It's Lonely at the Bottom

[Morreion]

Player Perspectives: It's Lonely At The Bottom

Visit almost any MMORPG that's been around for a year or longer, and you're bound to find that the game is top-heavy. A heavy focus on end-game content, whether it's raiding, instances, or other max-level content, has led many community populations to become heavily concentrated with characters at maximum level; for example, almost a full 50% of active World of Warcraft characters on US servers are level 80 based on Warcraft census data. While lower-level characters do exist in the form of new players and alts, and these games usually have a reasonable amount of low-level group content created during their development and growth, that content often becomes abandoned and neglected by players on their rush to join the masses on top.

There are plenty of players who want to experience that content, of course, even if they have experienced it before. Unfortunately, the numbers of those players are often scattered widely between time zones and servers, making it difficult to find the prerequisite number of people to fill a group - much less a good group composition. For the lucky people who have managed to hit the right compromise of factors, low-level group content still gets its time in the spotlight. For those who aren't so lucky, other solutions have to be found.

I'm a fan of releasing a new server every 6 months to a year or so. There are games that have been around for years that people would like to try, but nobody wants to be 100 levels behind- new servers put players on an even footing, and attract new players to a mature game. I don't know why this doesn't happen more often.

[Morreion]

A good comment on the article:

.........or people could simply learn from their mistakes and stop churning out linear MMOs with levels. Make a game where everyone can participate in various activities regardless of how powerful they are. EVE seems to have managed this so why is it so difficult for other games to figure out?

Yes congratulations we've learned that if you make a game where you start at the level 1 area and end at the level 80 area then eventually everyone will be at the level 80 area. Gosh! Who could ever have forseen such an outcome? How many times do games companies have to keep relearning this lesson before they finally figure out that maybe.....just maybe.....this is a really really sh*t way to make an MMO. Rather than trying to find various quick fix solutions to this problem, wouldnt it make more sense to just simply not create the problem in the first place? Pay a high level friend to walk you through all the games content? ha ha ha! What a joke! Can game design possibly get any worse?

[Loendal]

I think a game that would have a set time limit, either world-based or character-based, would solve this problem. Anarchy Online, when it first came out, was supposed to run for 2 or 3 years, then have a massive civil war of PvP before everything got blown to pieces and started over. i.e. an Armegeddon of sorts, where everyone then gets started from scratch again, with new content.

I've thought about putting an age limit on players. They will eventually grow old and die, what are they going to do with the time they have? Multiple end-player solutions would need to be created so it's not just a waste. i.e. Allow them to become NPC's or have children that their traits and heirlooms get handed down to. A retirement for PC's if you will. It worked in old school D&D, why not MMO's?

[Morreion]

I've thought along similar lines, Loendal- why not have a world that runs a year from release then turns into something totally different (or the setting completely changes) so that people start over with the same character but will grow in a different place. Make games cyclical, keep players coming back for more with their established character!

[Regolyth]

Actually, speaking on the topic of the game changing after X-amount of years after it's release, WoW is doing just that. The next expansion is called Cataclysm. It's turning areas upside down. Remember Thousand Needles? It's now completely underwater. Remember Darkshore? It now has a giant rift cut clean through the center of the land and most of the forests there have burned down. WoW is completely renewing it's land. Nothing from the original game will remain.

On the topic of levels, I think UO had it right. I know I keep pulling up UO as examples in everything, sorry... but it was soooo good! UO was a skill based game. There were no levels. So areas weren't divided into sections for level 50 people, or level 40 people, etc. You found 7x GM people alongside those who had just started the game. Maybe they were crafting, gathering materials, or learning a new skill. There were rarely completely empty areas. Obviously though, you wouldn't find a newbie at the bottom of some dungeon. Or if you did, he was a ghost asking for a rez. ;D

[Morreion]

Have to agree that skill-based systems get around all of the problems that level and class based games have. You don't need a healer class when healing is a skill anyone can level up, and you don't have level restrictions on grouping when any skill level can contribute to a fight. Level/class systems are easy to understand but they add in all sorts of contortions to gameplay that skill-based systems deal with.

We need more skill-based sandboxes!

[Loendal]

Skill-based is definitely better, hands down.

However, it does lead to isolationism. Why bother to make friends if you can do everything yourself? A limit on the number of skills one can learn (Again, ala-UO) is the only way around this. You can't let people be a Juggernaut of all skills or you wind up with a caste of elite people at the top who never bother with the rest of the poor schleps who are still working their way there.

[Morreion]

In a way, skill-based games probably lend themselves towards soloing, though I do remember in UO grouping up with some grandmaster weapon people and fighting things I could never have hoped to solo; my skills raised quickly doing this, so this actually was an incentive to group for lower-skilled players.

UO was part of the original MMO culture as well- us original nerds were much more into community than today's post-WoW crowd. So part of the good memories had to do with the prevailing culture at the time.

In my opinion, the quest-centered game is the single most responsible factor in isolationism. The typical MMO today has hundreds of quests in it, and many if not most can be done solo. Other players just get in the way of doing the quests in this system. Even group quests are very temporary affairs, do a group quest and bam! the group breaks up to look for another group who as yet another quest that individuals need. Nobody has the same quest list, so groups are ephemeral.

Many a time other players will just run right through my character as if I wasn't there. I've always had an aversion to doing that, feeling it is impolite. But it is typical now. Players are running back and forth with their quests; other characters don't matter. It's the era of the single-player MMO.

[Regolyth]

Oct 29, 2009 16:58:01 GMT -5 Morreion said:

Many a time other players will just run right through my character as if I wasn't there. I've always had an aversion to doing that, feeling it is impolite. But it is typical now. Players are running back and forth with their quests; other characters don't matter. It's the era of the single-player MMO.

Haha! I thought I was the only one who hated that. I will always side step (or in the case of Kulites, jump) a person.

I agree, quests are a big culprit in how games are played. If you have quests, then you know what you have to do. You go in, do it, turn in the quest, move on to the next. Whereas in skill-based games, you found a good bunch of mobs to kill and others would come and go. Sometimes they would join you and you'd become good friends, creating a guild together and still adventure together five years later.

But I also agree that it's probably due to the community (generation?) of gamers now. They don't respect that relationship, nor do they want it (do they even know it exists?).

I rarely soloed in UO. If I did, it was just because I got online before everyone else, or maybe they were at work. So I would work a little skill and try to get some money from earth elementals. Or perhaps mine some ore to make us a new set of weapons and armor to use that night in our PvP endeavors or raids. Hehe... they used call me the Mad Miner because I mined so much. It was my guild title on my mule (5x GM: smithing, tailoring, alchemy, mining, and fletching).

I find that I solo a lot in games now, unless I'm PvPing. If I'm in PvP, I'm always in a group, but if I'm in PvE, I'm generally running solo.

[Morreion]

Earth Elementals!

***Imagine an Earth Elemental image here!***

Man, Despise dungeon...memories...Earth Elementals were my cash cow, just watch out for when they ganged up on you. Ahhh, memories.

Fafhrd was my main, 4XGM (Swords, Anatomy, Parry, Healing). I was working on Magic Resist (hard to raise) but never got it to GM level.