[MUD-Dev2] [Design] Dinosaurs evolve to chickens, MMOs evolve to massively single-player games

[Richard A. Bartle]

On 23 June 2009 06:15, Damion Schubert wrote:
>Before WoW came out, too many designers were
>utterly in love with the idea that playing with other people was MANDATORY.
>EQ and EQ2 required grouping for any sort of non-tedious advancement.
	I believe this was due to an alignment of two ideas (one to
do with fun, one to do with business) that were floating around
in EQ's day.
	The idea about fun was that people found membership of a
community an important thing; it made them feel valuable and wanted,
and it gave them friends. By encouraging people to work in groups,
you were helping to make their experience more fun.
	The idea about business was that group membership was sticky,
therefore by encouraging people to form groups you were discouraging
them from leaving. People felt locked in to groups, because their
friends needed them.

	In early text MUDs, all content was basically soloable. This
was primarily because they didn't have the player numbers for it to
be otherwise... With EQ, there were so many players that grouping
became something that could meaningfully be experimented with, and
the results seemed to be good: its players did indeed seem to like
being in groups, and the groups were indeed sticky. However, with
hindsight we can see that the reason EQ's players were accepting
of group play was because all the ones who didn't like it left.
EQ's rising player numbers were due to its being the MMO everyone
had heard of, not due to retention (its churn was high by text
MUD standards).

>In WoW, the best content is by far the elder game content that requires
>10, 25 or 40 people to play (raids and battlegrounds)
	It may be for you, but there are plenty of people who don't
like it. Sure, most of the players seem to engage in it, but how do
you know that this isn't because the ones who don't engage in in
stop playing (much as the EQ players who didn't like grouping did)?
	Put another way, if elder game raid content is so great,
why bother with the levelling game that precedes it? You could
start everyone off at the level cap and use gear as the basis
for advancement. Yes, the levelling game helps train people in
the use of their character, but training can also be done in other,
quicker ways.

>where WoW
>differs from those other games is that they have plenty to do if you're
>alone - including taking your character from level 1 to the cap. This
>idea would have seemed heretical in 1998
	It wouldn't have in 1988 though.

>A lot of people like to claim that WoW had no innovations in it.  In
>my opinion, this is a big one - and may well have been the force
>multiplier that took the classic MMO formula from six figures to seven.
	I agree. That whole "play alone together" thing turned the
EQ group paradigm on its head, and it worked.
	This is one reason I was alarmed by what they did with
Karazhan in TBC - put all their effort into an instance with
hard core raid attendance requirements and a week-long cooldown.
It looked an awful lot like a return to an EQ grouping regime.

>To me, the answer is to provide a solid solo/
>small group backbone to the game, but have those paths lead
>to a truly 'massive' experience that only the MMO experience
>can provide.
	But aren't you doing an intersection thing here? Some people
like solo play but don't like (or can't make) raid play; other
people like raid play but don't care for solo play. The people
who are engaging in the elder game are those who like both.
This then leads to the question of what happens to those who
only like one?

		Richard