One of the best articles I have read here! I can only fully agree.
There are some escapes.
A) STORY: I hope SWTOR does it right. The Tortage part of AoC and the book quests of LOTRO are going into that direction. Tho even LOTRO in it's later years began to fall into the "faction grind" trap, which I so loathe. As a PnP nut I hope story will be the great new part in future MMOs.
NO LOOT: See CoH. Sure they added dops later, but by and large you look how you design and loot and cash don't play a larger role.
C) ROLEPLAYING: Difficult to attain game-wise, because people have to do it actively. If a MMO is too much a Theme Park like WAR, it practically kills the RP. I especially loathed Warhammer for it's narrow theme park orientation. It was like one long quest tunnel and not an open, free world to roam and explore.
D) EXPLORATION: Usually the strength in games with a Sandbox element. IMVPO I don't think Sandbox and quests with story are condradictions. A MMO can quite well have a large sandbox part where gamers can just live a virtual life AND have quests and missions with story. Either way for me who loves exploring I want my MMO worlds big and open. One of the things I loved about Vanguard.
MMORPGs cease to exist if they don't keep the players subscribing (or in the case of F2P, keep them dipping into the item mall). Grinds exist because it is content that takes a lot of time to accomplish, so it keeps players in the game. If there were no grinds, players would run out of things to do, and if there's nothing to do there's nothing to keep them subscribing. There's no way that a developer can create a steady stream of hundreds of hours of fresh gameplay content. That would be great, but it's unrealistic.
What is the alternative? I think the best thing to do is to give players the tools to create their own content. I don't necessarily mean something as direct as a "quest-builder" although that works too. The simplest example of player-driven content is PvP. PvP never really feels like a grind because the competition is a little different every time. The unpredictability of players makes it less monotonous. Another example is a player-driven economy. Give players a deep and rewarding crafting/economic system that lets them spend time building up an economic empire (see EVE Online and Pirates of the Burning Sea). Tools and game systems that encourage role-playing are also good. Not everyone is into roleplaying, but I think that's partly because most games don't encourage it with in-game systems. If you give players tools to play with, they will try it out. APB's system that allows players to incorporate their own art and music into their character is a good example. That may not seem like a Roleplaying tool, but I think roleplayers would definitely make good use of a system like that (although I don't think APB's gameplay and setting is good for roleplayers).
If a developer could create good systems like these, and perhaps some other systems that I haven't mentioned that empower the players, you wouldn't need grinds and probably wouldn't even need levels.
You are missing the entire point with this article. Of course they are trying to get us addicted, but if you are playing a game to acquire "shinies" you are doing it wrong. You should be playing because you enjoy the game, not because you get a reward after so much time playing.
"Gamers will no longer buy the argument that every MMO requires a subscription fee to offset server and bandwidth costs. It's not true you know it, and they know it." Jeff Strain, co-founder of ArenaNet, 2007
I have the same mindset as William Murphy, and I have had that mindset for a few years now. Extremely repetitive content isn't fun, nor should it be pointed out as such. But all we get on the MMO gaming front are the same type of crap from different gaming companies.
It just really shot the point forward when World of Warcraft started with the automatic LFG system, in a few ways it's quite decent, but in more ways it ruins the game and shows just how repetitive things have become. But most people don't care, and that's where the problem is at.
The people and the friends that we have lost, and the dreams that have faded, never forget them~
You are missing the entire point with this article. Of course they are trying to get us addicted, but if you are playing a game to acquire "shinies" you are doing it wrong. You should be playing because you enjoy the game, not because you get a reward after so much time playing.
Exactly. There is a reward because the game is not fun. I was thinking a month ago about a fun quest and after I put everything then I thought about the reward. I asked myself why should there even be a reward. Peoples would do it anyway because is fun. Like in most single player games, you just play it to have fun not to get a reward. This is how mmo work. You get a level up after a long boring farm as a reward. You get this shiny armor after you've donne this boring quest chain. That is how devs are keeping peoples playing. By rewarding the repetitive and lame road you have to walk in not by making it fun. That's why the leveling doesn't feel like an adventure but like a boring grind.
I thought about this article as I read it, and it has many true points, but there was something lacking in it. It wasn't until I re-read it that I caught it myself. The great grindfest is not brought on by developers I believe. I believe the reason we are hooked on games and continue to pay is the marketing department.
I'm beginning to think that Developers really are players. They want to make their product as excellent as it possibly can be. To do that, you need money, lots of money, buckets and buckets of it. Originally as I was working on my own RPG I definately thought this was the path. The problem is that where developers get the money is the proverbal devil on the shoulder. Especially since the developers take money up front for development and sign over control of the game to someone else. A person or team who developed a game now reports to someone else whom provided the money and wants to see a profit.
So how does this impact our games and the 'grinding' involved in it?
The developers are sitting in a meeting discussing new epic battle with really cool gear.
The marketing guys by nature or by design want to use this to increase subscriptions, money for the product, or word of mouth.
So even if it's complete, the marketing guys don't want a lot of details to come out about it. If it does then opposition will try to do something else to counter it.
They don't want players to know much about it because it's a perfect carrot to keep them subscribing.
Furthermore they have to 'tweak' the drops because if players get all the cool stuff, or get all the cool stuff they want they'll stop fighting that new epic battle.
This is done so they have enough time to come up with the next gimmick to lure players and keep what they have.
You can see that even if developers want to talk about something coming up, they are trapped by Marketing saying "If you tell the players about it you're going to lose money". They want money to keep making their game better. Even when it comes to loot, marketing figures out how fast it should take. Yes the guys in the suits determine how fast players should level, and how many ice-rods of uberness should drop. Amazing isn't it?
