A History of Bad Design: The MMOG Edition

[Takshaka]

(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.

I don't think that phrase could ever be repeated enough.

[Phunked]

Company: Mythic

Game: WAR

Gaffe: terrible initial UI, chat system, mail, etc.

Reason why: with their major competitor (WoW) having a very streamlined, intuitive, highly moddable UI with a great chat system, the UI for WAR pretty much just turned some people away right there, whne they weren't able to recreate the WoW feel. I have no idea why Mythic feels the need to reinvent the wheel with the fucking CHAT SYSTEM, but they failed very hard. Not to mention the API tools for modders are laughable, to the point where many of them have abandoned this crap. Oh and also, need I mention crafting and the crafting ui here, or is that a separate gaffe?

[Lightstalker]

Company Name:  989/Verant -> SOE
Game:  Everquest
The gaffe itself:  Alchemy, working as intended.
Why the design was bad:  Up until level 25 players could train new abilities at a specific trainer, after reaching level 25 they couldn't.  Alchemy required level 25.

Players knew there was a problem.  Internal testing just created a level 25 character with HasAlchemy=true and confirmed that Alchemy was working as intended.  Many public re-assurances were made that things were fine before it was finally accepted and fixed, then the players got to deal with Alchemy itself being underwhelming and conventionally broken.  "Working as intended" is all over the place now, while alchemy isn't the only thing in EQ that was working as intended in early EQ, it is the first I remember.

-edit while this is a bug more than a deliberate design decision, the game design itself (lengthy level progression) made testability through end-user scenarios unfeasible, which was a design decision.

[schild]

Company: Mythic

Game: WAR

Gaffe: terrible initial UI, chat system, mail, etc.

Reason why: with their major competitor (WoW) having a very streamlined, intuitive, highly moddable UI with a great chat system, the UI for WAR pretty much just turned some people away right there, whne they weren't able to recreate the WoW feel. I have no idea why Mythic feels the need to reinvent the wheel with the fucking CHAT SYSTEM, but they failed very hard. Not to mention the API tools for modders are laughable, to the point where many of them have abandoned this crap. Oh and also, need I mention crafting and the crafting ui here, or is that a separate gaffe?

Chat window, OK, even though it never bothered me. As for the rest of the GUI... I think the idea of a design error has to apply across the board for most users. For example, the argument that Trammel fragmented the playerbase, OK, I can buy that. But that it wasn't like by X, well, that's not the consequence. As for the WAR GUI, point being, I loved it, it did everything it needed to do and was high customizable out of the box. I'm really not seeing the problem here, other than the chat box. Upon listing this, I'm probably going to refine the error to just that.

[Iniquity]

I don't think any of these are too redundant with what's been listed already...

Turbine
DDO
The gaffe itself: Character creation that had you making hard-to-fix choices that you could hardly comprehend at the time.
Why the design was bad: Made the player feel helpless.

Some random Korean company
Space Cowboys
The gaffe itself: Paired action-oriented twitch gameplay with heavy level restrictions, a la Auto Assault.
Why the design was bad: The mismatch between the two effectively alienated both types of players -- those who wanted skill to rule the day would get whalloped quickly by higher level players/creatures, and those who wanted the levels they'd earned to win the day would just get whalloped repeatedly by the people at their level who were more skilled.

Turbine
Asheron's Call
The gaffe itself: Magic and melee/ranged systems were developed separately from one another and integrated at the last minute.
Why the design was bad: Years of ridiculous imbalance.

Mythic
Dark Ages of Camelot
The gaffe itself: Compensating for a lack of storyline by saying that 'the players will write the story through RvR', and counting on that to actually happen.
Why the design was bad:  Players *can* write their own story, so to speak, through PvP, but *only* under a limited set of circumstances; they have to be free to form their own sides, and make their own politics.  EVE, Shadowbane, and other full-PvP environments have stories worth reading for precisely this reason.  In a game with fixed sides, and intentionally gimped communication between player sides, RvR will simply not produce that sort of memorable drama.

SOE
The Matrix Online
The gaffe itself: Combat system that radically departed from people's perceptions of how the license 'should play'.
Why the design was bad:  A re-skinned 'city of heroes' with appropriate alterations to the powersets would have felt far more Matrix-y than the almost-turn-based combat they actually came up with.  As a non-Matrix sci-fi MMO, it might have worked better, but it radically conflicted with how people expected a 'Matrix experience' to feel.  It's not a coincidence that no single-player Matrix games have utilized a similar combat system.

