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The MMORPG Bloat Problem | MMORPG.com
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The MMORPG Bloat Problem | MMORPG.com
In returning to EverQuest II, Jonathan noticed there's a major issue that plagues basically every MMORPG on the market. In his latest piece for MMORPG, he takes a look at MMORPG's problem with bloat.
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The problem is not that there is a lot of old content, the problem is gaming companies don't put any incentives to revisit them. And no, double XP is not always the best way to handle incentives. Some people don't actually want to get to max level in 20 hours...some of us WANT to experience everything a game has to offer, especially the first time through.
A world where you "adventure" and "Survive". Questing, Crafting, hard af content, an overflowing amount of stuff to do, glacier slow leveling. Friends became extended family.
They were designed to last, keep you actively playing, month, after month, after month, Year, after Year, after Year, all in the same game, thus where the term "Home" came from, Now, they're just flashy fucking night clubs.
BUT... People love McDonald's, easy fast food, easy fast leveling.
It was so much better when it was niche.
Your whole argument is time. Why would I do X area and get 10 levels in 3days, when I could go do X and get the same 10 levels in 3 hours. Maybe because someone wants to, I don't know, enjoy it?
Not everyone wants to be a freaking treadmill grinder. Not everyone wants to have an epeen. Maybe some people just want to enjoy the game in the middle of nowhere smashing some face having fun.
You can clearly see this is the case if you look at people talk about how many hours they played in Skyrim or any survival game.
The problem isn't bloat, the problem is instant gratification. I want it now. I don't want to wait. I don't care about how I get to level 50, I just need to be level 50 to go enjoy the game. Well a whole slew of people actually play the opposite, and never get to 50. I enjoyed 8 months in WOW. I never made it past level 49. The endgame was terrifying. I'll go farm turtles for 3 days straight, but tell me I got to run a boss multiple times and I'm out.
Close not quite right it's...
I don't care about how I get to level 50, I just need to be level 50 so i can whine like a little baby about howe ther isn't anyting to do and its grindy. lol
Perhaps that is the problem. 100 hours in a MMORPG is nothing. It took me close to a year to get my first 50 in DAOC. I spent more than 100 hours in Vanguard just farming for the mount I wanted. Becoming a master crafter in many games takes more than 100 hours.
For me, an MMORPG is a world to live and move and have my being in. I might spend an entire day fishing, or just running around, not even leveling.
If you consider the world as a hindrance, something that you have to get through to get to the next level, then perhaps MMORPG's are not the right genre for you.
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2024: 47 years on the Net.
OK so the dreaded sheep song and being slept.
This is exactly why i loved FFXI,i felt a need to THINK about what i am doing and to always be aware of my surroundings.
So i wanted to point out as a solo player that sheep song is pointless,soon youare attacked and hit even once you are awake again.However yes i bet many an early era group fought the sheep and were put to sleep and picked off one at a tiem until the group died.
There are SEVERAL layers to this very early level encounter that is is crazy and NO other mmorpg has this level of depth this early in a game.So as a group the MANY layers of learning are ...
1 Healer stays out of range of the sleep effect
2 Healer can heal any player and awake them.
3 If you feel the absolute needd to not be slept yo ucould take a poison potion that only hits you for 1 hp/tick and not be slept.
4 CHOICE perhaps your group decides,you know what maybe this choice of foe is maybe not a good selection.Why is this important,well most games post FFXi make it too easy,you don't even need to think about anything because the connect the dots quests lead you directly into foes you will defeat >>SOLO.
5 Group setup and player setup.If you are properly prepared your group might want to have an extra player with HEALING and since the game utilizes a sub job it is quite possible early on in game.No you will not have a sub job the first run of early mobs but that is all part of the learning process.
6 VERY early on in a game like FFXI there are MANY aggro mobs,so you learn what to avoid or make a detour around.
7 Various types of aggression mobs,some listen to you and some have to see you because their hearing is so bad and some will react to if yo uare injured or not ,this again is part of the learning process.
So all this while you and your group are learning many things about depth of design while in a game such as Wow you simply click a npc with a marker over it's head,vee line for that quest mob and have it easy mode with literally no thinking at all.One might argue that Wow teaches you to think later on in game and eventually ,who knows maybe level 50 until you group and have any kind of challenge but the point is Level 20 is not really a factor at all because games can change a lot over time.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
I didn't give up i just decided to work with what we got, my only saving grace is SWG:L been there over 3 years and still got loads of stuff to do. I'm playing wow as my EQ2 replacement.
