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MMO Mechanics: Lowering the barriers to entry
In the increasingly competitive MMO genre, games have to do all they can to keep you as a customer. MMOs have traditionally been quite difficult games to really get into since they typically require a considerable time and money investment and we tend to play them for stretches of several months to years at a time. The gameplay in MMOs is inherently social by nature, forcing you to relate to others, and there are some even more fundamental barriers that get in the way of new players signing up. I'm sure we've all enthused and rambled to our friends in the hope that they might check out our most recent gaming crush, only to see a repulsed look on their faces when they realise it's an MMO. The classic subscription model is a substantial paywall for the average gamer, and this is what has traditionally kept MMOs niche. The early game can be daunting to those who aren't familiar with the genre, and developers pour a lot of effort into easing newcomers into that gameplay. In this week's MMO Mechanics, I'm going to look at how some MMOs manage to break down these barriers through the use of clever mechanics in order to open up MMO gaming to more people than ever before.
Should Proving Grounds be an entry requirement for LFG content?
There's been an interesting discussion taking place lately regarding Proving Grounds, and their use as a barrier to entry for LFG content. Lead Systems Designer Greg "Ghostcrawler" Street tweeted to clarify Blizzard's potential intent, in response to the forum thread. @Meerkatx It would probably be more like LFR requires ilevel 500 OR a Proving Ground Silver Medal, or maybe Silver + ilevel 450 or whatever. - Greg Street (@Ghostcrawler) October 1, 2013 I thought this was an interesting idea, and clearly something Blizzard has taken into consideration, so let's explore the good and bad sides of it. In each section, I'm going to try my best to steadfastly ignore the opposite position. Think of it as a debate I'm having. With myself. Good Sides Proving grounds are at least a way to show skill. The current system bases itself purely off item level, so if you have the gear on your character, or the gear in your bags, you can get into a LFR raid. This is really really easy to manipulate, particularly for classes who can equip anything, and this in itself is an issue. It's far, far harder to manipulate Proving Ground achievements, particularly given how item level is scaled to 463 in Proving Grounds.
The Lawbringer: Positive value creation from the negatives in the games industry
Pop law abounds in The Lawbringer, your weekly dose of WoW, the law, video games and the MMO genre. Running parallel to the games we love and enjoy is a world full of rules, regulations, pitfalls and traps. How about you hang out with us as we discuss some of the more esoteric aspects of the games we love to play? The no-win situation is, at its core, a sad state of affairs. Seriously, no one is winning in a no-win situation. In fact, everyone could be said to be losing. Piracy has been long held to be the dire no-win situation in the video game industry because it represents a perfect culmination of utter loss -- an infinitely copyable product that took millions of dollars to produce being distributed for free. No profit means the studio gets its windows shuttered and no one goes home employed. Last week, I read an article on PC Gamer that talks about Runic Games's Torchlight. The game is a fantastic spiritual successor to the Diablo series that the company's CEO, Max Schaefer, served as lead designer for. Runic Games was essentially bought by Perfect World, a Chinese MMO company that seeks to release an MMO version of the popular game. Schaefer has some different views and conclusions about how piracy effects his game. In a nutshell, Schaefer sees no problem with the millions of illegally downloaded copies of Torchlight in Asian markets. When the MMO is released, the brand recognition and audience building that piracy affords will bring in new customers for the eventual MMO, where it is harder to pirate a service. With so many games going online these days with multiplayer components requiring authentication or even a license purchase (as with used versions of PS3 and XBox 360 games), is this the right attitude to have in world where a game's success is made or destroyed based on sales? Is this line of thought able to coexist with the fickle dev studio and publisher system in place now in the industry? Ultimately, we can learn something from Schaefer's comments, especially about audience building. And, potentially, we can see the future of World of Warcraft's distribution as the game gets a bit heavy in terms of barrier to entry.
The Soapbox: Time is money, friend
Disclaimer: The Soapbox column is entirely the opinion of this week's writer and does not necessarily reflect the views of Massively as a whole. If you're afraid of opinions other than your own, you might want to skip this column. MMOs are plagued by nasty -isms. Racism. Sexism. Nationalism. Ageism. Orientalism. Homophobia. Misogyny. OK, so those last two aren't really -isms, but you get my point. No matter how much we want our fantasy games to be zones of escapism, these prejudices chase us there. Sometimes we bring them with us as unwanted baggage that spills out in chat channels and character choices. And sometimes they're inherent in the game design itself. Classism is one such problem you'd think the internet would reduce or conceal, but the divide between the haves and have-nots is stronger in MMOs than ever. To illustrate that point and how it affects us as gamers, I'd like to talk about another set of games ruled not by skill or talent but by money.
