A History of Bad Design: The MMOG Edition

[tmp]

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.

Would say to the contrary, it'd always strike me odd you're allowed to enter anyone's home in a game and rummage through their closets while owner stands in corner with their 1 line of trigger dialogue, and that line is not "GTFO". You can't enter most places because most people do have common sense not to let complete stranger just barge in. Especially in town.

As for replacing stuff with trees... why, you can't interact with these trees in any way, either. With this logic why the hell even MAKE trees..?

[Raph]

More than that, though -- corpse runs were part of a constellation of features that perhaps only worked well in text games. For example, some of the things that made corpse runs less onerous in muds:

• travel time in a 3d world vs travel time in text is vastly different. Getting back out to the place where you did in a non-aggro mob death was trivial. It was easy to get corpse recovery groups to the same place.
• global chat with a smaller, tighter group. Muds were smaller -- peak concurrency of 60 was a typical thing. So asking for help on global chat was plausible and easy.
• donation rooms, wherein people would put fresh loads of gear for newbies or the newly dead.
• less emphasis on "perfect" gear, and more cases of equipment loss. Stuff like deathtraps which ate all your gear were more common, and thus gear was not as irreplaceable. A corpse run could in fact be optional to some degree.

Picture a UO with instant teleport back to your corpse (get rid of the tedious travel bit) and instant summon of friends to your corpse (get rid of the "I can't handle what killed me") bit. UO already had the more disposable item mentality. All of a sudden, corpse runs don't necessarily seem like a supertedious thing. The above combined potentially means you could very well show up to recover your corpse and find the monster was easier than when you died to it, making the corpse run a case of satisfying revenge.

Goes to show design choices don't happen in isolation. I think a LOT of design choices from MUDs were altered dramatically for the worse given the text-vs-3d-space issue.

[Ubvman]

Company Name: SOE
Game: Everquest 1

The Gaffe(s):
(1) Designing a game expansion around a feature (level cap increase), and then releasing the expansion WITHOUT the feature.
(2) Placing a higher priority on releasing expansions on an arbitrary 6 months schedule rather than releasing them when they have been adequately tested and debugged.

First let us have several angry emoticons -             
Its very hard to write any of these without going ALL CAPS SHOUTING but I will try...

The expansion in question is of course Everquest's seventh expansion Gates of Discord.
On release, the content of the expansion was designed around having the level cap for players increased to level 70. Unfortunately - that feature was not included in the expansion - players were STILL CAPPED AT 65. What acerbated everything was the fact that this expansion pack was released a hardcore raider expansion pack, and most of the content (around 70% by my reckoning) lay behind SOE's patented grinding cockblocks that were tuned to level 70 players. No matter how well geared anyone was, NOBODY could advance through the expansion. The icing on the cake was,  the expansion was rushed to meet the 6 monthly expansion schedule, it was a half baked, inadequately tested, buggy POS.

Well, cut to the chase. A few weeks in the expansion - top end raiders (in full Plane of Time gear) were struggling to advance thru the first basic gated content. The few that did manage to get thru to the first tier (into Kod'taz) found that almost all the raiding quests, keys and flags were broken, bugged or just seriously borked. After several emergency patches to make the game playable to 99% of the paying customers, players managed to proceed further only to encounter more ridiculous dev cockblocks. Event raids that were deliberately tuned to be impossible to win (the first incarnation of the Uqua instance) to hide the fact that the end game instances were still unfinished (they had to halt player progression as the players were progressing to nothing - no content).

Consequences:
Hardcore raiders left the game in frustration and anger. Casuals left the game because, essentially there was nothing for them to do since everyone was stuck at max level cap of 65 - they had nothing to do in a level 70 expansion. GoD was released at the peak of Everquest1's subscription numbers, sub numbers went into a steep decline soon after as the expansion provided a perfect drop-out point. Later, the double whammy of Everquest 2 and World of Warcraft soon finished it off and relegated the former #1 MMOG into a niche title.

Its not the full story, theres more to it - but i think its enough for this gaffe listing.

[kERRA]

Company: SOE
Game: Everquest 1
Gaffe#1: Requiring L.1-29 spellcasters to stare at a static image of a spellbook to recover mana at a normal rate
Why the design was bad: Reaching L.30 took weeks for average players at release ...weeks spent staring interminably at spell icons instead of the game we were supposedly playing.  It was every bit as boring as it sounds. 

Gaffe#2: Granting access to the Luclin expansion's end game through a series of the most tedious rare spawn camps in MMO history. 
Why the design was bad: It forced each member of every guild that wanted to enter Vex Thal to camp a number of otherwise-worthless or level-inappropriate, often contested encounters for hours and hours and hours.   Was there a single raiding guild that didn't have to scramble for members to replace the people burned out by shard camping? 

[UnSub]

Company Name: Planetwide Games

Game: Risk Your Life: Path of the Emperor

The gaffe itself: Hold a PvP tournament with a $1 million prize for first place; you had to buy a box copy of RYL to take part.
 
