f13.net

In the various discussions of the EQ1 progression servers, I’ve heard the guilds pushing the pace referred to in many ways, which I think can be broadly divided into Catass vs Uber.  These labels go way back, but I think they do more to inform you of the politics of the presenter than they do the playstyle of these guilds.  Both are alleging that these guilds are unique in some fashion, whether it be high playtime and low morals or high skill and top end characters.  I’d argue that neither is illistrative or enlightening.

I also want to take issue with another old notion, that of the time-starved power gamer, which somebody put forth years ago to explain why people were so desirous of ‘casual’ content.  This too plays into the idea that the high end game is just a matter of time.  I don’t agree with this thesis.

I would argue that, while these guilds do spend a lot of time in game, they are matched in this by members of less noted guilds, some of which spend many hours in game.  I would suggest that the membership of such guilds is much more representative of the general playerbase than is usually assumed.  This is not too high a bar, of course, since the assumption tends to be that the members of these guilds spend all their time on line.  This seems to me, based on personal experience (Yee and Co. have probably done research on this, but I don’t recall it), to be untrue.  Rather, my experience is that all guilds have people who are on a lot, and others who are less so.

What sets these guilds apart, IMO, is their focus.  In a less focused guild, a common logon question, after ‘any groups’, is ‘where can an X get good xp’, or whatever.  In a focused guild, the common logon question is ‘where are we today’.  These guilds sublimate the individual player’s interests to the guild’s.  While on the surface this would seem to take away from a player’s ‘fun’, in fact, members of such guilds may well have much fuller experiences.  They are likely to see more of the game than an ordinary player, albeit from a particular perspective.  These guilds are intensely social, but that aspect is turned very much inward, centering on the guild.  And the value of focus to both the killer and achiever is obvious.

Thus I suggest, with little hope, that these guilds be called focused guilds, rather than the more political names now in use.

Fat chance.

agreed

what separates these kinds of organizations from others is their killer instinct

they're just a lot more mercenary and intent on beating the game.  And by "beating" I mean that literally and metaphorically -- they're out to punish it.  Like a test driving a car into the ground-- they wring everything out of it, making it unusuable for anyone to drive later.

I'm not sure what exactly you're referencing or defending here, but I've never seen a "focused" guild that didn't catass. Just because they don't play as a bunch of soloers doesn't mean they're any less catass-y.

Also, why is "catass" a "political" word now? Wtf?

This is stupid.  Everyone views them the same (except those within their cool guy friends circle.)  Let them be.

everquest grind catass vanguard diku poopsock diediedie

I've never seen any collection of players that didn't have some degree of excessive playtime behavior, aka, catassing.  That is why I don't think the term is particularly meaningful in this setting.  There is a lot of catassing being done on the Progression servers, but only three guilds that I am aware of are actually taking down the progression mobs this early.  As for your question re the political nature of the term,


Do I really have to expand on this point further?  Do we really just call it catassing because it's a cool word, or is it because like most effective negative political labels, catass is both catchy and derogatory?

I'd further cite your inference that I am defending something here, as proof that there is a political basis.  As it happens, I am not defending anything, but I do think we have commonly used terminology (both catass and Uber, and others besides) which confuses rather than clarifies.
 
I don't think there is anything unusual about the players in these guilds, for better or worse.  What I think sets them apart is the focus of the guild, and I think that this is worth consideration when looking at how content is structured and consumed.  Now, I'm hardly the first to point out that the groups we are talking about tend to consume content relatively selectively, but I do think that in discussing content issues it is worth while to note what sort of content is desirable to which sort of groups.

Well, if it makes you feel better, I only blame the games really. They're only catasses because the games require them to be. Using the term "catass" is not so much an insult to them as it is a protest against everything MMO's have become. It has nothing to do with politics. It's more about dissatisfaction.

Some games may promote longer play sessions than others, but no matter what you are playing, some people will catass. Even in "casual" games, if they  have any form of competition in them at all (being the first to kill raids, leader boards, anything),  catasses will catass just to be at the top while knowing most people play casually.

It's not really fair to blame game design entirely. The problem is just that this genre really appeals to the type of people with no responsibilities or cares for money. We clearly just need to kill those people off.

Alternatively, we could take all of their money and reverse roles in the future.

Any terminology designed to refer to an entire group is inherently flawed as it will never exactly apply to any one member of that group. Macro level descriptions only hold up when you confine your analysis to the macro level. Such is the case with any term used to a collective -- it degrades the further the group is decomposed and inspected.

I have no idea what you just said, but that is the awesomest avatard ever.  I cannot, stop, watching, it.

I think the term "uberguild" is more than appropriate. It implies that they dominate games through numbers and their amazing ability to forget about the outside world and injest whatever game they're a part of.

On that same note, I don't think Uberguild is even remotely offensive. Not like catasses or whatever. BUT, these people don't deserve our respect. They are, for the most part (short of guilds that spawn out of being crazy assholes - like a Goon guild - a guild full of douchebags and alpha male types. I don't mean the good sort of alpha male type, but the devious uninspired alpha male type. Like that Deyth fellow. He's just a dick. He has google send him information about his guild and name. Now, it'd be one thing, like I sad in that thread, if he just took the emails with a grain of salt as some sort of barometer. But he cared enough about Haemish's version of the past to come here and start a pissing fight. Had I been in Deyth's position, I'd have said "HAR, THEY STILL TALK ABOUT ME." and then gone on with my day. But no, he's that sort of alpha male type that is so common in uberguilds.

The kind of guy you'd want to beat the shit out of on the street.

That's why we apply unsavory nicknames to them. Not because they're good at a game - they often are. Especially games where time = success. Not because they have more blues than a soloer or have killed a boss before everyone else simply due to being organized. No, we apply unsavory names because of the stereotypical poopsocking dickheads that lead and represent the guilds.

schild
Administrator
Posts: 13337

powerposting catass imo.

I was a stereotypical poopsocking dickheads once.  Now I just play one on TV.

I agree that "uberguild" is a fine description, if a bit overblown.  Most catassers are not uberguilders.  Not all uberguilders are catasses, at least in WoW.  In EQ1, it is very difficult to be an uberguilder who is not a catass.  At least back when I played.  Now that EQ1 supposedly has a lot of raid instancing, I imagine you can be a non-catass uberguilder. 

They dominate games because they are much, much, much better organized than <Happy Bumpfuzzle Time>, <Dramawhores 4 Lyfe> and <Knights of InsertGameworldHere>.  Those other guilds often have more members and play more hours, but have zero ability to do anything in a coordinated fashion.  In three hours on a given evening, UberguildX will have taken out three bosses with hive-mind precision.  Happy Bumpfuzzle Time will have spent 2 and a half hours waiting for every last member of their incompetent zerg force to get set up and then wipe because they were too busy cybering with the 45 year old man pretending to be a sixteen year old elf half-vampire nymphomaniac to pay attention to the plan.  They will then go to the forum and complain that UberguildX is only better because they are fat losers.

Focus vs casual is an ok distinction, but you cannot get away with qualifying one as better or worse. I've been in a 'focused' guild where the first question asked is 'where are we today', which roughly translated to 'where is our guild leader yelling at us at this particular moment'. I've also been in a casual guild that was part of an alliance where one could choose to be in a raid or go grouping. As to your contention that the 'focused' guild is more social than a casual one, I have to blow the whistle on that one. Socializing is not a product of focused raiding; if anything, its the other way around.

As to raiding being a 'fuller' experience, that is truely in the eye of the beholder. If you play a game because you cannot wait to discover the next pixelated outcome of an encounter, then fair enough, focused is 'fuller'. Some of us, however, have learned the hard way that the next encounter is very liable to be regurgitated graphics with little to no innovation behind it at all. It depends on the game, and sometimes even an expansion within the game. I would argue that Velious did provide good, immersive content if you had a focused group of players. PoP and GoD, on the other hand, were not more immersive as time went on.

That has not been my experience. About 50% of the "uber/catass" guild filler often resents the regimentation, and will create alts just to be able to do their own thing.

As a former leader of Happy Bumpfuzzle Time, I can tell you right now that it isn't just because someone was off cybering, but because the leaders don't want to be the poopsock-eating twats like Deyth, and they don't want those kind of twats in their guild. Those people are poison in guilds that are not "focused" guilds. Yes, that's a stunning generalization, but it's true. Casual guilds exist not because they are incompetent, but because they don't want to be so goddamn obsessive about a game that they step all over everyone involved. When you mix the two types, you get resentments on both sides. The twats want to get stuff faster faster faster and can't understand why it takes a normal person 6 months to get to level 50, while the slower players don't have either time or patience to do all that stuff that quickly. The longer these two try to compromise on their wants, the more the problems fester.

I've met some great people in catass guilds, and some real shitheels in casual guilds. But schild is right. Catass/uber guilds get their name and derogatory connotations because their leaders invite them.

Despite you incessant use of the word twat, you touched upon why I mostly avoid casual guilds.  You may say you don't want to cramp on the style of your members and invite an unwanted playstyle in, but it's just ineffective leadership.  If you've got a group of people that want to do something and you can't get it started in less than an hour because you're unwilling to kick Joey-afk-wackin'-it from the group or tell Jenny-homemaker to stop organizing her bank because we need to start now so people can finish this dungeon before people start leaving from boredom, then you're just illustrating why I can't be in one of these guilds.   

Uber/raid/focused guild (doesn't have to be large, my 3 man guild was a machine) tends to not waste my time and that's why I gravitate towards that. There's no sitting for an hour at the zone in line because people can't get their shit together.  Casual guilds can have effective leadership that doesn't cramp anyone's style but it takes a willingness to do things that are not always going to go over well with everyone.  Viin/Yoru are a good exampe of this in EVE.  They keep the guild moving in the right direction while providing allowing operations to happen in a timely manner.  A few of our mining operations have been wonders to behold.

There's reasons I can't make it in raid guilds either, the main being time commitment.  Secondary conerns are stupid people in leadership positions, the hardcore catasses setting policy, etc etc. 

Heh, is it any wonder I won't touch a MMO without some sort of ability to play solo?

Yes, eventually you have to set some baseline of expected behaviour in any guild. Casual guilds generally require more of their leadership because you can expect less out of any individual member in the guild. That's just one of the many reasons I burned out. When people fiddly-fart around, the leader/officers tend to have to do so much more work that they become resentful of the fiddle-farters and everyone else that gives them shit about it. The shit-givers are usually the fuckers that really belong in the focused/uber guilds anyway, like yourself. You want what you want, and that generally means the fiddle-farters have to pick it up, regardless of whether their problem is that they have kids to take care of or cyber-wanking to do.

It's only ineffective leadership if you don't give a fuck what the other people in the guild have to deal with. If you try to run the delicate balancing act of satisfying as many people as you can with as many playstyles as there are religions, it's an ulcer waiting to happen.


Or any wonder I don't do much with guild leadership anymore?

Why would you imagine this to be any different? You're still required to be able to raid usually 5 nights per week between x and y times of the day, yadda yadda yadda, same old same as it ever was.

I probably have a stricter definition of "catass" than you do.  In the old days, being in an EQ1 uberguild didn't mean "be online from 8-11:30 Sunday-Thursday for targets that will be available on schedule" it meant "be online 8 hours a day, 14+ on weekends, at least 6 days a week and be prepared to get your ass online when shit pops at 2:30 to beat other guilds to it when necessary."

To me, while the first guy may play too much for his own good, only the second is a true this-game-is-utterly-destroying-my-life catass.

Uber is a goal.
Catass is a method.
Focus is a strategy.
But the end result is same.

Wow. I'm really appreciating my guild now. I'm going to have to remember to think the Guild Leaders next time I see them online.

Although back to the casual/uberguild thing, I've noted that Guild alliances do tend to help. It does the uberguilds good if they have a pool of more-casual, but decently-geared and skilled, folks to call upon whenever one of their catasses gets accidentally burned by the light of the sun or sees a booby or something.

I think our WoW guild has a pool of 10 to 20 that another guild frequently calls upon to fill slots in their raid. Our guildies don't want to raid on their catass schedule, but like the occasional chance to get in. The uberguild likes having a list of reliable people to call upon when they need a few extra hands. And when the rest of our casual guild staggers up to the raid, having finally meandered in that direction, we've got experience folks to lead the fight.

I guess it helps that most of our guild is over 30 -- children of guildies have their own titles, so we know when to stop using four letter words. :)

Uberguilds in EQ were not about numbers -- in fact they looked down in disdain on those guilds who could only kill things through sheer force of numbers, aka the "Zerg(ling) guilds". WoW's different since there's a cap on the raid size, unlike EQ where the only limit was the amount of people you could cram into a zone before the server gave up, which on a busy weekend in ToV could number 300+ (though the practical limit for a single encounter was around 100).

Change returns success
Going and coming without error.
Action brings good fortune.
Sunset, sunrise.

I realize now that the MMO genre eludes me entirely.

See, most of the time I'm reasonably happy plugging away in my UO sandbox.  But every once in a while I get a hankering for ding and lewtz.  Then I go play Diablo II.  Every once in an even longer while, I'm hit with a desire for ding and lewtz and shiny at the same time someone else I know is talking about playing WoW, so I go and give that another shot.  Then I quit out of sheer boredom within a month, having leveled to somewhere in the mid-thirties.  I resolve never to do it again, until six months later...

Anyway, I'm astounded at what passes for fun non-grindy gameplay in this genre.  The 1-59 game is fun?  The 1-20 game is mildly fun, everything from there until I get too sick of it to bother logging in is pure shit.  It's Diablo II with better shiny, weaker lewtz, and the ding slowed down to a fucking crawl so you'll keep paying your monthly fee.  I mean, here's a conversation I had with my brother recently:

Him:  Puzzle Pirates is fun.
Me:  It's just Bejeweled and crap like that, in a bunch of different contexts.
Him:  Strip away the context and which is more fun, Bejeweled or WoW combat mechanics?
Me:  You know what, that's a damned good point.

