This one is going to sound kind of weird, I know. I think too much emphasis is being placed on our happiness as players, as characters, in our mmorpgs now. Note that I am not saying happiness is a bad thing, but rather the degree that developers are going to, or the amount of emphasis being placed upon it, is too great. It does seem counter intuitive to think that perhaps developers are making us too happy in a game. I submit to you that ‘fun’ and ‘happy’ are not synonymous in a mmorpg and in fact too much of a good thing can indeed be very, very bad.
I won’t be going into depth and picking apart mechanics, but think about mmorpgs as a whole that have released over the past five years or so. There is a most definite trend of developers making games more and more appealing to everyone. I talked about designing games for too many people in my last blog entry and how that can affect the outcome of the game; this has a lot to do with that as well. If too much emphasis is placed on our happiness in game then a really important part of the game is devalued: The part of the game that is designed for when you’re not happy — to make you unhappy — or be the consequence. Yes, these aspects of a mmorpg are indeed important. I stand firm in my conviction that making a game devoid of all consequence, penalty, or system to generate the opposite feelings of ‘happy’ is a very bad thing. There is also a difference between boring, difficulty, and consequence. Some people want to lump these things together to strengthen their arguments for or against a particular mechanic but they really belong isolated because they can and do stand on their own.
This concept transcends individual mechanics like death penalties or exp curves. This is about games as a whole (look at the big picture) being designed to make everyone happy. The reality here is that we’re not supposed to always be happy in a role playing game. That’s right, I think we should have moments of despair — not just when we don’t win the roll on that epic or can’t find a group. I won’t be able to get this point across to many of you, but for those who are receptive (I know there are some of you out there) think about how you would feel about the times that make you happy if you knew that there could be times when you’re not. For me that creates an even greater, even if indirect, importance on the happy moments. Knowing that I can suffer or have moments of unhappiness is exhilarating when done correctly.
When accomplishment can be lost, hindered, or something related to it risked then success suddenly becomes relevant. If you have zero risk then what value does anything have? This is very important to character development and part of why I always felt more attached to what I accomplished in older mmorpgs. We’ve reached a point where there is no longer any resistance. It would be like walking slowly with no incline: There will be a limit to how far you can progress. Increase the speed or add an incline, a program, or whatever to change things up and suddenly you start to see results. Yeah, it’s harder. Sure, it hurts. Yet at the same time you’re getting somewhere. Same type of general idea applies here.
My favorite lines are probably going through some of your heads right now (heck, maybe you didn’t even read most of this and you’re already commenting — we’ll have fun laughing at you in a second): “Don’t get in the way of me having fun!”; “You can’t tell me how to play.”; “Why should I have to do X before getting to Y?” If those things are running through your head right now then I have failed to get my point across. It’s not about something getting in the way to stop you from progressing. We’re not talking about difficult grinds, death penalties, or the negatives. Why focus on the negatives? I’m trying to say that developers do not have to focus on the negatives if they would simply stop focusing too hard on the positives.
I’ve been following/watching Graev in a game that some of you may be familiar with called Demon’s Souls. Quite a concept. It’s a single player game but people can come into your game and fight you — in fact they can kill you. Is that actually fun? Not only is it fun but it adds this immeasurable depth to the gameplay experience. Even if it never happens, the idea that someone can come in and set you back gets adrenaline flowing. Guess what happens when they come into your game to kill you but instead you kill them? You’re provided with a feeling of pleasure/happiness that surpasses anything else you would have felt through the entirety of the game. The developers focused quite clearly on how to throw a wrench in the status quo of what I consider to be the straight line of complacency/happiness.
The direction towards complete happiness without an eye for its opposite is a terrible path that will lead games to being empty shells without a soul or the ability to evoke any real feeling in the player. Without defeat there can be no victory. Without loss there can be no gain. Without despair there can be no joy. Games didn’t used to be so one dimensional and I know for a fact that my senses were not as dulled back then as they are in today’s mmorpgs.
Think about whether or not you feel developers have begun to focus too much on your happiness in game, and as a result have dumbed down or even gotten rid of all true depth of feeling in mmorpgs. I’m mostly interested in how fellow first-gen’s feel about the topic.
