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It is always of great interest to me when I visit forums and read about what other players want out of MMORPGs. It does a lot to make me realize that I represent an ancient, out of date MMO philosophy. Some of the design features that players point out I fully understand. Others confuse me to no end. The one I’m talking today is the request for “no gear grind” at the end game. That is just something I don’t understand. Either I don’t get the meaning or I have an extremely different view of what an MMORPG is.
What is a gear grind? My assumption is that these players mean the constant effort to achieve new tiers of gear after they’ve reached max level. There is certainly a whole spectrum when it comes to this. World of Warcraft, with its complete gear upgrades multiple times per expansion and massive inflation, is probably a culprit. I can agree that such a system would seem oppressive and annoying. Too much gear replacement is not fun and does ring more true to the analogy of the carrot on the stick. I’m a bigger fan of the slower gear replacement that EverQuest exhibited. Some items would last an expansion, others two. A few very rare and very awesome items might last three or more. Everything you got two minutes into a new expansion wasn’t automatically better than everything from the one before. If you had done well before you didn’t reach that point until the later half of the content. That is how I like things. I don’t like my achievements to be immediately washed away.
On the other hand I have to ask a simple question. If you didn’t have gear progression what would keep you playing an MMORPG? Some would say alternate advancement points. OKay, I’ll buy that but there isn’t any difference fundamentally. You’re still just continuously playing for an upgrade. Others would say that you just play to play. To that I would say “yeah, right.” I know very few human beings who would continue to play a game that is born in repetition with the only reward being fun or play. Yes, you would have fun doing everything once or twice. After the 10th time you’re going to unsubscribe and if you believe otherwise you may be lying to yourself.
What is an MMORPG without progression of some type? In the simplest terms I’d say it is a game you play for about two or three months. After that you move on to the next game and then the next. Gear (or any type of) progression is essential to the genre. If you want to keep players engaged you’ve got to give them an additional reason to play until the next content patch. That reason has to be beyond fun, friends or some other random notion. A “random notion” that is on the move lately (and I’m certain someone will make a comment about it to refute my premise) is story. Story is the key to Star Wars the Old Republic. It is the PvP of the next batch of MMORPGs. Just like developers thought that PvP was the wave of the future and created a bunch of average to failed MMOs I imagine we’ll see a similar situation with “story.” Yes, I’m going to pre-refute the refute.
Boys and girls, story alone is crap. Yes, I said it. Don’t mistake me though. Story is extremely important. Look at it this way. Think about your favorite game with the most awesome story ever. In my case I absolutely loved Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic. The story was great and I stayed interested the entire time. I couldn’t put it down! Picture that game in your mind. Hold onto it. Feel the flow good cheer about it. Become one with it. Are you there? Excellent!
Now imagine that same game but it costs $15.00 a month. Imagine that you play it three hours a day, four days a week, each year. Let’s build on that notion. Bring into this fantasy that the company that makes your game only adds about eight played hours of story to it every quarter year. Are you going to tell me honestly that you and the average human being are going to continue in that system? You’re not. You might want to fight me on the “story is crap” issue but you know as well as I do that you’re not. That is why if the Old Republic is only relying on story it will be awesome for a few months and then a subscription you cancel once you’ve seen each story. Story has a low replay value. Story brings no surprises on the second or third time through. It just isn’t enough on its own. You need something else!
That something else is progression. The feeling that you are more powerful today than yesterday. The vision that in two weeks you’ll be more powerful than you are today. It mirrors life. You finish junior high and then high school. You get a diploma. You go to college (or not) and in time you get a degree. You find a job and advance. Who wants to work at McDonald’s for 40 years? Not a lot of people. Not a lot of people enjoy repetition and it is most obvious in MMORPGs. It is even more obvious in the stories they tell. That is why it is only one of “four pillars.” Otherwise you have to accept that every story ends the exact same way, “The End.”
GREAT ARTICLE! One of the main reasons I could never get into WoW for longer than 2-3 months at a time is because I was ALWAYS upgrading my equipment. It gets old really quick! EQ had a great system… I would always be striving for more gear but upgrades were circumstantial. For instance, as a Bard in EQ I relied on many different stats (Str, Dex, and Charisma) mostly if I remember correctly. If I wanted to tweak my build a bit I could use AA’s OR better yet, I could swap out some STR gear for CHA gear making me a better CC Bard… it was great, and the customization was wonderful. This occurred for all classes too! Also, as you said Ferrel, gear could last as many as 3 expansions. Just look at how sought after the Cloak of Flames was seemingly forever!… That was ORIGINAL EQ and it was around for expansions up to like PoP. There were other haste alternatives too… it wasn’t just CoF or bust. What a great system.
