We all come to MMOs and virtual worlds with grand expectations. For months before a MMO is released we experience the hype about how this time it will be different. We salivate as we see the trailers and read the marketing copy about how you and your friends will be transported to a world of wonder and magic — a world of adventure and excitement awaits where anything can happen.
At first it’s all good, after all it’s a new world. You are seeing new amazing locations, battling new monsters and meeting new people. But after a few years the honeymoon is over and logging on to our favorite MMO feels like wearing a comfortable sweater. Players settle into their routines and even worse they start to like it and even expect it. Don’t you dare go changing things or else you’ll face the terrible wrath of the players.
Anyone who remembers the reaction of a significant number of people in the WoW community after last year’s zombie event can attest to this. Quite a few WoW players were outraged and indignant that they were “inconvenienced” by the zombie invasion and let Blizzard know in no uncertain terms. Isn’t the underlying premise of MMOs like WoW supposed to be a “world at war”?
Why is it that as a MMO starts to age that players seem to embrace predictability and routine and reject dynamism and variety?
Rethinking the Zombie Invasion
What piqued my interest in this topic was a few threads on the official WoW forums about the zombie invasion “live” scripted event that took place in WoW before the release of the Wrath of the Lich King expansion. One thread in particular caught my eye. Atheniae dares to make and “Emper0r has no clothes” observation about the nature of the WoW community:
Before the last expansion was released, I felt very disappointed about World of Warcraft. It was not the content or the developers fault. It was the WoW population, the people who play the game, that let me down.
It seemed to me that each time Blizzard introduced a change, for better or worse, the majority of people were adverse to a change at all. However, there was never that much complaint, normally those affected cry louder than those who are not or do not care.
However, the zombie event revealed something that I had only slightly suspected about the WoW player-base. They cannot break the monotony of the game, for even a day or two. The daily actions of WoW players to me has become: Gold Grinding, AH, Gold Grinding, AH, Gold Grinding, AH, raid, AH.
It seems that all MMO communities eventually end up like this. We become like grouchy old codgers sipping lemonade on our virtual porches and we scowl at the kids who throw a ball on our lawn. How dare that anyone or anything changes our routine in the slightest.
Over time we willingly trade the feeling of wonder and excitement for the security of the daily grind and the routine. We become like the cast of Cheers. We show up in our favorite MMOs each night, occupy our virtual bar stools and embrace the insanity of tedium and repetitiveness.
Why Unpredictability Matters
I loved the zombie event. It was nice to finally see some chaos in a world that had become all too predictable and stagnant. Almost everyone was affected by it and most certainly everyone was talking about it. And here’s the good part: finally at last a real enemy — the Scourge — to unite all of the races of Azeroth!
It may come as no surprise but I also loved the panic and confusion caused by the Corrupted Blood Plague incident all caused by a disease originating in Zul’Gurub actually spread to players throughout the rest of Azeroth. For me that was a shining moment of emergent, unscripted glory for virtual worlds. However soon Blizzard put an end to the mayhem and Azeroth reverted back to its safe and comfy former self.
These kinds of events are worthwhile because they relieve players of the monotony of daily life in a MMO. This is even more pronounced when you take into account the highly scripted nature of the content in WoW. People need to be challenged more often in MMOs. It’s not just a matter of the traditional challenge of skill, rather it’s the challenge of dealing with and processing variety, randomness and new situations.
The problem is that change and dealing with the unexpected can thwart the player who views his MMO like an amusement park.
After the Love Has Gone
I believe the part of the problem is that as the world starts to become more familiar and safe we lose our wanderlust and passion — we start to become jaded and immune to the world around us. After all “exploration” is a finite as far as content is concerned — at least until the next patch or expansion. With nothing left to explore we turn to becoming super achievers and embrace the min/max philosophy which makes us grind all aspects of the MMO more efficiently.
Slowly we fall out of love with our virtual world but somehow we stay addicted to the grind. We in effect make a Faustian bargain with our virtual world; we replace what should be hours of danger and excitement with the comfort of predictability. We become like the husband and wife that can barely tolerate each other but we stay together because we feel safe and secure with the devil we know.
Creating and Supporting a World of Unpredictability
The root of the problem is that MMO devs fail to establish and promote a culture where players are kept on their toes. From its inception you need to infuse your MMO and your players with the expectation that they will be living in an unpredictable world where anything can happen. And it has to be more than just marketing speak. The MMO company has to make a serious commitment to communicate to players that they are going to be immersed in a world of danger and change — they should always be on guard, constantly looking over their shoulders.
If players start viewing your MMO as a *job* then you are failing as a MMO company. Most players already have enough routines in their live — they don’t need it in your MMO. Your job as a MMO developer is to provide your players with virtual world full of fun and excitement not bland predictability.
