A History of Bad Design: The MMOG Edition

[schild]

The purpose of this thread, is to consolidate, through history, all of the piss-poor judgement and bad design decisions that have gone into MMOGs since the beginning of time. I'd really like everyone to participate, so I'm stickying this. I will be updating this list as things get posted.

Relevant info to Post?
Company Name
Game
The gaffe itself - also a link to PR associated if it exists. Any other relevant links are fine.
Why the design was bad (i.e. the effect it had on the game).

The great thing about this list is that it can probably only grow. This isn't about armchair design or solutions, this is simply about having a consolidated list for designers and devs to look at. If you're a dev and made a mistake yourself, feel free to respond! In fact, that would probably be awesome. Think of it as a history book, one that you should NOT follow.

Edit: Oh shit, forgot to fire a warning shot. Don't dick around with arguments about Trammel, NGE, or shit like that. Of course, they're up for debate, but this thread isn't about debate. Bad design can apply from everything to GUIs to unified hot key cooldowns to potion timers to... well, anything really. Some may be right, some may be wrong, but I think it's important to have all of this in one place. You'll thank me when we can point to this list when a dev says something and respond with "don't be retarded."

Edit 2: Also, if you just post something that made you butthurt, like Trammel, I'm just going to delete the post. If you want a butthurt thread about anything, just throw it in the graveyard, or over on the vault.

[schild]

Reserved for the compiled list.

[Venkman]

Company Name- NetDevil
Game- AutoAssault
The gaffe itself - n/a
Why the design was bad- Adding avatars and a monthly fee to an otherwise great arcade-y predecessor to Think Tanks.


Company Name- Paramount
Game- The original STO
The gaffe itself - handing out a highly contentious license to a licensee (Perpetual) who didn't actually have an idea on the kind of game they wanted to do.
Why the design was bad- n/a because there never really was one

[wuzzman]

I think you should enforce an upper cap on how many times WoW will be referenced...

[Soln]

SOE
SWG
adding holocrons and giving them to all players (heroic class unlock attunements)
heroic class (jedi) required a grind and the holocron item was a time saver that given to all players enforced a single end game (i.e. unlocking Jedi class)

Mythic/EA
DAoC and WAR
not having community forums
Can't control expectations, can't provide good and reliable information on the game.

SOE
EQ2
not having ways to heal for all classes
no heal potions or first aid in EQ2 just required increasing dps or buffs unnecessarily or irrelevant grouping

[Ard]

Ndoors
Atlantica Online
Adding a system (Stamina) that both artificially limits your players' play time and options
Limiting number of combats in an MMO solely based around combat is one of the most retarded things you can do.  And don't wrap it around the excuse of wanting your players to try out the other subsystems, when the game is based around combat.

[insouciant]

Company SOE
Game EQ
Glitch Release of Two Lame Expansions, Followed by EQ2 one week prior to WoW Launch
I do not know if anyone other than me sees this one this way, but IMO SOE committed a giant faux pas by deciding to bifurcate the Omens of War and Gates of Discord expansions, resulting in two different, buggy, and unfinished feeling expansions where there should only have been one buggy expansion (per the SOE usual).  On top of this, they served up EQ2 to an already disgruntled playerbase (though truth be told ALL EQ players were disgruntled with SOE for one reason or another). Thus, EQ, a game whose core mechanic and main "stickiness" factor was the social and guild links in game, hammered those links by pulling over half the playerbase into EQ2.  Hindsight being 20/20, we can see this happened just as the new behemoth, WoW, hit the market.  With friends already having left for EQ2 and guilds being soured on two bad expansions, there was no reason NOT to move on to WoW.

[UnSub]

Company Name - Auran
Game - Fury
The gaffe itself - I've written a long piece on Fury, but in short:
 - a near open alpha / beta that turned players off before the game had launched

 - a launch contest for real money that attracted all the hardcore PvPers and drove the casual players away

 - a stupidly high barrier to entry, with a limited tutorial and a huge number of skills along with a fast combat system that would see new players die before they even knew what was going on

 - a PR campaign that involved calling their players a "LLLOOOOSSSSEEEERRRRR!"

