Five Cardinal Rules for MMOs

Five Cardinal Rules for MMOs
From a long disgruntled gamer

I. CHALLENGE AND REWARD THE PLAYERS, NEVER PUNISH THEM

This ought to seem self-evident right? Well apparently it isn’t. Punishment to players comes in a wide variety of forms – from excessive grinding, to forcing players to spend tons of money just to respec or alter their own characters, etc.

Players enter into an MMO for several key reasons, the two predominant ones being
1. To meet and play with new people and
2. To escape into a fun world where they can genuinely enjoy themselves.

A MMO should never resemble work, but how often is it that MMOs end up seeming like just
that, work? Gamer designers often seem to have this notion that they have to include all different forms of grinding into games in order to force the players to play for longer amounts of time. This is silly, however, because then players get burnt out and decide to stop playing those games. Grinding XP for levels is something that exists in every game, but ideally it shouldn’t feel like work. Challenge your players with various different means of obtaining the things in the game that they really want. Tasks should be difficult, attainable, and fun – not simply require one to hit the attack button for three hours. If there is an item that players will want, then include more than one method of getting that item so that players with different gaming styles can still attain the same end goal – and most particularly, never put something in the game that is so “uber” that it gives someone an unfair advantage and then also make it impossible to attain except for someone willing to pour in hours of effort grinding for it.

I’m about sick to death of people who can’t invest 12 hours a day in a game getting left behind because they simply cannot or will not waste all of the effort involved in gathering together gear powerful enough just to be able to get the item(s) that they really want. Grinding XP, grinding gold, limitations on respeccing characters: these are all punishments to the players. Players ought to be rewarded for their efforts, creativity, and dedication: all in the forms of XP, “gold”, items (both useful and fun), and special events.

II. KNOW AND CHERISH YOUR COMMUNITY

How many MMOs have I played where it seemed like the designers didn’t actually much care what the community wanted? Most of them, actually. The two greatest exemplars, so far as I’ve seen, for games which actively cater toward their community’s wants are Guild Wars and City of Heroes/Villains; most other game designers don’t seem to bother.

Your community is your lifeblood, they pay the bills. Their happiness equals your financial happiness – and they are the ones who know what they want in the game. Therefore, you ought to cherish and cater to them, not only to your own desires for what the game will look like. The greatest crime that you can commit against your community is that of money grubbing. If you begin making more money than the community thinks is just, considering the amount of work that you put into expanding and improving the game, then the players will grow jaded and negative sentiment towards the game designers will increase. For some this will be enough to simply stop playing the game, and for others it will simply lessen their enjoyment of it.

So how do you come to know and cherish your gaming community? Three words: Ask, Act, and Surprise. Ask your community what they want. Take in their ideas and opinions, honestly consider how viable they are as well as how many people seem to want the same thing and then consider how you might implement them. If viable, even include players in the think-tank process for the concepts implementation. Act on their ideas. If you listen but never include player ideas then the players will soon realize that you don’t actually care about their desires. Lastly, surprise your community. Pleasant surprises come in several forms. Players want in-game surprises for rewards, special events, etc. that they did not know were there: don’t just throw everything in a game-guide and hope that people don’t find out if they don’t want to know, some things should be random and fun – even if very few people ever have the pleasure of stumbling across it. A secret place or item, a hidden event – all of these things increase peoples enjoyment of the game. Surprise your community with events that they didn’t know about, or new aspects of events that they were unaware of.

III. PROMOTE CREATIVITY

Don’t just allow creativity, actively promote it! The game designers create the constraints of the game, therefore unless you are actively promoting player creativity then you are, in fact, limiting it. Players want to be able to have an impact on their world – they want the characters that they worked so hard on to leave a lasting impression. It becomes quite discouraging when we work on leveling and building our characters for so long, just to end up with no tangible impact on the world. By the way, having NPCs that randomly yell out “we love you Mr. McTitan!” is not sufficient.

