Tom Chick is one of the (if not the) most influential video game writers out there. He also doesn’t like MMOs very much. This is a problem!
He lays out five reasons why not here. You should go read. When you come back, I have some helpful suggestions!
Problem one: Subscription fees
Well, um, not every MMO charges subscription fees. Guild Wars lets you play as much as you want once you buy the box. MMOs for teens like Maple Story and Runequest pioneered the model of “playing for free until you get addicted, then pay a little more”. Games like Puzzle Pirates let you pitch in a dollar or whatever when you need to. This isn’t an unsolved problem. What is an unsolved problem is that perception that subscription fees imply a level of quality in craftmanship, and “free products” are cut-rate. This is driven largely because at the moment, that’s how the market shakes out. After all, World of Warcraft charges a subscription fee, therefore, statistically speaking, all MMOs do! Right?
Problem two: Why do I have to install Omen again?
For those of you not being drug by your nose through World of Warcraft raiding, Omen is the name of a third party threat meter used to ensure your aggro management is precisely where it should be. Aggro is a key part of the Holy Trinity that to date every DikuMUD (muds descending from Diku code bases, as Raph Koster’s magisterial analysis describes), and the core combat mechanic hasn’t really changed that much in the intervening decades. You takes the beats, you heals the beats, you mitigate the beats, you spread the beats around. It’s all about the beats. Unless, you know, you fight other players, since other players are usually immune to taunting unless it takes place on message boards. Even in DikuCombat, PvP breaks the whole aggro paradigm. And there *are* other combat systems that have been introduced. They’re rare, and usually get roundly trounced in the marketplace because people enjoy the safe, secure embrace of take/heal/deal beats. Ultima Online, for example, is entirely apart from the whole DikuMUD aggro mechanic – it has aggro, but it’s dependent on lots of bizarre things such who hit what when and whether you had a bard and the phase of the moon and whatever. But, if you play World of Warcraft, that’s what you’re going to learn, since, statistically speaking, all MMOs are actually World of Warcraft.
Problem three: Why are there so many goddamn buttons on my screen?
Because you’re playing a Warlock? Because you’re raiding? The core World of Warcraft UI is actually pretty simple. It’s player-crafted addons that hoist it aloft into a F-16 HUD. But the real core problem is the button-mashing that, again, DikuCombat is dependent on. It’s an artifact of MMOs being client-server systems at their core; more interactive combat such as Oblivion’s sword slashing imposes a huge tax on latency and percieved responsiveness. There have been hacks (such as Age of Conan’s “autoattacking into space” directional attacks) but, in the main, World of Warcraft uses the same tried and true DikuCombat which means you’re going to be pressing the 1, 2 and 3 keys on your Rogue over and over. And statistically speaking, all World of Warcraft players are in fact Rogues (soon to be Death Knights).
Problem four: Why is there a line to kill Sauron?
World of Warcraft is, by its very nature, intentionally a static amusement park. You get on the ride, you experience thrills, chills, the occasional spill, and get to the end, at which point you get to do it all over, but for reputation points. This is because if someone came before you and saved Bloodmyst Isle from the Sun Elf threat, you’d have a pretty damned boring time getting your space goat to level 20, wouldn’t you? There have been many attempts to address this problem – having player-generated content (such as UO’s Seers), having player-vs-player content (such as Dark Age of Camelot and Warhammer’s Realm vs Realm fighting), or having procedurally generated content (such as Anarchy Online’s early stab at instancing and World of Warcraft’s current iteration of ‘phasing’). But… hey, I bet you know how this will conclude, and I won’t spoil it for the next 50 people doing this quest line. (Hint: ’statistically speaking…’)
Problem five: I can’t go raiding with Bob with my level 6 paladin
That’s because, for whatever reason, World of Warcraft never implemented sidekicking or mentoring – the ability to temporarily boost yourself or lower your friend’s levels so that they can match, which is a key feature of pretty much every MMO that isn’t World of Warcraft. Unfortunately, statistically speaking, every MMO that isn’t World of Warcraft doesn’t exist, so that’s probably why it hasn’t been implemented yet.
