The importance of "work" in an mmorpg

Wandering Mist

I'm curious to know what your thoughts are regarding the following video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a1Zxl98tGZk

Discuss

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neuroguy

So this is why I agree with @dygz about the video being a bit strange. No single design philosophy will please everyone. No matter what the design philosophy is, there will be a population that stops playing it and another population that wouldn't have played it otherwise. When it comes to games that have had vibrant communities as long as WoW (very few such games come to my mind personally), when dramatic change occurs, naturally the people that were already playing and liked how things were will be disgruntled and leave. But trying to prevent population fluctuations in games will risk making them a bit niche or stagnant like EVE for example, super stable population because people are invested but without dramatic changes, they won't attract (and also lose) any substantial population.

Overall, "meaningful work and meaningful relationships" is a vague and nebulous truism. It's not a particularly useful exercise to simply look at something that is (perceived to be) clearly broken and identify why. If it doesn't help you predict future trends it's not really that impressive, a lot of possible explanations can be given about why something fails (because usually it's many reasons). That being said if you identify the reason something failed then proceed to create/adjust something leading to success based on said reason, THEN you have something worth talking about.

Here are a couple more truisms I just came up with that current bad games lack and good games have:
"appropriate pacing"
"meaningful progression"
"immersive storyline"
"relatable character motivation"
... it doesn't actually have much meaning without getting more specific which usually requires narrowing down the conversation to specific mechanics in specific games.

Jjampong

wanderingmist wrote: »

@azathoth @atama and @dphantomtv The main gist of the video is that older mmorpgs like Classic WoW and Old School Runescape are proving popular because they follow a core principle of business:

"Cultivate meaningful work and meaningful relationships."

Bellular argues that Classic WoW was successful back in the day because "players felt like their work in the game built towards something important and that their social bonds in the game meant something."

He then goes on to say that games like Retail WoW, Fortnite, etc rely too much on instant gratification where they want the players to get a quick hit of pleasure/excitement and reward without really earning it. This results in players being driven solely by the rewards and as soon as the fast progression and the rewards stop, the players get bored and quit.

That's a fair point, I think there is some truth in it. But I'm not sure if the "instant gratification" is the only reason why people quit games like that. I think the real MMO killer is when the instant gratification comes through the cash shop.

Also thinks for explaining the situation

Blackhearted

From my experience, when a game is too easy, hard or grindy compared to real life, the immersion evaporates.

To me, the key difference between old and new games seems to be that new games arent born out of passion but of hunger for profit. To new games players are only numbers and they change the game accordingly. To players that means unpleasant dailies, p2w and excessive grindyness.

When ure playing osrs or classic you can feel the creators love for the game. The highest priority is not being highest profitable game but simply the best game to ever exist. To players that means we get to sink into fantasy and experience someone elses vision of a perfect world. The game isnt made to adapt to the player but to teach them to adapt. Teaching players its useful to be social, to create friendships, observe the world and enjoy the journey.

Plateau

[Editted cause giant quotes are annoying.] [Edit2: Gosh formatting is hard.]

@noaani I'm gonna put your quotes in italics and my responses in plaintext because I don't want a bunch of quote boxes. If I leave something un-responded to, it's probably cause I just agree. If anyone thinks this long-form reply thing is dumb, well I'm doing it cause I think he made a lot of good points, but I have some specific clarifications or rebuttals that I want to add. Read however much you want to.
_______________________________________________________________________________

Spamming chat for a group is never fun, but that is what friends lists are for.

In my experience, past the first 20 levels (or one week, what ever takes longest) people that spam chat looking for groups are the people I have grouped with in the past when things went poorly.

People that are constantly in groups that go well don't spam chat looking for groups, they whisper people in their friends lists.

You don't ever see a good tank or healer spamming for a group.

This is that whole social connections thing.

- These's are good points, but I still would prefer if those bad players always looking for new groups did so in a party-finder than in chat. I'd rather save region chat and LFG chat, for regular conversation and time-sensitive distress calls (like for world events or PvP gankers), respectively.

Not a fan of action combat - that is what online FPS games are for.

- That's a valid opinion. And the macro-gameplay is certainly more important in an MMO. But I like it when the micro-gameplay is engaging too.

No game has ever had a better consignment system than EQ2's broker, imo.

