the-soapbox
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The Soapbox: Decent challenge
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. The ancestors of modern humans had a lot to contend with, but I'm willing to bet that the seeds of MMO gamers existed even in those days. There had to have been at least one person who looked at a wooly mammoth, a titantic mass of tree-trunk limbs and tusks and fur, and announced "I bet you get great loot for killing that thing!" And as it turned out, he was right, assuming "great loot" means "meat for food and fur for clothing." I'm exaggerating, naturally; everyone knows that ancient humanity spoke Norwegian, not English, and it's a well-known fact that the term "loot" was first coined in the Canterbury Tales along with "spawn camper." But that need for a challenge is still there, the central idea that in order to get something really awesome you have to overcome a big obstacle. Which is why challenge is such a thorny issue for MMOs and always has been, because one person's challenge is another person's irritation.
The Soapbox: Polished vs. feature-rich
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. A few weeks ago I wrote a Soapbox article that exposed the flaws in the MMO first kiss theory. It generated more discussion than I anticipated, much of it spiraling off into tangents like MMO design, sandbox and themepark elements, and the seeming incompatibility between a polished game and a feature-rich game. It's this last bit that I'd like to discuss today, and you'll have to forgive me if we tread some familiar ground in the process. While there are many fascinating perspectives and debates in our bizarre hobby, none is as perplexing to me as the disconnect between gamers who want more game and those who want less game, highly polished.
The Soapbox: Sandparks
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. The war between sandbox and themepark MMOs is being fought now, not just in the hearts and minds of players but in the simple matter of which project is getting funding for development. It's a war in which adherents to one design philosophy loudly decry the other, where both sides sling insults at one another and mourn how the other side has damaged the promise of MMOs or has no idea how to make a compelling gameplay experience. It's a battle of words and of subscription fees. It's also really, really stupid. Setting up the MMO sphere as a battle between two opposing design philosophies probably feels like a great chance to explore a two-faction system in real life, but it's also shortchanging not just MMOs but games on both sides of the nonexistent fence. It sells a number of games short, and it adds nothing useful to the genre as a whole. It's time to stop seeing the onling gaming sphere as a match of opposing forces and start seeing it as a varied and frequently awe-inspiring spectrum.
The Soapbox: The Uncle Owen paradox
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. This week, the venerable Star Wars Galaxies celebrates its eighth year of existence. I was there in the beginning -- before the beginning, in fact. I did what a lot of you early SWG players probably did: I had a guild and a guild city, multiple accounts, a booming business as a chef, and a character who could entertain and fight. Even then, we realized how different SWG was from its immediate predecessors like EverQuest and Dark Age of Camelot. We'd returned to the earlier age of Ultima Online, of persistent worlds (as the term was used back then). It was more a world than a game, and in it we could roleplay whatever we liked, to a point. Nowadays, we'd call it a sandbox. Old-school MMO gamers know well that the sandbox is under attack. Some will blame it on EverQuest, some on World of Warcraft, some on the free-to-play phenomenon. Among the Massively commenters, there's a large contingent of gamers who consider SWG's own NGE to be the beginning of the end of the classic sandbox. I can't say they're wrong when it comes to the philosophy governing new MMOs, but the sandbox isn't dead yet.
The Soapbox: The absurdity of the endgame
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. Like most of you, I play a lot of MMORPGs. Too many, in fact, and the deluge of new and interesting games in the offing is only going to further erode what remains of my free time. I've managed to see the mythical "endgame" in a fair few titles over the years, so when I say that I play a lot, I don't mean that I boot up a trial and hit level 10 before hopping to the next bright shiny. Off the top of my head, I've dinged max level in Age of Conan (three times), Aion, Star Wars Galaxies (six times), Anarchy Online, Lord of the Rings Online, Global Agenda (twice), Vanguard, and The Matrix Online, to name a few. While many of these games subsequently raised the level cap, I've nonetheless raided, PvP'd, and chased enough gear carrots to have an opinion about the proverbial MMORPG "endgame." And I'm here to tell you that most of what passes for said endgame is repetitive schlock.
