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The Soapbox: MMO 'nostalgia' isn't nostalgia
Here's the Merriam-Webster online dictionary definition of the word nostalgia. nos·tal·gia noun \nä-ˈstal-jə, nə- also nȯ-, nō-; nə-ˈstäl-\ : pleasure and sadness that is caused by remembering something from the past and wishing that you could experience it again 1 : the state of being homesick : homesickness 2 : a wistful or excessively sentimental yearning for return to or of some past period or irrecoverable condition; also : something that evokes nostalgia And here's where I tell you that nostalgia is the most misused, overused, and overly simplistic word in modern MMO discourse.
The Soapbox: The Raid Finder ruined raiding
I don't typically limit myself to ranting about only one game at a time, but I decided to make an exception this week and speak out against World of Warcraft's Raid Finder mechanic. I was running a small and modestly successful raiding guild when this system was introduced, and my team definitely felt the onslaught of this guild-destroying game mechanic first hand. Raid Finder, commonly dubbed LFR by the cool kids in Orgrimmar, is a system that demolishes the competency barrier that stands in the way of freshly level-capped characters and normal raiding content. The system allows players to join a random raiding group in order to tackle a nerfed version of a normal raid and exists mainly to maximise inclusion in the game's best PvE endgame content. LFR was quite popular among casual players that were usually passed up when it came to raiding group formation, but it didn't offer much progress to seasoned raiders. The gear gained had lower stats than its corresponding normal raid counterpart, but the LFR tier simply didn't need the co-ordination required of a group tackling regular raids. A void was created somewhere in between the casual masses who could benefit from the LFR mechanic and the hardcore raiders that simply did not need help with progression. My casual raiding guild was caught in the middle and ultimately met its demise at the hands of LFR, which simultaneously depleted the PUG pool and gave our members another way to see the endgame content they wanted without putting in virtual blood, sweat, and tears.
The Soapbox: Enough with selling alpha tests already!
The dam has burst, restraint has been cast off, and caution has been thrown to the wind. Seemingly overnight, game studios all over the place have thrown the doors open to the general public to get in on alpha testing, usually as a reward for loyalty and financing. Steam has an entire Early Access section that's dominating the sales charts, offering players a chance to hop right into an anticipated game while it's still in the middle of development. Kickstarter games routinely offer alpha and beta access to their financers as part of their reward structure. Trove, Elite: Dangerous, Shroud of the Avatar, Star Citizen, and EverQuest Next Landmark are among the vanguard of upcoming MMOs that have promised alpha or early access to players willing to shell out a few bucks right now. It's not enough to covet and chase after a beta key these days; all of the cool kids are in the alpha, apparently. The willingness of developers to wield alpha access as a reward and the enthusiastic acceptance by gamers to literally buy into it has me very concerned that this could poison the industry, the community, and the future of our games.
The Soapbox: Launching with a subscription is still a good idea
The massively multiplayer online game industry is constantly changing, but one thing about it never will so long as capitalism stands: MMOs have ongoing costs, and those costs are passed on to the end user. Exactly how they're passed on is one of the things that has been changing, but new methods don't mean old methods don't have their place. New isn't good because it's new. New is good because it can provide solutions to old problems. When an old method is seen as the source of a problem actually caused by something unrelated, shoving a new method in there can just create new problems. So why all the wailing and gnashing of teeth over games trying out a subscription before they move onto other models? And why all the wailing and gnashing of teeth in retaliation to this opinion?
The Soapbox: My MMO resolutions
Today is the last day of 2013, a long year of extended betas, early access pre-purchases, and soft launch nonsense. The release slate for 2014, however, brings slightly more excitement. 2014 is the year we'll (hopefully) first set foot into Elder Scrolls Online, EverQuest Next Landmark, Destiny, Star Citizen, WildStar, and more. It's the year in which a record number of MMOs will go live on consoles. And most importantly, it's likely the year in which consumers will decide whether the traditional MMO is dead or just in need of a good kick in the pants. Ordinarily I'm not the type to make New Year's resolutions. It seems arbitrary to hang important life changes on a date on the calendar. But the end of the year does bring a nice opportunity to look back on my gaming habits over the last 12 months and provides me with an opportunity to draft a list of things I'd like to do better moving forward. 2014 will be an MMO year like no other, so perhaps it warrants a few adjustments in behavior. With that in mind, these are my 2014 MMO resolutions.
