Making MMOs More Social
Raph has a great post about making massively multiplayer games (and other virtual spaces) more social. This is one of the great failures in the age of World of Warcraft, and it’s one of the main things I dislike about WoW. If you played older games like Ultima Online and EverQuest, you know that both were significantly more social environments. Recent games have failed players in their social aspects more than anything else, and Raph has some good thoughts about how to make virtual spaces more social.
From my point of view Raph doesn’t mention the single most important factor: having a population of players that I would conceivably want to socialize with. I guess there’s not much developers can do about that…. I always play on a test server if possible because they seem to have fewer asshats, not just in absolute population but as a proportion. The best thing about belonging to a good guild is that you can effectively screen out idjits. EQ was, to my mind, not a more social environment in any positive way…it just forced you to interact with more jerks.
I’m inclined to disagree with the notion that EQ forced you to interact with more jerks. In my opinion there were less jerks back then than there are now.
I can think of a lot more EQ players I miss than ones I loathe. I think the age of the jerk was ushered in when MMOs were brought to the masses and youth. WoW as a baby sitter is very prevalent and the young internet culture is, to say the least, unfortunate.
In WoW you can be a jerk because you can get a new group/guild/server in 15 minutes. In EQ people were less inclined to ruin their reputation because a group was hard to come by, guilds meant years of service and a server transfer was extremely scary.
Personally, I’d take three EQs to every WoW. Unfortunately, these days, it goes the other way.
“I’m inclined to disagree with the notion that EQ forced you to interact with more jerks. In my opinion there were less jerks back then than there are now.”
Could be. But I was bouncing back and forth from AC to EQ so even at the same time I was forced to interact [group] with jerks in EQ but I could ignore them much better in AC.
“I can think of a lot more EQ players I miss than ones I loathe.”
Sure, so can I. Friends are memorable and we WANT to forget the mouth breathers.
“…guilds meant years of service…”
Well we already know that you and I aren’t interested in the same type of guild
“Sure, so can I. Friends are memorable and we WANT to forget the mouth breathers.”
That is indeed true, especially when we’re talking about ex-girlfriends! Really though, I had more good experiences than bad ^_~ (except with ex-girlfriends)!
Yeah, we are indeed different birds =)
Possibly City of Heroes’ greatest problem for retaining players: almost zero downtime. It does not have auto-attack, so you cannot chat during combat unless your power has a long animation. Travel is fast with few places for it to converge. The social space, Pocket D, is just that: a pocket dimension, not a central place.
EQ wasn’t perfect. It forced socialization rather than just rewarding it. Its travel was often prohibitive to players getting together. You could steal named kills that groups had been working for. There were a lot of things in EQ that were anti-social. There are a lot of things in WoW that are anti-social.
There’s probably a happy medium in there somewhere. No forced socializing (can’t really do anything interesting without being in a group), no forced anti-socializing (fewer rewards when you are grouped).
There are many other things, some of which Raph suggested, which really have no major downside, so there’s no good reason not to implement them (quests taking you to interesting places, designing spaces for events, gifting, etc.).
JuJutsu’s comment about a critical mass population is good. When I was playing WO, I was on a sparse server (they were offering free xfers). I played for days never seeing another player. One day I did, and it was sort of a “MY GOD! ANOTHER LIVING BEING!”" moment.
Alas the other person didn’t want to chat and just wandered off.
But, but, but, if casual gamers can’t log in for 15 minutes and get epic loot then developers get zero money hats?!?!
Interesting read. I strongly believe that the “ease of remaking yourself” through leveling & server transfers has played a (moderately large) part in the social break-down of MMOs. A lot of “b.net-aged kiddies” & game design impacts things, but contrast EQ with WOW, it took a lot longer to level, server transfers were rare, and you got a new name, your old one was listed next to your new one on the SOE site. It was infinitely more difficult to hide than it is today.
