[MUD-Dev2] [REPOST] Value

[Michael Hartman]

William Leader wrote:
> I guess I would sum up my point by saying that the expectations for 
> MMORPG's needs to change. It can't be the same as single player games. 
> The expectation should be that you are paying to participate, and play 
> by the rules. Players cannot expect they are paying for a certain amount 
> of entertainment. The second expectation that must change is that not 
> everyone can 'win' (or be Uber, or experience everything, or whatever.). 
> This again is because it is paying to participate, and not paying to 
> 'win'. I must say that there are some games that I have never beaten. 
> The original Mega Man, and Rygar come to mind. I have accepted this as 
> fact that I will probably never beat either of those games, but I'm not 
> bitter over it since each provided me with literally hundreds of hours 
> of play. They certainly were good value.

I think you are right that some of the above expectations need to change 
in order for players to more accurately understand what they are paying for.

There are some other expectations that I also think need to change, for 
the good of the whole genre.

Players need to stop expecting crappy levels of customer service. 
Support tickets are more often than ever responded to with stock emails 
that often fail to address the actual topic at all. Some games are 
making it more of a pain to send in a support ticket (requiring that you 
do updates on their web site via a form, in some cases) as a way of 
reducing the number of tickets. Sadly, players are starting to just 
expect poor support and the MMORPG providers are happy to oblige.

The idea of "daily server maintenance" that is common on many MMORPGs 
should not be expected or accepted. I remember back in the old days, a 
MUD that had to reboot every day or so was considered a piece of badly 
coded crap. How long a game could go before it needed a downtime was 
actually a major badge of honor, and a sign of how well run the game 
was. Nowadays, people are starting to just EXPECT a game to go down 
every day, or have a couple hours of maintenance at least once a week. 
This is a travesty. There is no excuse for this and it needs to stop.

Players need to stop expecting see-saw nerf/buffing. This has gotten so 
common that players just expect it nowadays, and the reality is that it 
just isn't necessary. I speak from the experience of running a 
commercial game for over 10 years, and while it defintely takes effort, 
it is possible to do all your game balancing carefully and delicately 
enough that you don't have jarring swings in power balance. If you think 
you need to nerf something 20%, try 10% first. It is tempting to follow 
Machiavellian logic which would instruct you to do everything bad you 
think you have to do all at once, to limit the number of times "the 
people" are angry. This is not true for game balance. A lot of SMALL 
tweaks is a lot better than back-and-forth large ones that drastically 
transform your game from one patch to the next.

If MMORPG creators can work on the above, that will add a lot to the 
value you get with the service, and make the whole market look more 
mature and high quality.


-- 
Michael Hartman, J.D. (http://www.frogdice.com)
President & CEO, Frogdice, Inc.
University of Georgia School of Law, 1995-1998
Georgetown University School of Foreign Service, 1990-1994