Broken Toys

I really, really failed at life by trying to make an honest living. I never should have listened to my parents constantly admonishing me that videogames would get me nowhere in life.

I met a lot of new folks playing warcraft. Then I moved over to a new MMO. A number of those people came over as well so I kept some contact with them. Most had ordered gold before they even left the first newbie areas. One had gold delivered before he even hit level 3.

I would say that MMOs need a different perspective. When the customers are looking up gold seller prices for your game while still figuring out what the keymapping the foundations of MMOs has an issue.

xaldin is right, clearly we need a non monetary based game without private ownership and where all labor goes towards the common good of the playerbase. The common good could then be dictated, only b/c the playerbase would not yet be ready to run their own game, by the head dev team.

It strikes me as a game Lum would be good at designing.

Huh….. If the USSR had survived, and the communist party designed a mmog, how would it operate and what would be the overall purpose of the individual logging on?

Julian Dibbell needs to die.

In China.

Nicademus: I can’t tell you what a communist party mmog would look like. But didn’t someone here mention that the most successful EVE guild on the US server has a communist-style rule, and the most successful guild on the China server has a capitalist style rule?

Julian Dibbell is of about the same worth to the world as Paris Hilton. And for about the same reasons.

Being poor is not fun. Stop making games that emulate being poor.

“Hi! We have a great game you’ll want to avoid playing 50% of!”

RMT is the result of poor game design. If people enjoyed the advancement process they wouldn’t avoid it.

It’s all been said before.

D-one is completely correct. If the game design is so soddeningly boring that folks want to pay to avoid it, then reconsider the game design.

Some people are going to RMT.

The question is not how to stop RMT, but to reduce it to non-game impacting levels.

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on June 19, 2007 at 3:27 am ubvman wrote:

Being poor is not fun. Stop making games that emulate being poor.

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I think that is the best description of newbie grind I have ever heard.

I think people are going to “buy advantage” no matter how interesting the game play is. But that does give unfair advantage and hurt the gaming of other players. The only thing you can do is design the game differently, and as stated already, making a more interesting game to play is a start. Nothing will completely remove farming, but it’s effects can be limited.

-Static spawns are like having a money tree in your back yard. They need to be limited to beginner training and used as lead-ins to other content. Predictability has to be removed.

-The level grind design gives godlike gains in skill and items. This not only screws up any attempts at an interesting economy and social environments, but it enhances gold farming. MMORPGs need to change this play style to something different.

-Julian Dibbell serves a purpose in life. Sort of like a skunky beer, you learn to sniff first before taking a drink.

Trouble with that is that a lot of these games are set in some fantasy land where being Poor is part and parcel of ‘The Journey’. After all, slaying dragons has to have a point; and it’s usually the massive fuck off pile of gold they sleep on.

An unfair advantage is:

Having the ability to invest the time required and the ability to endure monstrous tedium and monotony of content for several days worth of played time, is an unfair advantage.

Are they any MMRPGs that don’t base a very large part of their progression on time spent doing something that can, and is something that literally, becomes a macro that can be left to run for days?

Does anyone else see botting as a game design flaw rather than a customer service issue?

“D-one is completely correct. If the game design is so soddeningly boring that folks want to pay to avoid it, then reconsider the game design.”

He may be correct in part, but many people will gladly take any shortcut even if it bypasses fun.

For instance, take a well-acclaimed 1-person RPG, say Baldur’s Gate. Is it fun to roll one’s character, explore the starting plot, find challenge in the encounters? Yes. Are there many people who installed the game, found a character editor or cheat code, and “played” through BG with complete invulnerability? Yes.

I don’t agree at all with the latter kind of player, but I know they exist. In a single-player game their fun doesn’t intersect mine and I don’t care. In multiplayer/MMO play all I can expect, in the long run, is that the game mechanics at least keep their idea of fun from ruining mine.

Personally I’d be highly amused by a MMOG where powerful enemies are attracted like flies to low-power PCs with inordinate wealth and equipment.

Welcome to Xobat! You are level 1.
RMT wishes to trade with you.
RMT whispers, “Here’s the gold you bought.”
RMT has given you 10000 gold.
A_rogue_guildmaster_001 backstabs YOU for 548!
A_beggar_chief clubs YOU for 146!
A_ratman_assassin bites YOU for 348!
You are dead.
A_rogue_guildmaster001 loots 10000 gold from your body.
Please wait…

To me botting and buying gold are the same. With all this talk of RMT lately, I’m actually interested in what Lum will do to possibly solve this dilemma in his game design.

Heh, No.6. Anybody old enough to have played Alternate Reality: The Dungeon? There was a monster called the Devourer that spawned if you were hoarding too much stuff, and when you fought it, it sometimes would suck up some of your equipment and eat it. Good times.

No.6 wrote:

For instance, take a well-acclaimed 1-person RPG, say Baldur’s Gate. Is it fun to roll one’s character, explore the starting plot, find challenge in the encounters? Yes. Are there many people who installed the game, found a character editor or cheat code, and “played” through BG with complete invulnerability? Yes.

