Slashdot Mirror
Incentive To Keep Playing MMORPGs?
Thanks to RPGDot for their opinion piece discussing why gamers would want to continue playing MMORPGs over long periods of time. The piece asks: "What is the best way to keep a player in an MMORPG? Reward their effort? Players will never have enough rewards to satisfy them for long periods of time. Remove all advancement limits? Players will complain that there is no goal. Reward their patience? Sure, but the gameplay has to be pretty engaging, if skills are gained through time instead of effort", but concludes without a definitive answer, begging the question - is there one?
Seriously, what IS the point of MMORPGs? Ultimately, people are going to get bored of doing repetitive tasks to increase their hitpoints and get nifty new gadgets. After seeing my college roomate get totally sucked into Ultima Online, I haven't been able to touch any game in the genre. There's a whole lot more out there in life to do then sit down and get a monitor tan while playing Evercrack. It's like all these people have to live their lives through their game character instead of going out and actually experiencing life.
I think the first asheron's call had the right idea: create an epic storyline, with quests and events, and the base the outcomes on what the community does.
For example, in AC1, there was a period during which these shadowy beings began to invade. over a couple of months, these creepy floating fortresses started appearing outside towns, strange new monsters appeared, and new dungeons opened up. Over the coming months, quests and events precedeing the resurection of a demon-god began to appear. Some players swore to help revive the god, and others tried to defend the shirnes and prevent it. One server actually held back the march of darkness most of the month but finally fell and the entire world was assaulted by this devil.
I am simplfying it a lot but you get the idea. I had a lot of friends that started playing the game more than ever when this event was going on, and I think something like thisis the key to keeping your customers.
The "sandbox model" in which players are just let loose in a static world to kill respawning mobs over and over isn't appealing to about 90% of the potential MMORPG players (that is anyone that plays RPGs) If they want to grab that market, they need to make the game as interesting as a brandnew epic RPG every month. "new content every month? that will cost a fortune!" you say. But I say "whoever figures out a way to do it without breaking the bank or hiking subscription costs will be the one that comes out on top"
On Wall Street they say "buy low, sell high" On the pad we say, "buy high, sell high" Isn't that somehow better?
If your players stop playing your game, they have to reformat their brains to stop thinking about it. They have to deal with everyday life, which is annoying, because they've been neglecting it for so long. Thus you don't have to try very hard to keep them in the game, they want to stay in.
Just like how all those people who are getting a monitor tan reading slashdot at noon need to get out and actually experience life.
Now I have never played Lineage myself but from what I've read about it this is a good example of game that has such a scale. Once you have gotten a strong character you still have other things too look forward to, mostly Guilds. Once you have found a guild you can build your guild and capture castles.
Now these high up players may eventually own one of these castles but this still gives them many things to do; for example they must defend their castle, they must manage it, and perhaps they eventually get bored with this and go to capture a second castle?
Games should not have a definete ending for the players. The best online games I've seen are the ones that let the players fight against each other and put in balances so that no one power can ever overwhelm another.
Why is there a difference between an online game an and offline one? Build a game system or engine in which you can run different story lines or "campaigns" if you will. If you release a game that can only ever be played one way, it'll get stale (something like HeroQuest, the boardgame, for example). People who game because they like gaming will come back for interesting story lines and different types of role playing and character interaction. People who want to live off selling items on ebay can do that anywhere, but gamers who really play the game want variety and a chance to play characters.
These questions could be the same as the ones to real life. What is the point of living? What is the point of going to work? Is there a goal? What is the goal? Yet numbers of people find life exceptionally fun, intriguing and worth living.
:P). It allows them to make choices without guilt or consequence. An MMORPG needs to have such a wide set of goals and choices to get to those goals, that a person's insatiable, psychologically proven, need for more more more takes over. The status quo is never good enough for people when there's an option.
/emote. Right now, people are too limited.
:P) still with you. I once knew a guy who proclaimed to be a video game fanatic. He didn't play many games. The reason? He owned a business, and that was the same kind of high to a whole new level.