However if you don’t want this kind of world then at least have the guts to put this on the box:
Warning: This virtual world is full of predictable and safe gameplay. Things rarely change here. You will most likely fall into a daily routine and your experiences will rarely change from day to day. If anyone or anything disrupts your fun please contact our helpful Gamemasters. Please stay safe and have fun while you are a guest in our world!
5 Years Later: Still No Live Quests and Events in WoW
Clearly with Blizzard there has been absolutely no real support for the notion that a MMORPG is a living breathing world. Instead of embracing it, they run away from it at full speed. They have conditioned their players with the exact opposite — a cornucopia of predictability where mobs always respawn and questgivers never change.
It’s an outrage that they still have not run one live dynamic event after 5 years. Shame on them. I suspect that Rob Pardo or someone at the top of Blizzard’s design team must have had a bad experience with a overly zealous EverQuest GM running a live event and the unfortunate result is that 11.6 million players will never know what it’s like to be a part of one of the most thrilling and exciting facets of a virtual world.
What a missed opportunity this is for Blizzard when this kind of experience should be a unique selling point for a massively multi-player online role-playing game of the caliber of WoW.
Not only have they refused to run live quests and events they have refused to support role-players who are the lifeblood personified of virtual worlds. One great role-player has the potential to bring more worth and life to a virtual world then 100 greedy achievers.
Conclusion
You get the player community you deserve. Feed them with a steady diet of lopsided achievement based gameplay, a predictable world that never changes and heavily scripted quests and the result is a community of unambitious, apathetic, stodgy players who are resistant to change but very eager to complain and riot in the streets when they experience any form of inconvenience.
Even worse they have become resistant to the notion of true fun as they’ve forgotten what attracted them to this MMO in the first place. As Raph Koster seemed to be saying in his book A Theory of Fun for Game Design, when the brain stops learning people stop having fun. It’s hard to imagine that players are having fun doing the same bland repetitive tasks each day.
If the zombie invasion of 2008 taught us anything it is that thanks to the timidity of MMO companies who have failed to consistently deliver a gripping world of excitement and immediacy it’s the players who’ve become the real zombies in MMOs. Friends don’t let friends become well-behaved zombies — even in MMOs.
-Wolfshead
The worst thing I ever did in a MMO to another human being apparently was killing his bank alt in the auction house in Ironforge. (Zombie Invasion) :>
Remember the new harbor of Stormwind, how tame the bone dragons where – they did not attack players.
Player mindset nowadays seem to be different, too “LF Farming guild!” is not unusual nowadays.
It is not only Blizzard fault, but the contemporary vision and interpretation what a MMO is changed considerably from what it was initially.
I call it the lowest common denominator philosophy. A safe and fun game for the whole family. But for sure not exciting!
Excitement and dynamism don’t bring in the $15/month. If you use a sub model, you *want* zombie players who play your game because they are in the habit of doing so. Challenge and dynamic content create exit points and cost money to make.
The zombie event was an obnoxious grief-fest and the worst part was that there was no way to fight back against the scourge except by suiciding ASAP so as not to spread the plague. (Which was my tactic of choice.)
I have no idea why you’re placing such a poorly conceived event on such a pedestal, and then flaying WoW players for, on the whole, hating it.
The event may have been poorly conceived. I’m sure more could have been done to give players some recourse to being able to cure the plague and fight back against it. I’m more interested in the bigger picture. For me the way the players reacted is a metaphor for what’s wrong with MMOs and the players that play them.
What if it rained for 7 days straight in Azeroth and as a result it “rusted” all of the armor creating a situation where everyone was walking and running at half speed? Given the current predisposition of the WoW population there’d be screams of injustice.
I look at it with the glass half full instead of half empty. Suddenly players would want to group with hunters for their speed buff (Aspect of the Cheetah). Suddenly players may want to get their armor repaired more often (money sink) and blacksmith players could for a fee charge to have that armor fixed.
I hate griefers as much as anyone but griefing is more of a symptom of a larger problem. Players don’t really have much freedom to express themselves within the MMO so they find ways to grief others via chat abuse and other tricks such as releasing the toy train in the Auction House.
When did MMOs and virtual worlds become so warm, cuddly and safe that we can no longer tolerate any deviation from the norm?
Oh, Andrew… did someone kill your bank alt?
The extreme 1-2 day grief-fest to the hordes of new WoW players and alts in the starter areas?
And you are serious about the “poorly conceived grieffest”?
But you are a zombie already. Sorry to say that, but this is the criticized theme park attitude.
Longasc:
I didn’t have a bank alt (or any real alt for that matter) when I played WoW. Sorry to disappoint you, and thanks for assuming that you know my mentality inside out.
