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Do We Need An "MMO By Commitee"?
AlBQuirky
Member EpicPosts: 7,432
Seeing some recent posts about certain MMOs and sometimes the general attitude of some players, it seems that an MMO should be made by the players, instead of developers with an idea and a direction.
Are some players expecting too much from a developer? Should developers listen to the players and their hundreds of polls?
To make it more fair, the polls should be simple 2 choice (either "A" or "B") questions, so a majority is reached without a huge division of the voters. A question like "What kind of PvP do you like best?" would be all over the place to reach a good majority vote. It would have to be asked in multiple steps to get an accurate count, I think.
How do you think an MMO like this would fair? Would an MMO by the popular numbers interest you?
What are your thoughts?
- Al
Personally the only modern MMORPG trend that annoys me is the idea that MMOs need to be designed in a way to attract people who don't actually like MMOs. Which to me makes about as much sense as someone trying to figure out a way to get vegetarians to eat at their steakhouse.- FARGIN_WAR
Comments
"COMMITEE - A group of people who individually can do nothing but as a group decide that nothing can be done. Ideally suited to just 3 people, 2 of whom are absent"
If you let the forums have their say you'll end up with a uniquely generic original IP thats been done to death a 100 times, featuring shaven bearded dwarfs wielding axes against a space backdrop, utilising cutting edge tech that is watered down to run on every system with photorealistic cartoony graphics. Combat will be twich based tab targeted with hundreds of key combos all wrapped up in a very neat 8 button tactical mashfest, listening to reams of well written quest text, none featuring any fedex quests at all except for those quests featuring apparently 3 legged animals who happen to secrete 6ft war mauls and such about their person. I'm sure the sandbox style PvP will also be super fair in the themepark PVE zones, which rely on the holy trinity of Tank, DPS, Healer, Crafter, Gatherer and Support. in a 5 man group. All this while taking at least a year to reach level cap next week.
Sadly, I don't think any current bunch of MMO players could collectively or effectively collaborate their ideas and come to an agreement on a forum.
Judging by the majority of forum posters, I don't think many players even know what it is they even want to play.
We can't even reach an amicable agreement on the most basic of issues of whether a game should or should not include PVP - or even if you can call it an MMO if it does or does not feature PVP.
Even if we did have a 'Perfect' game that pleases the masses... We'll eventually tear it apart, spawning hundreds of obsolete spin off copy cat games, each one trying to please a separate issue that occours in the 'Other' game.
IMO MMO's should be niche and should cater for specific sets of players that pretty much have no business crossing each others paths.
...lol thats all quite depressing now I read it back
Hey ho!
EDIT: Oh and by forcing a set of people into a set of poll choices, you'll effectively destroy the whole idea in the first place. Take a million people and give them 2 choices. You just lost 500,000 people atthe first choice!...
I want a mmorpg where people have gone through misery, have gone through school stuff and actually have had sex even. -sagil
I think the question is how many developers there actually is ? true artists. Less than i have fingers,they dont need any kind of help.
but these "developers" who dont actually develope anything,who just copy and paste ideas invented by others,they do need all help they can get from others.
So, did ESO have a successful launch? Yes, yes it did.By Ryan Getchell on April 02, 2014.
**On the radar: http://www.cyberpunk.net/ **
I'll have to say no. Developers should decide what target market they wish to aim for, make sure the people paying the bills are OK with the risk vs reward, and then keep the focus narrow and tight to meet the projected delivery dates/budgets and deliver a quality product to the audience.
Sudden changes in midstream have rarely worked out well (see Tabula Rasa, or WAR) and trying to be all things to all people sometimes has resulted in disaster (FXIV round 1)
Unfortunately MMO features are frequently mutually exclusive, or at the very least make no sense to include depending on the niche being sought after. You just don't put FFA PVP with full loot in a title aimed at drawing in 2 M casual, PVE centric players, just never going to work out.
