New efforts!

[princezilla]

I was just wondering something.  Back in the old days when WoW was becoming the juggernaut, every game that came afterwards pretty much, got accused of trying to be a WoW clone.  In many cases, there was pretty strong evidence to give that idea some credence.  I see the same accusation leveled against many newer games.  What I wonder is, could that even be true anymore? 

Let me explain.  To me, regardless of the number of subscribers/active players that WoW has, the game itself is more of an institution anymore.  It just IS.  It has been on top of the heap for so long, there really isn't any hope of dethroning it anytime soon.  I would think that a good number of other MMO developers out there are aware of that, and may have the same kind of feelings.  Could it be that what people are ascribing to wanting to be a WoW clone, is actually just laziness?  Not that they are trying to make a WoW clone, but that the WoW system is so entrenched, that a lot of these developers just assume that is the way it should be done.  It goes back to a version of an old cliche, "never ascribe to malice, that which can be adequately explained by stupidity."

Maybe it is just because after CoH, I pretty much stopped playing MMOs.  Nothing out there entertained me as an MMO nearly as much as CoH.  Maybe a lot of newer games really ARE trying to be a WoW clone, hoping to steal enough players to make themselves some money.  I just wonder if that is really the case anymore.  Of course, I never understood wanting to be a WoW clone, mostly because I disliked Wow intensely on the two trial accounts I tried.  I just never could see how a game like WoW became so huge.  My tastes are obviously not the same as the majority of gamers that play WoW.  :)

It's a bit of both and it creates something of a self fulfilling prophecy. WoW completely dominates the MMO market so everyone assumes that in order to create a successful MMO it must be like WoW or that WoW like systems are the only way to make MMOs and act accordingly. But an MMO that is like WoW will never be able to compete with WoW so WoW continues to totally dominate the market.

Now WoW is top of the pile for a reason, it is very good at what it does, and can be very fun but it's style of MMO is just one of many and doesn't appeal to everyone. It's kind of like how after The Dark Knight's overwhelming success everyone in Hollywood rushed to make dark gritty superhero movies then were baffled as to why Man of Steel was a colossal flop. Customer's like variety while industries like to play follow the leader because it's easier than coming up with new ideas.

[LaughingAlex]

Most mmorpg players, imo, are not like about 99% of the gamers out there.  Most gamers like surprises, mmorpg players dislike them.  Most gamers like variety in there games, mmorpg players dislike variety.  The sad thing is, mmorpgs are themselves what psychologists call "Skinner boxes".  Basically the games are designed to trick you into continuing to play long after the game is no longer fun for you through often superficial and meaningless rewards(higher numbers).  This breeds nasty behavioral habits of elitism and tendency to get mad at losing and generally a tendency to treat the games like a job.  But they don't quit and move on because so many mmorpgs are skinner boxes, the players would rather not "change jobs" and lose progress or fall behind and be unable to play with friends.

MMORPG players tend to dislike any surprises that come with better games.  When a player loses in a good game, they just reload and use the knowledge of the thing that may happen to get past, or try something new.  MMORPG players when they lose, get upset at the loss of time and feel like they wasted time, but also get mad that they didn't get any rewards.  They only care about the rewards and becoming "more powerful" so they can "raid more".  When they fail, they feel they are falling behind others and failing there friends, guild and display frustrations about it.  So they only enjoy games which are "consistent" and that they can win every time once they know how to get there one holy trinity tactic to work.  Content has to be made the same over and over to cater to them as that is all they expect and want, even though they are no longer having fun and haven't been for I guess years.

City of heroes was the only mmorpg to not fall into that trap.  Because it was a game, not a skinner box.

But so many mmorpg games, well, they try to cater towards well mmorpg players, so they try to clone WoW and fail.