Now allow me to actually explain the event to you, since I’m doubting you played WoW through that time period judging by your sneering attitude:
The zombie mechanic was fairly level-agnostic – it would turn a level 70 just as easily as a level 1. As I already said – the lack of fun derived from the complete lack of ability to fight back – a zombie could generally turn you before you could kill it, and you were doomed if there were multiples in the area (which there usually were).
If there was a mechanic whereby players could do X (spend gold, farm something, etc) to earn protection then I wouldn’t have loathed the event nearly as much. And if there was a mechanic that allowed players to nuke zombies and eventually make an area safe then I would have been even more into it.
In fact, the invasion of Stormwind Harbour a few weeks later was a GREAT example of this – players gathered to repel the Scourge – random raid group sprung up to share the rewards, and the area was absolutely crawling with players taking a break from their daily routines, and all of them were buzzing with anticipation. *THAT* was a great event. The zombies were just plain ol’ stupidity.
Just to drive home the fact that I enjoy live events: I used to both participate in and run them when I was an admin in my MUDing days. I remember hosting one invasion where we sic’d a pile of Wheel of Time-inspired critters on the main city, and the players rallied to fight them off (and collect some unique/timered drops in the process).
I played WoW during the Zombie Invasion, if you just would have bothered to read you would have known this.
I cannot believe that you call this “fight versus the Scourge” in Stormwind Harbor a great event. It was the most pitiful part of the whole event. Some dragons flying around, doing… nothing!
What was the great thing about the fight? That they could not fight back, as they were trained to only attack NPCs?
I also wonder what was so annoying about the zombie invasion. You lost nothing, you cannot lose anything in WoW anyways.
The Zombie players rarely managed to make coordinated attacks, the auction house rarely got overrun. And this was on a highly active high population server.
How can you call this already “griefing”, this is going too far!
Uh – were you in Stormwind Harbour at all in the weeks leading up to Wrath?!? Just dragons? Not able to interact with the invaders?
There were all manner of scourge assaulting the Harbor on Garona server, INCLUDING dragons that could be killed by ranged classes.
Only attack NPCs!?! Are we even talking about the same event here? The scourge that invaded the Harbour that *I* helped to defend would aggro anything, NPCs and PCs.
As for the zombies, I’ve already told you what I found annoying: that we had no way to effectively fight back. A fun event isn’t a wholesale slaughter of players, it’s an interactive experience where both sides can participate equally.
And if players on your server didn’t band together as zombies….. well, consider yourself lucky. It was utterly miserable on Garona when they did, and the AH was the least of our worries (though it was almost always overrun during prime time).
Difference is one was interesting fight vs other players. Another one was just dumb npcs designed to be slaughtered
You could fight back vs zombies ,you could gather toghether other players, but nooooo -everyone is so busy running away from any perceived danger (what danger in WoW btw?) and complete inability to handle any non hand holding mechanics
@Tesh: You are right… and this is sad. 🙁
@Andrew:
Depends on what you call griefing. This was a real war, and giving control of attacking monsters to the player was a good way to ensure that the maximum damage could be done. It may not have been perfect , but it was an interesting idea.
I’ll direct you to a message from the lich king:
http://brokentoys.org/2008/10/28/a-message-from-your-lich-king/
@Wolfshead:
I’m wondering if this does not come partlyfrom the subscription model. You pay 15$/month, and have some goals you want to reach. If something stops you from reaching those goals, you are losing money !
And, in the event of the plague, there wasn’t even anything to gain, you were just “trying to survive” in a world where death is meaningless… So, no incentive, for our cuddled players who must have phat incentives for everything they do.
Also, such events are so rare in WoW, that maybe people are just not used to it.
My account wasn’t active during the zombie invasion, but I heard about it and saw it from my friends who were still playing.
The event was poorly designed in so many ways:
1. It didn’t fit the game. As the post points out, there are no live events in WoW. There were no big, involuntary events like this in the game in the four years previous. People who were bored with the routine (like me) had already quit the game. I went off to do other things besides wait around in the game for something uncontrolled to happen.
2. There was no choice. As far as I could tell, there was only one outcome to the event: zombies took over major areas. Even though it was possible to “cure” the plague, it became harder and harder to do so. The game took away player control to tell a story that was not all that interesting to many people. In a game, a medium defined by interactivity, this is a sin.
3. The focus was off of the player. WoW is a game built around a power fantasy. Your character is the embodiment of a tremendous amount of power. Maybe you can’t change the world by finally finishing off Van Cleef (assuming you didn’t want to side with him), but you are undeniably a hero of the world. This event wasn’t about the player being the hero, because choice was removed (as seen in the previous problem). So, the event violates that power fantasy.
