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2005 MMORPG.com Reader Awards
MMORPG.com has announced the winners of its 2005 Readers Choice Awards. Interesting to mention, because the MMORPG.com users have a unique outlook on the genre. Eve Online leads the 'Favorite Game' category, and Saga of Ryzom nets the 'Best Story' prize. From the site: "Ryzom is set in a science-fiction universe and in addition to its story, it also boasts crisp graphics and a loyal and supportive community. The game also boasts PvP and is on the verge of a revolutionary expansion called 'The Ryzom Ring'. In this expansion, players will be able to take story-telling to the next level as they introduce player-created content tools. The original category included Horizons instead of Asheron's Call and managed to produced a dead split between the top four games (22% each). Oddly enough, this didn't carry over into the finals, where The Saga of Ryzom emerged on top with 31% of the votes. City of Heroes / Villains grabbed 19% for second place. They were followed by Anarchy Online at 18%, Asheron's Call at 15% and Star Wars Galaxies at 14%."
Eve Online cleaned up these awards, and all it gets is a "Oh yeah, it won best game?" I mean, no offense to Saga of Ryzom, but why does winning best story determine who gets the full paragraph on the /. summary? I mean, Eve online won some of it's four or five awards on write in's for pete's sake! It beat out WoW for PvP! It won best MMORPG! And all it gets is one of it's awards mentioned once?!?
Actually, it's the exact opposite of what you seem to assume. Most games start with the "best" part, and gradually, slowly move you to the worst parts.
They're built upon studies saying that the average account is cancelled after 6 months (some sooner, some later, but that's the peak of the Gauss curve), by which point all that keeps you there is some mis-guided "but I'll lose my uber-character and all my online friends if I quit!" illusion. I.e., the fun is long gone by that point anyway.
The hard part is getting you hooked in the first place, which is why they start with the best parts. The end-game grind isn't the grand cake at the end, it's one last-ditch repetitive grind you're thrown. Its only role and purpose is to give you something to do at all while you're still in denial about quitting the game.
So, to give you a metaphor, they're built on the boiling a frog alive model. They say that if you drop a frog in hot water, it will hop out of the pot. But if you put it in cool water and very slowly warm it up, it will stay there and get cooked. (Mind you, I haven't actually tried it.) That's the model MMOs take. The have to make sure you don't hop out from the start, and from there it's just a matter of going downhill slowly enough so you don't mind just a little more grind, just a little more travel time, just a little more farming for your next weapon, and generally just a little more time-sink and less game.
Let me use WoW as an example: in the beginning you're seriously more powerful than the opponents (the newbie wolves in Northshire do 1hp per hit), you level up fast, quests are plentiful, and they don't require you to move travel more than one or two hundred ft. And you see new content all the time. It's all game and no time-sink, and you're happy as a frog in a nice (if cooking pot shaped) pool of cool water. And that's what gets people addicted.
And it gradually changes into something that's more and more time-sink and less game. At the end-game you pretty much pay the monthly fee just to sit there for hours getting enough people for a raid you've done a thousand times before, and then riding for half an hour to it. Not only it's a lot of time-sink, you're not even seeing any new content. You're doing the same repetitive crap, pulling the same NPCs, in the same order, using less spells/skills/whatever than you used at level 10... in the vain hope than you'll hit the 1% chance that this time the boss will drop the armour piece you need. And that someone else won't roll higher for it.
Or take the reputation quests, say, the Thorium Brotherhood. You need, what? To farm some 1000 pieces of medium leather just to get them to talk to you? And that's just the ante. Then you get to farm dark iron residue for the next stage.
Again, the hard part is getting you hooked at level 1. After that, chances are you'll take care of deluding yourself, and keep yourself coming back anyway.
The illusion that there's some massive reward at the end is all psychological, all a self-made illusion, once you got hooked in the first place. You just have to keep with the virtual Joneses. You just have to believe that anyone actually gives a damn about your having a bigger player house (in games that support that) than the Joneses and an epic horse (the virtual equivalent of a car with a big wing at mid-life crisis) before the Joneses got one. You just have to believe that having reached level 60 will make you _someone_. There's an unspoken illusion that once you've reached that apex, newbies will speak in admiration of you, TV shows will be dedicated to your self-made-man success, and random (elven) women will beg to have your child, etc.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
If you've ever played EVE you would know why it would be easy for them to cast votes on an out of game website... because there is a hell of a lot of nothing floating around in space. Hit the go button and a couple hours later you'll arrive. Sure if you are going through low security space you may run into problems, but overall its rare to run into other people. Even the combat is a rather dull affair. Now go to a bunch of people playing WoW. They are banging away at the loots so fast that they don't have time to alt-tab out and vote. EVE has a dedicated internet fan base that will zerg under any site where they can bring in the awards for their beloved underdog. Its like American voting... only with those with something to gain tend to vote. If it doesn't really affect them then they just don't get off their fat asses to vote.
No mention of the 22k people on at the same time, concurrently, without different servers. No mention that in Eve PVP you lose basically everything to the other person, giving a real incentive to the other party. Just bothers me that it gets marginalized because everyone was busy playing WoW. heh
Hopefully, this poll opens some people's eyes.
Gonzo Granzeau
"Nothing the god of biomechanics wouldn't let you into heaven for.." -Roy Batty
-1 Troll?
My fault, I suppose, for being less than thrilled with an under-designed griefer-fest that nevertheless has an amazingly dedicated and active fanbase. EVE certainly inspires a degree of advocacy and identification amongst its playerbase that puts larger and more mainstream games like EQ or WoW to shame.
That said, it's still an under-designed griefer-fest with hours-long travel between locations. I'm sure that there are some people who find it to be their dream game, but it's a niche product at best. I don't actually have a problem with niche products, and such that fill their niche elegantly and perfectly are excellent case studies. But EVE is not the best MMORPG, and it's mindless fanboyism to assert that it is.