Puzzle Pirates
The gaffe itself: Not nearly enough feedback early on for whether you're doing well at a given game, and if you're not doing well, how to improve.
Why the design was bad: Especially as a newbie, where you're running basic puzzles with a bunch of others on ships, you don't really feel the individual contribution of your labor, and you don't really know how well or poorly you're doing or what impact you're having.  It makes those games feel pointless, and drives players to the immediately competitive games in the taverns -- which, while fun, are more of a glorified Yahoo games and don't really get you 'interconnected into the world'.

NCSoft
Tabula Rasa
The gaffe itself: Bullets that curve around walls to hit you, based on dice rolls.
Why the design was bad: Ever heard the saying, "A compromise is a decision that pisses off everybody"?  At some point, hard choices have to be made about which group of players you want to attract, and splitting the difference means you lose everyone.

Wurm Online
The gaffe itself: Failure to experiment with alternate rule-sets makes it hard to have the game catch new players.
Why the design was bad:  I firmly believe that a Wurm Online with the grind reduced by a factor of 10 might actually be the Sandbox Jesus everyone has been waiting for for so long.  And yet, people see that it takes 2 hours to make your first bowl of fucking soup and they're instantly turned off.  The devs have everything to gain from trying out alternate rulesets, and basically nothing to lose.

Origin
Ultima Online
The gaffe itself: The ecology system.
Why the design was bad: Giving your players what is essentially a collective action problem to solve doesn't work well without justice and governance mechanisms to provide consequences.  Otherwise, it's the tragedy of the commons, and the race to the bottom is swift.

Linden Labs
Second Life
The gaffe itself: Completely schizophrenic, disjointed new player experience.
Why the design was bad:  Means that the only people who make it through are the gibbering obsessives.  Then again, those people are the ones who'll actually put money in, and their PR team seems to do a crack job of keeping SL in the news regardless.  Maybe this isn't a gaffe after all?

Turbine
Asheron's Call 2
The gaffe itself: Giving every single monster both a ranged and melee attack, so as to eliminate perching.
Why the design was bad: The cure was worse than the disease.  Made monsters feel far more 'same-y' than they otherwise would, made encounters feel and play out much more generic.

Cryptic Studios
City of Heroes
The gaffe itself: Lack of incremental rewards coupled with grind.
Why the design was bad:  People like rewards.  Rewards make their brain go 'yay'.  They like getting rewarded often.  Most MMOs have loot upgrades as a sort of incremental reward in addition to leveling.  City of Heroes has/had almost nothing in the way of 'loot that feels like a reward', save special endgame enhancements; the midlevels were an unpleasant grind.  But the lack of loot, coupled with the much slower dwindle of new powers, left players feeling unrewarded for especially long periods of time.

[UnSub]

Company: Various
Title: WAR, Tabula Rasa, others
Gaffe: Reducing effective XP gain / character progression right before launch

Reason: So, you're almost ready for launch. You've had feedback from beta testers for many moons now and should have a fairly good idea about how the game 'feels' at each stage with regard to character progression.

Then you cut the effective rate of XP gain, either by a direct reduction, by increasing mob hit points (so they take longer to kill) and / or slowing combat by some other way. Loot rates may be reduced, making it harder to get a 'good' weapon, or the way character stats work might be altered in a way detrimental to how fast a character can advance themselves.

The reason this is a stupid thing to do is that 1) it pisses off your beta players, who you want out evangelising the game to all their friends at the time of launch, 2) you've just changed the game experience so that a lot of your existing beta player feedback on character progression is now worthless and 3) given launch is right around the corner, you've got no time to check if the reduction on character progression is working as intended and was pitched at the right level. If you've overdone it and players aren't getting their 'ding gratz' moments close enough together, they will start to talk about the grind. Outside of flour and coffee, no-one likes the grind.

[Phunked]

Company: Mythic

Game: WAR

Gaffe: terrible initial UI, chat system, mail, etc.

Reason why: with their major competitor (WoW) having a very streamlined, intuitive, highly moddable UI with a great chat system, the UI for WAR pretty much just turned some people away right there, whne they weren't able to recreate the WoW feel. I have no idea why Mythic feels the need to reinvent the wheel with the fucking CHAT SYSTEM, but they failed very hard. Not to mention the API tools for modders are laughable, to the point where many of them have abandoned this crap. Oh and also, need I mention crafting and the crafting ui here, or is that a separate gaffe?

Chat window, OK, even though it never bothered me. As for the rest of the GUI... I think the idea of a design error has to apply across the board for most users. For example, the argument that Trammel fragmented the playerbase, OK, I can buy that. But that it wasn't like by X, well, that's not the consequence. As for the WAR GUI, point being, I loved it, it did everything it needed to do and was high customizable out of the box. I'm really not seeing the problem here, other than the chat box. Upon listing this, I'm probably going to refine the error to just that.