4. It gave players tools to harass other players. I think the event would have been much more acceptable if the zombies had been only NPCs attacking the major cities. Put players in control and some will go harass other people. People who get harassed by others don’t appreciate that. It’s the same thing that irks a lot of people about PvP.
5. It was one-sided. If someone went out of their way to harass you, what was your response? Go zombie them again so they can harass someone else? It’s not like a game of TF2 where you could go get revenge on someone who has been dominating you.
6. Everyone isn’t the same. One of my friends was trying to level up an alt to max level before the expansion came out. His character was trying to do quests in Shattrath, but couldn’t do anything because he kept getting turned into a zombie. Maybe being a zombie is neat if you’re a max level character just hanging out being bored, but if you’re actually trying to, you know, play the game it’s not that much fun to be disrupted.
I could go on, but I think that’s enough for discussion. 🙂
I think you’re committing a design sin, Wolfshead, assuming that all players are (or maybe should be) like you. You find routine boring. Some people don’t. Some people appreciate the fact that they have some measure of control over the game when they feel out of control of their offline life. They like the fact that they can do X and get reward Y and not have to worry about all the vagaries we do in the “real world” like others stealing credit, shifting blame, or the person just being at the wrong place at the wrong time.
In all, the zombie event didn’t fit in WoW. Would a game with a highly dynamic world be more interesting? For some of us, sure! And most of us are probably playing PvP worlds to get our regular dose of unpredictability. Or, working to design our own dynamic worlds. We shouldn’t be trying to shoehorn an event in a game that has a fanbase who likes the feel of a favorite four-year-old sweater.
The conservatism of WoW players is astounding. I too was a bit frustrated about the scourge invasion when it took place. Later I’ve changed my mind about it, regretting my silly approach to it. Just like a spoiled child, tossing away the gifts the gave us.
Actually the same thing happened during the children weeks event recently. The achievement made the BGs work a bit differently to what they normally do. It was a change that lasted for a week or so, but oh, the outcry of it… “Don’t touch our world”.
It’s sad to hear. Sometimes I hope that the devs are wearing thick hearing protection devices to cut off some of the whining from the community.
I would certainly welcome more of temporary changes. But since it’s so little appreciated, I guess we won’t see much of it in the future.
I still have the folder on my desktop, with a collection of screenshots from Ironforge at night, during the zombie invasion. There was a skeleton CARPET covering the entire area. All over, from the Explorers’ guild to the duelling grounds in front of the gates, everything was covered in skeletons.
It was the most amazing sight I have ever seen, and I loved it.
I used to show it to friends who dont play MMOs, explaining – “these are live players, this is a real world zombie apocalypse” . Our very own “Night of the Dead”, and you get to play on both sides. It was fun.
And now, like in an AA meeting, I’m saying “I’ve not played WoW for 2 months”.
One day I just didn’t log in, and I’m staying away since. I realised my daily routine was “Get up, eat, go to work, go home, log-in, do dailies, eat during raid pauses, go to bed at 01.00, get up for work tired”.
I don’t need this sh!t. I have enough real life chores to be wasting my time grinding, or whiping on the same boss, every night, because immature kiddies are too dumb, or too stoned to play decent.
I’ve been raiding since MC, and I know very well, all the sleepless nights in Ulduar will be for naught in just a few months, when the new set of gear hits the streets… I mean dealers… I mean.. vendors 🙂
Now I’m forced to get my game fix off of singleplayer games, and I’m actually having fun 🙂
Seriously considering giving EVE a try. That’s my last beacon of hope until the “next gen MMO” comes out, whatever it may be 🙂
@Wolfshead
Your WoW bashing starts to get a bit boring for me recently, but this time you seem to be hitting the nerve.
Perhaps it is true that every game has some life, and sooner or later all veteran players turn into grumpy old men. Perhaps, but I refuse to believe it.
There must be a way. There must be a way to make an MMO that would be fun, and dynamic, and everchanging and everinteresting…
Aaah, one more thing.
There was some quote how Blizzard likes the Diablo series…
Well… I dont like the Diablo series.
I can see where all the grinding mindset comes from. My friends used to be farming Pindel boss for days, even weeks, just to get the item they need.
Can you imagine the sight? One guy, sitting in front of his PC, going into the level, killing the boss, looting, getting out… -> Fast forward 8 to 10 hours -> the guy is still doing the same thing, his eyes are bloodshot, there is an ashtray somewhere under the pile of cigarette butts, but you cant make it out… before he goes to sleep he tells me that with some luck he ll get the item in two or three days of this madness… for his 2nd toon.
Jeesus, thank god I wasnt playing back then! But I can definetly see where all the grinding mentality comes from. At least they had hardcore mode, so there was some risk-reward in fighting another player or such. In an MMO, your toon never dies, only gets fatter.
