MUDs/MMORPGs: play a while.. leave.. What's going on?

[belowmecoldhands]

This thread started when I googled "mud non-linear automapper". The idea started when I was logging into Federation 2 and thinking about how to keep track of where I am. I'm using Mudlet and it has an automapper you can script for a mud. I was asking "How do I code the automapper?" Then I got to think about non-linear maps. These're maps where a portal might go to a place far away, or they're maps where NW/NE/SW/SE aren't always adjacent, but instead could be far off in the distance, linking to other nodes. I love these kinds of mental exercises.

I found this link and was reading it:
http://mobfactory.blogspot.com/2009/03/clients-and-newbies.html

(...)
3) True new players who probably have never mudded before. These people are the long-term future, as the number of mudlist players is shrinking and blind players will eventually get their eyes fixed. This is also by far the largest market to tap. You don't compete with World of Warcraft unless you're hitting up ordinary sighted people.
(...)

(...)
The third category, by far the biggest market, is the problem. Since they have no prior mudding experience, odds are very good they downloaded the client, which shows up easily in my stats. I can also track logins based on web page hits. If this class of player is sticking around, I'll see it by looking for newbie players using the client.

This is exactly what I don't see. I see the expected players log in with the client, just as they should. There's a large initial dropout rate, but a good percentage of them level and play for a while. After that they all disappear. We're not keeping people entertained.

I suspect what's going on is they play for a while, run out of stuff to do or don't see the point, and bail. That pretty much describes my first mudding experiences; I got a low level character and basically just wandered around looking at stuff. None of the text meant anything in particular to me, and I would wander ridiculous places because I didn't know where to go or what to do. I didn't even know what the point of the game was.

I clearly need to add a lot more statistics tracking and try to see where the dropoffs are occuring - what level ranges, number of logins, etc. With this information in hand we can improve the introductory areas; but so far, my initial numbers indicate that the dropoffs happen for the newbie areas that are well tested and considered in good shape. So what is really going on?
(...)

So what's going on? I'll review what the quote says. It says a person is working on their MUD and wants to get people playing and to keep playing longterm. This person wants people who've enver played MUDs because they're the future. Problem is they're not staying. They play for a while but eventually they're gone for good.

Well I can't tell that person exactly what's going on. But I can say that getting lost in a game or confused about what to do is not always what the problem is. For exampe, of all the MUDs and MMORPGs I've played in my life, I only stuck with a couple: EQ and Wurm Online. The rest I might have played for a month or two at most, but never returned. Now, I remember very well the first time I played Wurm Online in 2012. I remember the feelings and thoughts. That game had no in-game map. No direction. YOu're thrown into the world with no more than a couple items. There're corpse runs, for christ sake!!! But I kept playing and LOVED the s*** out of it!!!!! So why did I keep playing? Why do I still have a house I keep maintained, almost 3 years later?????

I think part of the answer is I knew in 2012 how special Wurm Online was. When I logged in and played for those first few days, I just KNEW. See, I'm an old player. I know what to expect from games. I know what I like too. I've been there, done that. When I noticed the game had no in-game map and just dropped me into the world with little more than a "Good luck!", I knew I had something special!!! It was something I liked, in fact. Most MMO's don't do that, especially in modern times. And more than that, the extensive sandbox in Wurm Online was something special too. Many or most of the mainstream MMORPGs do not have a sandbox even remotely as extensive. I played Ultima Online, considered sandboxy by many, and it's far from what Wurm Online has. SWG is dead and gone, but its sandbox was almost comparable to Wurm Online. What other MMO/MMORPGs have sandboxes???? No many.

So what do I thnk? I think not every player WANTS linear safe places. Not every player WANTS directions or to be told what to do. Most players want that, so doing that as a game maker is the easiest way to reach a large audience. However, unless you do it better than WoW, with brighter/flashier colors, you're not going to climb that mountain. More important than figuring out what hte largest audience wants is making something which sets itself apart. See, probably the biggest thing which kept me playing EQ and Wurm Online is thye felt special. EQ was one of the first of its kind! Wurm Online was a rare gem which didn't have glowies and maps and its sandbox is unequeled by most others. So my feeling is if a game wants to succeed in the modern world, it has to figure out its audience AND it also has to blaze a new trail, otherwise it'll just be played and soon forgotten.

So you see all these WoW clones didn't go bigtime because they didn't blaze new trails. They mimicked to perfection, perhaps, but cloning something else ain't good enough. You have to stand on your own and take a chance. Be different somehow.

 

[Norfleet]

Well I can't tell that person exactly what's going on. But I can say that getting lost in a game or confused about what to do is not always what the problem is.