Storyboard: Working without /random
Two weeks ago, you might recall, I ranted about using random rolls as a mechanic of resolution when roleplaying in MMOs. For those of you who can't be bothered to go back and read the whole thing now (which I totally understand; you probably have holiday games burning a hole in your pocket), the core point was that random rolls don't actually tie to anything for resolution and wind up coming off as an obvious and unfun kludge for the sake of random resolution. "Well, if you're so smart, why don't you come up with alternatives?" And I did. Readers also had some wonderful suggestions and feedback in the comments last week, which make the article even more worth reading, so really, go ahead and take a look at it. This week, I'm taking a look at how you're going to resolve conflicts in roleplaying without relying on what amounts to a coin flip. And as you may have expected, they're all taking tips from tabletop games.
The Soapbox: The horror of embargoes
We're right on the cusp of one big holiday or another. Festivus, I think? I don't really pay attention to the calendar. So we're going to take this opportunity to talk about something near and dear to our hearts that a lot of you don't even know exists because you aren't working here. It's the magical miracle known as the press embargo. Embargoes work something like this. Let's say that Bungie is hard at work developing My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic Online, and the company wants to reveal a new piece of information on August 9th. The company sends a lot of different press outlets a release with all of the information on August 2nd, mentioning exactly when the embargo lifts. So on August 9th, everyone can cover it at the same time! It sounds like a great way to ensure that the press knows things in advance and that every big revelation is nicely coordinated across all media. In practice, though, it's something less than beneficial due to failures to communicate and the very nature of the beast. Giving more time between the information and release just means more space for things to go wrong.
Some Assembly Required: Yet another FFA PvP sandbox
I dabbled in yet another alpha-state indie sandbox game this week. As you'd expect, the title is rough around the edges. Also as you'd expect, it boasts FFA PvP and the correspondingly godawful community for whom the game's "do whatever you want" mechanics immediately translate to "kill everything that moves first and ask questions later, if at all." Since it's still alpha, there's plenty of time for the devs to correct this unfortunate bit of business and separate this particular game from the legions of crappy FFA-PvP-with-zero-consequences titles clumping together in the vast litterbox of bad MMO ideas. Will they do that? Probably not, but at least I'll get a good rant out of it.
The Soapbox: There's nothing wrong with easy
The word "easy" gets a really bad reputation in gaming, an unfair reputation, at that, because there's absolutely nothing wrong with something's being easy. A while back, we hosted a great column about how we tend to call things easy when they really aren't. (Seriously, go read that.) That's all well and good, but that's also not what I'm talking about here. Gaming as a community seems to have decided that easy is just plain bad, that it's a horrible insult, and a game being easy is like saying that a game is worthless. But easy isn't bad. Playing a single-player game on easy difficulties isn't a mark of weakness, and having an MMO that's easy on a whole doesn't mean it's a bad game. Having easy content isn't just an acceptable thing; it's an outright good thing for a lot of player. There is absolutely nothing wrong with easy.
Storyboard: Don't fight with /random
Most of my Storyboard columns center on larger issues, providing advice in some way. This one does not. This one is purely about one of the elements of roleplaying in MMOs that I particularly dislike: using in-game random rolls to determine the outcome of actions during tense scenes (or out-of-game rolls in games that don't support /random or /roll or something similar). This is a time-honored practice in MMOs, but I've never had many nice things to say about it, to the point that I wrote an entire column about dueling without even discussing it. In practice, it makes sense, casting otherwise unresolvable situations back to the realm of tabletop gaming. What's not to like? Lots of things. Resolving conflicts with random dice rolls is unsatisfying and to be avoided at all costs. And if you want to compare it to tabletop gaming, you're making a lot of logical leaps that don't hold up under scrutiny.