I'm glad people still love EQ2, for me, i played from 2004 till 2008, (to me) they turned themselves into a wow clone when wow OG was a simplified dumbed the f down version of EQ2 and now it's even easier.
I like Shadowlands even more now than i did at launch. Busy with other things so my available play time dropped, and had to adopt the mind set of i don't have time to do everything by reset, and oh man, enjoyment shot through the roof, wow unfortunately promotes a horrible mindset, of the falling behind factor.
Even i fall prey to it, i've been enjoying the journey this expac from day one, mostly solo, doing my thing, taking my time but i guess not entirely as once i realized i just don't have time to get it all done and just log in and do whatever, like yikes, felt adventure, explore, was awesome to not feel like i'm working on the weekly to do list.
Since they promote that mind set you find players that kept on schedule will end up with nothing really to do early on in the expansion, and now waiting for 9.1, unless they are raiding or have alts. So yeah, glad you kept on schedule, not! Alts help make this expac i have 3 more covenant's content to got through still.
So there is ZERO logic in ever saying that i love to level faster because it is FUN.If a level is made to be completely pointless other than seeing a number beside your name and locking out items,well you might as well stop making mmorpgs imo,because your putting the mindset of a child into the design.
There is a whole different mindset as to why someone needs to do something FAST ,like kill real fast.That type of mindset does NOT bode well for a group mechanic because there would be no need to have a group if the mob just dies in two hits.
In reality,people put WAAAAY too much importance on a level number,like it is some meaningful GOAL to set in life.I would HOPE that nobody chooses a mmorpg because their goal in life is to see how fast they can get level numbers and to see how fast a mob animation can stop animating and disappear off the screen.
You either GET IT....or you DON'T.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
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2024: 47 years on the Net.
Yeah take a dump every couple years or so. lol
I wouldn't say I considered any of it a "hinderance". I guess it's more of a consideration of time, considering people generally don't have as much free time to spend - it was far easier to spend `100+ hours grinding for a pet drake that had a 1% drop rate in WoW when we weren't inundated with a billion other games coming out each month. For example: I played EverQuest for over a decade, played in a top tier raiding guild, had multiple alts, and still had time to play other massive games and still not feel like I'd missed a beat in any of them. The sandbox was there, but it wasn't all consuming. These days, I don't consider the idea of an MMORPG being the only game I should ever play, but rather - to use the food analogy from an earlier comment - an MMORPG should be like if you're making a whole ass turkey. You can slowly eat that thing throughout the course of a week, but some days you're going to want something different, but you can't without feeling like you're not making progress on the consumption of the turkey (cause it'll go bad if it sits around too long).
I spent probably 600 hours in FFXIV in 2019 and it was pretty much the only game I was playing. I still have a massive backlog of other games that I still haven't gotten to, and maybe it's because FFXIV changed how I view the MMORPG as a genre. You dive in, you experience the content and play to max level and do the end game content, and then you can kind of slink away to alts/other jobs, or other games for a while, only checking in occasionally in order to ensure you're there for the next content drop/patch/expansion. I believe Path of Exile also kind of follows this process, even though it's not the same type of game. With single player games no longer being 10-20 hours, the appeal of having The One Game (tm) becomes considerably less attractive knowing you're going to need to spend 300 hours or more to get to the new expansion that caught your interest. This means you either deal with time sink, you get power leveled, or you buy a character boost. What I'm suggesting isn't that we eliminate the content, but rather, we see games include an expedited version of existing content so that it can be experienced as it naturally should have been throughout the existence of the game, but requiring far less of a time sink for new players to get to the part they want to experience. Wouldn't this help breathe new life into older games? Kids these days don't exactly have the attention span that old school MMORPGs demanded.
Maybe you guys are right though, maybe I've just grown past the idea of the MMORPG as it was intended. Maybe I'm just impatient or have a FOMO? As always, I write these pieces for discourse, and thank you for reading and commenting on them.
The fundamental problem is that when games add new content, they usually don't make it supplement the old content. They usually make it replace old content, as the old content gets deprecated. It's not that the old content isn't rewarding enough anymore. It's much worse than that: the old content commonly isn't even in a reasonably playable state. That's how you can have a game have 10+ years of continuous development after launch that results in the game having less content in a playable state than it had a month after launch. (I'd say at launch day, but you know how launch days go.)
You seem to have the idea that everyone hates all lower level content and wants to skip past it as quickly as possible to get to the endgame. And there are players like that. But there are also players who just want good content, and will play lower level content if it's good, but don't want to slog through something awful. And there are also players who hate endgames and want lower level content that is good. If all lower level content has been deprecated, then to some players, that basically constitutes unofficially pulling the plug on a game, as there's nothing left that is interesting to play.