Being lost in the game, or even being confused about what to do, these aren't the problems...but being lost in the game and NOT BEING ABLE TO FIND SOMETHING TO DO, that is a problem. If I'm lost in the game, but I'm finding things to do, I'm at least still engaged, at least until I figure out I should definitely not do those things. But if I'm lost in the game and there appears to be nothing to do, I'm out. The only thing worse than being lost with nothing to do is not being lost, but still not having anything to do.

I would also say that despite the fact that I am usually a solo-type player, if only because it's hard to find someone who can keep up with my pacing, that the social aspect of the game is probably the most important element of the game in player retention. How many MMO/MUD players have kept playing a shitty game they hated simply because all the people they knew were still there? I've seen this lots: The loss of one player often begins a cascade of lost players, with the next guy who quits citing boredom and leaving, mostly because the first guy was the only reason he still showed up at all. Then third guy, having lost two of his best friends, sees no reason to stick around either. He becomes bored, quits. And soforth, until the entire circle crumbles. I've witnessed this firsthand: Several guys I knew from another game have subsequently quit that game following my involuntary separation from it. Apparently our arguments were the glue that held them to that game.

Newbies, of course, leave because they don't have any such ties. They were always tourists, and if they don't meet anyone or find something interesting to do, they'll leave. Simple as that. Of course, what appeals to a given individual is pretty variable, and apparently what I find interesting in a game that makes me fascinated by it differs markedly from things anyone else notices or even gives a shit about, so I'm not a good test case: I fall into the odd minority of the Killer/Explorer, so what interests me is an odd wrinkle in the game that I can use to triumph over the other players.

 

[belowmecoldhands]

Being lost in the game, or even being confused about what to do, these aren't the problems...but being lost in the game and NOT BEING ABLE TO FIND SOMETHING TO DO, that is a problem. If I'm lost in the game, but I'm finding things to do, I'm at least still engaged, at least until I figure out I should definitely not do those things. But if I'm lost in the game and there appears to be nothing to do, I'm out. The only thing worse than being lost with nothing to do is not being lost, but still not having anything to do.

Well thing is I've experienced a couple times being confused about what to do next in some of the MMORPGs I've played. However, this was not common. In fact, I can only really think of MUDs which caused this. Some MUDS are really weird how they do things on top of already not explicitly telling you what to do. To explain it best, I'm used to killing s*** when I first start playing a MMORPG. I just want to be pointed in the direction of the nearest things to kill. Sometimes it's not clear where to go. That said, I don't want combat which doesn't challenge me. And as I progress I want other things to do too. And I don't expect this from every MMO I play. For example, in Wurm Online 95% to 99% of my time has been spent NOT doing combat. The only reason I even do combat is to get meat and practice my fighting skill. I think if the amount of hours I have played (about 46 days combined) was compared to my fighting skill I'd probably have one of the lowest skills in fighting on the server. Serious.

Insofar as getting lost, it happened many times in EQ, but mostly it was just (a liked) part of the game for me. I never was out of things to do, but sometimes I'd get lost while doing something - like killing s*** in a dungeon. In Wurm Online, I almost never get lost because I follow the water and because there're landmarks on the map - like the lights or mountains. I rarely travel at night. You can also see the gridline for the map which gives you a hint where north/south are. When I first started playing, I referenced maps which were created by the game makers and were updated every few months. These were not in-game. Now, there were times I had to travle through the forest and almost got lost, but I like to think my sense of direction helped.

I would also say that despite the fact that I am usually a solo-type player, if only because it's hard to find someone who can keep up with my pacing, that the social aspect of the game is probably the most important element of the game in player retention. How many MMO/MUD players have kept playing a shitty game they hated simply because all the people they knew were still there? I've seen this lots: The loss of one player often begins a cascade of lost players, with the next guy who quits citing boredom and leaving, mostly because the first guy was the only reason he still showed up at all. Then third guy, having lost two of his best friends, sees no reason to stick around either. He becomes bored, quits. And soforth, until the entire circle crumbles. I've witnessed this firsthand: Several guys I knew from another game have subsequently quit that game following my involuntary separation from it. Apparently our arguments were the glue that held them to that game.

Ya, I played EQ probably a few years after I got tired of it because of the people. I'd check eqplayers just to see what they were up to. However, I did like to grind the leaderboard too. One of my favorite things to do was to look at my hp/ac/atk/aa and compare to others at my level range. I was on the pvp server.

Newbies, of course, leave because they don't have any such ties. They were always tourists, and if they don't meet anyone or find something interesting to do, they'll leave. Simple as that. Of course, what appeals to a given individual is pretty variable, and apparently what I find interesting in a game that makes me fascinated by it differs markedly from things anyone else notices or even gives a shit about, so I'm not a good test case: I fall into the odd minority of the Killer/Explorer, so what interests me is an odd wrinkle in the game that I can use to triumph over the other players.

