The players, the players, the players are into Everquest - now. AAAH, you have no idea. You know players like to do the same thing over and over again - kill-loot, kill-loot, kill-loot. And the funny thing is I've actually come to love Everquest because of it. And I'll tell you why, you know why? Because these players are a giant rehab festival - just waiting to happen. Oh yea! They are gonna crash and burn so quickly it's gonna be fucking great.
If you don't have players, I don't know how to describe it to you - I really don't... I don't know how to describe it to you... You know, it's like... I don't know what it's like. It's like, it's like having drunken midgets around the house - that's what it's like.
(With apologies to Dennis Leary - My Kids)
The player is the most important component of an mmog. While the developers define the game, the players define the gaming experience. An analogy would be that the developers supply the frame while the players draw the picture. Except that the players draw a picture based on the frame - or in some cases, in spite of it. If there's a crack in the frame, rest assured that someone would take their pen, escape through the crack, and start drawing on the wall. Now, for some reason, developers seem to fail to anticipate what the players will do within the frame - I find this amusing, the players will always act in the most efficient manner. To be sub-efficient on purpose could turn you into a social outcast - something you don't want to be in a game that requires other players to cooperate with you from time to time. Power gamers are usually the most efficient players; they will set the standard for how your game is played more often than not. This leads to features not working the way the developers intended them to, which in turn leads to rebalancing, changes, and wildly popular nerfs. Sometimes it can be difficult to see where power gaming stops and exploiting and cheating starts. You can make a well-meaning system, but if there's a way to exploit the system - someone will do it. It has always been like this, and it won't change anytime soon (a few weeks ago 17k players were banned or suspended from Warcraft3 battle.net for cheating, anyone who thinks cheating and exploiting is less common in other games is very naive). You have to take the power gamers into account or they will screw you over.
Cheating isn't unique to games - it's probably even more common in real life. There are people whose job is to discover ways to exploit the system - because in real life, just as it is in games, exploiting bugs in the system is the fastest and surest way to gain power and loot. And, just as it is in games, it is ok as long as you don't get caught. Take e-baying for example, in essence an exchange of money for ingame power - sounds familiar? It is called business, or if it's a huge sum of money in exchange for a great deal of power it is known as politics, or corruption - depending on where in the world you are. Similar comparisons can be made for all types of exploits and cheats.
Then we have the community, an mmog without a community is a dead mmog. Strangely enough to support and encourage community building often seems like it has low priority. The most obvious example would be UO2 where guild functionality was supposed to be patched in after launch (yea I know uo:oops was canned, but it's a good example). I can think of few things that deserve higher priority than guilds. The fact remains that the main reason for people to play online is to play with other people - anything that'll enhance the communication between players is a good thing (yes, even if it goes against the flow of gameplay, as much as I hate to admit it - gameplay is not the most important part of a mmog). A good community building system affect player retention in a way a good combat system could only dream of. To take it a step further - communication. Now, what is the most common way to communicate in semi real-time on the net? I would bet on IRC. Compared to most of the technology in an mmog, IRC is ancient. IRC is really simplistic, and should be reasonably easy to mimic - then why are the communication systems in most games worse than IRC? They are just now starting to catch up to 15 years old technology; I don't get it.
Players want to (directly) influence the game - this makes sense. You spend a lot of time in an mmog, obviously you'll want to change or remove all the things you don't like - and add things you think would be fun, right? And since the players are "paying customers", they expect, even demand, that "the developers should listen more to the players". I honestly don't think that is a problem - most companies even employ people specifically to listen to the players. The problem, though, is that what they mean is either "The developers should do what we want them to" or "The developers should communicate more with us". The first one is stupid for multiple reasons; I'll get back to it. The last one seems reasonable though, doesn't it? There's only one small problem - company policy. In most types of business "communicating" with your customers means providing them with information. You don't need to do any more, because once they buy your product the relationship is pretty much finished from your end. The next customer is always more important than the one whose money you've already got. A lot of people seem to think that this is the case with mmogs as well - it's not. If you're building a business model based on monthly subscription it is more important to keep existing customers than it is to get new ones. Especially if there is any kind of community building within your product - because your customers add value to your product. I might be wrong; maybe they think they're communicating with their customers. They're not, they're communicating to their customers - that's not the same thing. Interpersonal communication is based on conversation: e.g. mail, instant messaging, IRC, message boards or ingame. Then why don't they communicate with the customers - oh, what if someone said something they shouldn't? Does it matter? With some kind of guidelines (you know, the same guidelines you have on regular conversation with people outside the company), the only thing anyone could say that would be worse than silence would be "shut the fuck up and fork over your money little man".
Let me point at my previous rant and what I think of design by committee and what will eventually happen when things get changed contrary to the design. Now, the effect would probably be the same if the players were included in the equation, don't you think? Admittedly, there are players who know a great deal about the game they're playing - but on average most of them are quite ignorant. They know about a few selected things, e.g.: one class, one part of the world, and their own playstyle. This is hardly enough to even make an educated guess.
Now someone might say: "but what about open source projects, they work right? Why can't we do it like they do?" Yes, open source projects work. However, there are a few rules that apply to most open source projects:
The people working on them have a common goal, and work toward that goal together. In gaming this is known as the mod community. Most mod communities are reasonably small, and for good reason. It is also questionable if a mod community could support an mmog - but there are a number of private UO shards that could prove me wrong.
Features are optional, I can choose not to install them - or at the very least disable them. A feature, change, or bugfix in a spreadsheet will likely benefit all its users - in a game there will always be someone who'll hate the change you just made. Optional nerfs and such really isn't an option in an mmog.