Yet very few people even consider how much impact marketing has on the decisions of the developers. The devil on the shoulder says "We have numbers that indicate players don't mind grinding, so we can stretch it out by 5% and gain a 10% boost to population and revenue." That 5% is the next week that you're going to be hunting for crystals for armor.
It's easy to look at this and say "Marketing is evil" but keep in mind that marketing does a good job trying to hook us onto games, they use the best videos, or even videos that do not really show what the game is like. Such is the case however when the gaming world doesn't have ethical laws in place to protect the players. It's the bell and food experiments. Everytime they ring the bell we drool. You need marketing to sell games. The real question is 'how much is too much'?
It seems that everyone wants to overthrow blizzard, and I'm beginning to think it's much like wanting to be the strongest of demons. Developers head down a dark path of owing a lot of money and hand over control so that they can 'live the dream job and try to take down the biggest game there is". They're players at heart though, so it's natural to want to compete. Only instead of trying to get that uber armor like we do, they're trying to hit that 500,000 subscriber mark.
Every game still wants to profit, and so you're not really going to see 'FREE to play' games. Furthermore there's nothing wrong with making a profit from a game. The ways it goes wrong is when Marketing is the Developers filter to everything. Communication with players. Loot system. Event System. Information about the game. Even changes to the system based on 'what the players want'.
There are better ways of making mmos without selling your soul to development companies, of this I am sure. It however is the fastest way of getting your game out there. Perhaps that's part of the problem. In the old days when mmos were still new everyone was trying something different to succeed. Now a days when there are hundreds if not thousands of mmos, there's less creativity involved with getting the money to make it. People start following the WoW business plan because it works. Even people who don't like WoW, use the same business models as WoW.
My suggestion to fix grinding and developers abusing players? Go after the marketing guys. Write complaint letters to marketing not the developers. Ask the development/community team to speak with Marketing members in a Q&A. I bet you the marketing guys know the answers to many of your questions. Examples like "when is X going to be added?", or "why something was changed". Other then that question things. Don't just accept a video of the new WoW expansion, get details, find out information.
We are all gamers.
We all care about the games we play.
We all have the abilities to rationalize, discuss, and gather information. It's why viral marketing works. Use the skills that you learned from Uncle Owen to be involved in your community and oppose things such as grinding and horrible loot. If you don't get involved, then likely no one else will. If no one speaks out, change doesn't happen. I'm not saying to be mean or insulting, but having facts and presenting them is the best way to fight something you don't like.
The problem MMO progress curves face is that you have different players playing with different intensity. No matter how many levels you include in the game, there will be some people who overdose in the first week and complete them all.
What you want is a progression that lets powergamers "preview" content/levels-of-power that will later become easier to attain. So at any given time, there are diminishing returns as you near the limit of the published content, but the difficulty/cost of advancing also slowly drops over time (prices drop, easier ways to gain exp/skill, higher level cap, etc). So to experience any given tier of content, you can either grind hard or just play at your comfortable speed and it will come down within your comfort range.
MMORPG.com's Bill Murphy writes about the trend of MMO games to forget to "add the fun" and instead focus solely on how to keep us paying that $15 a month.
i wish there had been a MMO where all dramatic content, challenge, ingame economy, geography, politics, conflict, advancement, crafting, territorial boundaries, were created and promoted solely by the players.
OH YEAH, SHADOWBANE.
too bad so many people got put off by a soggy launch and few superficial reviews. the game did have its problems, but its still head and shoulders above any of the shiny and shinier gimmicks being excreted these days. that is, only if you prefer MMO's that arent just multiplayer single player games.
i wish there had been a MMO where all dramatic content, challenge, ingame economy, geography, politics, conflict, advancement, crafting, territorial boundaries, were created and promoted solely by the players.
OH YEAH, SHADOWBANE.
too bad so many people got put off by a soggy launch and few superficial reviews. the game did have its problems, but its still head and shoulders above any of the shiny and shinier gimmicks being excreted these days. that is, only if you prefer MMO's that arent just multiplayer single player games.
Shadowbane's launch wasn't as bad as Anarchy Onlines lol
Don't really care what I play as long as my clanmates are playing as well. A rat?? Naww..
You're right, you're not a rat. You're a sheep following the rats.
Originally posted by Cruoris
i wish there had been a MMO where all dramatic content, challenge, ingame economy, geography, politics, conflict, advancement, crafting, territorial boundaries, were created and promoted solely by the players.
good article, pretty much sums up whats wrong with the mmo genre. They want us to work for shiny gear, grinding our way up to the top, boring as hell but people still pay for it.
Its not just one company either, sure some mmos have more grind then others but every single mmo has one form of grind or another. When quests consist of go here kill 15x then you get a new one "go here kill 8" its just grind. Boring as hell so Il be all for more "fun" in mmos since well.. its a limited resource in this genre its all about progression, not entertainment.
This article hits the nail on the head, and it's because of people that continue to pay for exactly the same boring games over and over, that we are continually fed the same drivel over and over.
People are basically paying for games that have no substance at all, and the game publishers are laughing all the way to the bank with it. Same reason it's so rare that you get to watch a movie that actually is worth watching. People keep on paying to see all the stuff with no substance, so why on earth would the people putting this rubbish out want to spend any time or thought on giving us something else?