The Soapbox: World of Warcraft isn't back, and that's fine
So. That Warlords of Draenor, huh? To take the narrative that a lot of people have constructed, World of Warcraft has been sort of floundering for the past few years. It released one expansion (Cataclysm) that consistently ranks as the worst expansion in the game's history, coming behind the launch game, The Burning Crusade, and Alganon. Then it released another one that turned out to actually be pretty good but with a premise that turned a lot of people off right out of the gate. Mists of Pandaria's quality doesn't matter in the face of the game losing five million subscriptions in three years. But then, Warlords of Draenor was announced, and suddenly hope returned to the faithful. There's this thought that the game has suddenly returned from the brink, that Blizzard hit the big red button labeled "Save World of Warcraft" and the game will be catapulted back into prominence once again. Except that I think that portion of the story isn't just premature -- it's making a stab in the dark about a game that isn't back and can't, in fact, be back.
The Soapbox: Seriously, we have enough fantasy MMOs
Let's play a game. I'm thinking of an MMO that features magic, monsters, humans, and a vast fantasy world full of steamy swamps, grassy plains, and deep, dark dungeons -- can you tell me which MMO it is? If you answered RIFT, you're right. You're also right if you answered TERA. Or World of Warcraft. Or Guild Wars 2. Or Neverwinter. Or... you get the idea. We're people who play MMOs. Our hard drives are practically bulging with games featuring wizards and warriors. We've plunged our swords into millions of orcs and gnolls. We've looted more imaginary copper pieces than anyone could possible imagine. We've even slain so many dragons that you have to wonder why dragons even bother showing up anymore. It's not the gameplay but the setting that can make the whole exercise so soul-crushingly boring.
The Soapbox: Developers build MMOs backward
How many of you MMOs players have ever maxed out a character's combat level then stood around wondering, "What do I do now?" I would venture to guess that a vast majority of you at one time or another have done that, and I'd also guess that it's been recently. That's because developers have built your game backward. Far too many MMOs rely on the leveling process to be the primary content for the game, and everything after max level appears to be an afterthought tacked on to the game until the developers can come up with new stuff for you to do. I propose that if developers would start building a game's endgame first, we would be looking at a very different kind of game, a more enjoyable game. If a game is intended to be played for months, then developers should spend the most time on the content that players will spend the most time on. It's only logical to me. However, if you ask most developers they will likely tell you that the most expensive or time-consuming part of the game is the leveling process. Why is that?
The Soapbox: Instant high-level characters are a terrible, horrible, very bad, no good idea
While handing players the keys to a high-level character isn't something brand-new that studios are doing, it does seem to be more en vogue these days, from TERA to EverQuest II and now to World of Warcraft. It's a topic that has caused a lot of discussion and debate in the community, not to mention a lot of disquiet and dismay in my heart. In last week's Soapbox, Massively's Mike Foster advocated instant leveling by saying, "There is no downside to giving players a chance to skip to the start of new content." With much love and respect to my fellow Massively writer, I think Mike is completely wrong on this front, as are others that are giving a thumbs-up to any MMO that allows players to jump past content and into a high-level character. It has nothing to do with elitism and ego, as was suggested, but has everything to do with cheapening our mutual experience and the very foundation of MMOs. There are many, many downsides to this disturbing trend, and I need to get this off my chest so that at least I've said it somewhere.
The Soapbox: Instant leveling and the whining fringe
Over the weekend at Blizzcon 2013, Blizzard Entertainment announced the fifth World of Warcraft expansion, Warlords of Draenor. The content add-on brings most of the things one might expect from an expansion -- new zone, new features, new quests, new dungeons -- but perhaps most notably includes the option to instantly raise any one of your characters to WoW's current level cap of 90. While you'll still face 10 levels of Warlords of Draenor questing, killing, and fetching if you opt to take the insta-level, the feature has re-ignited the argument among MMO fans as to whether offering players a maxed-out character somehow violates the core rules of the MMO genre. Should developers really provide high-level characters just to get/keep players in the game? The short answer, of course, is "duh." Here's the long answer.
