The Soapbox: You don't know what you're hungry for
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.
If there's one thing that binds almost every player together, regardless of game or anything else, it's the fact that we're a bunch of demanding little snots. Seriously, we want pretty much everything in place at the moment a game launches, to the point that we begin hollering bloody murder if even a scrap of a game is considered missing. And it doesn't matter what sort of player we are, either. Whether you're a hardcore endgame enthusiast or an altoholic in love with low-level PvP, you want the game tuned, and you want everything in its right place.
The funny thing is that in our demands for what we want, sometimes we never stop to ask why we want something in the first place. And it cuts both ways. Sometimes we think that something is an absolute necessity when it isn't really needed... and sometimes something that never even pops into our heads is an important element to what makes a game fun.
If there's a current system in place that we think of as a necessity, it's grouping. Games need to have endgame challenges that require people to get into a group, get organized, and work as a team against a common enemy. If you aren't doing that, after all, you might as well be playing a single-player game. Except that it's not that simple -- as has been pointed out previously, you can get people to play and enjoy the game and even enjoy the social aspect without requiring a huge team. For some, it's actually more fun to enjoy the social aspects when you aren't forced to group up.
Does that mean that turning everything in the game into a solo play experience is necessarily a good thing? No. It means that grouping up might not be necessary to make the game fun. It might mean that offering a progression path for completely solo players would be a good thing resulting in happier players with no downsides. It might actually result in more overall players.
Or it might mean that no one wants to group up any longer and the fun of the game is greatly decreased. The only way to know one way or the other is to try, to find out whether the "necessity" of grouping is a matter of making the game more fun or of putting in an arbitrary barrier to keep players held up longer.
Sometimes, games try. It turns out that it wasn't necessary for open-world PvP to be a part of Ultima Online, as the option to escape it attracted a lot of players. It's a topic that still raises a lot of strong opinions and calls that free-for-all PvP would build a large market... except that said market never seems to actually materialize around the games that do so. There's no point in recounting what's already been said with plenty of eloquence, but it's worth noting that it's another case in which people are convinced of what has to exist in a game even when history and evidence says otherwise.
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Taken as an absolute, the only thing that a game actually needs is something the players find fun. That rules out any necessity of grouping, PvP, PvE, questing, roleplaying support, backstory, and so forth. You could argue that MMOs do also need to have servers robust enough for the game to be playable, but that's less of a necessary game system and more in the category of making sure that your car doesn't explode when you press on the gas. Every system added, every additional form of reward or challenge, is another dial being turned to try to find that nebulous realm of what people find fun.
That's why we crow that we need something -- because we found it fun before or we think it would ease the less fun parts of the game. But the problem is that we're really terrible at figuring out what we find fun.
I claim no special privilege or insight here. When I hit the level cap in World of Warcraft's first expansion, I saw how fun it was to be able to get new equipment via the honor system. That started a destructive cycle in which I found myself going into the arena system, then into entry-level raiding, and so forth -- until by the time Wrath of the Lich King had been out for a couple of months I was at the top of the DPS charts with my Elemental Shaman and dreading setting foot inside of a raid instance.
As it turned out, what I actually found fun wasn't so much getting new and improved equipment as it was having a progression system that didn't eat up huge chunks of time. Misidentifying the source of fun led to me demanding more out of myself and making the game progressively less fun.
Before you ask for or expect anything, you really need to ask yourself what makes a system so necessary. PvP in City of Heroes is a perfect example -- the systems were added to the game a year and a half after launch, and it shows in all the worst ways. The people who wanted PvP had largely already given up, and the players who didn't want it also didn't care. That meant that the few people who tried it and liked it wound up with a system the developers quickly stopped caring about. If it isn't something that people actually want and isn't built with meaningful rewards, why add it in the first place?
did the exact same thing in reverse. A game that prided itself on the strength of its PvP experience sank a huge amount of time and development energy into PvE endgame content. It was a noble attempt to mimic World of Warcraft, but it neglected that the people who were coming into the game didn't want the endgame PvE grind in the first place. The development team has since moved away from this model, largely because it's not actually necessary for the enjoyment of the players the game has.
There are lessons to be learned for developers -- but there's one to be learned for the players, too. Say no. Take a step back and don't ask for something new. Heck, ask for developers not to put in an extraneous system that isn't adding any value to the actual game. Ask yourself, before you crow for an addition, whether or not another system will make the game more fun or just more complicated, and think for a while before you try to answer that question.
Not everything we take for granted is actually needed. Sometimes, it's better to go without.
Everyone has opinions, and The Soapbox is how we indulge ours. Join the Massively writers every Tuesday as we take turns atop our very own soapbox to deliver unfettered editorials a bit outside our normal purviews. Think we're spot on -- or out of our minds? Let us know in the comments!
