Activity Duration in MMOs (was: [MUD-Dev2] [DESIGN] Spore and MMOs)

[John Buehler]

Michael Hartman writes:

> Damion Schubert wrote:
> > FIrst off, I think that's completely inaccurate.  Raiding in WoW when it
> > shipped was much better than raiding in EQ when it shipped, and they've
> > made significant improvements in the Burning Crusade.  There are
> > definitely things I'd like to see improved upon still, but to say that
no
> > progress has been made is very misleading.
> 
> Much better? Much better how?
> 
> And how was BC an improvement? There were barely any changes at all. In
> some ways it was made worse.
> 
> It is still the same thing. You have to get a ton of people together,
> they have to have the right classes, build, and gear, and then one
> person herds cats requiring that the majority press the 1 button for 3
> hours. Oh, and then as a final bonus, you get to quibble over loot,
> since the drops are always stingy as heck and idiotic concepts like Bind
> on Pickup mean if you don't happen to have people there you can use it,
> it is trash.
> 
> And yes, I am speaking from actual experience. I was founder and GM of a
> raid guild on WoW and was the main tank (and frequent raid leader) for
> it all the way through Gruul's Lair. Then I just couldn't do it any
> more. It is not fun. It is not interesting. It doesn't feel epic.
> 
> I felt like an extra in a movie. There was a set of rote maneuvers I had
> to do, and I just had to perform them over and over again. The amount of
> trash killing was prodigious and boring. The fact that wiping on a boss
> 10 times to figure it out was "game design" was just an absurd laugh.
> 
> I was lucky that I actually played the one role (main tank) that had the
> most "freedom" to act. For DPS characters it is even more boring, since
> they do nothing but assist and press their 1-3 attack powers. They do
> this for HOURS. If they do even the slightest thing of their own free
> will - including standing somewhere a tad off - the whole group wipes
> and everyone is pissed off. Oh, and oftentimes this also means the group
> gets to clear another hour of trash or just call it a night. YAY! FUN!
> 
> So no, raiding in WoW is not significantly different from EQ or from any
> other fantasy RPG raiding. It is just as boring and just as tedious as
> it is everywhere else. You spend 3 hours listening to one person give
> orders over TS/Vent and have virtually zero free will whatsoever. You
> don't get to "think on your feet" at all. You do exactly as the raid
> leader tells you, or the raid wipes.
> 
> Compare that to, for example, the end game content of DAoC. Every single
> player had to be on their toes. Every single player had to be thinking
> about what they were doing, coming up with ideas on how to perform, and
> reacting to the battle field. Yes, this is partially because it is PvP,
> but the point is this was actually interesting content.
> 
> If someone wants to come along and make fun end game "raid-ish" PvE
> content, they need to drop this inredibly painful raid style method that
> currently exists.
> 
> I don't want to memorize a script like an actor in a play and just
> follow it through identically 9,000 times so I can get UBER ITEM X to
drop.
> 
> I want to be able to feel like a real player who reacts to situations. I
> want to use MY OWN JUDGMENT rather than simply slavishly obey a raid
> leader for 3+ hours, who in turn is slavishly obeying a guide on some
> web site.
> 
> I haven't even gotten into craptacular concepts that arise like DKP,
> loot tracking, raid scheduling, raid rostering, and other garbage that
> is absolutely NOT FUN and makes playing the game feel like working in
> some cubicle farm as middle management.

I could not have said it better, and that very definitely needed to be said.

I played a druid on raids.  The fun was not when we succeeded.  That meant
that the script went according to the designer's plan.  Because success with
an encounter usually balanced on a razor's edge, you did it the right way or
you were on the highway.  The real fun of raids for me was the wipe.
Because those were more varied than the successes. I got a little tired of
feigning a thrill when my character gear was upgraded.  Oh good.  My
whack-a-mole hammer is gilded now (druids spend their raid hours targeting
raid members to remove the effects of curses, poisons and damage).

> > Secondly, it's not as tiny a minority as you think.
> 
> Actually, it is indeed as tiny as I think. Even Blizzard has admitted
> that the raid population is a small overall percentage of their
> customers. Most of their customers do not even have a level 70
> character. Before the expansion, the majority of their customers did not
> even have a level 60.

For those who like to look at numbers, I tripped over a fascinating web site
that analyzes World of Warcraft population trends like crazy.  The
population distribution during the course of the day in various types of
zones (raid zones being one of them) is presented here:

http://blogs.parc.com/playon/archives/2006/08/hours_of_the_da_1.html

You'll notice that indeed, the raider population is small compared to the
rest of the population.  At peak raiding time, it would appear to be less
than 10% of the server population.

> > * Raid bosses require complex strategies to beat, with much
> > experimentation and learning.  This appeals to Explorers.
> 
> Exploring what? The Web? Nobody "learns" the bosses. A raid leader reads
> the strategy online and then dictates it to the group on Teamspeak of
> Ventrilo

Such was my experience.  Raid leaders knew each other, read stuff, etc.  "Do
it this way or we all die"

> > * Raid bosses drop ph4t loot and give bragging rights, and are
> > one of the few things in an MMO which are truly HARD, appealing
> > to Achievers.
> 
> What bragging rights? Maybe the top 2 or 3 guilds on an entire server
> have bragging rights... that's it. That's an infinitesimally small
> percentage of your population.
> 
> As for the loot, have fun fighting over it, wrestling with DKP, arguing
> who should get a piece of loot, being mad that the character you left
> home was the one who really neded it, but it gets disenchanted since it
> is Bind on Pickup, and all sorts of other things that ruin what little
> nugget of joy the "loot" might bring.

In fairness, our guild used DKPs and had zero issues with it.  That was
because of the people in the guild.  Everyone retained their perspective.  I
don't know from "bragging rights for playing whack-a-mole for four hours"
The joy of loot for me was that the guild always congratulated whoever got
loot from a particular encounter.

For a few hours of work, that just wasn't enough joy to keep me playing.

> > * Raid bosses require cooperation between players, and require
> > coordination, socialization and strong incentives for group play,
> > appealing to socializers.
> 
> There is almost no socializing. There is one person giving orders and
> everyone else following. In fact, in many raid guilds (and almost all
> the top ones), socializing is expressly FORBIDDEN and speaking
> privileges are limited to the raid leader and a couple of assistants.

It's not quite that bad.  The guild that I raided with was quite good about
keeping up a running conversation about things partly because we raided
together regularly.  Folks knew what needed to be done.  The raid leader
would check to see who understood their role for the boss encounters and
explain things prior to the encounter if needed.  During boss encounters,
people rarely made off-topic comments because we all knew that we had to
focus in order to defeat the bosses.

It was NOT possible for everyone in the raid to be chatting away on the
single party line.  Many times, we'd revert to text to make comments that we
filtered as being unworthy of voice time.

That said, I would definitely like to see game designers lighten up and try
to let us enjoy the encounters.  Let our characters do the fighting and let
the players do the enjoying.  In an MMO, that should definitely include
socialization.  Even during encounters.  That's a technical area that should
be developed more aggressively than visualization.

JB