Like previously mentioned, content is a wonderful, albeit expensive way, to keep people interest, coming back, and enjoying their online lives. But then, that's like reading a book. The game, like mentioned, has to be interactive. I believe this needs to be taken a full step further, to full interactivity.
MMORPGs can allow people to become things they can't be in real life (like real jackals
Another invention into interactivity is communication. Letting people interact with each other in brand new ways. I personally can't wait until they reach such a level that most any act is possible, that there is a graphical version of
The final thing, which is hard to balance between no consequence, is risk. There has to be some risk of loss. A game is no fun if it's too easy. There have to be ways you can end up where you began, with only the experience you've gained (RL kind, not ingame kind
Games need to emulate the openness of life without the consequences. They can be a person's release from the govt., from taxes, from the DMCA, from weird slashdot modders modding their great posts offtopic, from horrible cubicle life, from anything that has to exist in real life but they can't stand.
Is all this possible? No. You can't code life, yet. But you can make damn sure you come close, and if you do, people will want to escape into your world.
a) the person that discovers it will become very wealthy for a while
b) everyone will be playing the game and not working/farming/eating/reproducing and the human race will die out!
So if anyone knows the answer- do your duty to mankind and keep your mouth shut! Being very rich doesn't help if there's no food to buy, and no babes/bros to impress!
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"The best thing, IMO, is to let players start running their own worlds/servers at some point. The company could even move on to something else, and just keep selling client software (or not). It could even move into the new world of independent servers and sell game items and services, or contract tools and services to the people running independent servers. (On the other hand, maybe they would just be putting themselves out of business, I don't know :)
:)
This is generally where I'd like to see online gaming/entertainment go, maybe a mixture of free and commercial software, but with low barriers on people who want to run servers. This is how the Web happened
reed
VOS/Interreality project: www.interreality.org
No.
Putting the romance back into necromancer.
Another idea, if you just want to keep players, is to allow very high level players become gods, and they can help run the game, and add to it.
VOS/Interreality project: www.interreality.org
However, I argue that the main purpose of those games is still to have fun. Back in the days of MUDs, we were really roleplaying. I really was Ishap, the bastard son of a knight and on my way to become an evil paladin (my orcish half didn't allow me otherwise). However, those were times when only the truly dedicated people played on-line roleplaying games. Now you have all those casual gamers who are more interested talking about the Palestinian conflict or the newest comic hero hitting the big screen than playing the game, and most MMORPGs became glorified chat rooms.
I personally feel that there is no way to rescue MMORPGs. They will never become engaging enough for people to keep playing. Hardcore gamers will still use MUDs for their out-of-this-world experience, and the rest will keep chatting in Everquest and other games. Game designers may make these games more engrossing by creating a linear storyline on a mass scale. Sony had the chance to do so with Star Wars Galaxies - they could've written a script for the next three real-time years of the game, which would include plenty of hard-coded events that would push the gamer forward. For example, an attack on a planet would send all gamers from there to other planets, as refugees, forcing them to start from scratch (but with more experience already, making it easier to work themselves up in the new society). Or a rising status of a planet (new spaceport, for example) would increase job opportunities, tourism, etc. Players could vote to join the Republic or the Trade Federation or choose a despotic planet where the game designers would choose for them. To make a long story short, players would keep being entertained if there was a dynamic world. Instead, all you get are very static worlds, where all the players can do is to join the queue to kill another monster or clean 100 bowls to achieve a higher level as a potential cook.
I don't play a game for a long period of time. Maybe for a week or two or three, then it goes on my shelf - and even during that time I'm playing it, maybe only for like an hour or two a day, if at all.
However, I played EverQuest for about two years religiously, and have been playing SWG for the past two months almost 3-4 hours a night, and I don't see that stopping any time soon.
Why?
