A big part of what’s wrong with today’s MMORPGs

For the most part, they’ve turned into this:

pointsnotfun

I’ve seen it everywhere and in many forms.  It’s not an issue that can be taken at face value or attributed to one specific thing.  It’s not limited to World of Warcraft or PvP.  It’s the direction that mmorpgs are going and have gone.   I just have one question: Why?

  • that is one reason why i do like the point system in WAR. where in you are only awarded something based on how close to winning your team was.

    Ex. 500 pts = 10k Xp 500 renown
    so if the team gets 250pts it would be
    250pts = 5k xp and 250 renown.

    The problem ive found is that people are so stuck in winning that they dont realise how the system works so you will get games that turtle “because we have the lead” instead of trying to get the max points. they will stop trying to cap the flag in pheonix gate when you get one cap and the game ends 90 to 60 and you get very little for rewards.

    i think some of it is because Mythic hasnt made this well known so people thing you get this huge bonus for winning regarless of score like in WoW, but its not true. if you win with 100 you get same as losing with 100 so try to score points.

    i cant tell you how many arguments ive had telling people to keep trying to do the objective so we can get more points.its why black fire pass is on my NEVER play list because its always 35 to 30 at the end cause one team turtles and wont leave the flag so no scoring happens.

    i know its almost opposite of the wow problem but its the same kind of mentality basically.

  • This issue is the most bothersome to me. Players want honor so that they can get gear. I have asked, the players that prefer quick losses, what they plan on doing after they get their pvp gear. Most have said that they will stop playing BGs because they do not enjoy them. It’s an oxymoron.

    I have always played the battle grounds to win. I do not care to farm kills, or honor for that matter. I simply enjoy the strategy and competition of BGs.

    I challenge everyone who plays scenarios/BGs to play to win the game. Playing a game to lose just makes you a loser.

  • This is the symptom of a problem that bothers me even more: That MMO design creates a barrier of entry to certain activities, that often requires doing a different task, or the given activity at a severe disadvantage, for long periods of time.

    I.e. Battle Grounds – if you want to get honor for arena gear, you need to do BGs; they are (or were) the only way to have any chance of an even playing field in Arena. So people are forced to do them, and will obviously choose the fastest way to get the honor grind over with – since they are there (absurdly) to play arena. A completely different game, essentially.

    I can’t blame the players for wanting to spend the least time necessary doing something they don’t enjoy. I do blame the developers for not having the vision and confidence in their own game to allow people to start playing it for real out of the box. Confidence that their MMO can stand on its own as a game without a treadmill and a carrot/stick conditioning system to draw out the /played time.

    I think WAR got this right for the most part, allowing you to get into the RvR lakes at rank 1 and start competing on an even footing – at least on core servers. My problem with WAR is simply that the long leveling curve seems out of place. The grind, and the inability to help in the war effort when a fortress comes under attack, is really frustrating.

  • People give up to easy. They get behind, and then just give up.

    I refuse to give up, ever! There have been matches in Tor Anroc where we were about 200 points behind and we came back and won.

    If you are losing, try different tactics.

  • That could be a copy/paste from 2005, so little has changed. You would think people throwing BGs for years would lead to some kind of system change, yet here comes 2009 and we still have token farming.

    It’s even more pathetic if you get into a good premade, as basically every ‘match’ turns into the other team sitting at their spawn point doing /dance.

  • This is an inevitable result of game design that doles out power rewards for performing repetitive activities. If you build in a grind, some (most?) people will optimize their path through said grind.

  • It’s simple. MMO’s require people to do certain tasks for rewards. These rewards draw in people to the task that have no interest in that part of the game except the reward. BG’s in WOW were far better before they got turned into a gear grind because the people that played were there for fun. The developers gave up trying to make new content and tried to turn Arenas and BG’s into the never ending time sink for everyone. Now most people that play them aren’t thier for fun they are thier for advancement and thus they take the easiest path to the reward they want.

  • People are not playing the game anymore. They are playing the game systems, meta-game, etc.

    MMO’s are made for this behavior. You don’t see it much in single player rpg’s.

  • I’m no WoW expert but it sounds like it’s lacking the honor you get from winning in PvP. You never saw people in Guild Wars dropping battles in the Hall of Heroes because they were facing a top 5 team and down in points. Everyone wanted the glory from winning, and the same went in GvG to make the higher ranks.

  • Jeremy and Werit both have it.

    Rewards are incredibly powerful motivators for player behavior. All you have to do is look at Achievements in WoW or other games to see how far people will go even when the rewards are little more a check on a checklist.

