[MUD-Dev] DESIGN: Study of MMORPG/MUD friendliness

[Spot]

Mike Rozak Wrote:

> Has anyone ever done a study on MMORPG/MUD player friendliness,
> and how UI designs influence friendliness?

> For example:

>   If I show up to an area to kill monsters or finish a quest, and
>   other players are there, I say "Hello" or "Do you need
>   help?". Only about 50% of the time do I get a response
>   back. Sometimes I try to see if the other player (usually alone)
>   wants to group to complete the quest and don't even get a
>   response.

>   I've also been randomly buffing up lower-level PCs that wander
>   by. (Random acts of kindness.) About half of them say thanks. Is
>   that because they don't notice the buff, or because they're not
>   being friendly/polite?

>   I've been contemplating handing equipment/treasure to random
>   people, but MMORPGs make it awfully cumbersome to do so, and
>   players are usually running by too quickly.

> Does this vary amongst MMORPGs/MUDs?

> What UI design decisions influence this? For example: With
> whispers, party-chat, and Teamspeak voice-chat, no one seems to
> use local chat. Are these features solely to blame, or are other
> design decisons responsible?

I think I can explain why some people in MMORPG's don't respond,
based on the group that I've played with in the past.  There were a
number of first time MMORPG players in this group, and many of them
also sucked at typing, so when we'd play in order to get our own
group to talk to us we'd have to do a 8 way conference call.

Occassionally we'd get people running by and commenting on our
characters names, as we normally choose a theme (Ultima Virtues,
Periodic table elements, etc), and occassionally we'd talk actually
reply, but we'd be in Team-Speak mode, and just didn't feel like
getting out of it.

I myself do try to be polite, especially for those that are doing
the random acts of kindness, as there is so much of the opposite
behavior, I'd be sure to at least shout out "Thx!" if I were in a
hurry to get somewhere, but I do think your onto something as far as
UI design and kindness go.

So people are just poor typers, or they simply can't walk-and-talk
at the same time (they use the arrow keys rather than the games
"run" features), so they view talking as a tedious activity.  But
maybe if the game offered a quick hot-key for acknowledgement for
kindness, and actually "trained" users to use it in some type of
newbie quest, then you may get more of a show of thanks.

But, based on my group, many just played the 1-day-a-week and
weren't that familar with any of the fun features of the game, as we
generally had leaders that would plan the weeks activities, so other
members could really just "Show up" "Group up" and "Level Up"...so
even at higher levels, they were still newbies to the world, though
most could still handle themselves in a battle.

I think the ease of use for some of these features as well as
training characters early on in the game experience how to use them
would go a long way in "getting a response" from some people, but
you'll always have the ones that view exiting Team-Speak as a waste
of time, the ones that can't type at all (but have remapped the
combat keys to their Nostro pad), or possibly those from another
country in the game that don't know your language even if they
wanted to reply they can't do too much...Though, a favorite ploy of
my group when we didn't want to group with anyone, we'd just all
begin speaking a different language (I knew enough spanish to get
by, one knew French, another German, another Norwiegn, two would
speak Pig Lattin, and the rest were the poor typers that wouldn't
respond to anyone).

I've been out of the active gaming for a while, so I'm not sure the
improvements in some of the newer MMORPGs, but I think you've got a
valid point for some of the older ones.

-Spot
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