MMOrigins: The devolution of a gamer

It's so true, though, isn't it? I remember the first time I dared venture into the MMO scene on my own laptop, Ragnarok Online. Even from day one, I was running around with other people who were willing to offer help, direct me towards a playstyle I liked, get together and play together. Everything was new, acronyms I didn't understand, and the more we played, the closer we got. We built a guild, Black Guard, spent time in the newbie zones to help newcomers, had a blast! There was a sense of community, especially with the guild vs. guild events that happened.

Then I got into WoW, and from day 1 it seemed very... isolated. There were other people running around, sure, but no one seemed to care. I knew the acronyms of the MMO world by now, help wasn't as necessary, and when you ran an instance, the group disbanded shortly thereafter.

I miss that feeling of being new, of discovering, of people willing to help, of actual active GMs that you could interact with directly and ran occasional events to take the edge off the grind. Now everything feels like... everything else. When I want innovation or something to scratch my ever-present sci-fi itch, I have to turn back to those Single player games like Mass Effect or the like. We need something new and refreshing again, and hopefully the coming years will bring that back to the genre.

Nice article. I think a lot of people can relate to what you've experienced. Whether this is good for the genre as a whole or just shows that we're never going to get back what we first experienced... who knows?

It's fascinating the path you describe, as it's similar to my own. I founded the guide program back in EQ and followed much the same path you did, through the same games, with and without my spouse and children.

I love the concept that MMO's are the new "3rd place" (1st being home, 2nd being work, 3rd traditionally being bars or clubs where we hang out with friends) and they're now a part of my life.

As to where we're going vs where the industry is going, I'm seeing a split, and it frustrates me now and again. We (the players) are moving on, but so many of the new MMO's coming out seem to be looking backwards, like they are saying "what would WoW do?" but they're looking at old WoW, not new WoW. WoW did the "epic battles" but found that 40 people was just too many to manage, it made the content unreachable for most, so they dialed it down and are almost to the point where it's "WoW, the end game the whole family can play!"

Newer MMO's seem to still be focused on this huge, epic feel, but I no longer have the ability to invest 60 hours a week in an MMO, in 8 hour chunks. And if the MMO's selling point is the end-game raiding, and it requires that kind of commitment, then I can't see spending my money on it.

Very well written article, thanks for putting it up here.

Just curious but was your guide name Purgatory? O.o I seem to remember my group having to fight its way through some orcs in crushbone only to have one start talking to us and taunting us hehe. I miss purga :(

I have never been as immersed in a game as Evercrack. It had a weird sort of perfect balance between fun, time investment, and carrot on a stick that just sucked people in. That was the problem with it also though. I moved from eq to Asherons Call just so I wouldn't have to invest so many hours a day just to make a little headway. Of course then I discovered pvp.......sigh

I know what your talking about though, I feel like im constantly trying to recapture that glorious, red-eyed evening that we first stepped into Sleeper after hours and hours of deaths, yelling, and in the end a couple people getting banned it is still one of the high points of my gaming career. I have yet to recapture that feeling. In a recent fit of nostalgia I installed and played anarchy online for a bit and it occurred to me that the main problem with modern MMO's isn't that there are too many bells and whistles but that they have been dummed down for the masses. Could you imagine the forum crying if at level 5 in wow you had to plot out your implants so you could squeeze into that armor you just bought?

I have decided that forums are the single worst thing to ever happen to MMO's as they give far to much power to lazy, or just immature, man-children.

And then...how much is it actually nostalgia?

I had AMAZING memories of my first MMO, Asheron's Call. Played from 1999 to 2002. Many years later, about two years ago, in 2007 I decided to play it again. And lets just say...I should have left memories be just that...memories.

Game was really outdated, graphics didn't bother me (I don't mind "bad" graphics)...but the mechanics and gameplay. It wasn't the same at all, and I couldn't really put a finger on exactly what...but it just seemed outdated.

I actually didn't read any sarcasm in your reply, it's a legitimate question and one that's been much on my mind of late. I absolutely feel it's possible. To understand why I feel that way, I need to explain how I interpret epic. (I apologize if it rambles, I'm writing it between interruptions at work)

There are lots of ways for something to feel Epic. In SW, the Death Star felt epic, because it was so huge, but the fight between Luke and Darth in the 3rd movie was also epic and it was just 2 guys....well 3 with Palpy.

Epic is about the scope of the conflict, it's difficulty, it's importance, it's rewards and it's risks. It doesn't have to be huge, but huge is one way to do it and by far the easiest. Way back in Nagafen/Vox days, the EQ devs driving philosophy was one of "anything worth doing was worth doing big". To make a boss harder, you simply added hp to them. Wow picked up from that and continued the theme with its 40 man raids. Then WoW started doing data mining and realized that, before BC came out, < 1% of their users had fought Nefarian and less than .1% had even been inside Naxx. How can 30% of an MMO devs effort be justifiably invested in < 1% of the player base? Which in turn begs the question is it possible to make something epic yet also available? They changed how they rand their end game significantly based upon that, but didn't change much else so the fights felt less epic and more tedious, at least to me.

