Quality in MMORPGs

How do you measure the quality of a game? A common practice is to use the sales figures. As you can see below, that approach is contentious.

Ben:
---Which objective measure of merit do you suppose to gauge quality on rather than supply and demand?---

Why must it be objective? Use the powers of persuasive argument to demonstrate why (for example) nonconsensual PVP is worse than Battlegrounds. Sales receipts aren't an "objective" measure because the feature may not be the cause of success. Maybe it's advertising, or circumstances, or a million other things.

Britney Spears isn't the greatest artist of all time, it's really not that hard to understand the discrepancy b/w sales and quality.

Tobold:
So what you are saying is that while no objective measure is able to tell us what a good game is, God Almighty has blessed YOU, and only you, with the gift of the one true subjective measure?

So, pray tell us, which one IS the greatest artist of all time?

I think it just happens that you like a smaller game more. That is okay. But trying to tell everybody that they are wrong, they are stupid, and only you can identify a good game is total bullshit.

MMORPGs are not songs. People pay for monthly subscriptions continuously, and often for years. If a large number of players does that, it is proof that the game is good.

Let’s first try to find out where we agree: We probably all agree that using sales figures is problematic. By sales figures Big Macs are the perfect meal. As are small and cheap cars the best cars around. The artist analogy has already been commented on by Ben. There are countless others. Of course, that does not mean that we should only use our own subjective taste to measure objective quality. It is a typical Tobold strawman (sorry) that can drive his commenters insane (if they care).

Now, let us do the next step. We agree that sales figures are a problematic way to measure quality. But what if it is the only one? Let’s assume for a moment that we could not come up with a better way to measure quality. Let’s assume that sales figures are the only way we know. Does that mean that we need to agree that a product that is sold often is very good?

We can certainly agree that the answer to that question is »No«.
Explanation: Assume you want to guess  the distance between sun and earth and your only tool are your eyes. Your guess is 1,000,000 km. Is it a good guess, just because you only had your eyes? No. Just because your only tool is a hammer, there is no reason to assume that all your problems are nails!

If sales figures are a problematic way to judge quality of a product, then using sales figures to judge the quality is just that: Problematic. It does not matter that you have no other tools at hand. In general, your conclusions do not magically become better, just because you lack the tools to achieve better conclusions.

Market Segmentation

Now, let’s have a look at how problematic, exactly, the sales figures approach is. I copy/paste from an old post.

Imagine five players and two ways to design your game: Option A and Option B. Option A could be “Introduce a feature” while option B could be “Do not introduce the feature”.

Imagine a scale of 1-10 to measure the subjective quality of the game, as rated by the individual players. 10 means a player loves your game; 1 means he hates it, considering the respective options A or B.

Let’s further assume that
1) All players buy a game if they give it at least a rating of 6/10.
2) All players pay the same price, there is no price differentiation.

Now consider this situation of possible ratings (=individual and subjective player benefit):

	Player benefit of Option A	Player benefit of Option B
Player 1	9	6
Player 2	10	6
Player 3	9	6
Player 4	3	6
Player 5	3	6
Sum:	34	30

To maximize aggregate player benefit you would have to choose option A, but with option B you sell the game 5 times. With option A you only sell it 3 times. Option B means 67% more revenue!

Thus, the game companies go for option B. It is better for them to make a game in a way that it is just good enough for every single player to play it. That means that the products that sell most are either products where consumer tastes do not differ, or option B like products.

There are a few ways out of that dilemma. For example, allowing players 1, 2 and 3 to pay more than players 4 and 5 for an option A game. This way they get what they pay for. Another way would be to make the same game twice. One version with option A and one with option B. This is called market segmentation by price differentiation or product differentiation, respectively.

Since the MMO industry does not do much price or product differentiation and since there are wildly different tastes in the MMO community about what is a (subjectively) good game, there is every reason to assume that the companies (just like Hollywood) always go for option B. It maximizes their profit. But does option B always make for a better game? Not for the majority for players. Three of five players, in the example, liked option A more. Also, the aggregate player benefit is higher for option A.

Even More Problems

There are even more problems about the sales figures approach. Firstly, there can be constrains, like money. A lot of people would like to buy better wine and better cars, but they do not have the means to do so. Secondly, as Ben already noted, some artists sell their products exorbitantly more often than other artists, not because they are so much better, but because of advertisement, network effects and the-winner-takes-it-all characteristics. A slightly worse product always runs danger to not be sold at all, because it is, well, slightly worse.

Other Tools

However, there are other ways to judge product quality. Consider good meals. There are experts who judge restaurants and chefs. They do not care about the costs of the meal, they do not care about advertisements and, hopefully, they are critical enough and do not care about network effects. They are able to rate a slightly worse meal just slightly worse. They know about some tricks, like too much fat and too much salt that can make a non-specialist always prefer McDonalds to Kathleen Daelemans.

This same tool, expert opinion, could be used in the MMORPG industry. Trust bloggers who seem to have the same taste you have (but still read the others!), trust independant game magazines (are there any?). Trust good arguments and your experience. And have a look at the sales figures if you want to. Just don’t think that they are a good indicator of product quality.

Ghostcrawler is Great

Random Player:
The Devs may be correct, in theory, that we don't need to squeeze every last drop of DPS out of our talent trees to down bosses. But in practice, you try to get in a raid with a tree that sacraficed 1% DPS for some fun utility, and you don't get an invite. Why would the raid leader take someone that didn't even spec the "right way"?

Ghostcrawler:
Posts like this make me very sad. You're portraying yourself to be at the mercy of uninformed yet tyrannical raid leaders who are quick to judge your performance based on perceived "tells." I know you need some basis to evaluate potential recruits or even pug members. But I do wish there was some way to turn around this virtual phobia of inefficiency -- this terror of being WRONG -- that we have managed to instill in our player base. I honestly think it's one of the greatest challenges facing the game.

Just realised that Larissa also found this part of the forums.

For years now I say exactly this:
The community is never responsible/guilty. It is always the developers. Ghostcrawler knows this, but that is not much of a surprise. The guys at Blizzard might not be the most dedicated virtual world/immersion guys, but otherwise they are the best of the best (payed) english-speaking MMO developers ;)

Players are predictable. They respond to the game they play. Often with considerable delay and in looping patterns that not always result in an equilibrium. That is the problem.
For example, awful DF-PUGs are an indirect result of the DF mechanic. The guilt is with the developers and Blizzard makes a stand here and accepts the responsibility.
Applaudable.

So, what needs to be done by the developers? Now, they could disable the armory, disable talent specc lookups, disable recount and things like this.
Since that is probably out of the question, they should change encounters.

Encounters should require DDs to specc into suvivability a lot. Raid leaders should not only look at "damage done", but also at "damage received". Next, they need to stop adding artificial enrage timers and add soft enrage timers that come naturally when healers run out of mana. Cataclysm seems to take some steps into this direction. I also wrote about it much more extensively before. Encounters need to be more diverse, but not too diverse that you feel pressured to respecc before every fight.

Blizzard has made players so powerful during WotLK (and late TBC) that they now have problems catching the ghosts the called. People now exspect to have dual-specc, cheap respeccs, teleports, the armory, no RNG loot, inspects, ...

As I wrote before: Rules exist to constrain players. It is their very nature. Good games have strict rules.

Actually, this is the most interesting aspect of game design. There is an endless feedback loop of player reaction to the game and game reaction to the players. Some of these feedback loops are stable, some osciallate, some are unstable or even chaotic. In this property game design and social sciences are very similar. I guess this is the reason why I love (MMO)game design almost as much as social sciences, like economics.

Dungeon Finder and Raiders

This is going to be very short about the Dungeon Finder.

Usually raiders these days like how fast they can gear up and get to the 'meat of the game'. Which, for them, is raiding about every other night.

Now, after reading a rant from a returning raider, Blacksen got doubts about the Dungeon Finder and since it is very well written, I link it for you.

The World of Warcraft Community: Just One in the Crowd

A Discussion with Tobold

Related to Tobold's post on nostalgia yesterday, I emailed him and we started a discussion. The discussion was in German, so it would be useless for this blog. I translated it into English as well as I could. In yellow you can read my emails. Tobold's are cyan. I let out a few personal parts

Hi Tobold

Out of interest:

Do you really think that nowadays games are better than older games in every single detail and that all discontent is explained by nostalgia alone? I wrote a post last Friday, arguing that there is a selection process at work. Do you think that is completely wrong?

