that once players tire of a MMO like WoW they are gone. They don’t hang around to try to make things better. This creates the phenomenon of MMO companies preaching to the choir.
Thanks for sharing your experiences with the WoW community. I thought I was the only one that was appalled. I used to spend hours petitioning people and cleaning up my server but then they’d be back in a few days. I thought to myself, why should I bother when Blizzard won’t enforce their rules? Sometimes I feel like a cop in TV show that is sick and tired of arresting criminals only to have liberal judges put them back on the street. 🙂
I completely agree with your assessment of the WoW community. This is the community that Blizzard has created, nurtured and pandered to all these years.
Back when WoW was first released there were two distinct types of players that were attracted to Blizzard’s first MMO:
Bnet kiddies — young, trash-talking, immature Blizzard fanboys who played Diablo 2 and the more mature, generally more socially sophisticated and community minded players from existing MMOs like EverQuest and Dark Age of Camelot.
The Bnet kiddies were spawned from the Battlenet culture that Blizzard created. When they and the MMO culture clashed it was not pretty but eventually the Bnet kiddies won out and their mentality dominates to this day.
(Back in EverQuest and even in Lord of the Rings Online I recall having discussions with players in general chat about philosophy, art and other uplifting pursuits and yes we role-played too. Just try that today on the Trade Channel.)
The result is the abysmal cesspool that we see today and the worst MMO community in the history of the genre. You should be ashamed of yourself Blizzard. You created it and you unleashed it on all of us. The WoW community is your Frankenstein Blizzard.
I have spoken out against this devolution of the MMO community for years now. I have posted many viable and reasonable suggestions but Blizzard will not listen. They always seem to know better.
What Blizzard has failed to grasp is that community is a very valuable commodity. I’ve published extensive articles about this. Good communities must be promoted, policed and encouraged. There has to be standards and there has to be rules and they need to be enforced — just like any organization, theater, restaurant or bar in the real world you can’t let a few malcontents and trolls destroy the morale for everybody.
Yet Blizzard seems oblivious to this basic fundamental truth. When they allow innocent players to be exposed to the garbage that is currently on General and Trade chat they are impinging upon the enjoyment of paying subscribers. Blizzard’s player disciplinary punishments are incredibly lax and forgiving. Bobby Kotick, Mike Morhaime, Chris Metzen, Paul Samms, Rob Pardo and all of the other bigshots at Activision/Blizzard would never allow their own families and children to be exposed to what goes on in the average Trade channel. Why then is it ok for us and our families to be continually exposed to it when we play WoW?
Then you see the spectacle of various members of the executive team up on the stage at BlizzCon repeating the mantra about what a “great community” of gamers and geeks we are. Please…Have any of you listened to Trade Channel on any given night? Have any of you been to the official General Discussion forums in the wee hours of the morning? Do any of you actually play WoW?
I never thought of player housing as an oasis from the madness and cacophony of the “street” but you make a great point here. For me, I just want a few square feet of some personal space that I can call my own. I’d like a small flat in Ironforge where I can look at my trophies of the various mobs me and my friends have vanquished. Somehow were supposed to believe that this is a “world” yet we are not allowed to own a small part of that world and call it home.
Blizzard are masters saying one thing and doing another. I hear the “we listen to our customers” mantra a lot when I read interviews with Blizzard employees . Tom Chilton uses this tactic a lot. He often makes selective appeal to popular opinion “based on feedback from the fans we did this….” when he wants to justify a certain decision.
Despite what they routinely claim, Blizzard really doesn’t care about the “world” aspects of World of Warcraft. The towns and cities are just window dressing for the main attraction – the loot PEZ dispenser called instancing. Every element in WoW is subservient to the “game”. There’s just enough artwork, sound and ambiance to fool you into thinking you are in a world.
For even more evidence of this narrow mindset just think about the panels that could have been presented at BlizzCon. Where was the professions panel this year? Not important. Why not a world events/holiday panel? Not important.
