Comments on: How MMOs Designed Away Social Gameplay

By: Stabs

Stabs — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 04:33:09 +0000

I suppose the test case for this will be SWTOR.

SWTOR appears to mainly be offering 8 quest lines that will be fun to play through once. Almost certainly it will be more fun to play solo than to group with people who Esc out of the dialogue you want to hear.

They are vague about end-game content. Possibly it will be surprisingly brilliant but I’m expecting something fairly wow-like (battlegrounds, solo mob grinding, raid dungeons etc).

If the main reason to play the game is to solo each class once will they be able to keep people?

Oddly I half-expect that they will for the same reasons WoW keeps people. People get in, get comfortable, have some status, have some friends and don’t want to hop to some other game where they’ll be a level 1 noob again.

It will be a very interesting test case for your theory.

By: MMO Design Blog of the Month: MMO Tidbits | Wolfshead Online

MMO Design Blog of the Month: MMO Tidbits | Wolfshead Online — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 03:52:46 +0000

[...] How MMOs Designed Away Social Gameplay [...]

By: Frank P. Williamson

Frank P. Williamson — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 00:57:57 +0000

Interesting article. I still remember the guild raids in EQ, herding chickens is the light-hearted way of describing the pain of setting up a 70-person raid and actually executing it effectively. 2 hours or more just for raid setup were the norm. Frankly I do not miss that.

World of Warcraft has very good gameplay mechanics, greifers are not hard to deal with, you can log on for 30 minutes and do something meaningful, or spend hours with your guild in a raid.

There will always be a shift in game play when the experience bar vanishes as you hit the level cap. Making experience to level exponential (ie: Legends of Kesmai) makes it easy to blow thru the early levels and get to upper level content within a couple levels of your friends with high level chars, while also making the upper levels extremely long to go thru .. I thought that was very nicely done.

I felt the biggest drawback to Conan Online was the lack of anyone to group with for end game, towns were deserted ..social interaction became very rare. It was an empty world. I do think they had the best Barbarian online though :)

In all the games over the years I have learned there is no simple formula for success.
If there were, everyone would be doing it.
There are elements that need to be there, though.
Enough carrots dangling for a character to pursue. Variety instead of a beaten path. A sense of humor. A way to deal with greifers effectively. Effective small unit tactics that complement each other. A mix of single and group things to do that offer short and long duration adventure/accomplishment. And .. a good story :)
If it’s fun, people will play it.
If it isn’t .. they wont.

-Gray Eagle aka Frank P. Williamson, just my 2 copper