I feel that games are not written by people that enjoy games, they're written by dullards that do ( as someone above mentioned) what the marketing department tell them. A fortune is spent on some shiny graphics, then with 3 days left before launch, a bunch of crap is added (some boring quest and some boring characters with some boring skills and really nothing in the way of any coherent reason as to why you're doing what you're doing, not that that's needed, since you'll do it anyway) and a game is born. Takes far fewer idiots with more money than sense to pretend to themselves that they like it than you might think in order for it to pay off. When the playerbase becomes pointless to sustain, release next game exactly like the one it's replacing, but a bit shinier to attract the same fools back again.
Until people stop buying the same game over and over, they're gonna keep giving us the same game over and over. If you're feeding farm animals the cheapest nastiest food you can find, and they are continuing to eat it without question, get fat and make you money, what possible reason would you have to spend time and effort changing your recipe to give them something better?
Game makers need not use any imagination or thought in making a game, so long as there are enough players without any imagination or thought lapping it up.
I'm just wondering how many more years the article's author will continue paying for something he already did a thousand times before. Will you ever actually get bored enough to say "No more"? How many of the thousands of hours wasted, actually were genuinely entertaining?
MMORPG.com's Bill Murphy writes about the trend of MMO games to forget to "add the fun" and instead focus solely on how to keep us paying that $15 a month.
Please do NOT bring up hunting rats... I still twitch when I think of that... ^^
The point is to have fun, but that means different things to different people. The MMO industry seems to be stuck between the Dev''s who want to make fun games(those who know what it is...) and the marketing suits(backed by the investor types) who only really care about money. The trick would be to convince the powers that be, that there is more money to be made longer term, with more fun designs.
i wish there had been a MMO where all dramatic content, challenge, ingame economy, geography, politics, conflict, advancement, crafting, territorial boundaries, were created and promoted solely by the players.
OH YEAH, SHADOWBANE.
too bad so many people got put off by a soggy launch and few superficial reviews. the game did have its problems, but its still head and shoulders above any of the shiny and shinier gimmicks being excreted these days. that is, only if you prefer MMO's that arent just multiplayer single player games.
It wasn't only that that eventually killed SB. The fact is that SB was pointed at a player demographic that is really narrow in the western markets these days. The time of the FFA gankfest has passed. Games with that design have a really limited appeal in the west these days.
I normally dont post comments to articles on this site, but I feel I must on this topic.
You people have way too much time on your hands to be talking about this load of crap including the author of the article. Play the games for what they are for or don't play it at all. It's that simple. We all know companies need the money they charge us to keep the game up and running, ESPECIALLY WoW because of it's stupidly large player base across the world. So shut up and enjoy the games you play for once.
By the way I wont be reading any replies to my post.
The problem is that when developers actually try to remove the grind and make the game only 100% fun (Lets say global agenda or APB), people play for a month and then get bored and leave.
MMOs are really special. I do not agree with it, but you have to admit that adding grind to a game is VERY effective at making your players spend more time and money on it.
Great article, I've been saying the same thing myself about both the subscription model and the potential of ANet's model.
To add to it though I think part of the reason why developers are becoming so focussed on creating ways to keep players playing is because players are actually running out of decent reasons to do so without being lured into it. I actually think the biggest thing that will keep an MMO gamer playing is the community, whether that be the server community or just their own small group of friends or guild. As games are becoming so solo friendly the strength of MMO communities is faltering and individual players are not engaging with them as much which means that the primary reason people played MMOs is no longer valid. Devs have no choice but to come up with other methods of keeping the community playing...
The grind for radiance gear in LOTRO was such a blatant move by Turbine to treat us like rats. I refused to do it. Raiding with my casual kin was no longer possible. I quit.
Now I do the same for any game that has me repeating content beyond what I will happily and naturally do (e.g. same content with a different class).
Really, players need to take more pride in themselves. Don't let yourself be treated like this!
I normally dont post comments to articles on this site, but I feel I must on this topic.
You people have way too much time on your hands to be talking about this load of crap including the author of the article. Play the games for what they are for or don't play it at all. It's that simple. We all know companies need the money they charge us to keep the game up and running, ESPECIALLY WoW because of it's stupidly large player base across the world. So shut up and enjoy the games you play for once.
By the way I wont be reading any replies to my post.
First of all, we don't have "too much time on our hands." We're passionate about games, MMOs mainly, and this article was just asking for discussion. Go onto every forum about anything having to do with sports, music, movies, politics, and tell them they have too much time on their hands because forum posting doesn't contribute anything.
Blizzard may need that $15/month from those 11 million people, I don't manage their server bills. What we don't need is Blizzard shovelling the same recycled and re-skinned content over to us, or making an extra 5 million on a stupid Magical Pony. If people are stupid enough to keep paying for the same stuff over and over again, along with a whole GAME worth of money for a stupid horsey, then by all means, let the stock holders have their money.
Good article. Could have been a review of Funcoms new expansion for all the repetition and grind that offers. The holy grail is a solid endgame that keeps people coming back for more and the only game that came close to that was DAoC, but even Mythic themselves didn't learn their own lessons and screwed it up with WAR.
Endgame at the moment boils down to three major camps, raids for epic gear, faction grinds for epic gear and PvP. The first two by definition are repetitious grindfests and the third hasn't been done well since Mythics aforementioned classic, which was close to brilliant but still missed the mark slightly. I say it missed the mark because at the core it was still a repetitious grind, just a grind that was slightly different evening by evening because people play differently, different players turn up etc.
