Post by Morreion on Sept 30, 2009 6:49:46 GMT -5
OK, there's a 2 hour + queue to get into Aion right now, so I'll write this little essay instead.
I remember back years ago when there was a community on MMO servers. Now, I can see Oatik rolling his eyes and muttering to himself already! Even through rose-colored glasses and romanticized reverie I realize that not everything was perfect then. Of course it wasn't. But, there used to be server-wide gaming communities a decade ago, even half a dozen years ago. I participated in some of them. A majority of the players then were tolerant of others, whether they were roleplayers or powergamers or what-have-you. I'm sure things were said in guild chat or private conversations that may have not been complimentary, but there was a certain basic standard of not messing with others in a flagrant public manner. In this environment, making a bad name for oneself can and did have consequences. Ninja looters would find that many a group would not accept them as a member, and loudmouths on alliance chat would get contacted by the GM of their guild who had heard from others on the channel who did not appreciate their style. And so on.
Now of course, we have a lack of a community in MMOs. There may be small islands here and there of guilds that have their own codes and cultures, but server-wide communities have gone the way of the dodo and the passenger pigeon. In a perverse way, many players go out of their way to make it hard on anyone who would have the temerity to not want to deal with their annoying behavior or public chat. In other words, the anti-community has taken over. It is the reign of the Chuck Norris joke culture on general chat.
What the hell happened?
UO, AO, DAoC- those early MMOs that I played had a general community, at least back in the day. what has changed since then?
Whatever happened to grouping? Could this be the answer?
This is a tempting explanation- since casual and solo play is all the rage, nobody needs anyone else to assist them in leveling up; therefore, no community is necessary. While plausible, this explanation doesn't apply to UO, which was solo-oriented- groups were almost an afterthought mechanism there. Also, even in a grouping game like DAoC (back in the classic days) there were solo classes such as the pet-class casters. I don't remember all of them being jerks (I was one, a pet-class caster that is!). So it's a little more complex than this.
These are not the players you used to know.
Modern MMOs are very casual and solo-friendly; this is the market today. The small niche market of online gamers has grown to millions of people, and they have different expectations. Many have come from FPS or console gaming backgrounds. I'm sure the demographics have changed. So this is a contributing factor. But- players respond to incentives, and incentives can produce certain behaviors. More on this later.
Well then, why?
My answer:
Game mechanics.
There is more than one game mechanic I am thinking of that is reponsible for the demise of community. One of them is grouping penalties. WoW is a perfect example of this. If 2 people group up, each of them receives half of the experience from each mob they kill than if they would have killed the mob solo. 5 players in a group will each earn 20% of the experience a mob would have given them if they had killed it single-handedly. When you figure in splitting up the loot, there's little incentive to group. Soloing is a rational response because you make more progress without all the bother of collecting and maintaining a group.
DAoC had a grouping experience bonus that made grouping more of a rational response for players. You grouped because you could clearly earn more experience grouped. Grouping tends to be more of a social experience than running by other players while soloing; it encourages (but is not necessary for) community.
There were other mechanics that enhanced community, unique ones such as public quests in Warhammer Online, common server-wide goals such as building a bridge to an island in Horizons to unlock more house lots, or cantinas in Star Wars Galaxies. Players had to go heal battle fatigue in cantinas by listening to player musicians or watching player dancers. This brought lots of different types of players together; social experiences broke out, including roleplaying, dueling, and just plain old chatting and making friends. Brilliant idea.
But. The #1 mechanism that has made communities a thing of the past is:
the quest-centered MMO.
What? you say. Questing is good, it gives you a story to follow, it relieves the tedium of just killing things; it gives you a purpose to do what you do.
Back in the day, there were few quests in games. Now don't get me wrong- quests can be fun. They're especially fun when there's not a thousand of them to do (kill 10 rats and then later on kill 10 giant rats, and after that kill 10 rabid rats- you get my drift). For instance, in DAoC you had an epic quest line that would supply you with a multi-part quest every 7 levels or so, relating to your class. You'd look forward to doing it, and friends would help you. It was a unique event, seeing that you weren't constantly doing it. In the meantime, you'd be hunting with said friends, doing dungeon crawls or camping a group of mobs or simply running across a zone killing things with your buddies.
Why are lots of quests bad?
Because they replace your buddies. Many of them are soloable. Group quests can bring people together, but only until that group quest is done- then it's bye-bye, boom, group is disbanded (this was my first month's experience of playing LOTRO, a long chain of one-quest groups lasting about 10 minutes).
Quests are the soloer's friend, the casual's balm. Nobody else is required to assist you in advancement. Many of them can be done in minutes. Why is this bad?
Because a quest-based game is really a single-player experience played out by largely isolated individuals who run right by each other without any interaction. If anything, other players are a bother, because they interfere with the quest you are trying to do. Everyone is trying to kill the 10 rats, and other people are just in the way.
