Let’s stop using the word “fair” when talking about games, okay?

On the one hand, it’s a personality thing.  Here I am in a nutshell, according to Meyers-Briggs at least; I’m pretty much never going to sympathize with “fairness” as a motivator.  On the other hand, it’s one of the major issues with modern MMOs: fairness has no place as a design principle.

Let’s look at World of Warcraft, since that is ultimately the big beast on the block.  And it’s hard to argue that it’s unsuccessful, though some actually do, and now there does seem to be some truth that it has entertained as long as it can entertain: it’s numbers are slipping by Blizzard’s own admission, and in my incredibly limited and subjective experience, their last expansion did not seem to have much staying power.

I subscribe to the Syncaine theory of WoW success (a blogger, for any confused, add .com to his name and read him, you’ll find he’s got much more snark than me).  He would basically claim that while WoW was not a terrible game at release, its popularity was due more to timing than design.   You can go scan his site if you want more detail than that, and I think there’s a post way back in my first few months where I talk about it in more detail as well.  But only the core is important: WoW’s original playerbase came as much from releasing after broadband had become more common than it did from any element of design.

But let’s get to fairness.   I feel WoW’s current downward spiral can be blamed on thinking fairness was their key to success.  You will never meet someone in WoW that has anything special.  Anything anyone has can be obtained by anyone else.  All characters at endgame are utilizing pretty much the same equipment to complete the same raids, and while they may look impressive to new or mid game players, they’re really a dime a dozen, all of them equipped and leveled in nearly the same ways.

But in the early days of WoW, that simply wasn’t true.  It took effort and time to build a 40 member raid team: it took socializing, talking to people, getting to know their personalities and skills.  Folks that had done so, and had the equipment that proved it, stood out — it meant something.    But that wasn’t fair: only a few select guilds on each server were capable of putting together such a team.  So let’s make them require only 15 people instead.  But you know, that’s still not fair: while many more groups are capable of coordinating 15 members, some players don’t want to make that effort so create the looking for raid tool.  And yet, that’s still not fair, as players that have never spoken to each other and have no social ties to each other tend not to work well together, so this high end content is just “too hard.”

Well, they’re a heck of a lot more fair and accessible now, yet they’ve been bleeding subs.  But hey, it still must work since all these other games have gone the same route; you know, games  like Warhammer and Star Wars: The Old Republic just hit the ground running and never looked back, right?  Right?  Right?

Well no.  For one, they’re not the first MMO for the majority of their players, so they simply didn’t receive the benefit of the doubt that WoW received.  And they copied the later versions of WoW, the versions that took accessibility and fairness to extremes — so lacked any flair or flavor.  There was nothing for dedicated players to look forward to, nothing for casual players to ooh and aah over.  Vanilla WoW, as the original release version is now known, ironically had a hell of a lot more flavor than the later iterations.

Let’s look at an example of something that clearly wasn’t fair or accessible yet was good for the game.  I always lament the Jedi of SWG.   Until Lucasarts forced SOE to gut that game in an attempt to mimic WoW, Jedi were a rarity.  I won’t get into the process, but obtaining the ability to create a Jedi character was a huge time sink, practical to only a very small portion of the community, not even available to all who played the game frequently and for long sessions, but only available to a segment of that community that was willing to face a grind that was always long, but even worse, varied: it could be even longer than long.  And once the player got one, she might not get to keep it: after the third death, Jedi characters stayed dead.

And that made sense.  It might not have been fair, but it worked.  It rewarded the crazy grinders for their dedication, giving them reason to stick around and drive sandbox content, and giving them a high difficulty challenge to follow up all that grinding.  It gave us casuals “holy crap, I spotted a Jedi in the wild” moments.  And most important, it fit the lore: the game took place between Episodes IV and V, a time period in Star Wars lore when Jedis are either dead or in hiding.