 - a management team that appeared to blame the workers for the failure of the title

 - a not-particularly well defined revenue model

Why the design was bad (i.e. the effect it had on the game).
By exposing a lot of players to Fury before the title was ready, a lot of potential players were turned off before it even launched. Yet they kept inviting more alpha players to test things, which continued the cycle.

Having a huge amount of skills, items and different ways to fit out your build but no way of assessing exactly what each thing did just ended up confusing new players.

The hardcore PvP nature of the game (driven by those who stuck around since alpha, plus those there for the money and might have stayed) drove new players away because they couldn't win, nor learn how to win.

Insulting older players was the worst example of reverse psychology you could think of.

 ... end result: Fury tanks, Auran pretty much closes its doors as a new games developer and PvP MMOs take a big step backwards.


Company Name - Perpetual Studios
Game - Gods and Heroes
The gaffe itself -
Perpetual cancelled G&H despite having a feature complete, near content complete title because they managed to acquire the Star Trek Online licence and wanted to focus on that.

Why the design was bad (i.e. the effect it had on the game).
G&H's design was another diku set in fantasy Roman mythology. It was completely mediocre, but had a few nice touches - choosing a God who would interact with you, every class being a pet class - that might have helped it stand out. However, it lacked a number of systems that most MMO players would consider basic requirements, like guild systems and PvP.

Perpetual had put a lot of money into G&H and SOE was going to publish it. Then SOE pulled out (or was forced out, but I know what I think better fits) and Perpetual was going to self-publish. Then they dumped the title altogether and started to focus on STO.

It takes guts to look at something you've spent a lot of time and money on and go, "That's not good enough for launch". However, dumping G&H saw Perpetual's reputation take a battering - for a rookie studio that would be looking for funding, that can't be a good thing. Perpetual getting sued by its PR company and selling itself to itself (from Perpetual to P2) in an apparently attempt to dump assets out of a failed company didn't help either.

Would G&H have worked if it had launched? We'll never know. It could have worked as a niche title which might have seen it survive if the business model was correct. But it would have seen Perpetual launching one product and seeing revenue flow in. Given that it seems Perpetual ran out of money, that revenue would have been a positive thing AND would have helped attract more investment.

[Ratman_tf]

Company Name- Paramount
Game- The original STO
The gaffe itself - handing out a highly contentious license to a licensee (Perpetual) who didn't actually have an idea on the kind of game they wanted to do.
Why the design was bad- n/a because there never really was one

Are we going to count unreleased games? Seems kind of unproductive to me. Too much speculation and no real game-in-action info.

[schild]

Are we going to count unreleased games? Seems kind of unproductive to me. Too much speculation and no real game-in-action info.

That would mean we can't bring up things about Mythica, Imperator, Wish, etc. As none were formally released, and I think that'd be bad.

[Venkman]

Company Name- Paramount
Game- The original STO
The gaffe itself - handing out a highly contentious license to a licensee (Perpetual) who didn't actually have an idea on the kind of game they wanted to do.
Why the design was bad- n/a because there never really was one

Are we going to count unreleased games? Seems kind of unproductive to me. Too much speculation and no real game-in-action info.

Gaffes and game designs all stem from early business decisions, as those drive the type of team pulled together or type of company brought in. It's good to talk about the wrong company doing bad things on a game that needed to be treated a completely different way, but sometimes there's root causes that go so deep expecting that wrong company to do right is like expecting blood from a stone.

[Ratman_tf]

This is a general bitch, but I'll give it my recent example.

Mythic/EA
Warhammer Online, Age of Reckoning.

Text fonts.
Another notable culprit: Tabula Rasa.

Yes, you may have an option to change the text. Doesn't matter if I've already uninstalled the game. Your game's default text should be plain, simple and easy to read. This is not the place to experiment with themed fonts or have a bad default text scale.

[apocrypha]

Company Name: Mythic
Game: DaoC
Problem: PvE grind expansions that delayed the fun - PvP
Why this was a problem: DaoC's strength was always it's PvP. By requiring a whole new load of PvE grinding in order to be viable in PvP it drove people away. IMO a perfect example of failing to play to your strengths.

And yeah, I know this has been talked about millions of times here, but it stands out for me (apart from the NGE ofc...) as the most glaring example of how to piss off your playerbase.