Why the design was bad: It's probably a convincing discussion prior to launching a game that a big competition should be held to attract players to it. Offering a $1 million dollar first prize has a fantastic ring to it. MMO- and gaming-sites also eat it up, which gives a lot of free promotion to your game.

Here's the problem: PvP brings out the worst in people. Competitions with big cash-prizes bring out the worst in people. Add the two up and you get the best of the worst. Plus, it's PvP in a MMO which is all about bringing out the exploits - especially in indie-developed titles. After announcing the tournament and having an unknown number of people buy RYL on the possibility of winning the tournament, Planetwide cancelled the contest on the grounds that they couldn't stop the cheating.

Add this to some pretty poor reviews and you have a fairly hostile community working against you.

(For those interested, take a look at some of the in-game videos - it looks like Darkfall. Plus the games recommended for those who like RYL are Shadowbane, Saga of Ryzom and AC2 - I can't fault the accuracy there. )

[Elidroth]

Game: EverQuest

Gaffe: Donal's Breastplate (Complete Heal, Right Click Effect, 0 mana, 0 reagent)

Why the design was bad: Putting (then) Complete Heal as a click effect on a breastplate meant you basically reduced your clerics to the role of "Click this button once every X seconds" and that's it. Since this was a 0 mana spell effect, you basically stacked your raid full of enough Clerics, and you won. Nothing else mattered.

[MournelitheCalix]

Company Name:  Turbine Entertainment
Game: Asheron's Call 2
Gaffe:  Bait and Switch

"The sequel to Asheron's Call provides a new combat system and monthly content online. In this multilayer online role-playing game, you are responsible for rebuilding the world, and your decisions determine how the world is restored. Your campaign features multiple quests in which you'll align with a faction, fight monsters and other players, and control precious resources. As the story unfolds, you'll experience world-shaking changes such as blizzards and volcanoes. Do everything from changing the immediate environment upon completing a quest to triggering global events."


This was taken from the box.  To many people who were vets of Asheron's Call 1, Asheron's Call 2 was sold to us as 1 with better graphics and a chance to change the landscape literally "rebuilding" the world.  This game offered none of that.  When players logged in, they could impact almost nothing  and they certainly couldn't alter how the world was/is restored.  I would really like to play the game that allowed me to do what the box said.  I think it would be really interesting.

http://www.gamefaqs.com/computer/doswin/home/470171.html

[Amarr HM]

Company:CCP
Game:Eve Online
Gaffe: 2007 Winter patch deletes boot.ini file from 1000+ Windows XP users.


This was the only time in history people were happy they upgraded to Windows Vista it fits under the header of bad software design, or plain sloppy programming.
Review.
http://massively.joystiq.com/2007/12/13/eve-trinity-ccps-take-on-the-boot-ini-debacle/

A CCP dev explanation of how it came about.
http://www.eveonline.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&bid=526

We could probably dedicate a whole thread to CCP' bad game design but this one stands out for me.

[Comstar]

Company: CRS
Game: WW2OL
Gaffe: 2002 Winter patch deletes boot.ini file from 100+ Windows XP users.

So bad it's been done TWICE, but CRS lead the way in showing how not having any actual paid testers can make you just as good as companies 10 times your size in being really really bad.

[JackKerras]

Company: Turbine
Game: Asheron's Call
Gaffe: No Nerfs policy

Nerfs are really, really important.  They piss people off (I know I was absolutely beside myself when Lugian Tacticians got the nerf bat, but I was young and stupid then) but they are of huge value as balancing tools for developers.

Everything you do as a player is a chance to screw things up and wipe everyone in your party.  Anytime one of your teammates has to take action, they may screw up, and it may wash your whole party away and make you all start over, or so it is endgame in more popular, conventional MMORPGs.  Every fight is a series of seconds, each of which is a chance to step on a rake of some kind; you can take your weaker folks and assign them to less demanding roles, but the fact remains, every person that touches everything has a chance to screw it up.

The same is true of developers.

If there are a dozen types of weapons and one is too powerful, you need to nerf that one.  The devs on Asheron's Call decided not to nerf, so now they need to make eleven changes instead of one, increasing power across the board.  This continued to happen.  Things got more and more out of whack, even in early game, to the point where not min-maxing like crazy and having crazy gear available to you out of the gate meant that Random Bunny A would kick your teeth in.  This is not even going into the fact that making eleven changes instead of one is eleven times a many chances to not just unbalance things, but introduce bugs, cause memory leaks, make the server not talk to the client precisely right under certain, arcane circumstances, or a vast host of other terrible things.

Never nerfing is a terrible, terrible idea.  That one decision cost Asheron's Call's team -thousands- of hours of effort trying to fix things by -not using- the best tool in the 'fix things' toolbox.  People will be mad and huff and stomp their feet and maybe even quit, but the health of your game will benefit and you'll keep more people in the long run if the game is not terribly broken at its foundations.