About Me

I'm new here but I've been lurking around for awhile. Recently I have been thinking about the current state of the MMO industry and I'm interested to see how you guys feel about the direction it's headed. My intentions are not to create a new MMO, I'm not delusional, I understand that such a game can easily take upwards of $100 million and even if completed it still has a high risk of failure. Not to mention that I have never launched a game nor developed one, I'm an experienced programmer of 7 years mostly working on distributed systems and large scale public APIs.

Overview

This post isn't about me, it's about MMOs and some lifecycle observations that I've made in my time playing MMOs. The examples I'm going to use will be taken from both Everquest and World of Warcraft. I believe there are other MMOs that could be included in these examples; however, I'm going to stick to the two that I've played when the game was first launched. Maybe some of this analysis applies to other games as well. I think all games evolve and change rules over time, decisions are made primarily based on the number of players and their current progression in the game.

Social

I believe this is one of the more critical parts to a successful MMOs and I think the social changes as the game evolves have been rather drastic. There have been many well polished MMOs that are very similar to WoW. Many of those MMOs have great potential and some of them may even be better than WoW. So you might be asking, why are these games not successful? Why would anyone play WoW when there are other games with better game play or more interesting content? The core reason is the social bonds formed while playing the game. The majority of people who play MMOs are already in a guild or have a lot of friends. They enjoy logging on and playing with their friends and socializing, they don't want to change games. Does this mean that all future games don't stand a fighting chance? No, not necessarily, I think if done correctly there's no reason more games couldn't succeed. If I believe its possible then why are almost all of these copycats of WoW failing? I think it's because they look at where WoW is today and not where it was at launch. Now that WoW has the critical mass they don't need to force the social bonds on people. Many of the newer games seem to try and skip the beginning of this social evolution and jump straight to the end. I think this is the wrong way to go about launching a game, let me give you some examples.

Social Evolution in Everquest

When this game launched it was very difficult to do anything alone. I remember dying repeatedly at level 3-4 trying to kill an NPC the same level as me. Especially if the class I had chosen was a healer or enchanter. As the levels got higher around level 15 - 30 almost every form of leveling required a group to get good experience. Sure if you wanted you could go out alone but for the majority of classes this method just wasn't very effective. Having a close group of friends and or being a part of a guild was almost required to reach the max level. You also needed help from friends in many other ways, each class has special benefits to people and this helped form friendships and increase the social aspect of the game. If you died down in some dungeon somewhere you almost always needed help from someone to recover the corpse. If you wanted to move to the other side of the world you needed a wizard or druid. I can go on forever with this list but I'll stop here since I think I've made my point, when the game started people were forced to be more social it was difficult to play alone.

With so many high level characters in the game there were less people to group with at lower levels and as a result the rules had to be changed. Leveling up alone had to be easier for new players. Everquest realized this and they started making it easier to level up alone, they made it easier to transport without using a wizard or druid. Buffs that help the leveling progress had increased duration and were easily accessible even if you didn't have a friend with the buff. You could just run to town once every 2 hours and get a refresh and some could even be purchased as potions. This seems like the right thing to do but what happens to all the new people to the game? How do they meet friends? It use to be easy to meet friends and find a group but now it’s difficult and new people get bored playing alone.

Social Evolution in WoW

WoW also had a similar evolution throughout the game. At launch WoW's quest system enabled people to level up and play the game without ever grouping with another player. To supplement their quests WoW had a dungeon system that required a group. The motivations for joining a dungeon were strong for players like healers and tanks because doing quests was hard and slow for those types of classes. It was beneficial to almost everyone to be in a guild or have a close group of friends because it was difficult to form group with complete strangers. The dungeon crawl was much more laid back and relaxing because people must be on their best behavior. If any player started to cause problems nobody will want to group with them again. Everything they did emphasized a strong social tie to the game.

As the game progressed WoW added a few more features that changed how people level. The number one culprit was the ability to have multiple talent trees. Leveling was made easier because all classes had the ability to level solo. Nobody really cared about grouping because it was considered a much slower leveling with groups than questing. If you wanted to hit the max level and start doing things with your real life friends who were level 80 then you needed to level quick. People stopped playing dungeons as often and started questing more. Something had to change because all the content wow developed wasn't being played. So what did they do? They added the auto queue system to ease the difficulty of finding and creating a group. This has an obvious impact on the social aspect of the game as now you don't need to make friends anymore. You could just click a button and the computer would find temporary friends to play with you. This also changes the players behavior while in a group, because you will never see these players again you can be a complete dick and it doesn't matter. I don't remember the last time I met any friends in WoW that weren't a new guild member. There aren't many other ways to meet people, everyone plays alone. The fact is, it doesn't matter anymore WoW has so many people playing and everyone already has friends. As a result their focus has changed, now they're more worried about what content to add then forcing people to make friends.

