My Proof that MMORPG Design Isn't Perfect

This is an issue I have consistently with MMORPG's, so I'm going to blather on about it here, because, hey, that's what this place is for.

MMORPGs inevitably create a "stuff envy" in a good 90% of the players of the game, due to the fact that there are a vast amount of items/abilities/whatever that are flat inaccessible to a certain portion of the playing populace. The problem is that MMORPG designers are constantly feeding the minority at the top, without ever feeding the vast majority at the bottom. Someone remind me to hit back on this topic in a second.

As an example, examine, for a moment, the latest additions to the World of Warcraft universe: Soon-to-be Ahn'Qiraj (consisting of a 20-man and a 40-man dungeon), the Four Dragons (all raid-caliber opponents, 40-man deals), Zul'Gurub (the first 20-man "casual raid" dungeon), Blackwing Lair (the third 40-man instance.)

Notice a trend? None of these additions appeal to gamers who do not have access to 19 friends, all of similar mindset, who can devote massive amounts of time to solving these dungeons. Now, for background, I have been known to go on some massive raids in Dark Age of Camelot, killed a couple of dragons, taught King Tuscar a lesson, and the occasional massive artifact raid or ML raid, so I'm not necessarily against this kind of content. After all, if you don't have the capacity to support that first M with specific content, there's no reason to have a billion people per server.

However, MMORPG designers need to realize that the majority of their fan base simply aspires, at this point, to "be like" those people who can go on MC/BWL raids every night. The honchos at Blizzard have seemed to come to the decision that you are a "hardcore player" only if you have a raiding guild behind you, without realizing that there are a pretty large amount of "hardcore players" out there who are not in a raiding guild, but are every bit as hardcore as the raiders are.

Instances like Blackrock Spire, Blackrock Depths, Scholomance, Stratholme, and even the "newly released" Dire Maul provide some incentive for people to go out and do things as a smaller group, but none of these instances are remotely challenging to the smaller group (though some encounters are, oh the horror stories of the Skyfury Helm quest).

The theory I put forward is this: You have epic encounters, and you have raid encounters. Any encounter can be both or neither. Epic encounters are designed to be the cream of the crop, the place where you get all those shiny purple items, and feel all good about yourself. Those are for the hardcore players. Then you have raid encounters, in order to take advantage of that first M, encounters which require a large number of people. But not all of the epic encounters have to be raid encounters, and likewise, not all the raid encounters have to be epic encounters. Throw a couple of straight zerg fights in there, with some decent blue gear to appeal to the casual gamer who can get a ton of buds together, but all of which are either poorly skilled or poorly equipped. Likewise, provide smaller-tone encounters for the 5-man group which is superbly skilled.

Thusly reminded, I believe the reason for this is that that vast majority who are not actively raiding are actively doing other things, and enjoying other aspects of the game, such as leveling or PvP or what have you. When the raiders have beaten Blackwing Lair repeatedly, started to just get to farm status, they're looking around for what's next (hence the release of Ahn'Qiraj.) If there's no newer, bigger, better challenge for these players, they simply go away.

The rest of us can only see the carrot on the stick. I look at the new artwork for Ten Storms, and I think "man, that looks pretty sweet," and drool over one day, just maybe, owning a piece or two. But the fact is that, given my play time, and the lack of raid guild behind me, I will never see a piece of that set. Yet I keep playing under the belief that I have the ability to get ahold of the whole set and parade around like I just got hired by Calvin Klein.

Obviously, the highest end gear will only be available to those who can raid, and who are exceptional players, those who go through dungeons that are both "epic" and "raid," but the epic quality tier should not be limited to only those with 19 people behind them. At the moment, I can see absolutely zero reason to level my Shaman from level 52 to 60, due to the fact that once I hit 60, there's not that much more to do. I won't see a raid starting at 6 am, and there's almost no PvP that early. No raid guild will even invite me to go on the one night a week I can participate due to their silly policies about attendance. So the game pretty much ends at 60 for me.

And I think that's a large problem, one that MMORPG designers need to look at. Stop staring at that "Massively" part of the name, and focus in on the "Multiplayer." A group of 5 or even 10 is still a group that needs some focus or direction in the game, and giving them sub-par equipment and less-than-challenging encounters to beat isn't the way to do it.

On a Lighter Note...

Woo!