Because of the community of people I play the game WITH. THAT is my incentive. If I didn't have the people in the player city I'm in to play with, I probably would have dropped SWG about a month ago. But, I've found a great group of people (met them in EQ back in 1999) to latch on to and to play the game WITH, and THAT has given the three MMOG's I've been with them in (EQ, AO, SWG) the desire to keep coming back. I stuck it out in AO for 6 months during it's launch phase because of the people I was playing with, instead of throwing it away the first week like many others did.
These games are social, and if you tap into the right social buttons, then you will come back for more and more. These days, I hardly find myself doing anything to advance any of my exp bars (I'm already a Master Musician and Master Entertainer, and the Entertainer skill set is primarily a SOCIAL one...see the correlation?) but I am hanging around our city and other cantinas to be social with others.
Heck, we just moved our city to a better location, and it looks like a city now. There's streets and intersections, and people in those intersections...It feels like home. Only a great group of players can pull that off.
PVP in MMORPGs has always been a niche culture, but no MMORPG has stepped up and snagged that niche and made it its own. UO did that for a while in it's first two years (especially before their first expansion) but there's no trace of that left. Planetside tried hard to snag the PVP niche but failed miserably due to the fact that all Planetside is is another Everquest where your target isn't a mob, it's another group of people. This is PVP but it's not the kind of PVP I'm talking about. In an ideal MMORPG, you have the same casual atmosphere where PVP isn't 100% required. You still have some incentive to fight monsters in dungeons. But the focus of the game is 1v1 to 5v5 pvp. No massive scale stuff only small groups.
But my opinion is bias because my ideal PVP situation would simply be the early days of UO when the level treadmill meant nothing because you could script yourself a nice macro to max your characters in a week, then go out and kill everything in sight. Sure you have your overwhelming influx of people who will complain about PKers and macroers, but if an MMORPG came out that encouraged this kind of behavior, the complainers would simply be told to stfu and find a new game.
You're right, I wouldn't steal a car. But if it were possible, I sure as hell would download one!
It could have been put more pleasantly but DrSkwid is correct, it raises the question. Begging the question is "to assume that which was to be proved in a discussion, instead of adducing the proof or sustaining the point by argument."
I hereby inform you that I have NOT been required to provide any decryption keys.
The thing is, the current centralized server model lets the game companies enforce a form of copy protection that really works. I'd venture to say it's one of the only successful forms of copy protection (DRM) ever implemented, or likely to ever be implemented. (Even dongles can be copied)
I doubt they will be happy to give up this system, unless they can safely say they are missing out on something huge by sticking to it.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
Ebay.
One thing that will help hold players longer is more variety. That will benefit the entire community over time, too.
You shouldn't have just 42 monsters, 4 lands and 150 kinds of weapons and armor. That in itself - even if it sounds like a lot - is limiting right from the start.
Game designers should be adding new, detailed, interesting content all the time. They should design new kinds of armor, weapons, monsters, lands, areas of the world, NPCs and everything else. Even after all this time, humans still haven't discovered everything about our world, so why should you be able to discover everything about an MMORPG world in two weeks? Also, the actual land/map/world should evolve over time, too. The landscape needs to change. Not as quickly as weapons or new monsters are added, but it should change none the less. And new lands shouldn't actually just me new worlds or continents. They could be new areas of the existing map previously "unknown to the world" or something.
And these things should be inherent to the game, not simply available through an expansion pack that only a few people can afford or want to buy. It should be something added to the entire game as part of the total package.
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
Of course there is a way...the social atmosphere.
Think about it..what is the difference between an MMORPG, and a game you play on your console at home? The thounsands of other people that make up the "world" you play in online combined with the immersive experience of playing in that world. That is what should be a MAIN attraction in online gaming. Of course, the content provider cannot dictate the quality of those playing the game, but they can help with:
*Limitless ammounts of clothing and items to make you unique in a crowded world
*Countless communication options (from chat, to emotes, etc) to allow for meaningful conversation and roleplay.
Of course there is always a tactical and gameplay component to these games, and to some this is the only reason for playing. But that will not keep people coming back alone, or else you are out of the game as soon as a better action packed game comes along, or the current one gets old (and it will sometime).
