f13.net

Somewhere along the line the "grind" became the cornerstone of all MMOG's. Even the better ones have them. But why? Why can't there be one game, just one, without a grind? I'd like to know the one underlying reason why it's unthinkable that players should advance quickly. Why MMOG developers seem to scoff at the idea. Why all of these games seem to be about nothing except advancement...and when that's finished -- even more advancement.

When do I get to "play" instead of "advance"? Where the fuck is the "game"? Do I find it in the end? Then why did I need to waste all that time getting there in first place?

I can put up with "advancement" if you offer it within a context (ie. a story), but I've yet to even see a hint of that (FedEx missions do not qualify as "story" to me).

I'd be a longterm subscriber if you let me play the so called "endgame" right off the bat (like PvP for example), but you do everything you can to keep me from getting there.

Why? Just a simple question really. Maybe there's a simple answer, but I'd like to know for sure.

Because grind is content on autopilot. Real content is hard.

Grinding makes the developer money.

Grind doesn't exist, except in your head. What grind means is "there's something good up ahead, more fun than anything I'm doing now". (which is why it's really puzzling to hear City of Heroes called "a grind with no payoff")

Part of grind comes from the player. If there are 50 things to do to progress, and one or two of them yield the most progress/time, everyone will do those one or two, all the while complaining about boredom and a lack of variety.

Similarly, if you can enter the PvP endgame at level 20, but only be two-thirds as effective as somebody at level 50, nobody will seriously expect to exist in the endgame at level 20 and will "have" to advance to 50, even though it takes 4+ times as long.

And look at it from the other perspective - if the game didn't get more interesting as it progressed, if chopping down larger and more garishly-colored slugs didn't offer some sort of advantage in PvP, wouldn't people complain that they weren't getting anything out of their time?

The reason there are no games without a grind is because people play them. If people could be patched out of a game, there wouldn't be any grind.

--GF

To put the previous post more succinctly, players push themselves to advance with the greatest degree of efficiency they can manage. And, for the most part, efficiency is not fun.

Moreover, after spending all this time mentally building up a great reward waiting for them at the endgame, it almost never lives up to their expectations, because they've spent a few hundred hours grinding and daydreaming of being a demi-god of R0xoRinG PwNag3.

So why do we push ourselves to be efficient? A lot of it is just a competitive desire to be the first to achieve something or discover something. I know who Monika T'Sarn is, despite never having played SWG, because she is widely acknowledged as the first Jedi. That's a powerful incentive...fame and recognition by other players.

Additionally, it's a microcosm of our humanity....we want instant gratification, infinite power, and we want the journey to be easy for us, yet difficult enough to make the accomplishment non-trivial.

Why do we grind? Because, despite every attempt the devs make to tell us that players are borked, we keep insisting that we are working as intended. Moreover, we reinforce this point by grinding, and despite the fact that we bitch about it the whole time, we keep buying these games, and we keep paying for the privelege of grinding.

Bring the noise.
Cheers.............

Edit: Typo

I've said this many times in other discussion threads but  I think it has been enough of a change to my experience of MMORPGs that I don't mind repeating it:

Turn off the visual display of the XP bar, if at all possible.

I did this in EQ2 and it changed my perception of the game. I became focused on what I was *doing* with my time instead of focused on watching a line on a bar. I *so* wish I could turn off the XP display in CoH. CoH feels like a grind -- right now mainly because missions just feel like the same thing over and over, so the only thing I have to look forward to are new types of villains, new settings, and the hope of getting a new power (which, of course, requires levelling).

In EQ2, I stopped doing things "for the numerical experience", and started doing them for the "play experience". Some things have been fun, some things have not been fun. But levelling has occurred as a side effect of playing rather than being the point of playing. It's been a much more satisfying experience than I would have believed possible.

I don't think it's an illusion or paradigm shift. The emphasis in every mmorpg I've played has been advancement through combat. You can say there's tradeskills, but generally speaking they exist to facilitate combat. It's not my imagination that "quests" are generally dull things.

I'm not the type of person who looks on websites to find the areas where I can xp the fastest. I'm not the one who plays fotm classes. But don't listen to me, let's get it from the horse's mouth:

http://www.vanguardsoh.com/forums/showthread.php?threadid=4618



These games are treadmills because they are designed to be treadmills.

