[MUD-Dev2] [REPOST] Soapbox: World of Warcraft Teaches the WrongThings by David Sirlin

[Lost]

David Love <dlove at nighton.net> wrote:

> There's an excellent rant focusing on the lessons of World of Warcraft
> (as in, what is it teaching people?) by David Sirlin an Gamasutra.
> Everyone who likes to implement forced-grouping mechanics in their
> engines would do very well to read this carefully. 
> 
> http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20060222/sirlin_01.shtml
> 
> In classic mud-dev style, here it is in plain text:
> 
>          Soapbox: World of Warcraft Teaches the Wrong Things

I've read this before when someone posted it on the WoW forums a few
months back.  Back then I was in the thick of the raiders vs.
non-raiders debate and it hit close to home.  Now that I've pretty
much given up on WoW and started working on my own project, I can see
both sides of the picture and feel like MMOs should not be compared to
fighting games like Street Fighter.  There are many differnt people
who play RPGs and for different reasons.  I remember getting into a
debate with a guy I played AD&D with because he played AD&D to do
things that he could not do in real life and felt like die rolls
should keep him from having to do any real "work" or use any real
"skill".  In some ways, RPGs are this way.  They take the physical
skill out of the equation and rely on dice rolls to make up for it.

If die rolls are going to make up for skill, then what do you use to
make things tougher?  In the current MMO model, it's simply grinding.
Where in the end time is greater than skill.  This means that
regardless of what your real skill level is, if you have the time to
grind it out, then you'll get the reward at the end.  Personally, I
don't like this way of thinking.

On top of that, you have some sort of dependance on gear.  Gear is the
life's blood of the character.  You see this in so many MMOs on the
market today, and even in some single player RPGs.  Gear is more than
something that makes the character look good, it's an augment to your
stats, and it determines your damage potential.  In most gear
dependant games, it always comes down to where gear is the most
important thing to get, even over levels at some point.  Off the top
of my head, the two games that don't really have this issue are City
of Heroes/Villains and Guild Wars.  Guild Wars has gear, but it gives
little overall benefit and all gear looks the same for each class, if
you want to look different, you have to purchase dyes for your armor.
City of Heroes has no gear at all.  The other games that I've played
and seen played (EQ1, EQ2, WoW, FFXI, Neocron 2, and Lineage 2) gear
is everything.  It's so important that people will spend hour every
week going after it.  There's a friend of mine who basically lives in
FFXI.  He spends just about all of his free time going after gear in
the game.  I would have figured by now that he wouldn't need anymore
gear, but when they add more with updates, he has to go after it.

So this leads to the issue of how to go about getting the gear.  In
most cases, the best gear will come from the toughest monsters and
those monsters require lots of people to defeat.  In no case are these
monsters soloable.  There are lots of debates about groups and sizes
and whether or not they deserve their rewards.  I've seen this on many
forums including new MMOs that haven't been released yet.  Developers
are stuck with the issue of how to allow players to get the best gear
but getting the gear will be a challenge and only the best players
will get it as the items have some kind of "value" to them.  The
harder it is to get said item, the more valuable it is.  This can lead
to some distressing situations as well as lots of drama among players
when the item actually drops.  How can we, as developers, keep this
from happening?  I've asked myself this question many times.  So far,
I haven't seen any real answers put down by other developers.  It
almost always comes back to the "the player must go through hell to
get the item and that should not be something the player can do by
himself".

Inevitably, this leads to the group size discussion.  How many players
should be required to take down a boss to get this awesome item?  The
current way is to have 10+ players at once to defeat some boss.  I've
heard time and again from different people that the best rewards
should go to the highest group size.  But then this comes down to the
question of "are players having 'fun' when grouped up this way?".
Should players be rewarded for simply having to put up with all of
these extra people?  When you get groups of say 200+ how much is each
person really contributing to the situation?  Should external programs
(Vent, Team Speak, etc) be required to defeat one of these bosses?
Lots of questions and lots of different ways to look at it.  Coming up
with difficult situations is difficult in the first place, but having
to juggle all of these issues as well makes designing MMO content
difficult.

Regardless of how you feel about what the author of that article had
to say, we should all be thinking about what he's talking about.  Both
as players and developers.  My personal opinion on this is that the
MMO genre needs to be reinvented.  It's obvious by the number of
people who play them that the old group style play is slowly getting
pushed aside.  WoW gave people a taste of what it was like to actually
progress by yourself on your own terms.  It didn't matter how much
time you had to play, you could always progress in some way and did
not need to spend hours looking for groups.  I decided to go back to
FFXI just to experience the world again, and it's amazing how long
people will stand around in that game waiting to form a group.  I
asked a player one time why he was standing there for so long waiting
to get in a group in WoW and he told me simply that's how MMOs are and
it's something he just had to get use to.  I wonder if the genre could
expand to more players if these stigmas were lost somehow.  People
have simply come to expect that this is how MMOs are supposed to be.

Anyway, I think I rambled on enough.  I've got some ideas about this
topic and I don't know if it's the right way, but I figure that at
this point it's worth trying.  Rather than try to copy the success of
WoW, I think that game developers need to start thinking outside the
box.  I'll admit that there is no way to please everyone.  However,
that doesn't mean that the formula doesn't need a bit of revising in
order for the genre to grow.


-Garv