The entire blogosphere is full of nostalgia posts at the moment. It seems very noncredible to me that nostalgia is the whole truth. Nobody denies that nostalgia plays a role.

Thought experiment: You put WoW from 2010 into a time machine and transport it back into the year 2000. Which game would all these bitter veterans have played, EQ or WoW? I think WoW, and I think that also applies to the people who claim that EQ was better.

You are right in that this is not the whole truth. But the rest of the truth is unflattering. A lot of what veterans miss is that they have been a small elite and nowadays everybody plays. I can understand that well, but it is not especially nice to refuse to give the other kids a place in the sandpit. Nor is it nice to not respond to the wishes of a broader public. In my opinion, a lot of what Wolfshead writes is very insulting. For example the idea that games nowadays are more stupid and address more stupid players.

Mmh ... As you know there are differences between you and me when it comes to ‘world vs. gameplay’. An age-old debate. We could discuss in length what is more important, but we can certainly agree that you consider gameplay more important and I consider the ‘world’ more important.

Would you agree that WoW moved in the direction of gameplay in the last 10 years? Probably – a few weeks ago you made a post saying that you are glad about it. :)

Would you agree then that this fact, combined with the fact that I am less glad about it, also is responsible for the fact that I consider WotLK (in parts!!) less enjoyable than Vanilla WoW?

Would you agree that this is “part of the truth”?

If you are talking about WoW only, I agree that there is more gameplay, but not less world (unless you insist that a world you are not forced to walk in is not there). I just don’t like the generalizations, like “all games of today are dumb”. There are a lot of games with a lot of world and not a lot of gameplay.

And Cataclysm will make WoW a bit more difficult. So, even in the case of WoW one cannot say that it becomes dumped down more and more. The pendulum of balance is swinging.

Before I rejoice about the first compromise in a year: So you agree?

Yes.

*rejoicing* :)

And you say that *I* consider discussion PvP? I have never rejoiced like that about the fact that somebody tells me that I have been right.

I do not rejoice about ‘winning’, but about having found a common ground.
All you just agreed to was that nostalgia is not 100% responsible (perhaps just 99% responsible).

99% is not my opinion. My opinion is that nostalgia is about 20% responsible. But we just made a first step! The next one would be much more difficult.

We agree that nostalgia is not 100% responsible. Is it not nice to have a discussion go like this: Trying to find where we agree and then step-by-step addressing what we do not agree on?

In comments I haven’t made it so far often, if ever.

I never said 99%. My guess is a bit more than 50%, let’s say 60%. And nostalgia does not describe the phenomena completely. “Burn-out”, for example, is also part of it. “Strange, somehow these games are not fun anymore after 10,000 hours. Probably the damn patches are responsible”.

Mmh.. Neither your blog post, nor your first email today seem to be consistent with this. It appeared to me that you considered 100% to be correct. (Go read my email and your first answer again, if you want).

In this case all our emails have been for nothing. However, now there is even more reason to be happy: We even agree that there are a lot of reasons for people to consider WotLK (in parts!!) worse than Vanilla. This is in addition to nostalgia (at least 40%).

In this case you should perhaps tell Oscar, Bhagpuss, Askander, Tallyn and Syl. Judging from their comments they also thought that you were talking about 100%.

In my first Email today I wrote:
“Do you really think that nowadays games are better than older games in every single detail and that all discontent is explained by nostalgia alone?”

Why have you not answered: “No, in my opinion nostalgia is only responsible for about 60%”?

Well, in my opinion

You: Argument 1
Me : Argument 2
You: Argument 3
Me : Argument 4

Is a lot better than
You: Argument 1
Me: You are so right, holy Nils.
You: I love you, too.

Just because I answer with some argument that does not mean that I do not agree with anything you said. And if you have a look at your comments at my blog, I cannot remember you partly agreeing with me. Either you had a completely different opinion (rarely, and with some bite to it), or you attack full force, although I certainly had said something reasonable in a long blog post.

On the contrary, if I write something that is 99% correct, I get endless hate-comments about the 1%, just like some time ago by Darren.

You criticize that I try to lead the discussion and .. yes, you are right.

You are welcome to send a question to me tomorrow and we will discuss that question and that question alone. Considering your emails today, if I had responded to all I disagreed with, we had been jumping around like bouncing balls, always past each other. Just like in the comments: The one guy says 1+1 =2 and the other guy does not say “You are right”, but criticizes the space in front of the =.

A discussion, to achieve some kind of result, requires a precise question to be tackled. If there is no moderator, the participants themselves need to concentrate on the precise question at hand.

Of course, I could have responded to burn-out and vanilla raider epeen. But that have just been distractions, have they not?

My offer is serious: You are welcome to lead a discussion with me and I will try to not distract, but come up with a true answer to your question. And if you can detect some inconsistency on my part you have ‘won’. And so have I!

Well, you cannot expect rhetoric on the level of Aristoteles or Cato on the internet. If Wolfshead writes that WoW and Farmville are the same, I will NOT say: “I agree in so far as I also welcome Cataclysm becoming more difficult again”. That is not the core statement of his post. If some discussion on the internet concentrates on a core statement it is already one of the better discussions.

The kind of discussion you would like to have, were only possible if the starting point were moderate. If Wolfshead just writes a hate post and claims things that are not true, there will never be a moderate discussion. On all objective scales of complexity, World of Warcraft is far away from Farmville, with thousands of players in between. If WoW were as simple, we would not have gigabytes of databases and thousands of addons. That these databases and addons make the game more simple is true, but it is not the responsibility of Blizzard, but the responsibility of the players. And if millions of players work hard to make a game more simple, it cannot have been that simple to begin with.

Nostalgia

Nostalgia. This word is really popular in current MMO debates. That has two reasons:

1) There are a lot of influential players who think that WoW: WotLK was a relative failure and there were much less such players at the end of Vanilla WoW or The Burning Crusade.
2) A lot of players think of themselves as especially insightful when argueing that the only reason for (1) is nostalgia.

Now, as you can see by the way I wrote (2), I am not a fan of this point of view.

It is not that I think that there is no nostalgia involved. Nostalgia plays a role. Nobody sane could deny it. But nostalgia is not everything. Nobody sane should deny that, either.

Let's stay with WoW: It has changed. Not just a little, but a lot. There was a time without raids, without battlegrounds, with regular open PvP, with totally unbalanced classes, superfluous damage dealers in groups, forced healing speccs in raids, only one tank specc, few flying routes, almost no teleports, strange bugs, severe stability problems, extremely expensive normal mounts, unreachable epic mounts, almost no epics, only two legendaries, farming raid groups, long distances to travel to get to anywhere, no flying mounts, only one viable weapon enchant, bad graphics, no shadows, many elites in the open world, too much auto attack, terrible UI, not enough addons, strong advantages for Alliance when raiding, ...

I tried to list good and bad things and you might see that the bad things probably outnumber the good things - no matter your preferences. So was early WoW better than current WoW? That is a really tough question .. and a totally unimportant one!

What is important is that the vision behind early WoW was something I like much more than the vision behind current WoW. But since early WoW also had a lot of execution problems, it is hard to say that it itself was better.

Early WoW tried to create a seamless (no loading screens!) virtual world. A world with a lot of quests and some sandbox elements, like open PvP. WoW never tried to beat Eve Online at being a sandbox, but it tried to resemble a virtual world.

Current WoW does not have the vision of a virtual world. .. If you do not agree, I can weaken that statement to: Current WoW has a lesser focus on the virtual world aspect than early WoW had.
Two examples: The rewards in dungeons suddenly change during patches without any immersive explanation. Some NPCs seem to have all the equip you need to defeat the Lich King: Why don't they just give it to you ? You can suddenly teleport to automatically assembled groups of strangers from other servers and do a random dungeon with them. After that you automatically get teleported back to were you were. Not even by some NPC, but just by the game mechanics.

