The parable of Chesterton’s Fence has been making the rounds on social media this week in a political context, but I want to talk about its relevance to the MMO genre. Here’s the gist: Nearly 100 years ago, novelist GK Chesterton argued that laws were like a fence across a road. “Modern” reformers would look at the fence as useless and rip it down, he argued, but “intelligent” reformers would try to figure out why someone would build it like that first before trying to improve the situation. In other words, when you’re trying to fix a problem, you don’t want to create a new problem you didn’t even see coming.
Let’s assume he is correct for the moment (I realize not everyone agrees he was). I think we can probably cite multiple examples in the MMORPG genre where game devs tried to “reform” a game by breaking something fundamental, something they didn’t even realize was load-bearing, and it caused all-new problems – or worse, introduced previously fixed problems back into the game. Let’s do that for this week’s Massively Overthinking: When has a major MMO change broken something else that was 1) fundamental and also 2) completely foreseeable had anyone bothered to look first? When has an MMO broken load-bearing mechanics, and what happened next?
Brianna Royce (@nbrianna.bsky.social, blog): Random thought: George R.R. Martin played with this idea quite literally in his Song of Ice and Fire works, as the wisest characters rightly believe nobody would spend so much time building a massive ice wall without a good reason, and they were reluctant to stop defending it or stop taking it seriously without knowing why. Of course, the dumb and avaricious characters didn’t care, and it’s from their idiocy that the saga spawns, I suppose.
OK, as to the original question, I want to home in on Ultima Online because I’m confident nobody else on staff is going to pick this one. Specifically, the Age of Shadows expansion was a perfect example of breaking Chesterton’s fence. EA brought in Diablo-minded developers to hash out this expansion, which completely demolished the game’s fairly simple and linear loot and gear structure and turned it into a more ARPG style of randomized stats and insurance on death. But as old-school players can tell you, the original gear structure had a good reason for existing: It was meant to support the crafting economy and make gear simultaneously worthwhile to hunt but not too harsh to lose in PvP. The new system broke all of these things, including PvP, and it took the developers who came after multiple expansions to try to repair it. In my opinion, those systems have never fully recovered and never can.
Star Wars Galaxies’ NGE is also another great example that surely someone else will mention. Listen, I don’t like the class system in the NGE, but that wasn’t really the key problem. It was that the devs came in and wrecked a beloved free-form character building system and in so doing also deleted several whole playstyles and systems from the game, most of which were deeply interconnected to others because that’s how sandboxes work. For example, deleting the bio-engineering skills from the game meant no bio-engineered enhancements for chefs and no way to craft critter mounts, either. The knock-on effects from these ignorant decisions made the game part of the game literally unplayable, in addition to demolishing the player agency that drives a good sandbox. And again, it took SOE several years to restore all of those things – and it did, eventually. Couldn’t ever really restore all the lost trust, though.
Chris Neal (@wolfyseyes.bsky.social, blog):Â Man, there are a lot of examples that come to mind when it comes to MMOs attempting to fix or adjust things that were not broken. There’s the ham-fisted way that Star Wars: The Old Republic handled its monetization and the class balancing in Lord of the Rings Online, but I think one of the biggest ones for me is WildStar’s idea of endgame design.
It seemed as if Carbine leadership was deeply incapable of reading the room when it came to things to do at level cap, whether it was forced attunement to enter raid content – a decision that even the much-copied World of Warcraft elected was a dumb idea – or the large-scale Warplots PvP mode that didn’t even stop to think whether WildStar would maintain the right kind of population to support it. And that’s before even considering some of the chest-thumping messaging it was using to promote some of this stuff.
Of course we all know what happened next: The game’s well was poisoned and nobody could look past the other good things that WildStar was doing because assumptions were already made. I still to this day can’t fathom how those decisions passed muster, and I’ll constantly wonder if those changes (among others) would have altered WildStar’s fate.
Justin Olivetti (@Sypster, blog): I’m sure there are plenty of design examples of this that aren’t coming to my mind, so I’ll look at the tech side of things. A few years ago, LOTRO (and DDO) were updating their server tech and databases, and we were all promised that this would greatly improve the game. It ended up doing the exact opposite, causing scads of problems and a multi-day downtime as the studio scrambled to fix it. In the end, it was clear that this wasn’t thought through — or that something vital was overlooked — and it bit the game in the butt.
Sam Kash (@samkash@mastodon.social): This is one of those topics that as I read the question, I thought, “Oh there’s so many, it’s ridiculous.” I do know that to be true, but I’m having trouble remembering them all!
I recall the market value of mystic coins in Guild Wars 2 getting completely screwed up after one of the updates in the first couple of years. It completely wrecked the economy for those or something adjacent. Balance in GW2 was always swingy too. At one point during Heart of Thorns, the developers wanted to reduce the time-to-kill, so they bolstered a few skills and cooldowns… which unintentionally empowered a whole bunker meta in sPvP for a while.
Tyler Edwards (blog): I would argue that most if not all changes made during the transition from The Secret World to Secret World Legends fall under this category. As I’ve said before, the same complexity that made it off-putting to the average gamer is what made it special to loyal fans of TSW, and there’s no happy compromise to be made where both groups are satisfied. By trying to do so, Funcom only created a game that no one was truly happy with.
Every week, join the Massively OP staff for Massively Overthinking column, a multi-writer roundtable in which we discuss the MMO industry topics du jour – and then invite you to join the fray in the comments. Overthinking it is literally the whole point. Your turn!