October 12th, 2009 at 4:37 pm
Risk and consequence – most people simply do not want these in their MMO gaming experience. They do not want to be able to make a bad choice and they really don’t want to be affected by another player’s decisions/actions. It has nothing to do with the risk/reward balance, rather with the level of how much their own choices and ability can affect their gameplay. The higher the risk or the more dire the consequence, the further ahead the risk takers and good decision makers get than the rest. It is a platform dominated by time-invested rewards because most humans wrongly feel that they will always have enough time. They know they are limited in ability and money, but they always feel that they will always have enough time. It’s not just in gaming that they feel that way, either.
October 12th, 2009 at 4:56 pm
Risk and consequence are indeed a big part of this, but I’m looking beyond even their existence to the part of core game design that is being affected. Deciding early on that the main goal is to make players happy all the time naturally means that whatever has to change to accomplish that will be lost. If the goal is to always make someone happy then the opposite experiences and feelings, and everything associated with them, are lost too.
I really do believe people need to be able to make bad choices. Mistakes should be possible. Unfortunate circumstances should arise. I do not believe that it should be implemented in such a way that risk takers get ahead. I don’t think people should feel completely destroyed by their mistakes or forever stuck with bad feelings but rather they should know that they exist and should experience them. It makes the experience complete.
I know you played a lot of UO, right Lok? I believe anyone who played UO knows exactly what I’m talking about. Don’t consider it in terms of how or why you play today or how you feel people want to play today, but how you played back then and how it felt back then.
Personally, I don’t care about the majority anymore. I know exactly how to make a game that will attract a huge playerbase. However, that’s also the same recipe for making a mediocre game. I don’t care about how humans as humans feel or how humans as gamers feel. I know how I felt, and how tens of thousands felt, when we played a really good game.
October 12th, 2009 at 5:04 pm
The only thing I hate in my MMO’s is the RNG god, I love risk, rewards for accomplishing difficult goals, and that kind of stuff.
But the RNG can go die in a fire. RNGs are the bane of my life, no luck at all, no matter how much challenge I put myself through, I will have gotten nothing after my bazillionth try, and someone else whos a moron will get it on his first. And in many MMO’s I will go out of my way to do things the harder way, cause I like feeling rewarded for doing something difficult… when I just try to grind away at easy to overcome obstacles I get EXTREMELY bored, and ususally stop playing the game (Warhammer was a bit guilty of this for me, and not rewarding me for going out of my way to do anything).
October 12th, 2009 at 5:12 pm
I know you jumped off the Darkfall bandwagon a long time ago, but is seems like your comments fit the game rather well. I agree with your desire to play a smaller game that caters more to a small niche within the mmo community. That is why I like Darkfall and Fallen Earth.
October 12th, 2009 at 5:14 pm
I don’t want or need a consequence to enjoy a game, especially an MMO. In fact the less there are, the more I enjoy it. I like challenge and being absorbed for long periods of time, but consequences? Nah. They don’t have to go hand in hand in order to produce something. opposites are NOT required. You don’t have to kill someone just to have a better appreciation for life. And victory can be gained without defeat.
In my youth maybe I felt different. I partied hard and the riskier the things I did, the bigger the high I felt. Now in my 40s I don’t need those risky behaviors or attitudes to accomplish the same happiness. I feel the same way about games, and its probably just me. But if I’m playing a single player game and someone comes in and kills me, well that just ruined the game for me, I don’t want to play anymore.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t want a game where I can’t die, but I also don’t need my ‘adrenaline flowing’ to enjoy a game. There’s enough real-life things to get adrenaline flowing, when I need a game to start doing that will be the end of gaming.
October 12th, 2009 at 5:20 pm
@Mig: This is very crucial to everyone’s understanding here. Darkfall went for tedium, road blocks, and consequence. Clearly Aventurine did not want to focus solely on players being happy. However, in the process they removed the GAME. While UO and EQ (as two examples) had their ups and downs, there was a game there too.
This discussion is less about one game, or even three games, but a direction and about extremes. There needs to be a healthy balance. While Darkfall went to one extreme, the direction we’re headed now is taking games to the other extreme. Eventually we’ll see games failing to be GAMES because the developers cared too much about us being happy.
@Salbos: You’re focusing too much on the negative. Think about the bigger picture and try to visualize a perfect blend/harmony of emotions and then try to take that big picture you’ve just created and turn it into a mmorpg. How would it play out?