Crafting UI?

Please don't tell me you enjoyed dragging item x5 to craft for ~500 some executions? This is not to mention the entire crafting system itself (which was admittedly awful) but hell even the UI for it was unintuitive as fuck. That and cultivation. Clicky every 3 min to plant seeds? No one thought this would become annoying?

[schild]

I didn't notice your last question there. I think crafting is an entire gaffe all to itself. I don't understand how they could possibly fuck up crafting. It's mind boggling. It's such a huge gaffe in fact, that I might have to bold it when I get through reading (and in some cases deciphering) all these posts.

[UnSub]

Company: Verant & SOE / Monolith
Title: Star Wars Galaxies / The Matrix Online
Gaffe: Developing a game based on a licensed IP that doesn't really reflect the license

Reason:
When a company licenses an IP from somewhere it costs money - the bigger the license, the bigger the cost. So it is then a bit mind boggling that MMO studios then turn around and develop a title that features a play experience that only lightly touches on what is expected from the original IP.

With SWG, players expected Star Wars space opera - Jedi, lightsabers, space battles and so on. What they got was Jedi-less sandbox. Some players liked this environment, but it only had a thin veneer of Star Wars to it. Star Wars should be about Jedi vs Sith, not hairdressing and cantina dancing. Jedi came in at a later date, but unlocking them meant grinding through careers (who knew that being a moisture farmer was a vital step in Luke's progression to Jedi-hood?) which struck few people as fun.

With MxO, players expected an action packed combat game involving guns and kung fu. What they got was a title where melee was inferior to magic hacking and the actual combat involved pressing a button every 4 seconds while you watched your character go through a limited range of moves - hardly thrilling stuff. Although MxO looked the part, it didn't deliver in making the player feel like they were involved in the Matrix IP experience.

In both cases, the lack of connection to the IP hurt the title, as players coming to experience the nature of the IP first hand were let down and left.

[Fordel]

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

I would argue it isn't the idea of classes themselves but the rigidity of most class systems in MMO's. Guild Wars is a good example of a working class system. The Flaw in Most MMO's is the idea that a priest must be the BEST healer or the ONLY healer or do NOTHING but heal etc...


Now to add to the list:

Blizzard
WoW
Retard Rocks (Original Meeting stones)

Instead of a proper LFG tool/interface, WoW had Retard Rocks. The only way to access the LFG queue for a specific dungeon was to trek out to said dungeons stone. The Dungeons were spread far apart and there was no guarantee anyone would be actually wanting to do said dungeon to begin with, let alone be at the stone to enter the LFG queue. Resulted in tons of wasted time and a system no one used AND it clogged up the city trade channels with constant LFG spam.



-----

Mythic
DaoC
Failure to understand their own mechanics. That they wrote and have access too. (Also failure to properly FIX said mechanics after flaw has been pointed out. AKA: "Hardcoded" )

I know we all know ALLLL MMO Dev's are 'pants on head retarded' and etc...  but I mean this quite literally with DaoC. One example is Friars and Staff spec. Friars are a class in DaoC, their primary (and only) melee weapon/specline is staffs. Staffs scale off of Dexterity in DaoC. Friars gain STRENGTH when they level. This resulted in the increase of a useless stat for Friars and a deficiency in their melee output. At first Mythic claimed staffs scaled off of STR. Then once that was clearly proven incorrect by the players, instead of fixing either the Staff spec to work off of STR, or fixing Friar's to increase their DEX instead of STR, they gave Friars a self DEX buff... one that did not stack with the other DEX buffs in game... which meant Friar's were going to be at a permanent disadvantage in melee dps output.

http://www.camelotherald.com/article.php?id=18 ( Please Note:  Staff damage is based on Dexterity. )

Maybe a third of the classes in DaoC have stats that scale as they level, that claimed they are used by the class on the character creation sheet, that in fact have NO use for the class at all. Not in the "I'm a MMO Player and I'm QQing" useless, but the literal "This mechanically does nothing to any of abilities or spells" useless. Instead of fixing the base issue, they tried to work around it. Band-Aid fix on top of Band-Aid fix.