And then they made it fair.  And everyone left the game.  Okay, fair enough (har har), we left the game for many reasons, but one of the major ones was that Jedi became a starting class.  And suddenly, while Luke Skywalker is the universe’s only hope, there’s a few thousand only hopes running around swinging lightsabers openly in front of imperial storm troopers.  Immersion was gone.  In the name of fairness, the game stopped making any sense at all.  And it failed: while the game only recently shut its doors, it peaked before the NGE update changed the game, shed subs like a sandwich artist on crack, and died a shadow of its former self.  Since the game’s numbers were never more than a shadow of WoW’s, we can actually say the game died as nothing but a shadow of a shadow.  Pretty sad really, but hey, it was fair.

And then there’s the game I mentioned way back in this blog’s first post, when I was listing the f2p games I had tried before starting the blog: Mousehunt.  I never imagined I would find the need to discuss Ronza’s Traveling Shoppe.  If you read the opening of that link, you probably noticed that this Shoppe only arrives for short periods of time.  If you’re on vacation without a computer, tough luck.  If you read further, you probably noted that those short periods of time are often separated by a year or more — if you played after a visit, and played for less than a year, tough luck.  If you read even further and for detail, you’d discover that she almost never offers the same goods twice.  If you weren’t playing the game in the year a certain item was sold, tough luck.  And these items are generally not cosmetic, they tended to be incredibly useful for certain parts of the game.  That’s really not fair.

And while I stopped playing after the friends that dragged me in stopped playing, the game, and the company that creates it, are alive and well.  And thriving last I checked.  And Ronza helps.  Ronza’s appearances and disappearances create excitement and buzz, create interest in playing.  Even before her 2009 visit, I would see traps from her 2008 visit and not look back with anger and envy; instead, I looked forward with excitement.

I hate fairness in games.  It’s bland.  It’s beyond vanilla: it’s a rice cake, plain, and covered in sand.

My inspiration for this post came out of the Glitch community — shocker I know.  These thoughts came up because an idea I pondered but was not seriously considering  was picked up and run with by others.  There are these meaningless collectible items in the game modeled after blind box vinyl toys — I thought it would be interesting to watch the prices if they were ever discontinued.  Others thought it might actually be good for the game for them to be discontinued, and oh boy was that an unpopular idea.  But the objection, almost every time, had nothing to do with whether or not it would be bad for the game — the objection most repeated was that “it wouldn’t be fair to players that came later.”  As self-appointed resident cantankerous windbag, I felt the need to argue against fairness, even though I didn’t really care: I just wanted one person to lead with something like “keeping all the series on the vendors for all time provides a greater currant sink than would come from the urgency of knowing a series is being discontinued” and then I would have shut the fuck up.

But if I’m going to be forced to talk fairness, let’s show how subjective it is.  I think it isn’t fair that players that come after launch might never have an opportunity to display something unique, an opportunity available to every alpha player, every original beta player, and supposedly coming to every current beta player.  I think eventually discontinuing the series 1 cubimals after several sets have released would provide players that come after launch with the same opportunities we have, and thus would be more fair.

Or we can just agree that fairness is basically meaningless and has nothing to do with what is good or bad for a game, that refusing to be fair can actually be better for a game: it provides the excitement.  Hell, you can even say it provides the lows — without the lows online games are just a series of progressive ticks, never a setback, never a boring moment.  But never an exciting moment either.

It’s Friday somewhere, I guess, in some dimension

If you’ve found yourself here because I tipped Massively to a story and they were kind enough to link back to me, the post you are looking for summarizing and breaking down Stoot’s impromptu Community Q&A about Glitch can be found here.

I hesitated to make a new post knowing that Massively’s article linked to my home page, but it’s been over 24 hours.  Time to move on.

Speaking of Massively, today Syp made a post at his blog Bio Break about being happy to be a gamer right now that seemed a bit of a poke about gamers nostalgic for a past that theme park fans are often tempted to claim never existed.    Syncaine responded with a post on Hardcore Casual strongly disagreeing, in his somewhat snarky, fully sarcastic, yet rather insightful style.  I was participating in the comments on both pages, when I found I was writing about the same thing on both blogs.  And that the current response to Syp was going from comment territory to small novel turf.  So I’m going to try and put it here.