[Strazos]

SOE
EQ2
not having ways to heal for all classes
no heal potions or first aid in EQ2 just required increasing dps or buffs unnecessarily or irrelevant grouping

Are we allowed to dispute claims?

I've played the game to at least the 40s with only non-healer classes. I had no real problems with not being able to heal myself. Out of combat regen was high enough to make this a non-issue.

It's called Making Classes do Different Things.

[Venkman]

I believe he's talking about EQ2 at launch, which was a bear.

[UnSub]

Company Name - Cryptic Studios
Game - City of Heroes
The gaffe itself -
The implementation of the powers limits together with aggro caps (i.e. none) and max AoE targets (i.e. all within range)

Why the design was bad (i.e. the effect it had on the game) -

Here are some videos:

Dumpster diving

Herding the entire map

Certain ATs could herd huge numbers of mobs in complete safety thanks to how defence and resistance was implemented in CoH, leading those mobs into AoE traps of death (either with the help of team mates or their own powers). It was possible to team up with someone doing this and powerlevel a character from lvl 1 to 16 in seconds when the AoEs started coming in. This also left some ATs as either pretty much filler and only invited onto teams to increase the spawn size because they didn't have the AoEs or defences to actually contribute much to the fight.

The solution was to change how bonuses worked when added to powers - diminishing returns was the order of the day with Enhancement Diversification - and AoE power limits and taunt limits (a maximum of 14 at a time) were implemented. Prior to SWG, these changes were arguably the largest re-development of an existing MMO that had occurred.

[Votan]

Company Name -Everyone since UO
Game -All of major ones
The gaffe itself - Class based system
Why the design was bad -

Class based systems force you into a defined "roll" forever that you can never change.  You will forever have the exact same spells and abilities as everyone else of that "class".  The idea of Classes is also to force dependence between players.  Example a healer class is dependant on a dps or tank class to play the game optimally.  Developers know not all 'Classes Are Equal' so they introduce mindless quests(EQ, WOW) as a way to make things fair for all to solo through the game. So now we have questing which grants XP to make things more fair, they reduce the XP gained from soloing NPCs. This way, you make leveling more competitive between all the Classes.  So now we get games that give us mindless quest which no one reads, nerfed leveling to make it fair for all, to level up to max level to begin the gearing phase of the game which requires equally mind numbing class based grind.

Because of the class based system the idea of free for all PVP gets tossed out and so does open PVP because it reveals glaring unbalanced nature of some class's vs others and highlights the game flaws . PVE is static and great for defined rolls or class's, pvp is dynamic, and this is why we get craptastic games we do that continually disappoint us.

[Azazel]

I like my "rolls" with ham and cheese. And tomato.

[bhodi]

Blizzard
WoW

From launch until nearly the first expansion, "raid dungeons", that is, dungeons requiring a group of 25-40 people to complete, dropped a variety of items that were only useful (or could only be used) by a specific class.

This meant that hours of work by dozens of people culminated in a reward that sometimes wasn't usable or was already obtained by members of that group. Eventually, this system was replaced with a more usable "token" system, whereby the reward was an item that could be turned in by anyone and then converted into a class-specific item for the possessor's class.


SOE, Origin
EQ, UO

So called "Corpse runs", whereby once a player dies, he is spawned elsewhere in the game world and must fight his way back to his body without benefit of all of the items upon it. If you were not able to recover your corpse, your items were lost.

This was very unpopular, due to several factors:
 * This has a 'chilling effect' on gameplay, making people unwilling to experience some game content due to the risk of death
 * Fighting your way back without benefit of your items may be difficult or even impossible
 * Items on the corpse amounted to hours, days, or even years of game time to acquire and was thus an overly harsh penalty
 * It's possible to die in a nearly unrecoverable area - falling off the bridge in "The Warrens" in EQ, for example.

This was later replaced with XP loss, a milder form of death penalty, and in some games, lessened further to wealth loss or simply time lost walking back.