I know most of my crew didn't necessarily get into the Warcraft storyline. To tell you the truth, I didn't either until I had to go without internet for over a month, and played through the WC3 campaigns to satisfy a craving for WoW. However, the Blood Elves' storyline has appealed to me, the thought of horrific beauty being a pretty powerful one. It is rather likely that I will be changing whatever alts I have of whatever classes can be Blood Elves into Blood Elves once I get my hands on the expansion.

Most interesting to me though, is that they're Horde, which seems to follow the logic that Garithos pissed off Kael something fierce, to the point that he was driven to join the Horde with Illidan temporarily out of the picture. Kael and his pals are somewhat lost, since they have an insatiable need for magic, and no one's feeding it to them. So they start capturing demons and draining them. In the meantime, they form an alliance with Thrall and the Horde, due to their hatred for the Humans from their Garithos days, and the Horde welcomes them, because they're offing demons left and right.

It all seems somewhat centered on a single plot point involving two characters, rather than racial biases and all, but it's feasible. At least more feasible than the "Illidan sends Kael to infiltrate the Horde" idea. Because if the players know about that, it becomes less of an interesting concept. Especially on RP servers. I mean, there's a definite reason on an RP server to hate Undead with a passion if you're playing Blood Elf, which could make for some interesting roleplaying, but how do you put aside the knowledge that the Blood Elves were sent to betray the Horde and roleplay normally there?

Some other comments:

I'm not sure I like the interdimensional thing, I never have been a fan of that particular plot style, but it has been a part of the Warcraft universe for some time, they're only just translating it into the MMORPG, so I guess I can suffer. The thought of flying mounts I disagree with, because it generates other control issues, 3D movement always does.

The level cap increase scares me to death, because I know how much more powerful the Shaman gets with just *one* more talent point, giving them 10 more seems ludicrous. Of course, they don't need to give talent points for those 10 levels, which seems like a possibility, but does present things as being rather dull.

The Caverns of Time strikes me as an excellent idea, from a plotline standpoint as well as the standpoint of creating interesting gameplay. It gives Blizzard an opportunity to recast various events that have already been represented, as well as allow the players to kill various important figures, without actually affecting the current storyline at all. It also provides opportunities for inter-faction cooperation, through scenes like the Battle of Hyjal, though it would still only involve one faction. But fighting side-by-side with NPC's of the other faction, particularly the big names like Thrall, is a pretty big nugget.

The Alliance race has generated speculation, most people claiming it will be Pandaren. I frankly think this would be a mistake. The presumed reason to introduce Blood Elves to the Horde is to provide a more personal race to that side, to attract more players to play Horde. As it is, there is no "human" type race for the Horde, so I can sort of see it. But if you then introduce Pandarens, which carry a huge fanboy following, you balance your own effects. Which leads to the question, how do you introduce these two races with the intent of increasing one side's player base without causing the other side to yawn?

I think it's more likely that the Draenei will be the new Alliance race, though that seems very awkward. One, their alliance with Illidan means that something could have happened to him which cast out both the Blood Elves and the Draenei, though why the Naga still act against everyone, I wouldn't know. Also, I don't know of a single human being who actually cares about the Draenei, so I don't know why they'd add them.

Naga as Alliance playable? Seems like a possibility, and would accomplish the two main goals: It would be less desirable by the fanbase than Blood Elves, drawing more players to Horde, but it would also not be completely crapped on by the fanbase, as quite a few people would want to play Naga. Problem is that the Naga are already in the game as mobs, whom anyone can kill. They even have their own instance, sorta. Granted, with the addition of Zul'Gurub, this isn't a huge weight against them, it is something, a similar problem with factioning Goblins and Ogres (both of which were neutral in Warcraft III as well).

More will be told after Blizzcon, some developer will let something slip that they probably shouldn't, I imagine, or more information will be given than was released in that Italian magazine. Hopefully, people won't blow things out of proportion.

Well, hopefully, but I fully expect them to...

Dark Age of Camelot: Trials of Atlantis/Catacombs versus Darkness Rising

I choose to open things with this example of a pretty standard game design dynamic, biting the hand that feeds you. Sorta.

Mythic released Trials of Atlantis to originally much yawning. Frankly, there wasn't much there to change the game immediately, because it was 99% high end raid content. There was much talk before the expansion about the expansion not affecting RvR much at all, so everyone expected that going in.

Then came Retribution.