Here's the thing..... If social ties are required, how come I've kept playing Wurm Online? I haven't made any longterm friends. I only know of a couple names, but if I look at my friends list I don't even know who they're. I don't even live with other players. I've spent 99% of my time alone, building houses/farms/etc. This is different from my experience in EQ. I can still remember players I met, even if I don't remember their names. I can also recall maybe a dozen names or more from my guild when I last played several years ago. OMG, I could tell you some stories! That emotional attachment hasn't occurred in Wurm Online yet. Maybe it will someday.

I COULD join villages in Wurm Online and be more social, but I haven't felt teh urge (or had the need?). It's close to my 3rd year. I really don't play much consistently. I might play for a few months and then not play actively for half a year.

 

[Norfleet]

For example, in Wurm Online 95% to 99% of my time has been spent NOT doing combat. The only reason I even do combat is to get meat and practice my fighting skill. I think if the amount of hours I have played (about 46 days combined) was compared to my fighting skill I'd probably have one of the lowest skills in fighting on the server. Serious.

Very common in veteran players, we've usually subverted the core objectives in some way and are doing something which often has nothing to do with the game as written. I spend an awful lot of time in the Auction House...or in farms.

Here's the thing..... If social ties are required, how come I've kept playing Wurm Online? I haven't made any longterm friends. I only know of a couple names, but if I look at my friends list I don't even know who they're. I don't even live with other players. I've spent 99% of my time alone, building houses/farms/etc.

You sound like me now. Just because you're atypical in this regard doesn't mean that it's not true in general, though. A significant number of people play games simply because their friends play them, they have long since exhausted what content the game offers and pretty much just hang around for their friends. But let's just say that when I preach my mantra of BUILD MORE FARMS to people, they treat me like I'm nuts.

The fact that you are NOT playing the game right now, though, seems to lend credence to my assertion.

 

[belowmecoldhands]

The fact that you are NOT playing the game right now, though, seems to lend credence to my assertion.

Perhaps I might have played it a bit more, but I still play, mostly to keep my place from falling into ruin for the next time I get the itch. I used to get an itch to play EQ "back in the day". That happens with Wurm Online to.

One of my goals in the longterm is to build a deed somewhere and get my fight skills up. There's sooooooooo much I haven't done yet. That's also a part of what keeps me going. It'd not be the same without things to do someday.

 

[Norfleet]

Yes, see, if you had friends that were pulling you back in on a daily basis, you'd still be actively playing it. Showing up to do passive maintenance doesn't really count as playing, and I betcha if you didn't have to do that, you would show up even less. So, really, your lack of glue shows. Me, on the other hand, I will persist without any friends at all, continuing to show up and log my 24-hours-a-day until they decide only a robot could possibly keep this up and ban me, and then I sell all my shit. BUT I AM CAFFEINE INCARNATE.

 

[belowmecoldhands]

Want to add I've went through probably a dozen homes and several "homesteads" on the map. I play on the pvp server. I've done some crazy things. I've lost entire homesteads to other players destroying and looting them, while losing others simply tp to,e. I guess what I'm trying to tell you is it's not like I've spent the entire time keeping one house in repair. And I did join a couple villages. The first time ended badly with an epic tale which followed. The second just hit a wall and they changed faction. I waved goodbye. I was sad in a way because I hoped they'd stick together and stay with freedom. It's JK or MR for most.

My statement about being alone the vast majority of time is true.

 

[Norfleet]

JK or MR?

 

[Xenich]

WoW's game design is its own killer. WoW was not popular because of its game design, rather because it was the first to reach a massive market of non-gamers who were new to computers and online gaming (ie right time, right place and accessible). The reason no other WoW-clone could achieve even remotely the same success is because those people are already playing WoW and the "gaming public" doesn't see WoW as a game as much as it is a glorified chat room.

 

[belowmecoldhands]

WoW's game design is its own killer. WoW was not popular because of its game design, rather because it was the first to reach a massive market of non-gamers who were new to computers and online gaming (ie right time, right place and accessible). The reason no other WoW-clone could achieve even remotely the same success is because those people are already playing WoW and the "gaming public" doesn't see WoW as a game as much as it is a glorified chat room.

It's not enough to copy what's out there. That's what all these WoW-clones show, if not prove.

And WoW didn't just open up gaming to new gamers. It also did it exceptionally well.

I'm fairly sure WoW knew its audience: casuals and gamers new to mmo's. But what trails did it blaze? Well, this is where I'm not altogether sure. No other game at the time served so many so well. Perhaps that's the trail it blazed. And if it really did pull in massive numbers of new gamers, assuming that was its goal from the beginning, then that could also be something special about it. To serve so many so well is not an easy task. Surely their had to be something special about Blizzard Entertainment to accomplish that. But now that WoW is surviving on its past, its future is much less confident.