Tom Chick’s core problem: MMO = World of Warcraft. This isn’t really a fair cop, as I have it on good authority that he’s fond of LOTRO, too. But still. Every screenshot in his story is from World of Warcraft. Every problem in his story is from World of Warcraft. Every time he says MMO, he really means World of Warcraft.
And you know, when one of the most influential game writers in the industry makes this mistake, and essentially writes a piece on “Why is World of Warcraft Like World of Warcraft?”, I think we have a problem bigger then aggro management.
Statistically speaking.
#1 by William Purvis on January 29th, 2009
@undead dolphin hacker
I think Lum likes “Snarky”… He is on a roll this week however.
P#1: Many of the subscription MMO’s have free trials. Try as many as you like for free.
P#2: Most of the folks I play with seem to be quite content being able to predict and control the mobs with agro. Tanks seem to be required to know how to succesfully “hold the aggro”. In the end, they just want the lewts.
P#3: You don’t need a third-party software for adding buttons on the screen. WoW’s interface settings also allow you to add all 6 bars of buttons to the screen if you want to. You need third-party to organize or customize the buttons.
P#4: I think they are actually giving you more of an opportunity to make yourself or your character feel better while they guide you through this fantasy story of many different choices. You don’t have to wait in line for dungeons or raids, and the fact that it comes back again seems to make most folks happy.
P#5: You can go play with any other level you want in Wow. The higher level can run the lower level through any lower level dungeon they want, they can gain exp for the quests, and will eventually catch up. “Power Leveling”.
#2 by Andrew on January 30th, 2009
Nice, I posted a reply to him saying something similar before reading this. Spot on, if I do say-so myself!
#3 by EpicSquirt on January 30th, 2009
@William Purvis
Congratulations William, you have missed all the points.
#4 by Occam on January 30th, 2009
Pretty much, yeah.
#5 by Vetarnias on January 30th, 2009
First of all, why did you change the order of the points? Or rather, Chick was doing a countdown, you’re counting up.
Well, the problem is that it’s so easy to make the MMO = WoW connection these days because of the lack of any comparable success in the genre (if we exclude EVE, which makes money for all involved but is always pushed aside as “niche”. And unfortunately, much of what Chick wrote can definitely be applied to WoW.
I don’t think the subscription model plays a large part. Chick is blaming it for the type of gameplay that results from it, but if anything it’s a vast improvement on those Korean cash-shop MMO’s driven by grind or the credit card. If anything, a subscription-based MMO can focus on being fun; the problem with this is if it starts being a treadmill. And what Chick sees as a problem might in fact be the refined treadmill that Blizzard has created — which has you first grind for levels, then grind for gear, then grind for reputation. Blizzard knows where its money comes from and just adds more of the same with each expansion. Well, that starts being an ethical issue when you add paid expansions — not just to make more money off the fans, but make sure your existing player base stays on the treadmill for one extra month — that result in everybody not buying it being an inferior (and yes, consider the WoW problem with levels).
Yet if you consider it, the treadmill is a high-maintenance approach, because people burn through content in hope of reaching the endgame as quickly as possible — just to realize that there isn’t one because the treadmill is the end in itself. But I don’t consider myself particularly discerning when it comes to gaming, and yet when I encounter a treadmill it’s already blatantly obvious to me — and if anything, it will tire me of the game at a much earlier time than when I would normally lose interest in it — because I know that the treadmill at level 4 is the same as level 20 and the same as level 65, I might decide I don’t want to stick around until level 65 to find out — because I already know what will happen unless the endgame is really, really good. It’s one of those journey-to-a-destination things; if the destination is great, maybe I’ll stick with the journey, but if I see no destination whatsoever, and that the journey is dull or a pain to go through, I’m not going to stick around — especially in a case of a treadmill for a treadmill’s sake as I think WoW is, as with most “theme park” MMO’s. (Still, I must admit I’m quite perplexed at those who continue to play a game they have started hating, as evidenced by all those WoW love-hate relationships, and EverCrack before them, so maybe I can speak only for myself.)
