Sometimes, my opinions change over time and things I said even a few months ago could be different from what I’d say now. That’s a good thing for the life of the blog, because I can talk about the same stuff multiple times and will often contradict my past self.

Sometimes, I give my personal preferences rather than what I think would be right for a specific type of game. Some things I preach don’t apply to, say, a Free-for-All PvP Destruction Derby game. Whatever is right for the game we’re making is what will be implemented, regardless of my personal preferences.

Sometimes, my ideas will get trumped. There are often other ways to do things than what I feel we should do that are equally viable for the game. Since I’m not the god of game design (well, sure I am, but not according to my position at the company), I can’t always get my way (this is probably a good thing).

When SOE decided to add “gems” to their game, that was when I realized this wasn’t the game for me. If you need to add a game to your game just so I have something to keep me entertained during downtime, I really need to be doing something else with my time.

I know a number of people who said the same thing, but from my perspective, gems wasn’t needed because I never had true downtime unless I decided I wanted downtime. For me, time between pulls and fighting was spent either a) exploring the new area because as the monk/puller I needed to find out how the zone worked, or b) chatting with people, be it friends in tells, the group, the guild or just in the OOC channel. I’ve said it before and I will continue to say it, but for me what drove me away from WoW was the silence… it lacks a lot of the social aspect of EQ because they have eliminated most of the “downtime” to the point where the group is almost always moving and fighting.

And Ryan… every time you post one of these, I imagine there is a guy out there (probably a few) furiously making notes and keeping track, and should the game 38 Studios released violate any of your rules, you are going to catch a lot of hell for it.

That line sums up the single most important lesson that I took from the MUD and Everquest days.

I never really made the connection between time-wasting quests and the writers/devs who design the quests. Odd isn’t it? It would certainly be a great standard to see raised in the development community. Quality over quantity ftw!

Threat of Travel Times

The thing about it is, most MMOs dont exist in a vacuum. Right across the room from my PC, I have my PS3 hooked up and running. Within seconds I can be online playing first person shooters or even the PS3 brand of MMOs - WarHawk. Instant rewards, very little time sink, no monthly fees. MMO designers should learn from the “console” model and offer more content up front and not worry about the “diehards” that accomplish everything the game has to offer in one or two sittings. The vast majority of players are not that person (anyone know the percentage of people who have actually seen Illidan? No, WCIII doesn’t count…)

Having said that, WOW is quite possibly the best MMO to date in terms of time versus reward. There is literally something for everyone, and having played EQ, then SWG, then EQ2 for years, I think I’m qualified to comment here. The quests in WOW are actually far more fun than the “quests” in any of SOE’s offerings. In WOW at least I feel as though I’m actually able to accomplish something. I’m all for the community aspect of the game, but after spending all that time getting my Necro his epic and all the best gear, getting wiped out by a single green con mob was not only frustrating, but embarrassing to try and explain to people who didn’t play the game.

Don’t get me started on FFXI…

I think the progression of Jeff Kaplan experimenting with (time based) content pacing in WoW’s endgame has been pretty interesting. Tier2’s end boss was capped at 1 attempt per day. Tier2.5’s end boss was not capped, but they made time between wipe and next attempt 15-20min due to sheer travel distance. Add to that the gating to open the entire dungeon being a 3-6 month server-wide farming event. Tier3’s end boss was gated by another boss which required repeated(capped by instance reset timers) farming of hundreds of ingredients from lower area of the dungeon. Tier5 was paced by grinding reputation in the lower instances, and Tier6 by limiting the drop rate of attunement items from tier5 end bosses. It appears Tier6.5 will be gated by the entire server grinding daily quests - a much less transparent metric and thus easier to adjust than the Tier2.5 event for low pop servers.

All of those gating mechanisms have been removed over time, and thus the vast majority of the playerbase never runs into those hurdles - they never actually get to run into the endgame of WoW at all anyway, but that is an entirely seperate failure. The really intense delay mechanisms are meant solely for the players spending all day slamming up against the edge of content, like Kaplan used to do in EQ1.