(ya I disagree WoW appealed to non-gamers. I think many of its players were already gaming in some manner.)

Note that several of the original team members belonging to Blizzard Entertainment (in 2005) left and later created an MMORPG called WildStar. But its success has been subdued and bleak by comparison. A link to its wiki is below:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WildStar_(video_game)

By "subdued and bleak" I mean on the order of ~300k activer players. And while Wildstar was billed by websites as more "core" or "hardcore", the creators of the game have instead stated players can play their way.

My guess is if somebody wnats to beat WoW they're going to have to first let WoW beat itself. Then they're going to have to offer something more accessible. It's going to have to have things which WoW doesn't. It has to be something very compelling. My guess is whoever is going to beat WoW has to be figuring out at this moment what players in WoW don't like about WoW.

I'll put this out there.... it'll probably resemble social gaming lite. Social gaming is very quick and easy to play. It's also very popular. The question is whether social gaming can produce the $$$. It certainly has produced the population. But just because a large population likes to (lightly) game, doesn't mean they'll spend a lot. I also think it'll have to be mobile-friendly, or at least have some apps which can run on mobile which allow you access parts of the game. This increases its accessibility.

Here I thin is a clue:
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/27310/DICE_2010_Zyngas_Reynolds_On_Social_First_And_Foremost.php

This quote (from above) is intriguing:

Zynga doesn't rely on gut instinct to zero in on what users really want. Reynolds said Zynga follows an array of real-time metrics in order to find out what players like, and what they don't.

One example was of a screen from FarmVille that promoted another one of Zynga's games, PetVille. The font used in the promotion was originally red. By experimenting with other colors, the studio found that pink fonts, strangely, generated an exponentially higher click-through count than colors including purple, green, and red. Without metrics, Zynga would have never known that.

"Using the data mining, the metrics, you are able to learn the things that are counter-intuitive," said Reynolds.

Real-time metrics and..... psychology of gamers. That's the key, I think.

 

[Norfleet]

The thing with reliance on metrics is that metrics don't tell you what players like, merely what they do. If you were to analyze my typical gameplay in a game, you might conclude that I really like certain things because the vast majority of my gametime is spent on them. The thing is, I hate all those things, I do them because the opportunity cost of not doing them is too high. Not once have I ever gotten to actually enjoy the game, because that costs me money. The truly enjoyable activities are things that tend to have logistical and organizational entry barriers so high that you would never get them to happen. Imagine, for instance, a particularly enjoyable raid or battle that requires that you collect a party of 20 people, and randoms will not suffice because they aren't good enough, it has to be 20 handpicked men. You really like this thing...but assuming that each of the 20 men can be on the game only half the time (50% uptime, no-life, to the general public, filthy slackers, to me), the odds that all 20 people can be on, given a 50% probability of being on, is a pitiful 0.000095%. This will never happen. You can imagine how bad the odds become for a group which isn't composed of relative no-lifers (SLACKERS), who might log only 2-3 hours a day (12% uptime). Compound probability in uptime is a harsh mistress. So, the content people like, might be the things they rarely ever get to do. Metrics don't tell you this.

 

[Xenich]

WoW's game design is its own killer. WoW was not popular because of its game design, rather because it was the first to reach a massive market of non-gamers who were new to computers and online gaming (ie right time, right place and accessible). The reason no other WoW-clone could achieve even remotely the same success is because those people are already playing WoW and the "gaming public" doesn't see WoW as a game as much as it is a glorified chat room.

It's not enough to copy what's out there. That's what all these WoW-clones show, if not prove.

And WoW didn't just open up gaming to new gamers. It also did it exceptionally well.

I'm fairly sure WoW knew its audience: casuals and gamers new to mmo's. But what trails did it blaze? Well, this is where I'm not altogether sure. No other game at the time served so many so well. Perhaps that's the trail it blazed. And if it really did pull in massive numbers of new gamers, assuming that was its goal from the beginning, then that could also be something special about it. To serve so many so well is not an easy task. Surely their had to be something special about Blizzard Entertainment to accomplish that. But now that WoW is surviving on its past, its future is much less confident.

(ya I disagree WoW appealed to non-gamers. I think many of its players were already gaming in some manner.)

When WoW was released, it was nothing like it is today. In fact, the bulk of the players today in WoW would throw tantrums if they played Vanilla WoW. WoW while not as "hardcore" as EQ was not a game for casuals at the start. This is what it became over time as the "non-gamers" started playing and started complaining on the boards. You can see with each expansion a progression of response to these complaints. Content drastically changed with each iteration (ie dumbing down, catering to the casual mindset).