I don't know if you've played it, but IMHO Dragon Age Origins has a big epic feel to it. Too many cut scenes, too often my PC is not the center stage, and being mute is annoying, but they get a lot of the feeling. My character is the center of the universe and my actions mean something. To me, that's the essence of epic in a game, for players.

The problem with epic in an MMO is that it's impossible for something to feel epic when you do it every Tuesday from 6-9pm, make sure you bring all your consumables, don't be late or we'll dock you DKP, oh, and make sure you do your dailies so you can pay your repair bills and socket/chant your new gear. How epic does it feel to kill the dragon that, tomorrow, will be there again, doing the exact same thing? Every day we take a mission to rid the world of her, and every day she's back again. Isn't that the definition of insanity? That, or the trial of Prometheus? So epic or crazy?

I remember my first visit into the Ulduar 5 mans, Loki's lair and such. HUGE, epic feel to the zones and encounters...the first time. The 15th time we did it to help a friend get gear or to work on achievement we just whined that everything was so bloody far to run to get to. For something to feel epic to the players more than once, it can't be because it's big. Big is the "cheap and easy" epic. Anyone can do big, it's just graphics. But epic becomes tedious quickly after the 2nd or 3rd visit.

So how do you KEEP the epic? The players need to feel like they are a part of something special. They need to feel like they're the center of attention (which is impossible in a 40 man raid), the rewards need to be commensurate with the effort, and it needs to mean something. In today's market of single-instanced games, it's possible to do 2 things that I feel are the next generation of MMO's: Change the world and have live content.

By "change the world" I mean that the players need to make a difference in some small way to the game world. I'll use WoW as an example, because it could never happen there. If we are starting off in Ice Crown and you advance the DK area before I do, when we're both there, you're invisible to me...wtf? You're in a different "instance" of the world than I am, even though we're standing in the same spot. IMHO that's garbage, we're not changing the world, we're just playing in different instances. Conversely, the server-wide effort to open the AQ gates was a HUGELY epic thing to do. Every day we "grinded" and moved closer to the change. If WoW had the ability to actually change the game world such that the players made a difference, that would be epic.

STO's a game Cryptic has coming out. If players have the ability to find new worlds, new civilizations, do missions for these new people and eventually adding them to the Federation, expanding the Federation and therefore the game by their efforts, THAT is epic. If the Klingon players can push across and, over time, take a world away from the Feds, that's also epic. It can't be quick changes, or the entire game will be frustrating chaos, but the players must have the ability to effect change or there's no point to playing because whether you log in or not, the game is always the same. SWG kind of had a feel like this with its player cities, but fell short when it had no streets or actual city features, just buildings plopped onto grass or sand. I saw an Aion trailer that showed buildings being built and the city forming around them....that felt epic to me.

Live content is what has been missing in MMO's since the very beginning and it's PnP origins. I was a Diku wizard and one of the funnest parts of that game was the live gm's making the worlds for us. EQ is a graphical Diku with that torn out, and it suffered for it. Now, when I say live content, I mean GM's, not player content. Player content is garbage because players are idiots...specific players can be awesome, but players as a group are barbarians. All you need to do is log into SWG or CoH and look at the player missions there...99% of them are detritus. Find committed storytellers who are dedicated to the canon/IP and give them tools to entertain players. For a game like CoH, let a GM be a super villain and let them start a plan to destroy a building in Steel Canyon. If the players don't stop him, change the texture of Steel Canyon to include a smoking crater where the building used to be. Again, not fast changes, but a series of missions where the players are working against this horrible villain. Don't just drop onto the street and fight 100 heroes because it's funny, but instead drop in on random teams of heroes, like they accidentally discovered you. It's a celebrity moment, like "Whoa, Dr Fatespinner's behind all this?!" If that group of heroes can defeat the evil Dr's efforts then they are rewarded with an epic moment where they changed the game.

You give a good GM the freedom to shape the game and they can create an incredible environment. Going back to STO, have a group of GM's who act as Admirals of Starfleet, creating missions and treating the entire game as an RTS. There are Klingon Admirals who are doing the same. Everything is on a huge scale, and every action feeds down to mission arcs for the players that they do ONCE, not repeated. STO's PERFECT for this, because of its military structure. "The orders are down from the President himself, Starfleet Intel says the Klingons are making a push towards planet Flosten. We need to stop them." The players are pieces in the larger game and the overall feel would be epic.

Epic is a perception, a sense of importance. I certainly feel it's possible to implement in an MMO, but not without a dedicated effort to do so. It's cheap and easy to go big (Aion) and give the epic feel the moment you walk in the door, but after awhile pretty becomes boring when I'm killing my 1,000th orc, then "epic" becomes "damn that's a long way to run".

My $.02, for what it's worth.

Great article!

Oh, and Ms Poisso, my ex and I (Ozymandius and Lagniappe) founded the EQ guide program in the beta, but I can't take credit for any particular GM. We spun it up in the beta and the first few months of release but after 2000 guides we gave it to EQ as it was just too much to run for us as volunteers, so smarter minds took it over and turned it into what you likely experienced.