I prefer game mechanics in MMO's that are largely viewed as time sinks, unnecessary and tedious and only a small group of players enjoy them as opposed to the larger market. So no game that I would build/enjoy playing would be a huge market success, my tastes are just too limiting for most.
"True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde
"I need to finish" - Christian Wolff: The Accountant
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
Committees are good for leveraging brain power and coming up with solutions to problems. So, if a developer were to ask the question "How can we make siege pvp better in our upcoming game?" I think they'd get a whole slew of useful answers to help build their game around. Similarly, getting feedback on tweaks and changes during the development process is a necessary aspect. How many times have forumites around here opined "If only they had listened to our feedback during beta!"
Still, my instinct is that the creative aspects of putting together a world, creating lore, roughing out general gameplay systems, and deciding the principle focus for a game are more likely to be hindered by a democracy than helped by it. Large scale endeavors of this sort really require a singular creative vision backed by a competent group of people who can each bring the vision to life. To use a poor analogy: to bring in any sort of committee at that stage of the process is like asking for feedback while painting a landscape. "What do you think-- too much red in the sunset? Should the trees be a little fuller?" You can imagine how bland the final product would be.
I worry that democracy, unrestrained by some form of constitution of values leads to marginalization/alienation of minority views. Everyone is in the minority on some issue that is potentially game-breaking to them.
I think that votes on priorities are good, but need to done carefully so that player input doesn't become a game of survivor, focusing on divisive issues that vote one play style after another off the island.
The problem is that the current state of mmorpgs has been created by these so called gaming community committees. Most the people that scream, have no clue what it takes to make a entertaining game or a world were people feel at ease.
People keep speaking of the old days because they had devs. who had a vision and actually built games they would want to play themselves. Now its all about appeasement. I mean what ever happened to loot gear being the best... Now everyone gets the chance to get top gear by doing quest ect...
Games that make everyone the best even the dude who logs on 3 hours a week will never succeed.
My MMORPG of choice (Runescape) has been doing this for a few years now. First, they gave the biggest decision for the game future up to player voting. And, since then, most of the new content has been player designed or heavily requested. The Runescape team even has a sub team of Mods who's sole job it is to gather player feedback and present it to development. There are would you rather and guaranteed content polls weekly. And, the newest quest features many aspects designed by the players.
Runescape, is no stranger to letting players guide development. And, many other developers are really beginning to trust that their players can be given the steering wheel. But, this is done largely in already existing games and new versions of old games.
Now...to actually make a game from the start by committee? Iunno, sounds iffy.
As people always point on these forums, but most people seem not to take notice, is that this is a very specific and niche group of people who don't even come close to representing the MMO market as a whole.
So just at the start the idea already wouldn't work.
Players tend to be bad at expressing what it is they really enjoy as well as thinking they enjoy one thing when really it was something else. A lot of players would have the game reward them with a bunch of stuff the moment they log in. Something like that would be exciting for a day or two, but then naturally it would become incredibly boring and they'd quit quickly. Yet at the same time many players would tell you they don't want anything to be hard, require figuring out, or even have chances of failure because they find it frustrating. Of course psychological studies have repeatedly proven that a reward worked hard for is appreciated and enjoyed far more than one that is easy to get.
In other words, no it would not work out well at all.
Tell that to WOW.
I dont play wow but from what I read on the forums 3 hours a week wont get you to the top... wow, had marketing, a player base that has not been equaled to since. Blizzard was the golden child, everything it released was amazing. After wow the company has been on a downward spiral in terms of quality.
But back to the subject no game you log on for 3 hours a week and become a top player will ever succeed.
Lol .. i thought "will never succeed" refers to "games".
Your sentence, i read it this way ....
Games, that make everyone the best even the dude who logs on 3 hours a week, will never succeed.
If you mean the PLAYER will never succeed ... then .. i apologize for the confusion.
An MMO developed like this would more then likely be a train wreck. The next big thing will come from someone with a vision that gives us something that we haven't really experienced before.