Retribution is about the best group of players of any game that I've ever seen, each and every one of them a die hard gamer, each and every one of them able to break the game simply through skill. They were for a time the only guild in DAoC ever to lead guilds in on two different servers at once in total realm points (in fact, with Nimue being clustered with two of the most populated servers in the game, Retribution still ranks 7th, and realm points come much slower on lower population servers).

What Retribution did was devote themselves to the expansion for a few weeks. They quickly learned how to get through all the Master Levels, they quickly had all the artifacts they needed, and when they were done, they dominated the server like they had never done before. Before anyone had completed Master Level 2, Retribution had access to Power Fonts, Warguard, Forceful Zephyr, and the wealth of game-breaking abilities that Mythic promised would not affect RvR at all.

While Ret didn't do it, a group of 8 Animists and buffbots took down the Hibernian dragon during this period of time, an encounter which is supposed to be done with 30+ active players, and is usually accomplished by non-farmers with 50 or more.

They also had all the drops that comes from going through all those encounters, and because they did most of it with their sister guild, The Phoenix Guard, they split the drops evenly, so in the end, everyone had +25% (before they went "uh oh" and changed it to 10%) casting speed, melee speed, and damage to both. Divon, an Eldritch who was already disgustingly good, turned around and began soloing with a traditionally poor soloing class (Mana Eld), and could not lose. He had Brittle Guards and Prescience Nodes to go along with the fact that he could fire Mastery of Concentration and cast 8 or 9 PBAOE's before their target could get out of the radius.

Needless to say, Trials of Atlantis was broken.

With the release of Catacombs, Mythic did it again, releasing three new overpowered classes (Warlock, Vampiir, and Bainshee), while the other two classes were somewhat lackluster.

And now, with Darkness Rising, we see the phenomenon come full circle. Having been bitten one too many times, they have released what may be the most boring and pointless expansion released for an MMORPG to date.

It is human nature that, when you do something wrong, you fade back, try to cover it up, and hope it goes away. This is the way that phenomenon works in game design. After blowing your game wide open, you come back unwilling to push the boundaries of the game. The Champion Levels are similar drivel to the Master Levels, except of very little use, and with no real different abilities available, just rehashes of the same stuff. The Champion Weapons are largely just artifacts with various abilities, though none of them compare to the power of artifacts out there now, such as Battler and Malice (though I admit the caster staves are pretty nice.) It seems the only selling point of the expansion is mounts, something which was purely done in reaction to WoW having them available.

It is the equivalent of a walk after a home run, the fear of going too far ensuring that you don't go far enough. Game design is about walking that line. You have to escalate, if you don't escalate from one expansion/addition to the next, you simply don't make money. If old players don't need the expansion to succeed, they won't get it, but if you make it so that you can't succeed without the new expansion, everyone complains about it.

And then they go out and buy the expansion.

So think about it next time you see some new addition (like the new Warrior ZG trinket), and your first impulse is to complain. If it isn't a little better than what you already had, then you have no reason to get it.

First Post

For those coming from other blogs who know me, one of the few things I loved about living in Virginia was the ability to talk shop about gaming. Personally, I am a man obsessed with puzzles, with figuring things out. And gaming is a natural extension of that obsession, not just figuring out how to break a game (which I've done), but figuring out what happens behind the game, the decisions behind it, the way the mechanics work, and all that happy crap. Most people find it intensely boring, which is why I treasured the friends I had in Virginia so much. Any one of them, I could sit for an hour and do nothing but analyze one minimal portion of a game, why it was there, whether or not it was powerful, its impact on the game.

Now that I live in St. Louis, there are precious few people that I can discuss this with, and nothing really fills that void aside from babbling about it randomly on a blog. That's kinda what these things are for.

Like with my other blog, there will be some ground rules:

The blog is about the games, not the companies. While there will, on occasion, be ribs thrown directly at game designers, I realize more than 99% of gamers out there that a lot of these decisions are hard. Anything I say here is not meant as a direct indictment of any game designer, even if it might come across that way.

This blog is meant to cover gaming on the whole, but obviously, it will more directly cover my experiences, primarily the current game of the moment for me. You'll find a majority of the posts now focusing on poker and World of Warcraft, because that is what I play right now. I'm sure things will change in the future.

Finally, this blog is meant to spark discussion, but not arguments. This is a pretty dictatorial thing on my behalf. If I think you're flaming me or another poster, the post is gone. Plain and simple. You're welcome to disagree, in fact, I hope you do, but keep it within the confines of discussion.