At least for me, the big appeal of participating in a MMORPG was the fact that you could interact with other people online. Not only could you band together to defeat monsters, you could also communicate with and get to know your fellow players.
There was something magical about being able to log on with your avatar and join up with other adventurers located in other parts of the real world and explore the dark secrets of virtual worlds. The shared online experiences made possible by those new worlds helped to redefine and transform the video game experience and those of us fortunate to climb on board.
Why Chat Used to Matter
Not only did we learn to master our classes and figure how to survive in strange new worlds, we also were faced with the prospect of cooperating with people online. The social aspect of learning how to converse with others, making friends with people, and navigating the unique social systems of each MMO community were indeed a game unto itself.
Play that game poorly and you could not find a group or a guild. Play that game well and you could easily join groups and guilds — in fact you could even leverage your social skills to run a guild or you could even fall in love and get married to a player in real life.
The ability to chat mattered because due to the challenging environment presented by those early MMORPGs, communication was essential in order to play at the top of your game and defeat enemies. One could draw the same conclusion to the importance of good communication within the military during combat with regard to communicating strategy, issuing orders and reporting back the information gleaned from reconnaissance.
In any serious team game or sport, communication should matter and it should affect the outcome. When it stops mattering and becomes inconsequential, then there is something seriously wrong with the design of that game. The problem is that MMOs are fluid organisms and the rules are not cast in stone due to the propensity of game designers who love to tweak, tinker and fiddle.
The design of a MMO has many fathers and some of them such as the shareholders don’t necessarily have the best interests of the MMO and the players at heart. The erosion of the importance of chat has been one of the casualties of that complex reality.
Enter the Dungeon Finder
In late December of 2009 something fundamentally changed about the MMO experience for millions of players. Blizzard introduced the much ballyhooed Dungeon Finder system that enabled players from different servers to join random groups for various instanced dungeons adventures.
Initially this new mechanic was seen as a good thing as it enabled players to find groups so they could upgrade their gear and more importantly keep subscribing. But something strange started to happen. As the dungeons themselves became more of a predictable and routine grind for badges and tokens, the people in groups created by the Dungeon Finder matchmaking system stopped chatting altogether.
To illustrate how absurd it is for people to stop chatting in a MMO, imagine for a moment going into a restaurant and the patrons are there are mechanically eating their food and not saying a single word. Wouldn’t that be bizarre? Dining and eating have been a social and communal experience since the beginning of mankind. So too has chatting been part of the MMO experience since the very beginning.
As I mentioned earlier, I don’t fault the players for not chatting as people always choose the path of least resistance. I’m going to be honest here but it needs to be said: MMO players have become like trained Pavlovian dogs that react to the carrots and sticks that MMO designers lay before them. Players are just playing the cards they have been dealt with by a careless group of designers who have little respect for the importance of communication and social cohesion within a MMO.
After all, why bother to chat when chances are you’ll never see your fellow players (from other servers) again? Why bother to chat when the dungeon content has become so trivial and transactional that most players can walk through them blindfold?
It took a little over 10 years from the MUD inspired EverQuest to the EverQuest inspired WoW to finally have no need for group members to chat to each other to complete a dungeon. That’s a very impressive accomplishment!
Years from now when MMO historians ponder who was responsible for the death of chat within MMOs, they might point their fingers at the unwitting game designers at Blizzard who ushered in this ignominious age of a chatless virtual world.
But let’s turn our gaze at another type of video game platform has been growing these past years: consoles. Whether it’s the Playstation or the Xbox, MMO developers have been salivating over this huge untapped market. Part of the problem has been due to the social nature of MMOs it would have been hard to recreate a quality MMO experience on a console due to the fact that they have no keyboards.
From PC to Console
If players can now perform the main task in a MMO — which is combat in dungeons — without speaking to each other, then there is really no need for chat anymore in MMOs. Combine this with the increased solo-friendly nature of MMOs where chatting with players is not even necessary or required, we are now a step closer to the day where a console MMO could be conceptually and financially viable.
In 2009, Rob Pardo the VP of Blizzard and the true architect of today’s mass-market MMO philosophy talked to IndustryGamers about the lack of a keyboard as a problem for making a console MMO:
But as far as MMOs on consoles, there’s a lot of challenges. I’d say challenge #1 is the input device. So if you’re going to port a game like WoW how does that work? Do you ship a keyboard and a mouse? Do you try to make a game that [adapts] to all the different controls and buttons? That’s a porting issue.