Again with EQ2, they had scaling down to levels in a 5 level increment implemented 12 or so years ago.

- I never played EQ or EQ2, so I'm sorry if I'm ignorant about their accomplishments. I tried to cover my ass by saying "design that was developed or popularized in the last decade", so that things I hadn't heard of I could claim were not popular yet. Can we at least agree that power scaling became more prevalent over the years?

Seamless worlds are good. This is one of the good things from the last 10 years or so that I would have mentioned in my above post if it weren't for the fact that it was already too long. It is something developers wanted to do back in the 90's, and were talking about way back then, but the technology simply wasn't there to run games like that.

- That's fair. I just wanted to include a couple gimmes to make the point that, while Classic WoW and OSRS have good design, I think they are still severely lacking because they run off 10-year-old tech. But yeah, that's a bit pedantic of me.

While many games have made use of the Z-axis, I am yet to see actual content that uses it, or a combat system based on it. Until that happens, using the Z-axis isn't really much of a good thing.

- My point of reference was GW2. The Heart of Thorns expansion added a lot of verticality to the new zones (with gliders, jump pads, and air currents). You're right about the combat though; the Z-axis never matters for that unless we're talking about LoS over cliffs or dropping bombs occasionally for a flying quest.

If you disregard flying mounts though, EQ2 (again) had an open dungeon that used the Z-axis as much as any other - it was about 9 levels deep.

Easy spec swapping has been around for more than 10 years.

- Again, I'm probably just ignorant of other games. I was mostly just thinking about WoW specs. And about the extreme opposite in FFXIV (full class swaps anywhere).

In game tutorials as per modern games are not a good thing. They tend to guide players through with shiny graphics, and players tend to ignore the game and just follow the blatant cues they are given. Once the tutorial ends, players often realize they didn't actually learn anything past W, A, S, D to move (who doesn't know that?) in the tutorial, they just followed the blatant cues. Most players tend to leave the tutorial of a new MMO as clueless as they started it.

- I think we're on different pages here. I was talking about tutorial UI's or documentation, rather than tutorial levels. And yes, players will always leave tutorial island clueless. That's why I think it's important to make that information easily accessible/searchable in a "help" section.

Online websites such as wikis have improved a little bit over time, but that has nothing to do with game developers. I've yet to see a developer produce a more useful system for their own game than is available on a third party website.

- 100% agree. I just wish developers supported community wiki-makers more.

Costume slots are not a good thing. If I am in an open PvP world such as Ashes, I want to know if the player about to attack me is wearing plate armor or cloth.

- 100% disagree. Fashion is important to in-game identities and roleplaying. And it should be separate from gear scores. People shouldn't have to sacrifice stats so they can look how they want.

In game cash shops are necessary in order to prevent developers having to increase the price of subscription, but when you consider that the things added to them used to just be added to the game for free, I don't see how they can be considered a good thing rather than a necessary thing.

- They're just more convenient that going to game's webstore and checking out and waiting for things to appear in-game. And it let's you try-on outfits before you buy them. It's not much of an improvement, but it's something. Ya'know, as long as it isn't shoved down players throats, of course.

Party finders are all good. They were a reaction to dungeon finders, a kind of compromise.

P2W cash shops (including "convenience" items), dungeons finders, phasing, treadmill style content, fast travel and hub zones are all essentially bad things for an MMO, with no exceptions that I can think of.

- I think there are exceptions for other games, but yes, we're in agreement that they would be bad for AoC. That's what the list was for: trying to define more precisely what modern developments we (and Intrepid) don't want to see in AoC. Ideally, for the sake of my arguments, I would have preferred to have a shorter list. But eh, there's a lot to criticize in some modern games.

- I wanted to make it clear about phasing though, that it's usually good for theme-parks, so solo-content (story quests mostly) can have visual impacts on the world for each person. But AoC is far from that kind of game.

However, I personally think that flying mounts and multi-mode dungeons could be done well.

- That's surprising. Most MMO fundamentalists point to those as two of the reasons why WoW feels so casual and lame nowadays.

- Personally, I've been convinced by Intrepid/Steven that flying does remove a lot of the interaction/meaning in open-world zones.