A perennial problem with MMORPGs is having enough content. Games never have very much content at the latest endgame, as that's just looping through a handful of things some ridiculous number of times. If a game has constantly been adding new content for 10+ years, that should result in having a lot of content. "Streamlining" it to remove most of the content isn't the solution, as that gets you right back to not having enough content.
So why does content get deprecated? In some cases, companies made a conscious decision to do so, whether by explicitly removing it, or having a particular patch to make mobs basically stop dealing damage or some such. But often, it's just power creep. This balance pass made your class 5% stronger. That one made it 10% stronger. This new feature made all classes 20% stronger. A decade of that cumulatively happening without old content being rebalanced can mean that something that was challenging to two-man at launch is now easy to solo.
The current problem of deprecating old content doesn't work well for any of the types of players. For people who just want to rush to endgame, they have to slog through a bunch of something awful in order to not have much at endgame to do. For people who want good content, there isn't much of it, as most of it has been deprecated. For people who like lower level content, the developers have long since given up on caring if the lower level content is any good, and just made sure it's easy enough that no one will ever get stuck. And trivial enough that no one will ever have fun playing through it. But everyone has to play through it anyway in order to reach the endgame.
The problem is particularly bad for new players interested in picking up an older game. Many older MMORPGs have less to offer a new player today than they did shortly after launch. That is, the game would have been more welcoming to new players today if it hadn't had a single update since launch besides bug fixes. If you spend 10+ years of development to only make a game worse than if you had put it into maintenance mode right at launch, then you're doing something severely wrong. But a lot of MMORPGs manage to do that, and the success of "classic" servers proves that a lot of players know it.
So how many MMORPGs have managed to add content for 10+ years while keeping the old in a playable state? Uncharted Waters Online certainly has. Dungeons and Dragons Online has. And I'm not aware of any others. UWO is a weird game, so its approach isn't necessarily replicable elsewhere. DDO focuses on getting to the cap, then reincarnating back to level 1 to play through the lower level content all over again. And even then, it relies on adjustable difficulty to compensate for power creep; the "elite" difficulty today might not be any harder than "hard" was at launch.
I think the eq’s are sort of trapped, they can’t financially afford to refine or clean things up and they also can’t financially afford to stop making expansions, and so the feature cluttering problem goes on.
In some ways, like a good band or tv series I wonder if it may be better to just let these games run their course and let them go before it gets too ridiculous.
I have no problem with new content or more content as long as it makes sense in the game and is fun.
Logic, my dear, merely enables one to be wrong with great authority.
100% agree - why not be able to enjoy old content with a more streamlined quest series that gives you the gist of the zones and story without having to do the other 75 fetch quests in the area? I don't want them to give me a faster way to get from level 1 to max, I want them to make the leveling experience more enjoyable for newcomers or returning players. I haven't played EQ2 seriously since right before before Desert of Flames was released. I want a reason to play the DoF content and not just skip past it because there are other places I could go. I wanted a reason to go to Enchanted Lands and Zek, not because I like those zones - because I hate them both - but there are Lore and Legend quests there as well as the quests for the legendary EQ1 gear but that is all skippable thanks to powerleveling and/or the Agnostic Dungeons.
If I only have 4 hours a night to play, with my end goal being to get to the current expansion content (since that's why I jumped back in), am I going to continually slog through old zones with slow fetch quests that could take hours to gain two levels (you'll hear about this in the next edition of Norrathian Stride), or am I going to run a dungeon that I can master after two or three runs and gain a level or two on autopilot in 30 minutes? It doesn't take a math whiz to see that class gear quests and what not are obsolete since you get tiered for your 10 level bricks in the Agnostic Dungeons when you kill a named mob, and that lasts until you hit level 90 or so. Why have to slog to catch up? Why not go back and tweak older areas and clean up the clutter since those areas are now outdated? Instead of rewarding players 30k XP for doing a main mission and then 5k XP and a piece of gear or a potion or something for a side quest, why cut the rewards and instead give 80k XP for the quest (maybe even increase the length or amount of enemies needed to kill) instead of forcing them to slog through tedious meaningless side quests? Gear would still drop off enemies instead of be guaranteed quest rewards. This would incentivize players to not only NOT get power leveled or run the short cut dungeons, but rather to experience all of the story and older world zones as the developers intended without grinding them to death with uninteresting fetch quests and what not.
Side note: I like League of Legends and Runeterra as a world, but hate the player base, and the newly changed items made it unplayable for me. I'm hoping that Ruined King is going to be solid and not just Battle Chasers: Nightwar w/ LoL skins.