There are some things in development that may fit the bill.
edit:
Something big and game changing usually comes around about once per decade, were due
"Be water my friend" - Bruce Lee
actually i don't care if a game is designed by a committee, by a single person, or by a monkey. I only care if it is fun to me.
I will say just let the market produces whatever MMO, and i will decide which one (if any) i will play.
For every minute you are angry , you lose 60 seconds of happiness."-Emerson
Hey AlBQuirky, great post. I agree with limiting poll choices so we have a general consensus rather than 50 different opinions/choices.
I particularly agree with these points. ROFL at the defintion of commitee.
Luckily, i don't need you to like me to enjoy video games. -nariusseldon.
In F2P I think it's more a case of the game's trying to play the player's. -laserit
My 2 pennies...
If your making something with enough demographic variance that a committee is even viable then your already no different than any other recent mmo. Pick your vision; pick your audience; and stick with the plan. The fools who keep trying to be the next Wow and end up being mere footnotes are excellent examples why being everything to everyone does not work.
As for the rest of the posts, I am NOT for this type game
I just see this kind of process with every MMO announced. MMORPG.com makes a forum for the new upcoming MMO. Soon, there are lots of "POLL: XXX" threads going around before anything is really known about the MMO and speculation abounds.
I am not suggesting this needs to be done in MMO making
- Al
Personally the only modern MMORPG trend that annoys me is the idea that MMOs need to be designed in a way to attract people who don't actually like MMOs. Which to me makes about as much sense as someone trying to figure out a way to get vegetarians to eat at their steakhouse.- FARGIN_WAR
Players think because they can figure our how to log into a game and log into the forums they are experts at game design. Their highly trained hind sight is all that is required to tell devs how it is.
Forums are probably a worse place to get feedback than random people on the street that have never even heard of the game.
Game design is more about filling in many thousands of little details than the few high-level things that we mostly argue about here. For a committee to argue about every little detail would paralyze game development. For a committee to mandate big picture things without understanding the little details wouldn't end well. They'd probably end up mandating various contradictory things.
Given any game design document that isn't self-contradictory, a good game design team could create a highly polished game following every meaningful instruction to the letter that the author of the design document hates, simply by making a ton of unspecified details not what he wanted. And the "highly polished" part of that is by far the hardest part.
Yeah .. and based on all the ranting about devs not catering to their precious needs, i doubt devs are actually listening to these forums.
They have better methods, like marketing research, or actually look at data in their games to see what is popular and what is not.
Do you think WOW took away world pvp just because? Or expand the use of LFR just because?
This would just reinforce my premise that this MMO would not be very good, if it ever reached a point where it could be launched
Yet some players seem to think that many polls and similar posts on game forums should be taken seriously and seem to get upset when ideas are ignored.
- Al
Personally the only modern MMORPG trend that annoys me is the idea that MMOs need to be designed in a way to attract people who don't actually like MMOs. Which to me makes about as much sense as someone trying to figure out a way to get vegetarians to eat at their steakhouse.- FARGIN_WAR
I do not think a poll-driven development process would be feasible in the first place.
I feel that the best games are done by the Dev's that have a clear vision of their game AND stick to it, crowd be damned.
For example, the Wing Commander series wasn't for me as it was much too shooting-minded.
Yet, when Privateer (and especially later Freelancer) was released, it was more to my liking. Still, Wing Commander was a good game/series in their own right, just not for me.
With MMO's i feel, it should be the same.
Like Wing Commander had it's following (and many of those didn't much like Privateer, at least in my peer group), so do games like STO which i feel has failed horribly.
If a Dev-Team sticks to it's idea/vision, the crowd of potential players might be smaller, but in the end more satisfied and loyal i bet than if they had tried to please everybody or "the majority" (and in doing so alienate some group of players that voted differently than the majority on one poll or the other).
And really, if the general concept were "open" (and robust) enough, there's nothing in the way to make "spinoff's" to suit different groups' tastes, just like with the Wing Commander Series.