The vision has changed and with it changed the game. The fact that some players nowadays often feel like early WoW was better, is not just nostalgia. It is also due to the fact that people who had liked WotLK in 2005 did not end up playing Vanilla! There was a selection process at work! Those who did not have the time to play Vanilla stopped playing Vanilla! They are not around to tell you that they like WotLK more!
Therefore, it is reasonable to assume that those who mourn after early WoW, in fact, are not nostalgic, but actually are only present, because they liked early WoW.

If there is one thing I learnt from participating in the MMORPG blogosphere, it is that people, indeed, prefer different games. As incredible as I think it is: Some people indeed like to be teleported around the world. They do not consider it an immersion problem. They like AoEing in dungeons, hate crowd control and do not want leveling to be hard at all!

In the last 5 years, the market did not just grow. It grew by attracting players with different attitudes, different gaming mentalities. If you want to play WoW the way you play a console game, you will like WotLK more than Vanilla. Regardless of when you started to play WoW. But it is more likely you started during WotLK as you would not have liked Vanilla.

Up to now the companies still try to make games for all players. But in the future there will have to be market segmentation and product differentiation. A polished Eve Online-like fantasy MMORPG will attract players. But these players will not want to play together with other players who consider a teleporting dungeon-finder a necessity. And vice versa!

MMORPGs cannot cater to everybody anymore. The market became too big, too diverse. At some point the developers need to make a stand and try to convince the players that their vision of a game is actually fun. That does not mean, however, that game developers cannot pool ressources. In fact, they should!

Guild Wars 2

Another Guild Wars 2 post. But I will try to keep it short.
Have a look at this video.
For 72 minutes the Guild Wars 2 designers explain their game.

First: I think these are smart people. They talk alot about player mentality. That alone is prove that they are smarter than most developers :)

They analyse a lot of problems correctly. It is just that usually these problems have several solutions and they consistently pick the 'wrong' one. At least from my point of view.

Example:
Problem: Players are conditioned to ignore a poisened lake, because there is no ! on top of it (player mentality).
Solution: A lot of green gas erupts from the lake. Thus it is easier to spot. Unfortunately, it also does not look like a lake anymore! They also add NPCs with symbols over their head. Just to be sure.
My solution had been: Make trailer/intros that condition players to lookout for problems in the world. Add an extensive tutorial.

I congratulate the GW2 team to make a new MMO experience and to try to move the genre forward. That is quite a deed! I even like some elements they introduce.

Unfortunately, they cater to a completely different player than I am. So I will buy that game, have some fun and then .. hope that CCP makes a good MMORPG - finally.

On the other hand: All they seem to want from me is to buy that game once. Not to play it for some months. I consider this a waste, but .. well. They will get what they want. I will spend 50€ on the game once, instead of some 200€/year. Serves them right.

Pleasant Anticipation: Vorfreude

Most English speakers know the German word Schadenfreude.

What they probably do not know is that there is also no Englisch word for another German one: "Vorfreude".
In this context "freude" can be translated as "fun" and "Vorfreude" means something like "pleasant anticipation".

And then there is a German proverb: "Vorfreude ist die beste Freude".
Which could be translated to: "Pleasant anticipation is the best fun there is."

Now, I don't want to teach German here.
This proverb contains some wisdom, I think, especially when it comes to MMOs. When you "grind" heroic dungeons in World of Warcraft for the first time, it is a lot of fun. This is not because the isolated activity is a lot of fun. It is because you anticipate future rewards and this anticipation itself is fun; in fact: the best fun. Because, as soon as you got all the items you will probably hate heroic dungeons and the joy of having gained all the items does not match the prior "pleasant anticipation" for long; if ever.

When I wrote about the Fun Fallacy I mentioned that "circumstances matter". Actions do not have some mysterious inherent fun attached to them. Instead, circumstances matter. Fun is not derived from an isolated activity, but from an activity that is embedded in the rest of the game.

Vorfreude is one of the most prominent circumstances, especially in a reward-driven game like World of Warcraft. But it is very powerful in all avatar-progression-based games; that includes most sandboxes and themeparks.

Therefore, when discussing fun, we always need to remember that the anticipation of fun is fun in itself. In fact, it is usually more and longer lasting fun than anything else.

Grinding

There has been some talk about 'grinding' in recent days. In my opinion it comes down to player mentality.

1) If a player wants a MMO to be 'just a distraction' after work, every minute of his 'valueable time' should be fun. He will not remember any activities, because they do not have any meaning for him. And because he does not even want to remember them. It is all about passing time. An example is using the dungeon finder in WoW although there is nothing to gain from it. It can be fun, but it has no meaning. The player does not remember it and there would be no reason to.

2) If you want a MMO to be interesting, like watching a good play at the theater, however, you are interested in a meaningful activiy. The main motivation is not to pass time, but to experience art.
For this player mentality, monotonuous repetition is not a problem, if it is still immersive. Repetition is part of the game designers toolset. Hacking lumber to build your own in-game house for two weeks may be boring as an isolated activity, but it can still be a lot of fun, if the final house means something to you.

The problem in understanding (2) is that some players look at fun like an inherent property of a isolated activity. I wrote about that fallacy before.

You should also check out what Evizaer wrote about grind. I like his definition a lot:

Grinding is when the mental process of play breaks down because it became separated from the game’s meaning.

Babylon 5

Babylon 5 is a Sci-Fi series created between 1993 and 1998. Therefore some readers have a good chance to not know it.

But.. a post about a 15 years old Sci-Fi series on an MMO blog?

This has two reasons:
1) On my absolute scale (1-10) of the perfect series, Babylon scores a 7. And I do not know any other series that scores more than a 5 on that scale. Stories are art and to tell them well is incredibly hard. Babylon 5 does exceptionally well.

2) This blog has a focus on what I usually call immersion. Essentially that is the feeling of experiencing something important when you play an MMO - or watch a series.

Babylon 5 is what I recommend to watch, experience. Not over a few months, but rather a few days. Buy/rent the box, take a few days off and watch the entire series in a week (will about take that long). That is not especially healthy *grin*, but well worth it.

Once you did that you will understand why I critizise immersion in MMOs and why I consider playing/watching anything for less than 60 min only a distraction, instead of experiencing art. You will understand what an epic story is and that your T10 set is not epic, but a f***ing joke.

As a little appetizer: Here are a few Youtube videos. They should not spoil it too much for you. To understand the complete story you will have to watch it twice, anyway.

(1)
(2)
(3)
(4)
(5)
(6)
(7)
(8)
(9)
(10)

And two must-see videos:
(11)
(12)

About this "nostaliga" thing: Babylon 5 was not my first Sci-Fi series. There have been good ones before and then there came a better one. Even Babylon 5 can be beaten. Even in Babylon 5 there are inconsistencies, and technical/financial limitations applied. The reason good stories and games do not happen often is, because they are so hard to make; and even harder to finance.

From Wikipedia:

Straczynski set five goals for Babylon 5. He said that the show "would have to be good science fiction" as well as good television ("rarely are science fiction shows both good science fiction and good TV; there're generally one or the other" ); it would have to do for science fiction television what Hill Street Blues had done for police dramas, by taking an adult approach to the subject; it would have to be reasonably budgeted, and "it would have to look unlike anything ever seen before on TV, presenting individual stories against a much broader canvas." He further stressed that his approach was "to take science fiction seriously, to build characters for grown-ups, to incorporate real science but keep the characters at the center of the story." Some of the staples of television science fiction were also out of the question (the show would have "no kids or cute robots"). The idea was not to present a perfect utopian future, but one with greed and homelessness; one where characters grow, develop, live, and die; one where not everything was the same at the end of the day's events. Citing Mark Twain as an influence, Straczynski said he wanted the show to be a mirror to the real world and to covertly teach.

The Future of Gaming

So ..

What do you think about the Future of Gaming ?

EVE Online

I do not play CCP's EVE Online as I dislike the user interface and the character progression system. I am also not a fan of any form of RMT.

However, EVE Online is the only reasonably popular and successful MMO that focuses on an immersive virtual gaming world. Thus, CCP managed to keep me subscribed without even playing their game. My hope is that by donating monthly money I can increase the chance for a fantasy version of EVE. Not necessarily done by CCP, but any able company.

A faint dream of mine is that the guys at Blizzard want to diversify their portfolio with their 'next-gen MMO', thus not killing World of Warcraft, but complementing it.