http://www.camelotherald.com/article.php?id=45 ( Please note: Some Wizards feel that Constitution is a more important attribute than Quickness.)
http://www.camelotherald.com/article.php?id=28 ( Please Note: Most Paladins feel that Dexterity is a more important attribute than Piety. )
http://www.camelotherald.com/article.php?id=9 (Please Note: It is true that empathy appears as a highlighted attribute for the bard class, and that empathy grows as a bard levels. In the early days of design, empathy was indeed a crucial statistic. However, as the class was implemented, empathy did nothing, but the attributes section was in error. We have since balanced the class with its strengths, weaknesses, gear, and abilities, with the knowledge that empathy does nothing for this class. Please consider charisma, constitution, and dexterity as the most important attributes for your points. )

[UnSub]

Company Name - Cryptic Studios
Game - City of Heroes / Villains
Gaffe - The selling of Enhancement Diversification to CoH players as part of CoV

Reason - CoV's launch had a number of gaffes associated with it - the implementation of bases so that very few people could see them and at a rental cost that both relied on a new in-game currency AND had a upkeep cost that sank most dreams, a world that left a lot of villains feeling not particularly evil, a completely separate world for villains that rarely crossed with heroes - but the biggest one that is remembered is the announcement of Enhancement Diversification. (FYI, most players combine the Global Defence Nerf (GDN) that reduced target limits a player could hit with an AoE / taunt, among other things, with the impact of ED, even though the two came out at different times.)

For the record, CoH/V needed ED in some way, shape or form, so I'm not going to go into that (someone else wants to, fine by me). However, the biggest issue was that after a lot of power tweaking / nerfing that led to CoH gaining the accusation of City of Nerfs, the lead designer Jack Emmert outright said "No more nerfs to powers." Players breathed a sigh of relief, only to intake sharply on getting into CoV beta and finding out that enhancements to powers were now designed to provide diminishing returns instead of stacking straight up. The effectiveness of six slotting enhancements had been basically cut in half.

Outraged players violated the NDA and started posting about ED. Bannings and forum edits may have taken place, but the news was out, often in a half-formed, chinese whispers, filtered-through-the-internet way. Cryptic was forced to play catch up and release info about ED before they were prepared to and to deal with the fallout of it. Emmert came out and apologised - he stated he'd considered the enhancement system as separate from the powers system and although technically correct, a lot of players saw it as a sneaky, academic distinction.

CoV didn't do its expected job of attracting new players (multiple reasons likely came into it above and beyond just ED) and post-launch the CoH/V team was cut by 75% (or to only 15 developers). Emmert has indicated that NCsoft was behind the purse tightening (which, ironically, may have made CoH/V a better title as the team focussed on what they could do), with the publisher likely now focusing on the success of its upcoming jewel in the crown ... Tabula Rasa.

[Demonix]

Wurm Online
The gaffe itself: Failure to experiment with alternate rule-sets makes it hard to have the game catch new players.
Why the design was bad:  I firmly believe that a Wurm Online with the grind reduced by a factor of 10 might actually be the Sandbox Jesus everyone has been waiting for for so long.  And yet, people see that it takes 2 hours to make your first bowl of fucking soup and they're instantly turned off.  The devs have everything to gain from trying out alternate rulesets, and basically nothing to lose.

God, I hear you on this.  I tried it out twice.  The first time I was just mucking along when I realized 'my god, you are spending 6-12 hours a day trying to dig a tunnel, where all you do is click enough times to induce RSI and wait 15 seconds while you carry out the task'  The second time I relearned what I realized the first time :)

Still, the fun is THERE, if it wasnt so damn grindy.  Progress bars for tradeskills didnt work for DAOC, I dont know why they think it will work for them.

[naum]

Jedi came in at a later date, but unlocking them meant grinding through careers (who knew that being a moisture farmer was a vital step in Luke's progression to Jedi-hood?) which struck few people as fun.

 

[Pendan]

Funcom
Anarchy Online
Gaffe: Not stress testing your server until last days of beta
Final day of AO beta they wiped the servers and opened it to everyone willing to do download. Result was 90% of characters could not zone out of the starting area. If managed to get out you had the worse rubberbanding ever experienced. Two day later the product released. About 6 months later it was playable.

[Falconeer]

2 pages and Age of Conan isn't here yet? I'll give it a spin.

Company Name - Funcom

Game - Age of Conan

The gaffe itself - Not going for a full PvP game having the best MMORPG combat ever, and instead attempting to cater PvE people in a DIKU with basically non existant, by design, itemization.

Why the design was bad - Simply put, as someone else pointed out in the PvP thread, you can't really have a PvP game based on human skill which, at the same time, relies on itemization. Age of Conan failed by trying to get both PvE and PvP people happy, actually disappointing both. The PvE felt unfinished and empty without the usual hunt for rare epic ubercool items. The PvP on the other hand was perfect... for a meaningless duels! Massive PvP goals were not working and totally unfinished. Lots of promised and basic features were missing and there was no support at all for Guilds and Alliances other than a tag under your name and a shared chat. They had the best PvP game ever in their hands, and let it slip into pointless battles over spawnpoints (as of November 2008).