SsandmanN, I wonder how Diablo 3 will be. If it just continues where Diablo 2 ended it is for sure not my kind of game, despite all the Diablo Nostalgia that is so common nowadays.
This really makes one desperate for future, upcoming MMOs. Seems I have to stick to Mount & Blade (offline singleplayer, yes…!) till then. Or reading more fantasy literature, but I do that anyways, with or without MMOs or computer games.
OK, back to work, waiting for the MMO revolution to happen. 🙂
“As Raph Koster seemed to be saying in his book A Theory of Fun for Game Design”
It’s occurred to me before that the behaviour of the population in WoW invalidates Raph’s book. Not that the book doesn’t have a lot of great insights anyway but the central premise that people want to be intellectually challenged and this is what they will find fun is clearly disproven by WoW.
I actually think this resistance to change is because a lot of players have picked out their own goals by this stage and are happy to be left to quietly get on with it.
It’s not that they hate live events or stuff changing, but they hate being dragged into it without their permission, and they hate when it messes with whatever else they’d planned to do. I know it’s subtle but I don’t think it’s that all players are lazy or not having fun. They’re happily immersed in the game world and getting on with their own in-game lives when some uppity GM ganks them randomly with zombies. Not cool.
At least, not cool unless you had a way to opt-in.
I remember seeing this on MUSHes. I had this great plot planned where loads of people got infected by some vampire-disease, there was a timeline for symptoms and so on. Players hated it, except for the few who got really into the plot and loved it. Next time I tried it, I had learned better. I asked OOCly for volunteers for an unspecified plot. That went a lot better.
MUSHes? What is that?
*feels old* Text based multi player RPGs. A bit like MUDs but instead of character classes and killing mobs, the main gameplay is wandering around the world (which will have cities, etc) and roleplaying with people. The RP tends to involve lots of politics and political maneuvering.
So running one of those is like running a big LARP (live action roleplay). Lots of characters, lots of factions, lots of politics, lots of stuff going on all of the time.
I am sure your community has not been stolen at all. It is just no longer dominated by university people in awe of the wonders of internet (which where the case of MUDs and early MMOs). The playerbase now consist of lots of different kind of people, players who have lots higher standards then previous users. The game beeing disrupted by (quite literally) a virus, is someone interferring with their gameplay. There are after all many timed events in game (Brewfest, Childrens Week, Fire Festival etc.) that is expected to bring other elements in game. Unannounced features doesnt fit well with a playstyle that is not random, but infact measured and planned (as in having to show up at specific times to raid). The random element in game (the unpredictability) is not in any way as important as its rules (the predictable stuff). Stability is a huge drive. Why?
Cause the majority of MMO play is negotiating the rules. We willingly enter long periods of work-like activities (such as farming, raiding, grinding), to gain certain benefits. If they are not rewarded when the task is completed, it invalidates the effort put in.
The some tasks are outright boring, doesnt go against the spirit of the game – it actually furthers its competative nature. Who is willing to go through all that tedious stuff, to gain that extra reward? Ghostgrinding Timbermaw for the Medicin Pouch for twinks comes to mind.
Not every element of a game needs to be saturated with “fun” for the game to be rewardning and challenging. The parts that are dull, the parts that are predictable, is vital in creating the tension between “random and rules” which defines gaming.
Sad , sad state of affair. Zombie event and plague was 2 second best things ever happened to wow (first was pre-BG world pvp and ironforge/stormwinds raids)
They removed them. It is sad to see that the game degraded overtime, not improved. While I consider arenas very worthwhile addition at the core (unlike most players) -this is just another facet of the game which became progressively worse overtime (season5 considered widely the worst season ever, wotlk is worst expansion for pvp and most players are not happy with rollercoaster class balance rides blizzard is so keen on doing.
I really wish they diversified their servers a lot more, providing t the “safe experience” to the casuals but having “hardcore” servers with more world conflicts ,world changing events etc
Nice post. I remember loving the Scourge event and being absolutely baffled by the strong negative reactions by so many players who didn’t want their routine disturbed. The routine sucks, which is why I no longer play.
Because of penalties.
The problem with dynamic is that, more often than not, it leads to you getting dynamically killed in multiple ways, multiple times. Meanwhiles, whatever penalties your game has starts adding up and you find yourself down a lot of gold or exp quickly.
The reason why players are conservative and routine is because if they aren’t, usually the game punishes them for trying new things. When you can only fight a mob once a week, you have no incentive to try a new approach. When you lose 10% of your experience points each time you die, you aren’t going to be willing to eat many deaths as a party trying tougher mobs.