[princezilla]

Most mmorpg players, imo, are not like about 99% of the gamers out there.  Most gamers like surprises, mmorpg players dislike them.  Most gamers like variety in there games, mmorpg players dislike variety.  The sad thing is, mmorpgs are themselves what psychologists call "Skinner boxes".  Basically the games are designed to trick you into continuing to play long after the game is no longer fun for you through often superficial and meaningless rewards(higher numbers).  This breeds nasty behavioral habits of elitism and tendency to get mad at losing and generally a tendency to treat the games like a job.  But they don't quit and move on because so many mmorpgs are skinner boxes, the players would rather not "change jobs" and lose progress or fall behind and be unable to play with friends.

MMORPG players tend to dislike any surprises that come with better games.  When a player loses in a good game, they just reload and use the knowledge of the thing that may happen to get past, or try something new.  MMORPG players when they lose, get upset at the loss of time and feel like they wasted time, but also get mad that they didn't get any rewards.  They only care about the rewards and becoming "more powerful" so they can "raid more".  When they fail, they feel they are falling behind others and failing there friends, guild and display frustrations about it.  So they only enjoy games which are "consistent" and that they can win every time once they know how to get there one holy trinity tactic to work.  Content has to be made the same over and over to cater to them as that is all they expect and want, even though they are no longer having fun and haven't been for I guess years.

City of heroes was the only mmorpg to not fall into that trap.  Because it was a game, not a skinner box.

I agree with your assessment of the industry and it's mechanics but the obvious dissatisfaction prevalent throughout the community of MMO players clearly shows that this is not something they enjoy and they like variety and a challenge just as much as gamers in any other genre. In fact one of the most common complaints I hear about WoW's current incarnation from veteran MMO players is that it is to easy and simplified.

[LaughingAlex]

I agree with your assessment of the industry and it's mechanics but the obvious dissatisfaction prevalent throughout the community of MMO players clearly shows that this is not something they enjoy and they like variety and a challenge just as much as gamers in any other genre. In fact one of the most common complaints I hear about WoW's current incarnation from veteran MMO players is that it is to easy and simplified.

I talked to a fair number of mmorpg players who displayed a complete contrast to that though, who just wanted things to remain clockwork :S.

As for easy/simplified, how so?  Do more then one tactic work or is it less "punishing"?  Many gamers who complain of a game being to easy often also fail to grasp the difference between "challenging" and "punishing" games.  They want variety or say they want it, but variety to them may not necessarily be variety to most players.  Some gamers get mad when more than one tactic works, this is true with gamers in all genres.  Just that mmorpg players, well, I remember the demands in GW to have very specific builds, or even shfg's in city of heroes demanding I have very specific powers(heck even I was slightly guilty of this back then).  Or even specific powersets(we all remember the tendency of players to expect every defender to be an empath, not have attacks, and only heal).  They say they want variety, when they really want more of the same :S.

[princezilla]

I found that to be few and far between on CoX and saw far more people mocking that sort of thinking then I ever saw participating in it. You seem to have an extremely low opinion of your fellow MMO players, I have never once heard of someone getting angry over having multiple viable ways to do something and just about everyone I've ever talked to considers creative freedom to be a good thing.

[P51mus]

I agree with your assessment of the industry and it's mechanics but the obvious dissatisfaction prevalent throughout the community of MMO players clearly shows that this is not something they enjoy and they like variety and a challenge just as much as gamers in any other genre. In fact one of the most common complaints I hear about WoW's current incarnation from veteran MMO players is that it is to easy and simplified.

I dunno.  I haven't played WoW in a while, but back when I played (Wrath of the Lich King/Cataclysm) there were people complaining about things being too easy/simplified/whatever even while the game had the hardest raid encounters it ever had.

I think some WoW players just have serious nostalgia goggles for the classic 40 man raids or something.

[princezilla]

I dunno.  I haven't played WoW in a while, but back when I played (Wrath of the Lich King/Cataclysm) there were people complaining about things being too easy/simplified/whatever even while the game had the hardest raid encounters it ever had.

I think some WoW players just have serious nostalgia goggles for the classic 40 man raids or something.

There is a good bit of that, but a lot of the complaints center on the stats no longer having any actual meaning just being a marker for what class the gear is for. WoW has been steadily removing any and all possible variances from the game over the years to the point where the game doesn't even have builds anymore.