There was nothing in Baldur’s Gate that ACTIVELY encouraged everyone to turn on the cheat codes to finish the game (god mode being the most extreme). There are 1-person games in fact that actually did that – these are the badly reviewed ones and most of the end up in the bargain bins within a few weeks. On the other hand, every MMOG that has a thriving RMT operation attached to it indicates that it has some part of the gameplay so bleak and depressing that it drives the player to enable the “cheat codes” (RMT).

Yeah, the RMT industry is gonna exist to some extant no matter what you do, but do the devs have to write newbie grinds so torturous as to enable RMT companies to actually make a good living out of it? I say the devs and the MMOG companies are the true ultimate enablers of the RMT industry.

D-one said:

An unfair advantage is:

Having the ability to invest the time required and the ability to endure monstrous tedium and monotony of content for several days worth of played time, is an unfair advantage.

Are they any MMRPGs that don’t base a very large part of their progression on time spent doing something that can, and is something that literally, becomes a macro that can be left to run for days?

Does anyone else see botting as a game design flaw rather than a customer service issue?

I think you are talking about two separate issues here. The tedium doesn’t neccessarily go together with botting.

So my point is about unfair advantage. I don’t see one player having more time to spend on a game as “unfair”, but it sure is an advantage. Note too that my comments on level grinding and predictability with static spawns falls right into place here. If a player can’t grind in predictable fashion, it lowers the scale of difference. Instead of 100 to 10 (a difference of 90) it might be 20 to 2 (a difference of 18)….if you get my meaning.

I have to also say that there will always be some players who cheat, but I totally agree with you that if they are cheating themselves due to great game play lost, then far fewer will decide to use cheats. So yes, botting does show quite a game design flaw.

Where’s the adventure? Where’s the fun? If you have to “pay your dues” to get to the meat and fun of a game, there most definitely is something wrong.
Why is this done?
Why is this accepted?
There is something sort of ugly about the MMORPG scene these days, when you look at the answer to those questions. Greed comes in many flavors. Greed for power, to be supremely uber, dangling as a carrot in the face of the player and consentrating his/her thoughts in that one and only direction….someone needs to slap the players in the face to snap them out of their trance like state in front of the computer. Slap them with a handfull of fun and adventure, intrigue and mystery, with exploration and discovery, with a cool world waiting for them to unlock the past, the present, and the future.

Speaking of the annoying “pay your dues” mindset, I ran across that in LOTRO the other night. After busting my butt to hit level 35 and hoarding all of my available cash to accumulate over four gold, I was ready to be trained in riding and buy a mount. So I ran up to the horse-fields north of Bree to talk to the mount vendor/riding trainer, only to find that he wanted me to do not one, not two, not three, but FOUR tedious quests (3 delivery quests and 1 ride-around-the-farm quest).

According to the fanbois on the boards, these quests are designed to familiarize you with the various aspects of riding and show you what each mount looks like. Of course, the horses come in beige and four barely-distinguishable shades of brown, so there is not much to see in the looks department. Add to that the fact that the horses don’t actually behave the same way they do once you get your mount, and top it off with the fact that you are traveling to places you have been a million times already by level 35 (west Bree, Michel Delving, the North Downs) and it all begins to feel like one giant cock block.

No adventure. No fun. Even if I thought it was an acceptable mindset to “pay my dues,” surely the leveling-up process, along with the huge cash outlay, was enough. It really chafes to know that somewhere at Turbine there is a design document or email chain that discussed this sort of thing as if it were a good idea. All the whole forced-content gauntlet really does is expose another side of the base issue here, which is that games shoudl be fun and challenging, but never should they feel like a job.

If there had been a way to go to a web site and pay ten bucks to instantly skip the mount quests without compromising my account security, you can bet I would have done so. And that, in my view, is a design flaw of the same type as the forced-poverty model that games like WoW and LOTRO seem to like so much.

Hey Scott – the title of this uses incorrect pinyin. Youxi Gongzuoshi – sans the “h”.

zai qian!

*returns to lurking in Shanghai*

I’m with D-One’s views as well.

I’d wager that most readers/posters on this site come from pure or aspiring industrialized, neo-liberal, capitalistic societies, so all the RMT hate I see continually here is such a bittersweet irony.

But I guess to most people it’s all about purity of The Art(tm) of the virtual world and/or a desire for that completely level playing field that you won’t find in RL. Grow up and get over it already, life’s not fair and neither are virtual worlds which even remotely resemble RL mechanics (e.g. market economy, trading, social caste, combat, etc.).

That having been said I can only hope that through a variety of game/mmo/virtual world designs that there could be something for everyone. If you really want that “locked-down” MMO with NO currency and NO trading whatsoever so no one can possibly “cheat” (simplisticly) through RMT…hopefully someone will make that game for you. I suspect it might be a pretty niche game though.

The only game where I really noticed “farmers” and they truly impacted my game-play experience directly was in Lineage II because they literally flooded the non-instanced dungeons and were _everywhere_. Most other games I have not noticed them so much and it’s been out-of-sight, out-of-mind for me and my game play.

And lastly I’d like to use City of Heroes/City of Villains, yet again, as another example in my mind of good game design in this department. While it has some tedious stretches of gaming, I have never ever felt the need to buy currency for that game and felt the accumulation was just right. But that is for me from a more casual gaming perspective. Someone who’s really hardcore and games more hours than I (a definite advantage) would find the wealth accumulation probably far too easy. Unfortunately you can’t please all your players equally in these regards.

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