Regarding the primitive input device of a controller versus the sophistication of a keyboard, there are 2 distinct advantages that a keyboard has:
- An almost unlimited combination of keys that allow the complexity and nuances of control over an avatar within a virtual world
- The ability to directly communicate with another player using text
Companies like Blizzard have been simplifying the MMO experience for the last 6 years. It is entirely feasible to reduce the current glut of abilities and spells in a typical MMO for use with a standard console controller like the used by the Playstation. Combine that with the recent phenomenon of a chatless MMO as exemplified by WoW and we are one step closer to the development of a console MMO.
More Reasons Why Chat is Dying
One of my first articles published way back in 2005 warned about the impact of voice chat in MMOs. The need to verbally communicate as complex raid encounters are attempted has ensured its survival. At least voice communication within a MMO is better than no communication at all.
Still, I’m concerned about the diminishing need to chat in MMOs and the isolation the comes with it. One is left with with the sense that MMOs are becoming more and more like single-player games. Your fellow player is nothing more than a NPC — just with better A.I. This is not what MMOs were supposed to be about. Even the nature of community itself which has been a huge part of the appeal of MMOs, has deteriorated in the grand scheme of things and has taken the quality of chat with it into the sewer.
Even if you were to risk chatting with someone in a MMO today, you’d probably have better luck having an intelligent discussion in a mosh pit full of wasted punk music fans. So why chat at all?
Many people frustrated with the lack of policing of general chat channels — thanks to feeble and impotent customer service from companies like Blizzard — have turned off chat channels completely and are experiencing MMOs all alone with minimal interaction with other players.
Conclusion
While chat may not be quite yet dead, its days are surely numbered. Chat in MMOs has about as much chance of surviving as a feature as cigarette lighters do in new automobiles. Besides, chat seems to be a relic from a different MMO age — a bothersome barrier to a new design ethos that’s all about attracting more subscribers. Chat is so yesterday as it actually requires the ability to actually type which would prevent many new illiterate subscribers in untapped markets from playing. Even in the realm of the so-called “innovative” social games on Facebook chat is nowhere to be found.
Now that chat is on the decline, every potential console MMO developer can now point to the current state of WoW’s chatless core gameplay as evidence that the conditions are becoming more opportune for the production of mainstream console MMO.
Given the current state of player expectations and developers who pander to them, it is only just a matter of time before console MMOs take over and exert their design conventions over the industry. When that eventually happens, this genre will never be the same.
-Wolfshead
Chat may be dying, but that’s only because people are too busy pressing abilities to chat. Beyond the “hi”s at the start it’s all pull pull pull and the odd “Mana Break”
The future is voice comms. WoW has had voice comms since The Burning Crusade but it’s never been forced on anyone so everyone has it switched off, and I’ll bet that loads of people don’t even know it’s there. The first proper Console MMO will have the Halo crowd as some of it’s biggest patrons and they will expect Voice Comms.
I think most of the players turn WoW ingame voice chat off because its laggy, poor quality and uses the same channel as other chats, slowing the actual game itself. Not because they don’t know it’s there: in fact, I think it’s on by default now.
Had Blizzard put some effort to the voice system it may have come out completely different. Now it’s more a hindrance to actual use, and an incentive to use Vent or TS or equivalent.
C out
I think you’re a bit hasty to blame Blizzard here. Personally, I think this might be a “chicken and egg” situation: have players stopped chatting because Blizzard’s design encourages it, or did Blizzard design the game to not require chat because that’s the path the players were already on? Personally, I suspect that the players are driving this trend more than Blizzard since communication adds overhead and complexity to the game experience, and players have been ruthlessly efficient at reducing these complexities.
I also suspect this is more of an issue in WoW. While not all PUGs are magical and wonderful, I’ve notice this is less of an issue in DDO and LotRO. In fact, I’ve not really had a bad PUG experience in LotRO (all before the free-to-play transition, of course). I suspect that playing a game that caters to the lowest common denominator means that you’re going to be interacting with people who fit that description.
In a not so distant future when MMO’s are just called “games” there will be some lonely aspiring developer in the midst of millions of people wondering why they need to be online to play this game. They will invent a “game” that no longer needs to be connected to play. They will call it a “Single Player Game”, the entire industry will be turned on its ear… and history will have come full circle.
Good article. I have to disagree, though, in that I think the quiet state of WoW’s 5-mans is more a result of gear inflation and being late in the expansion pack. At this point, the majority of players know the boss fights like the back of their hands. If they don’t, everyone is so overpowered that they really don’t need to worry about it anyway; fights are really just countdowns until the boss dies from rampant DPS. Strategy discussion still happens in the majority of raid dungeons, admittedly through VOIP, but that seems to reinforce that players are still willing to talk. It’s just a matter of necessity. A combination of overpowered groups, over-experienced dungeons, and little desire to form fleeting social bonds has pretty much made communication unnecessary — but only in this case and under those circumstances.
