MMORPGs of Today and Tomorrow, Part 3

I hadn't originally planned on doing a third part of this series, but an abundance of free time has given me the opportunity to sit and think about the genre a bit more. In my ponderings I came to a rather disheartening conclusion: MMORPGs, as we currently think of them, simply cannot work as a competitive environment. If the genre is forced direct player vs. player content, in which players directly battle each other, key elements in what define an MMORPG are either removed or needlessly burden the player.

Consider World of Warcraft. In WoW, character progression is clearly the end goal for the player. This starts as a focus on leveling the character and later turns into focusing on gear upgrades once the level cap has been reached. As a purely player versus environment setting, this is all makes sense. The player isn't competing with anyone, so that player can complete content at a rate comfortable with him or her. If that player wants to team up with other players to complete a dungeon, he or she can choose to group with only other players who are at the same level of character progression.

If we include player versus player content into this mix, the experience immediately turns sour. If one player has a distinct advantage over another player because his or her avatar is more progressed, it is seen as an unfair advantage. This is where the concept falls apart. To make the PvP aspect balanced, and therefor fair, there cannot be character progression. If there is character progression, then victory isn't solely dependent on ability. However, PvE is based around character progression. Ridding the game of character progression would make PvE pointless as there wouldn't be any incentive to partake in it. PvP and PvE content are simply incompatible in the same environment.

WoW attempted to solve this problem with the introduction of the arena system and the resilience stat. The idea was by giving the PvP players a stat that only they would find useful, character progression could be sped up enough for them that they could quickly reach the effective gear cap without affecting the PvE players. Unfortunately, the stats of a weapon tend to be irrelevent if it deals a lot of damage, and the PvErs quickly discovered that losing the minimum number of matches every week gained enough points to get the PvP weapons long before they had progressed far enough into PvE content to get comparable weapons. From there, exploitation of the arena system continued to plague the system, and heavy-handed attempts to fix the problems brought on even more problems.

WoW, as flawed as it may be, managed to contain both high-end PvE and PvP content by effectively sandboxing the PvP players away from the rest of the game. But even this solution entails problems: if you, as a player, play solely for PvP content, what's the point of leveling up to the level cap in order to be eligible to compete? For the avid PvP player, the leveling aspect is superfluous at best and a needless time sink at worst. But how would a developer rid the leveling aspect for the PvP player without also ridding it for the PvE player?

One solution to this problem would be to reduce the advantage being further progressed than another player would necessarily entail. Unfortunately, there are only two ways to implement such a solution: either reduce the progression advantage across the board, affecting PvE and PvP content uniformly, or reduce the progression advantage solely for PvP. Both solutions carry their own flaws.

If the progression advantage is reduced across the board, then PvE players would feel that their play time didn't result in appropriate character advancement. After all, why invest hours of in-game play time when the end result is only a marginal increase in character power? Why bother putting the effort into gaining another five levels if the same mobs the player struggled with before are still a struggle to take down? If the desired goal is character progression, the player needs some actual progression as incentive to continue playing.

If the progression advantage is reduced only in PvP encounters, then the transition between PvP and PvE would seem awkward to the player. Presumably, if the MMORPG were to contain both PvP and PvE content, the majority of players would at least experience some of the content in both aspects. If the player had only experience (or a significant majority of his or her experience) in one aspect of the game, transitioning to the other aspect would inevitably confuse the player when the expected results of his or her actions didn't occur. If the game mechanics are different enough between the two game aspects, unexpected outcomes from game moves can be quite jarring to the player. The ultimate result being that most players either devote themselves to the PvE aspect of the game or the PvP aspect, leaving the developers eventually balancing one set of characters for two completely different games. Fans of World of Warcraft will probably recognize this end state.

Either way, both choices are ultimately flawed: in PvP an advantage is still an advantage. How can one create a system to properly recognize in-game superiority if progression can give one player an advantage over the other? The system isn't completely fair. No matter how well the developers balance two characters, the further progressed character-- by design-- will have an advantage. It's simply impossible to properly credit the winning player as being superior when he or she has a mechanical advantage.

So that, in a long and drawn out manner, is my revelation about the MMORPG genre. What I always dreamed of as the pinacle of the genre, massive player versus player encounters decided on player ability, is fundamentally not part of the genre at all. So what is this genre that I've craved? What would it be called, and how would it work? Until next time.