Both of these are things that WoW players actually really enjoy but they aren’t promoted because the upper echelon at Blizzard lets their personal preferences and biases cloud their decision making.
The decision makers at Blizzard live in a protected bubble. Despite being responsible for the virtual world where 12 million gamers spend much of their lives in, they are not accountable to anyone and have never been subject to debate or scrutiny in a independent public forum that they don’t own and control. Like groundhogs they poke their heads up once a year at BlizzCon, take a few questions, obfuscate to the best of their ability, smirk at the crowd, then they go back into their holes for the rest of the year.
Once upon a time, there was a WoW that was a refined MMO experience. It wasn’t perfect but it had its moments and came pretty close to being a world of wonder and awe. That’s all gone now. Look at how far it has fallen under it’s current management. Don’t expect any different with their new expansion except a fresh coat of paint on an old automobile that has seen better days.
I just turn off all chat channels in any MMO these days. It’s not worth the headache. That doesn’t make me any more asocial than I am to start with, though. In fact, it makes it easier to hold interesting conversations via whispers, like the random high level hunter that gave my lowbie hunter a dozen stacks of ammo a while back. Yeah, yeah, she and I both probably knew that ammo was going away eventually, but she was just so kind about wanting to help out a low level player that I couldn’t be anything but grateful and gracious.
If I were reading the spam in the trade or local chat channels, I’d have missed her whisper.
Incidentally, I have a similar sort of experience when I go to the mall for my annual foray into local capitalism. I tune out all the chatter and converse amiably with the shopkeepers or occasional fellow line waitees. I mentally turn off the chat channels and go about my business, a part of the crowd organism, but not partaking of all of it.
…all because I have my own space (albeit mobile) and don’t have to have others along to get things done. 😉
Good analogy about the shopping mall and just focusing in on the personal conversations with the shopkeepers. I’m just saddened that public chat channels have become X rated noise and yes I turn them off as well too.
Part of me can’t help thinking what it must be like for a new MMO player to venture into WoW and hear all that garbage. It must be very depressing. I also think of the new player trying to reach out for help with various questions only to be shouted down and mocked. It’s pretty disheartening to say the least.
Where is the player community in all of this? I suppose enough people have tried to effect change and petition Blizzard customer service but the very same offenders are “back on the streets” within a few days and left to ply their trade all over again. Conscientious players get frustrated and just stop caring.
It’s just maddening that with General chat we have one more element of MMOs that has fallen by the wayside all because weak enforcement and lax discipline all which is the result of Blizzard trying to keep costs down and subscribers up.
@Tesh: I’ve done that too (turning off chat channels) – but even though I am a pugger, I’m a raider at heart. I’ve been able to enjoy most of the game Blizzard have created through Pugs – I’ve only not killed two bosses. Getting into those good groups by being in general chat for the most part, so I have to stay exposed to get to these goals. To be fair to Blizzard I’ve enjoyed being able to accomplish those things with their new mechanics that wouldn’t have been possible otherwise in older games. I just wish they would cultivate the mature community along with it.
@Wolf: while some argue against your position with Blizzard, which can be harsh sometimes (deservedly) I look at it much like complaining about the government. Change is needed, and if the community doesn’t rise up and have these thoughtful discussions it
won’t change. Where you will face resistance is that Blizzard is a business – not government – but what many fail to realize anytime a community is involved there is a responsibility – one they feel they don’t need to address if they are only concerned with their dollar chasing.
Good news is, they have obviously been bleeding subs in the NA market, and if Cataclysm doesn’t bring then back maybe they will look to alternate community building solutions sans ‘Dance Studio’.
One of the reasons I’m particularly tough on Blizzard is because the MMO community has largely fallen into a state of complacency on many issues. It falls on me to do much of the heavy lifting in this department.
Many players have become lethargic and careless about keeping high standards for their MMO so they don’t speak out and articulate what is wrong. Part of the problem is that the average MMO player of 10 years ago possessed higher intelligence and more thoughtfulness of today’s average MMO gamer. Sounds absurd? Just read the official WoW forums for evidence of this.