[K9]

Funcom
Anarchy Online

Damage caps as a % of maximum HP

Designing a system whereby the most powerful attack available to all-classes in game (Aimed Shot) had its damage capped by the targets maximum HP (originally 100%, then 40%, later 30%) was an awful design choice. It effectively rendered high-hp to be a disadvantage to several classes, and pushed many classes to actively lower their HP, a wholly counterintuitive activity. For classes that were based around high-HP as a defence (i.e. enforcers) this meant that as you improved your gear you also increased the damage you took, which would rapidly outstrip the amount of healing and other mitigation available to you which tended to either be static, or scale very poorly.

The thinking behind this was pretty simple, no attack should be able to one-shot people. The problem was that aimed shot scaled incredibly well with gear, and was the most buffable skill in game. Increasing the skill had several effects, it reduced the cooldown to a minimum of 11s (at a fairly low skill requirement), it increased the damage multiplier, and it had a marginal chance to increase the probability of critting with aimed shot. At an early stage a physical cap of 13,000 points of damage was also imposed. However, as damage was capped in pvp based on a % of the targets maximum you wouldn't see any benefit from increased HP until you were getting well over 30,000 HP, an impossible feat.

[Venkman]

Company: SOE
Game: Planetside
Gaffe: Targeting an FPS to MMO players with an then-typical MMO business model.
Design: Good design in theory

Explanation: PS was not likely to appeal even then to the main FPS audience. However, I've long felt that had they launched it as just a box purchase, or listed it for $4.99 a month, or been on the leading edge of microtransactions, or basically tried any other business model other than the one used for sweeping-world persistent RPGs, they'd have had a far better shot at success. The just-before-launch major XP nerf didn't help, but by that point the die was long cast anyway. They nerfed because the audience they got were split off from MMORPGs, not people coming from the then-popular Quake and Unreal.

Everything else about this game is more right than many of the underdelivered promises of even typical MMORPGs. A good accountbase could have unlocked the resources needed to make the game even better.

[SnakeCharmer]

Company:  Pretty much all of them
Game:  Ditto
Gaffe:  Continued development of head in the sand, close minded holy trinity archetypes.  Your game design you've been working on since the 5th grade isn't revolutionary.  Find something new.

Company:  Pretty much all of them
Game:  Ditto
Gaffe:  Continued AAA development of games based on Dungeons and Dragons.  It's been done. 

[schild]

Company:  Pretty much all of them
Game:  Ditto
Gaffe:  Continued development of head in the sand, close minded holy trinity archetypes.  Your game design you've been working on since the 5th grade isn't revolutionary.  Find something new.

Company:  Pretty much all of them
Game:  Ditto
Gaffe:  Continued AAA development of games based on Dungeons and Dragons.  It's been done. 

Too vague. This is for specific gaffes, not general stupidity.

[Synnoc]

Company Name - Cryptic Studios
Game - City of Heroes
The gaffe itself -
The implementation of the powers limits together with aggro caps (i.e. none) and max AoE targets (i.e. all within range)

{ EDIT: Misread your gaffe.   Rewriting a little. }

I think the primary gaffes were  the Global Defense Nerf and Enhancement Diversification coming as a 1-2 punch.   It turned City of Heroes into a completely different game for many players, a bait-n-switch-like experience.  The initial AoE stuff and aggro was overpowered, but it made people feel like heroes, a feeling that was taken away with the above nerfs.

[Ingmar]

Company Name - Cryptic Studios
Game - City of Heroes
The gaffe itself -
The implementation of the powers limits together with aggro caps (i.e. none) and max AoE targets (i.e. all within range)

{ EDIT: Misread your gaffe.   Rewriting a little. }

I think the primary gaffes were  the Global Defense Nerf and Enhancement Diversification coming as a 1-2 punch.   It turned City of Heroes into a completely different game for many players, a bait-n-switch-like experience.  The initial AoE stuff and aggro was overpowered, but it made people feel like heroes, a feeling that was taken away with the above nerfs.

That's not a design gaffe. The gaffe in the context of what this thread is talking about was the initial design that made those nerfs necessary. What you objected to is more of a PR gaffe, in that it could have been handled better or more gradually.

[Bunk]

Company - Turbine
Games - LotRO, AC2
Gaffe - Sluggish, unresponsive combat. It's a minor difference between the feel of those games' combat and WoW, but that minor difference is huge. Combat is much more fun when it feels like the game is actualy responding to you. WAR is guilty of the same issue.