WoW like I said was released at the right time. WoW would run on limited hardware. Most gamers kept their machines upgraded, it was a ritual of process to keep up with the new titles being released. The average consumer had under powered computers not designed for gaming to which WoW could run on. These people weren't PC gamers. Now there were some gamers that came over as well. Console gamers came to WoW in droves as well (which helped kill WoW as well), but a lot of the people were new to gaming. When I first got to WoW, most of the guilds were comprised of old EQ guilds and other game guilds. After a bit, when WoW really got popular, pretty soon the guilds were filled with these new players. I was in one guild where I would say that 3/4 of the guild were people who had never played a PC game at all. Most were average non-gaming people. That is, up until WoW, their experience with gaming was maybe a console game here and there or playing random flash/java games on the internet.

Not only did I notice this progression in game, but I noticed people in the work environment who started playing. When I played EQ, it was only the IT department and only the very high-tech fields of that department which people played games, though after WoW was out for a few years, there were people all over the company playing WoW. Those same people hated games before, even snickered at us in the meetings about our gaming habits, but here they were playing a game like WoW.

WoW as I said experienced a coming of people who did not exist in gaming before. WoW had the perfect storm and appealed to this new market and this won't happen again until there is a new tech to entice people in (I predict that when VR gets acceptable enough for the average public, whatever game is able to market off that will be huge like WoW was).

As for games like Farmville, apples to oranges. Those aren't games, they are gambling gimmicks. That is, they use the same mechanics of design based on behaviors that gambling games use.

 

[belowmecoldhands]

WoW was definitely not harsh when it was released Xenich. Death penalties were less than EQ. The cartoon-ish graphics appealed to a larger demographic. Healing yourself was much faster - downtime was much worse in EQ. If you don't believe me, look here:
http://pc.gamespy.com/pc/world-of-warcraft/571585p1.html

Don't tell me they were trying to appeal to someone like myself. Don't make me laugh. They knew what they were doing. Back in those days, WoW didn't appeal to me. Too cartoony. Too carebear. BUT neither did I ever give it a chance. Obviously, WoW was a great MMORPG. If harshness wasn't as important to me, I would have tried WoW and seen just how good it really was.

The link (above) is a review of WoW from, dated Dec 2004.

The effect of the game's abbreviated time scale simply can't be underestimated. Playing World of Warcraft comes as close as any MMO ever has to giving the responsiveness and gratifying feedback of the best single-player games. Even death becomes only a minor issue as there's no penalty beyond the few minutes it takes for your ghosts to run back to your corpse after dying -- and even that can be avoided at the very slight cost of some money via item decay for an instant resurrection. Players with only a half-hour to play on a weeknight can actually log on and get something accomplished. For all this, though, there's never any sense that you'll run out of things to do. Underneath the game's simplified veneer is a remarkably complex offering. World of Warcraft is loaded with things to do, places to see, monsters to kill, and quests, quests, and more quests to solve.

I do not, of course, think downtime or corpse runs make a game good. For me, I only value those kinds of things if the rest of the game is good. I think in the case of WoW, it just plain did almost everything better than EQ. And since most players do not care about heightened tension like I do, they can happily do without high death penalties or threats of downtime if you flinch. Tension doesn't make a game challenging anyway. I've said before, I can get challenge from Tetris.

WoW, like any other game in history, mudflates and, as it ages, combats this by making leveling up to the mid and upper range easier. When games get old they also tend to relax the rules or otherwise broaden their appeal, to attract gamers into the fold. It's instinctive. What company wants their game to be known as harsh and unfriendly? Not if they want $$$.

WoW got more casual and "broader" as it aged, but as history has shown, aging games usually decline anyway in terms of incoming new players. Even Eve-Online, one of the staunchest defenders of longevity, will succumb to age and declining interest.

If you missed it, I'll say it again: WoW beat EQ not just by reducing downtime or harsh rules, but by plain being better. It had more content, a seamless world, lower system requirments, voiceovers and on and on.

Here's an old video review of WoW from 2004:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j6idVDFNZJU

Note when he says you can play solo or group irregardless of class (at 3:00). That's much different from EQ back then. From your posts I've seen, I canb see you're a big fan of grouping. What do you think about that?

At about 4:12 he starts talking about death penalties.

 

[Xenich]

WoW was definitely not harsh when it was released Xenich. Death penalties were less than EQ. The cartoon-ish graphics appealed to a larger demographic. Healing yourself was much faster - downtime was much worse in EQ. If you don't believe me, look here:
http://pc.gamespy.com/pc/world-of-warcraft/571585p1.html

Don't tell me they were trying to appeal to someone like myself. Don't make me laugh. They knew what they were doing. Back in those days, WoW didn't appeal to me. Too cartoony. Too carebear. BUT neither did I ever give it a chance. Obviously, WoW was a great MMORPG. If harshness wasn't as important to me, I would have tried WoW and seen just how good it really was.