Still, I’m pretty sure that developers (especially those not releasing expansions with clockwork regularity) would rather opt for the “here’s a sandbox, create your own fun” approach if it were guaranteed to work — little to no maintenance, no need for the developers to even add content because the players can provide their own. But there’s a reason the treadmill exists, and The problem of the treadmill isn’t so much a result of the subscription model than as the inevitable conclusion of Scott’s #4 (Chick’s #2).
As for aggro management and buttons, those are relatively minor issues. For the record, though, I think that any game that almost forces its players to install a third-party add-on to get a massive advantage (from WoW add-ons all the way to Utopia Angel) is either a little too popular or badly designed.
Static worlds: That’s the big one which makes the use of a treadmill necessary — because, well, something has to move (or give the impression of moving, better if you think you’re the one in movement) for a seemingly interactive environment to be considered as such, but it can’t be the world, because you’re supposed/forced to share it with other people, and you can’t take a course of action which will limit other people’s interaction with said world. (Didn’t the Something Awful crowd pull a stunt a while back whereby they kited the flight masters on one WoW PvP server and tried to hold them for ransom, with Blizzard just killing them off so they could respawn? I find the SA antics deplorable, but this exploit just shows how little impact players have on the WoW world (and Blizzard coming across as killjoys for not letting the ransoming continue, though apparently they thought it was a bug when they killed off the flight masters).
Kill a boss, it’ll respawn. Achieve that epic quest in an instanced, you get elated for a short while, then everything is back to what it was, as though nothing has happened, because the next guy must also be able to save the world. It’s why some of the criticism of WoW says it’s just a single-player game with a chatbox. Saving the world is far more feasible in a single-player game, because the action centers around you — you’re the hero, not that NPC sidekick. Maybe he’ll suffer a terrible death after a great sacrifice to save you, just for an emotional response on your part, but you’ll make it out alive (of if you die, some sidekick, suddenly playable, will find a way to resurrect you), or you won’t finish the game. Dandy for single-player; impossible for MMO’s, because the game doesn’t revolve around you, and, more importantly, the game world can’t evolve, and if it evolves you are a spectator to the events rather than an actor. If, in a future WoW expansion, Orgrimmar is conquered and burned to the ground, and Thrall is in exile in Booty Bay, what happens to people who don’t buy the expansion? But if Blizzard decided to insert the Orgrimmar scenario for all its subscribers and make it permanent, it happened as a result of the developers’ whim, not player actions — and you can’t do a thing about it. (Still, it would be far better than the “all is as well in Kalimdor as it ever was and always will be” of the current approach.)
Though let’s consider the alternative. A sandbox world, no instances, where players can build their own structures and cities, besiege their adversaries, decide how they develop the world, hoping to leave a mark on it. That might have worked when MMO’s were brand new, because you still had this “all characters are created equal” ethos flying around. Now you get pre-formed guilds of hundreds, and alliances that got their start five games and three years ago. You and your three buddies who like small independent groups don’t stand a chance, and sooner or later you’ll have to be forced into a course of actions you don’t want to take. You can predict this even before playing the game, and let’s face it, only masochists would want to play Serf Online.
Just consider Darkfall, which put out a video (for lack of an actual game) where complete freedom is being peddled. The problem is, if I’m free to kill the next guy, take his valuables and enslave his children, and that the next guy has also watched that video, suddenly one is free and the other one isn’t. It’s so obvious that it’s laughable that they even tried to sell complete freedom to everybody. The only ones with complete freedom will be the large guilds that will quickly dominate the landscape and chase all other subscribers away.
Is it any wonder then that worlds are static, lest players run away with them? Chick saw no solutions to this, nor can I. Maybe developers could make their game worlds evolve; it wouldn’t be in the players’ control but at least there would be more evidence of movement than you sweating on the treadmill. But since that would involve throwing more money at a game than is absolutely necessary, yeah, right.