If you even make it to level 60 in WoW, much less a game that isn't as "casual friendly" then I can't help but look at you as some sort of weird alien catass.  It's like someone telling you their hobby is slapping their nuts with a dead chicken.  It's not exactly harmful, I guess, but I just have to scratch my head and wonder where you're finding the fun.

Dude, you think UO is fun.

Bejeweled is more fun than macroing to do a lot of, errr, nothing.

Here's the thing about UO, Schild.  If they did it over again with modern shiny and a world large enough to defeat housing sprawl, and avoided the general incompetence that sank SWG, you would fucking love it.  Me, I'm just more forgiving.  I'll tolerate the shitty graphics and urban blight to play an MMO that isn't set on rails.

There's always been a combination of the two, at least on my server. I wouldn't call it 8-11:30 either. Add in an hour or two either side and you'd be more accurate, but really you're just splitting hairs and measuring the size of your e-uberguild.

And there were and I'm sure still are plenty of catasses who do manage to hold down jobs and all the rest, it's just that they spend most of the rest of their time that's not at work or sleeping on EQ. Or Wow. Game. Whatever.


Also, Margolis. I see your point, but really can't see why you or anyone else would care enough to do the "let's call them this instead, howboutthat?" thing..

Sounds about right.  Never really liked the term "catass" because it unclear whether the target of the word truly is as sad as the word implies or if the person doing the labelling is just resentful.  Usually it seems to be a mix of both.  Otherwise, why give a shit whether the other person is a sad dork who lives with his mom or a successful jet setter who plays on off hours?  And who doesn't catass at least a bit in these games?   The word "catass", as I read it, is a double-edged insult that lands on both the target of the word, and the speaker of the word.

The only game I've ever been truly "uber" in was SWG.  And that was focus, not catassing.  A lot of the time anyway.  And a lot of people automatically thought of me, and my guild, as assholes (they didn't have the word "catass" to throw at us). Mostly because we actually got shit done and that made other people feel bad about their own accomplishments (we never intentionally did this).  The people bitching about us were online at least as much as we were (a lot more than I was, certainly, I don't have that much time to play).

In the end it's just a culture clash.  Different folks having fun in different and somewhat incompatible ways.  Uber folk resent casual folk who "waste" their time.  Casual folk resent "uber" folk because they make their achievements seem less.   And far too many players, from both sides, catass.  The uber folks wait until the server comes up to nail all the tasty spawns, grind Jedi, and other stupid stuff like that.  The casual folk meanwhile are grinding just as much but doing so on less "uber" things (like hitting level 30, or master dancer).  Neither right, neither wrong. 

Why I tilt to the "uber" side more often than not is just that, in order to enjoy a game, I have to be able to analyze and strategize with it.  That means that MMORPG's usually become an optimization challenge for me.  Whatever I do, I want to be able to plan how to do it efficiently and well.    If I can spend hours analyzing whether this build is better than that build then I'm happy.  If I have to grind for 5 hours then I'm going to spend my time figuring out how to do it in only 4 (although actually I'm pretty bad at true grinding as I get bored quickly and find something else to do).  I'm just a big math geek is all and I get off on stuff like that.  Casual play is boring because casual players don't give a shit about the things that interest me.  Analyzing builds, or spawns, or whatever the game offers to analyze bores them.  Or it actively annoys them because it "takes away the immersion" or it points out that they aren't playing optimally, or whatever.  I can understand that but of course their style of play bores and annoys me.

Me.

Tops is a 3 hour session, with a lot of afk'ing and cigarette breaks in between (Yes, eating, taking a piss, and inhaling smoke grabs my attention more than MMO gameplay). Followed by logging off in boredom. Followed by unsubbing in disappointment. Followed by resubbing in misplaced curiosity. Rinse. Repeat.

The only thing I'm a catass about is dissecting how catassy these games are. Don't bundle me in with that other stuff.

I see your point, but I think there is a pretty big difference between the level of commitment required to be an uberguilder in WoW and an uberguilder in EQ1.  Instancing is the biggest reason for that.  When you have competition in various timezones all fighting for contested targets, you need to have a raid force available most of the day at the drop of a hat.  AAXP points are another biggie.  The relative lack of targets is another.

In short, I think there's an enormous difference between playing 60+ hours a week at times throughout the day and playing and 20-30 hours a week only on weekends and evenings.  Most people watch that much TV (not that TV watching is healthy, either, and gaming is certainly less healthy in that it is more attention-intensive, but it's not too much of a stretch to imagine most adult WoW uberguilders having fairly healthy lives and almost impossible to imagine any adult Luclin-era EQ1 uberguilder's life that wasn't at least a borderline wreck).

Chance favors the prepared mind. - Louis Pasteur.

That's basically where I see uber/catass guilds at. I don't give a crap what some non-involved armchair outsider thinks of them. These groups of focused people are there for the benefit of their group alone. Whether that group compresses or contracts to include or exclude allies or the random pickup addition is merely a subset of how these types of groups operate.

I agree with Evangolis' use of "Focused". That's what they are, a group that transcends a bunch of free-thinking happy-go-lucky random-AFK semi-interested while-watching-TV/IMing "casual" folks into something that values efficiency and winning. This is why they're playing after all. Cammaradarie and socializing come as a result of like-minded folks maximizing their chance at winning  in a game all about continued acquisition.

Many actual players I know (as in, folks who actually play instead of just talking) are fine with the behavior of focused groups because they themselves know their own limitations. If they have the time, they'll petition to join such groups or become the leadership of a guild or sub-group that becomes focused themselves. Others who don't have that time either leave the game, leave the genre or scale their own expectations lower. They aren't getting Legendary gear. They're not making Flasks in the Alchemy Lab. They're not a notorious pirate. And they're fine with this.

Focused groups get the job done. They are good at doing so in games that are all about that. Who's the more frustrated? The insider having success or the outsider who doesn't want to play the game as intended and continually waits for it or another to be redesigned so that they can be successful?

It's fine to want blood from a stone. It's not fine to expect it.

Two points:

1) Why should the Uber/Focussed/Catass guilds give a shit what internet terminology is used to describe them? If they're having fun, as it goes, who gives a fuck?

2) These games should ideally be designed to support more than 1 style of play. That's one of the major flaws with WoW's level 60 game and an area, bizarrely enough, where EQ1 offers more playstyle options to players.

Silly me. I thought it was OK to expect fun from games.

Scratch that: I just expect games.

Unless someone breaks it to me that these are not games, can not be games, and were never meant to be games, then I'm going to expect. They've taken on the facade of "games", so it's only natural for me to expect them to actually be games.

Just don't try to bullshit me about this focus stuff and tell me that's the game and that people are "winning" at it. It's not a game. It's catassing. Nothing else. Stop bullshitting yourselves.

When I say "blood from a stone" I mean the expectation that the game is absolutely for everyone who volunteers to log into it. It's not. If they're not fun for you, it's better to continue searching than to expect the game itself to somehow change so that it does become fun for you.

The reason for this is three-fold:

1) With so many games, what's the point of waiting around for one you don't like to eventually change to become something you do like.

2) What is fun for you today may not be fun for you tomorrow. Either the game rules change (pre-60 WoW v post-60 WoW) or you simply got bored with the core concept (if you've played a zillion diku-spinoffs, maybe you need something completely different).

3) If the company has a game that is already very successful for a bunch of folks who play differently from you, what's the business rationale for them to change it just for you.

That's all I'm saying. Just because it's called an "MMORPG" doesn't mean that anyone who's ever played an MMORPG should find it appealing. Shit, this is the genre in which, technically, both Second Life and Guild Wars are a part. You can't get much more diametrically opposing than that.

Leverage the breadth here and keep searching.

I think the fact that in WoW, the rules change completely, as you've pointed out is the main problem I have with it.

I should qualify my point - in EQ1 I was happy to raid several days a week, grind AAs, work on LDoN/DoD points, etc etc. I found the endgame/level maxed part of the game the most fun.

In WoW, the fact that they did such a good job on the 1-60 game, making it very accessable and fun, then changing it to a sub-par version of EQ1's endgame is the real biter.

Though I think we're off the topic of catassing by now...

The problem is focused groups get things done, then bitch to high heaven when they have no more things to do instead of fucking off to other climes when they've strip-mined all the goodie out of their current one. They hang around, and they petition the devs and they scream loudly, all to get the devs to provide them more and more content that they'll consume faster than the devs can shit it out. It's what drove EQ1 from being a decent RPG world to a catass, achiever-oriented grindfest. It's what makes steep leveling curves, and soul-crushing gameplay cockblocks.

I'd be fine with "focused" groups if they just did the content and shut the fuck up about it. But they don't. They brag, they whine, they lobby and they protest until the game is centered around them and them alone, spoiling it for the rest of us who don't live to locust-fuck a game to death.

EDIT:
And that's what the casual, non-focused players do. As more of them leave, they make the whining cunts that make up most uberguilds into a larger proportion of the players, and so the devs cater to those players, which further alienates the casual players in a vicious cycle.

Continuing to think from the company side, how is this bad? Yes, we know that endgamers bang on the content the most, forcing an endless cold war between them and the developers. At the same time though, their continued interest in the game, their continued conditioning and scaling achievements and their basic "star power" adds to the compulsion of fledgling players and organizations to give it their own shot.

Without these endgamers goes one aspect of the compulsion to get to the end. Look at the time-per-level curve differences between WoW and EQ2 for example. I guarantee you more people quit EQ2 much faster than WoW because it takes so friggin long to get to the last level. It's obvious that the last level alone is not a compulsion unto itself. This is generally because of a content thing. Unlike an RPG, which are traditionally finished, there's no ongoing story arc to keep people interested, the last level in an MMORPG is typically achieved long after the game has become "work". Even WoW, content complete to the end, is merely a long series

So what's the point of bothering unless there's a lot of people there "proving" how fun it is?

That those players are noisy, boisterous, annoying, and in the case of some older games with stupid niave rules, able to prevent others from dethroning their eminence is just a natural result of an environment where people can brag and others create false idols. How many ace sports stars are also paragons of society? How many of the worlds most powerful leaders have also been the most compassionate and virtuous?

It's competition.

Some say MMORPGs are not competition, even in the face of the realities that smack them upside the head every day.

It's bad because:

1) It gives the company a black eye to see twats like Furor spouting off about how broken their content is.
2) It drives other players off who DON'T want to compete for the biggest e-peen.
3) It makes the user base of a game seem to be full of whiny, immature shits who only want to show you how much better than you they are. Anyone who researches the game who might be on the fence is probably going to be turned off by these people.
4) It makes the devs have to work harder to produce more content for less people, meaning the dev dollars have less bang for the buck.

From the "uber" end of things the problem is that casuals don't get things thing done, then bitch to high heaven when other people do.

The root problem isn't ubers or casuals.  They are just two ends of a spectrum.  The problem is that MMORPG players bitch about everything and get upset when their particular end of the spectrum doesn't "win" the bitchfest.  Even though, in my experience, the bitching doesn't actually affect development that much.

Here is something I've been pondering.  

Perhaps the reason for all the supposed catering to the "focused" gamers is because of just that- their focus.  This is a segment of the audience that has a relatively very predictable desire- maximizing their characters through content consumption.  One merely has to create a collection of glorified rooms and corridors, fill them with some timesinks and incentives, design a couple creative encounters, and let 'em have it- they are sated for a time, and anything more is gravy.

"Non-focus" stuff though, gets complicated.  When you approach the design of really accessible content, you have to account for all the different variables that come along with catering to scads of different playstyles.  You also have to waste tons of time polishing and rethinking elements that are hard to quantify- atmosphere, the "feel" and enjoyability of individual classes, playstyles, tradeskill lines, etc.  

It's a lot of work designing a world that almost anyone is supposed to enjoy.

Aside from what Haem said, a catasser of any stripe is not the ideal customer for an MMO. They use up far more resources (bandwidth, processing time) than a more casual player and pay in the same amount while likely generating more smoke, noise and CSR calls. Their overhead cost likely outstrips their monthly sub fee.

The ideal player stays subbed forever, never logs in and never makes a CSR call.

And yet, years of the same lists and same discussions have resulted in the same schtick over and over. Why is that?

Personally, I feel it's because while the catass2hardcore crowd, whether a good or bad rap, can be a better customer, more accepting, of alternative business schemes. Yoru, I agree with your description of an ideal player. However, that player is not likely to pay extra for ingame goodies and maybe not likely to buy expansions. Why should they? If they log in so seldomly they barely achieve what the default game has, they're obviously not going to be compelled towards continued advancement once various avenues of growth stop (first levels then faction then gear, for example).

For those games that want to sell boxes to pay down/off the upfront development and then manage their ongoing service on subscription fees alone, yea, more accounts, lower concurrency, no CSR, those are nice things. But we're also on the cusp of a period when that's not going to work for those games that aspire to large subscriptions bases. Costs are too high. We're already seeing a greater influx of company-facilitated RMTing ("micro transactions" if you're squeamish). That's not pure profit any more than ingame advertising is.

Haemish, I feel your list applies to a few select high profile (or wannabe high-profile, ala VG) games. Meanwhile there's scores of games that have their respectable base of users that never get talked about, here nor most places the veteran MMOG crowd hang out. And they all have the same types of players that the AAA ones do. It's just that opinions of folks who have been around forever and/or were all catasses in EQ1 don't really apply to them.