The idea that the world really needs more good sandboxes, obviously, is not mine alone. CCP themselves give designers a little headstart by talking about some înteresting problems and their solution when designing a sandbox.

A very interesting article, especially for anybody with some programming background.

Infinite Space: An Argument for Single-Sharded Architecture in MMOs

And maybe CCP eventually rework their entire user interface. Then I would start playing again, instantly.

The Fun Fallacy

Yesterday I had a short discussion with Tobold, from Tobold’s MMORPG Blog. Eventually he decided to use this argument:

It is YOU who doesn't WANT to run around anymore. There is nothing in WoW which would prevent you from doing it.

As you can guess the subject were teleports.
This kind of argument is what I call the fun fallacy. It is the result of a pseudo-scientific approach to games. In general in goes like this:

1) The developers want to find out if activity X is fun.
2) Therefore they conduct an experiment: They allow the players to skip activity X, with a click on a button.
3) If a vast majority of players skip the activity, it cannot have been fun. qed.

Let me reduce this argument ad absurdum.
1) Blizzard wants to find out, whether raiding ICC is fun.
2) Therefore they introduce a new NPC in the ICC lobby. You can click on him and buy the complete T10 heroic set for 1G.
3) A vast majority of players clicks on the button. Within two weeks raiding in ICC drops by 90%. Therefore raiding ICC cannot have been fun.

Next, we introduce a button at the start of the game: “Gimme level 80 epic char”, and the next month we introduce a “Gimme gold cap” button. Eventually we introduce god mode. Suddenly, the only people who play WoW are those who use it as an expensive chat room.

What is wrong with this kind of argument is the idea that fun is an inherent property of an isolated activity: It is not.

Imagine eating one sweet cookie every day before you go to bed. Now imagine eating 500 sweet cookies all at once. Fun does not multiply. The isolated activity of eating a single sweet cookie might stay the same, but the circumstances matter.

Some months ago I was exploring the mountains around Jebel Toubkal in Northern Africa with a few friends. It was very hot and very dry. At one day I found out that I had not taken enough water with me on the trip. It was quite terrible. However, a few hours later we arrived at the top of one of the smaller mountains and to our surprise there was a guy who sold coke. Just like in a movie. Now, usually I don’t drink coke, as it is too sweet for my taste: But this one coke was easily one of the best drinks in my life. Having returned home, I retested coke and found that it still is much too sweet and not enjoyable at all. Circumstances matter.

Imagine this one cool dungeon in your new MMORPG. You just love it. The dungeon has a great atmosphere, good story and although it certainly is not easy to beat, you managed to do so the last few times. Now imagine somebody telling you that the loot in this dungeon sucks and there is another dungeon that drops much, much better. Moreover that dungeon is quite easy to beat and people generally consider it the norm to run this dungeon, instead of the other. They call you stupid to do the wrong dungeon. How much fun will you have the next time you run your favorite dungeon?
Some stuborn people might want to insist that they would feel the same. Well, a lot of players would not. Circumstances matter.

---
But there is more to it. Games consist of
- equipment,
- players,
- goals and rules.

The reason for the rules is to constrain the players from reaching the goals. And to do so in a fun way.

Think of chess: There is the board and its pieces, the players, the rules that tell you how to move the pieces and the goal of the game: Drop the opposing king. Dropping the king could be easy in chess: Just use your thumb. But playing chess this way is not much fun. It is the rules that constrain you that make the game fun.

But good rules are hard to come by. There are trillions of ways to play “The Settlers of Catan”, but only a tiny proportion of them is fun. When we buy a modern game, we also pay for the rules. In fact, the rules and goals are often the most valuable part of the game, as they are the only thing that cannot be bought with money.

It is important to understand that rules constrain players. That is their very nature. Developers should be wary of players that wish to be less constrained. These players usually do not look at the matter from a developer PoV, but a pure player PoV. They ask whether they could have their queen move like a knight, too.

In classic WoW I had to ride to every single dungeon I wanted to visit with friends. I usually tried to get to the dungeon ASAP. Had you given me a teleport button, I had used it. But that does not mean that introducing that button had increased my long term fun.

With the Dungeon Finder and its teleport to every dungeon, I do not see the world anymore and I miss that. I miss the rule that disallowed teleport. To tell me that I do not have to teleport does not help. Fact of the matter is that I can and circumstances matter.

Market Segmentation

Imagine 5 users and two ways to design your game: Option A and Option B.

I use a scale of 1-10.
10 means a player loves your game. 1 means he hates it.

All users buy a game if they give it at least a rating of 5/10.
All users pay the same price when they buy the game.


"User benefit" on a scale 1-10 of different users depending on design option:

Option: A | B
----------------
User 1: 9 | 5
User 2: 8 | 5
User 3: 9 | 5
User 4: 2 | 5
User 5: 1 | 5
----------------
Sum : 29 | 25

Total benefit
Option A: 9+8+9+2+1=29
Option B: 5+5+5+5+5=25

To maximize aggregate user benefit you would have to chose option A, but at option B you sell the game 5 times. At option A you only sell it 3 times.

Substract costs, and your profit at option B is much, much higher than at option A.

That is why the number of sold items says nothing about quality of the product! This explains why Hollywood blockbusters make the most money, although nobody sane would argue that they are the best movies possible. This is why WoW is just fun enough to occasionally resubscribe. That is the reason all Star Trek movies only appeal to the non-fans.

Player 1-3 would absolutely love a game developed according to option A - they will never get it.

Only way would be to make (allow !) consumers to pay more. But that is a tricky problem; and don't start talking about item shops!

My suggestion is market segmentation:
It would not cost much to take e.g. the WoW engine and change a few rules. Create different MMOs for different players.

Give the market a choice!


-----------
-----------

I suggest to build the basics of one MMO with a lot of money. Then I suggest to give this framework, that has everything but rules, to different teams.

These teams cannot add graphics, they cannot add server architecture, they cannot add animations...
But they can change the rules of the game.

That is:
- They can calibrate difficulty
- They can calibrate reward structures
- They can calibrate PvE/PvP
- They can add incentives to explore
- ..

All the things that don't cost much to change.

When Blizzard talks about content, they think about adding graphics/animations to the game.

But when designers are faced with the limitations mentioned above, they will find out that this is not the only way to create content. For example, a story doesn't necessarily need much work.

Move some creatures from one point to another, make a NPC camp bigger. Make a NPC camp overtake a town. These are all examples that cost almost nothing. I wrote about it some time ago.

We need some rivalry between concepts. Not just a rivalry about who can churn out more polished 3D graphics/sounds/animation per month.


Compare it to chess:
The board and the figurines are created once. Subsequently they are given to different developer teams.
These teams will invent rules that they consider fun and eventually the teams with the best rules will have the most players. In capitalism this works especially good if you allow the different teams to charge different amounts of money for their games using different payment methodes.

Some teams will think that making chess easy to win against a computer is the best way. Another team will think that making chess all about PvP, is the best way. Another team will want to add concentrated coolness and allows all your figurines to move like queens.

We need pluralism and competition in this market. This is not only good for the consumer, but especially good for the suppliers(developers).

Actually, it is also a very risk-averse approach!

Immersion and stuff

I am just going to list a few points here.

1) Some people value credibility and (internal) consistency more than other people.

2) Everything depends on the kind of game you want to create/play and the way the player approaches it. (Hard to stress this enough).

3) Credibility and "gameplay flow" most often complement each other and only sometimes disturb each other. To play one off against the other is foolish.

4) The word "realistic" needs to be scrapped from this entire debate. Only thing it has ever done is create strawman arguments, like "Fantasy is never realistic". Yeah, thanks.

5) There is a reason most games strongly assemble real life: It is a wonderful box full of potentially interesting gameplay mechanisms. E.g. smithing in a Tale in the Desert.

6) A MMORPG has to be as immersive, credible and consistent as possible and as little as necessary.
Ergo: Don't sacrifice credibility for no reason. Search for ways to increase gameplay, flow, credibility, consistency or immersion without decreasing any of it.

----
Fantasy is never realistic. But it can be credible, consistent and immersive. It can also create "flow".

Flow is what Tetris has, but Tetris is not immersive, because you don't even have a 'char' or any entity that you control.