It’s also worth noting that this trend is almost exclusive to WoW. I’d contend that the main reason communication is so poor in comparison is because of the sheer amount of readily available information. Database sites, strategy videos, and class forums are more available to the WoW playerbase because there’s more money to be had in it. When a LotRO player has a question, they’re more likely to turn to their fellow players for assistance. Dungeons in LotRO, too, require far more communication since very few people are publishing tutorials on the web. In games without that massive resource base, it’s simply easier to lean on your fellow player. As it should be, in my opinion, but it’s for that reason that I think chat is suffering in WoW moreso than any other major MMO.
If we bring MMOs to consoles, I agree that chat will probably die away there. The most likely replacement, however, is voice chat since most users already utilize it. That’s assuming, though, that MMOs make the jump in their traditional form wherein communication is a key aspect of play, and I’m not convinced the consoles player’s definition of MMO will be so closely tied with the classical MMORPG.
Just my two cents. Entertaining read as always, Wolfshead.
@Brian
To describe it as “chicken and egg” is right. I agree that WoW was already pretty chatless before the dungeon finder, I’ve often described it as the quietest MMO I’ve ever played, however, I feel the reason WoW was chatless before was because of the ease of solo play in the game. You don’t need to talk to other people if you don’t need other people. So, is it Blizzard’s fault for making a game where you could easily level to the cap without grouping with other players and therefore no need to talk to them?
As much as I defend WoW, I really do think the Dungeon Finder was the worst decision ever made in gaming history (perhaps second only to the firing of Infinity Ward.) It will kill the game…and I’m someone who wants WoW to survive. The lack of communication is ultimately going to translate, as you say, into the faceless, friendless deathmatch-style play of consoles. If there’s no friends playing, and making new ones just got significantly harder, then it’s not going to be long before WoW’s population finally starts a major decline.
And that’s a shame.
I’m with my pre-posters: WoW is possibly the MMO with the least cooperation required in order to succeed – hence the need and meaning of chat was always rather low compared to other games of the same genre.
similar to the min/maxing debate I have to ask myself whether it is blizzard’s game design only that encourages players to do it or whether part of it isn’t also player mentality and choice, because clearly WoW does not require you to play like that in order to succeed. in the same way WoW does not require voice comms, there’s been raidguilds in vanilla that easily raided 40man without them – but somewhere along the line vent and TS became ‘a must’. Why?
the effect of this is that chat dies, the advantages of voice comms are just overwhelmingly big; especially in a game that requires low cooperation / cooperation with only a closed circle or guild. once the wheel is in motion, it’s impossible to stop, however I am not sure who to “blame” here.
maybe WoW is just not the best example to discuss the meaning of chat for an MMO. I don’t think it can set a “trend” therefore either, as long as other MMOs are still cooperative enough.
I have to say I agree somewhat with the evaluation that the dungeon finder has started a significant decline for the need for socialization, teamwork and polite small talk for groups in WoW. I can easily do most everything independently in that game without needing to talk to anyone. However, I am also part of a guild that uses TS so saying anything is just a click away on a hotkey.
I have been following and blogging the new release of Square Enix’s FFXIV MMO, and I have to say this is a game that encourages chat and interaction. There is no shortcuts here, in fact the game is worldwide so you have “auto-translate” functions to bridge language gaps. No dungeon finder here, and the economy is completely player based with no auction house. I also played LOTRO and had very positive experiences with socialization and chatting in game. I strongly feel that WoW is so big it attracts a player base and variety of ages that may have such different personalities and playstyles that they have less desire for interaction. The community feels very impulsive and instant gratification, and Blizzard has reinforced those concepts with things like the dungeon finder and “vote to kick functions”.
I also noticed utter silence in many other MMOs, including LOTRO. Partly there due to the short range of local talk and the interface, without a tell it is hard to make people react. While global and user made global channels became some kind of OOC chat that for some reason still takes place in the game instead of using an IRC server.
Some things:
1.) Voice Communication. Implemented in almost every MMO by now, 95% of the players that use it still rather use TeamSpeak or a ton of other less popular clients.
I do not like it for several reasons, and apparently I am not alone, so far this has not started flying outside of raids, and the Dungeon Finder also killed it somewhat for PUG dungeon runs. On German servers it was almost mandatory to join the TeamSpeak channel before the Dungeon Finder.