Hmmm, topic has done better than I thought it would.  Interesting discussion.

I posted this out of enough different reasons that explaining them would sound like some sort of free associating stream of thought art piece.  But I will note that Lum made a point about the Coldain Shawl in EQ1 screwing up crafting by forcing every power gamer to craft, hence killing the crafting market, and I have to think that the reverse should apply.  And watching FoH/RoI/IV rip through progression content was an input.  And my experiences with Purity Council in SB; they were focused long before they were uber, and, in my experience, happier that way, which brings me to Schild on size and lack of morals defining Uberguilds, and Haemish on people making alts to escape the regime, and one of the many bobs saying he had no interest in SB, because all he wanted to do was log into his little house that he had with a few friends, and gank people.  All of which tells me that bigger isn't generally better, but that game design seems to have made it a requirement.

And while there are lots of things to say about the whole thing, my co-workers generally note me as someone who focuses on problems, which doesn't make me popular, but does keep me amused, and I have to wonder if there isn't a way to make a problem a strength.  As has been pointed out, it isn't hard to predict what the focused player is likely to do; they will head for the cheese by the shortest possible route, doing whatever it takes to get there.  And I recall the idea of Wizards in MUDs, and while you can't really give MMO players that power, it still seems to me that there ought to be a way to harness that drive and determination for the amusement of others, because I don't entirely agree with Yoru, since players who never logon never contribute to the world, and that is why people on the progression servers are upset about progression, not because they want to spend months having whoever monopolize the best spawns, but because they want to play in a world full of other players, because people suck, but being alone sucks even worse.  And that runs back to Bartle, saying that achievers give socializer's something to talk about, but I think that's too vague, they need to be giving socializer's something fun to talk about.

So I was just thinking, and I made this post, because I wondered what other people thought.

They're in the wrong game for that then. This goes back to my "blood from a stone" thing. It's understandable that they tried of course, but EQ1 has moved way way beyond the happy-go-lucky wild west early days of both that game and the genre in general.

For the masses to harness the benefits of the focused, there needs to be a better proportion of all types of players on a server (somewhat outlined in the Player Pyramid (http://www.mxac.com.au/drt/PlayerPyramid.htm)). The problem with EQ1 Progression Servers, I think, is that there just isn't that good cross-section of playstyles that existed in the early days of EQ1, or the early days of any game.

Over time, the server personality evolves. People stay or move on, finding a comfortable niche somewhere in the game. The camaraderie of the early days of a game are often borne of the collective learning being done at the time. Years later though, the game itself is so well understood that it's mostly left only to those people already interested in it to stick around and play it. Throughout that evolution, the proportion of various playstyles has changed.

Given that the progression server was built specifically to drive even more the sense of achievement, it is not surprising to see that the players for whom this most appeals are are not the Socializer types. Nor is it surprising to see those people at odds with everyone else. This is an old game with old rules the Achievers always dominated.

(and I just use the four common Bartle archetypes because others have here. I don't necessarily subscribe to that thinking any more than he does)

Because it's easier to do and MMOG players still buy the same shit repackaged year after year.

It also must be pretty flattering to have people who basically want to live their whole lives inside the world you created.  It would be hard to resist catering to those people.

But I suspect the real reason is that it is too expensive to cater to the people who want WoW's 1-50 mostly solo shitloads of content with lots of quests experience in a MMO to go on forever.  Basically, those people want you to produce a whole, new release-day WoW every three months or so.  For $15 a month.  Not gonna happen.

Achievers will always be the first to get the shiny.

Casual gamers will always whine that it takes too long to get the shiny, that it should just be given to them, because by golly - they pay their 15 dollars a month too!!!  Which is something I vehemently disagree with.  Just as in real life, if you want it, then go out and do the "work" necessary to get it.  Keep your welfare systems off my MMOs, please.

On the flip side, Achievers will burn through the content, whine to the devs.
Devs will (hopefully) listen to the achievers, create new content that is beneficial to the casual gamer.  It's also those catass uber achiever guilds that whine and complain about broken content/bugs...

And, all of this will never change.  Posting poetically on an internet forum will not change it.

Fuck you, games are not fucking work. Casual gamers aren't asking to be handed the shiny, they just want to have a reasonable expectation of getting the shiny in a fun way, instead of having to treat a game like a second job.

Ah, the voice of reason.  How I've missed you. Games being played for fun... why is that concept so lost on the masses?  Could you please take some of this to the ATitD forums.  Those people need a reality check... BADLY!

Well, there's fun, and there's fun. Getting an "epic" drop in Titan Quest after clicking on shit for a few hours may be considered fun to some, but in the world of MMOs, that's not a practical methodology for player reward. That said, EQ catass raids that last over 6 hours in execution and months in preparation is the sure sign that both developers and players have immersed themselves in a fantasy world just  a wee tad too deeply.

Well y'know, there are a lot of hobbies that aren't immediately very entertaining at all, but if you keep at it, the long term experience is a very rewarding one.

Which is exactly my point, the reason I asked why a business should bother changing what isn't broke, for them.

As to Casuals, look, it's pretty much a reality that there's content for them and content not for them. Same with Hardcore PvP, same with Hardcore PvE, same with Focused, same with everyone. Nobody should treat this as work. But nobody can ignore that some do. That's a fact.

I don't think Casuals are whining for more stuff in general. It's just the Whiny Casuals that are, the folks who I think aren't yet comfortable with the sort of players RL or interests allow them to be. It's not that their Casual. It's that they're Whiny, a macro-label applicable to every playstyle. I feel it's the responsibility of this group to leave or adjust their expectations. Every good game gives players "enough" to do. Just because there's people in AQ40 every other night doesn't mean the level 60 Faction soloing in EPL should automatically be part of it.

At the same time, there's requirements for all this stuff beyond what the game itself defines. Groups that achieve sometimes get to make those rules themselves, part of that emergent behavior that defines new rules of play. Companies are responsible for ensuring this doesn't get in the way of how the game is supposed to play. Definitely an ongoing struggle.

We're not talking about hobbies. We're talking about games.

Actually, the distinction is an interesting one. Ever try to explain to a console gamer who's never ventured into PC gaming, much less MMO-land, the concept of MMO gameplay dynamics? They slowly inch away from you and whisper to your loved ones. You overhear the word 'intervention' a lot.

Some definitely consider this a hobby. Consider that these purported "games" have little in common  with traditional game experiences. There's certainly a start and a middle, but there's no end save that defined by individual players. Heck, and that doesn't even get into the really-not-game type stuff like Second Life.

Then consider the sheer amount of time spent in these experiences and the reasons beyond some game-directed goal for doing so. Yea, most spend time doing gametic type things to achieve game-directed goals. But we can't ignore ingame weddings, funerals, social events and so on, especially since such things happen in even the most constrained environment.

I dare say that for some, MMOG's are neither a hobby nor a game... they're a lifestyle choice.

The definition of 'hobby' and the commonly accepted definition of a game are strikingly similar. I'd personally consider WoW to be a hobby of mine.

The only relation games have to hobbies is the time when are played i.e. in the offhours.

That doesn't make them "strikingly similar". Did you somehow forget what games are or what?

Did you forget what a hobby is? It's something you do for fun. Same with games. Whether it's done with people online or not, on a computer or on a table, seems irrelevant to me.

We're talking about WHAT a game is. Not WHY. Not WHEN. Not WHERE.

And I'm saying a game can be a hobby - just look at Warhammer. What does this have to do with catassing anyway?

MMOs are - to me - a hobby and not a game.

You can beat a game, it has a clearly-defined ending you work through the rule set to complete.  You can certainly replay a game forever, but each is a different session.  MMOs lack an ending, but can have games within them.

Raids can be a game within an MMO. - Objective: Kill the Boss
Battlegrounds are a game within an MMO - Objective: Win the BG

I'm sorry....I can't answer this without being succinct and rude (which, I'll admit, I already have been) or writing a short treatise (which I don't feel like doing).

But gratz anyhow. Nice jab. My mind boggles.

Because eventually, the gravy train runs out?

EDIT:
Yes, but I don't sew quilts or whittle. I play games for a hobby. The MMO medium is one that promises me games, but for the most part, gives me work on top of work disguised as a game.

I paint miniatures to play games, but when I stopped playing the miniature games, I stopped painting the miniatures for that particular game. When I play an MMOG, I want to play a game and when that game starts to resemble work, with schedules and grinds, I deicde there are better games to play.

In none of this am I asking that shit just gets handed to me. I'm not asking for free shiney without being willing to best a challenge. What I'm asking is that the challenge be something I can have fun at, instead of something I persevere through. Again, we're back to the old problem with MMOG's: the only player skill required is the ability to sink asstons of time into the game without stabbing people in the face from boredom or frustration.

Yea I hear that. I think this stall on evolution towards better game play is because of the hiccup WoW provided. We were on a path to get out of this diku2raid crap and WoW comes along so polished, it pulls in so many new people, people think the genre reverted to 2000 with 2006 technology. All of these new people need to be pandered to. They need to go through the same self-actualization process, trying on a long series of games until they get bored of the root concept of them.

Unfortunately, that creates Demand. Are these neophyte MMORPGers going to leave WoW for EQ1 or DAoC? I doubt it. Those games just reek of datedness. Rather, I think they'll go for newer alternates, maybe GW, maybe as far back as FFXI. But they'll be left wanting for more, and I think some in the genre will respond by giving it to them.

Sure, I believe some of them will find their way to Eve, ATITD and so on. But not in significant enough numbers to prop up the virtual lifestyle side of things against the DAoEQWoW version.

Taking that all into consideration and then looking at the very high bar for entering the genre with derivative_fantasy_00 MMO, I'm thinking that the response to this Demand can only be met by such companies as the bigguns: EA, Ubi, Codemasters, etc. It's why I think we see so much iteration coming from Codemasters. It's why I think EA picked up a company that knows how to deliver grind2raid so well. This is the sort of stuff they know best: derivate in an established process and then feed those who seek repeat content at the endgame.

It's also why I couldn't care any less for things like VG or Warhammer or anything else that so obviously smacks as eq_doneright_2324. These are old concepts that are for new players who weren't hear since them.

Meanwhile, PotBS, TR, AoC, and others are more than just new themes not yet exploited. They're new gameplay concepts in some ways, for people bored with the sameness. None will be huge, but "huge" doesn't matter to the veterans of the genre.

We want to play stuff we like and don't need millions of other people to justify trying something new out.

And fuck you too.

Part of the fun is the achievement, it all depends on one's point of view. 

You want the ulimate shiny?  Go out and earn it.  This applies to all types of games, both computer and "real life" (golf, tennis, basketball).  Just as in for example, golf, the more work (practice, etc) you put into it, the better your shiny will be (lower handicap).

If you're willing to "live" without the ubercatass shiny, then don't worry about it.  Let the ubercatass shiny chasers have it.

And, if you look at as work, then perhaps you shouldn't play.

My friend tried to convince me of this once, when he would spend hours on end in FFXI waiting for a dragon to spawn. It's a load of crap.

Your bias is showing, Darniaq.  I'll agree SOME segment (and that's an alltogether unknown number) will get bored and discover it's because they dislike DIKU.  However, some of us have enjoyed it and continue to enjoy it and will likely continue to along with an increased base from other folks who have discovered they enjoy it.  You make this same mistake every time you pontificate about the direction of the genre;  falsely assuming that because YOU don't enjoy it or see it as a long-term investment, it must be inherently flawed or wrong.   Therefore, any game that follows this design mode is 'setting back the genre.'

It seems as if you think "getting the shiny" is the actual objective of golf.

The objective of golf is to put a ball in a hole. Nothing else. That's the game. Anything else is a byproduct or a means in accomplishing that -- But they are not the main point.

It seems to me that if one wanted constant gratification as they play, then a pure refined diku experience would be the best model to back.  The more freeform a game seems to get, the less the developers can ensure that the player is taking part in their controlled experience.

I consider this to be a delightful piece of irony, and it will probably keep Dikus on top, short of anything really crazy.

The objective of golf is to put the ball in a hole in as few as strokes as possible.  And to beat the person/people you're playing against.  That's my shiny.  As well as being able to hit a low hook, or hit a power fade when I need to. 

The shiny is just a representation of your end goal.  For some, its the uber dagger one hit of death, or others it's carrying a tee shot 265 yards in the air.

The objective when playing golf is to hit the ball in the hole while enjoying a nice walk or golf cart ride in the open air.

See, it isn't all about achievement for everyone who plays. People like me who play with people like you end up whacking each other with golf clubs. I have no problem with achievmanauts having their games and enjoying them. What I have a problem with is those achievmanauts going to every game out there like locusts, driving the developers to make every game cater to their achievement-obsessed playstyle and then when the game is thoroughly ensconced in the achievmanaut mentality, they leave for another game because the devs couldn't get there fast enough.

I'm trying to enjoy whacking the ball in the open air when the drunk asswipe behind me keeps telling me how much I suck and exhorting me to hit faster, better, more while insulting my manhood and letting me know how much better at golf he is.

And achievers have problems with casuals who just want to "dumb down" the game and "give away" all meaning to its accomplishments.  And in fact I think that a lot of MMO's, including UO and EQ1, have histories of significantly dumbing down content and just making content more accessible.  Compare EQ1 with full xp penalties, boats, etc., to what we have today.  It's not a one-way street.

As far as I can tell, both sides bitch and whine incessantly.  And the winner of any individual forum battle on this has little to do with development.  I think most players vastly overinflate the importance of random forum bitchfests on the direction that the game gets developed.  From what I have been told by people working in the industry, it is things like exit surveys, focus tests and player histories that companies really look at.