- But I do agree that multi-mode dungeons (especially story-rich ones) make the game more accessible without sacrificing much. And if they're done right, normal mode dungeons/raids are great stepping-stones to more complicated hard-modes (like when the normal-mode has bright telegraphs and the hard-mode doesn't). I just don't think Intrepid will go for that (not at launch), because of how much it hurts immersion when you think about it. Some people would see it as very game-y/gimmicky. Just look at the debate over Dark Souls/Sekiro easy-modes. Some players can get caught up on "how the game is meant to be played". And it probably makes more sense from Intrepid's perspective to just make more dungeons rather than re-balancing old ones. This topic is nuanced enough for it's own thread honestly.

For flying mounts, the main thing that is needed is flying combat, and thus flying enemies. It is stupid for developers to allow players free access to the Z-axis without also making use of that same Z-axis. Even EQ2 - that I have mentioned a number of times in this post - does flight extremely badly.

- True. (Not about EQ2. I still know nothing about EQ2.)

Gliding in Archeage is done OK from a PvP perspective (having a limited number of abilities, but being able to shoot enemy players off their glider to fall to their death). The whole world is designed with an eye towards the Z-axis, but there is still no actual content in that Z-axis.

While it is easy to say "add Z-axis content in order to make flying mounts not broken", explaining a way to make multi-mode dungeons work is not so easy. What I will say is that I am convinced there is a way to do them well, and I hope developers continue to try and find it.

- Yep, I hope Intrepid learns from other games, and re-introduces community-favorite dungeons with more modes (either easier or harder). But we'll probably have to wait until after launch for any of that.

There is no "today's context" in terms of what makes a good MMO. It is the same now as it was 20 years ago.

- We're just going to have to agree to disagree on that one. I just think gradual improvement is inevitable in any genre (or any industry really). Community standards/preferences will gradually shift. Today's context isn't very different from 10 years ago, but I think there are a couple important differences, especially when it comes to convenience. (Hence the regrettable market shift towards mobile games.)

People are still wired the same. What makes people feel good, and what people consider rewarding has been the same for thousands of years - it hasn't suddenly changed over the last few years. Yes, instant gratification is a real thing, but so to is delayed gratification. Both have their place in an MMO, but the closest thing modern MMO's have come to delayed gratification is delaying the release of a new zone.

- We're basically in agreement here. Modern MMO's have lost sight of what long-term goals and motivations are supposed to be. Maybe those MMO devs/publishers are blinded by the instant gratification approach -- it's certainly a better approach for microtransactions -- but they aren't mutally exclusive.

Sure, today we have better graphics, we have technology that allows developers to build seamless worlds, we have the ability to have 1,000 characters all in one area. But what players want - whether any individual player knows it or not - is that rewarding feeling we get when we achieve something we have specifically worked towards. Thing is, the more time and effort we put in to earning a reward (up to a point, and excluding RNG) the stronger that feeling is.

Put another way, time and effort put in to an MMO means players get more of what they want out of that MMO than they would with less time and effort put in.

- Well said.
_________________________________________________________________
Thanks for taking interest in what I had to say. Sorry it took a while to respond; it's a long post, so I saved it for the morning. I don't know about you, but I'm here, being all nit-picky, because I like talking (arguing?) about the MMOs I love. I think I've learned a couple things (at least a few things about EQ2

), and I hope you also got something out of my words, even if it's just a re-affirmation of what you already knew. Cheers.

Damokles

Wandering Mist

muridious wrote: »

wanderingmist wrote: »

@azathoth @atama and @dphantomtv The main gist of the video is that older mmorpgs like Classic WoW and Old School Runescape are proving popular because they follow a core principle of business:

"Cultivate meaningful work and meaningful relationships."

Bellular argues that Classic WoW was successful back in the day because "players felt like their work in the game built towards something important and that their social bonds in the game meant something."

He then goes on to say that games like Retail WoW, Fortnite, etc rely too much on instant gratification where they want the players to get a quick hit of pleasure/excitement and reward without really earning it. This results in players being driven solely by the rewards and as soon as the fast progression and the rewards stop, the players get bored and quit.

That's a fair point, I think there is some truth in it. But I'm not sure if the "instant gratification" is the only reason why people quit games like that. I think the real MMO killer is when the instant gratification comes through the cash shop.