2.) In former times bonds and friendships were forged through going together on adventure or in dungeons. In the extremely random and somewhat anonymous dungeon finder experience, this does not happen. And guess what, people simply do not like to talk to total strangers. The social aspect of having to behave if you want to be taken along the next time is gone, too.
3.) A new audience. WoW’s success was that it made people interested in MMOs that did not play them before. From the Counter-Strike kid to the grandma. And a lot of these players were single player game veterans.
4.) How to guide around players nowadays: ” -> , ! ”
People are so absorbed in their daily chore… erm quest and doing their stuff, there is not much need to talk.
5.) A lack of social engineering skills. They did not create a “world” of Warcraft, they put a guided single player experience on top of the supposed world.
Petter linked us this video, an Interview with Kalgan / Evocare / Tom Chilton, one of WoW’s lead designers.
http://www.gamereactor.eu/news/5093/Tom+Chilton+on+Cataclysm/
The problem with PvP is, according to him, that the designers are not as much in CONTROL of the player experience as in PvE. This is all what Blizzard game design is apparently about: control. One can check Ultima Online: Age of Shadows. It marked the beginning of the decline of Ultima Online, lead designer Tom Chilton. Both gear concept and PvP concept failed, and funnily the part that worked, the housing, is something they do not like at Blizzard. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_Shadows There is a problem to control the creativity of people if you let them create houses and interiors of their own, you know? 😉
Blizzard became big with single player games (yeah, I hear someone crying Starcraft, granted, but even that was played by much more single player dudes that never touched the multiplayer), turned a MMO into some kind of single player with other players optional amusement Disneyland theme park with raiding as endgame.
Tigole, EverQuest veteran and raider, and therefore also pre-WOTLK raid designer for WoW, also said the same thing about quest design a while ago: How to guide players around, with breadcrumbs, how to make sure they find quests and play them in the intended sequence. Sometimes they are given the exciting choice to either play this zone or that zone. And no wonder, if you ask a EQ raider to create an endgame for your game, it becomes raids. Which now causes tons of problems: They had to be dumbed down, made accessible for the tons of solo-players guided by -> and !. They get boring, new raids need to be designed. The moment the next expansion hits the content is DONE, WASTED, nobody cares for it anymore, very much like the old Azeroth raids and the TBC raids.
Today we have too many designers that copy WoW. They might be game designers, but they are not world designers. And if they are, they apparently do not have the funds or strength to convince investors to do things their way.
As the way a MMO has to be is… to be like WoW. See SWTOR. WoW 2.0 reloaded in space. Even Guild Wars 2 borrows a lot of the old DIKU formula just to look familiar to the huge mass of WoW players.
It was this kind of design the leads to silence in gameplay. Chat takes place as rants in zone chat or a talk show. In raids and voice comm the only guy allowed to talk is the raid leader and (sorry, could not resist, personal experience) his annoying girlfriend.
Bottom Line: The quest driven ! -> games of today are not truly MMOs, communication is more or less optional. The social aspects have been reduced a lot, and thanks to the Dungeon Finder it has almost been eliminated from WoW. Which is some sort of proof that Blizzard, creators of the western world’s biggest and most successful MMO, have an entirely different vision of a virtual world and the term “MMORPG” than me. Please don’t even remind me about the “RPG” in MMO-RPG nowadays.
I have a dual experience on this: I freely admit that I run all the five mans currently without a word, from my well geared tank to my newbie lv80 dk with blues and greens. All heroic and not a complaint so far. One comment on great gs on the dk in his first heroic, but nothing on the performance.
However, the guild I’m in doesn’t use any VoIP when raiding. That’s not forbidden, but it has been deemed the most efficient way by the original core who has been around since the start of Vanilla. The ingame chats are used, many channels at once and all I can say is that the crucial information is always available. The only thing this causes is the fact that its every man for himself: you really need to know how to play, what is the strategy, what is your role and understand your surroundings. You do not have the luxury of having someone tell you over the VoIP what to tell in the heat of LK fight, for example.
But I would be on the same lines about chat dying: it will do so eventually, as all things must evolve.
Heck, we would be going through this discussion over the local newspaper if there wasn’t the Internet.
I hate Dungeon Finder for other reasons than the lack of chat and communication: lack of contact, lack of community feel of single cerver, lack of need to maintain any kind of presence and honor.
C out
Huh. When I was LFDing leveling dungeons a few months back, conversation seemed to happen more than half the time. Even the quieter PUGs had a few salutations and thanks here and there. The most chatty run that I was on was dominated by a pair of idiots trying to race each other to the bottom of the gene pool.
Maybe the endgame, with its burned out veterans and players stuck in the tank n’ spank rut are quiet and businesslike, but meandering around in the lower levels with nonprofessionals, there’s still some chatting going on, most of it decent.