[schild]

The gaffe itself - Not going for a full PvP game having the best MMORPG combat ever, and instead attempting to cater PvE people in a DIKU with basically non existant, by design, itemization.

1. These are two different problems.
2. One of them is an opinion. Just because the combat is good doesn't mean it has to be full PvP. Whether I agree with you or not is pretty besides the point.

The real gaffe for AoC was the total lack of cohesive design or direction. Releasing a theoretically AAA game with less content past the midpoint than most indie RPGs. Thing was just a fucking mess. But not being full-pvp wasn't their problem.

Also, best PvP game ever? Comeon now, off the fanboi throne. It would not have ever been the best PvP game ever in the hands of Funcom. Surely you're mistaking them for a competent technical crew that also somehow understands balance. >_>

Edit: This isn't the only opinion in this thread. When you all come back Monday (for those that don't surf weekend, this post and all the ones before it will be rewritten in the second post in the thread and the posts following will be deleted. Tidy tidy, it is a list afterall.

[Falconeer]

In defense of my short-lived "opinion".

Design went for NO-itemization BECAUSE of PvP. Sign that they had PvP in mind as a long-term top priority. Choosing to make a diku with joke itemization (see Gaute's official statement about the hardcap of equip accounting for no more than 25% of a character capabilities-modifiers) is like a war declaration to any PvE customer base and  you know how it actually drained the will to play out of so many players. Where's my carrot at the end of the stick? What the fuck is 0.1% fire resistance? On the other hand, they couldn't finish the PvP part of the game too, alienating the other half of the customers the game was aimed to.

Just because the combat is good doesn't mean it has to be full PvP.

It's not because of the combat, I probably formulated it badly. The combat shows how good PvP could have been, while the itemization doomed PvE to be unfixably bad. These two aspects are tied at a design level (me thinks). They built it with PvP in mind (the combat is fun against mobs but shines only against players and THEN it MUST NOT be item dependant), that's why they made PvE boring (no loot no party). Please name a single western MMO with itemization worse than Conan's? That's the design gaffe. Not finishing content and all the bugs have to do with money and the mandatory Q2 2008 launch more than with bad design decisions.

Finally, I am 51% Conan fanboy cause it really IS that fun to play it in PvP. But I am a 49% Conan-Funcom hater for the reasons you all know and experienced yourself.

P.S: Right now, almost every single one of the 6 PvE EU servers is dead. On the other hand the the 7 PvP servers are packed and healthy. No idea about the US.

[tmp]

With MxO, players expected an action packed combat game involving guns and kung fu. What they got was a title where melee was inferior to magic hacking and the actual combat involved pressing a button every 4 seconds while you watched your character go through a limited range of moves - hardly thrilling stuff. Although MxO looked the part, it didn't deliver in making the player feel like they were involved in the Matrix IP experience.

From brief experience with MxO, seemed it wasn't even combat mechanics that'd cause issues, but rather combat balance -- people would come to game with expectations set by movies, where the heroes could tackle multiple opponents with ease. The game instead would still pit the players versus multiple opponents, but whenever 'multiple' exceeded 2 the enemies could frequently beat up the hero wannabe, which would lead people to go "wtf" (and quit)

On second thought, this mistake isn't limited to MxO, really.

[UnSub]

Anyone who's played / knows about any of the cancelled titles in this thread want to go into why they died?

Company Name: Aventurine SA
Game: Darkfall
Gaffe: Announcing a title a long, long time before it launches

Reason:
Darkfall was first announced in August 2001. It might - might - just be going into beta at the end of this year. In the between-time, proposed feature after proposed feature after proposed feature have been promised to players. By announcing all these features so far ahead of them actually being experienced by players - and perhaps even designed - it just creates an expectation for a game that is unlikely to ever be met.

If Darkfall pulls it off, it will be a title that lots of people play. However, for every skipped feature, for every "that will be in the expansion" system that players expected to get but don't, then a group of players is going to be turned off because that is what got them interested in the title. If enough features get cut (or delivered at a sub par standard) then Darkfall is going to find its player base turned off very quickly.

When it comes to marketing MMOs, you need to be able to show the systems in action, not just talk a good game about what you want to have in the game (Dawn is another game that fell into this trap, but Darkfall might actually launch so we can see this gaffe in action).