What I really want to address is the idea that in early MMO history, gamers had less choice.  They were stuck, to use an example, with either harsh death penalties or harsh death penalties.  The thought behind this thought, at least as I understand it, is that when WoW released gamers were given a choice between meaningless deaths and harsh death penalties, and by virtue of WoW’s subscription numbers, clearly gamers chose the meaningless deaths, right?

Except I don’t see when gamers really had those two options side by side.  When Ultima Online was at its peak, more people were using AOL for internet than their cable company.  Most had no other choice.  By the time broadband became more common, UO had been patched to have more in common with EQ, which alienated a lot of the UO vets, did nothing to convince EQ players to switch, and generally marked the beginning of the end for the game.  In 2004, WoW releases into an MMO field which included EQ II and really nothing else, at least nothing else that was polished and well marketed.  I did not, personally, hear about SWG until most of a year after it launched.  However, I not only saw articles about WoW on sites like gamespy (remember gamespy?  I remember gamespy); I even got a “talk” about how much better WoW would be delivered to me by the pimply faced kid at Best Buy that was ringing up my EQII preorder.

Turns out he was right, mostly.  But I digress, the point is that aside from MMO vets, whom at that time were a much smaller club, most people did not see their choice as between WoW and SWG.  Even those that were aware of SWG weren’t necessarily rejecting it for being a sandbox, but instead were rejecting it because it was buggy and unpolished despite having been live for quite awhile, and grinding missions to skill up to the “real game” was kind of a pain in the ass.  SWG was perfect for me, since I was primarily into crafting, but my glasses are clear rather than rose-colored — it was not the game for your average combat aficionado.

No, most gamers saw their choice as between WoW and EQII.  So their choice was between meaningless death penalty and meaningless death penalty.  Their choice was between questing or questing.  Their choice was between nearly polished and lacking polish.  And with broadband becoming cheaper and more common, there were more gamers looking for an MMO, and WoW, being nearly polished, managed to hook in a whole crap load of them.

Publishers took note.  What they saw was a game with formulaic character classes, solo quest-based progression, and a rather linear leveling game that led players from quest hub to quest hub without ever giving them an overwhelming set of choices.  They jumped all over those characteristics and decided that these, combined with as much polish as possible, were the reasons for WoW’s success.  They ignored any role shared by the increased prevalence of broadband, and they dismissed MMOs that did not achieve WoW status based on their game mechanics, rather than the fact that there simply was a smaller pool to draw on at the time and that when the pool finally became larger, WoW was the most logical choice.

Now is the point in this rant where I direct you to Extra Credits Season 3 Episode 15: Working Conditions.  While I do recommend watching the whole thing at some point, especially if you work in or hope to work in the game design industry, for this discussion I only ask that you jump to about the six minute point, and listen to the bit about ways that publishers can negatively interfere with a game’s designers.

I’ll wait until you get back.  I promise.

Publishers appear to be doing the same thing to MMOs that Extra Credits claims they tried to do to FPS games.  They’ve locked on to the features that were present in a game that happened to be more successful than any previous game, ignored anything else that may have contributed to that game’s success, and declared that the failure to achieve similar stellar results from games that did not include those features were a direct result of those missing features, so no game like them will ever be successful again.  They were wrong before.  I think they will find they are wrong again.  FPS games have a short shelf life, so that blunder of marketing governing design didn’t last so long, but I believe we will eventually begin to see polished sandbox releases as future competition.

Yes, I’ve seen the comments on Massively attacking sandbox fans as outdated troll that just need to accept that their genre moved on without them.  But I also remember friends saying there was no point to FPS games without multiplayer, and I haven’t heard any of them say that in years.  And most of them played Fallout 3.  I borrowed Bioshock from one of those very people, actually.

Just like I don’t see gamers ever having been presented with a choice between harsh death and meaningless death, I don’t see gamers having ever really been offered a choice between sandbox or theme park, not with games of equal quality, both still operating off their original design plan, both still live at the same time.

So yes, I too am happy to be a gamer in 2012, but only because, in my secret dreams of my secret heart, I feel the end of this hidebound repetition is somewhere just out of sight, just over the horizon.  Not because I think the games of today are objectively better than the games of a decade earlier — I think the games of today are different than the older games, that they traded one set of problems for a new set, and really have done little to advance the genre since WoW polished up a lot of EQ mechanics and made them the new shiny.

