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MMO Mechanics: Exploring death mechanics
They say death must come to us all, and that inevitability extends to our characters in MMOs. The death of our characters may be inconvenient when we want to plough through content, but penalising failure is an essential part of any MMO and further incentivises success by making you learn from your mistakes. As much as players crave gratification through rewards and progression, they also need to feel that such progress has been well-earned and greatly deserved. Rewards become that much sweeter when we must risk something to secure them, and failure without consequence would render the gains made in our favourite MMOs insignificant. Without a considerable death penalty, it becomes possible to mindlessly crush content through brute force. I don't know about you, but I don't find fun in bashing my skull repeatedly with a rock in an attempt to crack it! In this week's MMO Mechanics, I compare various death penalties and the effects they have on the MMOs that employ them. I'll explore just how tangible death penalties such as corpse running, gear durability loss, and XP drain make our character's demise feel.
A Vanguard fifth anniversary year-in-review
It's that time again -- time to look back on a year of Vanguard: Saga of Heroes and see what changed and what stayed exactly the same. The game is now five years old, and the last year has been relatively exciting for the community. Vanguard is just one of those titles that seems to want to last forever. The playerbase is loyal, mature, and truly dedicated to this aging title. Will the players' efforts pay off? We took a look back on the last year to see what the larger announcements were. There were some surprises and even updates (yes, actual updates to the game), something that is still affecting the community. While other games might publish monthly or even weekly updates, the Vanguard players are the camels of the greater MMO community and have learned to live off very little development fuel. Bear in mind that as I type this, an update is being played through on the test server.
Lost Pages of Taborea: Improvements on MMO standards
After having a couple of conversations on the topic over the last month, I decided to make a list of more reasons I am so attracted to Runes of Magic. Runewaker may not have created the next evolutionary step in MMOs, but it did do some new and innovative things. It created what I consider to be the first hybrid traditional free-to-play MMO. RoM predominantly uses western game mechanics and a quest-driven leveling system with a cash shop. As far as actual gameplay is concerned, RoM features many standards -- very nice improvements on those standards. In this article, I list six refinements that I think add to the increasing uniqueness of an MMO that constantly shows it's more than a generic clone. Jump past the break to see if you agree with me or share your favorite MMO standards that you think RoM improves upon.
MMO MMOnkey: The rat Skinner, or negative reinforcement in MMOs
Like the wardens in Everquest 2 or the druids in World of Warcraft, reinforcement in MMOs is not always what it appears to be. In an earlier column we wrote about how positive reinforcement, as defined by behaviorist learning theory, occurs whenever the player receives something beneficial and pointed out a number of the simple ways this kind of reinforcement is used in MMOs. A second column used the bounty and collection quests in EQ2 as examples of how positive reinforcement could be well (the bounty quests) or poorly (the collection quests) implemented. Several Massively readers who enjoy the collection quests took us to task and pointed out some of the ways EQ2's collection quests can be rewarding in terms of gold, experience and loot. They also made the point that bounty quests, like hot elf chicks, are old, tired and overused as staples of MMO play. I mean, really, who wants to kill another 20 rats for Fatboy the quest giver? Not me, and I'm guessing many of you don't either.
"An armed society is a polite society."
Or so wrote Robert Heinlein in Beyond the Horizon. The general idea was that, in a country where there were serious (and officially sanctioned) consequences to misbehavior from quarters other than the police, you'd wind up with a place where people really thought hard about whether it was worth pissing someone off just for the fun of it.Whenever I'm reading about PvP, that quote always springs to mind. People who have played MMORPG's with more "hardcore" PvP systems have mentioned that the amount of random ganking you see in WoW just doesn't seem to occur on the same scale elsewhere. WoW's PvP is pretty consequence-free. Corpse runs are annoying, sure, and being camped is nobody's idea of fun. But you don't take durability or experience loss after a PvP death, and you don't lose money or items to the attacker. Nor does the attacker gain anything from killing you (unless it's honor if you weren't a gray target).