The link (above) is a review of WoW from, dated Dec 2004.

The effect of the game's abbreviated time scale simply can't be underestimated. Playing World of Warcraft comes as close as any MMO ever has to giving the responsiveness and gratifying feedback of the best single-player games. Even death becomes only a minor issue as there's no penalty beyond the few minutes it takes for your ghosts to run back to your corpse after dying -- and even that can be avoided at the very slight cost of some money via item decay for an instant resurrection. Players with only a half-hour to play on a weeknight can actually log on and get something accomplished. For all this, though, there's never any sense that you'll run out of things to do. Underneath the game's simplified veneer is a remarkably complex offering. World of Warcraft is loaded with things to do, places to see, monsters to kill, and quests, quests, and more quests to solve.

I do not, of course, think downtime or corpse runs make a game good. For me, I only value those kinds of things if the rest of the game is good. I think in the case of WoW, it just plain did almost everything better than EQ. And since most players do not care about heightened tension like I do, they can happily do without high death penalties or threats of downtime if you flinch. Tension doesn't make a game challenging anyway. I've said before, I can get challenge from Tetris.

WoW, like any other game in history, mudflates and, as it ages, combats this by making leveling up to the mid and upper range easier. When games get old they also tend to relax the rules or otherwise broaden their appeal, to attract gamers into the fold. It's instinctive. What company wants their game to be known as harsh and unfriendly? Not if they want $$$.

WoW got more casual and "broader" as it aged, but as history has shown, aging games usually decline anyway in terms of incoming new players. Even Eve-Online, one of the staunchest defenders of longevity, will succumb to age and declining interest.

If you missed it, I'll say it again: WoW beat EQ not just by reducing downtime or harsh rules, but by plain being better. It had more content, a seamless world, lower system requirments, voiceovers and on and on.

Here's an old video review of WoW from 2004:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j6idVDFNZJU

Note when he says you can play solo or group irregardless of class (at 3:00). That's much different from EQ back then. From your posts I've seen, I canb see you're a big fan of grouping. What do you think about that?

At about 4:12 he starts talking about death penalties.

WoW's difficulties back then were not in things like penalties, it was in content design. Mobs were very powerful and required attention to class abilities and mechanics to overcome. CC was extremely important and careful attention to mob abilities (even trash mobs) was paramount to successful play. AoE zerg rushing didn't work. Dying was very common. Soloing also has nothing to do with difficulty. WoW designed the game with solo content, naturally classes could do this. Though group content was littered all through areas of the game and there were many group quests to which players couldn't solo. Like I said, WoWs difficulty back then was far more than what the WoW player today would accept. I mean, contrast the fact that in old WoW, AoE zerg pulling was not possible, it meant death though in today's WoW, this is so common, that they design the group content specifically for such (obvious group pulls throughout the dungeon). Scholomance/Strathalome were extremely difficult in vanilla that it was limited on the groups who could successfully do it and Uldaman? The final fight most people skipped until they were higher level. Few could do it at its intended level. This was common in content even on up to BC dungeons which were brutal on groups. Also, in Vanilla, group content meant... group content. In WoW now, group content is solo content for the most part. They have removed a great deal of the open world group content in favor a solo focused game.

Death penalties and corpse runs penalize zerging and inattentive play. They do not "define" difficulty, they are just a layer of risk. While WoW was harsh on content early on, it didn't detour zerg play. The removal of those features created some bad habits of players (this is extremely obvious when you take WoW players back to EQ like games. They get extremely frustrated with the dying and corpse runs because they are used to relying on WoWs easy death penalty system as a means to disregard risk).

When we moved to EQ, it was because EQ instances were nice change to having contested content. Being a casual player (ie someone who only played 2-3 hours a night and 8+ on the weekend, not the WoWtard casual who thinks it means playing an hour a week), having to compete against mobs kind of left you missing out on some nice raid encounters (well, until I went to EQ Stormhammer) and so the idea that players could schedule a raid and avoid competition zergs, this was interesting. Same with group instances, no more camp checks. People didn't leave EQ for WoW because of the death penalties and corpse runs, they did it because of very specific features that WoW offered and the fact that it was a new game. EQ had long endurance fights of strategy of resources and placement. WoW was an active system of reflex. Encounters were more dynamic and fluid and they had features that weren't available in EQ or other games. Death penalties and corpse runs weren't even on the map. I don't remember people saying "Oh awesome, no more corpse runs or exp penalties! Yea!!!", in fact I did hear quite a few snide remarks about how they threw risk out the window with it. The people who thought those were important points never played much EQ in the first place.