October 12th, 2009 at 5:34 pm
I think you’re treading close to dangerous territory here. Soon we’ll be discussing the definition of “carebear” vs “hardcore” (which is a lose-lose situation).
Honestly, I think most modern MMOs treat their game as a money making machine. Put in quarters, get pleasure. Old school arcade games were HARD, but we kids still pumped quarters in to get our arses beat.
When i was younger and played MUDs, the player base were the specific cross section of Pen&Paper D&D/Computer nerds. I think we were USED to working with a situation that had numerous difficult setbacks, and sometimes progress reversal.
Today, the MMO crowd is more of an “xbox generation” of fast-paced action and instant gratification with a “I’m paying my $15/month, why should ” attitude. Of course MMOs will cater to the people who play the bills.
October 12th, 2009 at 5:35 pm
friggin frack, when will i learn that Keen hates angle brackets.
October 12th, 2009 at 5:56 pm
The problem here is that given a non-trivial number of players, there will be a wide spectrum of tolerance to a game’s challenges and penalties. Those that cope well, prosper. Those that don’t, quit in frustration.
How do you deal with that? Separate servers with harder rule sets? Dynamically adjust the challenge level to the player’s ability? Write a better story, design better graphics or provide some other novelty to persuade them to tough it out, if only for a while? Build the game for a much smaller audience and focus on cost effective development?
October 12th, 2009 at 6:36 pm
I think its just that a huge amount of people just define fun as “pulse pounding action” or something like that. People always say “it isn’t fun to play EVE Online, I spend too much time looking at market screens, skill screens, etc, instead of actually ‘playing the game.’” To me, I can get a lot of fun out of actually thinking, debating, perusing the market pages, etc.
For some reason anything involving thinking gets labeled “boring” by a huge majority of people.
October 12th, 2009 at 6:41 pm
Keen, check out FE. Just … do … it.
October 12th, 2009 at 6:54 pm
I see what you’re saying. There’s a difference in “carebear” and “hardcore” and “simplicity.” Games like UO, EQ, and even SWG were memorable for many different reasons, but very few of them would be because they were accessible and easy to play. In fact, most of us appreciate that from them and want a new game to give us that feeling. Completely outside of the casual/hardcore dichotomy, developers are giving us no reason to continue playing outside of new, accessible content. I, for one, would be fine with no new content is the original game and world actually meant something to exist in. There’s a reason T2A, Ilshenar, Malas, and then Tokuno in UO are *to this day* under-populated when compared to the original Sosaria.
October 12th, 2009 at 8:49 pm
I think there is one extra element that isn’t in your analysis that could have an effect on the amount of risk/consequence people are willing to take in a game: the reliance on other people.
In Demon Souls, as far as I know, you don’t require another person to beat the game. And when another person comes in and tries to fight you, then that’s all you. Your success or failure depends on no one else.
In MMOs, however, your success and failure depends on the people you play with, and of course while this is a huge incentive to find a guild or clan or whatever, imagine this. You’re trying to do a certain objective where the risk and consequence is gigantic, and you can’t do it alone. The only person you can find to help you (because not everyone has friends or guildies on all the time) is this random person you’ve never seen before. And this person happens, in fact, to be one random person out of all the people you’ve ever played WoW with. Now you ask yourself, do you want your success to depend on this person?
Keep in mind that even in WoW, which is by general consensus one of least risky consequence-filled game out there, lots of people are still unwilling to group with random strangers.
Well, in short, I think that the dependence on other people for success that is characteristic of MMOs has a negative effect on the amount of risk people are willing to take.
October 12th, 2009 at 8:55 pm
I don’t think it should come as a surprise that MMOs designed for the mass market are…well designed for the mass market. There are also still plenty of developers aiming at niche audiences. They don’t get the hype of big releases like WAR and Aion, but they are out there.
October 12th, 2009 at 9:34 pm
Darkfall made me very unhappy.
but the community made up for it.
October 12th, 2009 at 9:41 pm
My most memorable MMORPG moments come from horrible defeats followed by great victories. The worst moments (especially if combined with some sort of resolution or victory) are the ones that make games memorable in a nostalgic sense.
The “easier” games get – the less I remember about them. I played WOW for several years but do I remember any great moments? No…
Very few people ask to to be punished by harder game mechanics – it is like signing up for paying more taxes – just for fun. The thing is…as a developer..you dont ask if it is a good idea…you just do it…and hope the overall good game experience will make it so that the player base accepts the more difficult mechanic.