If you want more dynamic worlds, you need to get out of the habit of punishing players for making mistakes.
The PvP aspects of the Events that are in WoW are a sure sign of the routine everyone gets into. It’s also a sign of the Me mentality of the current player base. Personally it was a good time for group up and accomplish a goal. A help each other out moment, you scratch my back I scratch yours. But this was not the case. The hardcore PvP didn’t want these scrubs in their BGs, and the Achievement junkies were only out to get theirs and wouldn’t help anyone else. I’m a casual player, and I usually only log on the weekends to play with a few friends I’ve met online, I log for the pure social aspect of it.
Dblade, this is true if there are penalties.
But this is not true for games without penalties, especially not for the given example of the WoW zombie invasion. People could even chose to deliberately get infected to play as zombie for instance, and not get penalized in any way for it.
Kristines Posting makes me shiver. The competitive nature of e-peen grind based on “who has the most time to waste/is most resistant to dumb grind” is indeed there, as many games give players virtual carrots to do so.
I still do not accept such dumb gameplay as a necessary ingredient for MMOs. I am a bit frightened that the new trend in MMOs seems to be to ADD more grind in very slight disguise and dare to say this is content. Some years ago some games even had the premise to be almost grind-free.
@Kristine Ask and Longasc
This is indeed frightening. Kristine, did you really mean to say that: “The some tasks are outright boring, doesnt go against the spirit of the game – it actually furthers its competative nature. ” ???
A real game cannot be boring. Anything that is boring cannot be good.
Tetris is repetitive, but it is not boring. The situation changes all the time and it requires proactive thinking and decisionmaking on behalf of the player.
“Kill 1 000 000 boars” is boring, the routine of killing 1 boar never changes, all the hunter bots prove that.
How is that competitive? What is this bringing to the spirit of the game?
What does the title “killed a million boars” say for this player?
Is he clever? Is he creative? Does he have fast reactions? High APM?
No – all it says is – this is the guy who spent X hours doing the same thing over and over.
Now that makes me really gelous…
And such behaviour should be incouraged? Rewarded?
Why? Why would someone, even a kid, let alone a grown person with a job, want to spend his time playing my game? Doing chores, that we already agree are boring?
Isn’t being fun the whole point of gaming? Is this not an entertainment “industry”?
Granted, a game can be repetitive AND fun – take a look at all the minigames like Tetris and Bejeweled.
But a game can be repetitive and boring, and thats the way MMOs are going.
The easiest way for a developer to stretch the playtime of his game is to put some insanely large number in the “Kill X mobs” quest, or the “reach X reputation”.
If the boar had several abilities that he used at random, that required me, as a player, to make decisions on the spot, anything that would make it a challenge, that would be a fun achievement.
If I am challenged, I am having fun. If I have to hit something moving fast, I have fun. If I have to solve a hard puzzle, I have fun. If I have to equip my toon in an effective way, I have fun.
If I have to move a pebble from one place to another, I dont have fun, I am bored. This is not a challenge. Anyone can do it, just a matter of time.
And if it all comes down to who has more spare time… I dont think this is a game, and if it is, I dont wanna play – you win.
Basically, what I gleaned from my own comment is…
Developers in MMOs tend to stress the impact of time as a resource in current MMOs.
This turns out to be a visious circle.
It doesnt matter if you do something effectively, it only matters if you have done it or not.
To use the 1 mil. boars example.
Say you want to make a boar achievement. Instead of making a “kill 100 boars for 3 minutes” or “kill 100 boars naked” achievement, the devs make “kill 1 mil boars”.
The first two examples promote creativity, the last promotes grinding.
Of course, grinding makes the player linger at this stage of the game longer, and ultimately makes the game longer.
But come on! Is this what makes a good game? How long it takes to play it through?
This is not an MMO, WoW is not an MMO!
It is a singleplayer game, that gets expansions every 3 months.
As soon as you reach max level and kill the last boss in the instance, you re done… wait for the next expansion, for more singleplayer content.
We will put more levels, a new boss, more rep to grind, more honour to grind, more badges to grind.
Once you grind all that… wait for the next expansion.
Suppose you had a maxed out character right now – what would you do?
longasc-wow is the exception, most MMO have pretty firm penalties to encourage time spent. The zombie thing was not so much that it punished players through game mechanic penalties, but that it monopolized players attention and prevented them from doing anything but. After the shine of the event wore off, people just couldn’t get anything done.
ssand-you’d never kill the boar. Reason why MMO games have a hate system is that a truly unpredictable mob is impossible to deal with. Players can’t usually react fast enough to deal with things that are unpredictable without some way of reading behaviors. That’s why the goblin has an animation before he throws a bomb so you can stun him and the healers can get ready to heal all the damage.