It was an amazing time in my life and a lot of fun working with the EQ folks to build it.

GM live content is something I've always felt was missing from MMO's, but not something that's easily done in shard-based MMO's. As guides in EQ, we toyed with the idea, engaging Sony on it, but it was impossible for us to coordinate across 30 servers, so the servers with the more creative guides got better content, and that doesn't fly at all.

That, and the second a GM-driven event occurred, every player from every zone flocked in and crashed the server, that's how desperate players were for it.

No, it has to be done higher up, and more personal, and only on single-instanced games. Eve's ripe for it, and depending upon how you define it, they've already had dev-driven content, where the devs cheated and made their own corp to take over the galaxy :) The idea of Eve GM's being the CEO's of the major npc corps and initiating changes in the game intrigues me.

I used to play PBEM's, long long ago, and we'd put strategies into play that took weeks/months to play out. That's the kinds of things I'd like to see in the next-gem MMO's. You have a team of storytellers with in-game tools who can create over-arching storylines that initiate change in the world, and these storylines create missions for players to complete.

Halfway through the arc you see that players aren't doing what you thought they would, so you CHANGE it, mid-stream, and it goes another direction.

The possibilities are endless.

nice one!

even though i've never been to everquest or even in a really "good" guild - always played with a handful of friends mostly - i can feel what you are going through.

the eve of mmos has passed and we are all awaiting the coming of something new... something greater. we are torn and bored, always trying to find the rush, that made the first time so splendid and unique.

sadly everything that's "new" is pretty much a rebound from the old stuff and it's not even always better. bland copies and always the same old mistakes made again and again and again.

mmos have become mainstream. bland and stupid to abide to the masses, the casuals. i feel cheated, there's no fun any more.

EVE ONLINE!!!!

I like articulate writing, but it is starting to get redundant.

Summary:
Repetitive gameplay is an essential part of modern MMOs. It provides us with a linear exchange rate between effort and reward, keeps the learning curve down and ensures we always know what to do in quests. It's the content designer's job to turn that repetitive gameplay into something interesting so that it doesn't feel like a grind. I can't help but feel MMO developers are continually hit-or-miss in that regard and gameplay suffers as a result.
http://www.massively.com/2009/11/30/disguising-the-grind-part-2/

http://www.massively.com/2009/11/29/the-trouble-with-goals-in-mmos/

The more blogs you look that the more examples I see of the same thing...you're tired of the same formula. It is all so easy, you put in time and you get gear. You can exactly map how much time equals how much advancement with a % of your success rate going up and down dependant upon your players. *hits head on desk*

Let me tell you about the MMO I'm playing right now. Originally I didn't like it. Know why? I was too conditioned by other MMOs. I was fatigued with that "WoW formula" even though I'd never even played WoW. I got dealt the WoW formula because WoW came out and changed the entire market. They changed SWG to try and get those customers, so my sandbox was destroyed, and my server "Valcyn" abandoned.

I started to search for another SWG. I first tried AoC...another WoW clone. I then tried EVE, hearing all of the hoo hah about it I figured there might be something to it. I created a Gallente miner and started mining those rocks...and got burned out. I thought "This game might have potential but I don't see where I can get to it from here."

I left EVE after creating a combat character and tried Warhammer online. Honestly it was fun for a bit but mostly I played for my friends and realized in the end it was just another themepark. I looked at my choices and decided I'm going to try it, going to put in the time and just see what matures in EVE online. My friends joined me but on one lonely night when no one was online in EVE (we'd rolled different races and they had to solo grind their faction and I had to solo grind mine) and they were enticed back to WoW and I was left alone.

After that I was pretty down on the game, I was alone in a cold space that is EVE and it was hard. I decided I'm just going to go for it, a friend of a friend told me about his 0.0 alliance but he couldn't get me into it as I didn't have enough but the objective I had was one thing, get blue. I saw a recruiter recruiting for that alliance and I gave it a shot. I was under the skill requirements but I had good references and I got in.

I was excited, a whole new universe opened up to me. 0.0 in itself is fascinating, but all was not decided. I had to meet a 50 mil per month duty and I had to PvP as part of the alliance or face getting kicked. I put in the ISK and the time, PvP'd in my crappy drake but I was part of it. I was going on fleets but I wasn't up to par. I decided screw Caldari and went Gallente after a long time of agonizing of not measuring up.

In my new Megathron named "Michi" I headed out to my first venture in my new battleship and got 14 kills....14 carrier kills.

This was 2 months ago. After a year of training skills I'm finally part of it. My ship has 112 kills to it's name and I'm part of one hell of a fleet. With Dominion, war has started. IT(bob) is coming back, and the universe that we were all so familiar with in 0.0 is coming apart at the seems and it's never been a better time for us combat pilots.

Right now we're doing policing patrols and killing pirates who think they can move in, and setting up our vassals so that we can consolidate the power of our Empire...but who knows what is around the next corner?

I'm the anonymous battleship pilot, taking part in a universe called EVE. It is the new formula, and I'm loving it. Next time you try EVE online maybe you should just stick it out too, and stop flooding the blogosphere with "We're oversaturated and fatigued of the same thing."