Also thinks for explaining the situation

Oh there is never any singular reason for a game to be abandoned by the players, but instant gratification certainly contributes towards it. Pay-to-win and Pay-to-skip mechanics also contribute, but in my opinion they are symptoms of bad game design than actual problems. For example, one of the reasons why Blizzard keeps putting in mechanics to speed up the levelling process in WoW is because levelling in that game is so utterly pointless and unenjoyable that literally nobody wants to deal with it.

Plateau

@damokles

Wandering Mist

@neuroguy What you say makes sense, and context is very important. One of the things I find fascinating about Classic WoW vs Retail WoW is that there are activities and tropes found in both games, and yet in Classic WoW they are acceptable, but in Retail they aren't.

Dygz

leonerdo wrote: »

[Editted cause giant quotes are annoying.] [Edit2: Gosh formatting is hard.]

@noaani I'm gonna put your quotes in italics and my responses in plaintext because I don't want a bunch of quote boxes. If I leave something un-responded to, it's probably cause I just agree. If anyone thinks this long-form reply thing is dumb, well I'm doing it cause I think he made a lot of good points, but I have some specific clarifications or rebuttals that I want to add. Read however much you want to.
_______________________________________________________________________________

Spamming chat for a group is never fun, but that is what friends lists are for.

In my experience, past the first 20 levels (or one week, what ever takes longest) people that spam chat looking for groups are the people I have grouped with in the past when things went poorly.

People that are constantly in groups that go well don't spam chat looking for groups, they whisper people in their friends lists.

You don't ever see a good tank or healer spamming for a group.

This is that whole social connections thing.

- These's are good points, but I still would prefer if those bad players always looking for new groups did so in a party-finder than in chat. I'd rather save region chat and LFG chat, for regular conversation and time-sensitive distress calls (like for world events or PvP gankers), respectively.

That is soooo 20th century.
I tend to disregard in-game chat for the most part.
Instead, I find groups via twitch, twitter and discord.

In Ashes, I hope to be able to find groups simply by visiting the homes of the players in my Node who like to play the way I play and are who are online when I'm online.
I wouldn't be surprised to find that we end up conducting the bulk of our communication through twitch or discord.

Seems like distress calls won't be very helpful with limited fast travel.

Karthos

Work work work

https://youtu.be/5GL9JoH4Sws

Wandering Mist

karthos wrote: »

Work work work

https://youtu.be/5GL9JoH4Sws

Hahaha those bimbos have probably never worked a day in their lives.

Noaani

The following is the main part of your post I have to comment on.

leonerdo wrote: »

There is no "today's context" in terms of what makes a good MMO. It is the same now as it was 20 years ago.

- We're just going to have to agree to disagree on that one. I just think gradual improvement is inevitable in any genre (or any industry really). Community standards/preferences will gradually shift. Today's context isn't very different from 10 years ago, but I think there are a couple important differences, especially when it comes to convenience. (Hence the regrettable market shift towards mobile games.)

Solid storytelling of a solid story.
Believable world.
Interesting and diverse content.
Enjoyable combat system.
Deep and meaningful crafting system.
Pushing technological barriers as hard as is possible.
Systems that encourage positive interaction with other players.

That is a list of what I consider key for a good MMO today. It is essentially a list from 20 years ago.

The fundamentals of a good MMO are the same. The only thing that has moved forward is the technical side - and this is a good thing.

The problem is, too many developers have shifted from the focus of what makes a good MMO, and moved to place their game to compete with the likes of online FPS games at first, then MOBA's, and now Battle Royale games.

Rather than making a good MMO for the sake of having the best MMO they can have, they are trying to compete for a 15 minute window people may have before school, or after dinner. They were competing for minutes, rather than competing for hours.

This is the point I am trying to make. An MMO should expect players to spend at least 10 hours a week in game, and should be focusing development efforts around that. Trying to compete for 15 minute blocks of player time runs count to that.

When you compete for 15 minutes of peoples time, you can't deliver a story at all, let alone a good story that is also well written.

With a 15 minute focus, you need to have instant travel to dungeons from literally anywhere in the games world. This is a fairly major step in destroying any suspension of disbelief in terms of the world feeling plausible.

