MMORPGs of Today and Tomorrow, Part 2

As promised in my previous posting, I'm going to spend this post discussing some of what I believe to be the core problems in MMORPGs.

One of the largest problem with modern MMORPGs is the complete lack of transparency. By this I mean the degree that developers disclose to their customers the mechanical details of their games and their overall design philosophy. For some reason developers of MMORPGs are always adamantly tight-lipped about all but the most superficial information about their game. Eventually the more devout fans of a particular game will want to know exactly how game calculations are performed, and the only course of action they can take is to try to reverse engineer the equations used. Any attempt to obtain these equations from the developers themselves will always be met with steadfast refusal.

I can understand the desire to keep the game formulas behind lock and key. It encourages experimentation, and some players do enjoy trying to reverse engineer the formulas. There's a point, however, where it truly reaches a ridiculous degree. I played one game for four years of its existence, and in my quest to better my characters I tried to reverse engineer a few important game stat formulas. One of the formulas that I had come up with was always wrong by a small amount in a very inconsistent way. The developers refused to comment on the equation I had come up with some three years after the game's release. What difference would making that formula public knowledge really make at that point? People already understood the stat enough to know in general how to maximize it, it just wasn't possible to predict the value given a certain stat spread with 100% accuracy.

The other problem of transparency (and definitely the more important one) is in regard to game design. When a person designs a game every class, item, spell, and everything else is designed with an intended purpose. The questions of how this thing is supposed to work and how the player is supposed to interact with it are answered well in advance to the game's creation by the game designer. However, the designer will not tell the player what this intended purpose is. The player can infer what this purpose is, but he or she has no real way of knowing if this assumed purpose mirrors what the game designer intends.

A single rigid, well-defined role for every class and every item is perfectly fine for an MMORPG if you, the developer, make sure that the player knows what that role is. You want clerics to heal and do absolutely nothing else? That's fine, just make sure that your end users understand that their cleric will never do anything but heal. If you make this design choice ambiguous for the player, don't be surprised when he or she tries to do something completely different with his or her cleric, and certainly don't punish your users for straying from class roles you had decided on but never explicitly stated.

(In the interest of full disclosure, I play a shadow priest as my main character in WoW. Despite the fact that no one reading this who has played WoW will believe me, I think it's worth mentioning that the reason I play a shadow priest is not because I'm too stubborn to admit that Blizzard decided shadow is not the intended PvP priest spec. I play shadow because it's the most viable spec given my situation.)

Unfortunately, today's MMORPGs are plagued with vague and undefined class roles. I suspect the main cause of this is from content patches over a long span of time. No doubt what exactly any specific class was meant to be specialized in became blurred as patches were added and new items and abilities changed everything. What ends up happening is the developers begin taking a passive stance towards class roles. They pick some element of the class, augment it through new items and/or abilities, and sit back and see what the players end up doing with it. After the fact, if the developers decide the players are going in the "wrong" direction a balance patch is rolled out to bring the class back to whatever the developers wanted the class to do on that particular day. The players remain in the dark throughout this process, and are understandably frustrated when they inevitably realize they weren't playing their character correctly and end up getting nerfed without so much as a whisper from the developers as to what they were supposed to be doing.

So step one to fixing the modern MMORPG is to have well-defined game design that is presented unambiguously to the player.

Another problem that plagues MMORPGs, especially ones that have been around for a while, is that balance changes tend to be very drastic. The term "nerf bat" is a very good image for the typical balance patch found in MMORPGs: the changes are very broad in scope, the desired outcome is difficult to hit with any accuracy, and unintended outcomes are commonplace. The "flavor of the month," with regards to character classes and/or builds, is almost always shifting directly to whatever is receiving improvements from a balance patch.

Developers overshoot the mark with buffs and nerfs with such consistency that it's almost guaranteed that any given class will have at least one period of being overpowered by a large degree and at least one period of being underpowered by a large degree. Instead of taking small steps to slowly bring all classes and abilities in line with one another, slowly decreasing the number of changes made as a balance is reached, the balance scales oscillate drastically. Balance is never reached in any appreciable form, and someone will always have an unfair advantage.

The final problem with MMORPGs that I will discuss is the problem of the grind. The grind, for the uninitiated, is the tactic of extending gameplay by forcing the player to do some task repeatedly. Usually, this takes the form of killing monsters. Lots of them, all essentially if not exactly the same. I've yet to find an MMORPG that didn't feature the grind as a core part of gameplay, at least in the process of leveling up.

The reasons for the grind is obvious: it's easy to implement and it extends gameplay. Unfortunately, it's very repetitive (by design) and therefor very boring for the player. Most will see it as a waste of time and an artificial barrier put up between the player and the content the player actually wants to experience. From a design standpoint this view is completely correct.

The solution to this problem is to create dynamic content: content that can change. This isn't as difficult as it sounds. I've save details for a later discussion, but even minor things such as monster camps growing or dwindling in size depending on how many players are killing mobs there can make the world feel more alive and make monotonous grinding more involved as players need to change in response to changes in the environment. Well designed dynamic content can even automate parts of the content creation process, which can save developers time down the road.

As a recap, the three most prominent problems with modern MMORPGs are, in my opinion, lack of transparency with game design, drastic balance changes, and the grind. I could write several posts discussing some of the solutions I think exist for these problems, but the overall theme would be to warn against lazy design. The simplest solution to avoid these problems is to just sit down and think about the choices you, the developer, make regarding game design. With every key press, mouse click, and whatever else tools used to create should be the nagging thought in the back of your head: "Is this how it should be done?"