Should MMORPG's Move Away From Tedious Game Design?

[The Abhorrent]

The repetitive design of MMORPGs, particularly their use of the "get the new Carrot-On-A-Stick", is there because it works. The problem there?

It works.

The issue falls blame just as much on the players as the developpers, because they are satisfied with the same thing over and over again. Of course, the game makes great use of operant conditioning (a valuable tool when used in the appropriate context) to functionally program the players' thought-processes into actually being fine with it (which one could argue as being ethically questionable). People get so complacent with the game's design and prevalence that they'll overlook other games which are better in (almost) every way; try a game outside the genre, and it should become very obvious what you've been missing (at least once you can stop thinking about your MMORPG of choice).

The whole system is a fairly basic routine which doesn't take a lot of creative input or variation to come up with a working product that gets great results. For the MMORPG to move away from this model into more innovative (for additional) would probably crush the standard model of the genre, because it would then evolve into functionally just making an entirely new game; not to mention the game could hypothetically collapse under it's own increasingly massive size (as in no computer could really handle it). The whole idea of the current MMORPG model is to build a system which requires minimal input from the developper/publisher while bringing in the maximum amount of profit; maintenance costs are lower than development costs (and developping an addition to an existing game is cheaper than building an entirely new one), and the steady stream of subscription fees means they're laughing.

The whole thing is built around non-innovation; build a cash-cow that works (and it certainly works), then keep it working for as long as possible. They don't want to rock the boat with innovation either, because new ideas aren't guaranteed to be received well; refinements on the system are much more reliable.

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For MMORPGs to move beyond the current complacent model would result in the genre as a whole (at least any resemblance as it is right now) to crash and burn, probably rather dramatically.

And in case it wasn't obvious enough already, I would still like to see that happen.

 

[babinro]

YES!

I'm loving Old Republic but there is a ton of tedium in the game (even though it's apparently better than some prior MMO's).

- Why don't I start the game with the sprint skill?
- Why is sprint limited to such a small increase? It still takes me minutes to travel through a town just to talk to someone. This constant practice in MMO's quickly grows stale as simply walking through long corridors is NOT fun.
- Why does it take so long to get mounts?
- Why does every enemy in the world feel the need to attack me regardless of my level or circumstance?
- Why does the super convenient call for transport skill have 30 minute cooldown? It's not abusive in any way to give it essentially zero cooldown.

 

[Kilo24]

In order to justify a subscription fee, players usually will want to be spending at least a certain amount of time in the game. To do that, there needs to content that the player can play to progress.

Stories and more linear cinematic content don't work well with multiplayer games. Players tend to get easily distracted by friends and miss anything even vaguely subtle. Not only that, it's quite expensive development-time-wise to keep on constantly spewing out linear content of any notable quality.

So, what you can do is to put in a number of systems (resource finding to craft better gear, money, levels, reputations, professions, and everything else similar) that all involve repetitive actions. Put enough systems in there that if you're far away from leveling in one, you can level in another to get concrete rewards. And hopefully before the tedium of those grinds gets really bad, players will have friends in the game and the social enjoyment of chatting and grouping together to pursue similar goals will alleviate the inherent tedium of the grinding.

In other words, MMOs can have really crappy repetitive gameplay because it's easy to design and social interactions with other players will often pick up the slack. Casual Facebook games have the exact same philosophy; it's just distilled into its simplest implementation there.

 

[Sean951]

So... get rid of raiding? Raids and dungeons were the only parts of WoW that I liked by the time I quit. Leveling was pretty cool, but only a temporary thing, and only the first or 2nd time through.