Is it any wonder there is no general community anymore?
In games where quests were few and special, the bulk of experience would be earned by what is pejoratively called 'grinding'. Grinding really means hunting or dungeon-crawling or spawn-camping. Getting together with friends or people you just met and going out and killing things for fun and profit. Grinding can promote exploring, finding new things. No matching up complicated quest lists (no, I don't need that quest, bye thanx!), just 'let's go kill bandits in the hills'. You'd go kill them, and then maybe run through the cave where the bandit chief resides. Perhaps you hang around and kill the bandit patrols that attack people on the road between villages, they occasionally drop good loot! You didn't all have to be the same level or be on the same quest to do this. You could do this for hours at a time, and you'd get to know the people you played with, who was fun to be around, who was a very good player and first-rate leader, what were the good guilds that you wanted to join. You'd also know who you didn't particularly like or who attracted too much aggro and wiped you all out or who didn't know what they were doing. Another side-effect of the hunting culture is that you did what you chose to do, not what the game made you do. In other words, you didn't have to do quest number 1 through 2,000 in chronological order, you could go kill liches in the woods or go tame horses on the plains or go hunt yetis in the snowy mountains or- you get my drift. You did what you wanted to do. Freedom is not overrated.
When all you do is hundreds of quests, the text of which many people do not even bother to read, you don't learn about which fellow players are cool, which are good hunting mates, which of them know what they are doing. You just know that you have to kill 10 more rats and that other players are killing your 10 rats, drat them!
I'm convinced that the main culprit in the lack of a general sense of community these days are misguided game mechanics. A thousand quests make for a single-player game. Experience penalties for grouping do the same. And the lack of common places and common goals, places like SWG's cantinas which gave players a reason to come together, are the final nail in the coffin.
What you incentivize, you get more of. Be careful what you incentivize. I'm not saying that you have to force people to group; I'm saying give them incentives that encourage community. Don't make solo or casual play impossible, just make grouping and/or being together for a purpose rewarding. Oh, and those annoying general chat channels? Give players the tools to create their own persistent chat channels. Alliance chat in DAoC was a great example. Allied guilds could all chat together in one big channel, sharing information and socializing. You had a measure of choice and control over what you wanted to hear and to say. No 'Chuck Norris jokes or turn off the chat' choices, but something closer to having a community you enjoyed.
No wonder people drop games quickly these days. Without a community to keep one around for years, we are really talking about a single-player experience anyway that quickly grows old.
I remember back years ago when there was a community on MMO servers. Now, I can see Oatik rolling his eyes and muttering to himself already! Even through rose-colored glasses and romanticized reverie I realize that not everything was perfect then. Of course it wasn't. But, there used to be server-wide gaming communities a decade ago, even half a dozen years ago. I participated in some of them. A majority of the players then were tolerant of others, whether they were roleplayers or powergamers or what-have-you. I'm sure things were said in guild chat or private conversations that may have not been complimentary, but there was a certain basic standard of not messing with others in a flagrant public manner. In this environment, making a bad name for oneself can and did have consequences. Ninja looters would find that many a group would not accept them as a member, and loudmouths on alliance chat would get contacted by the GM of their guild who had heard from others on the channel who did not appreciate their style. And so on.
Now of course, we have a lack of a community in MMOs. There may be small islands here and there of guilds that have their own codes and cultures, but server-wide communities have gone the way of the dodo and the passenger pigeon. In a perverse way, many players go out of their way to make it hard on anyone who would have the temerity to not want to deal with their annoying behavior or public chat. In other words, the anti-community has taken over. It is the reign of the Chuck Norris joke culture on general chat.
What the hell happened?
UO, AO, DAoC- those early MMOs that I played had a general community, at least back in the day. what has changed since then?
Whatever happened to grouping? Could this be the answer?
This is a tempting explanation- since casual and solo play is all the rage, nobody needs anyone else to assist them in leveling up; therefore, no community is necessary. While plausible, this explanation doesn't apply to UO, which was solo-oriented- groups were almost an afterthought mechanism there. Also, even in a grouping game like DAoC (back in the classic days) there were solo classes such as the pet-class casters. I don't remember all of them being jerks (I was one, a pet-class caster that is!). So it's a little more complex than this.
These are not the players you used to know.
Modern MMOs are very casual and solo-friendly; this is the market today. The small niche market of online gamers has grown to millions of people, and they have different expectations. Many have come from FPS or console gaming backgrounds. I'm sure the demographics have changed. So this is a contributing factor. But- players respond to incentives, and incentives can produce certain behaviors. More on this later.
Well then, why?
My answer:
Game mechanics.