You are also unable to produce diverse content, as diverse content requires players to learn it, and learning new content takes time. Same can be said with the combat system - if you focus on 15 minutes of gameplay, you will find yourself dumbing down combat itself, so people can just press 1, 1, 1, 2 and repeat ad infinitum.

In the scheme of 15 minute play focus, you also have to drop the need for any form of social interaction, as social interaction takes time.

While I have used the dungeon finder in the past as an example of what is wrong with many modern MMO's - and that older games got right - I am using it as one example to illustrate the entire change in focus to smaller content blocks that are easier to complete, and thus offer players less of a rewarding feeling (the in game reward is immaterial in this discussion).

Fortunately, due simply to the near total lack of fast travel in Ashes, the notion of catering to that 15 minute block will simply not work. Intrepid are essentially forcing themselves to cater to the player that wants to spend that 10 hours or more a week in game.

I mean, technology is always moving, and developers can do much more now than they could 15 years ago. There is talk now of 1,000 player characters in a siege - when EQ2 released getting even 50 in one fight was a technological challenge.

The notion of actual destructible environments was totally unthinkable 10 years ago, but these days it is freely talked about as being in development.

Graphics have improved immeasurably as well over the last 15 years, to the point where even I consider some older games unplayable due solely to their graphics.

Thing is, developers could put every player in the game in one fight, they could make the whole world totally destructible, they could use ray tracing to trace all their rays (because it "just works" or whatever), but if that game doesn't have it's fundamentals right, it will still be a shit game.

---

Will quickly also touch on flying and multi-mode dungeons.

WoW's game design is bad. Almost everything about it. If WoW were handed in to be graded in a game design course, it would get a D at best (vanilla WoW would have received a solid B- ).

The reason people that debate these things think that flying mounts and multi-mode dungeons destroyed WoW is because WoW did them in the worst way possible - and for most of the people in said debate, it is the only MMO experience they have. They identify flying mounts as the issue, rather than identifying Blizzard as the issue.

If the issue is that flying mounts allow people to skip over content in a literal sense, then add content to that Z-axis and it is no longer and issue. Suddenly, flying mounts go from being something clueless people point to as a reason WoW sucks, to being most important addition to MMO content since the advent of the instance.

Multi-mode dungeons I still don't have a working theory on, other than knowing there has to be a really good way to do it.

Damokles

@leonerdo

neuroguy

@wanderingmist
Yeah, I mean a lot of core design philosophies are just different between old and retail WoW, the game isn't made for you or me anymore so we perceive it to be bad. It's hard to judge the success of MMOs, usually it's through number of players and there are much larger demographics to target than the old MMORPG players that enjoyed games like classic WoW. I think a lot of design philosophies are just targeted at a different demographic now but we expect them to still be targeting us because this is a genre we enjoy. I suspect what ends up happening is that the target demographics are not interested in MMOs so they don't buy into it, and the demographic that enjoys MMOs (us) is not being catered to so we don't buy into the new MMOs either so it ends up feeling like a failure. Like what the video says about competing with these other games like fortnight is only true if you are competing for the same demographic right? Anyways I'm also getting vague in my thoughts now and have no expertise in game marketing so I'll just stop.

Wandering Mist

@noaani Another good point. It's like comparing films to a TV series. You are never going to get the same amount of story and character development from a 2 hour film that you would from a 40 hour TV show. But then again do you need to? There have been plenty of films that have been able to put a huge amount of depth and character development into their films despite the short run-time compared to a TV series.

I guess the question we have to ask is, can you put quality meaningful gameplay into a short timeframe that doesn't rely on extrinsic reward systems? I believe you can. Monster Hunter World does this quite well, with the story broken up into bite-sized missions that can be completed quite quickly either solo or with teammates. And if you are really short on time, there are arena battles which cut out the tracking/stalking element of the missions and just puts you in a room with a big monster to kill.

When it comes to combat, the trick is designing a combat system that can be picked up fairly quickly by a new player, but still offers depth for someone willing to put lots of hours into mastering it. Fighting games are great at doing this.

The point is, just because you are restricted on playtime, doesn't mean you can't still make a good product.

Noaani

wanderingmist wrote: »

I guess the question we have to ask is, can you put quality meaningful gameplay into a short timeframe that doesn't rely on extrinsic reward systems?

I personally disagree that this is the question to ask.

To me, the question isn't "can you", but rather "should you".