Grinding is a negative perception of the advancement treadmill.  Since MMORPG are all about player retention it is in the dev's best interests to make their game never end and to get people feel invested in their characters. Easiest way to do that without spending bundles on diverse game systems or interesting dynamic content is the infamous advancement treadmill; make it take longer and longer for each point of advancement a character gets in a huge curve of diminishing returns. The higher you go, the more vested you feel in your toon, the less likely you will want to throw all that time away by quitting.

The perception of "grinding" kicks in when you as player recognize what you are currently doing isn't much fun, but you'll still slog through it to get to X (where that could be a level, spell, equipment, ability, item, pvp etc etc); insert analogies of rat's pushing levers for pellets here.

The thing is, there nothing wrong with the treadmill per se so long as it's enjoyable to proceed up it.  It's not a grind if you enjoy the journey.  Almost every sp rpg has a treadmill built into it, but it's disguised by having a directed plot in which you are the star, and which moves you along the treadmill as a natural part of playing the game.  But, it also ends...

Just find a game you mostly enjoy the minute to minute playing of and the grind ceases to exist.  Easier said than done I know...

Xilren

Thanks very much for pointing to that thread -- now I know that I can mark this game way down on the list of future games to consider.

And from that same thread came this frightening sig:



Yikes!

Back away slowly from the computer....

One could argue that grinding allows game to diffrentiate between people playing the game. One of the key appeals in games such as EQ, is the "hero" status you get by getting better items or more exp - mageloporn at its finest. However, a hero MUST be diffrentiated from the regular peons of the world, otherwise how is he heroic?
Faced by this you can outline several strategies to conquer this.
Diffrentiating trough experience, items, statistics etc...

Why wouldnt a prediffrentiated be good for the game?
 Faced with a predestinied "hero" level, would people continue to play the game?
- Ohh look, my friend got the "amazing super mind wizard 2000"-box, he can save the world now.. I got the "lazy peon" one.. good that I like to chop wood then..

The advantage with the "grind" as a diffrentiating method is that its fairly equal in theory. X input = Y output with a clear line between X and Y. That is, the conversation would run more among the lines of.. - Ohh look there goes the amazing super mind wizard 2000, just 200 more Hs worth of playing and I can help him save the world too!..
However, since we all play with diffrent inputs, in reality not all of us will achieve the hero status

To conclude - grinding acts as an incentive for players to plug in more hs to being able to be a "hero". This often ends in a gigantic weel, as your hero-lvl is mainly relative to the rest of the populaces lvl, and since everyone is grinding to become stronger, so must you..

[edit: way too many "s]

I agree with the general concept that "grind is in the mind".

The one game I've played recently that involved levelling and items and getting new powers but had very little grindage was Guild Wars. I didn't need to grind for x hours to be able to be heroic. I spent much more time learning to build a set of powers and learn to use those powers, rather than hunt the same monsters over and over.

Regardless -- I'm sure that there will be those who find a grind in GW anyway.

Is what we're after some sort of multi-player take on Fable?

I hope not. The fishing and digging sucked.

Well, those are the most grind-like aspects, no? Repetitive. Unfun after the first few times?

Did you find the other "advancement" aspects of Fable less grind-like?

rofl

Well in defense of Orlun, Brad's favorite phrase is usually some variation of "managing expectations", meaning that he feels a big part of the negative players feel about mmogs is that the game never lives up to its hype. Sigil is very cognizant of this and they would rather not give details than over sale something.

edit: btw I loved BG1/BG2, even though they had levels, but IMO the story is more important than leveling, but it's painfully obvious in mmogs advancement is more important than story.

...story > game...


.. One of the reasons why i believe pre velious EQ was so succefull imo is that Verant applied a game to a world. That is they had the world done from what i understand, basiclly from old pen and papers, and then did the game..

Most new games, and new expansions, do it the other way around - yay we have a game, lets make up some stories for it... and pretty much all fail, immensionvise

I don't think it's that simple; I think you need both.  From all reports, Asheron's Call had some of the best backstory and ongoing plots of the first wave of mmorpgs, but the game systems turned so many off they never got to see them.

If I had to put more weight in one apect, it would be the game systems.  You can't tell those good stories without an architecture that support them and makes them fun to experience.  EQ got a free pass on a lot of things simply b/c they were new and different.  Looking back on say their quests, most were not terribly interesting, unfinished, or flat out pita's to do so from that standpoint i think their "stories" weren't very good.  But, the individual zone designs and flavors were very good, so that lent itself to a storybook world feeling.

Besides, I'd say it's only a small segment of the playerbase that even cares about the story aspect of these games.  Most players just want to bash mobs for loot with friends...