    Players will optimize their behavior to get rewards most efficiently.

    The optimum path to a reward isn’t necessarily the same as the “fun” path or the expected gameplay path. In fact, it can easily be a completely negative experience for the player, or for other players, or involve activities that
    break the expected gameplay.

    The more the reward is tied to a “meta” game mechanic — especially one that is accumulated over time — instead of direct gameplay, the more likely you’ll see these kinds of negative experiences.

    Ex.

    1. Epic loot drops from various boss mobs in instances; players kill various boss mobs.

    2. Epic loot can be purchased using a number of tokens that drop one at a time from boss mobs; players will gravitate to instances that are the easiest or have the most number of bosses that drop tokens.

    3. Equivalent epic loot can be purchased using “honor” gained from just participating in PVP battlegrounds; players will gravitate to BGs that provide the greatest or easiest honor/time ratio. If honor can be gained without playing (AFK), players will do that. If honor is gained faster by losing multiple games quickly rather than winning one slowly, players will do that.

    Figuring out a reward system that rewards effort without being too hard, encourages participation without being too easy, and aligns well with the gameplay the designers envisioned is actually pretty darned hard.

    Harder still for MMOs — where you have a lot of control over your character and the activities you can do — as opposed to a lot of single player games, where the designers can control so much more of the experience and all the other characters around you.

    You can point out a lot of failures that produce just the kind of screenshots you showed, but overall, I think MMOs like WoW actually do pretty well.

  • /agree with Sam

    Before the inception of battlegroups in WOW, BG matches were so much more meaningful. You faced opposite faction players and guilds on YOUR server and I always felt that alone was a good motiviator to win or a least give it your all. It was more diffiuclt to get in a match but it was worth the wait. Nowadays, it isnt worth my valuable free time to deal with stuff like the OP’s screen shot.

  • It’s the nature of that type of MMO. The point of playing for most is to keep reaping in rewards. If that’s the fastest way to reap rewards, that’s what many players will do. The gameplay reinforces it and, to an extent, necessitates it through it’s gear-centric design. In WOW, it’s exacerbated through the fact that you are not competing against the other team for rewards rather you are competing against your own team for points/rewards. The other team is just a means to accumulate it, and if there is a faster path with less effort required (losing) then many will choose that. Now, if there was something to gain from defeating the opponent or, more importantly, something lost by losing to the opponent, the gameplay and player goals would be very very different. 🙂

  • You’ll probably never get a true answer to your ‘why’ from people who have that attitude because they don’t post on forums or go out of there way to understand a game past the fastest way to level, gear ect.

  • Just take a look at the achievements of WoW, they often require people to do silly things in order to get a silly title or some really valuable rare drops or special items.

    Guild Wars, Lord of the Rings, all these games give rewards for performing repetitive and unfun tasks. No wonder that people try to optimize their way through the grind.

    The solution is to make sure not to couple certain play mechanics with others that are unrelated. To move totally away from systems that degrade into simple item and point/level whatever grinds.

    Modern MMOs try to offer so much content that it becomes a chore, instead of giving people freedom of exploration and choice. People even forgot how to explore. No quest marker, no arrow pointing towards the quest objective? The act of questing itself is unfun, good quests are quickly done and give good rewards… this is why I no longer enjoy MMOs nowadays. I hope for a better next generation that gives me the special feeling of Ultima Online and maybe a Guild Wars 1 on steroids again.

  • The problem is a lack of death spiral in PvP: where starting to win means you keep winning. Of course, that means a good first blow will win decisively fairly quickly, which becomes unfun. Imagine getting a stack of tenacity for each flag you held in AB: first to three flags would win 90% of the time, everyone would give up at the same point, only at that point it really would be a forgone conclusion.

    Also, rewards for losing.

  • SImply put….because it IS more effecient (after a certian point) to lose quickly instead of fighting a protracted 30 minute losing battle. Not that I agree with the standpoint, but when you are getting point farmed by a vastly superior foe its not fun at all. This is precisely why I like WG….you get enough honor losign to make it worthwhile, but such a huge increase if you win that everyoen fights as hard as possible. The point allotment for instanced battlegrounds in WoW does need an overhaul though. Dev’s have stated many times that its pretty high on their list of “stuff to do” in Wrath.

  • Why…because these games have become all “carebear” in the most insulting sense of the word. Nothing matters…death…loosing…games cater to the looser as a sign of encouragment…while you can argue whether this is good or bad…what you quote is the natural consequence of this.