Another point, particularly in MMORPGs, is role playing. I’m sick to death of supposed MMORPGs that don’t actually do anything to support RP; emotes are not sufficient. This can come in many forms, from including locations suitable to varying sorts of RP scenarios to including fun and interesting ways of customizing your characters appearance. Even including modules that allow players to more fully describe their characters for other players is a wonderful step in the right direction.

IV. DIVERSIFY

This means just what it says – diversity is the key to watering down the grinding process. If players end up only being able to spend their time in one or two ways, particularly if there is only one way to obtain the items that they want or to grind to the levels that they desire – then they will get burnt out. As for grinding levels, different types of quests would be wonderful! Courier quests, kill count quests, objective quests – these have all become common fare. How about a puzzle quest or other problem-solving quest? Make people actually use their mind on occasion. Also, include other methods of gaining experience and increasing level.

In most games methods other than fighting and killing monsters (aside from the XP gained from quest completion) can scarcely manage to account of 1% of the XP gained towards your next level, but if there were more interesting ways to gain XP aside from questing and killing – even if those only amounted to 20-30% of the XP you needed would still help to break the chain of monotony that is grinding. Add into that some differing types of quests, bonuses to XP gain, etc, and you now have a system that allows people options; and options are what players want.

V. KEEP THE MYSTERY

I know I mentioned this before, but I feel that it deserves reiteration. Some people want everything spilled out to them in some sort of guide so that they can power through a game as quickly as possible and attain everything that their hearts may desire. That’s all well and good, and I suppose that those people have just as much right to have their whims catered to as the rest of us – but don’t give everything away. You don’t have to include every little surprise and nuance into a guide so that it ends up being common knowledge and ruining it for everyone who enjoys exploring and finding surprises.

When you think about it, guides actually hurt the game as they make it easier for people to rush through and thus, not have to play for as long. On the plus side, guides can make grinding a less onerous process and so I’m not entirely against them, I merely think that they should allow for aspects of the game to remain hidden so as not to infringe upon the desires of the rest of us. These don’t have to be crucial aspects of the game, merely small hidden surprises that help to enrich the game for those of us who enjoy that sort of thing.

VI. WHO AM I AND WHY SHOULD GAME COMPANIES CARE?

Who am I? No one important, just a gamer that has had many years to grow rather frustrated with the MMO industry. I’ve played Horizons, Guild Wars, City of Heroes/Villains, Planetside, Perfect World, World of Warcraft, Final Fantasy XI, as well as numerous free MMOs and assorted MUDs. I love the MMO concept, but have become utterly frustrated because I have yet to find a game which truly suited me. I adored Guild Wars because of the game designers and the community, but eventually found that it was too pvp based for me. I enjoyed many aspects of FFXI but the grinding was horrendous. City of Heroes is still a wonderful game, but I’m afraid it does occasionally get boring – but this is likely more due to the fact that I can’t get any of my friends to play it. Planetside was fun – but lagged horribly and eventually the community dwindled. World of Warcraft is still fun, some of the time. I have a love/hate relationship with WoW, in that I enjoy it for a while, then get sick of it, and overall I love to hate it. Mostly, I resent how much the dev team apparently cares nothing for large portions of the game’s community.

Out of all the things that I’ve mentioned here, I think that the most important is listening to and rewarding your community. Because if a dev team focuses on that, then the other aspects will often take care of themselves: at least to the point of becoming bearable. So now I leave this rant as it is, to go off and hopefully find myself a game better suited to me wants and desires – perhaps I’ll pick back up CoH, or perhaps I’ll spend another month complaining about WoW; time will tell.

O.K. I lied, one final thing. My top three favorite MMO games, ranked in order according to how well they cater to the things I listed above compared with how fun the game actually is.
1. City of Heroes: It’s a great game and the devs seem to care about the players.
2. Guild Wars: Terrific game – for a while. Dev team is absolutely wonderful.
3. World of Warcraft: It’s a fun game until I get sick of it and want to throw it out the window. The dev team ignores at least half of the principles that I stated above, but somehow I still manage to get sucked back, in part because I have friends on there I suppose.

Daniel Wilson
Disappointed Gamer
4/24/2009