The Soapbox: No, 'we' don't hate the subscription model
If you're a casual reader of Massively and read a post or two from a few writers about business models, then you might get the impression that the Massively staff does not like the subscription model. While it's true that some of us praise some games for the choices their publishers have made regarding pricing models, others of us believe still other games have missed the mark. Lately, the subscription model has fallen under some hard scrutiny, but that doesn't mean that all of us dislike the subscription model completely, nor should a few writers' opinions be misconstrued as the opinion of the site as a whole, as if the site were some sentient thing to begin with. Economists have made extremely persuasive arguments in favor of the subscription model, citing its cost-effectiveness with hard numbers and statistics. We've also seen free-to-play and buy-to-play models allowing companies to revitalize their game, and most importantly for the people employed by the developer, doubling and sometimes tripling their revenue. So at what point does the subscription work?
The Soapbox: Free-to-play wasn't our idea
Free-to-play is surging. In just a few short years, free-to-play has become the go-to mechanism through which studios broaden audiences, entice players, and build revenue. No other method of monetization has proven to be so lucrative and effective with such consistency, whether it be a monthly subscription fee, a one-time purchase price, or some combination of the two. Free-to-play's growth has created a world in which non-free games are the exception, not the rule. Of the most popular MMOs and online games as of my typing these words, the vast majority are free-to-play. Games that are bold enough to buck the trend and launch with a sub fee are met with derision and suspicion from the online gaming community; the many thousands of words dedicated to ZeniMax Online's decision to require a subscription for The Elder Scrolls Online are likely the most recent and high-profile examples of this trend in action. When players complain about a game launching with a subscription, their opinions are often countered by a self-appointed gaming elite who believe that things were better in the good old days, when games cost money and poor people didn't ruin everything by demanding free stuff. The argument summarized is something like, "I am sick and tired of lazy, entitled gamers wanting everything for free." There's just one problem: Lazy, entitled gamers didn't invent free-to-play. Studios did.
The Soapbox: Game companies exist to make money
I'm going to start this article off with a statement, and it's going to be divisive, but not for the reasons you might expect. A good chunk of you reading this are going to read the line, roll your eyes, and immediately think that I've just written the most obvious thing ever. Some of you might even take to the comments to start calling for my termination just from this line alone. Ready for this? Game companies exist to make money. All right, so it was probably all of you rolling your eyes. This is pretty basic stuff, right? Except I'm willing to bet that some of you who rolled your eyes at that sentence still don't really get it. You understand that companies are trying to make money, but you don't really grasp what that means in a larger sense. So let's just accept that some of you are going to read this article and nod along the whole time without learning a whole lot. The rest of you will head to the comments and start demanding my head.
The Soapbox: Stop hurting the people who love you
Over the last few years, we have been witness to dramatic shifts in the way the video game business does its...erm...business. Crowdfunding appeared out of nowhere and turned people like Chris Roberts into money tornadoes. Digital distribution created an environment in which anyone with an internet connection and a laptop can create and release a game. Here in the MMO niche, early access, paid betas, founders packages, and extended soft launches became the norm. My opinion on soft launching and paid betas has been well established on this site. I dislike the idea that players must jump in to aid a flailing development team while it buys time on a project the team clearly should have reigned in. I also hate the environment soft launching creates in which studios are not accountable for their mistakes; a game like Firefall can have its entire PvP system wiped while its developers say, "Oops, our bad, beta! But thanks for all the money." However, there is another enormous problem with the prevalence of the soft launch system. Namely, it kills fans.
The Soapbox: What's my motivation?
If you play MMOs, odds are good that you're familiar with the classic "kill ten rats" quest trope. Kill quests are one of the most fundamental elements of traditional MMORPG design, and a great deal of modern and classic MMOs would have little to no content without them. Whether it's ten rats, ten wolves, ten bandits, or ten dragons, the basic gist of the quest is always the same: You, the seasoned adventurer, must eliminate animals or enemies for an NPC who for one reason or another cannot handle the task himself. MMOs are built on combat. It's difficult to design a full-featured MMO that engages players for years on end without some sort of PvE killing content; only a handful of MMOs have even attempted it. And while some would say the days of the kill quest are coming to an end, modern MMOs certainly aren't cutting back on killing in general. As a primary mechanic for advancing a character, slaying seems to be the most popular design choice. I don't have a problem with the bulk of my progression coming from throwing fireballs or bashing shields. I don't mind obliterating monsters in multiples of five. What I do mind, however, is being asked to kill without a good reason.