I'd be curious to hear in what ways you think that uber achievers have shifted development on the games you've played.  Is it a matter of making the existing game less playable for casuals or is it simply a matter of allowing more achievement for uber players which then creates a longer distance between casuals and ubers and therefore makes casual players feel less proud of their achievements.  If it's the former then I think that can be a problem.  I'm just not sure how much of that actually goes on.  With the latter, well, as a "focused" player I strenuously object.  If there isn't a way for me to do something better or worse than anyone else then what is the point?

Most games are, in fact, trying to hit somewhere in between.  And so they have to put up with the constant culture clash of their audience as it contains both ends of the spectrum.  These games both dumb down certain things and make certain bits more accessible (look at how much EQ2 has done for this since release) and add additional content down the road for focused players to head towards. 

What are you talking about? Short of presenting me with a blank screen, they're already about as dumbed down as something could get.

Currently, the only thing difficult in an MMO, in ANY MMO, is the time investment. That's it.

And for some, the people they don't know.

I think you have me confused with someone else. Or are remembering what I used to write at WT.o or some such.

First, and most importantly, I don't see a "direction" for the genre at all. There's too many different games, players and companies chasing individaul needs for there to be a singular direction. Maybe some marketing guru will continue to split this stuff into sub-genres. Maybe not. Maybe genres are irrelevant until the "most successful" games (as measured by outsiders) start showing some true differences in playstyles.

Second, like anyone who's been around awhile, playing, watching and talking, I do try to see the longterm investment in these games, from the individual's point of view. I know it was fun in the old days to mock anyone who still played {whatever}. But the fact is, being an "outsider" in this genre is a daily reality for all of us.

It's ok to not like something millions of others do. I'm just interested in finding out why. What I currently like is irrelevant. It has to be. Every year it's different (in both game and playstyle/motivation).

Good discussion though. I love this abstract crap :)

I have to say, I didn’t miss out on killing Naggy because I was waiting for the boat.  I didn’t kill dragons because I was doing something else, something I wanted to do.

And this old saw about these games taking nothing but time, this isn’t actually true.  They also take the choice to use that time in specific ways.  No, this isn’t grandmaster chess, but there are skills needed for some content.  Haemish’s old sig said he didn’t play games to be a politician, but that is one skill you will need in house to hold a large guild together.  Perhaps it is right to say these games don’t take skill, but they do take choices and abilities.  If all these games took was time, then I’d be fishing on the dock in ButcherBlock wearing planar robes.


Whereas I am one of those who sees golf as something that screws up a perfectly good walk.  Games are always about choices.  But I think the choices presented in MMOs tend to drive people apart more than they bring them together.

Ever done C'thun, a twenty minute encounter, where five seconds of bad positioning from one in forty members at the wrong time will kill the raid?  There are guilds in WoW that have half the raiding schedule of other guilds, and accomplish exactly as much, if not more. 

How do you explain this?

By difficult you mean going to some web site, getting the secret to an encounter, then getting 40 people to do as their told.  I can see the last part taking skill. 

PvE in mmog's is easy.  The only thing even remotely interesting is being the first group to do an encounter.  Due to crazy things like a job and a personal life, I'm certain that's an interesting aspect I'll never partake in. 

No, after a few days, there's no real secret.  It comes down to coordination, rapid communication, and battle awareness as an individual and as a whole- some have it and some do not.

You can believe otherwise, but you would be wrong.

Most gamers are like drivers.  They all think that they're good at it.  Statistically, that can't possibly be the case. 

Second, I never said mmogs didn't take at least some modicum of skill.  I just stated that it didn't take much to be successful at pve in mmogs.  I'd also argue that for every 40 people in a raid, there are probably 5-10 that are good at the game being played.  Good enough to drag the other 30-35 along and still manage to succeed. 

> Rapid communication has now been turned to the voice chat programs.  Hardly rocket science. 

> Battle awareness = not screwing up.  Often doing nothing > screwing up, especially when there are enough competent people to accomplish the goal. I found this to be the case in most mmogs. 

> By coordination I assume you mean getting people to follow a unified scheme.  Now that, I admit, takes some talent to pull off. 

PvE in mmogs isn't hard.  It's not meant to be.  Given enough time, nearly every player gets to win.   

 

I'd buy that, if I saw a raid of people kill something like C'Thun in AuctionHouse greens.

You registered for that gem?  :roll:

That's what it comes down to though, isn't it? No matter how good of a player you are, unless you spend the time to gather all the previous top end gear and/or any special resist type gear for the zone, you just won't get anywhere. Your only as effective as your numbers in the end, and the only way to get the better numbers, is to spend the time farming it all up. With other games, you get better with time and practice. With MMO's, you spend time to get better. I guess you could say MMO's take some skill, but the bar is just so low, it is mostly moot when you take in the stat differences.

True. Except getting that gear is just one step up the tech tree, enabling you to get the next step up.

It's not just about time. Anyone who's played an active role in raiding has experienced the skill required. But it also absolutely is about time investment, both during the raid and prior to it during preparation (which in large part is about prior raiding).

Not everyone can do this. My thought is that a lot of people who can't already accept this. They may feel a twinge of jealousy for someone parading around in their Sunday Best at IF AH. But they may also realize that they themselves are simply unequipped, lifestyle-wise, to make such a serious effort. The better games offer these people things to do as well. It is, of course, also the major issue people have with pre-60 WoW and after. Personally, I think WoW still does a good job for the most part.

I went back and re-read the post you were referencing and can see how you think that's what I meant actually. It's not though, but my bad for not clarifying. I don't feel all, nor even most, will go from WoW to eventually SL, following some line of deepening preference for even more virtual lifestyle experiences. Heck, I'm a pendulum myself, back and forth from pure combat/diku to crafting/commerce. However, I do think some who leave WoW will eventually tire of the other games of the like and move to other experiences. There's a lot of breadth in this genre.

Doesn't mean Eve will hit 6.5mil from everyone who left WoW though :)

Do we actually believe that?



*shakes head*  Yes I've watched C'Thun be taken down along with a few of the other bosses from that latest instance whose name escapes me.  I've watched every boss in MC die, Ony, everything in AQ40, most of ZG.  It does take some skill but again the time spent component of said "skills" is way too fucking high.  The fact is for every "skilled" uber raider there are 100-1,000 players who could just as easily do that job but they dont have the pre-requisite gear / ability to suck cock to get into a hardcore raiding guild.

While it does take skill, the barrier between defeat and success is not skill its time spent in-game and willingness to devote your life to a game.

You can believe otherwise, but you should realize it really sounds like you are in a ub3r-raiding guild and want to convince yourself that your actually accomplishing something when you "win" the same pve encounter that has been lovingly "put on farm status" over and over.  All so a handful of members per run can get relatively minor upgrades to their character's effectiveness.  While you wait for Blizz to release the next raid encounter which will have a little bit of power-creep then it is time to do it again.  Meanwhile you most likely dont have much fucking time for pvp or anything but raiding with the current # of instances and the reset times.  Most raiding guilds dont have enough hours in the day and everything pre-BWL is being dropped or done much less regularly.

On the other hand, the other side sounds like they are trying to convince themselves that it doesn't matter if other players accomplish things they don't because they must be assholes.  If they didn't care then why invest so much into calling them assholes.  I think there is some truth to both accusations.

Isn't it possible just to stop caring and say: you have your achievements, I have mine?  For both sides?  Developers stop listening to these bitchfests after the first few posts anyway and it ends up just being egos that are being thrown back and forth.

There aren't just two sides here -- one casual, one less time constrained, both vying for "achievements" in their own way. It's more complex than that.

All of this backlash against catasses really comes down to the neglect of other playstyles. It's not about time or envy. It's about playstyles. It isn't easy to just "stop caring" when there aren't very many appealing MMOG alternatives, let alone other advancement paths within the same game as the one catasses are playing, for other types of players to flock to. There isn't one good game on the market, especially a big budget one, that is as intensely focused on "Explorers" or "fast paced, arcade action", for example, as these games tend to be focused on "Achievers", gear, and grinds.

Or to sum it up:

You have your achievements, and I don't give a fuck about achievements.

If there's anything that I'm jealous about, it isn't the catasses' schedules, it isn't their phat lootz, it isn't their raids on farming status, it isn't their serverwide fame, and it isn't their uber full tier 3 set --- It's that they've got the entire fucking MMO genre on lockdown. I want that shit.*


Note: I still have single and normal multiplayer games. I can still enjoy myself. It actually is possible for me to "stop caring". I don't need to play MMO's. But for the purpose of this thread, I'm going to act like it.

It doesn't sound like you want more Explorer/Socializer games, but rather, more people who think and play like you do. The bigger companies and their $20mil+ budgets spend their money (and justify getting it in hte first place) by following the trend.

At the same time though, I get the sense that some folks think this genre only has about 10 titles or so, or at least, 10 titles worth checking out. I'm thinking that's because people naturally gravitate towards experiences obviously attractive to other people.

But since some already know they don't fit into that mold anyway, I'm surprised they haven't taken it upon themselves to change their barrier of entry. There's plenty of densely-populated alternatives out there beyond the sameold.

I'm just using those as examples (though I do fall heavily under the "Explorer" category). My point is that there should simply be more variety -- Both on the level of what types of players you cater to, and what kind of gameplay mechanics are involved.

It isn't easy for people to go their own seperate ways and "not care", as Gabe suggests, when there isn't exactly anywhere for them to go to. For the most part, the only players who can happily go their seperate ways are achievers/"focused" types/catasses, etc.. The market is flooded like crazy with games that can only appeal to them.

Also, I'm not necessarily arguing for more people who think and play like me. I don't need games completely centered around my tastes (though it'd be great....even if there was just ONE). If it was possible for a single game to cater to many player types and offered different methods of advancement -- Hey, fine with me.* What would I care what everyone else does in it?

*I guess SWG tried to do just that. I'll give it some credit. Too bad the gameplay sucked.

I used that statement as an opening to the business rationale. I agree with you that other playstyles do not get the same focus as the achiever-types and their ilk. The better virtual worlds attempt to balance a number of different styles. Unfortunately, each is marked with its own special brand of broken.

But even that isn't the biggest hinderance in my opinion, since lots of MMOGs have problems. Rather, it's that there just aren't as many people seeking the experience you want, and therefore are not seen as a significant market for effort.

Personally, I think that's bunk. The bigguns in this genre are so focused on plying what is, they're missing the tens of millions of people playing online games everywhere else but here. They miss these people by making games that require massive times sinks and no-emergency-AFK dedication because that sells and has prompted emergent industries like RMTing such that now publishers can get their own cut (as we all watch the influx of Far East titles and/or the business models behind them).

This is cannabalization of a player archetype though, diminishing returns. It's a shame too, but not everyone is as fixated on them. It's just that the games that aren't fixated on the WoW-type player also don't get the coverage. That I feel is because a good number of people talking the most about the genre came up through achiever-focused games, creating a bit of media cannabalization as well. How many more places do we need talking about the same dozen titles?

That's why, finally, I mentioned earlier about those people off playing games not talked about in many of these places. They're different games for different people talked about in very different places without the shackles of "convention" as defined by diku.

Will that matter? Will there be some type of WoW killer in the form of MySpace with a graphical client? Maybe. I do think that the next game to make it big ain't coming from any of the usual suspects though, because they are, and their supporters are, locked in a specific mindset.

Please define the MEANING of accomplishments in MMOG's. Wait, I'll do it for you. They mean fuckall, other than your own self-aggrandizement or the puffing up of your group of closeted rejects. Seriously, being the first to kill Vox in EQ really doesn't mean a damn thing to anyone outside of the people who accomplish it and the small cadre of sycophants that cling to these hopeless achievemanauts like the barnacles to the underside of a ship.

EQ only dumbed down content when the new expansions were about to be released. The boats were changed because the EQ devs kept breaking them and just got tired of fixing them or were unable to. The full xp penalties were most of the time either broken or just plain implemented wrong.


Sure there is. But what has traditionally happened in MMOG development, from EQ down to WoW is that the egomongers have driven the development. In EQ it was especially bad, because the developers of that game (McQuaid, Butler) took it as a personal insult when the Furors of the world beat their uber encounters in record time. So they tuned up the difficulty of encounters based not on skill, but on the mudflated item levels that the FOH's of the world had. They tuned encounters to be really hard for the ubers, and everyone else was fucked, because they didn't have the gear or the time or the levels to match. Kunark is the perfect example. Just plain walking-around encounters in Kunark were about 25% more difficult compared to their equal-level counterparts in the old world, all because the developers wanted to cockblock the FOH's of the world. Monsters hit harder, had more hit points and resistances, but gave mostly the same experience, all because the top 1% of the population could handle the stuff trivially. As a casual player, you couldn't keep up no matter what your individual player skill.



EQ2 has made itself more accessible because it was getting killed in box sales and subscriptions.

The uber-focused players are the squeaky wheel that gets more grease. WoW is another good example. Despite the fact that the best numbers that Blizzard can come up with show that only about 25-33% of the playerbase raids at all, every content-adding patch has added a raid dungeon for the highest levels. They monopolize the dev cycles because they chew up content so fast, leaving the rest of the playerbase starving for scraps. And this is a game that has done some things to cater to the casual player (fast leveling curve, lots of solo content) and has reaped success for it.

This thread isn't even an argument.  It's a goddamned cliche.

Actually, the MMOG medium has about 4 titles worth checking out, none of which hold my interest very long. WoW (because everything else is the same shit with varying flavors of sprinkles), Eve (which I just find too boring unfortunately), Second Life (which I just can't get myself into no matter how much I love the potential) and Planetside (which can be played for free and isn't as good as some non-massive counterparts). That's it. Everything else is just a different variation on the same thing. 

personally i don't think there is a way to design a pve game without falling in to one of these pitfalls. How can you get around the fact that no matter how great the content is or who you cater it for, you essentially have all of the players waiting on the dev team to pump out new shit?