[P51mus]

There is a good bit of that, but a lot of the complaints center on the stats no longer having any actual meaning just being a marker for what class the gear is for. WoW has been steadily removing any and all possible variances from the game over the years to the point where the game doesn't even have builds anymore.

And in classic WoW there'd be one set of talents for a class for raiding, and another set for pvp, and if you did it any differently you were doing it wrong.  Nostalgia goggles.

[Arcana]

City of heroes was the only mmorpg to not fall into that trap.  Because it was a game, not a skinner box.

I would actually argue that much of what many CoH players liked about CoH were its non-gaming aspects.  For many players City of Heroes was not a game in any traditional sense of the word, but rather more of a past time that had some gaming aspects.  The meta-meta game of making a game that did not conform to many of the rules mandated by structured gaming was itself highly gamed in the CoH community, with the devs tacit approval.  You could say, in this context, that I was the singular champion of the meta-meta-meta game.

[P51mus]

I would actually argue that much of what many CoH players liked about CoH were its non-gaming aspects.

I happened to like looking at global chat while soloing.  Not many MMOs have global chat channels.  I think Secret World is the only other one that I know of.

[princezilla]

CoX was a lot of things for a lot of different people, it's strength as a game came from the fact that there was no wrong way to play it because unless you purposefully gimped yourself every single power combination was viable in its own way.

[Arcana]

I found that to be few and far between on CoX and saw far more people mocking that sort of thinking then I ever saw participating in it. You seem to have an extremely low opinion of your fellow MMO players, I have never once heard of someone getting angry over having multiple viable ways to do something and just about everyone I've ever talked to considers creative freedom to be a good thing.

Yes and no.  First of all City of Heroes players are a self-selected group that prefer City of Heroes, which had very different perspectives on how MMO characters should work.

However, while you do not obviously see too many psychopaths directly complain about "having too many ways to do things" or "having too much freedom" or "having too many creative outlets" players do and did complain indirectly about those things, even in the City of Heroes community.  There was a time when players complained that Controllers were useless because Tankers did their control job well enough to make them redundant, and then that flipped and players began to complain that Controllers made Tankers redundant.  Players complained that too much content was too easy to solo making teaming largely redundant.  Players complained that the invention system trivialized standard content.  Everyone wants themselves to have all the freedom and choices, but they do not always like it when everyone else gets that freedom and choice and decides to use it by not needing them anymore. 

Even though tankers could sail through the content easily and lots of pick up teams still desired them, the number one complaint about Tankers on the forums was "they had no role" or "they were not needed."  Demanding the devs to make you needed is in effect asking them to take something away from everyone else: the freedom to not need you.

Once upon a time, the broadcast channel in PI was used primarily to ask for teaming help with the portal AVs.  Then one day that basically stopped, when people figured out how to take the AVs down with minimal or no help at all.  When that transition occurred, it did not occur all at once.  There was a period of time when many players needed that help but help didn't exist anymore because the rest of the playerbase had moved on to not monitoring that channel any more.  The same thing happened to respec: I was on one of the early teams to beat respec on Triumph, and I know that there was a time when people complained about respec being too hard, then one day people were complaining about it being too easy.  I remember the big fight over the LRSF and how it was "impossible" in its original incarnation, and then I remember the complaints about it being ridiculously too easy when the AVs were dropped from +5 to +3.

MMO players are not monolithic, and they do not all complain about the same things.  I have greater insight into the CoH player community because I was involved in so many aspects of it, but I can see the same schisms in other MMOs.  Some players complain things are too hard.  Some complain they are too easy.  Some complain there are not enough ways to do things.  Some complain there are too many ways to do things.  The common denominator, if there is one, is that complainers complain about the game not meeting expectations, and different players expect different things.