The discussions I used to have with fellow MMO gamers back in those days were far more elevated with respect to concern about design issues. Blizzard actually hired two of the most vocal “complainers” and the rest is history.
To be blunt, veterans like myself have some historical perspective when it comes to MMOs which many new and current players do not have. They are not aware of the issues and battles that Blizzard has deemed to be “won” in the MMO design arena but I and a few others refuse to capitulate which is the case with my advocacy of player housing.
Because of the continual influx of new players Blizzard is allowed to get away with watering down the MMO experience and because of their dominance of the market most players come to equate the MMO experience with WoW. Even current MMO designers are prone to this kind of mindset and it shows. Richard Bartle talks about this (and many other MMO issues that Blizzard has deleted from the design palette) quite eloquently in his latest 70 minute GDC presentation.
I highly recommend anyone interested in MMO design watch the entire GDC presentation. There are many gems of wisdom within and you will realize how far we’ve fallen:
http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1013804/MUD-Messrs-Bartle-and-Trubshaw
Another reason is that the video game press is unabitious and in the pocket of the industry. There’s an unhealthy symbiotic relationship between the gaming press and the manufacturers of video games. The relationship between the press and the industry should be far more adversarial than it currently is. We see this corruption even in the non-gaming press these days too.
The end result for WoW is the highest pinnacle of this kind of journalism ends up being something like WoWInsider which is full of cheery, non-critical, puff pieces.
With nobody to take them to task or critique them, is it any wonder that Blizzard feels they are doing no wrong?
“I just wish they would cultivate the mature community along with it.”
No disagreement here. Even so, I can’t help but think that some of what we see is also due to the general coarsening of human nature and public discourse. Certainly Blizzard could do more to make their playground better, but WoW isn’t the only place people are more rude than ever. Not that such is an excuse to allow it, it’s just an observation that common courtesy is increasingly less common.
I’ve never been a backer of player housing, but I think there are some really good points in here. I don’t really want housing for myself, but what I do want is something in the game that goes beyond raiding.
I raid, and I enjoy it. I also find lots of ways to amuse myself in the game outside of raiding whether its taking on existing content in unusual, making up my own goals that have nothing to do with the game-defined goals, or starting impromptu parades around the city. But when I played the Final Fantasy XIV beta, despite its incredible flaws, it really made me wish that WoW had a better crafting system – one where you felt like you were really doing something instead of just pressing a button.
All that being said, what I find incongruous about this post and the comments is all the trash talking that the dance studio is getting. There were some screenshots a while back giving some idea of what the dance studio might look like. If it is as robust as they suggested then it looks like something that could really help the community and that would put a new outlet for creativity into the game. I really look forward to one day walking through a city and seeing a bunch of people standing around watching someone do a new dance they’ve created.
Sthenno I appreciate your frankness and open-mindedness when it comes to player housing. It’s important that MMOs try to attract more people who aren’t 100% into raiding and enjoy doing other things within a virtual world. When everyone is the same player archetype it makes for a very boring and bland world.
Interesting you mention you’d like to see a crafting system that involves more complexity than simply just pressing a button. In an article entitled How Dancing Failed in WoW I examined the whole mechanic of dancing and found it to be similar to your observations about WoW’s crafting system — it’s involves just pressing a button.
To my knowledge, I’m the only person that has ever written an article that has ever examined the potential dancing has in WoW from a design point of view. Despite the fact that I personally don’t like to dance in real life and I find most of the dances that emulate current dances immersion breakers I support dancing and think that I has real potential if done properly.
If you read my article you’ll notice that I had nothing negative to say about the proposed Dance Studio even though I personally think that player housing would be more beneficial to WoW as a whole and introduce more depth and forms of self-expression to the MMO. So as I mentioned in the article, if Blizzard is going to release the Dance Studio then they’ll have one less excuse to implement player housing.