PvP is the only thing that remains dynamic because if there is some sort of ranking or objective (like towns or castles) it changes based on player activity and the players don't need to wait for the dev team to implement content.

I also think a good way to balance the skill = time issue would be to limit the amount of abilities which you can bring in to combat (sort of like guild wars) so that those who put in a lot of time have the advantage of diversity, but the actual character power should be about equal. Also to take one of the formats from competitive FPS games, you could have a weekly ranked match and setup a sort of in game league with a big tournament of the top ranked teams every couple months.

I agree with you in part WindiaN. There's a nice balancing technique GW uses, limiting the abilities.

The biggest problem with PvE in my opinion is that it's basically a rudimentary RPG without any real narrative and therefore no real end. People are not going to stop playing at level 60/75 just because they hit that point when there's always room for some form of improvement to be had. By the time they hit the cap, they're so accustomed to acquisition, they want more of it.

After, of course, convincing companies that collect so much money that this is actually a problem for them, one way to solve it would be to revert PvE to more traditional RPGing. Strong story, obvious cap, and then let the rest of the open-ended game take over. Sorta like a contrived UO, or what Age of Conan is trying with their 20-level solo-RPG front end (with public social and trade spaces) and 20+ PvP. Should be interesting. I’m a big fan of trying to leverage the aspects of this genre that make it unique, like large-scale PvP, commerce/economices, social emergent behavior, etc.
The core concept of EQ2 from way back in the design days was exactly that. It was SOE's misinterpretation of what "accessibility" truly meant that Blizzard has educated them on since. Basically, there was s "SOE accessible" and "everyone else accessible".

At the mechanical level, yep. The nuances of delivery and community set each apart though, but the latter is the more important part, the element that makes even derivative schlock palpable. I’d recommend ATITD3 for the very different crafting system, DDO for what interesting dungeon romping is like, MxO because apparently it actually has gotten better and Eve if you haven’t played in the last 18 months or so (only because the last two times I tried it, I was bored in a day, whereas this time I’ve been in for months).

Ya gotta find the right people though. ATITD and DDO suck alone, and Eve has a good F13 contingent already.

Yay for Teh Hate.

We need something like Jon Stewart's rant at Crossfire (http://www.ifilm.com/ifilmdetail/2652831?htv=12) for all the people who think that mindlessly hating and name-calling at the other side of MMORPG discussions actually accomplishes something.

"Say something nice about Achievers, right now."

Come on, you can do it.

Once you get past your first MMOG, the mechanical level is mostly all their is. I was immersed in EQ1 for the world. Since there, it's been all mechanics after the first 3 or 4 days of play.

And MxO may have gotten better, but it's still crap.

For YOU it may be that objective.

But not for me.  I'm a competitive person by nature.  I've played sports, in some fashion, all my life:  17 years of baseball (T ball to four years at a major Division I university), 12 years of football, 8 years of soccer, 7 years of boxing, 6 years of wrestling, and now playing mens softball and indoor soccer when time allows.  And I've played golf for 26 years now, with a single digit handicap.  Even when I get the earliest tee time possible, and it's just me and the course, I'm still competing against myself and the course.  

I don't see the point in doing *anything* and not trying to be the best I can absolutely possibly be at it.

Do I understand that there are people that aren't as driven as me to "be the best"?  Sure.  Do I look down on them?  No.  I realize everyone isn't as competitive, achievement oriented as I am.

You might do well put on a set of blinders and not worry about anyone else other than yourself.  That's what I do, and works perfectly.

As I said, the objectives and desires of the players are different. I'd have no problem with achievmanauts conquering their own piles of pixels if that's all they did. But their achievements drive almost the entire development cycle, spinning an ever-growing mountain for the casual players to climb. And it's a mountain we can't finish climbing, because it's always going to grow faster than we can tackle it.

I'd rather all content at all levels just auto-scaled to the level/item/power of the opponents at all times. You level 60 and uber-geared up? You get the assfucking version of Vox. You have Auction House greens and only level 35? You get the version of Molten Core that gives you just enough of a challenge to be fun without holding you down and dryhumping your rotting corpse.

But then, devs would have to make content that was unique and interesting, instead of endless iterations of level +1, because the homogenity of the mechanics would just seem too transparent at that point.

There are times that I completely agree with HaemishM, and this is certainly one of them, although I would change one thing --
It's not that I can't finish climbing the mountain or even that it's growing faster than I have the ability to consume... it's that I don't want to consume it that fast. I don't need the ego gratification that bad that I have to button mash until I feel self-actualized.

One can be competitive without the achiever mindset. One can compete without actually having the conscious drive to compete. The two are not synonymous. I've played sports (organized and otherwise) for a great deal of my life too. I've had great competitive and victorious moments both personally and on teams, but I'm hardly the "competitive" type in the commonly understood sense. I was good at a few sports and athletic abilities for a variety of reasons -- And my interest in those games sustained simply because they were fun. Not because I was competitive.

Back to Diku games. It's quite possible to be competitive in them and not really do it for the same reasons achievers do it for either. For example, there was once a time when I could plow through content, get all my shit, and do all the things a catass does --- But all by virtue of me just wanting to "explore".

Problem with that is, for an "explorer", that kind of experience can only happen once. Later on, there's nothing to keep that going. It's not really exploring when you know how these games work from the inside out.

In the end, is that really a bad thing?  In my (admittedly) naive outlook, that means the casual gamer never runs out of content.


Sounds like the Holy Grail of MMOs.  Sign me up.

Is the technology there to do that, and at what cost to the consumer?  And what cost is the *average* consumer willing to pay to get it?

Pfft.  Online achievement has no meaning, but at the same time it isn't fair that one can't have the same achievements as the ubers, time and/or commitment be damned.

At this point, most sane people shrug their shoulders and have fun with what they can find.  For the rest, it is an endless war for a playstyle that no development team has been able to substain or realize.

If EQ2 can autoscale a player down as well as they do for mentoring, then the content should be easy to autoscale as well. In fact, The Splitpaw Saga adventure pack instances all auto-scale to the average level of the group/soloer from 20-50. This did not mean that the content wasn't fun, in fact. It was done well enough. The content was reasonable enough be defeated unless you made a big mistake. It could be gamed by having the higher levels mentor down, lowering the average level, entering the instance, then unmentoring.

You'd think that, but that's not what happens. What happens is they run out of patience, and either get burned out or bored and leave the game. This then makes the achievmanauts a larger percentage of the playerbase than they should be, and it's a self-defeating cycle.


Instancing. City of Heroes already does this with missions to a certain extent, and even DDO has difficulty levels on its instanced dungeons. But you don't have to have instancing to do this, it just requires thinking beyond time-gated cockblocked content trains.

The concern I've had with this idea since Diablo 2 (which scaled zones based on levels of group members, ala CoH) is that the game is never harder nor easier at any particular level. It can easily become always the same challenge, just with different flashes. There's no real persistence per se, no way for elders to pass down their knowledge, no way for players to share equipment, no real need for an economy of scaling-up equipment. Granted, if all ya ever do in WoW is Kill X for Y quests, the game is the same from 20 to 60.

For people who can't or don't want to compete in that arena, those issues are non-issues. However, I believe in the heterogenious player society, one that has many different playstyles within. Each game has different types of people in them, regardless of the relatively few barking nutjobs on the game forums. This isn't about "Casuals vs Hardcore", it's about players who generally feel they have the same opportunity as everyone else... until they don't believe it anymore.

An auto-scaling game feels too homogenous to me, something that could be sold on that feature alone but which doesn't really have a "massive" quality. Maybe that's fine. There's plenty of games where the massive is questionable, Diablo 2 included.

But for those who want to leverage the presence of thousands or tens of thousands of other concurrent users, how can we balance the diversity of players that make up a more stable society against the rigors of a game development cycle decidedly focused on the warrior-elite class within it?

To me, the answer is a diversity of experiences within the larger whole. We see that somewhat already, with the different-rules environments in most MMORPGs, and the newer games with even more compartmentalized sub-playgrounds (PvP+, PvP-, iPvP competitions, etc). Good environments for the integration of auto-scaling content. Maybe it's more of that, or maybe there's something else?

The problem is that WoW encounters are too unique and interesting to make iterative in the way you want.  It would be very easy to make iterative Vox or iterative Avatar of War.  Iterative C'Thun, not so easy.  Even an iterative Upper Blackrock would be tricky.  Not utterly impossible like scaling those encounters for smaller or larger groups (another thing people often ask for as if it would be a simple matter of lopping off x DPS or y hit points), but still pretty hard.

This conversation just seems to be proving to me that a lot of players will never admit that:

1) They really do want the shiny.  And their problem is really that other people have it and they don't.  Otherwise they wouldn't care if there was a mountain of content to plow through because that would just mean lots of play value.
2) Other games were made after EQ1.
3) Just because a consumer wants something doesn't mean that there is a market for it.

Most of these are just leftover arguments that people never gave up after they were killstolen from in EQ1 by an uberguild.  Nevermind that even the most vanilla, DIKU games (WoW and EQ2) have moved on quite a bit from there.

And really what Haemish wants is a total sandbox world with no progression.  And that's fine.  It's just not something that sells very well.  Even the vast majority of casuals want to feel that they were capable of things today they weren't capable of last week and for games that have players of all colors, and are expected to be played for months or years, that means a very long pipeline of content.

Massive and persistence are both HIGHLY OVERRATED. They are also the two biggest factors fucking up MMOG design, IMO.

I see this claim a lot from people, but I'm not convinced it's really true.  I, for one, don't care WHAT other people have in these games, but when I hit a brick wall in content that I can consume, that annoys me.

Who doesn't want the shiney? Of course people want the shiney. But a mountain of content is NOT lots of play value, especially in PVE MMOG's when the variance between encounters is almost exactly the same from level 1 to level 60 (or 70, or 100 or 200) unless you manage to get 40 of your closest friends together. Bashing a wild boar at level 1 and bashing a murlock at level 60 in WoW isn't really that different. I will give WoW some credit for having instances that have some decent srcipted boss encounters like Deadmines. But the proportion of decent scripted PVE encounters compared to samey-same encounters is wildly out of whack.

In short, repetition is not play value.


Sure, but 95% of them have all been a reskinned EQ with features changed, lopped off or made easier. WoW really is EQ done right. Well, sort of right. Right-ER, I suppose.


Not really. See above.


Sure, it'll never sell WoW numbers. It may never even make EQ1 numbers. But that doesn't mean it can't be profitable.

I didn't even play EQ. And my first exposure to a Diku game happened to be with an uberguild. One that dealt with a harsher environment than kill stealing at that.


If that was true, then every game on the market would be an RPG.

That is actually the argument against your proposed sandbox world.  I agree that there is a sense in which WoW players never really progress although there are a lot of ways in which that is not true:

-- at 60, you can kick the ass of whatever you fought at level 50
-- you can get items, learn techniques, etc., that make you better without increasing your level.  And at level 60 that is the entire progression.
-- the types of fights you fight tend to change over levels
-- despite cries to the contrary, there is actually at least a modicum of skill in a lot of these games ... some players do get done in an hour what it takes others 5 hours to do ... some guilds manage to organize far more successful raids, etc.  It may not be the sort of skill you are interested in but it is there and there are lots of others that are indeed interested.

Your world, as you present it, is repetitive in a completely transparent manner which isn't really doing anyone a favor.  And it's going to make it hard to prevent the feeling of repetition because the limitation of being able to scale content to any level is in fact quite restrictive on design.  You don't even have the slight caveats above to the fact that the player is not progressing.  While there is a sense in which WoW doesn't have progression, the progression it does have is presented well enough that players don't notice or care.  And it does matter to them that they can kick the ass of whatever they fought 10 levels ago.

I thought it was taken for granted that this was all in the context of RPG's.  So yes, my comment is just about RPG players.  FPS's and other multiplayer games exist ... and yay for them ... but they're not what I'm talking about now.

I agree almost completely with StGabe. However, I also need to point out that there is a market for non-standards. In fact, given the capping WoW has applied to the concept, exploration of the non-standard is all but a business requirement.

Lots of folks are not a big enough market, yet they're here anyway. Who the hell cares if their game "only" has 50k or 100k or whatever accounts. The amount of active subscriptions is only as relevant as the business model behind it, and CCP, Tepper, Linden Labs and so on are all doing fine. Unless you'e in one of the few uniserver worlds out there, everyone beyond your own server's population is academic anyway, a life you'll likely not touch.

Just like wanting the shiny, some people can't help but want to be part of the crowd, part of something "everyone" likes. That's where you get leaders, followers and the people who don't give a shit either way. If you follow the crowd, you're going to see the same shit you saw years ago with a bunch of people that weren't there, or who don't want anything different.

Make up your own damned mind. Instead of waiting for your playstyle to pop up on the radar of marketable relevance, see if there's any one of the dozens of other titles that already fulfill the need. Then you'll see why so many titles bear very little resemblance to EQ1.

Sure, 95% of the accounts may be in some knockoff. The 5% is no number to sneer at, and that assumes you care about an academic stat in the first place.

FWIW, I do agree that the future of MMORPG's for us more "specialized" players is in smaller, niche products. 

