Global Chat: October 30-November 5, 2011

It is all in how you build the game. The way games are made put the playerbase in the position of being the guinea pig.

MMOs and gaming has been studied, but these games affect people in certain ways. You also have over a dozen different types of personality types or more, and to craft any game as social, you need to have many different anchors in place.

What do I mean by anchor? Something that pulls a certain type of person toward it. Many might be pulled to a certain minigame regardless of personality type, while others will perhaps like the other aspects that are all about challenge and reward.

You need to make your game with social aspects in mind when it comes to the MMO. Don't force people to fight over things when that isn't the intention, but rather have them happily work together. I mean, think about it... do you want to make your customer mad by putting him in an uncomfortable and frustrating experience?

If you create a dungeon, and you let players re-run that dungeon five times a week, and then on top of that you let anyone roll on low-drop items, how won't that cause conflict? Not only does it create a grind, but players are competing against one another with a set of dice for gear that might not drop again for 23 runs. It doesn't encourage community, especially when you give a person a vehicle to be anonymous cross realm with a dungeon finder. It brings out the worse in people!

I don't even design games and I could see this; how, pray tell, do people getting paid $100k a year or more not?

When will these fools realize we are gamers. Gamers have moved past the terms, hardcore, casual, etc., etc., and have realized that entertainment can be had by all and not an entitled few who think we should play their way.

This group includes clueless developers and anyone still using the terms hardcore, casual, etc. I call these folks busybodies, a slightly endearing derogatory term.

The games that either slowly or directly make themselves unplayable without paying are part of the problem. This is why I don't like F2P that is modeled more after DLC where you have to buy access to the later stages of the game either in terms of what zones you can enter or what levels you can get to. Just as bad are those games that basically make it so that you have to buy cash shop items in order to reasonably craft necessary endgame gear. If it is virtually impossible to craft the gear without the mystic widget from the item shop, then it is, for all reasonable purposes, a cash-shop-only item

The trick is that the game needs to make it neither too easy nor too hard to play the entire game and get all the items, including cash-shop-only items. It is fine if it is a bit time consuming, but it can't be made unreasonable, which is what way too many free to play games do.

If you can trade a few hours of game time for about a dollar of cash-shop access, then you are in the ball park. And this makes it so that nothing, not even the items of the cash shop, are outside the grasp of free players. It may take them more time, and in our instant-gratification culture that doesn't work well for many people, but they can still do it.

But if the company makes this access to the cash shop artificially high, then it still effectively cuts the free players off. That is no good either. This is why allowing the customers, between themselves, to set the price of cash-shop cash to an in-game currency though a market place is the best setup.