I know that the article had nothing negative to say about dancing, it was brought up as an example in a comment of things that they use resources on – which obviously doesn’t mean that it’s a bad thing. After that there were several derisive comments about the Dance Studio and I just wanted to stand up for it, especially considering that I think that the main thrust of the reasoning for why player housing would be good in the game applies to the Dance Studio as well.
I’d actually really like to thank you for this article and the subsequent comments. For the first time, after reading this, I think I understand why WoW has really raised the ire of some of the “elders” of the MMORPG community. Maybe if I’d been reading your blog for longer I would have come across something like this sooner, but until I read this I’d really never seen a decent criticism of WoW that got to the core of why it is so disappointing to some players who wanted it to be (or maybe more generally just wanted something to be) the next level of MMORPG.
That was my comment 🙂 I’m not against the dance studio but use it as an example of time and effort on another initiative that I don’t forsee as community building of the type we are discussing. It wasn’t even that harsh of a side comment although you have mentioned it a few times in your subsequent comments. 🙂
Point is, if they can actually do that and do that well they can easily implement a robust housing system 🙂
Or an appearance tab to allow players to wear one set to show the world and another invisible set for the stats. 😛
Which is the most simple way to solve customization problems, and shocking that it hasn’t been implemented yet. Sure, GW2 has a method for it, but they are monetizing it.
Wolfshead, good points in this article.
However, I am seriously opposed to player housing for two main reasons.
First, player housing would allow for significant individual customization. I do not think a huge degree of customization is good for an MMO. I believe that one of EQ’s (Classic-Velious) many (many) strengths was that it denied players any customization. A Cleric was a Cleric. A Warrior was a Warrior. A Ranger always sucked, etc. It seems like every new MMO these days allows so much class customization that many players just end up creating a “class” that is good for nothing. I think that WoW struck a good balance with its class customization. You could customize it, but only to a point (three major trees, minor variations within each).
By contrast, I remember when DAoC introduced player housing. I found that the beautiful and seamless world was torn apart when I entered a player housing zone and found ugly, half-baked and incongruous abodes strewn about in an unorganized manner.
Frankly, I think that there should be limits to what you can “do” in an MMO. When there is only so much you can objectively accomplish in a game, you can either log off for the day, or you can start doing fun, albeit pointless things with online friends or strangers. Allow me to illustrate… When I played WoW, I was in an elite raiding guild, and we were all highly achieving members. When I wasn’t raiding, I felt compelled to do my dailies, build faction, do arenas, complete those stupid achievements, etc. I never had time to enjoy the game because I was always working. I can only imagine that maintaining a house would be another item on that grocery list. By contrast, when I played EQ, all I had to worry about was raiding. Simple. Rather than having Verrant telling me what to do, I could create my own value and self-worth. For example, my best experiences in EQ were the random conversations I had in the EC tunnel or rollplaying with newbs in Crushbone, etc.
Second, I believe that player housing has an adverse effect on the community and socialization. The lack of meaningful interaction among players in today’s MMOs is a go-to topic in your posts, and I think player housing would make the average player ever-the-more introverted. Why interact when you can go around decorating your house? You might make the argument that player housing could encourage roll playing, and for some players it might. However, my experience with player housing is that they served as a private space to stash your gear if the bank didn’t have enough space.
As an aside, I think the success for FarmVille has alot more to do with the desire to grown and cultivate than it does with the ownership of virtual real estate. I think the same holds true for MMOs. Although your avatar is “yours”, I think the real motivation is leveling, gearing up and “growing”
I look forward to hearing your thoughts!
-Psyduck
Thanks for the detailed post Psyduck!
I have to disagree somewhat with your first point regarding player customization. The ability to personalize one’s class versus the ability to personalize one’s appearance are different in some ways and similar in other ways.
While I do think it can be problematic (and cause a lot of resources to be spent) for the game designers if you have 3 talent trees to balance for each class, I don’t see that analogy transferring to the realm of player housing. So I’m not sure how the ability to customize one’s virtual house in a MMO detracts from the player experience.