Xilren

heh saw this awhile back:

http://olebaldangus.blogspot.com/2004/12/mmogs-suck-103-hamster-wheels.html#comments

I never even heard of cognitive dissonance before :p

My High School Sociology class was largely about teaching this theory.  I hated it.  At the time I discounted much of it because I didn't believe that so many people actually thought that way -- but I've since learned that they do.  Still, I object to the theory in that it doesn't really tell us WHY people make the choices they do in the first place; it just tells us that people will rationalize their behavior afterwards if they have to.

Bruce

Actually, the best indications from neurocognitive research are that we rationalize our behaviour *while* we are doing it.  For example: Twitch a finger, any finger.  Neurologists can measure the initial neural firing that led to that finger twitch.  The interesting part is, that neural spike comes around 150 milleseconds *before* you consciously make the decision to twitch the finger.  IOW, your brain sends the signal to twitch the finger, and then your consciousness tells itself it just decided to twitch the finger.

Tie this in with studies of people who have had their corpus callosum severed (the neural cabling between the two halves of the brain, severing it is a treatment for some forms of epilepsy), who will invent and believe rationalizations for following instructions given to the right brain (which lacks verbal control) because the left brain (which controls speech) has no idea that the right brain was just doing what the sign said when it got up and turned off the lights, and you have a model of consciousness that is somewhat...disturbing.  "You" are a lie you tell yourself.  A tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

Cognitive dissonance, in this model, is nothing but your lie having to confront its own contradictions.

--Dave

How fitting that this thread turned in this direction: Blame it on the players!

I've played games without grind. Not MMORPGs, but RPGs.

Fallout, Fallout 2, Arcanum. 95% of the experience in those games comes from things some developer deliberately put on the map. It's faster and more accessible than anything random and occurs either in the process of exploration or as an obstacle to some definite goal.

And generally, you can't get too far over your head (memorable Fallout 2 FAQ detailing how to get the best suit of armor in the game as a rank newb. Some luck with random encounters, much saving, but no combat needed).

Sure, if I play 'em another 10 times it'll probably start to feel grindy.

_Some_ fault for grind lies with the player. Grind is saying "To get what I want in the future, I have to be bored now". Players can and do turn "minor numerical advantage" into "have to". At the same time, that's not to say that there aren't games where boring, repetitious activity _is_ actually required for advancement. But the problem is not "advancing at a decent pace", it's "not having time to get bored with your character", and even with other alternatives present people choose to get bored.

Boredom means you're safe, after all.

--GF

Fallout had 40 hours of content, maybe 60 for an avid re-player. That is barely a month of MMOG gaming. Hell, that is only 2 weekends for some people.

I would shiver with dread if it was my job to keep 50,000 people entertained nightly for 12 months.

Jon Stewart, David Letterman, and Jay Leno would laugh and call you a pussy.

The other thing you mentioned, about Fallout - it was what it was because of expert storytelling. MMOGs have yet to have that going for them.

Worthwhile content is extremely expensive to produce.  They pace it so you don't consume it faster than they can produce it.  If what you are doing isn't fun, you should quit.  You can deny it, but you sound like someone who is obsessed with being at the "end" of the game.  Why do you care about being in the "endgame"?  The endgame is not necessarily any more fun than any other part of the game.  You are the one presupposing that every inch of content before the end of the game is worthless.

In a PvE MMOG, you kill foozles.  Do you find the foozle killing fun?  If so, play.  If not, don't.  Killing the 5,000 it point foozle will be pretty must the same.  I guess I could see your point if you had a hard-on for a particular gaming style that only exists at the endgame (say, massive EQ-style raids) and hated the earlier components of the game (soloing or grouping).

If you want a MMOFPS, just play Planetside, or wait for a better Planetside.  I doubt you'll get many, because its vastly cheaper for companies to make smaller FPS games for people who aren't into MMOG style advancement, and not many instant gratification gamers are interested in paying a monthly fee.

They have that right, of course, but they don't have to feed the catass.

As the resident McQuaid apologist, also from the quoted post:

 

Fun challenging content offering continuing advancement all with an eye toward building community.  If that's "grinding" then sign me up.

Don't buy into that shit until you see it. Every single MMORPG since The Realm has offered the exact same goddamn thing. So did Dawn.

I was just going to edit in a disclaimer that I was speaking theoretically!  Of course I don't expect any game to be prefect.  It's just too expensive to give me enough new content to keep me 100% satisfied every second.  But I don't realistically expect to be coddled that much.