Some raiding friends of mine and I were talking about the incoming patch, and it seemed that we were all most nostalgic for the game as it was when we first started playing. One guy wanted to go back to BWL, another missed world PvP from before the BG explosion. For my part, I started leveling a character not too long before the zombie invasion, and I just keep eating the WotLK-style game up with a spoon.
As near as we could figure, it came down to this: We got into WoW because we were promised a certain game that we wanted to play and that we did not receive. Because we didn’t get the game we thought we were (whatever it was: virtual world, endless battlefield, digital version of tabletop RPGs,) we had to learn to love the game we got, warts and all.
Every patch, every hotfix, every new tier of content then becomes someone messing with the game we taught ourselves to enjoy. And we hate that, because while we may not have gotten the game we wanted at first, after a certain point we were playing a game we wanted to play. We didn’t marry the girl we loved, but we sure love the girl we married.
I didn’t learn to love a game full of random events and human-controlled NPCs dropping their idea of a good time in my lap. I learned to love the bite-size, carefully portioned out raiding scene. Someone takes that game away and hands me his idea of a fulfilling online gaming experience (Oh dear, rain has doubled all travel times! I think I’ll handle this crisis by not logging in.) and I’m not going to be too happy. This has nothing to do with any personal failings or constipated thinking, and everything to do with how people want to spend their leisure time.
Zombie event digression: Atmospheric, immersive, maddening. I never felt more a part of Azeroth than I did when my character was sprinting for the safety of the Undercity (then the single most secure location on the planet.) I also gained exactly zero levels during the event, something that tied indirectly into losing a player to a more advanced guild months down the line.
The failure of the zombie event was that it was a something for a different game. WoW’s about the endgame, full stop. The first 79 levels of WoW are a questionnaire asking you whether or not you want to raid at 80, and which role you want to take when you do. Anything that gets in the way of a smooth transition from the first yellow “!” to dropping Raid Boss X is actively working against the goal the game teaches you to shoot for. It does not belong.
Guild Wars has a pretty good “aggro” system. Mobs target usually the first player that comes in ranges and attacks them.
But aggro can break, if the player does not damage them enough and another char nukes a lot, they will go for the nuker. Distance to the mob and damage dealt play a role, but there is no “aggrometer” or taunt mechanic involved.
Tanking does actually not exist outside of some hyper specialized builds, mostly “tanks” are melees that do “corner-blocking” and prevent mobs from getting through to the others. Minion Masters are often used to produce minions as “decoy” targets for mobs.
I guess we could use some more unpredictability and less focus on the hate system, even some randomness.
The game “nuke till you have 90% of the tanks aggro and then stop” while watching an aggro meter is quite boring and enforces the holy trinity from EQ times even more.
To spin at least somewhat a connection to the topic: Players got so used to this system that they often cannot imagine MMO gameplay without that anymore at all.
…which is why I tend to brainstorm new mechanics. 😉
Turning this away from WoW. I whole heartly agree with orginal post starter subject about the stagnation of game events and how they turn even the best role-player into another mindless drone. I invite you you to investigate a game I played a long time ago Istaria: Chronicles of the Gifted (formerly Horizons: Empire of Istaria[1]. This game was going to be something new that would have been a cure for what we are writing about, if things had worked out better for the company and game mechanics. Best crafting I have ever done to date was in that game also. Ireally did enjoy it but somethings just didnt work out I hope someone comes up with something along these lines.
Ooh, I *loved* the zombie war, and was very sad when Blizz caved to the Serious Grinders and stopped it. Sure, people are free to have whatever gaming style they have and whatever preferences they have, but I myself find it really Weird to expect that a fantasy game environment will be *more* predictable than the real world (there are plagues and hurricanes and disasters and all *sorts* of things that ruin plans and break routines in the real world).
On TheVentCo (I know, bizarro server anyway hahaha) people were being pretty creative with the zombie story. Player-undead armies gathering here and there to attack cities, people in the cities (at least once or twice; not often enough imho) having actual organized plans to deal with them. People were actually thinking, being creative, doing something *different*. I’d love it if strange random things would happen in WoW (much) more often.
I’ve been playing WoW since just about the start of BC, and the trend is definitely for everything to be easier (mounts at level thirty? fire without wood? spiced wolf meat without spices??), everyone to be more and more the same (sure, anyone can ride anything! Taurens on chocobos! Why not!), and everything to be more predictable. It’s disheartening.
This inspired me to write sort of a counterreaction to why unpredictable behavior is bad at my blog, albeit a tongue-in-cheek one. Post is at http://mmomisanthrope.wordpress.com/2009/07/12/unpredictable-behavior/
@Dblade
I’ve read your article, and would like to write an opposing comment here, hope you take it as continued debate, and nothing personal.