#6 by Mist on January 30th, 2009
WoW gameplay isn’t really all that much different from say, Grand Theft Auto gameplay, another very successful game. It’s a bunch of repetitive, time consuming content centered around quest hubs as you move through the game. The newest version of GTA even has reputation grinding with your friends in order to unlock special abilities. GTA has this gameplay despite not having anything to do with a subscription service, so the two might not be necessarily linked. Maybe people just like repetitive, predictable content?
#7 by Iconic on February 1st, 2009
“Maybe people just like repetitive, predictable content?”
No, it’s just easier to create content like that.
#8 by Viz on February 1st, 2009
The trouble is that not only is it easier to create content like that, creating content that’s NOT like that is so much harder that nobody can feasibly accomplish it in an MMO setting–at least, not with the tools we’ve got. In single player games this is done by allotting a year or more to write a game that most people will finish in 30 hours of gameplay or less (and even then, some grinding is usually involved). In MMOs people won’t wait that long between hits. So if you don’t want to resort to grinding, you need some way to generate content at a much faster rate. You can’t just add designers because the required team to generate that much content at our current “efficiency” would be much larger than you could coordinate.
Some people advocate making games where people will create their own content, but this is a pipe dream: if you’ve ever played tabletop RPGs, you know that the fraction of the population who are competent storytellers can be measured in ppm. Above a certain (small) population size, there’s no way to create the kind of selection process that will result in your game having enough of these guys. Others say that the solution is to emulate multiplayer FPSes in making the sort of gameplay that people don’t mind repeating, but MMOs seem to create the expectation that player activities should matter, and the hatred with which many TF2 players regard dustbowl seems to indicate that FPS players aren’t really immune to boredom from repetitiveness, either.
#9 by Robin Kestrel on February 1st, 2009
I for one do not want scores of new “Generic Fantasy Plotline You’ve Seen 1,000 Times Before, Only This Time With Different Names Inserted” quests, especially not when at their heart they turn out to be exactly the same as one of less than a half-dozen basic quest mechanisms. For the people that like to read the quest text and follow the lore, that may be nice, but if I want lore, I’ll read a book. Trying to follow the internal logic of these MMOs too deeply gets silly considering that it just highlights how nothing players do or don’t do ever impacts the official story in any way.
To me, different content and player-generated content doesn’t mean that some guys sit down and code up yet another Epic Quest of Uberness, or give the players the tools to do so. I don’t care how good they are, at this point, anyone that’s been playing MMOs since UO/EQ probably winces when they see yet another quest icon over an NPC’s head.
What is needed is procedural content that is generated using a true random source ad according to rules that logically take into account the state of the local environment in the game world at the time. State meaning things such as time of year, time of day, weather, terrain type, existing mobs in the area and in adjacent areas, the average number and power of PCs in the area, what mobs those PCs are currently fighting, any structures built by PCs (forts, villages, farms, mines, logging camps, etc.), and other player actions. What is needed is world-affecting PvP content that is an integral part of the game from the beginning, not an after-thought add-on (Warhammer is a good first step down this path, and hopefully others will follow that learn from WAR’s mistakes).
In short, developers need to make a true virtual world rather than an endlessly repeating play that allows players to step in at certain points and read the lines. Yes, it would be incredibly hard to write, but you’d only have to write it once, and then monitor the world and do some manual tweaking here and there to ensure it was running smoothly, sort of like a DM in a D&D campaign. Special content could be written and inserted in response to the players doing something exceptional. No more producing “expansion packs” to try to revive interest in the game…every day would bring something new and different, on ongoing story that the players were helping to shape themselves.
#10 by unique identifier on February 1st, 2009
You’re spot on with the `mmo = wow’ critique of Tom’s critique. If we’re going to raise such complaints against an entire genre, we should at least be clear that we’re talking about the wow-mmo model and its legion of copies.
re: Robin Kestrel – “In short, developers need to make a true virtual world rather than an endlessly repeating play that allows players to step in at certain points and read the lines.”
