Games Radar lists five things MMOs are doing wrong

by Samuel Axon on Jan 9th 2008 9:00PM

The following slipped through the cracks a few days ago, but like Lewis Black we're going back to it because it's worth a look. Games Radar ran a feature called "Saying no to the MMO," listing five evils embedded in the genre's culture and design that have really got to go.

Read it for yourself, of course, but the five things include gold farming, elitist endgame content, unhealthy addiction, drab action-bar-and-auto-attack-based combat, and the continual bleeding of players' pockets via monthly fees and microtransactions.

The genre needs an infusion of fresh ideas to progress, but Games Radar's list is controversial. For example, a lot of people like the elitist endgame content. But maybe raiding games don't need to go away; maybe there should be new (or old) types of MMOs with different philosophies, and maybe those MMOs could co-exist with the EverQuestian standards. It's food for thought.

Source

Tags: addiction, combat, endgame, fees, games-radar, gold-farming, microtransactions

Reader Comments (1)

When Ultima Online came out, it had free-for-all PVP, allowing griefers to kill and loot players anywhere at any time. A lot of people LIKED that setup, but, when UO finally offered the choice NOT to participate in that kind of PVP, the vast majority (80+%) opted out. It used to be standard practice for players not to be able to reach the level cap of an MMORPG solo, and a lot of people LIKED that setup. Then Blizzard figured out that they could sell 10 times as many copies of their game as everyone else if they allowed solo players to play their game and reach their level cap, and now most games are scrambling to make their MMO's soloable.

And now the status quo is that you can level to the cap, but then the "elitist endgame content" takes over. A lot of people, mostly ones who are actually experiencing said content, LIKE this status quo too. And more importantly, game developers (who, in Blizzard's case, are former raiders themselves) like it. To use WoW as an example, most solo content can be beaten on the first attempt, or maybe with one corpse run because there were adds or the mob had some ability you weren't expecting. If you allow players to beat all the content in the game in one or two attempts, they will run out of game and stop paying your monthly fee. The raid game allows Blizzard to impose both a logistical roadblock - getting 25 players of the correct classes in the same place at the same time - and a difficulty roadblock - of course raids require months of farming old content (no more than once a week) to pass DPS checks, consumables, and night after night of costly wipes, they're supposed to be elite and harder.

My point being, the fact that some people like the way endgames are run today doesn't mean that many more people wouldn't like things a lot more if endgames had more resemblence to beginning- and middle- games. The way to make this work just hasn't been found yet, and it's not going to be found until other companies stop spending all their time trying to copy WoW.