The Playground Model

[Worgen]

Raiding requires you to be at max level, otherwise you won't be fully equipped/powerful enough to "max" the stats necessary to best implement the strategies necessary. And again, I don't know how you could let people be at max level without having to "grind" their way up. It might be possible to let people pick a level to start at, so people could start out max level, but I have no idea what the consequences of that would be on the game. It could be disastrous, or have no effect whatsoever.

I have to disagree. Warhammer Online had quite a few "raid" type scenarios, though admittedly they were one shot, big arse bosses rather than full dungeons. Still needed a full warband to beat them, though, and they always dropped some purple loot!

I think overall WAR had the most things in common with the equation Shamus is talking about. They had a wide veriaty of things to do from old fashioned solo PvE, to Public Quests to grind for area reuptation, to massive PvP battlegrounds that you just simply needed to walk into and you're in the fight with as many players that care to be there, to low level raiding using those "MvP Boss" type characters that drop very satisfying loot. PvP was actually pretty balanced from my experience and varied a great deal (defend the keep, capture the objective, or just flat out raid the main city) so that even players focusing on one point could get some veriaty. The classes were very distinct, too, because they were linked to what race you picked. Usually the classes had a counter-part on the opposite faction, but no two classes were turly copies within the same faction. A cornucopia of experiences all wrapped in a neat little game.

too bad the player base is a little smaller than anyone would have hoped =(

I totaly agree, I think war did the best of any mmo Ive played of balancing out the experiance, it just needed a bigger player base or for ea to wise up and get word about it out again

 

[geldonyetich]

Lately I've been getting into Mabinogi [http://mabinogi.nexon.com] because of this very reason - it offers a whole lot of different attractions at once. It's mostly combat and crafting but there's a lot of different kinds of crafting.


The game actually pretty heavily encourages diversification of activities via making some of them be rigged up to a game day cycle. My daily cycle (which takes about 30-60 minutes of real time) might go:

• 7:00am - Noon: Do a "part time job" for a store - usually available at 7am or noon. Lots of different potential activities running the gamut of all the activities the game offers, you won't know which activity until you ask for it. You can only do one part time job a day. (There's also schools where you can take classes, with one class session a day, but I've only run across one that functions.)
  
  Noon - 8pm: Run a dungeon/explore wilderness performing quests. Combat is actually unusually satisfying here in that it's a rock/paper/scissors combat and timing mechanism where paying attention to the enemy's posture is vital. It's very challenging, battles can be lost in a blink if you screw up.
  
  8pm - Midnight: Collect an inventory full of trade resources. There's a lot of collection activities from harvesting from plants, shearing sheep, collecting spider cobwebs, ect.
  
  Midnight - 4am: Convert collected trade resources into trade goods using trade skill. Trade skills, incidentally, often have a challenging minigame attached.
  
  4am - 7am: Cash in some quests, perhaps engage in a little fishing or manage my pets.

This is an unusually varied day, usually I'll just be doing one activity and try to make time to get my daily Part Time Job in since that's a good source of gold. Really, for a day that runs 30-60 minutes that's diversification enough. You might say that this game has a tremendous grind in that gold, levels, and skill use advancement is always going on, and mastery is rarely ever accomplished, but here's the kicker: given the high variation of activities, it really doesn't bother me at all.

So I'd say Shamus has at least one good example in Mabinogi to point out he's right in what he's saying here about giving players lots of activities and the freedom to switch between them as they see fit.

 

[Nerf Ninja]

I want to play an MMO that doesn't have levels at all everyone starts out exactly the same level and they all stay that way the only way you can improve is by getting "levelled" gear either by buying it, crafting it or looting it.

I've said before I'd love to play a western MMO where you can pretty much do whatever you like as it's a player run economy, I'd love to have my own weapon shop where I gather resources and then craft guns to sell in it, but if you want to be a bad ass you can become a train robber or something but be careful about your bounty level, if it's super high player controlled lawmen might come for you and can give you a permanent death. That's the kind of game I want.

 

[Mordwyl]

Shamus, this ideology will never change until developers finally realise MMORPGs are not Dungeons and Dragons. Get rid of the leveling concept if you want your grind gone for good. It's one of the main deterrents gameplay-wise freeform MMOs like Runescape carry.

 

[Eleima]

Wow, I'd never thought of it that way, but that's a pretty good analogy. Great read!

 

[Ed.]

I'm not sure if the escapist lets me post an article from cracked but it explains this perfectly

http://www.cracked.com/article_18461_5-creepy-ways-video-games-are-trying-to-get-you-addicted.html

the article is brilliant and disturbing.

 

[Dhatz]

the only mmo I ever played (for few days) was dead frontier online, it was because I knew the offline precedessors. I'd say there has to be environment populated with enemies for the gory stuff done with modern weapons to get me in.