    If you die in a game and you get exp loss or stat loss…plus your body will drop all kinds of items for people to loot…plus you have to run around as a ghost for whatever long to get your body back and it is a major pain..only then..will people no longer use death as a taxi to get from place A to place B…

    Only with these types of consequences will conflict and combat be meaningful. it is cliche – nut no pain – no gain. You cannot enjoy the sweet fruits of victory without having been on the end of a horrible defeat. As long as MMORPGs continue to be carebear…this is what will happen..

  • Reward based gameplay only leads to trouble. Games should be played for fun. If achieving goals/rewards by grinding something is fun for a player, perhaps they should take that attitude and funnel it into real life work 🙂

  • While people do generally “suck” this problem has more to do with design than peoples attitudes. From the design of the battleground system to the maps themselves. You have a system that does nothing to ensure balance in teams so that there is an even (or as near as can get) number of people on both sides. You also have the tiers/level differences which are completely screwy in my opinion. Anything more than 5 levels is too damn much.

    As for AVs layout, when was the last time you saw people complete any of the map objectives like summoning? I think it was almost 2 years ago. AV is trash in my opinion and is good for nothing but pissing people off. Blizz should replace it with another smaller BG until they can figure out how to do large-scale BGs correctly.

  • Another design factor present in WoW’s BGs is that of winners gaining a greater advantage. If you hold one flag in Arathi Basin you gain resources (victory points) at a rate of 0.8 per second .. but if you hold all five flags you gain resources at a rate of 30 per second, which is 6 per second per node. Six resources per second is >> 0.8 resources per second, and thus a minor edge in winning quickly gets blown out. Think of it as winning edge inflation.

    Now think how tenacious the trailing team would be if holding more flags only resulted in diminishing returns: the first flag held rewards 1 resource per second, the second flag rewards 0.8 resources per second, the third flag only 0.6 resources per second, the 4th flag just 0.4 resources, and the fifth flag is barely worth 0.2 resources.

    That’s what those flags are worth to the leading team .. but if you’re on the trailing team and only hold 1 flag, then the 2nd flag is worth 0.8 resources to you, while the same flag is only worth 0.6 resources to the defenders.

    Now, assuming evenly balanced teams, there is incentive to fight like hell for the 3rd flag, and barely any reason to try for a five-cap.

  • The majority of players, such as myself, have gone beyond looking at battlegrounds as a source of “fun” most of the time. They turn to be a grind for honor and nothing more unless you’re with your friends and such, though still you could be doing that for honor. Losing fast for that mark, getting 930 honor if you needed it for great honor, is better than dragging the game out 25 min and getting a tiny bit more honor (maybe) and losing time that you could have potentially won a different game.

    In a game that takes up so much time as it is, people want to get things faster.

  • I hate BGs, ive run them so many times its just no longer interesting, a big issue is many times you are not REWARDED for fighting your hardest against a superior team, it is in fact far better to just lose. It also doesnt help that if you are fighting a superior team they sometimes have a tendency to camp the heck out of you (warsong gulch for anyone whos been around a while), and thus losing isnt fun, you simply have no advantages to compensate you for losing, and no reward for even trying to fight back.

    You are also new Keen, its not fun to people whove had that BG for 2-3 years and have played and won/lost it dozens upon dozens of times, and are only still grinding it because they need some ridiculous honor amount for a new piece of gear (yay for treadmill!).

  • Oh yeah, my example pertains to WoW only, its rewards in favor of the winner are extreme, and because the pvp has no effect on your world, theres no reason for you to try to pull off a long painful loss if your in a BG with several of those kind of people… DAoC was my favorite of all time, and I remember DF and Relics being huge incentives to pvp, and very rarely was one realm dominating (although when I quit it was hibs, damn you hibs!). WoW and many other pvp games have the same thing, no real world impact or reason to pvp other than the gear treadmill and arena like ranking systems.

  • Werit has it bang on in comment #11. Meta-gaming suckage, d’oh.

    Whatever the other reasons people may argue, that’s the basic issue: shortest or least path of resistance (or at least perceived least path). You could boil it right down into Game Theory whenever any sort of points / stats / rewards / incentives are involved.

  • Maybe mmo should just go back to good old system:
    1) Gear up in PvE
    2) Kill people in PvP (no real reward besides e-peen rankings etc.)

  • Bad game design. Don’t blame the players for not wanting to suffer through Blizzard’s poor design.

    Its like people trying to convince me in WAR scenarios to give a flying fuck about the objectives, when in fact, only damage/healing reward the players, not actually winning objectives.