October 12th, 2009 at 10:41 pm
Oddly enough, I have been thinking on this topic too. Aion is currently feeding me the right level of “not getting what you want” or difficulty/challenge/frustration/small setback making you want to plan and work for victory, but not give up.
It’s a kinah shortage that makes me plot and plan “ok, I should grind here, or gather that to sell, or craft and market pvp appropriately.”
It’s random rifting or Abyss gank squads that throw a spanner in my nice plan and make me have to react and adapt and either fight back or do something else, instead of what I had wanted/been expecting.
But it’s not to an extent where I could not deal with it (whereas I’m probably too carebear for a full loot ffa pvp game) so it’s the correct balance of happy/not happy for me at this current point in time.
Too smooth and streamlined a path in some games, and they are ‘easy fun’ not ‘hard fun.’
City of Heroes was and is good easy fun. A nice happiness boost. Meditative and relaxing in its own right. Feeds social people warm fuzzy feelings, etc. But people can tire and get bored with easy fun too, some sooner than others.
Other too streamlined games just feel too linear and railroaded. WAR and to a lesser extent, WoW’s leveling game is guilty of this. Just coast, one path, straight ahead, vrooom.
Other people’s needs for hard vs easy fun may be along a different spectrum, so they may end up picking more hardcore stuff like Eve or Darkfall to find the right balance, or find WoW challenging enough for them.
October 12th, 2009 at 11:09 pm
You’re on to a very important point, but it’s getting lost in risk/reward/consequences crap.
The problem is more fundamental. Developers are trying to make games FUN, but this is a flawed approach, particularly in an MMO. Games should be designed to be entertaining, but not always fun. Fun implies happiness, and is too narrow a goal for a socially involved game. Entertainment is much broader, and a much better goal.
For example, take movies. Some of the best movies ever made are decidedly not fun, tragic stories. Others are serious, dramatic. There certainly are fun movies, but they rarely have nearly the emotionally gripping power that others have.
No, instead, game designers (in role playing game space) need to break out of this silly, limiting “fun” concept. Don’t ask yourself “is this fun?” Instead, ask yourself, is this entertaining? Enthralling?” It’s an important difference.
October 13th, 2009 at 7:11 am
I can only agree with you on this Keen. I know you didnt want to speak of death penalties but i think this was a fundamental reason behind the success of games like DAoC.
For me it wasnt so much the Xp lost at death that frustrated me, it was the run / horse ride back to your spot, especially after fighting your way into a good spawning area, an example for me in Midgard would be the ‘line-up’ outside the Varulvhamn dungeon. I could spend hours there grinding with my hunter / runemaster, fighting my way up the ravine to a good spawn point, if i died i had to start over.
This teaches us the fundamentals of the classes we play, these days not only can people die without losing out on what they had to work for, but they dont have to work very hard to get where they want to – it is too easy to kill something on a suicide run without consequence leading to people who dont learn how to play their classes properly.
The ultimate high during my MMO days was a successful relic raid where we recaptured a relic onyl days after an 8 hour defence was lost to Albion. The sense of joy at an epic battle was overshadowed by the defeat – but this only made us more intent to get our relic back!
Can somebody make a DAoC 2 please? i’m getting all nostalgic here…. wouldnt take much tweaking to make that game epic once more!
October 13th, 2009 at 7:13 am
Good analogy would be comparing mmos with real life team games. When I play in a summer soccer league I pay $$ to register, I pay $$ to go to games.. hell I pay $$ to get physio after my knees stop working on me..
My team usually sucks.. I feel like I am about to pass out after 90 mins of running in blazing heat with 90% humidity.. and already loosing 3-0. Yet I love the game, I would trade it for nothing.
Aion is a nice middle ground I think. I leveled from 25 to 29 this weekend all in Abyss. Elyos is ganking everything in sight, but the adrenaline makes the grind not bad and is about 10 times more fun the stupid quest bullshit leveling. I am so sick of doing quests..
October 13th, 2009 at 8:57 am
I’d like to see more suggestions in your posts. I subscribe to your blog and on several occasions lately I’ve waited for suggested fixes to the problems you define, and usually I just can’t find them. I know it’s technically the developers’ jobs, but in general I’d like to see the community do less finger-pointing and more brain-storming.