I have no doubt there will be some good content in Vanguard, but I also don't doubt it will be a grind. Even in that second quote there's something telling about Sigil's philosophy. See if you can spot it :p.

personally i think there's one huge thing a mmorpg has to tackle before things like the grind go away: the gaming mentality that my character has to be special and that I have to be the god-like creature among these thousands of others yearning for the same thing.

many gamers out there have played games for years upon years. until mmorpgs came around you were the god character in whatever game you chose. you were the star qb and halfback in madden - not the offensive lineman. you were the hero killing aliens and saving the day, not the alien that looks like ten other aliens getting smoked. you were the plumber stomping on the heads of multi-colored turtle-thingies to nab the beautiful princess, not the poor turtle-thingies.

now all of a sudden you're thrown into a pond full of thousands of other fish. all of you are used to being the big fish in your solo-gaming lives, and now all of a sudden you're not.


i think this leads to a lot of the ills i've seen in mmorpgs. nasty l77t d00dz putting everybody down at the drop of a hate because they're better than you. folks wanting to solo everything they can instead of needing to be part of a diverse team with different roles and abilities. flavor of the month templates by people who just want to be the best and could careless about the intricacies of a profession or role. lack of teamwork and team play in combat situations. in games with crafters there's no room for somebody who makes decent stuff at a good price. everybody needs the best thing they can so they can be the best. so on and so forth. and yes ... the grind. nobody wants to be a functional lvl 20 player. everybody wants to be the uber l77t god-like lvl 60 and will step on whoever they need to in order to get there as quick as possible.

btw i've seen this difference first hand many times on Corbantis in SWG. its one of the few servers in the game where, despite being outnumbers, the imperials have largely been the dominant faction in pvp. in fact the only time i'd say they weren't, it was because a group of imperials switched over to rebel and were able to get some rebel folks to following the same school of thought. this is because the imperials on the server are a lot more organized and willing to act as a team instead of a collection of individuals.

this is summed up perfectly by an engagement the other night. myself and about 15 other imperials were krayt hunting when we got word a large group of rebels was coming. we were outnumbered close to 2 to 1. the rebels had more jedi (probably about 9ish knights to our 4 knights and 2 almost knights). and clearly had the upper hand in firepower. when combat started the imperials were synchronized, with the head of hte party calling out targets for all to swarm and attack on ventrillo. ranged folks formed up behind. tanks and jedi moved in closely. no silly CMs on other side of the engagement. the imps worked together like a well oiled machine.

rebels? guys all over the place. no attack plan. folks running in to start combat then flying back out again. and they were the ones who initiated this attack.

the result - rebels got destroyed. we lost only two players. rebels had most of their pvpers killed with a handful escaping. one of my guildmates summed it up best: "they all tried to be the hero."

Buy a new keyboard. Your shift key is broken.

you're kidding me right? oh look - a question mark. i must have used the shift key.

when this place turns into the Wall Street Journal we can talk. until then i think content is the only thing that matters in a place like this. if you have a problem or a point of view on what i said - discuss. if not get off your high horse.

Actually, Mnemon, you need to get on a high horse with everyone else.  You don't want to be down there all by yourself.   :evil:  There are too many journos or, at the very least, competent wannabe journos skulking around here.

The problem is that you are presumably writing because you want people to read your points and comment on them. Unfortunately, I can't be bothered to take the extra time to decipher your illiterate ramblings. I suspect that I'm not alone. The horse is low enough for elementary school children to ride.

You're not.

If you don't have enough respect for your own opinions to convey them somewhat clearly,  I don't have any respect for them either.

What they are saying is:

Ignoring the convention of using a capital letter in the beginning of a sentence does not make you stand out as a writer, it makes your readers annoyed. Hence it is in your interest to adapt the centuries old tradition in order to actually have an audience for your writings.

 :roll:

Eh, you aren't saying anything that hasn't been said before. When everyone is the hero, nobody is. It's an easy problem to identify.

It's a harder problem to solve. Identifying a problem like that is cake. In Zelda I was Link, not Runny_Nosed_Brat_0716. Maybe being the hero shouldn't be the point, or maybe there is a way to make everyone heroic at the same time?

Propose a solution.

Simple. De-emphasize the importance of a single character. If you give the player 2 characters they care about each one only half as much. Give them 10 and if 1 dies they only care 10%. Unless they have a favorite and the favorite one dies. This has  already been tested with pets. How many MMO players care if their pet dies? They don't because they can always get another one. You might grow fond of a pet but it isn't the end of the world when it is gone.