Flow is still necessary for MMORPGs.
But MMORPGs also need immersion: The feeling that you are the char you control; like an actor who plays another person in a different situation and maybe even with a different personality. Immersion is connected with flow, but not the same.

To make you believe to be in the world, to make you ask the subconscious question: "What would I do next if I were him?", you need to be immersed. To immerse you, a game needs to be credible and logically consistent. It does not need to be realistic. The best game I know at immersion is Fallout 3, if played right. (See point (2) above).

I know it is all semantics. But the semantics are important here.

Credibility, Consistency, Immersion vs. Gameplay and Flow

[This is a modified comment on Tobold's post.]

For easy reading:
"Credibility, Consistency and Immersion" = "C/C/I"

Firstly: "Realism" is a very, very bad word in such discussions. E.g. fireballs are not realistic. There is a reason I usually use the words "credibility", "consistency" and "immersion" instead of "realistic". Nobody wants realistic games. Nobody!
"Realism" in these discussions is often used as a straw man.

The only realistic game there is, is real(istic) life and why should anybody want to play a second real life? (Pun intended).

Now, if a fireball hits a wooden door and nothing happens, that is not credible, because it is not consistent with the idea that the fireball is a ball of heat that can burn things. Here, consistency and credibility and therefore immersion are strongly connected. That is very common.

Many people wouldn't care about the fireball, but there are some people who consider the fact that a fireball burns some things, but doesn't burn other things to break the flow. You suddenly stop and think "How stupid!!". Breaking C/C/I can break gameplay flow!

On the other hand, there are people who are not able to find a single logical problem in the latest Star Trek movie. Sometimes I envied them, but I never admired them.

On a scale of 0-10:
Nobody would like a game with C/C/I of 0. That would mean that e.g. your character would want to keep the house he lives in safe. Only to stop at the next McDonalds to eat, while the house is burned down outside the window. After all, he is hungry.
That might make it easier for the story teller, because the guys who started the fire also eat at McDonalds and this way a barfight can take place. But most people would consider it rather stupid or "not credible". They would start talking to other people in the cinema, thus breaking flow.

Also, nobody would want to play on a scale of 10, because that would indeed require the developers/story tellers to make sure, you know that this guy never has to go on toilette, because he has some better way to release his body's fluids.

Most people like a rating of perhaps 3 or 4. I like a rating of maybe 6 or 7. That's all.

There is a reason many games start at the real world and change it. Real world is simply interesting. To have heat destroy things is a fact from real life and not something a game designer imagined. 99% of most games is a simple copy/paste from real life. It is less than 1% that we are talking about here.

In my opinion, a good game tries to maximize Credibility/Consistency/Immersion/Flow/Gameplay. All five of it.
Unfortunately, too much flow can hurt credibility and too much credibility can hurt flow.
There is an optimum here.

The trick, however, is to find game mechanics/explanations that let you increase one or more of these attributes without reducing the rest.

For example, the death penalthy in WoW:
You could imagine a hundrend and more stupid time sinks after you died. But Blizzard decided to use a ghost-running. That is much better than some arbitrary minigame, because there is some connection to the issue. It is not perfectly consistent with the rest of the world and therefore not perfectly credible, but it is much better than some puzzle or a simple timer etc.

EVE has an even better explanation for death that is almost perfectly credible and logically consistent: Clones. I like that as a gameplay mechnism and as a credible explanation.

Often real life mechanics can enhance games. For example collision detection, done right, could replace the silly concept of threat.
Of course, good collision detection is very hard to code. That is why we have "threat" today. But how much cooler would it be to really hinder the evil guys to hit your healers instead of 'taunting' them. LoL ;)

Neverwinter Nights

-
Interview at Gamespot.

I could like that; even if it is Cryptic. With every passing year I feel like my original vision of MMORPGs just won't come. An EVE-like triple-A fantasy MMO with meaningful travel, exploration, trade, conflict and focus on credible stories, immersive environments, etc. etc. etc.

The movement of the industry is eratic. Dominated by ill-informed short-sighted financial interests that don't understand the appeal of a virtual world in the first place. Talking about Farmville will probably get me more listeners at headquarters than talking about a consistent world.

In that case, I might as well play single player games with added multiplayer options. Here the limits of immersion are well defined at the start and not constantly violated while playing.

Free to play MMOs

Firstly let's talk about this injustice:

Tobold wrote in a comment:

Frankly, I find that Free2Play design a LOT more fair than the monthly sub design where the guy playing just one hour a week pays the same as the guy playing a hundred hours. In the monthly sub model the people who play the least effectively subsidize the people who play the most. I agree with your statement that this is great for the "serious" player, but it is rather unfair for the casual player.

The added advantage of the Free2Play model is that at times where you don't play at all, your cost is zero. In a monthly sub game you'd need to unsubscribe and resubscribe for breaks, and often keep paying for time you never used.

In my opinion, if you look at how much money people waste by subscribing useless insurance policies every month, this more.justice.for.MMO.subs argument appears absurd.
Add to that the low costs of playing MMOs in the first place; especially for players with some income.

And if you are still not satisfied: It is perfectly possible to have players buy points with their credit cards that can then be spent on accessing the game for
1) a day
2) two days
3) a week
4) a month
5) a year
6) ..

Just consider that people who constantly have a look at their watch don't have fun (and are not fun to play with!). So don't offer a sub for 5min and don't make players pay in retrospect.

Thus, this grave injustice, even if you think that it must be removed, can easily be eliminated completely with a slight modification of current subscription models.


Now, the only reason left for item shops (that I am aware of), is that players with a good job and much money should be able to substitute that money for in-game time, because the unemployed otherwise are better in-game than they are.

Firstly, I consider it immersive and credible and actually quite natural that characters who accomplish a lot of deeds in a virtual world progress more. They progress by those deeds.

Secondly, that ansatz implies that playing the game is not fun and it should be possible to skip it to have more fun. If that is what your favourite game is like, you should really stop playing now!

Thirdly, I just don't want a virtual world that allows character progression based on real-life wealth. The equation (more money = less time, and vice versa) is not realistic. The correlation may be positive, but it is far from +1.

Finally, I don't think a MMO should focus so much on exponential character progression. People usually 'get it' after a while and lose all motivation. (See T-Sets in World of Warcraft). Often they burn out. Sometimes they become addicted. It's just not fun in the end. It's not even admirable game design. It is based on greed.

Future MMOs will focus more on what you experience while you play the MMO, instead of how you build that 100,000k-crit numerical demi-god. This will also solve a lot of issues with players (high-lvl/low-lvl) playing together. Not even speaking about immersion. I can't wait.

MMORPG near future

In recent years I had been convinced that the only way for MMORPGs to move forward were sandbox approaches. The reasoning was that to create a diverse, interesting and in parts unpredictable world this would be the only way. Content creation of even hundreds of designer would never be enough to satisfy the consumers.

Now, I still think that that is the final stage of MMO evolution, but I am not so sure that it is the next one anymore. Players have a hard time role playing a fantasy character. There are a lot of problems that arise from the fact that you are actually playing a game (perhaps a fun simulation) and often have obligations in real life that require you to play only for a limited (non-epic) time frames. There are also conflicts of interest. Min/maxing is a result of the most prominent one.

The next generation of AAA-MMORPGs will consist of games like ST:ToR or GW2 (among others). These games try a different approach and got me thinking about the limits of that approach.

What are the limits designing a (more) credible MMORPG? What are the limits of dynamic questing?

Dynamic questing in this context means less static quests. In the past you had a quest giver who would ask you to kill, collect or transport things. This system was kept very easy, because it evolved from MMORPGs that only offered mob grinding as a way to progress ones character. It is also very easy to keep bug free and resistant against bugs that still get thorugh.

But the world keeps rolling and at this time, with today’s budget of AAA-MMORPGs we can have a look at more complex solutions. In fact, we must, because in the MMORPG market the winner takes it all.

Guild Wars 2 seems to make a great step forward, but they also make a mistake: They focus on the individual player. No immersive world focuses on the player. Otherwise, however, I like their approach a lot.

To explain what I would like to find in my next generation MMORPG, I will describe a dynamic (less static) questing environment that would be technically feasible and a big improvement over today’s quests.