Company - Origin, SOE
Game - UO, SWG
Gaffe - free reign on housing placement - nothing like unnavigatable urban sprawl to ruin a good idea.

[MerseyMal]

Company Name: Mythic
Game: DaoC
Problem: PvE grind expansions that delayed the fun - PvP
Why this was a problem: DaoC's strength was always it's PvP. By requiring a whole new load of PvE grinding in order to be viable in PvP it drove people away. IMO a perfect example of failing to play to your strengths.

Giving L50 players the option to /level their alts immediately to 20. Sure it skipped the first 19 sucky levels of PvE grinding, but it meant new players had trouble finding people to group with.

[apocrypha]

Giving L50 players the option to /level their alts immediately to 20. Sure it skipped the first 19 sucky levels of PvE grinding, but it meant new players had trouble finding people to group with.

The /level option wasn't the cause of that problem - it's endemic to most MMORPGs with leveled content. Those starter zones were ghost towns before /level was implemented, and you could argue that it helped with retention of players with level 50's at a time when subs were declining anyway. There weren't enough new players regardless.

Even WoW with it's continual influx of new players suffers from this, and is only mediated by the solo-friendly nature of the game and now the achievements system.

I agree that content becoming deserted long after the leveling curve has passed it by is a bad design, but it's not restricted to DaoC and it's not caused by things like /level.

[Sahrokh]

Company Name- Artifact Entertainment
Game- Horizons: Empire Of Istaria
The gaffe itself - Vaporware and more vaporware. Once condensed, it smells of piss.
Why the design was bad- You can't hire someone with no clue on creating a game as CEO, you can't spaghetti code like in 1990 and have code robust enough to endure a MMO rough life. You can't announce a somewhat "race vs race" PvP game that reveals to be an half finished pure PvE crafting game. I could go on for pages of huge and fatal mistakes to have as great example of what not to do but I think no one here even recalls what this game is.

A brief list of mistakes:

- No test cases nor debug facilities. One chief programmer was the repository of knowledge. Gone him, the game flopped hard and now they can't recompile it to make it Vista compatible.
- Since it was vaporware, when time ran tight and Atari + investors knocked at the door, they bought pre-made libraries and slammed a 3D engine together. Result: more than 5 players on screen meant a slide show.
- Started as race vs race PvP game, but it had no balance at all nor the engine supported it. So right before end of beta they changed to PvE craft game, instantly losing 60% of the interested playerbase.
- The CEO chose a *shady-at-best* billing company, many players left when they found out the ties that company had and how they'd get billed multiple times etc.
- They did not have an Europe Branch and like Mythic uses GOA, they chose a similar company. Too bad they were mostly a "casino on line + soft porn" company pretending to be able to manage a MMO. Result: the EU version could not be patched any more after several screwups they did on their servers that made them incompatible with the USA ones.

[schild]

Company Name- Artifact Entertainment
Game- Horizons: Empire Of Istaria
The gaffe itself - Vaporware and more vaporware. Once condensed, it smells of piss.
Why the design was bad- You can't hire someone with no clue on creating a game as CEO, you can't spaghetti code like in 1990 and have code robust enough to endure a MMO rough life. You can't announce a somewhat "race vs race" PvP game that reveals to be an half finished pure PvE crafting game. I could go on for pages of huge and fatal mistakes to have as great example of what not to do but I think no one here even recalls what this game is.

The whole point of this thread is to point out specific mistakes, not rant about a game that burned you. Whether or not I think Horizons was half vapor and half pure bullshit (which I do) is besides the point. The point is to find specifics.

[Yegolev]

Company - Dark Sky Entertainment
Game - Beyond Protocol
Gaffe - Charging for the manual
Why it was bad - Beyond Protocol is an incredibly complex game.  QED, motherfucker.

Company - Flying Lab Software
Game - Pirates of the Burning Sea
Gaffe - Combining levels and classes with skill-based progression
Why it was bad - Having a Merchant class with Merchant skills that are used for Merchanty activities is all wonderful, until you realize that you have to grind XP in combat to get skill points.  This forces everyone to learn a set of combat skills rather than ones pertaining to, say Mercantile, so that they can grind to gain XP to learn the non-combat skills.