WoWs success was timing and place. It did things no other game was doing at the time (many novelty factors such as you mentioned: seamless world, lower system requirements, voice overs, instancing, etc... ) combined with the points I made about non-gamers. Hell, most of the WoW players didn't even understand what I meant about those penalties as most WoW players never even touched EQ and as I said, for many it was their very first MMO.

These days, the older EQ players tend to long for the feeling of the past because no game since then could live up to it. Some say nostalgia, but that is pure bullshit as I have played Old style EQ recently (even with some of my old school friends) and they enjoy all the old play mechanics and features (yes, they even enjoy the risk of a death penalty and corpse recovery). Thing is, a lot of the things you say make WoW better, I either could care less about; seamless world, who cares... I am not a surface gamer who thinks a zone screen breaks my immersion, I mean... if that does it, someone must have a pretty piss poor imagination, or I think they are detrimental to game play.

For instance voice overs? Initially they were a novelty, but reality set in and I found them to be terrible because they removed any chance of depth of dialogue and resulted in dumbed down simplistic interactions because of the enormous time and budget expenses. As for lower system requirements? Gamers didn't have problems with this. We upgraded all the time, we were computer people, techs, scientists, etc... having a powerful machine was our thing. Your point here ends up supporting my argument. The non-gamer mainstream had shit computers and couldn't keep up with newer games, but with WoW they could finally play it. You think downtime is a bad thing, I think it promotes strategy of play. You think death penalties are too harsh, I think you don't want them at all and do not understand the value of consequence in play.

That is off topic though, the point is that WoWs success was not because the features it had were what EQ and old MMO gamers wanted, that is what mainstream non-gamer console/casual players wanted. Most of the old EQ and similar players don't play WoW anymore because what you claim is an improvement, they tend to find as the cancer to gaming. This is why those old school EQ style players flock to games that attempt to sell themselves as EQ/vanguard like.


Think on this:

In vanilla WoW, I died often, even in solo content. In EQ, I died constantly until I really learned how to play, and then it was just "often" due to the difficulty of content. In todays WoW and most MMOs, I don't die. Hell, most games I make it to at least 20-30 before I even experience my first death. Even then, my death was usually due to being impatient and developing WoWtard bad habits of zerging or smashing keys. If I played with any real attention and carefulness in those games like I did EQ, well... they could have an iron man mode for non-raids and it would likely be a while before I died. That is how pathetic the games today are. No challenge, no risk, no consequence, just "fun fun fun fun" until you want to put a bullet through your own empty skull.

 

[Norfleet]

No challenge, no risk, no consequence, just "fun fun fun fun" until you want to put a bullet through your own empty skull.

And that's why I ended up as an Auction House Guy, because I hate fun, and the Auction House has real risk, real consequences...it's the only serious PvP the game really has.

 

[belowmecoldhands]

Want to rephrase - or revist - why I made this thread.

It seems every game maker thinks they need to do this to make a successful game:
1) Copy the most popular game
2) Make the game easier or 'funner'

I think that's part of it, but you can't rely on it. In the end, it requires creative genius. It requires some true talent. And some luck. I know Dances With Wolves isn't a game, but it was thought to be a disaster until the final moments. Only shown in a handful of theatres, it somehow became a miracle. And Richard Drefuss thought Jaws was going to do terrible, he was convinced it was a mess. If Jaws had failed, it would have been Spielbergs last movie. And World of Warcraft, when it first started out, didn't have nearly enough servers at first to keep up with its increasing popularity. Even Star Wars rushed scenes and was thought by many, even its creators, to not have a chacne in hell to become what it did. The point of me saying all this? Success is not a given. It's not something you JUST copy or do. Success is also magic. It's more than the sum of its parts.

Don't just copy the most popular games. Don't just make them 'funner'. Take some risks. If there's a lesson to be learned from the movies I just mentioned it's that their futures were uncertain and fraught with worry up until they entered the theatres.

Note: I put 'funner' in quotes because one of my main messages in the OP was to relate how the MMORPGs (or MMO's) I played (or play) were not necessarily accessible or 'fun', but nonetheless I've repeatedly come back to them. A thing which is supposed to make MMORPGs 'funner' is hte thing I was running from when I (to my satisfaction) stumbled on Wurm Online.

 

[Norfleet]

Well, for me, it's quite easy to understand why making a game "funner" makes it less appealing to me: BECAUSE I HATE FUN. To me, what I like in a game is one where OTHER people can have fun, but I DON'T HAVE TO.

 

[Xenich]

Fun is subjective. Fun means different things to different people. If your design goal is to make a game "fun", then you already missed the point.