I look at it like this:
I don't care for McDonald's.  I don't like Budweiser.  I never wear what's in style.  I read obscure fiction.  I listen to lots of indie music and old jazz.  Since when have I ever been mainstream?  So it's not that surprising that mainstream MMO's aren't really satisfying my particular playstyle.  WoW is really the McDonald's of MMO's.  And I expect it, and games like it, to do very well for quite some time.  Even though I get bored playing WoW, I feel that I can understand why others enjoy it. Sure, progression is kind of shallow.  But it makes sense to its players.  There's where you were at killing bears 10 levels ago.  There's where are at now, killing murlocs, and there's where you will be at in 10 levels, killing scarlet monastary people.  It may be a very simple (or to most of us on boards like this, boring) narrative but it's a very accessible, easy, consistent and working narrative.  Not a lot of games have that.

My hope is in crazy, experimental, low-population games.  I try to find time to try whatever is out there when I can.  I've given up on Holy Grails, though, and I try to keep my expectations reasonable. 

Is there a good tracker/list(s) of these games somewhere you'd recommend?  Most everything on the market I disdain now, except Eve.  Logging onto any of the regular MMOs to play with friends is even a chore.  I fear I've been infected with the cynical anti-MMO virus.

Weeeeelllllll, here's the thing.

A golfer with a 30 handicap isn't relegated to playing on Broken Glass Hills golf course, conveniently located next to the sewage treatment plant.

In fact, the only time said golfer _can't_ show up at Posh Pines and tool around the verdant valleys in a golf cart is when there's a tournament on. Which is, what, every couple months maybe?

--GF

Likewise, I don't need to shoot under par to "unlock" the back nine.

Please to point me to these titles. They are few and far between right now. Off the top of my head I can think of:

Planetside (FPS with EQ level treadmill)
The Sims Online (blech with a treadmill)
Eve (Boring Excel spreadsheet gameplay IMO)
A Tale in the Desert (No combat)
Ultima Online (Like having a date with my grandmother)


Everything else has too much EQ in it for my tastes, if not a direct ripoff of EQ or a shittastic bugfest. I've made up my own damn mind, and it's that I don't like what the MMOG medium is giving me.

Planetside is not a levelling treadmill, although some might argue it can become a combat treadmill (same three contested continents 90% of the time.) You can re-cert every 6 hours. This means level 10 or 12 (out of 25) is fine for casual play and BR10 takes maybe 4-5 nights ina full squad on a contested continent.

Planetside is just boring after awhile, needs more world.

Tribes1 is free to d/l (full game) do yourself a favor and play that over PS.

I tried to get into Planetside....I just couldn't do it.

Planetside has allways been a great vehicle game for me.  Nothing like seeing a combined arms group of prowlers, raiders, mechs, and aircraft rolling up against an OPFOR and letting the chaos of battle go nuts.  When it switches to the inside game I go nuts as I don't care for it as much, which is too bad, since many fps types want that infantry/inside feeling to be the main theme. 

Planetside is great, without a fee. That they continue to carry a fee has always surprised me. I'd drop into and out of that game for weeks at a time every few months if I didn't have to pay for it. If that means making it all ad-enabled, fine. I don't care. It's an FPS I can play without getting steamrolled by jolt-nuts.

There's two different lists I reference for stuff I may have missed, with the first being much better for the obscure, or at least, not-talked-about-here/at-lummies.

• Virtual Worlds Online (http://www.virtualworldsreview.com/info/categories.shtml)- this link is a list of them all by category. Some stuff in there I've never heard of.
  
• The list at MMORPGdot (http://www.mmorpgdot.com/index.php?hsaction=10060&mode=letter&search=A&initial=0&max_lines=4&sid=48196ae3a850af9790340fcb9114a45a) seems to have most of them. This way you can go through the list, compare to stuff you've heard about here, and decide to give something a shot.

First, do you want a different game or a better WoW (as in, one that doesn't suddenly become an oppressive timesink at a relatively easy-to-reach level cap?). And I ask because while your utopia has been defined (reads like non-competitive light-multiplayer auto-scaling content), that doesn't exist outside of the some features in Diablo II.

Sadly onrpg.com is a great place to find lists of free games and usually they are buzzing about 1-3 titles that have recently come out.  You get what you pay for 90% with MMO titles though so dont expect too much.  Also stay out of the forums they are very vaulty.

I'll probably keep bitching about MMO's for awhile, I think. What can I say? I know what I want. Every once in awhile, a game comes along with a few neat ideas, but it's nothing to actually keep me happy.

Dream game, as I've stated elsewhere, is: Third person action set in the Wild West (i.e. Gun), PvP based around harsh losses and large territorial control, with Whorehouse/Railroad/Mayor/49'er mini-Tycoon metagames to boot. Details are sketchy -- But hey, if someone even attempted half of that, I'd totally be there.

If you're truly casual, why is the burnout factor so high?


IMO, instancing defeats the purpose of an MMO.  But it's a double edged sword: Achievers, who 99 percent of the time are min/max'd out, dominate the spawn/area, leaving no chance for casual gamers.  But then again, why does a casual deserve just as much chance as a hardcore gamer?  Just because they pay the same fee? 

Because the time commitment to feel like you are doing much more than spin your wheels is so goddamn high, and the repetition required is so well, repetitive. The gameplay in MMOG's, especially dikus, just isn't enough to keep casual players interested for years at a time without some stickiness like guilds (friendships), grinds (leveling treadmills) or never-ending new content.



Yes, that's pretty much it. I pay the same $15 you pay, why SHOULDN'T I have the opportunity to tackle the same challenges? I'm not asking to have the stuff handed to me, I'm willing to fight the big, bad dragon. I just don't want to have to bash 50 bazillion helpless bunnies squared to do so. If you can give me a compelling reason why two players with differing play styles who pay the same fee shouldn't have access to the same content (without using the word work at all in your explanation), you'll get a virtual cookie. As in, the cookie will be in your mind.

I just don't think you want to play MMORPG's.  You want to play at most 6-player games with chat clients that let you talk to all your friends.  Seems like Trillian and Diablo II/Warcraft III/Halo/whatever is your optimal "MMORPG".

This statement should have made that obvious.  There are more then one vision of where the "medium" should head, mine personally is towards more open-ended player-driven-content virtual world style offerings.  That embrace persistence and massive, and get rid of shit like instancing.  More pvp too kplzthx.

Others seem to be looking more for MMO's to just become a natural extension of the RPG genre. Small parties, limited interaction with random players.  Something like  DDO with WoW's attention to detail and more content, CoX with less grind, WoW with less cockblocks upon hitting L60 if I'm understanding the other side correctly.  In a few years were going to have to invent some new terms to define the two goals, but for now all we've got are halfassed versions of both side's wants with the current crop of DIKU-bullshit.

Nobody wins.

Well it didn't make it obvious but yes, that goes right along with all of this (and I almost quoted that).  The important bit to me though is that what's being asked for isn't an MMORPG anymore.  Persistence (moreso than massiveness) is the core of the genre.  Without persistence we're talking about stuff that already exists and all that you really want out of the genre is the chat channels. 

And I'm trying to understand why it is important to yell at people who like Soccer when really your only point is: "I don't like Soccer, I like Baseball."

Exactly. I understand the desire to be protected from the randomness of potential catasses and to have boutique experiences balanced for one's own lifestyle. But as discussed, there's not a huge marketshare for that right now when you look at MMORPGs in general.

However, we need to realized that immersive online games are still relatively niche when compared to ALL online games. There's a good amount of people paying a lot of cash to be immersed in massive time-sinky games. But there's a lot more, by orders of magnitude, seeking diversional entertainment, both alone and with friends.

I firmly believe the next big MMO will come from outside the current development community, and not be for any of us here :)

Speak for yourself, bud  :-)

My discontent stems from the genre not behaving or resembling all of the other fun games I'm playing/have played. I want to see these various ideas applied. From the first time I heard about MMO's, the "massive" part appealed to me --- There's a lot of potential in that. It just keeps getting thrown away in favor of molding all of these games into Massive RPG's -- A crappy form of RPG at that.

Hell, I barely like polished, single player RPG's. And don't even get me started on just "fantasy" in general.

[EDIT] Spelling. Yuck.

I like WOW well enough.

I even like it better if playing with RL friends.

What I don't like:  I can't get the cool "end-game" gear without having to repeatedly group with a bunch of people I don't really know and mostly dislike. 

If they could fix that, I'm all good.

I don't believe Darniaq means it won't be fantasy, or even that it won't be an RPG.  He means it won't be an FPS, RTS, TBS, Hack&Slash or any of the other familiar game-types.   Most traditional gamers probably won't even call it a game at all, as it'd be something more akin to Massivly Multiplayer Sudoku or Bejeweled or Boggle.  Thus why he made the statement about a lack of appeal to anyone here.

Also; while it throws me in with the 'rabble' of Gabe, Snake & Hoax I agree.  It's pretty obvious that many folks here just plain don't like MMOs at all.  It makes the discussion that much more pointless when one 'camp' is arguing for things already offered in SP games with Multiplayer options, they just don't want to play them for some reason.   As someone else said, Massive & Persistant are the entire core of the genre.  Remove those and you've got single player games.

Back to the "Why shouldn't short-session-time players get access to lewtz like long-session- time players?"  There's no good reason they shouldn't.   Quests, 7-10 man content, whatever (in RPGs, which like Gabe I assumed the whole discussion was initially about.)  to let them access the same stuff over-time.   It just shouldn't take LESS time over-all than large-group (which in itself takes a long time.) or else why have large-group, and if you're not going to do large-group why try for Massive.

Oh. I assumed he meant that when he said the next big thing won't come from the "current development community" -- Which, to my mind, meant those who come from and/or learned their lessons from MUDs.

Darniaq, can you clarify?

I don't care if it takes more time -- just let it be consumed in smaller time chunks.

I went through Sunken Temple the other day and it embodies what I like least about games of this particular mold -- pretty cool the first time around, good puzzle with the snake statues that need to be turned on, but the 2nd, 3rd, 100th time time through that place is interminably long and needlessly tedious. Our group is fairly well disciplined yet it took more time than I care to give in one session. If it could have been broken up into smaller sessions over a period of time then I would be more happy.

No, I want MOG's. Or MORPG's. The MASSIVE part is just reaching. There's no good goddamn reason to shove 3000 players into the same server community other than to be able to brag about numbers. But server populations of 600-1000? That's right about the sweet spot. Seriously. I don't see anything that having a large community of 3,000 concurrent users (translating into about 24,000 accounts and between 24,000 - 150,000 characters) on a server solves anything. It makes things worse, because it actually ends up stifling community development as opposed to fostering it. What happens is that most people withdraw into their cliques, with a inbred sub-community numbering around 100, maybe 200. These people only interact with each other and a few other friends. So you have hordes of little insular sub-communities running around ignoring everyone else unless those other people interact negatively (kill-stealing, spawn-hopping).

There's a sweet spot there in terms of gameplay, server costs, bandwidth and network usage that no one seems willing to find. All the devs want to do is pack as many folks onto one server as possible to cut down hardware costs, even if that means impacting the playability (lag, queues). A balance between cost issues and community issues needs to be found. Just falling back on EQ1 for a moment, EQ1's server community was never more alive than when concurrent users were capped at 1500 (right around Kunark). Beyond that number, all the little sub-communities began to withdraw into their raid shells.

As for persistence, all that has given us is static, boring worlds. The only thing that needs to be persistent is personal statistics, and perhaps some items (not all). But the world needs to change, the quests need to change (and I don't mean just adding MORE quests), and everything else needs to change. It doesn't have to be fast change. People need to be shook up. They need to create an alt and find all those quests they leveled up on gone and others in their place, to maintain some sense of replayability. Instead, the devs just tack on more at the "endgame" justifying it by saying "Everyone gets to maximum level sooner or later." That's a copout. Of course they get to maximum level. That doesn't mean you should just add levels. Encourage the making of alts by altering the level landscape, making the journey up a different journey instead of a more efficient repetition of the same road.

But again, THESE THINGS ARE HARD. And since there is money to be made iterating on a proven formula, no one wants to try something different. I'm not blaming them, but I am saying that if they want my dollars, they have to try harder.

I call bullshit. There's a huge marketshare for non-timesinky games, they just won't look or play like the hacky-slash shit we've been used to playing as MMOG's. But MMOG devs have to think outside the level grind, fantasy genre, retreaded single-player RPG's with chat mindset that makes up 99% of all MMOG's right now.

I think that you are describing, Haemish, already exists.  It is called XBox Live.  Or Battlenet.  And it still has problems and limitations of course.


What's the justification for this?  I think that plenty of worlds are going outside the box.  Puzzle Pirates for example.  Or ATitD.  And while they're making a buck they're not demonstrating a "huge marketshare".  I think this is just the standard fallacy of projecting one's own desires onto the market at large.  For me it's no longer a surprise that what I want isn't mainstream.  I'm not mainstream in any other market, why should MMORPG's be the exception?

As for the players per server "sweetspot" I also think that you have no justification for your desires here.  I think that we see high populations per server exactly because this is the sweetspot, economically.  Smaller servers with smaller playerbases requires more overall maintenance per player.  The only MMORPG, fwiw, that is approaching your model is Second Life which averages a ridiculously low number of players per server.  But it does this basically by renting out server space at a prices that dwarf what players pay for games like WoW.  There was a recent, interesting discussion about this sparked when the CEO of the company that does Puzzle Pirates called this model unsustainable.  Too lazy to find a link.

Good mass market MMOG's of the future will be based on an X-Box Live type of service, not a 1 game = $15/month. Extrapolate the Station Pass into something that doesn't suck balls.


Justification? Mobile phone games. Parlor games like Pogo.com. The pretty decent influx of gambling sites. Essentially, everything that isn't an MMOG right now, only projected 5-10 years in the future with a generation that grew up playing video games of some kind either casually or seriously. The emergence of online, mass market consoles. The fact that video games make as much revenue as first-run movies, only with genres and subject matter that has never been mainstream (fantasy, shooters, etc.)