I do suspect that the few times the run was silent was because of veterans on alts (reinforced by the occasional heirloom shoulders I’d see). They were too busy grinding via the LFD to actually interact with new people. Runs with people new to the dungeon or with one or two runs under their belt (by self-profession) were naturally more chatty.
When Tesh uses the phrase “self-profession” it makes me wonder… in an LFD/LFG tool, why do all the selection boxes need to be grounded in mechanics? Dungeon/dungeon type, classes needed, etc. Where are the self selecting “useless” qualifiers? Casual, chatty, exp grind… Why don’t the devs give people more ways to define the personality of the group or player instead of just the objective?
Great point! 🙂
Enjoyed the article. I am torn here, though.
The Dungeon Finder made WoW better for me. I believe that is the design of the game – for an analogy, it’s the drive through MMO generation. We used to go and sit and eat, now we just pull in, get the goods, and drive away.
I actually turn off general chat in WoW. It is terrible. Anal linking jokes are the theme of the year in WoW. I can’t stand the quality of chatter. I do turn it on sometimes if I am looking for a raid, but besides that it’s off. I can find most groups now with the various group finder tools to not be bothered.
Sadly, it’s getting to the point where I would almost rather there wasn’t chat, just clickable responses to get away from the 99% trash, 1% useful discussion. Very sad that I’d rather click ‘thank you’ on a conversation wheel than wonder how someone’s day is. It’s almost like radiation and I’d rather limit my exposure to it.
Of course, this is public and random chatter. Guild chat with the good people I have chosen to hang with is another matter entirely. But now that we don’t need guilds in WoW (I’m 10/12 ICC in both 10 and 25 man, with 50% hardmodes – all in pugs (before I unsubbed – again)) to accomplish anything, you just hope to find a group that isn’t annoying or insulting, get the shinies, and move on.
EQ, for all it’s flaws, had the downtime and necessary social interaction requirements that it built community as mentioned in the article. Bonds were made (not Bond-age, as you will find in general chat). WoW works for me for the lack of time commitment necessary to progress with strangers I would rather not hear from, or learn about.
I am being a bit of a Drama Queen here, as Tesh mentioned, you do find the odd group that can make the experience fun – but the sum of the whole isn’t aligned that way.
Talk about a social opportunity gone horribly wrong.
How much of traditional text-chat is going away purely driven by the desires of the consumers though. Speach is a more efficient form of short-message communication, and given the speed at which online games are played it’s not surprising that voice-chat options have started to dominate the market as the technological capacity for them becomes more readily availabe.
I don’t necessarily see this shift as a bad thing, particularly in games with a focus on PvP. The last thing you want a player to do is have to type out, “I’m getting jumped, needs heals.” when they could instead me manuevering and using abilities. That said, communincation as a whole going away is a problem, but the industry needs to come up with new ways to encourage the method that players are choosing to take part in.
It is more efficient, and it isn’t. Yes, just saying something is often much faster than typing it. However, text chat allows for multiple asynchronous conversations, just ask any teenager with an unlimited texting plan on their phones. Ventrilo is great as long as you want to talk to one group of people, but I haven’t found a voice solution yet that will allow me to simultaneously talk to my raid, my group, my guild, trade, global, and four friends privately. Text chat can do that, and it’s how I spent most of my time in EverQuest.
Taking the extra couple of seconds to type something out might just give some people’s internal censors a moment to remind them that what they were going to say really is ill advised. Speech is immediate, and it’s easy to blurt out something *really* stupid that might have been filtered out if you were typing. (And as a listener/reader, I can use filter scripts to keep the profanity down. Yes, some people don’t care, but I do.)
True, the worst of jerks won’t care either way, but I do like that text almost demands better communication skills, from reading to thought formulation, rather than mere verbal diarrhea.
@Jason
I completely agree with the ease of seperation and keeping different conversations clearly delineated by use of chat. However, I see this more as a hurdle to be overcome, as I have yet to find a good way of communcating on multiple front like that either. The other downside though, would be the loss of the physical record of the conversation that is often need when you switch back to conversation #6 of 9 and you think to yourself, “Ummmm… crap. Where was I?”.
@Tesh
I don’t know if anyone actually does rethink what they type, or at the very least, it’s such a small portion of players, as to be unconsequential. The typing ability of most people today is fast enough to be close to thought. The delay in game comes from having to move hands from controlling-input devices, to recognition by the audience, and then the audience reading. I agree though, the need for continued filtering of some form would need to be preserved. I don’t want my daughter to be sitting on my lap and hearing profanities.