In my opinion, the social atmosphere is the only reason to continue to play MMORPGs for an extended period of time. I think many roleplayers would agree!
I've been thinking about this for a bit. Probably the number 1 reason I kept playing the MUD I was on in college, was because of the player-run quests. Anyone could take some time to prepare a quest, though the quests prepared by the heros and immortals tended to be more interesting and have better rewards since they could create special items and mobs. (Mortal quests typically tended to be quizzes or hide-and-seek games for random spare equipment)
In other words, player-generated content allowed the MUD to sustain its popularity. In the MMORPG world, it seems that many of the attempts to give players such "powers" have backfired, usually due to disgruntled players.
So I've been thinking... what if the game had "quest points". These could be earned by participating in a quest (not just by "winning" the quest, players would quickly tire). Players could then use these quest points in one of two ways.
First: expend quest points to create a quest of their own. Use a fairly high starting cost to make sure that players doing this have participated in enough quests to understand what they are doing in running one. That gets the player setup with a basic gofer quest (unique item is dropped somewhere in a given dungeon, find the item and win). More points can be spent to get special items created, special monsters created, or for enough points, a major plot inserted. (All of these are created by the player, and perhaps edited by the staff). Some restriction should be in place on # of simultaneous quests.
Second: after participating in a quest, a player can choose to donate quest points back to the player who created the quest. This will create a feedback system and allow the popular creators to host quests more often. To prevent people from hoarding quest points, establish limits where if they don't donate quest points to hosts, they will receive fewer and fewer points.
You could use donated quest points to establish a ranking scheme, where "newbie" hosts can only create certain types of quests until enough people have donated points to them for them to try for bigger quests.
Aside from this idea... the "Hero" idea from my MUD was pretty good incentive to keep playing and exploring. When you reached a high enough level you became a Hero and were given a few extra powers. However, as you gained levels, monsters would give less and less XP, discouraging people from fighting forever in one place, and requiring them to explore the area to learn more about it.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
Keeping players is very important if server/game owners can't find new ones. I have no incentive to play an MMORPG. I'm not sure which one to try or how much network bandwith it uses; it seems too expensive; it probably requires Microsoft Windows; I probably don't have time to play, as I browse Slashdot too much...
==========
There are two types of people: those who are in the world, and those who aren't.
Make a game with good gameplay. You shouldn't need to bribe people to play your stinking game.
Its like when you were the first person to get a SNES on the block, you ran out into the street and shouted out "Yes!!" (ok so maybe you didn't but you get the idea.) But if you look, relatively, closely at MMO communities there are always a few players who get put down in that game's history as "first person to reach the highest level", "first person to kill X uber-monster" or "X player who owns the largest and most valuable house". Or something along those lines.
I play a game like that, although the graphics are very retro(mostly because it's hard to find graphic artists that play these sorts of games), and after a year of playing it I managed to make it to the dev levels(of which there are almost as many as regular player levels).
/.ing it.
What's really sweet is, after you get up a few levels, you get a realtime python interpreter, so if I want to make up stuff on the fly, I can. There's nothing cooler than casting a spell by literally making it up as you go along, although regular players can only use canned tested/balanced spells. Somebody should really make a "gameplay safe" interpreted language for spellcasting, even if it was only a quarter as neat it'd still beat the robes off of just about any other system.
And no, I'm not going to name it on here and get everyone ticked at me for
The biggest thing I have to say is that you should do a little dividing of the playing field.
For power gamer types, you can have a really difficult server where they will find many more people just like them. They will have no restrictions on how much they can play or do, but getting to the top will take tons of effort and time.
For more casual gamers, the kind that may get frustrated by how much time and effort it takes to do anything (WHAT?? I have to kill 300 Rats to get to level 2????), you should have a Social/Casual server. One in which "levelling" aspects of the game are restricted. You can only be in a fighting area of the game for a certain time amount per day/week. This would allow people that like to do things socially, or maybe only have time to play 1 or 2 nights a week or weekends to enjoy the game and progress, but not have tons of freaking power gamers running around to get jealous of.