Summary

I know this has been a long post but maybe I'm not too crazy after all. All of the new games try to jump into the game with all the features that are offered by WoW such as instances and cross-realm instances. You don't need to form groups any more you can just auto-queue for an instance and when its ready you get paired up with 4 other people you'll never see again. I believe that if a new game was to succeed they would need to re-think the game play a bit in order to force socialization between players. You have to build MMOs with a strong foundation of friendships and guilds to be successful. This is something that most new games miss now a day. What do you guys think? Are these changes good? Do you like them? Do you agree with my analysis? Are there any other examples you can think of from other successful games?

Me personally, I hate playing in a group in an MMO. I'm an introvert, and I especially don't want to invest my energy into developing a relationship with someone who lives nowhere near me and I'll never meet in real life. I'm in a totally different demographic than the one you are describing of people who stay in the same game even though it's old to play max-level content with their friends. I love to solo, whether I'm soloing quests, sim/crafting content, or dungeons. So, any MMO which is designed to make people socialize is going to be irritating at best to me.

Sure that makes complete sense I know there are a large portion of people that feel the same way. I think a game like wow also tries to target your demographic as well. I'm guessing that you either don't play MMOs or you spent a lot of time trying new ones when they come out?

Bwight, you make a very solid point and I understand where you are coming from.

Now the question is this; We know what future issues are in a game's lifespan, why is it that developers are trying to build using "existing fixes" in their game at release rather than try to design a game that avoids these flaws altogether?

P.S.
Don't worry about sunandshadow, surely likes games, but socializing certainly isn't his thing lol. Yet he posts here quite often... I think he craves social interaction! Sunandshadow, you just need the right MMO!

Bwight, you make a very solid point and I understand where you are coming from.

Now the question is this; We know what future issues are in a game's lifespan, why is it that developers are trying to build using "existing fixes" in their game at release rather than try to design a game that avoids these flaws altogether?

I'm not sure I would classify it as a flaw in game design. I think its just something natural that happens. If I was creating a game I would embrace it and plan accordingly. There's no reason the game play of your game can't change over time. The point that I was trying to make is that everyone tries to just jump to the 2nd stage and that's what breaks them. The solution to the problem generally has a negative affect on the social atmosphere.

My major issue with most social parts of MMOs is the time factor. I often want to drop in for ten or fifteen minutes to play for a bit or need to drop off for a little while in the middle of playing. Most single player quests you can leave and come back with minimal consequence but it is a major impact in a group quest.

I played Eve Online for quite a while doing manufacturing because it didn't really matter how long or short you were online. I'd put up purchase orders for materials, produce more equipment and/or put produced items on the market and leave. Those items stayed on the market or in production and continued working while I wasn't there.

I don't mind working with other people but I just wish the in game time requirement was not as strict as it is in most MMOs.

This is another thing I was thinking about as well. I know that when I was younger I use to be very addicted to MMOs. I had a lot more time and I wasn't looking to spend 15 minutes playing but hours and hours. Now, i'm working full time, have a wife and two kids and I find it hard to find an hour to play. I still love MMOs but the way I play them has changed significantly.

I think it would be interesting if there was a combat oriented MMO that focused more on the tradeskills as well. Both WoW and Everquest failed to make the tradeskills a vital part of daily life. It was important but once you reached the max level there wasn't a whole lot to do. Frankly they're just boring to me because it's always the same, make 1200 peices of cloth armor and you reach level 300. Some other games have approached this much better.

A long time ago, MMOs were text-based with no graphics whatsoever and were known as MUDs (multi user dungeons). During that time, forced socializing/grouping was the norm: almost everywhere require you to be in a group to survive, or to make any significant gains in gold or exp.

It was horrible.

It wasn't the social heaven that people thought it would be. You don't join the server and get lots of friendly people who are looking to group or socialize. Instead, the player population consists of closed groups of "elites" who already have their own group going and don't trust others, or clueless newbies. It takes forever to get anything done because you first need to find people to group with, then make sure those people know what they are doing or can follow instructions, and then make sure everyone has the time to complete the task. This would often fail, leaving you at square one with possibly hours of wasted time.

It greatly limited their audience.

If you can't find a group, and none of your friends are online - you can't play. If you're a new player, and none of your friends play, good luck trying to get anything done. Sometimes, you would get your friends to join the game, but because you had a head start, and because of all the barriers they put into the game, it is so hard to group with them. Good luck logging and playing for 15-20 minutes when you have the time - you'll probably need to spend 30+ minutes begging for people to group with before you can even start to play the game.

MMOs have evolved.

People realized that the smart thing to do is to instead give people the option of grouping/socializing. They realized that if people are grouping up simply because they want to gain gold or exp faster, then they are not really socializing or making friends. By giving people an option to go solo, they eliminated all the inefficiencies, inconvenience, and made sure that people who group are actually into grouping. Games like Everquest and WoW are famous for their huge, highly organized guild raids, and yet, one can finish the game solo without ever having to group. Many MMOs also realized that they need to give people the tools to be sociable: e.g. easy travel between location so you can meet up with friends, and removal of grouping restrictions so "old-bies" can group with newbies without penalty.

All in all, MMOs have come a long way from being closed elitist/snobbish communities that requires many hours of time commitment into a mass marketable genre.