Isn’t that EVE Online? & I’ll readily admit tEVE has its own list of horrible flaws…
#11 by Mist on February 1st, 2009
EVE is really down to one major flaw at this point, boring and unintuitive combat. They’ve basically fixed just about everything else.
#12 by Tesh on February 1st, 2009
Regarding player-driven game world evolution, the Legend of the Five Rings CCG did some interesting things with letting players have power. They took tournament results and let them help drive the lore for the next expansion. They even set up plot hooks and traps for players, planning ahead for different scenarios and directions to take the game.
Individual players didn’t have a huge effect, no, but the playerbase in aggregate had an effect on the game, and it was richer for it. Such a dev-controlled player influence might be a nice halfway measure for MMO devs to make their worlds more interesting.
Latecomers would just have to be content with writing history from that point forward. If it’s an accepted part of the game design, it shouldn’t be a big issue. Of course, that might also mean that the DIKU progression metrics should be overhauled or jettisoned, to give new players just as much potential power as veterans…
#13 by Viz on February 2nd, 2009
@Robin Kestrel
What you suggest would be fantastic, but falls straight into the category of “not with the tools we’ve got.”
#14 by Oliver Smith on February 2nd, 2009
Statistically speaking
#15 by Oliver Smith on February 2nd, 2009
Robin,
The problem with developing such a procedural generation machine is that you have to ensure the environment can’t be manipulated. Players want to win and they massively outnumber any development team. It’s like trying to get into the top 10 on SETI@home with your 386.
You’re going to be spitting out a good 5-10 quests per second per world/server/realm, they have to be achievable, so you can’t create too much contention between quests, and they can’t be too disparate or else you wind up spreading players out over a tedious amount of space. And they have to be sustainable because your questers might log out before completion and not be happy if they keep getting to 90% completion and finding the quest is no-longer plausible because regional conditions have changed.
That’s a LOT of considerations and constraints for generating relevant material that doesn’t just feel … randomly generated. Single player games have a hard time doing it and they don’t have to deal with a persistent world that isn’t revolving around Numero Uno.
#16 by EpicSquirt on February 2nd, 2009
@Mist
I guess you’re considering 6 Titans camping a gate fixed.
#17 by Robin Kestrel on February 2nd, 2009
@Viz
Then it’s time to write new tools. Many games I’ve played have adjusted spawns according to certain rules (e.g., is it nighttime?, have x number of a certain mob been killed?, etc.) and the bulk of what I’m suggesting is simply that with many more variables taken into account, applied to the world as a whole.
Not at all…the idea would be to allow and encourage players to manipulate the environment. “Quests” would have to arise naturally as a result of the state of the world and players deciding what to do about it. Say that because of favorable conditions, there’s currently too many aggressive giant bees in the orchards to allow the fruit to be harvested. The governing council (made of of elected player characters) of the nearby village issues a bounty reward on bee wings to encourage players to eliminate the problem. But as more and more of the worker bee spawns are eliminated, they are replaced with even tougher, larger, more aggressive bees. Players finally locate the hives that are generating these spawns, kill the queens, and destroy the hive, eliminating bees in that area until conditions are right for them to move back in. Perhaps next year, there will be too few bees to pollinate the trees, and the village will need to import food from elsewhere. And in the meantime, new creatures move in to fill the niche left by the bees.
So yeah, players would figure out through experimentation what they needed to do to trigger certain world states, and use that to their advantage. That would be part of the game play, and would be somewhat mitigated by randomness and GM intervention keeping things less predictable. And yeah, Joe the Rogue might log out one night intending to hunt worker bees the next night, only to find that they were now gone. That’s the whole point; that’s what happens when you don’t have a static world. Players that found such uncertainty unpalatable would always have plenty of other static games to play.