Sadly we are doomed for the forseable future to the same thing as inovation and originality dried up some time ago. The article mentioned GW2, a game that I haven't read much info on but I will watch with interest to see if it lives up to the hype. Oddly enough there have been games released in the past that could offer something to the MMO genre as a whole; Some which contained dungeon crawls but that generated a unique layout for each excursion ( old technology and todays machines could develop something much more complex and rewarding ). Trading card games that have had people hooked for years ( not saying that trading cards should appear in MMO's although SoE have tried it with EQ2, but the thing that makes those games fun and addictive needs to be looked at). Management and city building games, Wargames that rival tabletop in complexity etc. I think that there is a lot to be learned from these if some developer just takes the time.
As a last note to developers intending to put PvP as an endgame, 3 sides ffs because 2 doesn't sodding work. It isn't rocket science guys.
I wont go into the over used pseudo-psychology link that you base your 'rats' argument on as a few of the comments above already go into detail on that. Your article gives rise to the notion that past MMO's were of a nature that didn't rely heavily on grinding, and that time spent playing didn't give others an advantage. You act like current MMO's are somehow more of a grindfest than their early predessessors. Considering in todays age how many more people are enamoured by the MMO experience and are aware it exists and have the technology available to partake in it than a decade ago, isn't it interesting to see how poorly most MMO's do. Perhaps they SHOULD return to the formulas that worked so well for the behemoths that began the revolution.
The fact is that the MMO model is one that mirrors life in a lot of ways. The key obviously being time spent and repetitious action (in a variety of forms) reap the greatest rewards. MMO's were created as sandbox environments filled with an imaginative game world stuffed with Lore and other titbits which acted as the motivating catalyst for the player to give a damn and compete in the repetitious environment set. Gear, advances in progression, and / or PvE – PvP bragging rights were the key hooks designed to bring both fun, frustration and most importantly longevity to the game.
You want an MMO that doesn't have a grind? Where time spent playing doesn't reward players? Sick of being a rat? Then.. GO PLAY A SINGLE PLAYER GAME THAT HAS A BLOODY MULTIPLAYER OPTION BECAUSE THAT IS WHAT YOU ARE LOOKING FOR.
My hat goes off to MMO designers these days as they have a tough road ahead. They have to balance listening to these and other ideas from the general public which ask for 'non-grind', 'less-difficult', easier to traverse games versus the idea that if they do remove these features then all of a sudden the giant, sprawling, epic world they created will have become a very small single player tour with chat options.
The grind is an integral part of the MMO world. Make the grind more challenging, more interesting and more varied but the pursuit of the 'Shiny”, “The Ding”, “The Pwnzor” in some form of another is what makes MMO's -the gaming psychological achievement complex- what they are.
Since I'm ranting and as I imagine this will be my first and last post here...
While a lot of these are stock standard, some are not and some I know the vocal ever so ready to complain majority will yell at me for, but I strongly believe every MMO needs the following:
An epic open world saturated with lore both serious, and entertaining.
In depth class – speciality customisation which does not allow the player to come even close at maximum level to having all the abilities/spells/etc of your class / speciality.
Class / Race / Speciality system that requires the need for many different types of character to complete certain objectives.
In depth quests.
Multiple types of quests beyond that of single player and group.. beyond that of kill big boss X or kill 20 of Y.
Factional PvP that allows players to remain unmolested within certain areas that aren't just starting zones, cities or towns
Real cities.. not just make-shift, half-assed towns scattering the landscape.
Detailed Melee, ranged and spell combat options.
Professions such as those in crafting that require a multi-professional effort (thus multi-player) at higher levels.
A skill or level or whatever system that takes a decent amount of time to reach maximum possible attainment.
A PvE death penalty that actually means something whether it be xp loss that increases as you level / skill up, or attribute losses that do the same or even a chance to loss a item drawn at random or a mix. SOMETHING THAT MEANS DIEING IN PvE IS A BAD THING.
No PvP death penalty besides re spawning at the fringe or outside of the PvP area (s)
LESS bind points.
LESS modes of transport. MMO creators are undercutting the scale of their own worlds by giving far too many multiple instant modes of transport.
A map system that is a map showing found geographical locations which expands as the player uncovers more of the world. NOT maps that act as some advanced form of radar.
A questing system that requires some effort to fully uncover. NPC's should shout at the player if the player comes within range if they have a quest to give that they are comfortable sharing with any strangers. If the quest is a private matter the player should have to initiate dialogue then prompt the right conversation quest (And there should be real options here!!). NPCs should NOT... NOT be telegraphing every quest with giant punctuation marks above there head or being shown as types of sonar blinks on the SUPERRADARMAP
PvE should be detailed and varied with mobs being strong and weak to different things with different mobs having different AI mentalities.
PvE zones should be designed so that an element of danger exists from the medium – high level range that can actually give players a thrill. Zones should not only contain mobs differing in level / skill-type by minuscule amounts.
PvE zones should be open with multiple directional options.
If a designer is intent of having instances (Arg!!) then they should be few and far between. Large, real challenging dungeons should be at the very least on equal numbering as instances.
There are many other aspects I believe are staples but none come to mind this instant.
Being someone who was fortunate enough to have been gaming since before MMO's conception and someone who instantly fell in love with the very idea of MMO's. Where even in PvE you were competing with and against the same people in different aspects all the time. The modern MMO's shift to some single player / MMO on-easy hybrid which is tasting like mixing pavlova, scrabbled eggs and a steak sandwich together... all are great on their own and awesome at certain times but together they taste like dirt.
Don't like grinding? Don't play the massive multilayer online role playing games which hold on to that formula. Play those online games which are a blast to enjoy yet hold no real longevity.