I think the opposite is true; players are clamoring for ways to distinguish themselves from other players. One way this can be achieved is by the selection of a player’s wardrobe/gear.
Currently the only viable way to do this is via adventuring in instanced dungeons and raids where you can upgrade your gear. The tougher the mobs you kill the more exotic and rare is the gear that drops giving the player a chance to stand out among the crowd of drab outfits that are purchased via crafting and drops in the auction house.
Regarding player housing in DAOC, I played before its introduction but I understand it was not instanced which caused lots of aesthetic problems. I’ve always believed that if Blizzard were ever to implement it for WoW it would most certainly be instanced. That would take care of any problems of it destroying the hand-crafted beauty of WoW’s environs.
Your third point is interesting. While I can sympathize with the concern that you have that player housing would create a situation where your time would be spent having to manage your home I do not share your concern.
Player housing would be entirely optional. No one would be forced to purchase or rent a home, just as nobody is forced to do anything in WoW right now and that includes dungeons, raids, quests, achievements, all incarnations of PVP.
I completely understand your feeling of being compelled to do tasks like those infernal daily quests. It’s easy to feel foolish if you fail to pass up the gold and reputation you can make each day from doing them. The introduction of those daily quests really helped to kill WoW for me as it compounded the sense of drudgery and repetition that made me feel like the MMO was playing me, instead of the me playing the MMO.
Part of the problem with WoW is that everything has been so scripted and ends up feeling very routine after a while. Do your dailies each day, do your holiday quests each day, farm your badges each day, farm your mats for your flasks and potions each day. It starts feeling like a job!
I understand where you are coming from when you talk about the open-ended and self-directed nature of the experience in MMOs like EverQuest. I’m in your corner here.
Perhaps you are worried what Blizzard would do with player housing. That’s a legitimate concern given their proclivities for excessive scripting of their content and over incentivization of player behavior. I find that kind of design philosophy repugnant.
Hopefully, they wouldn’t ruin it by turning it into a daily quest like they have to even the simplest of things like fishing. I just don’t see player housing as being something that would impede your enjoyment of all the other things you can do right now in WoW.
Here’s another concern that we should think about. I just watched an interesting presentation by Brian Reynolds who’s well known game designer (Civ2, Rise of Nations) who created FrontierVille for Zynga. That Facebook social game was designed to be half “cowboy/frontier” for men and half “Little House on the Prairie” for women — his own words.
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/30848/GDC_Online_Brian_Reynolds_Wild_West_In_Social_Design.php
http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1013798/Bears-and-Snakes-The-Wild
Now apparently, females like decorating houses — just ask my wife — she’s crazy about interior design. Her and many other women apparently. Given the male nature of so many of the activities in WoW, would it not be a good idea to have the inclusion of the occasional element that appeal to females?
It seems to me that Blizzard is passing up a tremendous opportunity to capitalize on trends of female-friendly features that many social gaming companies are taking advantage of and laughing all the way to the bank. At a time when WoW’s subcribers are stagnating it seems very silly to be so narrow minded and stick to such a male-centric game design ethos that excludes fun things to do for women.
Finally, I do agree that games like Farmville are all about character advancement. Frontierville is like that too but far more advance and actually very much like WoW. Still the concept of player ownership i.e. having your own place is very compelling and something that MMO companies should investigate.
Thanks for your comments!
“Rather than having Verrant telling me what to do, I could create my own value and self-worth.”
Doesn’t that run in direct contrast to the comments about being railroaded into class identity? Verrant was telling you very clearly “you’re a Cleric, this is what you do”, with no room for experimentation and definition of self-worth for what you actually *do* in the game via your class.
I believe that a high degree of customization is essential to giving players ownership and interest in an MMO, and that it’s crucial to the “worldiness” of an online setting. When the world is static, there is little to exercise your agency on. Customization fills that gap.