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GeekNights 20100223 - Why Hardcore MMORPGs Are Not Popular
Tonight on GeekNights we discuss why hardcore MMORPGs are not popular. In the news, a Digimon MMO is coming and Street Fighter IV is coming to the iPhone.
Comments
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For those who enjoy PvP, most people particpate in 2v2, 3v3, and 5v5 Arena teams, as well as in several battlegrounds that range from 10v10, 15v15, or 40v40. For Arena teams, if you keep losing, the only way you get penalized is losing honor points which people can trade in for items.
As for griefing, I have to disagree. There is still combat griefing in WoW. On a PvP server, if you are in a contested territory, you are automatically flagged for PvP. This gives open reign for anyone of the opposite faction to fight you.
This flag will only be removed after you enter a faction-friendly environment for 5 minutes. So techncially, if a person of the opposite faction was in that area, they could still try to kill you.
This is actually something that's been the popular thing for griefers. Most high-level characters hang out in the shared capitals for both Alliance and Horde. They have portals that go to the faction-specific capitals. So sometimes, people who are out and about in contested territories are flagged for PvP. They hearth to the main shared faction capital and go to a faction-specific capital within a matter of seconds.
There is a short load screen time to go from one capital to the next. So basically what happens is, some griefer sneaks into the opposite faction capital and camps that portal spot and basically kills you right when you port, for those who are flagged. I find it to be amusing, because some people have longer load screen times, so they can hear battle going on and when the screen loads up, they are already dead.
There are probably hundreds of videos out there from various WoW players who make griefing a day job. I can't link to the video, but there is one called Top Gun Rogue, iirc. Basically this rogue kills people in the air within a few seconds and people plummet to their doom. Most people think that if you mount up and fly up high, you are safe from dying. This rogue proves them otherwise.
The closest thing they have to house competitions is a certain area called Wintergrasp that goes into contestation every 2 hours. This is where it's 40v40 and the Horde and Alliance battle to win the area. Whoever wins, that faction will have the ability to do a dungeon in Wintergrasp as well as it lets everyone of that faction collect certain items in normal dungeons they can trade in for various items. There are a few other bonuses, but it's not worth mentioning.
I'm in no way saying WoW is hardcore as you guys are saying, I'm only sharing a few PvP things about Wow. I really don't PvP because I don't have the time for it. However, I find it enjoyable when I do because people try to kill me and end up failing hardcore.
Unless it's really changed since May 2008?
In an MMO that allows for contextual conflict, this meta is unnecessary, and the conflict itself generates emergent constructs of narrative that the players do not only affect, but effect in total.
You also have to account for the fact that most modern MMO's are not, in fact, massive. So much of WoW is instanced that truly massive gameplay is a rarity. Basically, the focus has shifted towards streamlining these games and making them available on demand, which in turn serves to remove the player from their attachment to the world. When you instance everything to make it immediately available, you get instant gratification and can then move on. You don't really have to invest as much in a modern MMO in order to get a return, but many of them reward you more for increased investment.
Older hardcore MMO's were not convenient for the player in any capacity, and they were usually very arbitrary and unfair. This created a sort of dedication via sunk cost fallacy; players would continue playing because they wanted to extract the enjoyment and rewards from the game and didn't want to lose what they had already invested. It provided extremely delayed gratification. While this sucks in terms of user-friendliness, it also kept the players involved in the world and highly invested in the characters, which in turn enabled them to craft grand stories and tales using the system.
I'm not saying that the shift in focus is necessarily a good or a bad thing; it depends on what you want to get from the game. There are people who treat WoW and similar games like a "hardcore" MMO, and I always thought that was sort of silly; it's not the sort of MMO that really necessitates deep and obsessive involvement. I suppose those people who get addicted to WoW are the types who played older hardcore MMO's and just want to replicate that experience in something modern and supported.
EDIT: Star Wars Galaxies was the best implementation of MMORP I've ever seen. The world was entirely player created, and this necessitated a heavy investment in everything you did. Conflict would emerge naturally because of competition over limited resources. However, the G part was so amazingly and impossibly terrible that it completely ruined the experience. There was no point in playing or progressing. The most fun you could have in that game was sitting around in a cantina, chatting up your friends while a twi'lek danced for you.
If the game had actually worked, I firmly believe that Galaxies would have been the perfect MMO experience.
I was commenting on mostly on Scrym's comment on how people can only really grief via in-game mail/tells with penises. People still corpse camp/grief others all the time. It's nothing great, and it doesn't actually effect anything.
WoW basically tailors to the masses and gives them what most people want. If people want to PvE without having to get griefed, they make certain areas where PvP isn't possible. For people who just want to PvP, they make the Arenas and Battlegrounds.
But what Rym stated above is correct. I think it would be very interesting to see if Blizzard implemented contextual conflict. It will probably never happen, but it would be interesting to see.
Also, I agree with TheWhaleShark. He's pretty much spot on as always. I agree. I really enjoy the fact that people out there do this stuff for free. My hat goes off to them.
I also find the theorycrafters out there are insane. They really get into statistics, algorithms, and other various data to maximize their game play. I think it's cool for what they do, but man that takes some time and research.
Edit: Yes, I know I'm just perfecting the button mashing, but to me, that's a game in itself, and it's an enjoyable one.
One thing I wonder about is the death of player housing. Perhaps it's an inevitable by-product of increasing detachment from the world of MMO's generated by their increasingly streamlined and user-friendly nature, but I've always wondered if maybe the houses died first and attachment followed suit. If you start adding a money sink that really ties the players to the world, you might start creating the environment where they feel like they can truly affect the world. It probably wouldn't take much to generate that feeling.
Again, someone really needs to make a game whose economy is like Star Wars Galaxies, except they also need to make sure the game doesn't blow goats. Have everything in the game come from another player and not from some impartial server, and you'll get people invested in your game.
Do you ever check out the theorycrafting from Elitist Jerks? I mostly refer to them when I want to know about a class.
We need to do a show on this.
Basically, you can't make anything that even tries to do anything at all the way WoW does it. WoW is established and polished; nobody wants to wait for a new game to hash out its bugs.
Paranoia the MMO sounds very interesting. What would you do? Everyone start inside, work their way to the outside, build a civilization out there, and attempt to destroy the computer? Open-world player-derived stuff like that is perfect, but the game needs to have a point, and the mechanics need to be tight.