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“Permit not just group identity, but belonging to multiple groups. Humans are more strongly webbed into society when they are members of more than one cluster in the social graph.” I’d be refreshing to have a game integrated with the community site, and “tools” to support their short & long-term gaming goals, and easy establishment of communities that share those goals.
Example (using WOW stuff): Someone wants to complete achievements (or PVE raids, PVP, etc.) There should be “tools” in place so players can establish a community focused on achievements. They could discuss strategies/ suggestions (side benefit: minimizes the importance of cheat sites.) The “tool” should be flexible enough to allow for segmenting within the community (e.g. Heroic dungeon achievements), perhaps even the forming of *guilds* (server-level), while still keeping a feeling as being part of the core community.
“tools” include message boards & the like, CMs that don’t overly moderate, established in-game chat channels (bonus/ extra fee?: EQ-like out-of-game chat tool so people can participate in chat while off-line), a well integrated LFG tool, etc.
*guilds* there should still be some level of structure as guilds currently are now, but expand upon this – call them Clubs, Associations, Societies, whatever. This allows a player who likes to fish & raid to be part of the [Rather be Fishin'] club and [Ownin' Bosses] Association while still being part of their guild [BFF]
Just off the top of my head – didn’t have a lot of time during lunch to refine, but you get the idea. -Vald
Taken from Mike Rozak’s post in the thread on Raph Koster’s blog…
“And now too insult an awful lot of people with a hyperbolie: The biggest problems with MMOs is they are designed by achievers (and some killers) for achievers. Most MMO developers and players are so achiever-oriented that they cannot possibly comprehend why socialization and exploration would be important. As a result, players and (potential) developers who like socialization/exploration go elsewhere, turning MMOs into ghettos of achievers and killers.”
I’m not an industry insider but it sures sounds true from where I sit. I’m not sure where these ‘elsewheres’ are so I end up looking for likeminded folk in the games that I do play. Thank the maker for guilds and the ever useful \ignore.
In reponse to JuJutsu/Mike Rozak:
Not really. Diku MMOs do cater significantly to achievers because their design is based on earning stuff (levels, items, etc.). What it sounds like to me is like you can replace “MMOs” with “WoW” in his comment. This leads designers to cater to the strengths of the MMO they are making (if it’s a Diki MMO), and most make those because they are very easy to understand and get into, and because they’ve been very successful. Yeah, the social aspect of WoW is not there. It is a game without a heart or soul. WoW is the well-created robot of MMOs (they did almost everything well, but it all lacks artistry in execution).
I found in older MMo’s that the asshats did not get above a certain level due to the social requirements needed to reach past that levle and you were simply left eith more polite and curtious gamers at higher levels. FFXI was an extreme example of this for a long time as more often then not it could take upwards of 45 minutes to an hour for a party to gather together and during that time it was social conversation that kept parties together and in fact caused asshats to often be dropped as party memebers even before the first mob was downed. Of course the secend issue was skill, playwers who lacked knowledge simply didn’t make it past a certain point as with death penalties, groups would have much less tolerance for bad players so even if an asshat bought his character online, he would soon find himslef blacklisted by most people and in the end not be able to advance any further and perhaps even egress in the process. I personally hate death penalties for the other problems they cause and the way the demoralize gameplay, however I do miss forced social gaming. I tried raiding in wow with different degree’s of success to try to find a more social aspect to it at the end game and frankly still found it lacking as most players lacked experience in the social aspect, there is a neeed for games to require introduction to social gaming earlier in the content in order for the social experience to be more successful at higher levels. Now WOW offers the social experience starting at a low level but never requires it. I was shaking my head at someone the other day about this, why bother paying a monthly subscription fee to play a game solo, there are games much better graphically and storyline wise available single player, it only makes sense to do this if you intend to be an asshat, bragging about accomplishments to others while not adding anything social to the game. The one thing WOW as done to gaming is breed online asshats at an incredible rate and with ever gaming now following this model it does not appear to be likely that this will improve.