Today, we’re going to do a thing. But it’s going to be a kind of unusual thing. I want you to find a piece of paper and write down what you think should be the most rewarding activities for player progress in an MMORPG, first, second, and third. There’s not a list you have to pick from, so don’t share it down in the comments, don’t do anything but write it down, seal it away somewhere, and then forget about it.
Yes, forget about it. The rest of this column is not going to be about that. I promise you, this is going somewhere, but I want you to put that to one side and forget about it for the next week. Sure, you can cheat on it if you want; I’m not your teacher, and I’m not going to be checking your work. Just be aware that you’re really cheating yourself here.
But this week’s column is going to be about player progress; we’re just keeping that sealed away for the moment. Rather, I want to talk about a curious phenomenon specifically in MMORPGs wherein players act as if progress is somehow a bad thing or a punishment, instead of… something that is as basic in video games as having a video signal. Which means that we need to talk about playing poker badly and Smelly Dave.
To start with, though, let’s make something clear: Vertical progress is a pretty basic part of RPGs and video games in general, CRPGs even more so. From classic dungeon crawlers to more sprawling games, the idea of “start weak and end strong” is just basic stuff. The original Ultima is all about character progression; it wasn’t until Ultima IV that the series started being more about philosophy instead of expanding character power. These are games about getting stronger, acquiring powerful artifacts, and ultimately facing off against villains more capable than ever.
And this doesn’t really merit debate most of the time. But in MMORPGs you do have a contingent of people who get really upset at the idea that you should be expected to get stronger over time and you have to conform to some game standards in order to keep playing the game. Why is that? And you have a hint of what’s going on there just from that, but let’s start explaining by talking about poker.
Poker, as a game, is mostly a game of math. It’s about the odds of having a better hand than other players and the amount of money you feel comfortable wagering on that. If you care to look into it, there are tons of books about how to manage those odds successfully. It’s not a purely solved game like chess, since the random element is going to be there, but there are very specific ways to approach poker that are going to give you a solid win chance.
However, none of those approaches works nearly as well as always playing against Smelly Dave, who farts whenever he gets a good hand. You have game-breaking tech against Smelly Dave. Did Smelly Dave fart? Probably better to fold.
If you always play with Smelly Dave, there is always going to be a clear way for you to play, and that Smelly Dave tech defines your play experience. The larger experience of poker does not have to impact your local group because your local group plays with Smelly Dave. You could have the best poker coach in the world tell you that math says you should bet big on this hand, but you know that Smelly Dave is tootin’ away.
Under the right circumstances, you might even resent people telling you that you don’t know how to play poker very well. And if you find yourself in a poker tournament that doesn’t have Smelly Dave in it, you might feel suddenly out of your depth. No one here is farting. But you’re… you’re good at poker. You know how poker works. The problem here is that these people aren’t really playing it right. They’ve gotten so fixated on math that they’ve forgotten to include a Smelly Dave!
This might sound a little ridiculous, but you probably already see the parallels. But I want to take this a step further because at face value, the best poker coach in the world who was telling you to bet big… might have actually been right. Sure, Smelly Dave was farting, but you had a really good hand that Smelly Dave probably couldn’t have beaten. You may have only realized it afterwards.
It’s here that a lot of people move into an odd state of resentment. Or… perhaps not odd, exactly, but counterproductive. We have all done it before. I have done it before. Someone tells you, however politely, to do something in a specific way. Immediately, you have a gut impulse not just to continue doing things the way you had done it before but to double down and do it more. Your friend says, “Oh, that hot sauce is really hot, be careful,” and instead of stopping, you add on another splash because she’s not the boss of you!
And then you bite your sandwich and you regret everything.
The difference between most single-player games and online games is that the former will not involve anyone coming into your house and smacking the controller out of your hand. You can, in fact, play the game wrong and struggle through things the hard way. When I played Metal Gear Solid, I did not get that I was supposed to swap the controller port fighting Psycho Mantis, and I developed a deeply stupid strategy involving a sweep of automatic weapon fire that would clip him along the way. It was wrong, as I later found out!
In an online game, though, there is no Smelly Dave. The people who understand the game are going to be playing the same game as you. They are going to politely or not-so-politely inform you if you are doing things wrong. And it’s understandable if there’s a gut instinct to bristle at being told that you’re doing something wrong.
The thing is… the counter-response to that is, frankly, kinda childish. Even having been the person who has done that sometimes, I know it’s just not helpful.
If someone tells you that, say, your rotation is wrong on your chosen job in Final Fantasy XIV, that person may very well be a jerk about it. But that doesn’t mean that they’re wrong. And trying to act as if it’s your divine right to play the job wrong and no one should ever criticize you for it is… well, it’s just kind of weak sauce.
It can be understandable to be resentful of the guy who thinks that he’s some higher tier of human being because he can raid and he tells you that he knows better than you do about your rotation, but that doesn’t mean he’s wrong. And the trend of intentional, deliberate antagonism to the opposite side, refusing to look up any guidance and insisting that you must exist in a hermetic bubble and no one should ever, under any circumstances, notice that one number is bigger than another number?
I’m not saying you can’t live your life that way, but it creates a situation where both sides of the debate are between people acting like jerks. Smelly Dave just farts; he can’t help it. What’s your excuse?
Sometimes you know exactly what’s going on with the MMO genre, and sometimes all you have are Vague Patch Notes informing you that something, somewhere, has probably been changed. Senior Reporter Eliot Lefebvre enjoys analyzing these sorts of notes and also vague elements of the genre as a whole. The potency of this analysis may be adjusted under certain circumstances.