 

[Norfleet]

Well, WHAT Is fun is certainly has a high degree of subjectivity, but the nature of fun is pretty straightforward: Things done for entertainment rather than reward. Fun is a filthy parasite. I would rather be doing things that provide me with some form of moolah, even if those things aren't at all entertaining, like the Auction House. I hate fun.

 

[Xenich]

Well, WHAT Is fun is certainly has a high degree of subjectivity, but the nature of fun is pretty straightforward: Things done for entertainment rather than reward. Fun is a filthy parasite. I would rather be doing things that provide me with some form of moolah, even if those things aren't at all entertaining, like the Auction House. I hate fun.

For me, things that are rewarding are entertaining. I find a day of hard labor actually rewarding even though during the labor I find it less so. So doing things that you may not specifically like may be enjoyable if the result of such effort provides a reward of satisfaction.

As for money, I don't care about it. I played a Monk through all of EQ and until they screwed the class, money was irrelevant as the classes progression was primarily character skill based. (Damn Kunark and its changes by all the fucktard twink monks). I like games where people can't buy their way through progression.

 

[Xenich]

Want to rephrase - or revist - why I made this thread.

It seems every game maker thinks they need to do this to make a successful game:
1) Copy the most popular game
2) Make the game easier or 'funner'

I think that's part of it, but you can't rely on it. In the end, it requires creative genius. It requires some true talent. And some luck. I know Dances With Wolves isn't a game, but it was thought to be a disaster until the final moments. Only shown in a handful of theatres, it somehow became a miracle. And Richard Drefuss thought Jaws was going to do terrible, he was convinced it was a mess. If Jaws had failed, it would have been Spielbergs last movie. And World of Warcraft, when it first started out, didn't have nearly enough servers at first to keep up with its increasing popularity. Even Star Wars rushed scenes and was thought by many, even its creators, to not have a chacne in hell to become what it did. The point of me saying all this? Success is not a given. It's not something you JUST copy or do. Success is also magic. It's more than the sum of its parts.

Don't just copy the most popular games. Don't just make them 'funner'. Take some risks. If there's a lesson to be learned from the movies I just mentioned it's that their futures were uncertain and fraught with worry up until they entered the theatres.

Note: I put 'funner' in quotes because one of my main messages in the OP was to relate how the MMORPGs (or MMO's) I played (or play) were not necessarily accessible or 'fun', but nonetheless I've repeatedly come back to them. A thing which is supposed to make MMORPGs 'funner' is hte thing I was running from when I (to my satisfaction) stumbled on Wurm Online.

Most game makers aren't making games, rather they are producing fad widgets based on market analysis. They keep making gimmick crap because that is what their spread sheets dictate. Look at the movie industry, it is exactly the same thing and who do you think owns the game industry these days?

 

[Norfleet]

For me, things that are rewarding are entertaining. I find a day of hard labor actually rewarding even though during the labor I find it less so. So doing things that you may not specifically like may be enjoyable if the result of such effort provides a reward of satisfaction.

You might possibly hate fun, then. I mean, would you rather do a thing in a game that is considered highly entertaining by regular standards, or would you rather grind in a dark, forgotten pit for the same reward?

I choose the boring grinding. NO FUN for me.

I like games where people can't buy their way through progression.

I'm ambivalent about this. On one hand, not buying your way through progression means you have to git gud. But the on the other hand, who would I sell this stuff to? Not be able to buy your way through progression is dangerously close to mandatory fun. I would never choose this option, of course, but that the option EXISTS is good for the bottom line. For a choice to be meaningful, an alternative option must exist.

 

[Xenich]

You might possibly hate fun, then. I mean, would you rather do a thing in a game that is considered highly entertaining by regular standards, or would you rather grind in a dark, forgotten pit for the same reward?

I choose the boring grinding. NO FUN for me.

Were you a big fan of Lineage? Man... talk about grind. It made EQ look like it was fast leveling.

 

[Norfleet]

Never played it. Was it pay-to-play? I avoid anything like that like the plague. As I mentioned before, though, my taste in games is a bit odd, based entirely around avoidance. There must be fun, but only so I can not have any. If there's no fun to be had in the first place, I can't avoid having it, so I don't care for it. If there's no way to NOT have any fun in the process, then I hate it because I hate fun.

 

[Xenich]

Never played it. Was it pay-to-play? I avoid anything like that like the plague. As I mentioned before, though, my taste in games is a bit odd, based entirely around avoidance. There must be fun, but only so I can not have any. If there's no fun to be had in the first place, I can't avoid having it, so I don't care for it. If there's no way to NOT have any fun in the process, then I hate it because I hate fun.

Yeah, it was the early days when everything was PTP. We are the opposite. If it says "FTP", I avoid it like the plague as well. Never liked a single FTP game.