Your example is of a low level character, who embarks on a trip to the next “leveling zone”, and on the road is caught up in the skirmish of a band, raiding the nearby town. He doesnt have much of a chance and is frusttrated by the raid, that interrupted his daily routine of “living”.
Hmmm… so you’re saying we should lose all sense of adventure?
The metaphor in your example is very strong, it is actually a cliche. A perfect example.
Ever since Little Red Ridinghood hit the road to her grandma’s house, taking the trip along the dusty road in the forest is a hallmark for adventure, unexpected trouble and struggle to overcome huge odds.
I won’t mention other fantasy books, the “Lord of the rings” will suffice:
‘It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out of your door,’ he used to say. ‘You step into the Road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there is no knowing where you might be swept off to.’
We all know what happens next 🙂
And I do believe this sense of adventure, this thirst for the unknown is what motivates people to play fantasy games, fantasy MMOs in particular.
Your character is frustrated to be ganked by raiding goblins, or to end up in a plagued land…
Do you think Red Ridinghood was happy to meet the Big Bad Wolf?
Was Bilbo happy to be chased by goblins or Frodo by Nazgul?
And yet this is the excitement we all crave. At what point do we turn from adventurers, hungry to jump in the mouth of trouble, to take on every dark alley and every gloomy forest, to grumpy old men, little hobits, each living in his own hole in the ground, not wanting to hear of the outside world?
I understand there should be “living” and housing and a little bit of daily routines, so you can submerge into your character actually living a life. But since when do players prefer day-to-day boredom before adventure?
Does every adventure have to be planned?
“OK, I am going to kill me a dragon on Friday, then I will get ambushed by several bandits on Saturday, I am going to sqeeze the defence of Helm’s deep on Sunday, just between breakfast and the noon show on TV…”
If you want to play dress-up, you can play Sims, you can play it online even. There are several Barbie adventure games out there…
But when you play “World of warcraft”, and there’s a big bad Lich King on the cover, flaming eyes, frosty sword and all… dont you know what you are getting yourself into? Dont you actually expect to be fighting an evil foe? Why the outcry of frustration?
You are *so* spot on with this article. WoW has become a job- daily quests? Don’t we play games because we do the same stuff over and over every day at work? What happened to a game being an escape from that?
My fondest WoW memories date back to the opening of the AQ Gates…and that was like 3+ years ago…sad. So sad. The zombie and scourge events have been okay, but too short (zombie too short, scourge kinda repetive).
I’m afraid we’ll never get an unpredictable game thanks to the success of WoW. After all, I still play it. 🙁
“And yet this is the excitement we all crave.”
Just a short reply here. Unfortunately, the opposite seems to be the case. We who grave for the excitement, risk and reward and so on are a minority. The majority of MMO players have been spoiled with the endless supply of rewards with no risks. The sense of adventure and the source of excitement is gone. Games like WoW have truly become soulless. Dulled by the unimaginative content based on repetition.
Someone mentioned Diablo series here. I never enjoyed those myself. I did play them a bit. But if you still wondering where Blizzard took out the core of their customer base, it is from those games. They have said this, one developer specifially told in an internview that what they learned from Diablo was invaluable (not exact words) . Ask yourself, what type of players did enjoy Diablo series? And you will have answer to why WoW is what it is today. Blizzard made a very good deduction there. A business decision. I have no doubt that Blizzard, if they so choose, could make some of the very best dynamic content, but their core customer base would object.
I wouldn’t go so far as to bash the entire game just for one element.
Diablo is not a bad game and WoW isn’t either. It’s just that they both hve their problems, and the common problem is repetitiveness.
It seems to me that the developers are taking the easy way out and instead of striving to find a model that doesn’t feel boring and repetitive, they extend the play time of the game in the easyest way possible.
As to the community, I don’t think they would mind an alternative, as long as you show some character and push them in the right directions. Right now the game tends to promote the “spoiled brat” behaviour, where if you don’t get what you want, you just stomp your foot and the devs are at your service.
At Dblade’s blog I made the comparisson to a firm, where you have the two extremes of unwanted behaviour.
At one hand you have the die-hard raiders, who play 14-15 hours a day, just to “farm” all reagents for the raid, compared to a sweatshop factory workers. What’s wrong with that playstyle, I hope noone is asking such a question 🙂
At the other hand you have the “casuals” who get all kinds of titles just for showing up online, compared to unemployed people, living on social security money, just sitting at home and drinking beer.
A “middle class” playstyle where you put up some (reasonable) effort and get a corresponding award, is what should be the goal in my oppinion. It requires more development effort to achieve though, simply mass-producing template style dungeons aint gonna cut it 🙂