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The Soapbox: MMO slot machines

Jeremy Stratton — Tue, 16 Aug 2011 19:00:00 EST

Filed under: Events, real-world, MMO industry, Opinion, The Soapbox, Miscellaneous

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.

We are beginning to drown in a sea of MMOs that are shedding variety to mimic simplified slot machines. The danger in this is that MMO gameplay is becoming akin to gambling. Enjoyment of minute-to-minute gameplay is being replaced by hours of frustration unless we manage to match three-of-a-kind to get our loot drops. The success of the games isn't resting on the shoulders of enjoyable content but on the prizes to be won by schlepping through that content. We're letting developers know this not just by playing these games but by literally asking for more of the same.

The result is that money flies into developers' hands while they skirt the boundaries of ethics by supplying "gameplay" soaked in habitual greed, delivering to players only the barest skeleton of an MMO.

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The Soapbox: MMO slot machines originally appeared on Massively on Tue, 16 Aug 2011 19:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Ask Massively: Go outdoors edition

Eliot Lefebvre — Thu, 04 Aug 2011 09:00:00 EST

Filed under: Culture, Opinion, Massively Meta, Ask Massively, Miscellaneous

Here is the salient piece of advice from this week's Ask Massively, right up front and in the intro paragraph -- go outdoors. Right now. Shut down your computer and go for a walk. Take a hike somewhere you've never been. Explore. Take some time to just walk around out in fresh air and sunlight, or heck, enjoy being rained on. But take the time to break from a routine in which you read a whole lot of words on the Internet and just go see what's outside for a few minutes at least.

Really, this column will still be here after you're done. It'll wait.

I'm hoping that the two or three of you that actually listened to that advice enjoyed your walk. For you (and slightly earlier for everyone who just skipped over that paragraph) we've got questions this week about gold farming and the consistent scourge of site bugs. If you've got a question you'd like to see answered in a future installment, just mail it along to ask@massively.com or leave your question in the comments.

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Ask Massively: Go outdoors edition originally appeared on Massively on Thu, 04 Aug 2011 09:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Behind the Mask: It feels so good to be bad

Patrick Mackey — Thu, 30 Sep 2010 12:00:00 EST

Filed under: Super-hero, Opinion, Roleplaying, Champions Online, Behind the Mask

Playing bad guys in an MMO is one of those features mostly unique to the superhero genre. In other games, there are factions and these factions are vaguely good or bad, but it's kind of rare to see players clamor about playing an evil faction as much as they do in superhero games.

One of the reasons behind the lack of true villain factions in most games is that the hero factions in other MMOs are a touch more grey than the good guy factions in a superhero game. In World of Warcraft, both the Alliance and the Horde have their faults; the Alliance are stuck-up bigots and the Horde are ruthless and somewhat bloodthirsty. In Aion, the light and dark factions tread equally on the thin blue line that separates good and evil (although it's somewhat less obvious as an Elyos).

One of my biggest grievances with getting into Champions Online was the lack of playable villain content at launch. I was unwilling to test drive City of Heroes at all until villains were playable, and over half of the characters I've made in Champions are bad guys. Even my non-villains aren't heroes (at least not in character).

I have a certain infatuation with being a bad guy.

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Behind the Mask: It feels so good to be bad originally appeared on Massively on Thu, 30 Sep 2010 12:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Putting MMOG research under the ethical microscope

Brooke Pilley — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 17:00:00 EST

Filed under: Culture, MMO industry, News items, Academic, Virtual worlds

As MMOGs creep into mainstream culture they are becoming a valuable place to conduct scientific research on social systems and behaviors. Are certain MMOGs as addictive as cocaine? Do certain MMOG players use these games to escape from real life or stay more connected? Do certain MMOG players make better citizens? These are just some of the recent questions being asked by academics around the world.

An interesting and informative paper titled Playing a Good Game: Ethical Issues in Researching MMOGs and Virtual Worlds has just been published in the International Journal of Internet Research Ethics. The paper examines a number of ethical issues encountered when researching MMOGs and virtual worlds. What should be considered public or private in these spaces? What can researchers study, record, and reproduce without informed consent or permission? Should researchers simply observe or actively participate in the online community/ies they are studying? Part one of this paper develops a theoretical framework for researching MMOGs and part two presents qualitative data from interviews with five MMOG researchers (City of Heroes, City of Villains, Lineage I, Lineage II, and Second Life). The resulting data can be used to guide future research ethics in the MMOG space.

[Via Terra Nova]

Putting MMOG research under the ethical microscope originally appeared on Massively on Thu, 05 Mar 2009 17:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The Daily Grind: What if everyone turned over server logs?

Krystalle Voecks — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 08:00:00 EST

Filed under: EverQuest II, MMO industry, News items, Opinion, The Daily Grind

One of the pieces of news that came out yesterday is the decision by SOE to fork over all server logs for the last four years of EverQuest II to a group of researchers from the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In saying "server log" one would assume that this means not only your combat log, what you've stuffed into the bank or sent through the mail, ~~but also the entirety of your chat logs; public channels, guild chat, and private tells.~~ The question today is - even though it is completely acceptable for MMO companies to do so per their TOS/EULA, how would you feel were you to find out your MMO company forked over all their information - including all your private discussion - to researchers? Would it cause you to seriously reconsider your membership in their games, if not cancel outright? Or would you be entirely OK with it, so long as it were only being used for scientific research?

Updated to reflect new information from SOE stating they did not release chat logs.

The Daily Grind: What if everyone turned over server logs? originally appeared on Massively on Tue, 17 Feb 2009 08:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Building a better MMOusetrap: Morality schmorality, where's me sword?!

Dave Moss — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 20:00:00 EST

Filed under: EVE Online, Culture, Game mechanics, MMO industry, Opinion, Tabula Rasa, Building a Better MMOusetrap, Politics, Academic, Virtual worlds

Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men (and women ... and children)? Certainly most MMO players, or to be even more general most people who go on the internet know at least what they expect other people to act like. Certainly they would act like normal people right? Upstanding citizens, keeping the peace, helping old ladies across the street, buying girl guide cookies. But then if you have those fine folks, you certainly would have to have their counterparts, the criminals and scum-bags of the virtual worlds, preying on the innocent and weak. A sort of symbiosis has to exist even online, else you would either have complete anarchy, or pure utopia (and that sort of thing could never happen in a video game, eh Jack?) and neither of those situations truly juxtapose reality, they simply.

And that's what MMO's are supposed to do in some sense or another if I'm to believe what all the articles, thesis's, and marketing materials say. Even in the trailer for the upcoming MMO documentary Second Skin they say things along those lines. So you have to balance the good with the bad to have a virtualisation with reality, but then something is amiss, because it's certainly damned hard to be a bad guy online. Oh sure you can gank people in PvP, or use MPK tactics to train monsters on to groups, but those sorts of things make more of a dickwad than they do a truly evil person.

Something I hear flying around a lot these days, mostly in conjunction with RIchard Garriott's sci-fi MMO Tabula Rasa, is the idea of morality. But can there really be moral choices in an online world, where just about everything a character does is pre-destined, set on rails, and left to run its course on its own time table?

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Building a better MMOusetrap: Morality schmorality, where's me sword?! originally appeared on Massively on Wed, 06 Feb 2008 20:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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