[UnSub]

Company Name: SOE
Game: Vanguard
Gaffe: Spending money on what appeared to be a train wreck, then turned out to be a train wreck

Reason:
SOE has obviously built a successful business strategy out of it's Station Pass, where players pay a higher monthly fee but get access to a number of MMOs. Unfortunately, most of these MMOs are corpses propped up by duct tape and metal frames, so getting some fresh blood in every now and again helps keep people from working out they $30 a month when they only really play 1 game that costs everyone else $15 a month.

Vanguard, from ex-SOE golden boy Brad McQuaid, was picked up on Smedley's watch for a new, hot MMO to make SOE interesting again. McQuaid had struck big money with Everquest, so there was a good chance he could do it again with Vanguard, right? Perhaps SOE should have taken the warning signs that Microsoft Games had been willing to dump Vanguard like a hot potato let Vanguard go to a direct competitor. But no, apparently SOE thought that a bit of a reshuffle and some more resources with launch not too far away would be enough.[/url]

It wasn't. Things were rotten in the state of Sigil, Smedley was apparently surprised that SOE had spent a lot of money on something he hadn't appeared to vet particularly thoroughly which then had problems and gave SOE yet another flop to add to its stable and dent to its reputation.

On the other hand, SOE appeared to have learned its lesson when it came to Gods & Heroes trying the same kind of things; SOE dropped support for G&H rather than go through the same thing again.

[Drai]

Turbine
Asheron's Call
Gaffe:  Making a flexible skill based system that did not allow for unlearning skills until years after launch

Reason:  Allowing players to select any skill and add more as leveling occurred was a refreshing change, allowing for "pure" classes if desired, or a dizzying array of hybrid characters.  Letting players select any skill from the menu is great, except that players initially had no way to unlearn a skill or redistribute skill points.  This resulted in it being incredibly easy for new players to gimp themselves by choosing useless skills early on that could effectively cripple a character at higher levels.  Also had the side effect of hurting flavor of the month templates whenever balance changes occurred, which, although humorous, it is still bad design to give a player no outs when massive changes happen. 

A quest was added a year or two after launch that allowed for repeccing one skill at a time, via a time restricted quest (repeatable once every three weeks or so to prevent instant respeccing).

[FatuousTwat]

Mythic
Dark Ages of Camelot
The gaffe itself: Compensating for a lack of storyline by saying that 'the players will write the story through RvR', and counting on that to actually happen.
Why the design was bad:  Players *can* write their own story, so to speak, through PvP, but *only* under a limited set of circumstances; they have to be free to form their own sides, and make their own politics.  EVE, Shadowbane, and other full-PvP environments have stories worth reading for precisely this reason.  In a game with fixed sides, and intentionally gimped communication between player sides, RvR will simply not produce that sort of memorable drama.

I'd like to disagree. The epic quests every 10(?) levels were pretty interesting, and the scripted things were cool (Giant skele behind one of the newb villages, the giant worm thing by Connacht. The giant fight between the two types of monsters by the Farm with the Giant Frogman-thing.

I'm probably just seeing the game through rose-tinted glasses. I absolutely love my memories of the game, even though I hate what they did to it with ToA, I still had more fun in that game than any MMO since. 

[Ubvman]

I'll take a stab at the elephant in the room. The NGE is after all one big gigantic design gaffe. Hopefully this entry fits Schild's criterias.

Company Name: SOE
Game: Star Wars Galaxies
Design Gaffe: Drastic and fundamental changes to the core gameplay of an already established and (more or less) mature MMOG. Publish 25 aka the New Gaming Experience (NGE). "The NGE took what had been a skill-building character advancement system and transformed it into a level-based system with very specific classes."

Reasons why it was bad:
So many levels of fail... someone could easily win a Pulitzer prize if they could write a book about it, if not for NDAs.
History and stuff in this link.

The NGE alienates the existing player community who helpfully provides tons of bad publicity in the mainstream media for SOE while exiting the game in droves. Millions of new players that were supposed to be attracted to the game by the NGE and replace the losses, mysteriously do not show up. The buggy nature of the NGE changes themselves - rushed and tested internally in secret if at all, do not help matters.

When released, SW:G was expected to be the first million subscriber MMOG in the US market. Peaking at around 350,000 players, sub numbers took a stuka nose-dive soon after the NGE and now hover around the 50,000 mark. Rumor has it at far less in 2008 - 20k thereabouts and falling - free server transfers now offered.

[Ubvman]

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, .....