MMORPGs always were about the grind... remember DAoC? huge ass grind to reach lvl 50... questing was pretty much non existent... the best (and only for some classes) way to level was get a group together, sit down near a place where 6-10 lvl higher mobs spawn, pull some, kill them, reg, repeat. Then it was off to RvR, which ( if you cared for RRs) was an even bigger grind...
how dare people back then put up with that??? how dare they feel comfortable in their little rat lives???
well I guess they had fun.... I sure know I did... and I'm still having fun with that exact same type of game... because that is what MMOs are. The only thing that has changed since the old days is that nowadays developers try to cater to more playstyles. Especially - Casuals... back then nobody gave a submarining phoque about people who only wanted to play 2 hrs a week... nowadays they're the most important part of the crowd apparently...
anyway - I'm getting kind of tired of all this banter... "I love MMOs to bits but this and this and this and this and this is wrong and stupid" - guess what: if that is how you feel - you don't really like MMOs anymore... try other stuff... you might become happy again ^^
<S.T.E.A.L.T.H> An Agency that kicks so much ass it has to be written in all capital letters... divided by dots! www.stealth-industries.de
Comments
One of the best articles I have read here! I can only fully agree.
There are some escapes.
A) STORY: I hope SWTOR does it right. The Tortage part of AoC and the book quests of LOTRO are going into that direction. Tho even LOTRO in it's later years began to fall into the "faction grind" trap, which I so loathe. As a PnP nut I hope story will be the great new part in future MMOs.
C) ROLEPLAYING: Difficult to attain game-wise, because people have to do it actively. If a MMO is too much a Theme Park like WAR, it practically kills the RP. I especially loathed Warhammer for it's narrow theme park orientation. It was like one long quest tunnel and not an open, free world to roam and explore.
D) EXPLORATION: Usually the strength in games with a Sandbox element. IMVPO I don't think Sandbox and quests with story are condradictions. A MMO can quite well have a large sandbox part where gamers can just live a virtual life AND have quests and missions with story. Either way for me who loves exploring I want my MMO worlds big and open. One of the things I loved about Vanguard.
MMORPGs cease to exist if they don't keep the players subscribing (or in the case of F2P, keep them dipping into the item mall). Grinds exist because it is content that takes a lot of time to accomplish, so it keeps players in the game. If there were no grinds, players would run out of things to do, and if there's nothing to do there's nothing to keep them subscribing. There's no way that a developer can create a steady stream of hundreds of hours of fresh gameplay content. That would be great, but it's unrealistic.
What is the alternative? I think the best thing to do is to give players the tools to create their own content. I don't necessarily mean something as direct as a "quest-builder" although that works too. The simplest example of player-driven content is PvP. PvP never really feels like a grind because the competition is a little different every time. The unpredictability of players makes it less monotonous. Another example is a player-driven economy. Give players a deep and rewarding crafting/economic system that lets them spend time building up an economic empire (see EVE Online and Pirates of the Burning Sea). Tools and game systems that encourage role-playing are also good. Not everyone is into roleplaying, but I think that's partly because most games don't encourage it with in-game systems. If you give players tools to play with, they will try it out. APB's system that allows players to incorporate their own art and music into their character is a good example. That may not seem like a Roleplaying tool, but I think roleplayers would definitely make good use of a system like that (although I don't think APB's gameplay and setting is good for roleplayers).
If a developer could create good systems like these, and perhaps some other systems that I haven't mentioned that empower the players, you wouldn't need grinds and probably wouldn't even need levels.
You are missing the entire point with this article. Of course they are trying to get us addicted, but if you are playing a game to acquire "shinies" you are doing it wrong. You should be playing because you enjoy the game, not because you get a reward after so much time playing.
"Gamers will no longer buy the argument that every MMO requires a subscription fee to offset server and bandwidth costs. It's not true you know it, and they know it." Jeff Strain, co-founder of ArenaNet, 2007
WTF? No subscription fee?
I have the same mindset as William Murphy, and I have had that mindset for a few years now. Extremely repetitive content isn't fun, nor should it be pointed out as such. But all we get on the MMO gaming front are the same type of crap from different gaming companies.
It just really shot the point forward when World of Warcraft started with the automatic LFG system, in a few ways it's quite decent, but in more ways it ruins the game and shows just how repetitive things have become. But most people don't care, and that's where the problem is at.
The people and the friends that we have lost, and the dreams that have faded, never forget them~
Exactly. There is a reward because the game is not fun. I was thinking a month ago about a fun quest and after I put everything then I thought about the reward. I asked myself why should there even be a reward. Peoples would do it anyway because is fun. Like in most single player games, you just play it to have fun not to get a reward. This is how mmo work. You get a level up after a long boring farm as a reward. You get this shiny armor after you've donne this boring quest chain. That is how devs are keeping peoples playing. By rewarding the repetitive and lame road you have to walk in not by making it fun. That's why the leveling doesn't feel like an adventure but like a boring grind.
I thought about this article as I read it, and it has many true points, but there was something lacking in it. It wasn't until I re-read it that I caught it myself. The great grindfest is not brought on by developers I believe. I believe the reason we are hooked on games and continue to pay is the marketing department.
I'm beginning to think that Developers really are players. They want to make their product as excellent as it possibly can be. To do that, you need money, lots of money, buckets and buckets of it. Originally as I was working on my own RPG I definately thought this was the path. The problem is that where developers get the money is the proverbal devil on the shoulder. Especially since the developers take money up front for development and sign over control of the game to someone else. A person or team who developed a game now reports to someone else whom provided the money and wants to see a profit.
So how does this impact our games and the 'grinding' involved in it?
The developers are sitting in a meeting discussing new epic battle with really cool gear.