The other main aspect that is critical, is that you need to make the game require some cooperation to reach goals. It can't be just click click click wow, I'm a god.... Next game! Make the game require teamwork and creativity to go forward. You also have to allow power gamer types to have influence over the world. They have to be able to affect the storyline, and be spontaneously inventive. Otherwise they will hit any limit you imagine.
There's certainly more than one way about it. You could...
Encourage players to build. That element keeps people around on MUDs, and also explains why some people actually still play Quake 1!
Constantly revise. Even if players aren't building, the developer/admin can do little things to keep the challenges up. I could cite Diablo II here. I was burned out on it until I started playing with the 1.10s patch. The synergy bonuses really changed my approach to how I build my chars in the game.
Community! That's why so many people stay on MUDs for years at a time, because they have already made friends there, and even people who retire from playing stop by every once in a while to catch up. I'll cite Diablo II again, because the community's not really there. You're too busy getting spammed so you'll have to meet players through other channels (IM, Email, Message Board, etc.) Kinda sloppy there.
Even so, I'd almost consider the community the most important part of an MMOG. That would be why players in MUDs tend to stay with the same guild/class. Even the weakest guilds tend to have their social circles who are devoted to the guild till they retire to RL. Of course, there are always the guild-hoppers who liven up the community in their own special way. *Raises hand.... GUILTY!!!!*
That being said, aside from community, you gotta expand/revise in order to keep the game fresh.
Th-th-th-th-th-that's all Folks!
The solution is obvious but probably quite hard to implement. Let's look at some of the common misconceptions that the various existing MMORPGs have about what is needed in a game.
Was it ever the graphics? The elitist in me wants to say "No", but that's not really true. The better looking the game the more likely I was to give it a try. However if a friend says "It sux like Gigli" I wouldn't buy it. Similarly if a friend recommended a game with comparitively ugly graphics, I'd buy the game he recommended. Good graphics are neither necessary nor sufficient for a good game.
What about character advancement? That's a little fun, appealing to my over-acheiver instinct, but I'm not that obsessive about it. It's kinda fun starting out as a wuss that couldn't kill Mutant Wasps, into a walking tank that could destroy assault cyborgs without breaking a sweat. This is cool, but alone it's kinda boring right? Start off killing wasps (and getting hurt), then move up to killing panda bears (and getting hurt) etc. up to the big bad end boss. It's essentially the same just with different scenery. Fun for a little while, but it gets old. Necessary? For an RPG yes, almost by definition, but not for the general category of "Fun Game". Sufficient? Absolutely not.
Exploration? Huge, huge worlds? To some extent this is fun. But I don't want to explore a huge, huge world, and die a lot for nothing. Let's take Ultima VII, a game I consider to be quite good, in spite of many bugs. Part of the fun was roaming around finding cool stuff that the developers put in. Not quite easter eggs in that it wasn't cheating, but definitely not part of any main quest. I spent months wandering around finding new pirates to slaughter and stuff to steal and finding new sidequests. I had a magic carpet with crates and crates of cool stuff loaded onto it (ok so I cheated some, those cannons didn't just magically move themselves!). After a while I got bored, I had everything there was, and no in game obstacle was challenging enough for me to see value in further mayhem. Necessary? Yes. Sufficient? Nope.
Story? I can stay at home with nothing more than a couch, a lamp and a book and be hungry for more when I turn the last page. Seems like there is something to this one? But wait, Anarchy Online has a pretty elaborate story, and I stopped playing that game. Probably it's good, but I didn't want to read 100 pages of PDF's and download movies. In fact they made FMV's of the stories and I didn't even download them, and got bored with the game. Why? What's wrong?