Now, in most Modern Gen. MMO’s you are pigeon holed into gear X and you can only upgrade to Gear X+1… its boring and makes my playing experience a lot less unique than other players of the same class. AA’s are so generic too. Almost every warlock I knew in WoW started out as Affliction then that got Nerfed to hell (which made no sense because warlocks were all about DoTs) and everyone changed over to Destruction. Fun! Woohoo! I was the same as every other Warlock again! Bottom line is games just throw a players imagination out the window and pretty much tell us how to play… I miss customization.
Great article Ferrel.
It’s pretty tough to come up with an MMO that doesn’t have gear upgrades as a large part. People want goals and one of the easiest goals to put in place for max level characters is gear.
The problem is how quick a lot of people aquire new skills (and I mean people, not characters).
Anybody remember Mario Bros? The original one? You started out moving to the right, getting the mushroom, avoiding the turtles, and getting to the flag. For most of us, we died a time or two the first few times we tried this. Eventually, we got better and better at it to the point where there was nothing to it. What started off as fairly difficult became second nature after a while. This doesn’t retain our interest because it’s no longer a challenge. We learned the new skill involved in the encounter.
So, how do you create encounters in an MMO that are difficult that STAY difficult while still being fair? I don’t think they’ve quite figured that one out yet. Making things random doesn’t really work because it just frustrates those that have beat the encounter before. Might as well flip a coin.
Thats why skill will only get you so far and gear will only get you so far. You need both. But once you have both, then what? Add more gear and add more encounters is about it I guess.
“Everything you got two minutes into a new expansion wasn’t automatically better than everything from the one before. If you had done well before you didn’t reach that point until the later half of the content. ”
This was actually still true in WoW as of the TBC->Wrath expansion, it’s just that “later half of the content” took the powergamers a day or two and two weeks or so for the more laid back gamer.
The big design problem that developers have yet to solve is how to deal with characters (new players or alts) who weren’t around to clock months in the previous expansion’s group endgame. It’s easy enough for people who’ve been there, done that, and looted the t-shirt to say “oh, there’ll be people who run the old content because the gear is still relevant”, but it never quite works out that way if you’re the player on the outside looking in.
Great point about new players staring down mountains basically. That is certainly a good argument for total gear replacement.
Well this can as always be seen from both sides and my opinion is that it shall of course be gear upgrades as max level, preferably doable in groups, in shared dungeons that is both fun and challenging. I think the whole discussion is due to the increasing *real or perceived* gap between the “serious” gamers and the “casual” gamers, if you as you do in EQ2 get to 90 after soloing all the way (as there is no other worthwhile content than solo content after 70) and you want to do something challenging and hopefully see what EQ2 is about (game starts at 90 remember) you will get very discouraged when you hear that you have to grind marks (solo) to then maybe get access to the end game. Now I know that this is not how it has to be (or even that it is this way on all servers) but this is the message lots of players that are new to the 80 + game hears from forum posts, from level chat and from the ever increasing elitism in many guilds.
We can tie this to the discussion on “what are people (especially casual players) supposed to do at 90″, and of course there are several things to do, but people are funny as we usually only value the things that other people value, and if the general consent is that “good gear is needed to play the game” and if enough people feel that they are unable to get the gear, you will get complaints like this and calls for different ways of getting good gear.
To sum things up this is as much a player community problem as it is a design problem, maybe things like this would be avoidable if the Hole had been what it was originally said it would be (doable for small imperfect groups and a way to get upgrades for “casual” players. But to trust that the majority of guilds and players will invite new green solo players into their arms and group up with them and teach them the ropes is simply naive and I fear that the conflict (real or percieved) will get worse and the cries of “Nerf” and “Do not dumb the game down” will get louder and louder.