The marketing guys by nature or by design want to use this to increase subscriptions, money for the product, or word of mouth.
So even if it's complete, the marketing guys don't want a lot of details to come out about it. If it does then opposition will try to do something else to counter it.
They don't want players to know much about it because it's a perfect carrot to keep them subscribing.
Furthermore they have to 'tweak' the drops because if players get all the cool stuff, or get all the cool stuff they want they'll stop fighting that new epic battle.
This is done so they have enough time to come up with the next gimmick to lure players and keep what they have.
You can see that even if developers want to talk about something coming up, they are trapped by Marketing saying "If you tell the players about it you're going to lose money". They want money to keep making their game better. Even when it comes to loot, marketing figures out how fast it should take. Yes the guys in the suits determine how fast players should level, and how many ice-rods of uberness should drop. Amazing isn't it?
Yet very few people even consider how much impact marketing has on the decisions of the developers. The devil on the shoulder says "We have numbers that indicate players don't mind grinding, so we can stretch it out by 5% and gain a 10% boost to population and revenue." That 5% is the next week that you're going to be hunting for crystals for armor.
It's easy to look at this and say "Marketing is evil" but keep in mind that marketing does a good job trying to hook us onto games, they use the best videos, or even videos that do not really show what the game is like. Such is the case however when the gaming world doesn't have ethical laws in place to protect the players. It's the bell and food experiments. Everytime they ring the bell we drool. You need marketing to sell games. The real question is 'how much is too much'?
It seems that everyone wants to overthrow blizzard, and I'm beginning to think it's much like wanting to be the strongest of demons. Developers head down a dark path of owing a lot of money and hand over control so that they can 'live the dream job and try to take down the biggest game there is". They're players at heart though, so it's natural to want to compete. Only instead of trying to get that uber armor like we do, they're trying to hit that 500,000 subscriber mark.
Every game still wants to profit, and so you're not really going to see 'FREE to play' games. Furthermore there's nothing wrong with making a profit from a game. The ways it goes wrong is when Marketing is the Developers filter to everything. Communication with players. Loot system. Event System. Information about the game. Even changes to the system based on 'what the players want'.
There are better ways of making mmos without selling your soul to development companies, of this I am sure. It however is the fastest way of getting your game out there. Perhaps that's part of the problem. In the old days when mmos were still new everyone was trying something different to succeed. Now a days when there are hundreds if not thousands of mmos, there's less creativity involved with getting the money to make it. People start following the WoW business plan because it works. Even people who don't like WoW, use the same business models as WoW.
My suggestion to fix grinding and developers abusing players? Go after the marketing guys. Write complaint letters to marketing not the developers. Ask the development/community team to speak with Marketing members in a Q&A. I bet you the marketing guys know the answers to many of your questions. Examples like "when is X going to be added?", or "why something was changed". Other then that question things. Don't just accept a video of the new WoW expansion, get details, find out information.
We are all gamers.
We all care about the games we play.
We all have the abilities to rationalize, discuss, and gather information. It's why viral marketing works. Use the skills that you learned from Uncle Owen to be involved in your community and oppose things such as grinding and horrible loot. If you don't get involved, then likely no one else will. If no one speaks out, change doesn't happen. I'm not saying to be mean or insulting, but having facts and presenting them is the best way to fight something you don't like.
The problem MMO progress curves face is that you have different players playing with different intensity. No matter how many levels you include in the game, there will be some people who overdose in the first week and complete them all.
What you want is a progression that lets powergamers "preview" content/levels-of-power that will later become easier to attain. So at any given time, there are diminishing returns as you near the limit of the published content, but the difficulty/cost of advancing also slowly drops over time (prices drop, easier ways to gain exp/skill, higher level cap, etc). So to experience any given tier of content, you can either grind hard or just play at your comfortable speed and it will come down within your comfort range.
Should be we are all hunting rats.. heh
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Hot pocket!
"Yea, I've been drinking again.."
i wish there had been a MMO where all dramatic content, challenge, ingame economy, geography, politics, conflict, advancement, crafting, territorial boundaries, were created and promoted solely by the players.
OH YEAH, SHADOWBANE.
too bad so many people got put off by a soggy launch and few superficial reviews. the game did have its problems, but its still head and shoulders above any of the shiny and shinier gimmicks being excreted these days. that is, only if you prefer MMO's that arent just multiplayer single player games.
Shadowbane's launch wasn't as bad as Anarchy Onlines lol
"Yea, I've been drinking again.."
You're right, you're not a rat. You're a sheep following the rats.
And EVE to an extent
good article, pretty much sums up whats wrong with the mmo genre. They want us to work for shiny gear, grinding our way up to the top, boring as hell but people still pay for it.
Its not just one company either, sure some mmos have more grind then others but every single mmo has one form of grind or another. When quests consist of go here kill 15x then you get a new one "go here kill 8" its just grind. Boring as hell so Il be all for more "fun" in mmos since well.. its a limited resource in this genre its all about progression, not entertainment.
This article hits the nail on the head, and it's because of people that continue to pay for exactly the same boring games over and over, that we are continually fed the same drivel over and over.
People are basically paying for games that have no substance at all, and the game publishers are laughing all the way to the bank with it. Same reason it's so rare that you get to watch a movie that actually is worth watching. People keep on paying to see all the stuff with no substance, so why on earth would the people putting this rubbish out want to spend any time or thought on giving us something else?