I know that in a FF game, or an Ultima game, or even Space quest I am totally into the story. I read all the text, I watch all the videos, etc. But I feel like I'm part of the game in a very tangible way. I'm totally IMMERSED in the story, I'm part of it. Whether I read it, see it played out, or act it out is almost transparent to me. It happens as a consequence of playing, and when I see the text I read it without hesitation, I WANT to know what is there. When I play such a game I am disappointed when the game is finished, even if it's well concluded and there's obviously nothing more to do. I can't wait for a sequel etc. Necessary? Yes (see EQ, DAOC, EnB, SWG, etc. all losing people, all lacking a real story). Sufficient? Yes! I'll read a book forever, that has no graphics, gameplay, levelling, exploration, etc.
So the real task to a game designer, and I admit it's hard, is to figure out how to get everyone in a MMORPG so immersed in the story that they don't want to waste time levelling or camping the Grand Poobah for the Mace of Thumping. Those things will happen, and when they happen it will be fun, and people will be BEGGING to go kill another grand poohbah later, not for his Mace of Uber Thumping, but because it will be satisfying to slay such a ruthless bastard.
What will we do when the story runs it's course (hopefully only for a time)? Well if the story is written well, and it allows characters to choose sides and be immersed in whatever roles the
Begging the question is "to assume that which was to be proved in a discussion, instead of adducing the proof or sustaining the point by argument."
And I suppose a red herring isn't a fish?
Just because something is used as the name of a logical fallacy, doesn't mean that that's the only meaning, or even the primary meaning.
I dont agree with.. create an epic storyline to gather and keep players. The first rule I think is that the MMORPG game world should be big and diverse. In Anarchy Online, the world is huge, you keep walking forever, and there are so many levels, weapons, enemies etc you dont even know the tip of the iceberg. Basically you start out a street-level player doing small trade stuff and not even know the higher political level players. As you climb higher, you know too much about the game to pry yourself away or even try another MMORPG, and youve invested too much in your player there.
One thing, players should NEVER be able to buy game objects by paying the game company. I would never play such MMORPGs. Someone just comes along, hasnt played the game much and blow you to pieces.
Oh yeah, and the game should have a good social side and not just military and trade. You should be able to make friends and rely on them in small teams. Since youre in a team of real people that makes it REALLY hard to quit the game, thats like quitting your society.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
The common thread in all the Massivly Multiplayer Online Games I've seen is the eternal promise that the next patch will solve all those pesky bugs that keep the game from being what it should be.
The balance issue is not- "How can I keep my community balanced and viable?" or "Are my quests interesting and challenging enough to players?" or even "Do I have sufficiently easy/hard/numerous goals so that even the most dedicated players will always have a horizion to shoot for?"
The issues at stake are "Which gameplay issues can I afford to let slide and for how long?". "Can I promise to have fixed a particular bug one more time or do I need to actually correct it?". "How can I introduce new problems with a patch that solves old problems?". "When can I release the expansion that only costs an additional quarter of the price of the original but must be purchased if players want to get what they were promised in the original?"
It's a form of pavlov conditioning, only game publishers are relying much more heavily on negative reinforcement than people think.
Keep it fresh , Keep it new.
There are so many things that keep players interested in playing MMORPGs, I'll start with the cooler ones and work back to the basics:
1. An evolving epic story line: The assumption that MMORPGs are static is terribly flawed. There is no reason for MMORPGs to be static. A successful MMORPG will generate huge revenue, and some of this revenue should be employed for continual content production. In general this has failed in the marketplace, because of a lack of workable tools for content production, and a quality content production process. Consider if you will if you got three of the best sci fi or fantasy novelists working for your MMORPG company. Give each of these novelists a team of 10 workers and powerful content creation tools. Proceed with a plan of monthly, or even weekly, or evey daily launches of updated content. You will find no lack of subscribers eager to receive, digest, and interact with this content. It's easy to ignore this simple, yet exceptional truth, because the quality of content production in MMORPGs to date has been so poor.