 

[Lerxst]

Want a playground MMO just wait for Mortal Online to be released, its currently in open beta.
No level system, just login create a character and live in the world. They just released a new trailer on their webpage http://www.mortalonline.com/

Too bad it sucks. Yes, I can say that since I wasted part of my life testing the game.

 

[MNRA]

To answer your question:

Crafting, crafting and more crafting. Some gathering thrown in too, but that's to get at the crafting. hence why I enjoyed Everquest 2 so much. Not only was crafting a whole mini-game of its own, but being a woodworker allowed you to make stuff for your own home. Which was great

Oh and dressing up is fun too.

 

[Tandtroll]

I remember a few years back when I finally had the computer to be able to play GW. All my friends had been playing it for a long time, so I knew what I was getting into. The first few months whenever my ex boyfriend wasn't pestering me about doing the main storyline, I'd just explore. Sure, I died all the time because I mostly tried to avoid engaging enemies and when it failed I'd die because I didn't have the party or the skills to stay alive.

I guess what I still love about GW, and what I hope they'll bring into GW2, is the big open world. And the fact that they actually have a bunch of outposts or hilariously named bosses out there that you would never find if you only did the main storyline.
Strangely, grinding in GW pretty much starts AFTER you reach lvl 20.

And yeah, in a way the analogy works. Still, I wonder if streamlining mmos into more playgroundish behavior would remove all the sense of achievent. Because as it stands, everything worth having is worth fighting(grinding) for.

 

[Sjakie]

Personally, i enjoy the leveling the most in MMO's. Hitting a new level brings new skills and gear to get/exploit and new regions to rumage around in. Once you hit the levelcap, your basically stuck doing the same things: raiding and Pvp. That gets old for me after a while.

I guess im more of a explorer, i want to see the world the developers made, doesn't matter if it's new abilities to get or regions to see.

 

[w00tage]

Ok here's something I've been saving for an article of my own (someday). I'm going to share because Shamus rocks and maybe he'll pick up the idea, thus saving me the trouble of writing the whole article

Consider the source of our MMOs and their environment and motivations as they create . Do those people work directly with gamers, or do they work directly with co-workers in a cubicle environment?

My take is that virtually all of our problems with failed games are attributable to the work environment. You can't immerse someone in a place which forces them to personally behave according to one ruleset and then expect them to have an easy time of creating a place with a ruleset from the entire other side of the spectrum ( maybe alternate universe would be a better metaphor). That's a hard enough job as it is, imho.

I mean seriously, we're talking about people who are forced to schedule meetings to discuss what's going to be fun in their game. While some may be able to work with that, they have to be the exception that proves the rule. I think we'd get better games if they took any and all meetings about gameplay and held them out of the office just to get people out of the "work" mindset.

 

[w00tage]

EVE online is different though. They say, "there is the playground... don't die." I wish more games were like this. You didn't have to level up in the sense of go here and kill things to get experience. You just play. Yes, I know it, "takes a long time to get the big ships in EVE" but the smaller ships are needed in PvP warfare too, don't worry.

That made me laugh. Although I'd argue that EvE is closer to being thrown naked into a playground where a dozen kids have secured the facilities, carefully selling play time to the other kids, several kids are engaging in mortal combat while hanging from the monkey bars, and the handful of sad gits content to ride the springed animals get brutally lynched the moment they step away, and several competing teams of kids have seized sections of the roundabout, fighting visciously amongst each other and themselves, all the while the horrifically rich kids that control the supplies laugh and have weaker children trim their toenails.

Damn, I want to play again now.

Don't forget the fixed-rate skill gain system makes it like having to wait to physically grow up before you can move up in the pecking order. "Small ships are valuable in PvP" blah. That means you get to sit on gatecamps being "valuable" while the bigger kids build their empires via the alts they bought on CCP's forum with isk they bought via game time cards (although a veteran player has likely raised their own alts by now).

Your only way out of this trap is to buy yourself some game time cards and trade them for isk to buy some alt characters and gear so you can start playing at a higher level

 

[Ciran]

Well, I want to start off by saying that WoW does acknowledge your exploration in the form of achievements, after you explore a certain area of the map fully. That being said, I completely agree with you. I hate having to grind, I hate having to rely on other peoples professions (or the auction house, but people quickly realized what was necessary for other professions, so usually these are grossly overpriced) to be able to advance mine, and I hate, I really hate, being forced to team.
Now, mind you, teaming is one of my favorite aspects of the game, as long as it's with people I know and are friends with, or grew to be friends with while playing the game (I will spontaneously team with someone now and again, especially if it seems we're on the same quests) but I hate the fact that, after a while, almost all quests require you to team with someone to be able to finish them. I like doing quests because, most of the time, they are the largest form of XP gain while still being non-repetitive, but I also like to try and finish all the quests available to me in a certain area before moving on to another area, and sometimes that's not possible, just because you have to team with someone to be able to complete it.