Probably the biggest undercurrent schism in City of Heroes in the second half of its existence (outside the growing pains of the first half) was the alt-situation.  Some players wanted more stuff for their characters to do.  Some players wanted the devs to pace content differently so allow players with multiple alts to experience the content.  Where those two collided was when content contained unlocks or higher rewards.  If the content has no particular progressional impact then it doesn't matter if you have one alt or twenty.  But if that content unlocks incarnate slots or awards special drops, then it matters a great deal.  And there were a lot of players arguing that there should be only one narrow path to progression, and all other content should be totally optional to allow players with a lot of alts to have enough time to "keep up" with the core progressional path with a lot of alts.  This is fundamentally impossible without making the game boring for everyone else.  You cannot balance the needs of a player with fifty alts against the player with one, any more than you can balance the needs of the player that plays fifty hours a week and the one that plays fifty minutes a week.

On a separate note, it is important to insert here that the visible tip of the iceberg of MMO player communities in their public discussion forums and the self-selected circles a single player might move within are highly unrepresentative of MMO players in general.  In City of Heroes I was a deep forumite and could tell you what was happening in almost all corners of the forums (outside of forum games, perhaps).  If it was posted in the Defender forum, or the Triumph forum, or even that cesspool Suggestions and Ideas I probably knew about it.  But I also talked to multiple devs and heard what kind of feedback they were getting within their own feedback channels.  Because of the way I played alts, I also found myself pugging it with new players all the time randomly.  And I even participated in a partially random preview session held by Paragon Studios.  And my PM box overfloweth.  I got to talk to and hear from a very wide range of not-self-selected players, and I can tell you that when players said "most CoH players are [blank]" on the forums they were pretty much always wrong, at least from the wide sample size I was experiencing.  So I think it is dangerous to overgeneralize what most MMO players think about MMOs.  The most visible feedback is often the least representative.  The feedback I heard from random PUGs was completely dissimilar to what I was used to hearing on the forums.  The feedback I heard during the Freedom preview sessions was completely dissimilar to what I was used to hearing from the forums, and was different from what I often heard in-game.  The one hundredth time you get a PM from an MMO player that starts by saying "I don't like posting on the forums but I would like to discuss an idea with you" you realize that no MMO's forums represent their playerbase, only a self-selected bombastic edge case of them (I'm including me in that description absolutely: I'm probably an edge case among edge cases).

Castle once asked me my opinion of a certain game change.  I told him words to the effect of "the quiet powergamers will love it; the forums will hate it for about three months then come around; the average players will probably not notice it but it will probably help them the most.  I personally think you overbuffed it a tad."  I always saw the CoH playerbase as a community of communities, often under a lot of tension.  There was no "the community" except under very unusual circumstances when a general consensus was obvious (like, say, "the community" probably wasn't happy about the shutdown).

[princezilla]

Yet you generalizing MMO players as being unlike other gamers because they don't like variety or surprises. People do like to complain but that doesn't change the fact that player satisfaction in the MMO market is at an all time low and it is a direct result of the lack of variety between the games currently on the market.


People like different things and have different priorities when with regards to what is important in a game so when a market starts completely conform to one particular style everyone who has a preference towards a different one is going to be discontent.

[Arcana]

Incidentally, I should also mention that I can think of at least one person that argued against having too much freedom.  That would be me.

Freedom is an abstract concept, but within the context of gaming and game design theory I don't think most people fully appreciate that freedom is not synonymous with choice, freedom is actually the opposite of choice.  Freedom is the lack of restrictions.  Choice requires the imposition of restrictions.  If you can have A or B but not both, that's a choice.  If you can have A or B *or* both, then there's no actual choice being offered.

One of the longest running dogmas of City of Heroes is that it was a missed opportunity that CoH could not have released without its freeform original concept.  Archetypes, this dogma states, are a sad compromise to what is obviously the better option of allowing players to choose whatever they want.  But I argued for a long time (mostly alone) that's not true.  Freeform as a gaming option adds freedom but eliminates choices as a consequence.  In City of Heroes you can have scrapper defenses or controller primaries but not both.  Champions Online implemented something similar to what CoH was originally aiming for.  In CO you can now have scrapper defenses *and* controller primaries.  That suggests more "choices."  But instead, the opposite is true.  CoH gives you two options: Scrappers and Controllers.  CO gives you one: Scraptrollers.  In fact, I called out CO - going all the way back to beta - of reducing player choice to basically just one choice: ranged scrappers.  I was, of course, laughed at.**