There are a number of games that do this well - but none of the games that do it well are MMORPG's. Even more specifically, none of them are MMORPG's with limited fast travel.

Sure, an MMO could do that. You could make an MMO that focuses on just dropping players in on content without all the stuff around it so that players could do something in 15 minutes. It wouldn't be a good MMO, but it would be an MMO. If you went out and developed an MMO based around this notion, what you then have, whether you intended to or not, is a WoW clone.

Because of that, I'm not debating what is and is not possible, I am debating what is and isn't a good fit for this specific game.

Sure, this game almost definitely will have encounters that take less 15 minutes - but they would be sitting at the bottom of a dungeon that takes a good hour to fight down to.

That is what this game is about.

I have no doubt there will also be node attacks that take less than 15 minutes to play through. Thing is, it won't be content on demand - if you are 15 minutes travel away from something that takes 15 minutes to do, you will miss out.

I don't see any real way to make meaningfully good content in Ashes specifically targeted for players to be able to complete in 15 minutes after logging in - I would expect it to usually take that long to just get to the content you want to do, let alone do it. There will always be something to do, but players would be more likely to expect to do things like harvesting, or killing enemies near their node - things to help level your character or your node, or perhaps a small contribution to a construction project.

Basically, if you log in with 15 minutes to kill, you would expect to do base level content rather than boss level content.

Plateau

@noaani That's a really good point about the raw time-investment and equivalent return on that investment that we expect from MMOs. It reminds an episode of Extra Credits from a while ago, on the topic of "Lifestyle Games". Essentially, lifestyle games are just games that become a big part of your life. Of course that includes spending a lot of time in the game, but it also includes out-of-game stuff like theory-crafting, research, generally thinking about the game in your down-time (at work, during commute, etc), taking part in the community of the game, probably buying some merch, etc..

It seems like today, a lot MMOs have stepped away from that idea. They want to be accessible to players without requiring that level of commitment.

Lifestyle games aren't just limited to the MMO genre, either. Competitive games (MOBAs and fighting games in particular) can also offer a level of depth that players can devote half of their life to.

To me, that's what it comes down to: depth. MMOs put most of their depth in the world. The environment, the stories, the character progression, the world systems, the communities, and the choices that we can make to interact with all those. And there's just no way to access that depth in 15-minute play sessions.

Conversely, time-investment is closely tied to depth, but it's not enough on it's own. 10-hour quests or grinding sessions are pointless if there's no depth to them. Spending time to travel on foot isn't good design if the world you're travelling through is shallow and uninteresting.

But in the end you're exactly right; AoC is supposed to be a game that is deep and meaningful, and the only way for it to work is if the game (and by extension, the devs) expect players to spend a looot of time in the game.

Hopefully the community has the same expectations. The people on these forums obviously do (talking on the forums about an unreleased game is clearly a sign that we have time to spare), but I wonder about the wider audience that will arrive after Intrepid makes their final marketing push before launch.

Noaani

leonerdo wrote: »

Conversely, time-investment is closely tied to depth, but it's not enough on it's own. 10-hour quests or grinding sessions are pointless if there's no depth to them. Spending time to travel on foot isn't good design if the world you're travelling through is shallow and uninteresting.

Absolutely true.

You can't have depth if players don't put time in to a game, and players won't put time in to a game if you don't have depth.

Developers need to set the expectation early in development, and clearly communicate that expectation to players before release.

grisu

I think a good example are some of the hub based dungeon crawlers. There you have those 15minute bursts of content. Into the dungeon kapauw and out in 10-15minutes. It's absolutely uninteresting after a short while. You smash through everything so damned fast you never stop to wonder what you actually hit.
For all intent and purposes it could have been a stickman. You just wont notice.

On the other hand you have a game like Vindictus(aka. Mabinogi heroes) same principle hack and slash, but stuff lived for a while and especially bosses were more aking to Monster Hunter bosses were you learned the tells and attack paterns and fought for quite some time. It was work to down a boss, but it felt really good.(Not anymore tho, now the leveling phase at least is just a fast slaugther like Kritika) I loved Vindictus but I can't bring myself to play it anymore, it just feels so bad now.

Auron

https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comments/bn4zj4/this_is_the_sort_of_attitude_that_makes_me_want/

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