Personally, I don't play MMO's as me. I play in god mode. It just so happens that I can usually only control one character most of the time (or two if there is a pet or 6-8 in DAOC with a theurgist). Think about turrets and mines in Planetside in the context of a "pet". You don't care that your mine blew up and is gone. You probably got experience from it and there are plenty more where it came from.

And, to tie it into the letter from Smedley, if the MMO "family" that you controlled had 10 children and one died how much would you care? Just breed more.

Look at multi-character RPGs of old (read parties). If one of the six or eight guys in your party dies you might not be a happy camper but it wouldn't be the end of the world. You could pick up another member later. Wasteland. Baldur's Gate. Darklands. Wizardry. They all used a multi-character system. It just so happens that Ultima and DikuMUD only had single character systems.

In games like Darklands, you can switch party members in and out like gear at the nearest inn.


How much better of a game might World War II Online have been if you controlled a squad of players and not just one grunt?


I'm tired of these single character bullshit MMORPGs.

You're just talking around the problem. Maybe you feel like the problem isn't really a problem or something.

I think there is a natural inclination for people to want to be top dog, but in MMORPG the vast majority of players are plebians. Everyone wants to be the guy who has his own castle and has serfs, not be a serf.

It isn't that characters die. It's that characters live mundane lives.

No. You're still thinking of it in terms of the single character RPG grind.

Your claimed problem is that current MMOs players feel like peons, fine. In a multi-character system (ala a god game like an RTS or even something like Ghost Recon) all players have god like powers. They do not have a sole manifestation in the virtual world. They have many manifestations. This removes the "everyone can't be a hero" problem because there are no single heros and the goal isn't to be a hero. You do not live and die, succeed and fail by your single manifestation of a character.


So give every player a castle with serfs. It doesn't mean someone with a bigger castle and more serfs isn't going to come burn your castle down. There will still be winners and losers I can't help you there. Always want to be the winner? Better play a single player game and save often.


A pretty good example of multi-character vs. single character is The Sims vs. The Sims Online. You have multiple sims to control in The Sims (aka god like powers). In The Sims Online you only have one character. You no longer have god like powers. You are a peon hence The Sims Online is a grind game. Is the goal in The Sims to be a hero? No. Is the goal in The Sims Online to be a hero? Yes.

Edit: If I have one character in WWIIOL and I run up to the front and then get shot in the head by someone I couldn't even seen and boom back to the respawn point. Was that a rewarding play experience? I would say no. I couldn't be the hero and I got smacked down hard. If I had a squad of characters in WWIIOL instead and my six guys move towards the front. My guys run into two squad of enemies and they lose maybe 3-4 guys and all my guys die except the sniper who sneaks away. Would that be rewarding play experience? I would say yes from a god game perspective even though I lost the battle.

I'd point out that the folks you mentioned only have to produce less than 5 hours each week of content, and some of that is actuallly other people's content (e.g. Musical Guests).  Moreover, they have large staffs (Why isn't that staves?) and budgets (although the individuals listed are all very talented, they are not alone), and do not have the issues of running the whole affair through a software filter and out the internet to provide individual experiences to every customer.

Not that those people don't work their butts off.

I would suggest Soap Operas as a better example of the point you are trying to make.  Even there, however, you don't have to concern yourself with your audience being widely dispersed in terms of where they are in the storyline, although Soaps do spend a bit of time at episode start refreshing the viewer's memory.  Single player games also aren't faced with the sychronization issues like MMOs are.

Which is not to say that I disagree with where you end up.  I think more story and less grind is the right answer, but telling stories in a graphical MMO environment is unique even from telling stories in MUDs, which is the closest comparison I can make.  I don't think the whole answer is work harder or hire more writers, although I think some of it is, and I do think some of the answer is shifting focus from the empowerment system to the story system, and in part combining the two.  But I also think that there are parts of the answer I don't know.  I'm not sure if anyone knows all the answer yet.

Good points.  If you have an interest in this - in the journal Science paper was published talking about galvanic skin responses / autonomic responses in a card game.  These sympathatic responses developed as players actions began to track the correct action to perform - long before they actually became conscious of the rule set that would make them win the game:

Deciding Advantageously Before Knowing the Advantageous Strategy:
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/275/5304/1293?ijkey=qvmuCiNjPcckE

Looks like Tony (Bechara) has continued with research along these lines - you might check his recent publications.

It's the same problem. Everyone is a god, so nobody is a god. Some catasser is Zeus and you get to be that cripple Haephestus, what fun!

