I have been writing about this genre for far too long now and seen far too many games with genuinely good elements completely fail to catch on and ultimately sunset and flatline. The upside of this is that because all of this information is equally available to every designer (since “what game is still running” does not require access to insider data), theoretically every designer can learn all of these lessons before even reaching alpha. Which is why I am personally deeply annoyed each time that I have to read that open PvP will work in this game because we have a player-run justice system.
There are a lot of lessons that we just know to be true at this point, and if you’re ignoring them, you need to have a really robust reason for doing so beyond just “felt like it.” (Well, all right, you don’t need to do that if you want your game to flatline and lose money, but that’s not what creative people who spend years making an MMORPG want to see.) So here are 10 lessons that I really wish it felt like more than three people in the position of making decisions for upcoming game actually internalized.
1. Players are nostalgic for games and times, not necessarily their mechanics
There are, I would argue, two main things that WildStar did wrong, and one of the big ones was assuming that anyone wanted to do the game’s raids. Not just because they were too hard, although that didn’t help; no, the big problem was that people would give a nostalgia pop for the days they remember playing World of Warcraft raids with 39 other people because that was how things went back then. But most of those people were not nostalgic for raids involving 40 people and endless chores to unlock them. They were nostalgic for that time in their lives, which was not coming back just because Carbine Studios jammed on that button.
Yes, some of this is that humans are inherently weird creatures, and we sometimes remember things fondly even if we didn’t like the individual elements. (Nor am I excluding myself from this.) But I expect the designers working in this genre to be better at learning this stuff and filtering for it.
2. You cannot “fix” open PvP with the social penalty
I wrote a whole column on why the social penalty never works, but the point is that this stuff never ever works and at best the designers think it will. At worst they know it won’t. The problem here is a basic equation of unfairness, and the people who are still most fixated on open PvP while claiming the stuff other people had are the people for whom the unfairness is the point. You cannot fix this by shunning people when for many of them the shunning isn’t a penalty but a reward.
3. Guild-based MMORPG conflicts are hard to get going
It’d be wrong to say that you cannot structure a game around guild vs. guild conflicts because of how the role of guilds has changed over time; EVE Online and Albion Online both get loads of mileage out of guild conflicts. However, both games have other stuff to do and reasons to progress other than guild conflicts out of the gate. You have a reason to get in and play the game, maybe even get involved with conflicts, and potentially seek out guilds for support. Games that start off expecting guild rivalries are going to have a much harder time when the only real motivation to join a guild is “to play the actual game.”
4. You have to plan for the trolls
The tragedy of the commons is one of those things that is and isn’t accurate. There are studies pointing out that the tragedy of the commons doesn’t just automatically happen because human beings are not idiots; given a situation that relies on people living in equilibrium, most people will seek that equilibrium even if sometimes everyone grumbles a bit. But it does happen when someone comes in and just doesn’t care. Those players exist, and if you don’t build something to deal with the players who insist on being jerks, eventually you will wind up with servers consisting of jerks and people who are all right with everyone being a jerk.
5. Your max-level experience shouldn’t be the last thing designed
Star Wars: The Old Republic launched with one of the most recognizable IPs on the planet, a huge budget for voice talent, a studio with a reputation for excellent storytelling, and an entire game built around telling stories. And none of that ultimately mattered because the game’s level-cap experience was a very quick-and-dirty copy-and-paste of WoW’s endgame, which also conveniently showed up after you finished the story that was the big compelling reason to play the game. Given all of that, would you really say that everything that happened to the game is a shocker?
I’ve been talking about max-level experience and the like for years now, and I’m going to continue doing so, and I don’t have the space to restate again that your gameplay at level cap should look like your gameplay before level cap. (There’s more to say than that, but we lack the space today.) But no matter how it looks, it can’t just be the last thing you add to the game with a shrug and a hope players keep playing.
6. Large-scale redesigns aren’t an automatic win
Secret World Legends is indisputably a very large-scale redesign of The Secret World. Did it succeed where its predecessor failed? Absolutely not. Just taking a game back to the drawing board, reworking large parts of it, and putting it back out in the wild is not cruise control to success, and the games that have successfully pulled that off did more than that. You have to understand the core that’s worth preserving first, and then change around that.
7. You cannot throw enough budget at a game to make it successful
The two biggest redesign and relaunch MMO success stories are Final Fantasy XIV and Elder Scrolls Online, but in neither case was the solution to the problem those games had at launch “just fund it until it’s good.” Instead, you had teams who listened to player feedback, knew how to listen to the underlying issues beyond just the text of complaints, outlined the plans to address issues, and progressively encouraged player engagement. The problem is rarely money and more often designers who are trying to chase something that is, ultimately, ephemeral.
8. Your game gets the community you design for
Yes, this is tied into the fourth point, too. If you design a game wherein all player interactions are by necessity transactional, you are not going to get a supportive community. If there is always an element of potential risk, your players are going to be people who like the risk. There’s a reason that City of Heroes – a game that is designed to let people make whatever weird builds they want with few restrictions – has an active roleplaying scene and a supportive community.
9. MMORPG operation is a marathon, not a sprint – and you need to plan for that
This is one of those quotes that gets thrown around a lot (by us), but there’s a side to it that rarely gets addressed or observed: How many MMORPGs wind up going to launch because the studio is just about out of money? Heck, how many parts of the larger MMO genre like MOBAs or survival sandboxes wind up doing that? The problem here should be obvious. If you release on the basis of “a successful release means we have the funding to keep development going,” you have not considered how to deal with an unsuccessful release. And if you’re releasing because you need to be successful, odds aren’t great that your game is in a polished state that’ll draw in loads of players.
10. Nothing is ever going to make up for a long content drought except a bunch of content
I don’t know why this one keeps happening, but to avoid picking on the obvious and most recent target, we’ll look at Overwatch 2. The original game went into what amounted to maintenance mode for a really long time to develop the sequel, and what actually came out was… basically the same game with a different team composition, a few visual redesigns, and a couple new maps. None of the content that was supposedly the big PvE stuff that was the reason for the delay, which is now probably never happening. There are a lot of problems with that game, but a big chunk of player opprobrium was generated just from that long gap not being met with a load of new content. I don’t care how necessary it was; if your game goes quiet for six months, players are going to expect something that feels like it has been building for six months.
It’s kind of unfair, yes. So is life.
Everyone likes a good list, and we are no different! Perfect Ten takes an MMO topic and divvies it up into 10 delicious, entertaining, and often informative segments for your snacking pleasure. Got a good idea for a list? Email us at justin@massivelyop.com or eliot@massivelyop.com with the subject line “Perfect Ten.”
