Worst MMO article ever?

[Viq]

Sorry if this was posted before and I missed it. It's an article from a week ago on Gamasutra that someone sent me a link to at work today.

http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20070 ... s_01.shtml

Does anyone else get the impression that, despite what he claims at the end of the article about his playtime, the author has only spent about five hours playing WoW before writing this up?

[Insanecyclone]

Just a person who needs an eye check on how the graphics/gameplay is..and also IBTL before it becomes another wow war.

[Kytele]

I think I've read this article before, but I can't remember if it was here or somewhere else.

[Kaelan]

Yeah I read that before. Most articles about MMOs latetly sound more like articles about WoW(and WoW clones, of course) than MMOs in general. And lol @ his suggestion of making RPG games based on twich gameplay, because numbers(stats, gear, etc) suck

[Meriandle]

What the... what the bloody hell? I... oh my... I can not even... how can someone so remarkably unintelligent think to go about and write a comprehensive critique on MMO's or video games in general?

He uses the term PEG or persistant entity game as his discovery as to why MMO's are addictive. PERSISTANT ENTITY GAME?! You mean like a game with a save point? By the thundering hooves of the mighty horse of Thor! What a vile and new and inconcievable notion! Why next they may even have us try to participate and win, by means of unscruplulous murder, some sort of "encounter" with a variety of... what will they call it... enemy! Dear God! What has science done?

[Quicklet]

I thought the article was pretty well written, I think it was just intended for an audience that might not be as familiar with MMO concepts. Most of what he's saying is pretty accurate even if it doesn't go far enough in its analysis of why the problems exist.

I LOL'd at the artificial limitations part though, just because it made me think of FFXI.

[Charla]

By the thundering hooves of the mighty horse of Thor!

It's called Sleipnir




... ok, I'll shut up now.

[Correction]

Hmm.

How is this the worst MMO article ever written? Or are you just using the tired 'Comic Book Guy' meme to say 'I disagree with his conclusions.'

He's not wrong about how grinding and artificial timesinks are irritating flaws in current MMO design, and he's not talking completely out of his ass. He should probably take a course in human psychology though, because if people weren't drawn to repetetive tasks with little real gain from it then Las Vegas would be a ghost town by now. We grind because we like the little carrot that comes at the end 'LEVEL UP!' *jingle* It's a toy. We as a human race like playing with our toys over and over again until we get tired of them.

[Meriandle]

By the thundering hooves of the mighty horse of Thor!

It's called Sleipnir

/ja "Nerdy Riposte" <Charla>

Sleipnir is Loki's child and is the horse of Odin.

Thor rides in a chariot drawn by two goats named (just one translation mind you) Tanngrisnir and Tanngnjóstr.

P.S. <3 for bringing up norse mythology Charla ;3

[Jefe]

By the thundering hooves of the mighty horse of Thor!

It's called Sleipnir

/ja "Nerdy Riposte" <Charla>

Sleipnir is Loki's child and is the horse of Odin.

Thor rides in a chariot drawn by two goats named (just one translation mind you) Tanngrisnir and Tanngnjóstr.

P.S. <3 for bringing up norse mythology Charla ;3

Psh, you forgot to say Loki transformed into a mare >_>

[Mysterio]

I agree with Quicklet, he's pretty bang on for alot of things he mentioned.

[Plow]

wee I'm going to have some fun with this, I've begun to think lately that I could do an extremely good job of working towards eliminating many of the things we all hate and improving mmorpg's dramatically, nobody take any of this personally or anything please!

. And lol @ his suggestion of making RPG games based on twich gameplay, because numbers(stats, gear, etc) suck

You've seriously never thought to yourself "Man how in the sam hell did those people manage to do/get that?! They couldn't tell a breath attack from a melee crit!"

It becomes even more apparent in pvp oriented games (the pvp side of wow for example). In most mmorpg's with pvp, your gear matters *A LOT* more than your skill. More than once in WoW I've just been flat out destroyed in seconds by people that I dominated when our gear was equal, but later they got much better gear than me. It's pretty frustrating knowing that your skill means absolutely nothing in a *lot* of encounters. Hell, when was the last time you watched a kraken drk obliterating something and went "Wow, that guy was incredibly skilled at engaging, popping 2 abilities and swining away!"

There's a lot of us out there that really would like for real skill to matter in these games. Sure, there are different levels of gamers in the currently popular system. But almost anyone that has been on the bleeding edge of a pve game or dominated in a pvp game will agree that there is basically a flat out cap to how good you can be. For instance, nearly every action in world of warcraft is affected by a global cooldown of 1.5 seconds. On the one hand, this allows the clickers and the people that may be geniuses but just plain aren't that fast to be competitive. But there will always be those that feel that their ability to read and react to a situation better(faster) than others should always be a very important factor-- I personally feel very strongly about this. However, as much as I feel that way, to put it bluntly the global cooldown in WoW is necessary because the controls and targeting fucking suck, badly. The ephasis on gear and pure numbers on the other hand... is something I feel is strongly overrated.