Back in EQ1's heyday 1999-2001 this was considered a feature. I wouldn't exactly call it unpopular either as I remember players in those days actually fought very hard to KEEP IT IN. We just didn't know any better - back then we just took those 24 hour post-wipe corpse recoveries from Plane of Fear as an intrinsic part of the game. In fact one could advance very good reasons to have CRs in a PvE MMOG - loss and wipes do have a significant sting with repercussions and the danger/challenge levels to your char is ramped up appreciably.

for 1999 EQ1 and UO - it wasn't a design gaffe, the devs and the players didn't know any better.
In 2008 - Corpse Runs are obsolete gameplay design.

Nevertheless, for any MMOG designed after 2004 to have a hardcore EQ1 style CR now would be a design gaffe indeed. A corpse loss or several frustrating corpse runs would just make a convenient "jumping off" point for an MMOG to the any number of other competitors in the market.

[Morfiend]

I didn't see this.

Company Name: SOE
Game: Star Wars Galaxies
Gaffe: HAM

Reason: A system that actually could kill you if you fired your gun to many times. Decent idea to have 3 HP pools, with attacks that could target each. BAD BAD BAD that it used those pools as action points.

[UnSub]

I didn't see this.

Company Name: SOE
Game: Star Wars Galaxies
Gaffe: HAM

Reason: A system that actually could kill you if you fired your gun to many times. Decent idea to have 3 HP pools, with attacks that could target each. BAD BAD BAD that it used those pools as action points.

Despite all I've read on SWG, I don't think I ever saw this factoid. All the stuff about rifle damage not stacking with pistol damage sure, but this? Next time someone pines for the good old days of SWG, I might just bring this up.

[Raph]

Whee, I love getting publicly pilloried. ;)

I don't think corpse runs belong on this list. It's like calling the telegraph a design gaffe because phones replaced it. Corpse runs were all there was at the time, and under the philosophy of "don't change what works" would have been everyone's default choice back then.

HAM: FWIW, I still believe that the premise of "spend your energy to do attacks, and therefore become vulnerable" is a common game system across many, many games. It may have been wrong for SWG, and maybe there shouldn't have been three types of energy -- maybe, sure. But the basic premise itself? Used lots of places and doesn't break. Personally, I think the issue was the balancing of it more than anything else -- especially letting you spend your last point, which shouldn't have been possible.

Ecology/tragedy of the commons in UO: couldn't agree more. The specific design gaffe wouldn't be the ecology system per se, however, but the notion of a global spawn pool with a fixed spawn cap.

Jediless SWG: we were given a time period, and the constraints that Jedi must be rare. I suggested changing to a different time period so we could have Jedi, and was told no. I suggested not having Jedi at all except as NPCs, and was told no. So we land in the (uncomfortable) middle. I strongly concur the gaffe was dropping Holocrons. :)

My own nominees for SWG *and* UO gaffes would be the (lack of) static content.

[UnSub]

Company Name: Flagship Studios / Auran
Game: Hellgate: London / Fury
Gaffe: Know what your payment model is going to be and how that will work

Reason: Bill Roper has admitted HGL launched with a payment model that was confusing and they weren't sure of while Fury never seemed quite sure how to get people to pay for playing and would ask the forums for advice. Given that you fail if you don't get revenue in, the payment model would seem to be a pretty important thing to get right.

[UnSub]

Whee, I love getting publicly pilloried. ;)

Why else would you have become a games designer? 

As for corpse runs: there are sections of the MMO community who feel MMOs are too easy now and should go back to such mechanics. Barring the ability to electrocute them through the internet for the sake of the gene pool, reminding all those people who didn't experience corpse runs why they were bad is important to do.

[schild]

HAM: FWIW, I still believe that the premise of "spend your energy to do attacks, and therefore become vulnerable" is a common game system across many, many games. It may have been wrong for SWG, and maybe there shouldn't have been three types of energy -- maybe, sure. But the basic premise itself? Used lots of places and doesn't break. Personally, I think the issue was the balancing of it more than anything else -- especially letting you spend your last point, which shouldn't have been possible.

Play one of the Megaten games to see it done right. Notably Digital Devil Saga.

Physical attacks cost HP.
Magic Attacks cost Mana.

Don't have enough of either? Can't do the attack.

That said, 2 bars > 3, the third was just wholly unnecessary and frankly, made no sense.

Also, the entire skill system was all over the map. Oh, and combat was a mess, but mostly it does trickle down from the HAM design.

My own nominees for SWG *and* UO gaffes would be the (lack of) static content.

Well, No.

See: Eve.