In a single player game, your character is a mover and shaker, the focal point of the action. In MMORPGS you aren't the focal point. If you run a castle and everyone else has a castle, or you are a god and everyone else is too, you still aren't the focal point.

I know what you're saying. If everyone is Zeus no one is special. My point is in a god game the goal of the game isn't to BE special. The focal point of a god game IS YOU, the player. The universe revolves around YOU in a god game regardless if there are other gods in the game or not.


You make your own focal point in a god game.


I addressed the winners vs. losers already ->

This 'hero' thing is interesting - I've allways had the most fun in games when I could be unique in some way. Being the highest level is unfortunately to often the only way possible, but over the years I found some exceptions.
In UO, I wasn't very good in pvp, my character was not maxed at all, but I think my poison-field tossing mage and my trap-stealing stealther were remembered in the faction fights as unique not as just one face in the crowd. In daoc, I was a kobold warrior - unusual choice, and gimp-stealthing (hiding behind trees) alone in the frontiers was fun to do, but not very effective. In shadowbane, I did a dagger-scout template that was different, to be really good at killing other stealthers - but being max level first was key here to be successfull to. SWG had no real grind, no levels, and I had great fun in pvp and pve with different optimized templates: Pistoleer/Animal trainer, doctor/commando or defense stacking swordsman. The jedi, of course ( which I got first only through luck, quick holocron farming and a nice weaponsmith macro ), turned out to be one big grind only - I never even seriously tried leveling him up.
In wow, there's not much grind, but no uniqueness either. Evem with the different talent trees, one level 60 priest in blue instance gear is just like the other, the only difference between us is how much we let our mind control victims jump around before we toss them into the lava. Maybe pvp rewards , battlegrounds or hero classes will help here.

So, many games did offer that opportunity to be special, even without a huge grind - but often times it was only possible through being first to find a template, or by 'exploiting' unbalanced elements - many of which got nerfed after a while. How could a game be designed to actually encourage players to be special ? Maybe D&D Online is on the right way, with smaller server populations and a big set of multi or dual class combinations to choose from.

Another idea I've had is making the player a hero simply by having a lot of npc peons around. Currently, I estimate you have a rate of 1 npc per 10 players - some token guards, some quest npc's, some vendors. At a guess, 100 npc's all over the world to interact with in wow, for 1000 players. Of course there's no room for heroes now, and the player feels like a peon send out on menial tasks (quests) by the heroic. special npc's.
What if you could turn that ratio around - 10 npc's for each player on the server, 10000 total. A town filled with activity, an army somewhere fighting back the invasion that needs help, npc caravans that get raided. The opportunities for pvp in a game like WoW are endless.
I think this would work best in a kind of RTS/MMORPG hybrid, where the RTS part is played constantly by AI against each other in a mutli-sided war, and the player can effect the outcome on a small scale.




 

I agree 100% with having NPC peons outnumber the heroes.  The trick is giving those peons enough AI to act smarter than potted plants.  Remember SWG's cities, with big clumps of NPCs walking into walls and talking to themselves?

Sorry, but I'm smarter than the average person.  I'm better at remembering detail, I have decent twitch skills, I enjoy optimizing and analyzing, I enjoy building social networks with other smart players, etc, etc, etc.  This should make the characters I play on an MMORPG better than average Joe's characters, if we spend the same amount of time playing.  If I have the time and interest to catass, and I am a superior player, I should be rewarded with a notable, --nay--, famous character.  This is the only reason beyond pure socialization with friends that I have to play MMORPGS instead of single player RPGs.

If a multiplayer game forces me into an experience which is much the same as every other players because, well, you're just a player, I can't expect to stand out due to my own, in-game efforts.

So, yes, it would be more realistic for most players going into a MMORPG to have the expectation that they shall remain a part of the unwashed masses.  However, marketing your game as some sort of socialist solution to inferiority issues will lose you players, not gain them.  I'm pretty sure the majority of players want the opportunity to be the hero far more than a guarantee that everyone else will suck equally.

You're good enough, you're smart enough, and dog-gone it... you're also a thread-necromancer nooblet.

A friend of mine did almost exactly this with a custom warcraft 3/TFT map (Battle for Icecrown, not as well known as DOTA due to requiring so much system recources due to its size and scale, but IMO infinitely more fun).

The key thing it lacked was persistence.  Even had the unique snowflake appeal since thier were SO many hero's to choose from per side, and only 1 person could be any given hero (only 2 sides, but he turned lots of the regular and neutral units into heros).

Im guessing technical hurdles are the biggest thing stopping WoW from doing this.