But as Darniaq said, the people who make the mints at this kind of thing won't be the ones making bank now, because they can't see how it would be profitable.

That's not sufficient.  Sure, casual gaming is big and will continue to grow.  That's not an argument, however, that casual gaming will merge into the genre of MMORPG's.  Puzzle Pirates is a data point that doesn't confirm your (or Darniaq's) notions.  Puzzle Pirates actually did a lot of internet advertising in casual domains and they still didn't pick up that much of a fanbase.  I think that we will see casual game services, like Pogo, continuing to pop up.  I think there is great potential for that market.  However, I think these services may offer some virtual worldy features like showing off your trophy room or letting you decorate a house to invite people to, generally I don't think they will be much like all the things that I think the word "MMORPG" means to us.  We're looking at the next generation of Yahoo Games and Pogo here, not the next generation of EQ/WoW/et al.  It will stress player-matching and chat with a bit of profile customization but will not offer a whole lot of persistence or world which is really what makes an MMORPG.  IMO.


So yes, I definitely think that online gaming services will grow.  I just think that this will happen in parallel to, and not on top of or instead of what we now know of as MMORPG's.

edit: grammar typo

COGs have issues of their own. Great for publishers and aggregators, but the model of content development still needs a lot of fleshing out.


Yep. And while you called bullshit on me earlier, we do actually agree. I said there was no opportunity for the boutique microworld right now, specifically because of what I go into below (to clarify the earlier post).
I actually meant that the next big thing won't come from current MMORPG developers, themselves either from MUDs or building games off of the same lessons of MUDs. It'll come from totally left field stuff, maybe not even based on a singular-focus on game-directed achievements either. Sorta like what Merusk said.

If you're interested in that sort of trending, it's important to not just stick with what SOE and the like are doing. There'll always be a place for that of course, just as ATITD can exist alongside WoW. But I keep going back to one record WoW broke: the number of U.S-based MMORPG accounts. They effectively doubled it by themselves. To 3 million, and by pulling in players of very similar playstyles to those already here. That just isn't all that much when looked at from the scope of, say, casual online games or MySpace.

The "next big thing" to me isn't going to come from this genre. It's going to be a new title that's called "MMO" for the easy messaging, but which is a different experience targeting someone different. It may not be a single experience at all, but rather a collection of them a player is free to jump around. While there's SOE's Station Pass as one example, it's still "try games that are/not Everquest in style". Experientially similar to different from EQ is a very narrow scope from which to start.

Maybe it'll be a license-based compendium of massive experiences. Maybe it'll be a distributed world, like a beehive hosted experience that builds from grass roots, like MySpace, or XBLA, or RealArcade, with a 3D client. Maybe it'll be a Far Eastern manga-based title since Manga are starting to take off. It'll probably not target current 18-34 year old males either, but rather, a larger group with looser purse strings and greater buying power (like today's tween girls and teens). And it'll probably not have the same sadistic time-sinky crap that clearly defines the niche subgroup of this already relatively niche genre (in the U.S.).

Another important datapoint while there are probably more people playing solitaire/tetris/etc. right now than WoW, most of them aren't paying anything to do so.  The revenue of WoW alone is (by rough estimate) right around the revenue of the entire US casual games market.

If you look at the PC side of the market only. XBLA arcade though (http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=10054) features a much higher conversion rate, for a subscription base projected to be 6mil by next year. Being a closed system targeting traditional spenders with a broader appealing service helps them of course.

But putting that aside, we can't discount the price to deliver WoW. Whether it was $60mil or $100mil, it was still car-fulls of cash almost no other company either has or would be willing to spend on one project (though iirc Driv3r cost around $50mil... yea... good spend there). Compare that to the cumulative cost to deliver every demo-to-purchase COG title, and I think WoW would still beat them all.

Finally, COGs themselves aren't really a good comparison as they current exist, because most are sold on a traditional retailer model: a single environment in which to browse hundreds of titles. When they start getting connected, when there's some sort of community, when there's a metaphorical consistency between the titles, then we'll maybe see the benefits of having roped in millions of tweens/teens and 35+ adult women. Puzzle Pirates started that way, but the metaphor doesn't really match the mechanic well. They may be on the right track though. Maybe with Bang Howdy! Maybe Gaia Online. Will be fun to watch.

Because there isn't anything to pay FOR. Yet. Persistency is one of the keys to building that "reason to pay."

Uhh...

AOL Games Channel - onlinegames.channel.aol.com
arcadetown - www.arcadetown.com
Bigfishgames - www.bigfishgames.com
Boonty Games - www.boonty.com
Pogo - www.pogo.com
Gamefiesta - www.gamefiesta.com
Gamehouse - www.gamehouse.com
Grab.com - www.grab.com
iWin - www.iwin.com
MSN Gaming Zone - zone.msn.com
Realarcade - www.realarcade.com
Reflexive - www.reflexive.com
Shockwave - www.shockwave.com
Trygames - www.trygames.com
Yahoo Games - games.yahoo.com
Zylom - www.zylom.com

edit: and especially relevant:
www.puzzlepirates.com
www.banghowdy.com

All sites selling casual games (several with online service).  Hundreds of different titles  for $19.99 a pop, or less.  The problem is that the average casual title "converts" about 1% of the players who download it into customers.  A lot of people are interested in playing casual games but not interested in paying for them.  They'll take the free trial/service as far as it goes and then look for something else.  The financial committment of a more extensive service isn't necessarily something that the market is ready to bear.  The paying market is growing but I don't think it is growing as fast as some people would like to believe.

And the barrier to entry to create a lot of these titles is low enough that the competition will always be stiff.  Sudoku is wildly popular.  Sure.  And some people are making money off of it.  But that's a lot harder to do when www.websudoku.com exists, is free, and already offers pretty much everything that one would want out of a Sudoku game.  Sadly, instead of heading towards quality the market is likely to spiral into heavy licensing and marketing because those are elements that publishers can buy, control and leverage in order to get and keep customers.  There's a strong argument that the current indie casual market is an anomaly and that the market will eventually homogenize and head towards the mediocre, dumbed-down bullshit that take over most large markets.

This path actually isn't all that different from the path that educational games took.

You misunderstand me. They aren't buying it because the for-sale offerings have nothing to justify the cost of buying it. There's no there there. Why buy a slighty shinier version of Solitaire when it's already in Windows?

Persistence is one of the things that can be offered, as can community. As these features are strengthened and enhanced, you'll see more adoption.

I already feel like I commented on this.  I don't think casual players want persistence and I haven't seen any evidence that this is true (Puzzle Pirates hasn't proved me wrong, that's for sure).  Where they do want persistence it will only be in very small doses -- changing their avatar and keeping tracks of wins versus losses.  I do think they want community.  I don't think that community makes something an MMORPG.  They want friends lists, and chat channels and maybe even something like guilds.  And ladders and tournaments and stuff like that.  But that is Yahoo Games 2.0 or Pogo 2.0 -- not WoW 2.0.  WoW 2.0 will, I think, be a clearly separate entity that continues to do the same sorts of things that the mainstream MMORPG market is doing now.  It will also make a lot more per head because it has a more hardcore audience.  Yahoo games 2.0 will likely be dependent on product placement and ad revenue because it will be too hard to get someone to pay $19.99 for a Bejeweled clone.

So I agree that the casual market will grow and collect communities.  But I see no reason to conflate this with MMORPG's.

But anyway, what are you going to do if you MMORPG'ize casual games?  Add content to be earned over time by playing games?  A treadmill? *gasp* I thought that's what this market was going to somehow avoid.  If there isn't something like this then why is it going to be compelling versus the standalone or community-only versions?

Evolution is not going to come by keeping COGs and MMOGs arbitrarily separate. Puzzle Pirates is a good example of a direct combination, though I think them directly combining a persistent world with Pirate theming with integrated mini-games that only bear some resemblance to pirates is an issue. So take that a step further and create the consistency of metaphor.

SWG was arguably a world with many different mini-games within it. Most had major issues, but this stands as an example of an attempt to create different games for different people within a self-consistent world.

Switch it around to RealArcade, grab a few match-3 puzzles, some pathfinding ones and maybe an action-like title or two. Wrap them all in a theme and throw a mulitplayer graphical client on the front end. You'd end up with something similar.

Or add a graphical front end to XBLA

Or do so with Diablo II

This is the new thinking I feel is emerging. The old way was to spend tens of millions to create some perpetually-buggy yet infinitely scalable and ownable graphics engine you hope to pay down with box sales and support with subscriptions. That's not the future though, far from it. The costs are too high on all levels, so the rules had to be changed.

This is not a small industry. 1% generates a lot of cash. And with XBLA posting 25% average conversion (almost 60% for Geometry Wars), even though the games are half the retail price (based on the cost of Points and their value), they're likely making more money per title sold there than that same title sold on all other aggregator sites combined.

Yes, you can rope someone in with persistence and the vague promise of constantly updated content. But the person you grabbed is not from a huge crowd of people. King of niche is still niche. Appealing to that player with that level of immersion guarantees a narrow group.

COGs are diversional play though, something you do in between everything else. Kids treat it a bit differently than adults of course, but even to them it's not about one game. It's about being able to sample so many games from a constrantly growing and changing library. It lets them personalize the experience by seeing and learning new things (though don't mention the "learning" part to them ;) ). It's why one of the bigger MMOGs for them is Club Penguin. This is not a grind2raid experience. It's a Flash-based MMO with mini-COG-like games to play alone or with others, a microeconomy and ways to gain rewards and buy stuff to customize your dwelling(s). Sound familiar?

Those kids are the future and they're not playing WoW (as much).

Like I said: it's an industry with a revenue roughly on par with the revenue WoW alone. RealArcade, probably the biggest site in the US, had a revenue of 56 million last year.  Compare that with WoW.  There's lots of growth going on and RealArcade is doing well.  But the rest of the PC/Console market still dwarfs the casual market.  When considering Live Arcade's conversion rate you also have to consider number of actual downloads.  RealArcade has roughly 750,000 downloads per day (with about 2% of those ending in some form of sale -- although their subscription model confuses the numbers -- going by their revenue total they still seem to be averaging about 1% of retail price per download).  I doubt Live Arcade is doing anything near that volume.  With lower volume games it is common to see higher conversion rates (basically because a much higher % of your downloaders are serious about the game, it's genre, etc.) so the comparison isn't that surprising.  I do think that Live Arcade is doing pretty well and expect to continue to do so -- but I think you need to take its early numbers with a grain of salt.

You guys could be right.  But as a person in the casual games industry, and having followed the market quite a bit, it's my opinion that:

1) casual gamers (as in those playing Bejeweled clones, solitaire, etc.) want extremely simple and accessible experiences and won't need or want "worlds" to put these in.  Those who want worlds will actually be a small minority of the overall casual market.
2) it's very common to take recent growth of the casual market and run wild with ideas that aren't justified.  The actual size, in terms of sales, of the casual market is usually overestimated and while it is still growing well, this growth isn't enough to make the overly optimistic estimates true anytime soon.

Ok, so RealArcade only made $56 million last year. How much did it cost them to MAKE the games and run the service? Probably a fuckload less than it took to create and maintain WoW. And it likely takes a shitton less continuing development dollars because they aren't constantly having to add new dungeons that take months for a team of 20 or so to build.

I'm not saying that casual gamers are the way to make continuing revenue streams in the millions and billions. I'm saying these things can be profitable, for smaller investments than what we are seeing in current MMOG's, and total, they'll dwarf the current MMOG market. Even the MMOG I'm talking about is a niche compared to these kinds of numbers. But it's a larger niche than grind-intensive, power-stratified Diku MMOG's. And the potential for crossover is huge, but it's going to take a fundamental shift in thinking for MMOG devs to capitalize on it. You have to move away from subscription-based pricing, and $100 million dollar budgets, and layers upon layers of expensive shiny graphics.

I'm not sure why you want to downplay the success Puzzle Pirates had. These guys went from having no publisher and only being sold direct on the Internet to being a profitable enough enterprise that they got a publisher to put their game on retail shelves AND were able to create another separate game that's soon to be released. Just like A Tale in the Desert, that is a ginormous success story, not because they got WoW-type numbers, but because they made a profitable enterprise from fuckall. And though ATitD may be grindy, it's certainly nothing like the Diku-formula. Eve is an even bigger success, and that game is the anti-MMOG in terms of content and gameplay mechanics. Do all of these games offer something for the hardcore? Sure. But they don't focus 99% of their development assets on content that only 1% of the population will see, and yet each game is still a challenge.

I just want MMOG developers to follow THOSE models instead of the SOE/Blizzard model of spend a shitton of money to try to be #1 big top Joe boss of the subscription world.

Gabe, that's why I specify a few things:

1- Investment and Guaranteed Potential

It is a lot less of an investment to make a COG (though nobody in the industry calls them that, I'm just an acronym hound), even a series of COGs, than it is to make one MMORPG. Most of the game developers out there can't make an MMOG without partnering with someone who provides them the suite of tools and lots of expertise on hosting.

WoW is not a relevant comparison. They are unique for a whole bunch of different reasons, all of which I've (and others have) mentioned before. Their budget was much larger, their autonomy much greater, their IP much stronger, their retail support much deeper, their advertising spend from VUG much larger, and the worldwide relationships more accessible. There's not a company I can think of that has all the same elements to the same degree. Somebody will beat them, but they won't do so by taking them on directly.

You sure you're not being a bit blinded by the success of WoW? It's not an arguable success of course. It's just that a model for success requires other people be able to actually follow it.