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“That something else is progression. The feeling that you are more powerful today than yesterday. The vision that in two weeks you’ll be more powerful than you are today. It mirrors life. You finish junior high and then high school. You get a diploma. You go to college (or not) and in time you get a degree. You find a job and advance. Who wants to work at McDonald’s for 40 years? Not a lot of people. Not a lot of people enjoy repetition and it is most obvious in MMORPGs. It is even more obvious in the stories they tell. That is why it is only one of “four pillars.” Otherwise you have to accept that every story ends the exact same way, “The End.””
Hmm. I have a problem with this statement. I played LegendMUD for 8 years, with a non-gear grind system in place, and I never once experienced the need or the desire you’ve outlined above. Nor did ‘every story end the exact same way’ – far from it. I had about 50 characters when I quit, and none of them were clones of each other, be it in build, or in ‘story. And it’s certainly not why I left – let’s just say that my reason for leaving had nothing to do with gameplay mechanics. I still hold LegendMUD up as one of the most beautiful games I have ever played.
However!
…what LegendMUD did and does have, that MMOs do not, is an incredibly rich world. A world you can *live* in. So it’s not that I’m diametrically opposed to gear grind. I just feel that gear grind is the last resort of an empty, depthless world.
Also… one of the things I cursed about WoW when I was playing it was the gear grind. Now I’m playing Guild Wars, and I’m happy as a clam. I know it’s not for everyone, but for me, the challenge and progression does NOT come from gear given to me. It comes from improving my game, becoming a better player, beating *myself*, learning new things. None of these are given to me by gear. Many of those who come to GW from WoW have that exact same cry – wah, no gear, there’s nothing to DO here. And, in truth, I think if you do not like challenging yourself, and need the system to feed you ‘progression’ in order to continue playing, they’re exactly right. Non-gear-grind games have nothing for them.
And that’s okay. Not everyone has to be the same. =)
Just trying to point out that not only does everyone not have to be the same… not everyone is!
Squee the nugget!
I will most certainly agree that not everyone is motivated by some type of tangible progression. There will always be players out there that do a better job of “making their own fun” than others.
Just a couple quick curiosities. In the case of your MUD, wouldn’t you say that by having 50 characters, all of which were different, that you essentially created your own constant progression? The game may not have had a gear grind but you moved to a new character and started over. That in itself is finding progression.
Not that it changes how you feel in anyway. Guild Wars is a great example. It really speaks to a demographic of players. I’m all for progression through skill improvement but I think I’d get to a point where I’d be bored. Much in the same way I feel with FPS games.
That is the difference, I think – and spot on, your thing about ‘creating your own’ progression. Because 50 chars is just the easiest thing to quote, without having to drag in a whole lot of context sensitive stuff.
So yes, in the case of characters – it’s exactly like GW. Because respeccing in LegendMUD is handled… differently, and you might not want to respec some characters because you’ve themed them to be a certain way (story and all), you go out and make new ones. At least, I did.
The characters were builds first, and then characters after, and then somehow fused into living combinations of the two.
So yes, there’s progression on the level of player skill… which was what my entire rant was about in the first place. XD
However, there was also stuff on other levels in MUDs – LegendMUD because I played it so long and loved it so well, as well as other places I stayed at briefly. Do you call making friends, building relationships, etc ‘progression’, in a real life context?
If so then yeah, I guess that’s one more mode of ‘progression’. I wouldn’t call it that. I don’t know what I would call it. (lol) But ‘progression’ is not the word I’d use, is all I know. (Pron! I knowz it when I seez it!)
It’s not ‘progression’ when you jump around with delight after learning that a flower with a beautiful description drops in a specific place at a specific time. (A totally purposeless flower, other than being beautiful, I might add.) It’s world, and wonder, and all those other things that aren’t bound to treadmills.
These days, that’s something I really miss.
“Others would say that you just play to play. To that I would say “yeah, right.” I know very few human beings who would continue to play a game that is born in repetition with the only reward being fun or play. Yes, you would have fun doing everything once or twice. After the 10th time you’re going to unsubscribe and if you believe otherwise you may be lying to yourself.”
It actually is OK to stop subbing or playing a game if you’ve stopped having fun with it. I firmly believe the dev impetus to get that sub addiction going is the root of a LOT of bad design. Skinner box “progression” works, but it’s pretty blasted shallow. And, y’know, it’s OK for players to finish your game. Make a new one and sell that one to them, too.
That is an option too! That doesn’t feed into my need to tug a lever for pellets though!