Earlier this week, Daybreak told players it wanted to get back to time-limited events in DC Universe Online. “Events make logging in every day that much more special,” the announcement quotes Jack “Jackster” Emmert, now ensconced as the Austin studio’s CEO. “I know that I’ve got to complete that event before it ends!”
While the specific event Daybreak is cooking up actually sounds fairly fleshed out and nice — a new zone, new quests, and a raid — I start to fidget at the idea that the content will be time-limited or temporary. Sure, I understand why studios would want to funnel players to a central but dynamic content stream and get us all to pony up. But exploiting players’ “fear of missing out” — FOMO — seems like a crappy way to design game content for the long-term, and it bugs me. Am I alone?
That’s the topic I’ve posed to our writers for this week’s Massively Overthinking. How do you feel about time-limited events in MMORPGs? Are they a waste of resources or a necessary evil? Who does them right, and who does them wrong?
Andrew Ross (@dengarsw): I’m going to give credit where credit is due: Blizzard’s seasonal events were always really fun in World of Warcraft, and I’m hoping Overwatch will be seeing the same treatment. What they do particularly well is reuse seasonal content and most of the rewards, but maybe make slight tweaks so you can tell what year certain awards are from, based on, say, color or perhaps style. Often, these rewards are the easiest to get, like pets that come in the mail when you log in, but the harder stuff sticks around unchanged for years.
When events are done this way, and players know that they’ll have another chance next year, it’s fine. It’s fun, it gets me excited, and I could usually get other people involved. In fact, as more MMOs are vying for our attention, I feel setting up game-specific, off-season events probably should be emphasized by smaller companies so they don’t have to compete with bigger games. It might even help for immersion in some cases. As much as I love a good Halloween event in October, it might be interesting to do one in, say, September, before the usual rush (and conveniently sandwiched between some Asian and Western “haunted” holidays).
In fact, time-limited events were my first MMO’s specialty. Asheron’s Call 1 and 2 often had a special event every few months that could only happen once on the server, or players were participating in it only for that month as part of a story arch. While it may suck to miss out on, it does create a reason to log in and helps create a shared community history. The effects of the event, say, a new dungeon or armor set, often lasted longer in some shape or form, but you knew that a certain guild or alliance had defeated a big bad, took it’s head for their mansion, and unlocked the ability for the rest of your server to get a cool sword that dripped acid blood.
It does give hardcore players who basically live in the game a big advantage, but I think that tying rewards and events to communities is fine. Don’t give a legendary cloak of insta-kill or something to whoever got the killing blow, but maybe just a cosmetic cloak to those who participated in the fight. WoW’s gate event is a good example of this. A lot of the rewards were too personalized, but I think having everyone help donate supplies for minor rewards (and being able to see progress across several servers) was motivating, empowering, and memorable, while also helping to make use of items the economy was largely viewing as worthless. Really, special events, when they focus on community play and reward, should be something that swings back into the MMO core in my opinion.
Brendan Drain (@nyphur): Fear of missing out on a time-limited event feels like punishing people for not playing, but only if the event is a once-only deal. Guild Wars 2’s living story is a prime example of the problem with time-limited content, to the point where I actually don’t feel like engaging in Guild Wars 2’s story at all because I know I missed experiencing some of it. World of Warcraft’s expansions have the same problem, and I still regret not playing to endgame in some of the previous expansions.
On the other hand, I’m very happy with seasonal events that are guaranteed to roll around every year. I always looked forward to Frostfell in EverQuest II (I even used to re-subscribe for a month just to take part) and to Brewfest and the Darkmoon Faire in World of Warcraft. I do wish more developers would explain explicitly which events are seasonal and will return though, as I missed one of the skins I wanted to get out of the Overwatch Halloween event and that did leave a bitter taste in my mouth.
Brianna Royce (@nbrianna, blog): Studio exploitation of our FOMO bothers me a lot. It bothers me like lockboxes bother me. Instead of saying, “Here’s some awesome content; wouldn’t you like to come play it?” studios are saying, “Play our content right now before we arbitrarily take it away!” Lockboxes do the same thing by asking us to foolishly gamble for shinies instead of simply selling us shinies directly.
It’s insulting. It insults me. It’s cheap. It’s transparent. It disrespects my valuable time and money. It treats us all like ritalin-addled, short-attention span morons. I realize people fall for these things. I realize it boosts playerbases and makes money. I realize this is why studios keep doing it in a declining MMORPG field, with games vying for dwindling core players with limited time. But I don’t fall for it, and I very much do not like it.