2- Target Age

Casual online games are predominately for adult women 35+. The types of games most played are incredibly different from anything this crowd here generally plays. The model for success in COG-space is also very different, between there and here and between companies themselves. Some companies rely on their portals. Others rely on being publishers of content. Still others rely on providing tools for people to make games, and services to host them. The bigger ones have many positions in the value chain (like RA). It's all fluid. There's no single model for success. The numbers you report don't take into account the residuals of the other places in the value chain.

But I'm not talking about that crowd. I'm talking about the next generation of players, the ones for which the internet is a foregone conclusion, where the distinctions between different types of content and channels of distribution don't matter and where there's no clear dilineation between an online life and a real world one. They see, they want, they can and do get. And they do so with friends, not really caring whether that friend is online or next to them.

They're not out there playing Zuma or Bejeweled. They don't stick with one experience for any direct purpose. They play and leave and do so in environments that give them plenty of options of truly different experiences (unlike the adults, who seem to defer to match-3 and pipes-like games ;) ).

3- Growth

This isn't about looking at XBLA since December and announcing the success 5 years out. It's not about taking the COG industry since 2001 and predicting all things will eventually be match-3 games. It's about trying to figure out who's going to be in the best position to generate the next big thing for the bigger group of players that will be here in five years.

Take today's typical 11 year old. Do you think they'll be spending four hours a night on some MC-of-the-day raid when they're 16? No. Friggin. Way.

Short term gain can be had by trying to feed the existing beast, but it's a highly competitive field that, as I said, doesn't operate very differently from your standard brick & mortar. Limited content, limited attention, required advertising and all benefits to the establishment. Sure the content providers may make good royalties on sales in some cases. But theirs is just one of hundreds of games rotated through a "top picks" list refreshed daily or weekly.

Long term gain isn't going to be had by adhering to that formula though. Many developers are already talking about the issues with the space, saying much the same thing they did in the retailer-dominated era.

Here's what I see as a viable future for COG's as you call them:

Basically what we are going to see is online games collecting communities.  Consumer's want it and it makes sense for publishers.  It makes sense for publishers because a community has traction.  It keeps players entrenched in your system.  It adds value to games that are otherwise pretty cheap to reproduce.  To a lesser extent, I think we will see branding and rewards programs becoming more important.  This will be an attempt to further entrench users into the services offered by the various big players.  Branding will be in the form of creating brands that people synonomize with "COG" and in obtaining brands that will attract customers (such as obtaining the Monopoly brand and doing a Monopoly game).  Rewards programs will allow players small benefits in the service such as avatar customization but won't have any affect on the actual play of the games.

What these things won't do, is really have worlds or homes for people.  You probably disagree.  So why do I say this?  I say it because I think users will just be providing links to their MySpace (or to whatever services come after MySpace).  That makes a lot more sense overall for consumers and providers.  Why embed your game in a world that is going to be expensive to make and still not provide users the services that they already get from MySpace.  MySpace will just have to have access to plugins that let you show your "gamer score" or avatar or whatever from the game services you play.

The community aspects will be the biggest actual service.  They will let you play with singles your age, or fellow cancer survivors, or people who are learning German, or whatever.  This is really just an integration of IRC into Yahoo Games, but I think it will be powerful.

I don't think that casual players want or need anything beyond this.  Casual gamers, in my experience, want directed, short experiences.  They want to play their favorite game, be it Tetris or Bejewelled for sessions of 10m to 2 hours, with as little hassle as possible, and then go back to real life.  The only thing I think can really be added to this is c ommunity.  I do think that these services will make plenty of money (a lot or most of that from product placement and ad revenue) and will be a significant part of the game industry.  I don't think they will displace traditional gaming, however. 

And I don't see anything in this description that has really much at all to do with MMORPG's.  Maybe this has something to do with "Virtual Worlds" if you define them as vaguely and openly as say, Raph Koster does, but personally I don't think that such vague definitions are even that interesting.

Regarding costs, we will see that costs do in fact increase significantly.  Already a lot of the more successful casual titles (such as Huntsville) have budgets over half a million dollars.  On top of that, I fear that licensing and marketing will be increasingly important and neither of these are cheap.  It makes sense for publishers to push things this way as it allows them to control the market and provides high barriers to entry for competitors.  And, sadly, its a proven technique for gathering consumer attention and business.

We mostly agree. I do see a virtual world component coming though, but again, not for the current audiences. What you don't find interesting, and admittedly what I didn't find interesting in Puzzle Pirates, could be compelling to the next gen players. It wouldn't be done the same way either.

MySpace is an example of just how much the younger folks are into personalization and community. They can get that because the tech and commonality has scaled so low 5 year olds can make sites. It will continue to scale. A common language for 3D web will emerge in a couple of years and scale to that level as well. Prior versions not really taking off could be for a number of reasons, including the information overload for previous-gen early adopters of so many other things, like us.

The emergence and ease of such technologies will breed acceptance of it as newer gen folks look for ways to make themselves unique. What we accept as basic flat electronic-page viewing today will be quaint in maybe as little as 5 years. The beauty of convergence.

Will that mean everyone who's playing an MMORPG today will move to Second Life and launch Zuma from the RealArcade building on Island 12, or that that WoW will integrate mini-games in boss encounters? No. There'll always be a place for what's being played right now because there's a lot of money being paid by a relatively hardcore niche of interested players, but the barrier is still fairly high (mostly about the time commitment and the singularity of experience) and still very much rooted in linear game experiences.

Basically, we already see the convergence between game and lifestyle, and this'll only continue.

In an interesting way, WoW is less casual than EQ.  Even though WoW requires much, much less time than EQ it requires much, much greater attention to the game than EQ did.  Two hours of eyes-utterly-glued-to-the-screen because of the constant motion and action of a WoW dungeon crawl vs six hours of kinda-sorta-paying-attention-once-in-a-while as my stationary group mindlessly processes blues in a broken EQ dungeon camp.

I think there will be substantial growth in the traditional MMO market.  But I also think there will be some non-fantasy, non-combat-oriented game that explodes onto the scene in the future.  But it will not require the kind of focused attention WoW does, it will require (at most) the attention that EQ did, or even less.  I really think that this game will be something along the lines of "Sims Online done right."  I've never played it, but it sounds like Animal Crossing has some mechanics that could be expanded on for a game like this.  I think it could be huge if done correctly. 


This is a lesson Blizzard has learned, but the players have not benefited much from because Blizzard is so fucking slow.  The released Scarlet Monastery, a dungeon broken down into 4 wings back during beta 2 (iirc, I think it was in in like feb or so of 2004).  Everyone said "great, we like this winged dungeon idea because it breaks dungeon crawls down into smaller chunks."  Blizzard said "sounds good to us, we'll apply this to our future dungeon designs."

The next future dungeon was Dire Maul, which was winged (the remaining dungeons being too far in development to redesign).  There haven't been any new ones since.  So very slow. 

Naxx has wings. 4 of them, spiraling off from a central zone-in point. It's not casual now, but when the expansion comes out and people are level 70, I think it will be.

I really doubt that. Maybe by the 4th expansion but not the next one.

Most of the fights require much more coordination and paying attention than any previous dungeon, with a few exceptions, to be very open to casual players. MC is liable to be quite easy for post-expansion casuals to do pickup raids in but beyond that I don't see them happening. The first two fights in BWL will also keep out the casuals as well.

I disagree. Insofar as I have seen, you have straight DPS bosses like patchwerk and bosses that only require good timing from a very small part of the raid (main tank, MC priests). Consider the way a tier2 equipped raid can steamroll through MC, then remember a year ago where you wiped on your first destroyer. That difference is just gear, experience, and blizzard easymode patches. No additional levels were added. You'll be able to power through the bosses in naxx just like you do in MC, especially after blizzard patches the content to make it more accessable to the casual player. No stats have been released but I fully expect level 70 blues to be better than the tier 1 epics. So imagine everyone is full tier 1, plus the extra talent points and HP for buffers. I think it's entirely possible.

I agree with Bhodi on this.  MC is cake right now in so far that I've seen PUGs do it through at least Gehennas. (Coordination on Garr seems to pwn folks.)  These are groups of random folks in blues/ greens who've simply learned the dungeon, or know how to listen.   I doubt I'll see a PUG take-down Rag or Domo prior to the expansion, but it'll be a fairly regular occurrence afterwards.

I can't speak on BWL from an encounter standpoint, but Tier 1 equip is only a level 66 item.  Given the way items work, by the time folks ARE 66, wearing and wearing appropriate-level greens they'll have the equiv of a Tier 1 set.  (Which is where I take my amusement, watching people fuck each other or old guilds over for "teh shiny" without realizing they're cutting themselves short in the long-run.)   They shouldn't have a problem running BWL at level 70 in the same way folks do PUGs for MC or ZG right now.  In fact, if you get a group of blue-equipped 70's together, I'd wager you won't even need a full raid. (Provided they've got proper resists, but given the level disparity those resists won't have to be nearly as high as now.)

T2 stuff is level 76, which will still be a decent-enough upgrade from Blue level 70 equip, but without holding 'casual' players and newer guilds heads under the water forcuing them to run BWL if they want to run Naxx.  Just hit 70, get some blues and give it a shot.  Yeah, they'll lack the coordination of a more experienced group of players, but it'll be more like running MC the first time as a raid guild, rather than being a group of 60s in greens, popping into Naxx and expecting to pwn.

I basically agree with you on this as a goal, but the first steps in this direction don't seem to be selling as well as I'd like.  Much as I really love DDO (It has some elements of the MMO cookie-cutter, but it's moving closer to what Haemish wants at least), the playerbase numbers haven't been huge.

The Anub'Rekhan fight doesn't fit this at all. A couple of people fucking up and dying can easily wipe your raid.

Sure, but execution matters a whole shitload. DDO's execution at release just wasn't what it needed to be to really light the world on fire. It may be better now, but it's time has passed: it simply wasn't executed well enough when it was released. The concept of DDO is fantastic, but it's just not that fun a game, IMO. It certainly didn't have the tightness that the casual player is going to expect out of a game that's charging $15 a month. The casual player just won't pay that much for a game that plays like a mediocre barely above retarded cousin of MMOG's.

The game should be as tight as a good single player game since that is the flavor 100% instancing should be going after. It isn't. The graphics should be astounding since the number of models on screen can be carefully controlled. They aren't.

The game just looks and plays half-assed.

That was really part of their genious (or, at least, skill). Make the game more engaging for shorter periods of time. More console, less traditional (ie: EQ) MMO. It's what gamers want. Grinding is not gaming.

Yep. Blizzard has even come out and said this directly. This is the primary reason I'm not playing right now. While I don't like Raiding academically, I can deal if there's a chance to continue growing my character, once or twice a week. But once I heard: a) the level cap was going to 70; and, b) yes, level 65 green gear will be better than purple MC drops, I realized there just wasn't a point. I'd rather do normal outdoorsie-type quests to continue through 70 and then maybe Raid again than have to Raid for what would have been a whole 18 months to get stuff that's going to be outclassed. The 1.11 redesign of the Mage talents was going to initially bring me back, but they didn't change really all that much. And no other class really had much appeal because I'd have hit 60 in any of them before the expansion anyway.

Neopets has 25mil accounts :)

Seriously though, there's a lot of games that are doing quite well and are not the same. The trouble is, they also don't get much press. It's like MMORPGs before WoW. Occasionally some media outlet would drag out Ms. Woolley, but otherwise the genre was largely ignored. Now everybody wants a piece of this "brand new way of playing games".

True, but do Neopets users pay money for the privilege?  The closest I can think of is an 18 year old girl who gave out topless pics on the internet in exchange for Neopets dollars, and I think that stretches the definition of "micropayments" a bit. ;p

I wonder if RuneScape qualifies as being more "casual-oriented"; from what I remember of playing it, it was actually very grindy, but the low system requirements and word of mouth made it the drug of choice for the currently-ages-8-to-13 set.

Anyone who thinks that WoW wouldn't have been sucessful if it was a little more innovative and had less grind and raid bs throw in is stupid.

WoW is a shiny game and a popular one, but if you think it's selling itself on the annoying features like high end raids (that many people probably havn't even touched) and terrible PvP then you're delusional. You could change many aspects of WoW and still have as good a response.

If someone has the class (that Blizzard has demonstrated) along with the insight and Balls to try to deviate from the well trodden path it will be just as sucessful.

As Haemish has said getting things right is HARD, most cannot muster that kind of quality execution. Because it's so rare those that can don't have any reason to step off well trodden roads for their moneyhats.

So it wont happen quickly unlessl some smaller company does it, and does it well enough to get a better than expected return. Then the big companies can copy their model and just give it a few tweaks. Otherwise the Blizzards will just keep plugging away, one minor innovation after another. Because that's how it works.

Depends on how large the undercover rewards are.

No. Unless you black market for Neopoints, everything's gained the old fashioned way: grind (quests/events) and commerce (have a shop/mall that sells goods you've grinded for). The game is effectively a page-view MMO without the raiding.

And yea, Runescape was fairly grindy. But like Club Penguin (and Habbo and Animal Crossing and so on) you can play in a browser for free (for awhile anyway). That effectively lowers the barrier to nil. Which makes sense considering these were not 8-figure development budgets.

My little brother (12yrs old) plays Runescape a great deal.  He was like L6X last I checked.  Although my mom is upgrading her comp so he can play WoW on it (I bought it for him awhile ago).

Err, and? :)

Seriously, Runescape is pretty big, particularly for the tween/teen/library goers.

PM me if you want the pics. ;P Yay for LiveJournal communities.

I think not. I got enough Asian pr0n in my PM box as it is.