Not to start a WoW vs FFXI war here, but I'm going to give an example of the skill limit using a comparison. There are many fights in FFXI that require specific positioning, and even those that actually require you to move when such and such ability is active (kindred mnks, suzaku, yada yada). However, there simply aren't many fights where every member of the battle must absolutely be on their toes the entire time, and situations are constantly changing. There are getting to be some now, but WoW is absolutely filled with encounters like that, even in the most basic of high level content. (A level 68 5 man dungeon has a boss that will warp towards someone other than a tank, smack them, and then begin charging a large explosion. If people don't get the hell away from the explosion in time, they pretty much die. And he does this repeatedly, so it's not like "oh here comes the thingy run away then come back and finish pwning." Anyway just an example.) This is why while there's absolutely no question that the leveling curve in WoW is extrordinarily easy, many of the hardcore mmorpg players feel it has been one of the most legitimately challenging endgame experiences the mmorpg world has seen. And yet even so, there are a multitude of encounters where no amount of skill will get you through if you flat out don't have the mathematical numbers from your gear.

Getting back to why all this matters comes down to that "cap" of which I spoke. I'm going to use Aurik as an example here. We all know he's done a *ton* of research on every little aspect of the game, and has long been considered a top notch player by those who play with him. Here's the thing though: a player who understands mmorpgs' basic concepts could quite literally read all of the information Aurik has graciously shared with us, copy his gear exactly, find out what me macros in for what etc etc, basically be a complete copycat. Then, outside of a few emergency situations and the like, it would be extreeeemely difficult to say for certain that Aurik was actually better than said noob (provided that the noob understood mmorpg mechanics and was a competent player) due to the fact that there is quite simply a limit (and in ffxi it's a freaking seeerious limit with so few abilities given to each class) to how good you can really be. In the end you get to a point where you just plain do shit right, and outside of a few places that leave room for original thought you flat out cannot be any better than you are.

A lot of us reeeeally don't like that.

He uses the term PEG or persistant entity game as his discovery as to why MMO's are addictive. PERSISTANT ENTITY GAME?! You mean like a game with a save point?

No, he means like a massively multiplayer game with a save point. Many of the most popular online games (hell most of them), ranging from counterstrike and unreal to age of empires and old warcrafts, do not have a "persistent entity." It's a pretty legitimate thought process in my eyes.



This post took way longer than I thought so I'm stopping lol, but I'll write more later after I finish reading the article and see some more responses.

[GraveRobberX]

I read all 6 pages of the article.

It was very well written, and he gave his opinion how companies should try to formulate and not copycat what is hot at the moment in MMORPG or "PEG's".

I like what Plow stated.

Most MMORPG's cater to the grinding/timesink/hardcore/endgame players. ($$$$)
Not enough attention is given to the casual player, and that sometime really sucks.

1 thing that always annoyed me was the technical aspect of MMORPG's.
I understand some want perfection and strive for it, but that doesn't mean others who have potential but can not invest the time that others have, should be sujagated to be feeling worthless.

Sometimes when I read the FFXI Advanced section to see what is transpiring in the world of Vanadiel, and people bring up ridiculous calculations, like fstr-*2^10-9+1*3.14 (just joking, not knocking the formula crunchers) and they use that to justify that others should follow in the same steps as them/or should try to, is really retarded.

Most companies want to earn the almighty dollar. They are in the gaming business to make cold hard cash. Pleasing the playerbase is an after-thought to most. Some companies do try to fix past/present mistakes and listen, some keep miliking till it runs dry.

No game of any genre will ever get that perfect 100% fan approval, there always will be a % which will not want to get accustomed to, no matter what.

So rather than keeping 1 core of players happy, a company has to get the right % of each category to be sufficent in the MMORPG world.

[Plow]

Man the more I read of this the more I see he's absolutely spot on about a whooole lot of stuff. I keep getting distracted tho lol


example:

As players are able to predict outcomes with a high degree of accuracy, games are balanced with the assumption that players will win a very high percentage of their battles. In other words, the punishment for losing a single battle far outstrips the average reward for winning a single battle. Players will spend hours at a time churning through feeble, ineffectual opponents rather than taking on more risk, because the game rewards them more for adopting this style of play.

I simply cannot think of a better way to describe what I believe is the single biggest problem in mmorpg's.


aaand another:

Anything that was not planned for ends up being “fixed,” often by the addition of even more of these limitations. This type of design philosophy tends to close off the already limited avenues for creativity and innovation on the part of the player in the name of preserving the game’s longevity.

/a off /a <t> anyone?