The Soapbox: Grinding skill instead of gear
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. One of the most troubling things I see in gamers these days is their incessant pursuit of loot. If you happen to play World of Warcraft, you know that getting into a pick-up raid involves a lot of people waving around GearScore like it's an actual measurement of player ability. Ever tried to get into an Ultra-Max Security group in Global Agenda? I hope you've got top-quality token gear and are level 50 because the time you spent getting those things matters a lot more than actually having any sort of skills. As a tournament fighting-game player, I take offense to this. You don't need to have an epic'd-out Chun Li to win in Street Fighter. In online games, gear is important, but it isn't the first thing you should be pursuing.
The Soapbox: Debunking the first kiss theory
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. So I owe this week's Soapbox to one of my gaming buddies who recently opined that a lot of older genre fans wear rose-colored glasses. We're a sentimental, eternally ornery, and change-resistant bunch, he said, and we're all searching in vain for that one game that recaptures the magic of our first MMO rodeo. Ordinarily I'd take offense to those labels, but upon further reflection, my pal had a point (though it may not be the one he intended). This "first kiss theory" -- as I'm calling the bundle of nostalgia-related charges often leveled against old-school MMO fans -- is fairly common on massively multiplayer forums. This was the first time I'd heard the theory espoused by someone I knew personally, though, and as a result I spent a fair bit of time mulling it over. Join me after the cut to see why it ultimately doesn't hold water and why, if older MMOers are indeed nostalgic, there are quantifiable reasons for it that has little to do with half-remembered glory days.
The Soapbox: Why inclusion matters in games
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. You know what's awesome? Feeling cool. And at the best of times, we get that feeling in our day-to-day life anyway. But that's one of the great things about video games, MMOs especially -- they give us a chance to feel cool. They give us a chance to look at ourselves standing over a pile of fallen enemies, wielding a weapon of unimaginable power, and getting that rush in the back of our head from being totally awesome. Especially if you're a straight white male. I wrote a column up a while back about the issue of gender as it affects MMOs, and it garnered a lot of positive comments from readers. It also garnered a lot of comments that proved some players didn't get why it mattered in the first place, and a lot of comments pointing out that women weren't the only group in need of some better representation. The funny part is that I think the former ties directly in to the latter -- and the former is also missing the point. Because it does matter, and even if you are a straight white male, it should matter to you.
The Soapbox: Why we grief - a therapy session
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. Welcome to the Massively Psychiatric Center for Gamers, Griefers, and Greater Internet F-wads (link NSFW). I'm Dr. Reahard, and while I'm most definitely an armchair psychologist, psychiatrist, and MMOlogist, pay no attention to any of that. I'm more than qualified to help you determine whether or not you're a bleep (sorry, a griefer). So please, have a seat, make yourself comfortable, and let's talk about you. Tell me about yourself. Do you relish that feeling of power you get when messing with another human being? Is there a certain sense of being alive, a rush if you will, that only comes around when you bleep with another person? Does said bleeping happen exclusively in video games where your actions carry no perceivable repercussions? Are you secretly frustrated with a banal and disturbingly meaningless white-collar existence? Does releasing your inner bleep in a (theoretically) anonymous online environment scratch the itches made manifest by a minivan, 2.3 kids, and the otherwise inescapable confines of suburbia?
The Soapbox: The road (much) less traveled
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. Normally, this column is reserved for some pretty big discussions. This time, however, I would like to talk about one of my specific pet peeves in MMO gaming, or at least one of the problems that I am very interested in solving. If you have ever taken a stroll down a dirt road in your favorite digital world, or if you have found yourself literally taking the long way home, then you might know what I am talking about. Players similar to me really and truly do not care about impressing other players or about how those other players are trying to impress me. When I log into a virtual world, I want to simply meet people and possibly go on an adventure. The problem is that MMO gaming, like any other activity that humans participate in, has become a hobby with rules and proper guidelines on how to get it all done very quickly. What about taking the time to travel, though? What about "it's the the journey, not the destination?" No, I mean the journey -- literally. Join me past the cut and let's talk about the need for realistic travel.