The problem was, where there was static content, it was poorly designed and/or badly implemented. Really, SW:G was another game that could've gone the route of Eve, a game where the players produce 99% of the fun - and they did. But they had to fight the actual game systems to make all of that work. I'm beginning to think we're going to see a schism.

Game systems designed for players on one side and game systems designed around the content on the other. Having both is too pie in the sky for most teams, particularly the designers in charge of the current crop of upcoming MMOGs.

Again, I'd love to be proven wrong by the current designers - but all signs point to "lol."

[Slyfeind]

As for corpse runs: there are sections of the MMO community who feel MMOs are too easy now and should go back to such mechanics. Barring the ability to electrocute them through the internet for the sake of the gene pool, reminding all those people who didn't experience corpse runs why they were bad is important to do.

After playing WoW for years, I went back to EQ for a few months last year, and got a druid up to about level 28. I didn't mind corpse runs at all. I didn't think they were clever, like they were thought out and planned and balanced, but I also didn't feel punished. I also went back to UO earlier this year, and didn't mind it there, either. I really don't care either way.

Of course, a lot of this thread is just stuff that people disagree with, rather than serious design flaws.

[Dtrain]

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.

Seconded. Love this game/Loved it. So much wasted potential here. If this game had launched with a limited free to download trial and a reduced subscription fee I think we might be be looking at a very different MMO scene by now, with more options than your standard RPG tripe. Someone is going to come back to this game and revisit it propperly though, I have no doubt.

Putting a little more specificity on top of your point about the business model:

Company: SOE
Game: Planetside
Gaffe: Releasing an expansion that was not tailored to the game
Explanation: The standard model for an expansion to an MMORPG was worked out by UO and EQ; more and different items, collectables, areas to explore, enemies, etc. Loosely applying these same principles to a very different type of game did not turn out well.

The Core Combat expansion areas were a lousy place to fight - and this was a game that was entirely about fighting the other team. The unstable terrain mixed with zip lines for infantry made piloting land vehicles in the core a frustrating and unrewarding proposition. Air combat didn't go so well due to limited room for manuever, and a low flight ceiling. The bases in the core were so pourus and exposed that a ground defense was hardly ever worthwhile. In short, it was a kick in the nuts for everyone playing the game.

While it was still in use, the Core also spread out the population of the players in the game - fewer people were around to partake in the massive battles on the surface. A fragmented population partaking in suddenly less interesting battles seemed to lose interest and melt away very quickly.

Eventually, the playerbase chose largely to ignore the cores. Occasionally you could find a frustrating and sparsely populated fight, but eventually they were only used for small unopposed teams running modules (flags that give buffs,) and stocking up on expansion specific weaponry for use back in the original game - which soldiered on bravely.

[Montague]

Company: Blizzard
Game: World of Warcraft
Gaffe: The original honor system.

Having your most hardcore, no-life no-job players set the bar for PVP itemization for the entire playerbase on a server was a Bad Idea (tm). At the very least Blizzard recognized its mistake and did away with the system. (Then made another gaffe with Arenas but that's another story)

[SurfD]

Turbine
Asheron's Call 2
The gaffe itself: Giving every single monster both a ranged and melee attack, so as to eliminate perching.
Why the design was bad: The cure was worse than the disease.  Made monsters feel far more 'same-y' than they otherwise would, made encounters feel and play out much more generic.

I would like to add to this one:

The Gaffe: Cardboard World.

Coming from AC1 with its fully explorable houses to AC2 where the ENTIRE world outside of dungeons was designed to resemble a Hollywood Movie Facade was rather jarring.  Whoever designed the outdoor buildings in AC2 in such a way that you couldn't interact with them in ANY way (i mean, entire MANSION sized houses that have no entrances or interiors for that matter) should have been shot.  If you cant enter a building, why the hell even MAKE buildings.  Just put a big bloody rock or a tree there instead.

Its just severely surreal to come to a town of 5 or 10 buildings and not be able to do anything with them except stare at them blankly.

[Venkman]

It's like calling the telegraph a design gaffe because phones replaced it. Corpse runs were all there was at the time, and under the philosophy of "don't change what works" would have been everyone's default choice back then.

It's not corpse runs per se. Even WoW has those after a fashion (to avoid stat debt and gear damage). It's the full crush of the EQ1 specific corpse run, or "nekkid run in the live world with fully spawned monsters to potentially the bottom of a lava pit wherein your corpse had all of your stuff".

In my opinion the telegraph analogy because it existed until there was real competition that improved the end user experience. Corpse runs were accepted because they were tied to the game more than half of all players of the day wanted to play. A lot of EQ1 features were allowed to persist during that largely uncompetitive time.