• Orcs are landing at a beach somewhere in a world where you cannot teleport everywhere at will. There is friction of movement.

• The Orcs act on their own using scripts to try to follow orders of a game designer. The game designer needs to spend some hour every day to look at each server.

• The developer tells them to set up a very strong, but small camp.

• He orders them to march into the land and conquer a small NPC village.

• He sets sets up supply routes from the coast to the village and patrols the near land.

• He creates small quests from less-important NPCs who askes players to find out more about the Orc presence. The quest descriptions include a guess at how hard the quest will be. These quests can often be done alone, if you are careful, because you will only meet very small patrols that you can attack at a time and location of your choosing.

• A big army of players could attack the Orcs and decimate them below an (unpredictable, but guessable) number. Alternatively they could kill some important bosses of the Orcs, like an influential shaman or a chieftain. They could poison a well, if they are especially evil (the well might still be poisoned after the Orcs have been defeated). For obvious reasons this shouldn’t be possible for single players. A forth option would be to disrupt the supply routes of the Orcs. If the players succeed, the Orcs will retreat back to stage one: The coast in this case. If the designer wants, he can order more ships full of Orcs to land at the coast.

• Should the players not succeed in driving back the Orcs, the designer will order an attack and perhaps conquer another village after some weeks.

• A big Orc camp at step 4 could be weakened by defeating the chieftain at step 2, thus disrupting supplies. It could make the Orcs at step 4 go back and try to re-conquer the location at step 2 within a week. It is the game designers work to do what makes sense and entertains the players with a credible world.

• The designer looks at his screen every morning and decides that the Orcs will now move back/forth. He places a few buildings the Orcs will try to build with resources they transport via supplies or farmed at the location (wood). Finally he creates a few simple quests. It is very similar to a strategy game and might even eventually evolve into that direction.


Will this be fun for the individual player? You need to make it fun!

Players can ‘grind’ Orcs, collect their ears (or whatever) and go back to receive a reward. They can hardly be the great hero, because the Orc camps are too well fortified, but by chance they might attack a specific supply caravan of the Orcs that contained really valuable items (for them, for some authorities, etc).

While the invasion goes on, players can play this MMO like they played any other MMO. But their actions will have a meaning, will be much more immersive and if they want to make a substantial difference they can band together. There needs to be limits of banding together, as there are technical limitations. Players understand this. Give those Orcs AoE spells and it won’t even make much sense to attack a camp with some 200 players, depending on the terrain.

There will be little whining about ‘I cannot do this quest alone’, because it will seem natural to the players that 'accessing' the very well defended supply caravan requires support by other players. However, there always needs to be enough to do for solo players.

Several events can happen at the same time at different locations. Make it worthwhile to migrate to a location that has few players and the friction of travel will solve many problems with too many players at one location. Now you can try to introduce trade in a feasible, fun and still immersive way. Etc. etc. etc.

Today designers constantly update their online worlds. The worlds are not left alone today, either. Instead of creating a new raid dungeon all I ask from the developers is to guide their online worlds. If they are given the right (bug free, tested) tools they should be able to do this with ease. All they need are ways to order mobs to move from X to Y, to try to transport stuff from X to Y using route Z. To try to build something that requires X wood at location Y…
These things are possible to code nowadays. Given enough time and money they can be relatively bug free.

Today content creation means creating new mobs, new graphics, new dungeons. Tomorrow new content means more stories and more entertainment.


Concluding remarks:

1) There still is a lot of potential before we really need sandboxes to simulate a fun virtual world. Where a sandbox approach is feasible, however, it should always be used. If only for the reason that they are so much cheaper than developer interaction/scripts.

2) Instead of an exponential character progression, I suggest to create an interesting world that offers predominantly credible advances of character power. I.e. The difference of a high-end character and a new character (after tutorial) should be some 100%. No more. The world keeps players playing for the same reason we like to watch those TV series (e.g. Lost): We want to know what happens next.
The story can be supplemented by messengers that bring news from the front or even a newspaper/video, depending on the setting.
We have a unique character that can experience the world and could even be part of something larger than himself if the player is willing to use his saturday evening on it.

3) For the family guys: What is better: Watching Lost with your family or watching/playing that fantasy story that you can even be part of?

The Left and the Right of MMO Space

-
Since this blog post got a hell of a lot of coverage (compared to the usual coverage the blog gets :), I'd like to say one thing first:

I do not think that the ideas of left and right I mention here are related to the political left/right of any country. It was just a nice wording to describe 'welfare epics' as 'left'. That's all. Actually I thought about reversing the left/right, just to confuse people, but didn't do that in the end.

-
Here's a hypothesis:
As most of us know there are two groups of MMO players: Let's call them Left and Right.

Left:
Likes welfare epics
Wants easier content
Everybody should be able to access all content
Downtime sucks
Vanilla WoW sucked
Gameplay >> Virtual World
Theme Park >> Sandbox
Likes Instances
PvP has to be balanced and instanced
Group content should be optional. Players should not depend on each other
Anonymity is not a big problem
...


Right:
Hates welfare epics
Wants harder content
Wants only some people to beat the hardest content
Downtime adds to the experience
Vanilla was nice, Original Everquest even better
Virtual World >> Gameplay
Sandbox >> Theme Park
Disklikes Instances
Why shouldn't I be able to hit the guy in front of me?
Group content is important and requires players to depend on each other
Anonymity is a big problem
...

Now, most people belong to one of these groups. This is also true at Blizzard.

Hypothesis:
When working on WotLK the two groups made a deal:
One group would design WotLK and the other will design the subsequent expansion. The management liked it as they could use some social experiment data for the new MMO. So the groups threw a coin and the Left got to design WotLK.

They made raids accessible to everybody. They turned heroic dungeons into AoE theaters. They made outside mobs hit for 0.5% of players health. Etc. etc. etc.

Now .. CATACLYSM comes around and the RIGHT is back:

Outside mob damage is increased 400% !
Outside mob health is increased 100%.
No AoE in dungeons. CC is back!
Considerable downtime is re-introduced.
Much less itemlevel progression this time.
Slow mounts for the dead.

Let's see what else they have in store.

Easier Content

It seems we finally reached the far end of easier content. Was about time.

http://blue.mmo-champion.com/t/26435496423/creature-damage-output-changes/

Creature damage output has been increased from roughly level 65 and up. These increases scale upward with level. Creatures in exterior zones at level 80 now have 2.5 times the damage output they did previously in beta, 3.2 times at level 81, and 4 times at level 82 and up.

We’d like to get your feedback about how combat feels with creatures in level 80-85 exterior zones, including spawn rates and numbers of creatures in specific locations in each zone. Please let us know if this feels adequately challenging, or if there is a little too much face rocking going on.

[..]

The idea isn't for you to be in Godmode, mowing through everything in your path. The idea is - in fact - for you to have to stop to rest, bandage, heal, every once in awhile.

If you are reckless you will absolutely die. This is intended.

 [..]

We're currently investigating issues with creature spell damage scaling. The intent is definitely not for players to have to rest after every single solo pull.

Melee damage, on the other hand, seems about right, but may undergo some fine tuning.

Keep the feedback for specific lethal creatures and deadly points of interest coming. We're looking at everything submitted. 

Guild Wars 2

-
Guild Wars 2 looks very nice and even seems to have some interesting ideas about how to change the MMO industry. Unfortunately it also has a lot of properties that I dislike. I collected some quotes of the web page and commented on them.

But what if you don’t want to read flowery language and pick from a lot of dialog? What if you just want to simply kill everything and hand in some heads for a reward? No problem! We understand that not everyone wants to hone their interpersonal skills with NPC banter, but we recognize they don’t want to miss out on all the benefits either. Well, have no fear because the most rewarding NPCs will, as an alternative, also sell their services for some gold if you haven’t developed your personality or earned enough karma. And if you truly don’t want to be bothered reading at all, we make clear the shortest path through a conversation so you can get back to the fighting.

This is a prime example of trying to cater to really everybody. Understandable, but doesn't really work well from experience.

First off, we set the level cap for the game at 80, but we made the time between levels rather short. Instead of taking longer and longer to reach each level, it takes about the same time to go through each level. It’s pretty simple; if we expect you to level up every few hours, then why shouldn’t it be that way all through the game?