I feel that games are not written by people that enjoy games, they're written by dullards that do ( as someone above mentioned) what the marketing department tell them. A fortune is spent on some shiny graphics, then with 3 days left before launch, a bunch of crap is added (some boring quest and some boring characters with some boring skills and really nothing in the way of any coherent reason as to why you're doing what you're doing, not that that's needed, since you'll do it anyway) and a game is born. Takes far fewer idiots with more money than sense to pretend to themselves that they like it than you might think in order for it to pay off. When the playerbase becomes pointless to sustain, release next game exactly like the one it's replacing, but a bit shinier to attract the same fools back again.
Until people stop buying the same game over and over, they're gonna keep giving us the same game over and over. If you're feeding farm animals the cheapest nastiest food you can find, and they are continuing to eat it without question, get fat and make you money, what possible reason would you have to spend time and effort changing your recipe to give them something better?
Game makers need not use any imagination or thought in making a game, so long as there are enough players without any imagination or thought lapping it up.
I'm just wondering how many more years the article's author will continue paying for something he already did a thousand times before. Will you ever actually get bored enough to say "No more"? How many of the thousands of hours wasted, actually were genuinely entertaining?
Rats no. Sheep yes.
Please do NOT bring up hunting rats... I still twitch when I think of that... ^^
The point is to have fun, but that means different things to different people. The MMO industry seems to be stuck between the Dev''s who want to make fun games(those who know what it is...) and the marketing suits(backed by the investor types) who only really care about money. The trick would be to convince the powers that be, that there is more money to be made longer term, with more fun designs.
It wasn't only that that eventually killed SB. The fact is that SB was pointed at a player demographic that is really narrow in the western markets these days. The time of the FFA gankfest has passed. Games with that design have a really limited appeal in the west these days.
I normally dont post comments to articles on this site, but I feel I must on this topic.
You people have way too much time on your hands to be talking about this load of crap including the author of the article. Play the games for what they are for or don't play it at all. It's that simple. We all know companies need the money they charge us to keep the game up and running, ESPECIALLY WoW because of it's stupidly large player base across the world. So shut up and enjoy the games you play for once.
By the way I wont be reading any replies to my post.
The problem is that when developers actually try to remove the grind and make the game only 100% fun (Lets say global agenda or APB), people play for a month and then get bored and leave.
MMOs are really special. I do not agree with it, but you have to admit that adding grind to a game is VERY effective at making your players spend more time and money on it.
Great article, I've been saying the same thing myself about both the subscription model and the potential of ANet's model.
To add to it though I think part of the reason why developers are becoming so focussed on creating ways to keep players playing is because players are actually running out of decent reasons to do so without being lured into it. I actually think the biggest thing that will keep an MMO gamer playing is the community, whether that be the server community or just their own small group of friends or guild. As games are becoming so solo friendly the strength of MMO communities is faltering and individual players are not engaging with them as much which means that the primary reason people played MMOs is no longer valid. Devs have no choice but to come up with other methods of keeping the community playing...
Absolutely. Nice article.
The grind for radiance gear in LOTRO was such a blatant move by Turbine to treat us like rats. I refused to do it. Raiding with my casual kin was no longer possible. I quit.
Now I do the same for any game that has me repeating content beyond what I will happily and naturally do (e.g. same content with a different class).
Really, players need to take more pride in themselves. Don't let yourself be treated like this!
First of all, we don't have "too much time on our hands." We're passionate about games, MMOs mainly, and this article was just asking for discussion. Go onto every forum about anything having to do with sports, music, movies, politics, and tell them they have too much time on their hands because forum posting doesn't contribute anything.
Blizzard may need that $15/month from those 11 million people, I don't manage their server bills. What we don't need is Blizzard shovelling the same recycled and re-skinned content over to us, or making an extra 5 million on a stupid Magical Pony. If people are stupid enough to keep paying for the same stuff over and over again, along with a whole GAME worth of money for a stupid horsey, then by all means, let the stock holders have their money.
Good article. Could have been a review of Funcoms new expansion for all the repetition and grind that offers. The holy grail is a solid endgame that keeps people coming back for more and the only game that came close to that was DAoC, but even Mythic themselves didn't learn their own lessons and screwed it up with WAR.
Endgame at the moment boils down to three major camps, raids for epic gear, faction grinds for epic gear and PvP. The first two by definition are repetitious grindfests and the third hasn't been done well since Mythics aforementioned classic, which was close to brilliant but still missed the mark slightly. I say it missed the mark because at the core it was still a repetitious grind, just a grind that was slightly different evening by evening because people play differently, different players turn up etc.
Sadly we are doomed for the forseable future to the same thing as inovation and originality dried up some time ago. The article mentioned GW2, a game that I haven't read much info on but I will watch with interest to see if it lives up to the hype. Oddly enough there have been games released in the past that could offer something to the MMO genre as a whole; Some which contained dungeon crawls but that generated a unique layout for each excursion ( old technology and todays machines could develop something much more complex and rewarding ). Trading card games that have had people hooked for years ( not saying that trading cards should appear in MMO's although SoE have tried it with EQ2, but the thing that makes those games fun and addictive needs to be looked at). Management and city building games, Wargames that rival tabletop in complexity etc. I think that there is a lot to be learned from these if some developer just takes the time.
As a last note to developers intending to put PvP as an endgame, 3 sides ffs because 2 doesn't sodding work. It isn't rocket science guys.
Terrible Article.
I wont go into the over used pseudo-psychology link that you base your 'rats' argument on as a few of the comments above already go into detail on that. Your article gives rise to the notion that past MMO's were of a nature that didn't rely heavily on grinding, and that time spent playing didn't give others an advantage. You act like current MMO's are somehow more of a grindfest than their early predessessors. Considering in todays age how many more people are enamoured by the MMO experience and are aware it exists and have the technology available to partake in it than a decade ago, isn't it interesting to see how poorly most MMO's do. Perhaps they SHOULD return to the formulas that worked so well for the behemoths that began the revolution.