It is often organized like a regular project, with people who can veto features. I won't say that it won't happen, there are mmog projects in source forge that look reasonably well organized - let's just say it will remain rare :)
There rarely is someone on the project that would ruin the project for their own amusement, or code in backdoors they can exploit later, because there's no need to. In a game however, I'm willing to bet that at least 1 out of 5 submissions will have an intended flaw - and the remaining will have an unintended one. This is the main reason why allowing players in the development is a bad idea, we are extremely egocentric - we want what's good for us, screw everybody else.
Finally, take a look at a message board about a game you play, read a few posts, and then ask yourself: Do you want the evolution of the game to be decided by a popular vote by those people? That is pretty much what the players are asking for. I know damn well I would not want to play a game like that - because it would suck.
I've seen people complain about the developers not paying attention to the players, just to turn around and claim that 90% of the players are idiots. Someone wanting to empower a group where 90% are idiots would probably be one of the idiots, don't you think? It is possible to empower only part of the group - some games now have a system where selected players are chosen to represent the rest (e.g. one person per class), this seems to work pretty well. The developers get somewhat coherent and reliable input from the players they can use for bug fixing and balancing. Unfortunately introducing changes is a slow (and often inefficient) process - with the result that the players ignore their representative since nothing is happening. The representative will not get much information from the company (they don't like to make promises); it is mostly one-way communication. Leaving them with the company pushing from one side, and the players from the other - hardly the ideal place to be.
Players will complain about everything. Most gaming companies
see this as a good thing, because it usually means that they're
at least playing. But there are certain points that should be
included in a complaint:
Explain why you think something is broken or wrong.
Give a description on how to reproduce.
Give an example of a better solution.
If you can't manage at least two of these, there's no point
in complaining - because you will be ignored. As a rule, a player
always has his own motives for wanting a change - he should
not be trusted to be objective. The less information you provide,
the less likely it is that it will be taken seriously. Think
of it from the developer point of view - if you can't be bothered
to document your problem, it probably isn't very serious.
Here's a reasonably good example of how it should be done, except that the person writing it didn't know much about the issue he was complaining about - apparently neither did the developers reading his complaint:
Quote:
And three, here's a sample of my email: "Can you tell me
how I am lvl 42 and totally buffed (I am an enh spec cleric)
and ONE Archer does over 1100 points of damage to me before
I can take 10 steps? The guy did a crit on me for 599 points
and then two hits for approx 300 each. How in the world can
Mythic justify that AND give them the speed to get away as well?"
Well, I really can't say I blame the guy for being a little
traumatized.
Endquote.
Admittedly, archers did insane damage in the beginning - but that had already been addressed (before the fix he probably would have died from the critical). You see, he was lvl 42, and the guy who killed him was most likely lvl 50. Back then there were damage modifiers based on level. Most lvl 50 characters could kill a lvl 42 character in 3 hits or less (trust me, I was lvl 42 at the time as well). He was a cleric - the most powerful class in the game at the time (if he had specialized in smite instead of enhancement), he had access to instant heals among other things - something he should have considered using in that situation... The combination of ranged damage and invisibility (aka hiding, something all archers in DAoC have) was powerful though, but it was the invisibility that made the difference! Then again, people usually don't act rationally when other players attack them.
Another thing; at the time this happened 90% of the rvr was portal camping, meaning two armies facing off until one believed it has the upper hand and charged. Now, with this tactic, who'll excel? That's right, the classes with hiding and ranged attacks. A few months later rvr was more small bands constantly on the move - and suddenly the archers were as useless in rvr as they were in pve (because of the huge delay they have on the first attack).
But that aside, this is how you should report a bug - the fact that the developers didn't parse the report correctly can't be blamed on the reporter.
Here's an example of how it should not be done, but this is from a person who actually knew what he was talking about. I don't know Deyth that well (I played on the same server, in the same realm and got a lot of respect for him), however he totally misses his target with this rant.
I don't know if Mythic
has QA, I believe they have - but it doesn't matter. This "bug
report" is too vague, if I had gotten that bug report I'd trash
it. If it isn't important enough for you to write down some
details - it isn't important enough for me to sit and try to
figure out what is wrong. I probably have a large number of
more specific bugs to work on. You should have least have added
enough info for them to figure out who should get it.
Too few camps? Too low level mobs? Those would probably be world
builder bugs.
Mobs are too hard for their level? Weird mob behavior? That
could be either the person who makes the mobs, or a coder. See,
if it went through the entire chain it could waste the time
of five to ten people. It's just not worth it, since, if there
actually is a problem, someone will probably send in a real
bug report soon enough.
The devs can't be at the front of the level curve; they just can't afford the time. I don't think anyone would be happier if they played instead of work and let the game fix itself. As far as I remember, DAoC shipped with more than 80 race/class combinations - times how many hours? 5 would drop you a few levels behind, 10 would be asking a bit too much - maybe 7 then, making it 560 hours a week. Even if you had only one character pr. class it would be 33 characters - or 231 hours. Those hours would be damn hard to justify to management or an investor. Artificially boosted characters played by people who don't know their class intimately often doesn't show the problems. Now lets look at this from a different angle; do you think a developer who's playing his own game will remain un-biased? Do you think every developer will? I don't. It might even create additional imbalances.
They did make a mistake with Pendragon though (they fixed it later, letting people copy a character from another server to the test server). There's not much point in testing xp gain, the level curve, rvr etc on a server that is many months behind the production servers.