I’m sorry if this comment sounds mean. But if you think about it, I’m asking you for your opinion, and that’s a sign of respect.
October 13th, 2009 at 12:26 pm
While I agree with much of the general principle of the piece, I think this whole topic risks becoming another trip on the old nostalgia wagon. Yes, lots of the “risk” and “consequence” was thrilling a decade ago, but that had more to do with everything being new than the intrinsic superiority of the experience.
I very much doubt whether, had it been possible to release UO, EQ and WoW simultaneously in the late 90s, either UO or EQ would have survived. We played what we were given and made the best of it, but if we’d been offered more “happiness” we’d have taken it.
Nowadays many people who’ve been playing MMOs for 5-10 years are feeling, almost inevitably, jaded and disillusioned. The shine has worn off, the flavor’s been chewed out, nothing thrills like it used to. It isn’t always that the new MMOs aren’t as thrilling as the old ones; it’s that it’s more that it’s much harder to thrill someone who’s been thrilled many times already already by much the same thing.
Until some genius invents a truly new approach, everything’s going to taste a little stale.
October 13th, 2009 at 12:35 pm
It all ties back to the “massively singleplayer” focus that you’ve touched on before in your blog. In a regular single player game developers can put consequence in because of the existence of a save/load system but when you take that out and design what is effectively a single player progression arc in an online game you get rid of all consequence.
I remember in Age of Conan when conversations with NPCs would have multiple options, but they all led to the same result, or if they didn’t you could just talk to the guy again and choose the other option. All because the devs were afraid of locking the player into a choice.
Personally I can’t see the point of a persistent world where you can’t make persistent choices.
October 13th, 2009 at 1:13 pm
Here here!
We’ve lost the risk completely these days due to those exact quotes. Everyone wants the reward only. At least that is what they think they want.
In my experience you can’t really feel success or achievement without failure. EQ1 is a prime example as it represents the extreme of negative reinforcement. In EQ1 you simply did not want to die. Ever. You lost experience, you lost time and you had the chance of losing your gear.
Now that is extreme obviously but it makes a point. Due to how dangerous dieing could be, when you won a close fight you really felt like you had an achievement.
Since MMOs have gone 100% fun I have yet to feel that sense of achievement. Loot isn’t hard to get. I replace the same item slot ten times per two levels. It wasn’t hard to get any of those items and I cast them aside as garbage. There was no risk, only reward.
MMOs do focus too much on “fun” and “happy” these days. People just don’t realize that sometimes it is more fun to fail and then win again.
It is basically the same thing as playing little league just to play. Nobody wins, no body loses… ridiculous. At some point in life children are going to learn that sometimes they fail. Sometimes they lose. Sometimes they do not succeed and do not get their way. This is valuable training. People can claim MMOs are just games but so is baseball.
October 13th, 2009 at 1:42 pm
The sickness is called “instant gratification”, it’s the crack that WoW offered players more and more, faster and faster. Not saying WoW is the bad boy who destroyed every MMO and that no other MMO have ever done this before, just that WoW did it well and kept giving us more and more of it.
I love WoW for many reasons, but I hate it for a few important reasons. One of them being the devs taking the epicness out of being epic equipped. If you where full epic during Vanilla WoW, and I’m talking pre-AQ WoW, you where one of few on the server who had earned the privelege. Along came TBC and WotLK, purple became the new blue and borderline green because the userbase wants it more and faster than ever.
My2Cents.
October 13th, 2009 at 2:03 pm
I think that while your general principle here may be correct, it’s a very thin line you tread where you risk devolving into Syncaine if you go too far.
October 13th, 2009 at 2:25 pm
@Derrick #18: Definitely agree that the point is more of a fundamental one and any mention of specifics, such as risk and reward, dilute what I’m trying to say. I think that you understand simply because you picked up on that point.
@Caleb and others: To a certain degree it is a very, very thin and dangerous line. However, it becomes less of a thin line when you get away from details and focus on the big picture. MMORPGs should not always be about providing a 100% fun experience. There needs to be opposition in all things.
October 13th, 2009 at 2:54 pm
Today’s video games are a reflection of the society and culture that play them. We live in a culture where people want instant gratification as Proximo noted so aptly. The concept of delayed gratification is lost on most people; look at how much credit card debt most people have these days.
