Someday I’ll have to force Lum admit he agrees with me. From his blog:
The arcana that we get so worked up about? It’s marginalia. We really do play these games to dance. Speaking as someone whose career now involves fixing the marginalia, actually following this line of logic to its conclusion is somewhat humbling. What I do isn’t really that important, unless it somehow works to dissolve those social bonds. The first rule of MMO live teams should be that of medicine: First, do no harm.
And if you look at people who are furious at MMO Screwup X, I’d wager a bet that it comes down to, when reduced to its components, “the game is keeping me from being with my friends”. In most current combat-oriented games, this comes down to a reduction in effectiveness. I’m less effective, so I’m less likely to be asked along in raids, or I’m an imposition on my friends when they do, or I’m less likely to make new ones, or I contribute less to the group/tribe/whatever.
Ignore this lesson at your peril.
Which sounds like a remix of what he wrote a while ago.
Here below I repeat again that WoW’s success is in the accessibility and that these games should work toward “removing the barriers“. Lum’s “the game is keeping me from being with my friends” is, essentially, a barrier.
On his recently released book (I’ll have to say something more about it as I have more time) in the description of WoW he insists a lot on the fact that it’s the polish to make it successful. The new players are at ease with it, it’s the best mmorpg to start with right now.
I often insisted to define that as “accessibility”. The reason is again that it’s a generic term that is able to embrace all the other aspects that are still fundamental. But the accessibility is THE distinctive trait that joins those aspects. And, essentially, the accessibility is about the absence of barriers. Or the possibility to make them permeable.
If you read Raph’s book you’ll also see that a barrier is another element that prevents the fun. The accessibility to learn. If the game is too hard and you don’t have enough elements to figure out a solution, you crash against a wall and, often, you lack the tools to overcome it.
Now, *the very first goal* of my dream mmorpg is about removing those barriers. Removing the levels and replacing them with a skill-based sytem. Giving the players the possibility to travel between the shards, switch factions, classes and roles, and keep the (PvE)content accessible while still retaining progress and complexity to keep things interesting and involving. From my point of view, and it seems I’m not alone, this is a fundamental need that cannot be anymore overlooked. We cannot pretend anymore to develop mmorpgs without considering this point and provide an effective solution. My ideal game exists to give an answer to that problem. It starts from that point as the basic premise.
I’m writing this because I was commenting a post on Nerfbat about the PvP which made me re-read a long discussion about skill systems. It seems to not fit in this theme, but read this:
What are the negatives of uncapped skills? The traits I was able to isolate are:
– In PvE: gaps between the players, favor elitism and closed communities, difficulties to group and catch up with friends
– In PvP: unbalance
“Uncapped skills” stands for endless progress. See how we are discussing again about barriers?
Changing completely context, I was reading on FoH’s boards how, again, a PvE game just doesn’t fit with a PvP one. The justification was again that the item progression is fun when it comes to PvE, but then breaks in the PvP due to the unbalance. So the contrasting need to maintain the advancement into the game, but still keeping it reasonable to not screw up the PvP.
Imho, this is totally false. That unbalance that is obvious on the PvP is still there even in the PvE. If you look carefully you’ll see how there is absolutely no difference if not because the PvP is directly competitive, so making the inequality more visible. But not more relevant. I just posted a letter from WoW’s community managers explaining how Blizzard is committed to provide a satisfying character progression even for the casual players. Now I’m curious to see how. That huge umbalance in PvP due to the exponential growth in power provided by PvE raids is NOWHERE MITIGATED in PvE. I’m *really* curious to see how the hell they’ll balance a 5-man instance when they have no control over the variance in power of the characters.
Under these conditions it will be hard to balance the PvP as it is balancing the PvE. It was simple to balance an instance at the lower levels. The levels themselves were already a narrow estimation of the variance in the power. But at level 60 the variance goes through the roof. As I dinged 60 my 2-handed axe had around 48 dps. My new epic sword has 70.6 and there are better ones that reach 90.
Again: “gaps between the players, favor elitism and closed communities, difficulties to group and catch up with friends”.
So, am I the only one who has some concrete ideas on how to address these fundamental issues and trying to give an answer to these problems that we are dragging along from a very long time?
What the hell are you doing out there?
Well, beside Raph.