The fact is that the MMO model is one that mirrors life in a lot of ways. The key obviously being time spent and repetitious action (in a variety of forms) reap the greatest rewards. MMO's were created as sandbox environments filled with an imaginative game world stuffed with Lore and other titbits which acted as the motivating catalyst for the player to give a damn and compete in the repetitious environment set. Gear, advances in progression, and / or PvE – PvP bragging rights were the key hooks designed to bring both fun, frustration and most importantly longevity to the game.
You want an MMO that doesn't have a grind? Where time spent playing doesn't reward players? Sick of being a rat? Then.. GO PLAY A SINGLE PLAYER GAME THAT HAS A BLOODY MULTIPLAYER OPTION BECAUSE THAT IS WHAT YOU ARE LOOKING FOR.
My hat goes off to MMO designers these days as they have a tough road ahead. They have to balance listening to these and other ideas from the general public which ask for 'non-grind', 'less-difficult', easier to traverse games versus the idea that if they do remove these features then all of a sudden the giant, sprawling, epic world they created will have become a very small single player tour with chat options.
The grind is an integral part of the MMO world. Make the grind more challenging, more interesting and more varied but the pursuit of the 'Shiny”, “The Ding”, “The Pwnzor” in some form of another is what makes MMO's -the gaming psychological achievement complex- what they are.
Since I'm ranting and as I imagine this will be my first and last post here...
While a lot of these are stock standard, some are not and some I know the vocal ever so ready to complain majority will yell at me for, but I strongly believe every MMO needs the following:
An epic open world saturated with lore both serious, and entertaining.
In depth class – speciality customisation which does not allow the player to come even close at maximum level to having all the abilities/spells/etc of your class / speciality.
Class / Race / Speciality system that requires the need for many different types of character to complete certain objectives.
In depth quests.
Multiple types of quests beyond that of single player and group.. beyond that of kill big boss X or kill 20 of Y.
Factional PvP that allows players to remain unmolested within certain areas that aren't just starting zones, cities or towns
Real cities.. not just make-shift, half-assed towns scattering the landscape.
Detailed Melee, ranged and spell combat options.
Professions such as those in crafting that require a multi-professional effort (thus multi-player) at higher levels.
A skill or level or whatever system that takes a decent amount of time to reach maximum possible attainment.
A PvE death penalty that actually means something whether it be xp loss that increases as you level / skill up, or attribute losses that do the same or even a chance to loss a item drawn at random or a mix. SOMETHING THAT MEANS DIEING IN PvE IS A BAD THING.
No PvP death penalty besides re spawning at the fringe or outside of the PvP area (s)
LESS bind points.
LESS modes of transport. MMO creators are undercutting the scale of their own worlds by giving far too many multiple instant modes of transport.
A map system that is a map showing found geographical locations which expands as the player uncovers more of the world. NOT maps that act as some advanced form of radar.
A questing system that requires some effort to fully uncover. NPC's should shout at the player if the player comes within range if they have a quest to give that they are comfortable sharing with any strangers. If the quest is a private matter the player should have to initiate dialogue then prompt the right conversation quest (And there should be real options here!!). NPCs should NOT... NOT be telegraphing every quest with giant punctuation marks above there head or being shown as types of sonar blinks on the SUPERRADARMAP
PvE should be detailed and varied with mobs being strong and weak to different things with different mobs having different AI mentalities.
PvE zones should be designed so that an element of danger exists from the medium – high level range that can actually give players a thrill. Zones should not only contain mobs differing in level / skill-type by minuscule amounts.
PvE zones should be open with multiple directional options.
If a designer is intent of having instances (Arg!!) then they should be few and far between. Large, real challenging dungeons should be at the very least on equal numbering as instances.
There are many other aspects I believe are staples but none come to mind this instant.
Being someone who was fortunate enough to have been gaming since before MMO's conception and someone who instantly fell in love with the very idea of MMO's. Where even in PvE you were competing with and against the same people in different aspects all the time. The modern MMO's shift to some single player / MMO on-easy hybrid which is tasting like mixing pavlova, scrabbled eggs and a steak sandwich together... all are great on their own and awesome at certain times but together they taste like dirt.
Don't like grinding? Don't play the massive multilayer online role playing games which hold on to that formula. Play those online games which are a blast to enjoy yet hold no real longevity.
Z
I completely agree with the above poster...
MMORPGs always were about the grind... remember DAoC? huge ass grind to reach lvl 50... questing was pretty much non existent... the best (and only for some classes) way to level was get a group together, sit down near a place where 6-10 lvl higher mobs spawn, pull some, kill them, reg, repeat. Then it was off to RvR, which ( if you cared for RRs) was an even bigger grind...
how dare people back then put up with that??? how dare they feel comfortable in their little rat lives???
well I guess they had fun.... I sure know I did... and I'm still having fun with that exact same type of game... because that is what MMOs are. The only thing that has changed since the old days is that nowadays developers try to cater to more playstyles. Especially - Casuals... back then nobody gave a submarining phoque about people who only wanted to play 2 hrs a week... nowadays they're the most important part of the crowd apparently...
anyway - I'm getting kind of tired of all this banter... "I love MMOs to bits but this and this and this and this and this is wrong and stupid" - guess what: if that is how you feel - you don't really like MMOs anymore... try other stuff... you might become happy again ^^
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