There is more than one game mechanic I am thinking of that is reponsible for the demise of community. One of them is grouping penalties. WoW is a perfect example of this. If 2 people group up, each of them receives half of the experience from each mob they kill than if they would have killed the mob solo. 5 players in a group will each earn 20% of the experience a mob would have given them if they had killed it single-handedly. When you figure in splitting up the loot, there's little incentive to group. Soloing is a rational response because you make more progress without all the bother of collecting and maintaining a group.
DAoC had a grouping experience bonus that made grouping more of a rational response for players. You grouped because you could clearly earn more experience grouped. Grouping tends to be more of a social experience than running by other players while soloing; it encourages (but is not necessary for) community.
There were other mechanics that enhanced community, unique ones such as public quests in Warhammer Online, common server-wide goals such as building a bridge to an island in Horizons to unlock more house lots, or cantinas in Star Wars Galaxies. Players had to go heal battle fatigue in cantinas by listening to player musicians or watching player dancers. This brought lots of different types of players together; social experiences broke out, including roleplaying, dueling, and just plain old chatting and making friends. Brilliant idea.
But. The #1 mechanism that has made communities a thing of the past is:
the quest-centered MMO.
What? you say. Questing is good, it gives you a story to follow, it relieves the tedium of just killing things; it gives you a purpose to do what you do.
Back in the day, there were few quests in games. Now don't get me wrong- quests can be fun. They're especially fun when there's not a thousand of them to do (kill 10 rats and then later on kill 10 giant rats, and after that kill 10 rabid rats- you get my drift). For instance, in DAoC you had an epic quest line that would supply you with a multi-part quest every 7 levels or so, relating to your class. You'd look forward to doing it, and friends would help you. It was a unique event, seeing that you weren't constantly doing it. In the meantime, you'd be hunting with said friends, doing dungeon crawls or camping a group of mobs or simply running across a zone killing things with your buddies.
Why are lots of quests bad?
Because they replace your buddies. Many of them are soloable. Group quests can bring people together, but only until that group quest is done- then it's bye-bye, boom, group is disbanded (this was my first month's experience of playing LOTRO, a long chain of one-quest groups lasting about 10 minutes).
Quests are the soloer's friend, the casual's balm. Nobody else is required to assist you in advancement. Many of them can be done in minutes. Why is this bad?
Because a quest-based game is really a single-player experience played out by largely isolated individuals who run right by each other without any interaction. If anything, other players are a bother, because they interfere with the quest you are trying to do. Everyone is trying to kill the 10 rats, and other people are just in the way.
Is it any wonder there is no general community anymore?
In games where quests were few and special, the bulk of experience would be earned by what is pejoratively called 'grinding'. Grinding really means hunting or dungeon-crawling or spawn-camping. Getting together with friends or people you just met and going out and killing things for fun and profit. Grinding can promote exploring, finding new things. No matching up complicated quest lists (no, I don't need that quest, bye thanx!), just 'let's go kill bandits in the hills'. You'd go kill them, and then maybe run through the cave where the bandit chief resides. Perhaps you hang around and kill the bandit patrols that attack people on the road between villages, they occasionally drop good loot! You didn't all have to be the same level or be on the same quest to do this. You could do this for hours at a time, and you'd get to know the people you played with, who was fun to be around, who was a very good player and first-rate leader, what were the good guilds that you wanted to join. You'd also know who you didn't particularly like or who attracted too much aggro and wiped you all out or who didn't know what they were doing. Another side-effect of the hunting culture is that you did what you chose to do, not what the game made you do. In other words, you didn't have to do quest number 1 through 2,000 in chronological order, you could go kill liches in the woods or go tame horses on the plains or go hunt yetis in the snowy mountains or- you get my drift. You did what you wanted to do. Freedom is not overrated.
When all you do is hundreds of quests, the text of which many people do not even bother to read, you don't learn about which fellow players are cool, which are good hunting mates, which of them know what they are doing. You just know that you have to kill 10 more rats and that other players are killing your 10 rats, drat them!
I'm convinced that the main culprit in the lack of a general sense of community these days are misguided game mechanics. A thousand quests make for a single-player game. Experience penalties for grouping do the same. And the lack of common places and common goals, places like SWG's cantinas which gave players a reason to come together, are the final nail in the coffin.
What you incentivize, you get more of. Be careful what you incentivize. I'm not saying that you have to force people to group; I'm saying give them incentives that encourage community. Don't make solo or casual play impossible, just make grouping and/or being together for a purpose rewarding. Oh, and those annoying general chat channels? Give players the tools to create their own persistent chat channels. Alliance chat in DAoC was a great example. Allied guilds could all chat together in one big channel, sharing information and socializing. You had a measure of choice and control over what you wanted to hear and to say. No 'Chuck Norris jokes or turn off the chat' choices, but something closer to having a community you enjoyed.
No wonder people drop games quickly these days. Without a community to keep one around for years, we are really talking about a single-player experience anyway that quickly grows old.