But its true.  CO has far, far less replay value than CoH.  Even discounting all other problems with implementation and even discounting the fact that CO had to launch with fewer powers than CoH had a couple years to build up, when you let players choose whatever they want with far fewer limits on power choices, they actually do that: they build their first alt with as many of the options they want as possible.  That means the second alt is less likely to be as interesting, and that's not supposition, that's historical fact.  CO was a godsend in that it was actually a way I could prove the thesis that archetypes were actually good for CoH and good for gaming in general, and less restrictions aren't always synonymous with more fun no matter what your players think is true.

Which is not to say that some players didn't prefer CO's freeform and some players didn't get equally good replay value from CO as CoH.  But I'm comfortable stating that CO proves unequivocally that choices are more important than freedoms when it comes to gaming.  Choices must be distinct, independently interesting, and equally valid, but when they are they give players something to do.  They have to choose, and see what happens.  And if they want, they can play again and choose differently and see what's different about that choice.  CoH lets you do that with archetypes.  CO's freeform at launch took that away from the players, and it suffered for it.


** Then and even now, there are those that say that "technically" CO didn't take those choices away: you could make pure scrappers and pure controllers in CO, by simply voluntarily limiting your choices.  Separate from the fact that CO's content isn't balanced on the assumption that players will do that, this is also a completely ludicrous statement on its face.  The point of gaming choices, as I previously mentioned, is that they have to present the player with options that are comparable in value and relative to gameplay roughly equally valid.  Saying you can deliberately gimp yourself relative to the options the game gives every player and counting those as one of the valid gameplay options is simply objectively wrong from a game design perspective.

[Arcana]

Yet you generalizing MMO players as being unlike other gamers because they don't like variety or surprises. People do like to complain but that doesn't change the fact that player satisfaction in the MMO market is at an all time low and it is a direct result of the lack of variety between the games currently on the market.

I'm not sure who you are responding to here, but do you have any reference for MMO player satisfaction being at historical lows? 

I mean, the MMO industry in its current form is less than twenty years old.  How much history could any study contain?

[princezilla]

CO was based on a tabletop RPG and was built with RPers and concept characters in mind, obviously it breaks the whole system when you apply min/maxer mentality to that. The fact that the dev team behind it were totally clueless and based most of their launch speculations on the assumption that they would be the DVD to CoX's VHS only compounded their issues.

I'm basing it all on personal experience truthfully but after over a decade playing MMOs and hanging out with people who play MMOs people just aren't having nearly as much fun as they used to. I can't be the only one who's noticed that. Nostalgia lenses are strong but I know for a fact that the people I played with were happier overall years ago. It also only takes a brief look around to see that there is far less variety in the MMO market then there was five or more years ago. Hell a full forth of that list linked earlier was WoW and it's expansions and another forth are games that have been shut down.

[Vee]

i'd be tough to convince that satisfied and mmo player aren't mutually exclusive categories.

[princezilla]

i'd be tough to convince that satisfied and mmo player aren't mutually exclusive categories.

See five years ago I would have found that statement surprising but not anymore.

[Arcana]

CO was based on a tabletop RPG and was built with RPers and concept characters in mind, obviously it breaks the whole system when you apply min/maxer mentality to that. The fact that the dev team behind it were totally clueless and based most of their launch speculations on the assumption that they would be the DVD to CoX's VHS only compounded their issues.

Actually, CO was explicitly not based on the Champions RPG, aka the HERO system.  To be precise, Cryptic purchased the Champions IP - the story, the background, the principal named characters - but *not* the gameplay.  Exactly nothing about CO was based on the Champions RPG, because they did not have the right to use any of it.