And even setting aside all of that? It’s bad long-term game design. It works for holidays, fine — that’s logical. I’ll even accept it from games that are actually creating unique, gamemaster-led content like what Ultima Online still does with its event GM program. But as standard, automated, mass-consumption game fare, it’s a huge waste of effort to churn out disposable content. If devs spent half the effort they spend on temporary content instead making older content worth paying more for or even just viable longer (like funneling players back to it from time to time or even adding it to the cash shop later a la Guild Wars 2’s second and third seasons), they wouldn’t need scummy tricks to begin with.
No, Jack Emmert, time-limited events do not making playing MMORPGs feel special. They make it feel stressful, and they remind us just what this genre has become.
Eliot Lefebvre (@Eliot_Lefebvre, blog): I do like time-limited events… in the right circumstances. I like when I have something fun to do in the game for little cosmetic stuff, but – and this is crucial – I like that when I’m already logging into the game to do other things. “Oh, I can do some holiday content while I play this game I already wanted to play” is fun. “Oh, I need to log in this week if I don’t want to miss out on something” is generally just stressful and helps contribute to me wanting to not log in at all. And the bigger that content is, the more irritated I get about making it time-limited.
Yes, this does funnel players into the same direction, but so does the content being new. And if you’re adding something more substantial than minigames and seasonal events, making it time-limited is almost always obnoxious and counterproductive. I even dislike the various time-limited but regularly recycling events over in Star Wars: The Old Republic; while it keeps everyone engaged during the weeks of bounty hunting and the like, it also makes that week a great time to start burning out or getting frustrated at the sheer necessity of constantly logging in and keeping up.
The worst offender, probably in perpetuity, is Guild Wars 2’s lengthy period of adding content and then getting rid of it in huge bursts during its first “season” of the living story; the stated goal was to create the feeling of a dynamic world, but the actual feeling I usually had was “well, I missed out on this, I might as well never go back to the game at this point.” Final Fantasy XIV and World of Warcraft, by contrast, both are usually on the ball about creating content that encourages you to log in without making you feel as if you missed out by not doing so. I tend to get most of the seasonal achievements in the former and the big cosmetic rewards in the latter, but I never feel as if I’m pressured to do so, especially since anything particularly cool is likely to come back in the future.
Justin Olivetti (@Sypster, blog): Ugh. OK, I simply do not like it when an MMO pressures me to log in during a certain time frame or else miss out on content or a reward. I understand the marketing behind it, but as a gamer with a job and family and interest in more than one MMO, real life isn’t always amenable to a studio’s arbitrary schedule. At the minimum, players should have a three-day window to log in and participate in a special event, or barring that, know that the event is due to return at a set time.
What’s being offered also makes a difference. If it’s very light and fluffy, such as what might happen with World of Warcraft’s micro-holidays, I’m cool with hitting it if I happen to be there or missing it if not. If I’m going to miss out on a big reward because I wasn’t grinding daily event activities from day one, I’m going to reset the game somewhat fiercely for it. Flexibility is key for me, at least.
MJ Guthrie (@MJ_Guthrie, blog): I am of a torn opinion about this. I like limited-time events as long as they return at another time. That’s the catch. I remember being so upset at missing The Secret World’s first Halloween event between travel and being so sick. I begged in a Chaos Theory for the event to return, and am so incredibly grateful it did. I love how TSW beings back every Halloween event from previous year’s in addition to a new event, so that newer folks to the game, or those who just missed it for real life reasons, do have the chance to participate and get the rewards. Other holiday events have also returned, and some return randomly (like Gilded rage).
It’s true that I will probably log in much more often in order to accomplish the things I want if I know they are going away soon, but that also leads me to burn out on the game a bit for a while after, so I am not sure it actually equates to more time in game overall. For burn out, see working on the Doomboard achievement in TSW. I don’t think I logged in for more than a few minutes for a couple weeks or more after that!
What I am conflicted about is when an event is a one-time only ever kind of deal. Yes, I do like living and breathing worlds that change, and change that happens in a sandbox feels like a part of life. But when you tie a significant reward — or worse, the story! — to a one-time event, it makes me less inclined to ever want to log into the game after missing it. A prime example is Guild Wars 2. Yes, I get sad about missing some uber cool items, but missing experiencing the story in a themepark? BAH! That’s just the worst
Your turn!