The Soapbox: Eat your tanking or you won't get your ice cream
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. Picture this -- you're a parent of a squalling child. (For some of you, this may be a very easy picture as you sit at the dinner table.) Your child is refusing to eat his or her dinner on the basis that the broccoli doesn't taste like doughnuts covered in Skittles. Being a mature adult and realizing that a lifetime of Skittle-based food toppings is not a viable dietary choice, you are trying to patiently reason with said child despite the fact that the child assumes Kevin at school is evil incarnate because he took the good swing despite your child's having called it. Eventually, you break down. You tell your child that a special treat awaits if he or she eats all of those vegetables. And so your child queues up for a random heroic in World of Warcraft, and -- wait, we skipped ahead of the metaphor, but that's essentially what the whole Call to Arms feature boils down to. And it brings up interesting questions of bribery, choice, and what makes a fun and functional mechanic.
The Soapbox: A case for player-generated content (or why MMO story is complete and utter bollocks)
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. I read with great interest Ragnar Tornquist's recent blog posting concerning story in The Secret World. After I got over the initial impulse to roll my eyes at yet another developer jumping on the BioWare-induced story, story, story bandwagon, I found that Tornquist had a couple of interesting points to make. Unfortunately, he also missed an opportunity to strike a blow in favor of player-generated story content. While this is totally unsurprising coming from a man who has built his career on interactive storytelling prowess, it was nonetheless disappointing on several levels. Yes, yes, I know, Tornquist is a wunderkind developer, you'd have his babies, and who am I to question his almighty design wisdom? Regardless, I am questioning portions of this particular blog piece, because MMOs are an exceedingly inadequate vehicle for storytelling of the kind that developers are espousing lately. That's not to say massively multiplayer titles shouldn't have a narrative component, though. Join me after the cut to find out why MMO makers ought to stick to systems and math and leave the storytelling to the folks who do it best.
The Soapbox: Somebody should do something about all the problems!
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. Bugs. They are the scourge of gaming, crawling and chittering their way through lines of code, turning what would have been a sure win into failure, making otherwise useful abilities worthless, crippling quests and destroying playtime. And so the clarion call goes out every time a new bug emerges that the developers should fix it -- a reasonable request, given that we are paying these people every month. (Or, on several occasions, we would be paying if the game weren't such a mess of bugs that they should be paying us.) Yet months roll by, and despite countless lovingly assembled bug reports, these issues do not get fixed. And it's not just bugs, either -- balance issues go untweaked, content goes unfinished, features get rolled back or sometimes removed altogether. What the heck are we paying for? Why in the world doesn't the development team just fix these problems?
The Soapbox: The industry's obsession with shards
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. The MMO genre is now over a decade old, and in that time we've seen countless innovations in game design, graphics technology and hardware infrastructure. Some of these innovations have become so essential that without them a game looks cheap, old or backward. A functional market or auction mechanic now replaces the old meet-and-trade style barter of some early MMOs, for example, and an MMO without copious map or chat tools is seen as grossly incomplete. The limits of what is possible have been pushed gradually forward, and yet certain ideas that were formed in the genre's infancy still seem to stick to new titles like glue. Sharded server models made a lot of sense in the early 2000s, when server hosting was expensive and the teams working on the server code were small. Those limitations have been rapidly shattered in recent years, but still new MMOs shard their communities into small groups. There are even alternative server models out there that are just as cost-effective as the sharded model but are devoid of the negative side-effects of smashing the community into hundreds of pieces. Read on as I take a look at why developers rely on the sharded server model, the problems surrounding splitting communities and what alternative server models are out there.