Cryptic's original idea was to make CO into something like the original CoH freeform concept, but they discovered that would be too difficult to pull off in the time frame they had to develop the game.  Basically, I think they had no ability to make enough powers in a balanced and interesting way.  You see that when they first allowed players to slot all the defensive powers.  Yeah, even the dumbest beta testers knew that wasn't going to work.  Eventually, they decided on the "passive slot" concept to address the issue of "take any power you want, except for these: of course you can't have more than one of these."

They then tried to "borrow" a concept (but not implementation) from Champions in the form of frameworks.  The idea would be that frameworks would be power "skeletons" that you could slot powers into in manageable groups.  Kind of like do-it-yourself powersets from CoH.  Two problems arose quickly: first people seemed to have too many preconceived notions of frameworks, because a similar concept existed in the HERO system.  Second, I think it was even more difficult to figure out how to balance framework costs than make a freeform powers system.

The actual final form of the game in power "trees" is actually I think a throwback to CoH original recipe, with a little bit of Marvel Universe Online mixed in (which I've heard was very "tree-y").  I remember the moment in beta when the devs announced the licensing deal they made, along with the fact that CO would not, and could not, be anything like the HERO system.  I remember it clearly because so many beta forum players were so looking forward to having HERO in MMO form, even though I was saying that was impossible and the chances of that happening were exactly zero, because the HERO system is a complete mess to implement in an MMO.  There's no way to balance the points system without a human being in the loop making judgment calls.  The rulebook even warns GMs that a lot of it might be totally unworkable in some gaming settings.  An MMO can't make those judgments.  Quite a few beta people actually expressed betrayal over that decision (a minority, but a vocal one).

Fundamentally speaking, the reason why you're never going to see HERO in an MMO is because of defense.  Most PnP games have a wide variety of offense but actually rather limited defense.  DnD is like that.  Lots of ways to kill things.  Not a lot of ways to not get killed besides having a really high defense rating and a lot of health.  And PnP games are designed to take place over a wide range of timescales.  No matter how powerful you could make yourself right now, you can't sustain that over the days, weeks, and even months of a campaign.  But unlike even single player games, MMOs basically have to take place in real time.  How strong I am today is how strong I will be tomorrow.  How strong I am now is about how strong I will be in an hour.  In any game system where you let the players have reasonably arbitrary choices in what kinds of abilities they can have, and those abilities include continuous real time defensive abilities, and your combat is based on offense/defense balance, players will always figure out how to stack "good enough" defense to survive anything, then optimize for offense, then destroy your content.  This isn't specifically a min/max issue.  Even if you just throw darts at a freeform system you're likely to figure out really quickly that if your darts don't land on defense you die, and if they do you live, and if you keep adding defense until you stop dying you win.

I'm not even scratching the surface of the disadvantage system in HERO, which makes actual human beings go insane.  I don't know how you do that in a computer MMO with an extreme amount of engineering caution which simply doesn't exist as a practical matter in game development implementation teams.

[Nyx Nought Nothing]

CO was based on a tabletop RPG and was built with RPers and concept characters in mind, obviously it breaks the whole system when you apply min/maxer mentality to that. The fact that the dev team behind it were totally clueless and based most of their launch speculations on the assumption that they would be the DVD to CoX's VHS only compounded their issues.

This seems an odd assertion on its face since Champions/Hero System has always put far more focus on game mechanics and min/maxing than RP. Champions character creation revolves far more around designing powers and tailoring advantages and disadvantages than deciding on your character's favorite colour. It is by far one of the crunchiest, most mechanics-heavy game systems i've ever played. One of the greatest strengths of the Hero System is that it requires the GM be very engaged in character design, but that's also one of its greatest weaknesses as things tend to get very degenerate very quickly if players who are either too familiar or unfamiliar with the rules are left unsupervised when creating characters.


Yes, i always enjoyed working out detailed backgrounds and personalities for my characters, but most other tabletop RPGs, especially today, put far more focus on character background and personality during creation. Even the default Champions setting is little more than a fairly generic pastiche of the most common tropes and archetypes of the DC and Marvel superheroes from the last quarter of the 20th century.


Edit: *sigh* Damnit, Arcana did it again. Posted a similar, although more insightful and articulate, response to the same post while i was faffing about.