2. A player involved story line: this is a corollary to the previous point. Rather than setting forth and implementing a story line that is completely planned and static, leave the option open for player interaction. Perhaps there is a war between two gods, one will win one will die, and the outcome will depend on a server basis on what the players do. What god do they support? The result - a unique permanent change to the game world that distinguishes it from others. An accomplishment that individual players can relate to, "I helped the blood god defeat the maiden of tears, and now the desert of Sune lives in eternal darkness". You of course have to be careful about what effects you put in, but in general players will be excited by anything that is measurable and permanent that they have an opportunity to contribute to.
Ok now for the really boring ones.
3. Sword of N+1
This simple tactic is used constantly. All playes strive for the magic long sword +N. But, 6 months later, there is a sword of N+1. This is a surprisingly effective tactic.
4. Social networks
The best way to keep your players is for them to develop social networks that keep them playing. The killer app of MMORPGs is the friends they meet and adventure with.
---
I support spreading santorum
...horizontal (not vertical) character growth, dynamic worlds, and serious penalties for death.
And in long... (please, hear me out)
These hybridised D&D/Chainmail-based combat systems need to go. They were fine 30 years ago, for a couple guys crowded around a card table eating pizza and drinking beer, with a DM who could change the rules on the fly. All current MMOGs do is show the limitations and oversights of such a system, especially when it's run under a DM as unforgiving as a computer.
Take, for example, the concept of hit points. They're supposedly a measure of a character's physical toughness. It's a concept that seems to make sense. After all, isn't it safe to assume that through physical training, say, a pro boxer, is tougher than you? The problem is scale; certainly a professional boxer can take a lot more of a beating than a regular guy, but if you take a regular guy and a pro boxer, and skewer them both on a greatsword, they're both going to die. MMOG convention, on the other hand, would have us believe that the pro boxer (the level 50 character) could take many, many, many stabbings before going down, where the average guy (the newbie character) keels over at the mere sight of the sword.
Honestly, take a look at hit point totals in Dark Age of Camelot as an example of typical MMOGs: a level 1 fighter will have, depending on his stats, 25-40 hit points, but that same character, by the time he's level 50, can approach 3000 hit points. That scale defies any sort of logic. As in the case with the average guy and the boxer, certainly the veteran level 50 warrior is tougher than the level 1 viking, but a factor of 120 is a bit off. More realistically, even the greenest newbie could kill the mightiest warrior if be manage to smack the warrior upside the head with a mace. Although, in games like EQ or DAoC, that couldn't happen, because the mystic, logic-shattering concept of 'levels' imparts upon the higher-level characters some sort of immunity-to-newbies forcefield. I'm not exaggerating: continuing with the DAoC example, that level 50 character could be sitting down, naked, with the level one character standing over him, wailing away with an axe for days on end, and the newbie will never connect.
So, what's the point?
The point is that obtuse concepts like levels and hit points prevent the majority of the player base from playing together. Hence, the need for robust, deep, and meaningful skill systems that allow characters to grow, change, and advance without becoming orders of magnitude more powerful. This would solve many problems; not only would it allow friends of different experience levels to play together (and anyone that's ever played an MMOG for any length of time knows how much it sucks when you're outpaced by your friends and can no longer group with them), but it would help eliminate a lot of the wasted world design.
Case in point, again: Dark Age of Camelot. During the first year of the game's release, the Camelot Hills, a low-level zone, were bustling. At any given time, there were easily a hundred people there. These days? It's a ghost town. The population has matured, and players have moved one. With the expansion pack, the few newbies who are around, anymore, play in the superior expansion zones. Camelot Hills, along with probably 90% of the game's land mass, is a ghost town. It's almost depressing to be there, now, but of course, it gets no love. The characters are older, and have more levels under their belt, so the players are clamoring for bigger mobs, new zones, and more ph4t 13wtz, and much like EQ feels now, most of the game feels forgotton.