People don’t want to work for things anymore. They want it now. So it naturally follows that the developers at Blizzard and other MMO companies are doing their best to “give the public what they want” which is dumbed-down, risk free, ego-massing MMO of instant heroism.
True happiness comes from hard work and accomplishing goals. It is not doled out via a narcotic or an undeserved in-game perk. We are only truly happy when we have rightly earned something.
The entitlement game design philosophy is pervasive in the halls of most video game companies and it’s unsustainable and ultimately destructive. In a few years the MMO will be almost unrecognizable compared to it’s ancestors that were released around 1998-1999 such as Ultima Online and EverQuest.
October 13th, 2009 at 3:42 pm
@ 18 and 23: Completely agree!
Another point: A lot of “casual” or “carebear” players are just plain lazy, IMO.
We have a couple of those in our WoW guild — they constantly want someone to hold their hand… e.g. “Can you show me where to go?” or “Is X item better than Y item?”, that sort of thing…
I can’t help but think, “The rest of us figured it out our own, what’s your problem?!” or, “Just PLAY the game already! We’re not gonna play it for you!” =P
October 13th, 2009 at 5:42 pm
I have often said that the peaks can only be as high as how low your valleys are.
You need those moments of soul crushing misery to provide contrast to the moments of jubilation.
October 13th, 2009 at 7:44 pm
@wolfshead
true
MEMEMEMEM want more ! I want, I will, I have.
People are slaves of themselves
October 14th, 2009 at 3:25 am
Well, FFXI was pretty good about not caring about the players happiness, and trust me, its not as good as you think it is. The chance to fail always sounds fine in the abstract, but when you actually play the game, there is no upside. You don’t think how meaningful success is, because the adrenaline fades quickly. It’s only when the failure is removed or in the distant past it becomes meaningful.
It’s because failure is less of a risk that you can wax poetical on how it enhances gameplay. When you actually risk it, there is no poetic aspect or upside of it-you wasted hours of your life, you feel bad, others feel bad, anger is shown, and some people even quit. You really need to get your ass kicked in a game sometime to cure yourself of that-in FFXI my leveling beastmaster was such a perpetual ass-kicking that it debunked me of any idea that failure is good. It was memorable for the wrong reasons, and in the end it wasn’t even worth it, beastmaster solo was useless for endgame play.
October 14th, 2009 at 9:44 am
@Dblade
You make it sound as if we haven’t experienced the loss we’re advocating. Let me assure you, I was PK’d in UO and lost everything I had more than once. I’ve been in a death loop in EQ1 and had to make back tons of experience. FFXI is no stranger to me either. It was a very punishing game.
The point is not to make that the standard practice. I don’t think anyone was advocating that. The general sentiment is that we’re so far from there it is ridiculous. To list a very simple example: In War death has such a small penalty that it is frequently used as a method of fast travel. If your death penalty can be used as a benefit you’ve done something wrong.
October 14th, 2009 at 4:22 pm
Ferrel, I don’t think you have experienced it recently, that’s the difference. When 2 of 3 of your examples are games you probably played 5 years or so ago, it’s possible nostalgia sets in.
What keen calls depth of feeling was really just overcoming a lot of painful mechanics, and really wasn’t as enjoyable as he thinks. The truth is if you make a game a pain in the ass, a certain type of player will refuse to let it beat them, and grind their way to the finish with gritted teeth. This gets mistaken for emotional impact a lot. Of course when you get done it you get a sense of release, and over time you identify the game with that release, not with the profanity-laden ride to it.
Anyways, in FFXI people used death as a way of fast travel too, even with penalties, sometimes its better to lose experience than lose 45 minutes walking back from a camp.
October 18th, 2009 at 5:33 am
I think I get what you are saying, the Image I got in my mind while reading your article is as follows.
Metaphorically speaking, say for instance there is a Huge Jug of “Your” happiness that the game pours into your cup whenever you experience joy in the game, if there are reasonable penalties in the game when you do achieve something this cup of happiness is filled to the brim.When there are minimal penalties and consequences(like today’s MMORPG) this cup of happiness is never filled to the brim, just to half or 3/4 maybe.
So in other words in today’s MMORPG the levels of happiness spike/happen more frequently, but are not that high.Older MMORPG the levels of happiness spiked really high, but happened less frequently.
This is all due to the lack of consequence/penalties.