#18 by Viz on February 2nd, 2009
@Robin Kestrel
*sigh*
It’s not JUST a matter of writing new tools or it would’ve been done. What you propose is no more and no less than automation of content generation that currently has to be done by hand. If anyone were actually able to do this with the level of sophistication and realism necessary to produce a “virtual world” with the depth to maintain a large player population, it would be a change akin to the Industrial Revolution. Additionally, we’d be much better served using that system to simulate real-world economies and eliminate poverty instead.
#19 by Robin Kestrel on February 3rd, 2009
@Viz Not to minimize the complexity of such a system, but I think your comments are hyberbole. I also think the “it can’t be done” mindset will persist right up until the second that somebody does it, and that day will come sooner than you think. Bring on the revolution!
#20 by Ramification on February 7th, 2009
“Problem four: Why is there a line to kill Sauron?”
Why indeed?
I’m no designer, I would like to be, but I doubt I have any skill beyond over-grown imagination; yet still, it strikes me as weird situation to be queried about.
Games are meant to be fun, right? A form of entertainment.
The way they attempted to achieve it to date been by striking a balance, or tipping onto one category altogether, between simulation (mimicing real life, physics&otherwise eco systems) and arcadization (fast paced action, following the KISS principle).
So, I ask myself, how would it look if we had an army composed of thousands of players trying to topple Sauron as their main quest objective?
Well, naturally, they’d just fight their way through, then the most powerful heroes will rush forward, as the others hold back the lines to create a clearing, and strike at Sauron, or fall on the way one by one trying until one does manage to make it through (at least, this is the way those kind of epic stories go).
Just what exactly is preventing this from happening in a game environment? (the consequences of what to do next after Sauron goes down and the quest finished is a different debate)
Hmm…nothing that I can think of, really…
Certainly, many players will wish to be the one champion who manages it off…but “reality” (of the game) will prevent it from being that easy and will take care of it to render so only very few of the original group actually manages to make it through.
Shouldn’t be /that/ hard to design, right?
#21 by Ramification on February 7th, 2009
As for static worlds, ever since Everquest I had been wondering why MMOGs market themselves as persistant world as if it is any sort of an advantage (yes, I get it that it means your stats are saved).
The world is indeed persistent – it persists in staying the same, forever…how dull!
I want a dynamic world, one such as Derek Smart used to describe in his very early “shopping for publisher” documents that he was releasing around for the original BC3k when all he had was a poorly looking and barely even functional alpha.
One whereas the world governs itself, always changes, the AI do their own things, push for their own agendas and conquest.
Things operate on a computer-generated-content script kind of model.
Economics changes, empires rise and fall. Wars erupt and decline.
Whether the players play – and influence, or whether everyone go to party with their friends in a club, the world always is in motion and ever changing.
You log off today, and login tomorrow to find that gas is now x500 more expensive and that the Solarian empire is now part of the E.V.C who’re now in a war with their yesterday’s allies and brothers from the Occamorian Alliance, oh, and there’s a new blackhole sucking all traffic coming from Vellus so there’s a real high demand for supplies, but the new roundtrip is longer and dangerous, which may explain why the Pinkbeard Pirates are now recruiting.
P.S.
Your homeworld was blown by an unknown force, taking away your entire fleet and family.
But hey, you just won the galactic lottery!
And lookie here, a stray cat/dog seems to want you to adopt it.
#22 by EpicSquirt on February 7th, 2009
@Ramification
Excellent.
#23 by Jederus on February 10th, 2009
Hot damn that was a well-written and excellent response. I couldn’t believe what I was reading when I saw Chick’s original article and realized he was making the uber-non-gamer-noober mistake of MMO==WoW (I mean, every screencap a WoW image… does anyone even check this stuff?)
On a related note, visually he should have used a header image with 5 players in it instead of one with 6 players given the fact that he used the very diggable ‘5 Controversial Things to Say and Get Traffic to my Post’ format.
Anyway, thanks for the rebuttal. Well said.