Anyways, I'm getting ahead of myself: the short of it is that horizontal advancement would allow for 3 much needed changes:
1. Players of varying experience could still play together.
2. No more wasteful world design.
3. Perhaps most importantly, because of the sorts of changes required to make horizontal advancement possible, players could h
It's just so much harder to create original, inventive content than it is to enjoy it...
Instead these companies should focus upon providing the base content, content creation tools, and infrastructure. Then enable and empower their users to create, alter, delete as they wish (in a controlled fashion - trust ratings and staff moderation).
People are hard to amuse, but generally find it easy to amuse themselves - Old jungle saying.
Q.
Insert Signature Here
Err. wrong.. Body building, Healthy, happily married Software Consultant who prolly earns more money than you Wayne and finds your childish answer built on a complete lack of understanding of the situation, and immature need to strike out as something you dont understand. Poor little baby.. ever actually met MMORPG outside your own circle?? I guess not. How do I know this.. because I've organised real world meets for MMORPG players - and you couldnt meet a nicer and varied bunch of people. And amazingly enough.. not one of them was a 15 spotty geek in a basement - in fact the opposite was even more true.. -- Why we play them.. Er dumb sh*&.. because they are fun - why else..
I just read an article on Gamespy about Ultima X (a new MMO by the Ultima Online people) where after getting your character to a certain level, they basically ascend and become demi-beings, at which point you create a new character who is a disciple of your first, and who therefore gets some additional abilities right from the start.
Once your second character ascends, you create a new disciple that gets special abilities from your first to characters, and so on...
Sounds pretty neat to me - I have only played one or two MMOs and although I really liked levelling up the early stages (while you were rapidly gaining in abilties) it frustrated me in the later end that there was nothing to do with your godlike characters. But by continually playing in Ultima X your new characters will continue to grow - I guess they basically end up less specialised than a normal character, with the ability to perform many different traits.
This sort of thing is one of CCP's goals with EVE Online - They have a storyline with various events planned to (apparently) 2+ years out from now.
Things are kind of light on the content/events side at the moment since CCP is working on fleshing out lots of post-release bugs, but as the game shapes up and gets more stable, CCP has started kicking off occasional events and content, which should start becoming more frequent over the next months.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
To each their own but if you sit and think about you come down with this.
Every gamer wants to have fun in the game. Many MMO's still are basic treadmills just to level. In Asheron's Call I spent a lot of time on what we all called Coral Beach becuase the golems that spawned there gave the best XP. Of course it was the only one in the game so it was constantly fought over and macro'd.
Asheron's Call 2 hit the nail on the head with advancement rates but they forgot to provide a endgame or high level content soon enough. They're finally expanding it in sept's patch so that should end that problem. Sadly this delay has cost them the 90,000 subscribers they had originally. But I think MicroSoft's chat system issues and their forcing Turbine to release early hurt the game the most. Now that they've let Turbine redo the chat system and just generally let them run the game as intended it will improve and players are coming back.
SWG is another problem child in a series of games. You've got customer support issues, and you have what seems to me the slowest advancement you could possibly imagine. Each world is basically the same subset of creatures that you have to kill for money and experience. You get too little of both and since there's no personal mounts yet much of the stuff you nened to be killing for your level is too far to go for the casual player. Mounts are coming but they still need to make combat more engaging than it currently is. Taking the Shadowbane path of "You fight monsters just to gain levels for the pvp aspect" is not going to cut it becuase not everyone wants to be pvp. A typical example of a bad mission is to kill 45 Worrts so of course you'd head out of town. Guess what there are none to be found becuase spawns are mostly controlled to spawn when a mission is picked up from a mission terminal so you're basically screwed unless you pick up those missions. Then they're 3Km away which takes about 15 minutes one way to get out to for only 1/3 of the required kills so then you have to go back. You can only have 2 missions at once so stocking up on them does not help either.
Those are the biggest problems in many games. HC gamers dont really count since many are typically blind to the issues a casual player has time to see. You have to find a balance for Time vs Reward/Advancement becuase if it's too long then players get fustrated and if it's too short then players advance too fast and you find a top heavy server.