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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.
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.
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!
I can see how to do this, technically, I think. It's not easy and would require easily two or three years with a qualified team, and some serious training for the seed content creators, but it could be done. The good news is that a lot of the work would be surprisingly generic, and in the end, you'd have a framework for such games that you could plug into a lot of genres. Plus the end result would mean that the content creators, like I said, would be seed creators; they would not need to specify every last item in the game, but they could let the computer "grow" towns and such.
Surprisingly, IMHO, the biggest problem is balancing. People need to feel like they have some amount of control over things, yet with tens of thousands of people on a given server, they probably don't. Getting the balancing right could easily take another two or three years.
Another bonus, once it's done, is that you get real quests with real results, enough for everybody to have something to do.
I can't imagine we'll see this for a long time, though; it's certainly not something somebody could sit down and slam out, it will be very, very subtle work that will need very skillful people to perform. Current MMORPGs only need perhaps a quarter as much programming talent as this one would need. I'd like to see it, I'd even like to work on it, but I wouldn't expect to see it for decades, easily.
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...
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There are two types of people: those who are in the world, and those who aren't.
Thanks for the link. I've been looking for something on the reward schedules of MMORPG's. I've always thought that Everquest was based upon a gambling reward system, which is why I quit it from sheer boredom.
Nothing bores me more than gambling. I once went to a casino and bought ten dollars in quarters for a slot machine. I couldn't wait for the quarters to run out...in fact, I was slightly annoyed when it gave me back a few more (although I would have been quite happy if it had dropped twenty dollars in quarters, as this would have given me a chance to 'quit while I was ahead.') In Everquest, as soon as I perceived that success was based more upon luck than strategy, I couldn't stand the thought of logging on again. And the random reward schedules of crafting made crafting a complete waste of time for me. In fact, the only thing that held me on as long as it did was the fun I had playing with others.
The point of this is that the gambling reward system only works with a segment of the population. I want a reward system tied entirely to direct application of strategy. If there is a rare item, I want to be able to go through a series of steps which are guaranteed to produce it, subject only to events which are the direct, reproducible consequences of my own or other's actions. I have no interest in sitting around waiting for the rare spawn to drop the rare item. I would rather spend three hours hunting a common animal, to collect a sufficient number of pelts to give to an NPC to get the item (which always drop and are always of uniform quality,) than sit around for three hours at the mercy of a random number generator.
The curious thing about Everquest's exploitation of this reward system is that the business model is flawed. The players pay by the month, not by the hour. Why force players to play compulsively for hours (which increases log-in time, bandwidth, server, and maintenance requirements--and therefore, overhead) rather than allow them to derive enjoyment from playing for 5 or 10 hours a week? Why not have a system of intentions which would allow characters to perform repetitious actions (i.e. crafting) while the player is offline? If real-time, offline persistent intentions counted, the rewards of playing would be greater the longer a character persists (number of months the account is open, which is the schedule by which Sony actually gets paid.)
Compulsive gambling appeals only to a small segment of the population. The rest of us find it as exciting as watching grass grow (I call it 'Trial by Boredom!') Lose the gambling reward schedule, tie consequence directly to action, and you might have something I'd be willing to play.
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.