80 levels. What a coincidence! And then you will get to cut through them really fast, because: Let's face it, nobody likes leveling or playing MMOs in the first place.

Defeat in Guild Wars 2 is intended to be an experience, not a punishment. Let's face it: dying never feels great, even without a death penalty. As weird as it might sound, we decided to look into what would make dying a more enjoyable and memorable play experience.

Finally a game where it pays to fail. Even Gevlon wasn't that pessimistic about the influence of M&S on MMOs!

Much like in Guild Wars, the skill bar in Guild Wars 2 is limited to a set number of skills. Like a collectible card game, we provide the player with a wide variety of choices and allow them to pick and choose skills to create a build that best suits their particular play style.

Tobold will love this. Let's see how many builds will be played in the end..

The core of this evolution is our event system, which allows the world to dynamically change based on actions and decisions made by the players. A single player decision can cascade across a zone, changing the direction of a chain of events until they dramatically alter the content played by players in a map.
[..]
All of these events continue to cascade out into further chains of events where cause and effect is directly related to the player's actions.

I just don't buy this. Sorry. It's too good to be true and I cannot even think of how it might work. Either all players are constantly completely changing the world (ridiculous) or only a few will ever do it.

All players that fully participate in an event are rewarded for doing so; everyone who helps kill a monster or blow up an enemy catapult will get credit for doing so. There is no kill stealing and no quest camping.
[..]
If a bunch of players leave the event, it will dynamically scale back down so it can be completed by the people who are still there playing it. This careful balance created by our dynamic scaling system helps ensure you have the best and most rewarding play experience.

So you try to do that quest, but there are those guys who just don't do anything. Unfortunately the quest has scaled ...
Besides: This is about as unimmersive as it gets.

Finding an entrance to a secret cave deep at the bottom of the ocean and removing a glowing orb from the cave could let an evil creature loose from its ancient prison and kick off a chain of events as the creature terrorizes the ocean shipping lanes.

This will become the most crowded cave in history.

It's time for the genre to take the next step, and explore the idea of a truly dynamic, living, breathing persistent world where the player's actions really make a difference, and everything that occurs in the game world has cause and effect. The event system in Guild Wars 2 is going to bring this concept of a dynamic world to life for our players and we cannot wait till you all get a chance to play it with us.

I always thought that the only way to make an MMO feel alive is to allow players to generate content, like e.g. EVE. And I still think that way. Even a hundred developers will not be able to entertain me in this way for more than a few days.

We believe that telling a story begins with creating a deep, realistic world. Player characters should be the focus as much as possible, and be offered choices and decisions that meaningfully impact the world around them.

No no no. A deep, realistic world cannot focus on the player. If it does, it is not deep or realistic anymore. These guys know not what they are talking about!

Every character experiences an interactive, distinct tale. We want you to build a character, not a character sheet.

I always loved character sheets. But maybe this way to build a character works too. We will see.

When the player gains an emotional investment in the personal story, they gain meaningful reasons to step forward and take the battle to the enemy - to defeat the dragons before everything they love is lost. No matter the character's individual background or choices, their city, race, friends, and companions are all threatened by the rise of the Elder Dragons.

You want me to believe that all those cities, friends and companions are threatended by the Elder Dragons (very creative)? So I assume that should I fail or log out for some time, the persistent world is consumed by those dragons. Right ?

Destiny's Edge was once a brave alliance of heroes dedicated to preventing the dragons from destroying the world. They have been torn apart, and old wounds prevent them from unifying. These heroes must be gathered once more, by the player character, for a final assault against the dragon of Orr.

Gather the heroes to defeat the big evil dragon. How much money did you pay the guy who came up with that completely new RPG plot?

Although we publicly beta-tested the original Guild Wars® while it was still in early development, with Guild Wars 2 we will commence beta testing closer to the game's release. Guild Wars 2 is a very large and ambitious game, and Guild Wars players rightfully have very high expectations. We want players to be absolutely blown away by the game the first time they experience it.

Be careful with your pride here..

Nope. Like the original Guild Wars, there will be no subscription fee for Guild Wars 2. You just buy the game and play it online without paying a monthly fee.

So you put it right into my face that you don't care about player rentention? Understood.

While Guild Wars 2 adds a persistent-world experience, it retains the unique characteristics of the original game, including strong narrative, extensive instanced gameplay, anti-grind design philosophy, and strong support for competitive play.

Anti-grind philosophy .. I always liked grinding, call me strange. Was a good activity for Friday night when you came home late.
Strong narrative .. The one with the heroes you need to gather to defeat the big dragon?
Extensive instanced gameplay .. Yeah, right .. add that to the persistent world.

Also, to allow players the freedom to play together even if their friends are at a much higher (or lower) level, we are planning to implement a strong sidekick system, similar to that used in City of Heroes™.
[..]
We're applying this same philosophy to competitive play. Players will be able to engage in organized, balanced PvP (similar to GvG in the original Guild Wars) without first leveling up characters, finding equipment, and unlocking skills. While inside the organized PvP area, all characters will be the same power level and will have access to the same equipment.

So, you first introduce very strong character progression and then remove it again, because it is too strong! Very convincing. Now, the world may be persistent, but my character is not !

We want to make underwater exploration easy and exciting for players and eliminate some of the traditional limitations (i.e., drowning) to aquatic travel found in many games. The underwater zones open up exciting new possibilities and greatly expand the explorable areas in Guild Wars 2.

I know it is the new hype, but I really don't think walking around under water is immersive or credible or even interesting. Ever tried to dip underwater for more than a few minutes and walk around? If I played an aquatic race, ok. But I am not!

Playing World of Warcraft, WotLK.

-

Phase 1 (Starting):
It is not very hard to get me to buy an MMO. It is trivial, unless you cheated me before (FunCom).
I love fantasy worlds. I want to make a powerful avatar. The developer is big, so the game must have some quality. Character creation was nice, even if a bit shallow.

Phase 2 (First 15 minutes):
I like the interface. Very responsive – I feel like I am in 100% control of my character. I like the GUI; very organized. It is relatively easy to make my character do what I want him to do. Enemies are too weak, this is silly. But it may become harder later on. It’s probably a tutorial.

Phase 3 (Up to level 10, two hours):
I gain new skills, new stuff. I am learning and exploring a tiny part of the World of Warcraft. My character evolves at a very fast pace. I look forward to the next level. Lore is also well presented in those quests.

Phase 4 (Level 10-80):
Talent trees. Yes! So many new skills that I could learn. When I look at the trainer I can see all the skills I will get; up to level 80! I am curious. I want to wield these skills: A fiery blastwave that knocks enemies back, a water elemental, arcane power, …
Hopefully there are also some yet unknowns skills. Would hate it if there were no surprises at all.

Phase 5a (Leveling battlegrounds):
I can participate in battlegrounds. Instant teleport doesn’t make much sense – not very immersive at all. But instant action!
I am terribly weak. Hunters literally one-shot me. But I will become stronger; no problem yet.
At the end of the level bracket I become very strong. Level 19, 29, 39 .. It is fun playing BGs, but I need equip. More equip!

Phase 5b: (The Dungeon Finder):
I can get into a queue for dungeons of my level. A group of unknowns is assembled automatically. They know exactly where to go. Sometimes the tank, who leads, is very slow, sometimes the whole instance in cleared with a few big pulls and AE. It becomes old fast, but I get equip. The equip I will use in the battlegrounds.

Phase 5c (Questing):
Pure questing was fun at level 1-10, but really: The rewards suck and the enemies are a pushover! I find myself waiting in some major city near trainers and auction house, waiting for dungeons and battlegrounds to open. The only quests I do are some dungeon quests that people shared or a class-specific quest. The rewards suck, though.

General thoughts:
There is no community in World of Warcraft for me, every player does his own thing. I can even just leave battlegrounds or dungeons – a replacement is found very fast. Nobody cares. I care about my skills and my equip.
I wonder why there is not a single battleground that takes longer than 20 minutes.

Phase 6a (Level 80, battlegrounds):
I hit 80 and my character got all skills, but there is so much more loot to gain!
In battlegrounds I am weaker than ever. Somehow the loot of dungeons doesn’t help at all. I need specific PvP equip. I can get it by doing PvP. Little bit stupid. I liked the occasional dungeon and equipping my own individual character. Suddenly everybody looks the same. By the way: Does anybody know why the level 80 equip is pink?