 

[GothmogII]

"Exploring is one of my favorite activities, although as far as I know only Lord of the Rings Online formally acknowledges it as such. LOTRO has exploration deeds that you can earn for fully scouting areas of the game. " -Shamus

Guild Wars has something similar; the Explorer title. If you really want to max the title, you're in for a long walk. I like watching scenery, but having to look at almost every pixel in the area gets a little tedious, especially in forests (petrified moreso than living). How lenient is LOTRO with exploring?

Actually, WoW -does- give you achievements for exploring, true, this only came later with Wrath, but it's there. You even get a nice tabard and title.

Edit: Beaten to it, but the point stands ^^'

 

[Liam Bilton]

I actually love crafting, if i could I'd just be an NPC who tells others to go get me stuff just so I can make it but you need inordinate amounts of money for that so I go and destroy the flying machine

 

[Gindil]

I LOVE to boldly explore new areas. I can't stand having to grind for stuff. I dunno why but every time I'm 20 levels below where I should be and I'm running for dear life, it's a thrill than killing everything, taking the loot, and selling it indefinitely.

Maybe it's the fact that I've burnt myself out but if you're where you're supposed to be in level, where's the challenge?

 

[Shjade]

What I like about MMO's:
-Scale. Massive worlds. Lots of places to see and explore, lots of content to sift through so I can avoid the parts that bother me and pick up the parts I like without needing to do all of it to move on with the game. (Not all MMO's deliver on this, of course. Champions Online comes to mind. That game feels tiny.)

-Character development. While classes and races tend to be very strict in their paths of progression in most of the MMO's I've played, they tend to include a lot of options anyway. There's usually an "optimal" talent setup for leveling in WoW, but you can mess around with your talents and abilities to make some interesting alternatives if you just fiddle with it enough. Some classes might not feel very different in one tree compared to another (warriors always felt like warriors to me regardless of being fury or arms, though prot's another bag), but going from a feral druid to a balance druid is practically an entire class switch. This is also what I enjoy about leveling up as I like unlocking new abilities and adding them to my current strategies to see what I can improve as I go on.

-Outfitting. What can I say, I like to play dress-up with my characters. Sue me.

-Space to RP. Not everyone does, and this obviously does require other players around somewhat - though it can be amusing to RP on your own with the NPCs in response to their sheer weirdness (much like Shamus's stories do, basically, except writing that humorous little story for your own amusement) - but when it works it can be quite satisfying.


What I dislike about MMO's:
-Required grouping. Yes, I know that second M stands for Multiplayer, which is neat and all, but to be honest, if WoW were an offline game tweaked for solo play - raid content would probably have NPCs included with some altered difficulty/boss abilities to be possible or something, details not important for the moment (since raiding isn't my thing anyway - more on that later) - I'd have probably enjoyed it just as much. Possibly more. Hard to say. On the one hand I wouldn't have had to deal with jerks and strip-miners so I could do what I wanted/needed to get done without people acting as obstacles in my way. On the other I wouldn't have been making friends and socializing during play as I did. The latter point is less significant when considering most of my friends had already quit by the time I left the game, however. Given I was spending a lot of my non-raid time soloing the game anyway I don't think playing it offline would have been a significant change aside from making questing easier due to a lack of competition. And, of course, the AH not being there. That would bite a bit. Alright, that's enough on this topic. Moving on!

-Raiding. I play games to have fun. I don't want to feel obligated to play a game. This transforms fun into a responsibility, which saps the fun out of it. Raiding is less of a game and more of a job. LK Naxx aside (lul), raiding generally requires you to be at the top of your game and focused for several hours at a stretch to be successful. It's tedious, lengthy, monotonous and stressful. All that and you still fail if the rest of your raid isn't up to par. I can't recall how many times my raid team wiped on Archimonde because of people not paying any attention to doomfire crawling toward them, not activating their tears before making little player-sized craters in the ground, not popping potions/healthstones to survive if someone was a second or two late decursing them, etc., and there wasn't anything I could do about that. There were always people behind on DPS who, even after I tried advising them on various ways to improve, never showed significant progress. It was an exercise in frustration trying to complete a goal that, if it was something I could have done alone, I might have been able to do, but being unable to do so because of some team members holding us back. Could I have joined a more serious raid team? Probably, but that would have led to an even more rigorous raid schedule and required leaving behind the people on my team who I liked and with whom I joked around - the people who made raiding bearable at all. Moving to a "serious" raid team would have crushed out any remaining interest in raiding - a self-defeating prospect.
tl;dr - Hate depending on other people to complete personal goals. Extension of point one.

