Sunday, August 29, 2010

The World of WarCRACK

The concept of mmos is flawed in general.

As long as new mmos don't try something new, it will stay flawed, and in the end, vanish again.


First of all, you have to realize that most players are bad players. Reasons are not just stupidity, but more lack of interest and the fact that they probably never touched a challenging game before.

But when designing an mmo you have to aim for a huge player base. It's the only way to keep an mmo truly healthy.
One reason: The more players the game already has, the higher chances are of new people joining.

To ensure a stable player base, you have to take care of mainly two things:
First, there must always be something for veterans to keep playing (which is a feeling of neverending progress).
Second, you have to give new players a fair chance to catch up.
Somehow, these to things aren't without contradiction. You can't do this by not taking some value out of the veteran's players progress.
This problem can be kept low by judging wisely in regards of reaching the level cap, we've already seen that. In endgame this is a whole different problem, but I'll come to that.

The resource for achieving these things is, simply put, more content.
Since this resource is limited (you just can't make the team bigger and make more content of the same quality), you have to decide for whom you design it and how much of it.
The answer seems simple: For the biggest part of the player base and we all know who that is.

Interestingly, without some elite players even the casuals would feel bored. Remember how everybody whined about the easy hardmodes without having actually killed one?
There would be nothing to achieve regarding some social standing inside the game. And if you are a game designer by heart, you want to love your own creation. So, in the end, you'll always create content for the better players, a minority.

However, this takes huge amounts of the content you can provide and there are dangerously few things you can hand out the main player base then. This is a problem.
Blizzard tries to solve it by 'making content more acessesible'. We've seen how rarely this concept works.

Patch 3.2 was a failure in regards of 'casuals'. The instance is too big for them, they are stuck at the keepers for weeks. Nerfs won't solve this problem easily. See how the new instance is much smaller.


So, in the end, you end up with the problem that a huge player base always stands in some contradiction to a challening endgame without frustration.

I know that hadn't much to do with Aion or Fallout till now, but as long as they don't come up with a new approach to this problem they'll be a wow clone at best.
And I, personally, won't play another wow. I'm rather finished with mmos as a whole, then

4 comments:

  1. I think mmo's like WoW are too easy because they are designed for a mass of players, and it takes many long hours before any fun is had.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Well, there's also the grind which your not taking into account. They don't necessarily need people to have "fun" but they need them to keep paying for subscriptions. They do this by making a nonstop grind of killing creatures for resources and rewarding you for that. To start with it's easy to level up thus getting the player physiologically addicted to the work/reward that's going on. Then they ease them into longer and longer waits for the reward until they wind up playing the game like they would go to a job. It's great from their standpoint because the players just keep buying into it, especially after playing for a while because if they quit then they feel like they wasted a lot of time on nothing.

    I dislike MMO's not just for the style of playing but what it does to people's heads. But I don't think that they are flawed. In fact, I think that they work wonders for what they were designed to do which is drain people's bank accounts over time into the company's profit margins.

    ReplyDelete
  3. for a while i was playing the Fallout MMO. although it wasn't very massive. and too much grinding. i got killed by some guards in one city and lost my leather jacket. screw that.

    thanks for the follow, i'll keep checking back. --KG

    ReplyDelete