It always amazes me that modern MMO developers do not make more use of events, global contests, etc. I wrote this MMO design article to address that issue and explain why group contests can be such a powerful and fun type of content. Engaging Players - Desgining Group Contests for your MMO Players Let me know what you think.

Good question. Why won't Massive Multiplayer Online games let players play each other? In other words, why do MMOs fail at being _games_?

They suck as games because they try to be more than a game, they try to be _real_ like. A game is supposed to be a light thing you experiment with and laugh at the surprising results. MMOs throw all that out outright by wanting to accumulate player's actions over a long period. Small wonder designing mmo pvp is an awkward enterprise.

[Edited by - Diodor on February 7, 2010 11:49:47 PM]

My friend ran (and still runs) a server for a popular game, modified to run as an MMO. Although the server is largely focused on role playing, building alliances, accumulating wealth, holdings, in-game status symbols, etc., he also holds non-RP events now and then. Often these are the best thing on the server, and events have ranged from themed deathmatches to drag races to dogfights - all of them unrelated to the core gameplay. These events were some of the best times on the server when I played, but notably, as the player base expanded, it became increasingly impractical to run such events; people would log out randomly at key moments, or mess around pre-game. With a larger, more popular game, I imagine those problems would become increasingly rife.

So perhaps the answer is 'too difficult'. It certainly causes all sorts of stress and hard work for a designer that it wouldn't otherwise do. Of course, in a professional situation work is equal to money. Running an event might cause a boost in profit, but I doubt it would be enough to offset its costs in a commercial MMO with a playerbase much over 10,000.

Quote:Original post by Delphinus
So perhaps the answer is 'too difficult'. It certainly causes all sorts of stress and hard work for a designer that it wouldn't otherwise do. Of course, in a professional situation work is equal to money. Running an event might cause a boost in profit, but I doubt it would be enough to offset its costs in a commercial MMO with a playerbase much over 10,000.

For developer intense events, I agree. But there are all sorts of "fire-and-forget" events that are totally scalable because all you do from the developer side is get it started, and wrap it up.