[Takshaka]

Company Name: OSI
Game: Ultima Online
The gaffe itself - separating the world into Trammel and Felucia
Why the design was bad: I know that some will disagree here, but I already believe that the game had a pretty good system to prevent ganking too much.  Item loss was never a problem in earlier UO as no player would leave town with a vanq weapon as the only thing they were good for was showing off.  The implementation of skill loss into the red(murder) system was actually a very intelligent decision imo, I fell victim to this policy and had an expensive(reagents cost a lot) tank mage reduced to less than new character.  I also thought that the existence of the Buccaneer's Den as the only place that Reds could bank and use NPC vendors was a hell of a lot of fun, there would be many battles fought there, not only between reds, but also between blues and reds(I know banking was not really required as we all at least owned a house, if not a keep, and usually used a blue mule to do any banking or vendoring, but I went there for the fun).  The implementation of the Trammel/Felucia split destroyed PvP in the short run, there were simply not enough people who were heavily focused on PvP to fill the entire world and battles at buc's Den disappeared (at least this is how it happened on my Server, Catskills). 

(sorry if this turned into too much of a rant, I just wanted to give as much background detail as possible for people who may not be familiar with how wonderful UO was)

[UnSub]

Company Name - Cryptic Studios
Game - City of Heroes
The gaffe itself -
The implementation of the powers limits together with aggro caps (i.e. none) and max AoE targets (i.e. all within range)

{ EDIT: Misread your gaffe.   Rewriting a little. }

I think the primary gaffes were  the Global Defense Nerf and Enhancement Diversification coming as a 1-2 punch.   It turned City of Heroes into a completely different game for many players, a bait-n-switch-like experience.  The initial AoE stuff and aggro was overpowered, but it made people feel like heroes, a feeling that was taken away with the above nerfs.

That's not a design gaffe. The gaffe in the context of what this thread is talking about was the initial design that made those nerfs necessary. What you objected to is more of a PR gaffe, in that it could have been handled better or more gradually.

I was trying to briefly go over about why the GDN / ED were necessary (or, if not them, something very similar).

The gaffe was not understanding how players would slot powers. Despite there being a whole range of enhancement types available - that the devs obviously thought players would dip into in order to create something different - the reality was that players generally only went accuracy and damage / resist for damage powers and defence for a lot of other powers. The traditional 1 accuracy 5 damage slotting gave +150% to damage (off the top of my head) while a tank could get +200% or so to their defence / resist by six slotting the same enhancements. I don't think the devs believed players would slot like this, but it became the standard.

Also, because afaik the majority of buffs that stack add up in a linear fashion in CoH/V, each extra bit you get makes you that much better. Maneuvers gives +5% (or so, with enhancements) to everyone on defence. A lot of people thought this sucked, until they worked out that this 5% stacked with everyone else on the teams' 5%, so you could add +40% to everyone on the teams' defence if everyone took this power. Which in turn just added on top of to the natural defence levels of a character. It wasn't hard to hit the max level of things like defence with certain builds.

The gaffe was power designers not thinking about how people would play the system. Who cares about slotting a knockback enhancement when slotting another damage enhancement would kill their opponent 33% quicker? As such, players could herd the map and then kill the entire map mob spawn in seconds on a few stacked trip mines.

I will probably get to how ED / GDN were released to the players at a later point, unless someone beats me to the punch.

[naum]

SOE
EQ
Leaving bugs intact for years (like zoning from Qeynos Hills to W.Karana that never got fixed), eliminating crafting when presented with glaring exploits, gimping character classes too harshly when gameplay deviated from approved vision…

Mythic
DAoC
Boring, unimaginitive magic system. Plus, gimped spells/skills centered on "balance" that really made the gameplay  homogonized…

Wolfpack
Shadowbane
SB.exe errors mainly (obviously), but game should have automatic periodic reset and random game maps — that would have made this all-time best MMORPG

[Slyfeind]

(sorry if this turned into too much of a rant, I just wanted to give as much background detail as possible for people who may not be familiar with how wonderful UO was)

You mean how glorious the old Dread days were? OMG NO WE'VE NEVER HEARD THAT BEFORE EVER.

(Editted for sarcasm tags because I would have thought it was too obvious.)