The Soapbox: The unfairer sex
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. Talking about the representation of women in video games is usually an exercise in depression. You don't have to search very hard for negative examples; consider The Witcher, in which sleeping with women is treated essentially as some sort of ersatz Pokémon variant. Or take a look at Grand Theft Auto III, hailed as a groundbreaking game, which featured a grand total of three female characters in the story, all of whom were painted as some combination of promiscuous, stupid, or untrustworthy. Comparatively speaking, MMOs deserve a medal for being remarkably open to both players and characters of both genders. And yet that's damning with faint praise in the worst way. MMOs still leave a lot to be desired when it comes to how they handle women, in ways both subtle and searingly obvious. Female characters are generally expected to be in a state of perpetual undress, more often than not without a significant role in the storyline -- and precisely because the genre is so far ahead of its contemporaries, complaints are often met with eye-rolling and derision.
The Soapbox: Game developers are not rock stars
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. Take a moment to think of your single favorite game developer. Is this person your favorite because of his talent? Maybe he made a game that influenced you growing up, or he has a charming personality for interviews. Whatever the reason, we probably all have our favorite game developers whom we hold on a pedestal of greatness. But did this one person make the game entirely by himself? Did Sid Meier write every line of code for the Civilization games? Did Richard Garriott draw every texture in Tabula Rasa? No, of course they didn't, but their names are right there on the box, showing ownership. Despite my own fanboy appreciation of certain devs, the title of this article says it all. With a few notable exceptions, those who make our favorite games make up a collective group of talented people who come together under proper leadership and design guidelines to create something that keeps us entertained for hours/weeks/months/years. So why do we pick out one or two and treat them like rock stars?
The Soapbox: Same old song and dance
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. Our very first Soapbox column, you might remember, was one that I wrote. It was on the topic of World of Warcraft clones -- specifically, the fact that it's not really World of Warcraft's fault that a lot of developers have decided to copy an existing success rather than branch out into new territory. And the list of WoW-likes continues to grow rather than shrink, although naming games tends to produce frothing vitriol that isn't particularly helpful. But there's more going on than simply a parade of copies. Games increasingly aren't just copying the lead of WoW; they're copying a wide variety of the game's design decisions, even if those decisions don't make much sense in context. I'm not fond of the claim that creativity is dead in the MMO industry, but we're definitely knee-deep in a design rut for a number of reasons.
The Soapbox: Classism and the oxymoron of the casual MMO
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. Seeing as how it's becoming something of a Massively tradition to offer rebuttals to my Soapbox articles, I figured it was time to turn the tables. A few weeks ago, our own Bree Royce penned a piece about class warfare in MMORPGs. Though it contained a number of valuable insights, I feel it struck the wrong chord when it comes to discussing the reasons "hardcore" MMO players dislike the pervasive trend towards accessibility. While the thrust of Bree's article dealt with classism and my response started out with a similar focus, this week's column has since morphed into more of a pseudo-rant on the casual vs. hardcore debate. Yes, the terms are malleable, and yes, this debate is eternal, but it's eternal because it matters (inasmuch as anything related to entertainment can matter). Join me after the cut for a traditionalist's take on MMOs and discover why they aren't "casual" games -- and why this has very little to do with social class.
The Soapbox: Respecting the IP and why developers shouldn't
Here's how it is: 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 you've never heard of Firefly, you're either afraid of things that are awesome or you've had an unfortunate gap in your viewing history for the past nine years or so. If you have heard of it, however, you're more than aware that simply referencing the show is enough to send most gamers and fanboys into paroxysms of quotations and general gushing. To say that the universe remains well-loved is an understatement. And if you play MMOs, Firefly seems like a setting that's too perfect to be true. Who knows how many moons are out there in the black, how many crews are left to explore the 'verse and make a fortune? The game never went beyond an announcement, and it still topped our list of games that have gone MIA, after all. And the best part is all of that open nature plays right into the structure of an MMO, with no need to change the wonderful IP set forth in the slightest.
The Soapbox: Launch is optional, beta is forever
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. As the Massively staffer who puts together our Betawatch column every week, I can't tell you how many times I've heard some variation of "that game is not in open beta -- a working cash shop equals launch." While I can certainly see what these readers are saying, in the end it's up to the developer to dictate open beta vs. launch. On the other hand, I have to agree with our readers to a point -- particularly with games that have been in open beta for a year or more, have working item shops, and produce regular patches or expansions.