-PvP. I'm sure the basics of this argument are already understood so I'll just say this: it's never balanced, it never will be balanced, and competition with variance in lag is always rage-inducing even in a balanced environment. No thank you. No.

-"Random" quest drops. Someone mentioned this above. If you give me a quest to kill monsters for their organs, make them drop the bloody organs. A quest to kill # of monsters is infinitely preferable to a quest to kill ?# of monsters until they drop # of macguffins to complete the quest unless those items are a 100% chance to drop on each kill. Making them an arbitrary chance to drop is bull - cut it out. At the very least make a maximum kill limit: after X kills you're guaranteed to get all your drops. More than once I've gotten 9/10 items I need only to then get stuck killing upwards of fifty (sadly not exaggerating - sometimes the dice just SUCK) additional monsters to get one more item to finish the quest. It eases the tedium to just think of this as grinding monsters with a bonus waiting at the end, but only a little, and self-discipline of that sort only goes so far. It shouldn't be needed for a game in the first place, of course, given a game is supposed to be fun, yes?

-Endgame in general. I've learned all my class abilities, I've explored the whole map, and seeing the final story-related bosses requires getting upwards of 9 other players of similar power and skill to cooperate with me for hours at a time. All that's left to do is get shinier gear...for no reason, since my current gear is obviously enough to do the available solo content since, well, I'm at the end of it already. Bored now. If only I could see that raid content without needing an entire gang to do it...hm...

Eh...I could probably go on but it'd be getting into nitpicks. That probably covers the broad strokes. I'm indifferent to crafting, for instance: it's more a means to an end than an end in itself for me.

 

[xqxm]

I immediately must bring up my favourite example here, Tibia, that is Tibia before they sold out and decided to become JUST LIKE WOW in order to rake in as much cash from newbies as possible.

In ye olden days, Tibia didn't have any linear progression. No helpful guides pointing you in the direction you needed to go to most effectively progress to the next level. No quest logs letting you know EXACTLY how to solve the "mystery" of the treasure. It was a vast open landscape, and you were free to explore at your leisure, which people did, because that is what was fun. When people didn't want to explore, they organized games, like a crude version of football constructed from stacking boxes around a rectangular area and pushing a bear carcass around (that is, until the devs took notice and implemented an actual football). There was a sense of community, unlike stuff like WoW where you press the dungeon-button and get paired up with 4 strangers from different servers to unlock that next elusive achievement and piece of worthless equipment.

People in Tibia would stand by the beaches and fish all day, just socializing and using the "broadcast" spell (since defunct because of newbies) to communicate over longer distances. There were quests, one-of-a-kind items protected by fierce demons or a clever trail of well-hidden clues, that would not instantly respawn and reward the next player with the exact same thing for his skills at reading a quest-log or wiki-page.

I understand that things like this are hard to implement in a high-player environment, but I believe developers REALLY need to think things over. If they do really want to steal so many hours out of the life of youngsters, they could at least do it well, really giving the feeling of an alternate universe, instead of a linear grind-fest where every player can reach exactly the same goals and never pose a threat to one another or really matter, even in the game universe, like f***ing World of Warcraft.

 

[Twinmill5000]

Though it may not seem like a decent way at all to keep players engaged, forcing them to level tediously, while making most players quit before 20 in a small f2p title, actually keeps the hardcore gamers engaged longer. I don't like it, and I have quit many games simply because the grind was too much... but I've also played games that dumped you into the endgame without so much as a second of work. It's fun at first... and... maybe if we were all kids, the endgame could keep us occupied for a long time. Simply put: as gamers, most of us get bored easily. If we're simply handed all of the content from the start, we'd sample it, and in most cases, move on. In a multimillion dollar heavily designed project... they don't want us to just run around a playstructure a few times and go "this is boring," then walk off. Theoretically, if the playstructure really was that great, that it could keep all the angsty 16-24 players busy, then handing it to them from the start would work.

What makes an MMORPG an MMORPG, simply put, is the, whether I like it or not, fact that you have to work to get to the good stuff in it. It keeps a number of players constantly engaged and keeps them more inclined not to leave once they hit endgame and actually see it all. There are, however, a few examples where handing players the endgame early has worked... kinda. Guild Wars has a level cap of 20 but keeps players engaged through thousands of quests to gear up. It's a PvP game, however. Aika took the step of giving its players good solo content so they can enjoy their long, long trip to endgame alittle more. The giant World of Warcraft has 80 slow levels for the aforementioned reasons, as well. There's a sense of progress in it; it feels more like an RPG than a game where you go and press buttons till other things die. Maybe I'm wrong, however. I tend to quit both the games that require levelling, and those that hand me endgame content equally. It's a paradox, and I say, it comes down to the quality of the content more than anything.