Phase 6b (Level 80, raiding):
Here we are doing dungeons again. For emblems. Pretty boring. The dungeons are 100% linear. The loot is irrelevant. I need some thousand badges to be competitive. Well .. a few weeks later I got them. Let’s go raiding. There is only one raid dungeon with worthwhile rewards. I PUG and eventually kill the Lich King. Great. Now, .. let’s do it again – next week. I still need equip .. do I?

Phase 6c (Arena):
What a piece of shit! I join and get devastated. Again and again. They have better equip, but, honstly, they also are much better. My randomly assembled team is in bad mood all the time. After doing this for one evening I quit. Arena, my ass. Doesn't even make sense lore-wise.

Phase 6d (Questing):
Questing at 80 is so trivial it hurts. All enemies are super large, but die like a fly. The rewards suck big time.

Phase 7 (Burned out):
The 'world' is empty - is there even a world? I haven't left Dalaran for weeks. There is no community. There are only rewards and anonymity. My character is not powerful and will never be. I look like everybody else! Heroic raids are way too hard for the PUGs I joined! The 'old raids' are an AE-fest pushover. I silence the game and listen to music while the AE goes. I could just as well watch the endboss movies at youtube.
In battlegrounds people seem not to care about winning at 80. Resilience makes my crits extra small. Why don't they just give everybody more health? Healers are unkillable. Some players die in fractions of a second.
Ridiculous!

Phase 8 (Doing the fun stuff):
I reroll. Leveling was fun, endgame was a scam, but battlegrounds at level 35. Love it! They also open up much faster than the level 80 ones!

About Real ID

-
You know: There are literally thousands of people in this office building - all of them could be .. weird!!
The moment they see you, they could follow you back to your home and then - who knows what!!!
They could make a photo of you and then post it all over the internet. They could make an ugly and silly youtube movie with your face!

Life is full of dangers. Scary!
And yet here you are: Giving all those freaks your business card.


A society where everybody had several separated identities were full of fear. If you like to play WoW stand up for it!

I don't want to live in a world where people try to hide all their potentially negative characteristics out of fear that somebody might find out. Problem is: If you hide, I have to do it, too. But if you stand up for the fact that you once were drunk, I can stand up for it, too.

Sunlight is the best disenfectant. In this case sunlight makes us more bold, more honest and more sympathetic. And it also allows us to be less fearful.

There are some issues, sure. But I welcome the general direction. The complete dispartment of our identity into several layers at a grand societal level was an anomaly introduced with the internet. It is becoming worse the more important the internet becomes.

World of Warcraft doesn't grow anymore

[This is an answer to Tobolds Numeracy Blog entry.]


Have a look at http://mmodata.net.
This graph can be found on the page.

I did some research to find out more about the last 5 datapoints on the graph.
- The 11 mio one in October 2008 and the following 11.5 mio one from November 2008 come directly from Blizzard press releases.
- The 12 mio one in the beginning of 2009 comes from a Reuters article.
- The 11.6 mio one comes from the Guinness World Record Awards in June 2009.
- The 11.5 mio one from 2010 comes from this Activision Blizzard Q1 2010 Earnings Call Transcript

A shorter version can be found here.

There have been several articles about the last one:
Link 1
Link 2
Link 3
Link 4
Link 5
Link 6

Why do I make such a fuss about it? Well .. this kind of information seems to encourage some heated debates in the community .. So I better give sources as to where I got the info from :)

As to the reasons:
Since June 2009 Blizzard has problems with the Chinese government. My personal guess is that this is the main reason. What is quite strange, however, is the fact that everybody expected a significant drop in subscriber numbers due to the Chinese problems.

In the end, it cannot be ignored that the growth stopped very abruptly in early 2009 after (non-Asian) players had played through Naxxramas.

Edit:
The managing editor of MMOData.net, Cyberwiz, was kind enough to send me an email with some info

Furthermore, even tho WoW has been down due to some difficulties in China, it was only down for a month and there were people playing in both June and July ( downtime was from June 7 till the end of July ).
But in July it was closed beta ( free to play ), so I agree technically it was incorrect to not show it on the graphs.
I will change my charts on the next update to represent the downtime, to counter the critics.

and some further links:
Link 1
Link 2
Link 3
Link 4

Character Progression Systems (CPS)

Character progression system (=CPS).

I'll try to keep it very abstract, so level-based talent systems (WoW) are covered as well as Ultima Online-like 'skill'-systems. Prejudices have shaped the divide long enough. We should start to focus on what we actually want from a CPS, instead of fighting religous wars.

Too often tools are mistaken for goals. We should first list what we actually want and only then discuss how to realize it.

Goals:
-> The CPS should give players a sense of character progression.
-> The CPS system should be immersive. This is, it should make sense.
-> The CPS should be intellectually interesting.
-> The CPS should give as little incentive as possible to 'min/maxing the fun out of it'. (e.g. tedious, unimmersive, ridiculous spamming of skills just for the sake of training or advancing).
-> The CPS should not encourage macroing. Macroing should be (almost) impossible.
-> The CPS should prevent a small number of cookie-cutter speccs/skill combinations.
-> Accountability: The CPS should make players treat their characters as an investment. Something valueable.
->

Questions:
-> Should the CPS encourage socializing ?
-> Should the CPS have a cap? Should it have diminishing returns and a cap (e.g. 1-1/x). Should it have DR and no cap (e.g. Sqrt(x), Log(x)). Should it have no DR and no cap (e.g. f(x)=x)?
-> Should the CPS also work as a tutorial?
-> What should be the difference between differently progressed characters? (e.g. 10% difference, 100%, 1000% .. ?)
-> How fast should progress be made?
->

Means:
-> Progress decay.
-> Delayed progress accounting (e.g. players become better in intervalls, instead of instantly).
-> Only a limited set of actions grant progression.
-> Only general 'points' are earned that can be invested into 'skills' by the player as he desires.
-> Any form of diminishing returns.
-> The EVE-system: Progress comes automatically with time.
-> Horizontal progression: New 'skills' are added all the time. Thus, there is a theoretical cap that cannot be reached practically.
-> Faction influence on skill gain.
-> Classes
-> Unpredictability: Players only know the rough direction that is required to become more powerful. They don't know specifics.
->

This is a living document.

Badge System and Predictability

[This is a modified comment from Tobold's blog]

Things become work when they are predictable. When you know that boss X drops that item with 23.4% that is quasi-predictable. When you need exactly 4.56=5 runs for item Y (badge system) it is even more predictable.

Remove the predictability of the result and allow players to roughly walk in the right direction and they will enjoy the way.

Humans like to bring order into chaos. Most boss fights are like that and all internet game resources pages serve that purpose. We all want to be able to predict the exact amount of € we earn this month, and when we need to wake up tomorrow.

But just like in real life, predictability leads to the feeling of work (=grinding). Even if there are good reasons (like sustaining a family).

You basically solved the problem and all that is left is the execution. Execution is boring.
What we actually like is predicting. It's not the result, but the effort.

I liked running dungeons in WoW for a long time before raiding started and even after that. It was hard to set up a good group. The dungeons were dangerous and you could make a difference. I was happy when some item dropped that was a slight update. I was proud that my equip consisted of dungeon-dropped blues.

I ran dungeons very often (very rarely compared to today). I didn't know how much better the new boots were. I did my own approximate calculations, but in the end I just cared that the new boots were better. I didn't expect to feel a difference, but I had the feeling that these new boots were real good. Maybe I did have some best-in-slot items back then. I didn't know. Even after countless dungeon runs the game managed to surprise me again and again with items that had never dropped before.

I understand that internet resource pages do ruin that experience to a degree. But game design is not powerless in this fight. I like carrots somewhere at the horizon. Blizzard nowdays puts a carrot 1 cm in front of my eyes.

Life is best if you wake up in the morning and only then start thinking about what you want to do with the day. If there are many possibilities and none of them are predictable, but you know that all will be at least a little beneficial to you in the end.

This is exactly what a MMO needs to be like. This is what WoW was for quite some time in the beginning. And this is why I will never understand the badge system.