And I think next the gamers I mentioned in an earlier blog, the ones who project every mechanic on to WoW, will have many new opportunities to see mechanics, that they assume must be terrible, in games that build specifically around that mechanic and make it awesome.  The two MMO sub-genres may fuse for the sake of accessibility, or they may split further until most think of virtual worlds as a different genre altogether — but the idea that an MMORPG must be based on WoW to be successful will first drain from the publishers and then from the gamers once we actually reach an era where there are real choices.  Where the choice is not between harsh death penalty with no real direction and harsh penalty with no direction, and once the choice is not between hotbar combat solo leveling experience with endgame grouping and hotbar combat solo leveling experience with endgame grouping.

Eventually there will be real choices.  And many gamers, myself probably included, will likely find they are entertained by both.  Many will wonder why they didn’t have sandbox elements in those other games they tried, because it will seem so obvious once they play one where it works.

In the meantime, I steeple my fingers and stare out of the darkness.  Lurking.

Defining Sandbox: Part 1

Words are hard.  Here I am, a person who communicates continuously via the written word and is paid to craft words for others, and I know that despite my “expertise,” most of what I’ve written in my lifetime, if not all of it, can be misunderstood or interpreted from angles I did not imagine while writing.  Jargon is both a boon and a bane: although it allows people from the same fields to quickly communicate complicated ideas, people from different fields may use the same word to mean different things.  But the worst jargon comes in young fields, such as gaming criticism, where it seems assumed that “everyone knows” what it means without any discussion.

So have I justified talking about the meaning of the word “sandbox” in gaming and in the growing lexicon of mmo jargon?  Since I’m already writing this, I’ll go with the answer most convenient for me: yes.   So how do we define sandbox?  How is it being used out there?

Searching google for “define sandbox mmo,” the first relevant hit I come across is this hub page. The author, Tahamtan, equates sandbox games with freedom of choice.  He goes on to more details, including the claim that the players make the rules rather than developers, and specifics such as classless skill systems and customizable appearances, some of which I agree with and some seem optional at best and otherwise completely arbitrary.   I strongly agree with the freedom of choice bit, but I don’t think that’s enough detail to eliminate games that are commonly called theme parks.  I found a second blog post attempting to explain a personal definition of sandbox, but he focuses even more on the details than this first author.  And most of those details are lifted straight from UO.  UO is certainly a sandbox, at least everyone who has played it seems to think so, but I’m more interested in creating a definition of sandbox that includes any MMO generally agreed to be a sandbox (Ultima Online, SWG pre-NGE, Eve, Darkfall, Wurm Online, and such) while excluding any games generally agreed to be theme parks (WoW, Rift, Warhammer, etc.)

Sandbox games can certainly be said to depend on freedom of choice, but to what extent is freedom of choice limited in a theme park?   There’s a common argument about WoW that claims WoW offers choice despite generally being considered a theme park by most mmo bloggers and reviewers.  And it is certainly true that there are options available in WoW.  Although the most common path is to follow quests, players can choose to ignore the quests and grind mobs.  Players could also put together a regular group to crawl instances or exclusively use the dungeon finder and complete instances with PUGs.  At a certain point, though I cannot recall when, PvP becomes another viable option.

Similarly, WoW does allow for players to choose the zones they visit.  Once getting out of your racial start zone, there are frequently multiple options about where to go next.  There is not a single clear path that forces everyone to be in the same zone for the same level like there is in Forsaken World.  So with all these choices, why does the general consensus firmly place WoW in the theme park column?

Because all of these choices come with obvious limitations.  Although there are options about how to play, all of those options reach the same end: leveling your character and acquiring better equipment.  No matter how someone plays WoW, the goal remains the same.  Even when I imagine a player that gets joy primarily from exploration, visiting every in-game location still requires leveling up and getting new equipment.  Locations are designed for certain level ranges, and while there may not be something stopping a player from visiting higher level zones, players are not able to explore and survive unless they are in the right range for that zone.  The choice of where and how to level is governed by the character’s level throughout the game.  No matter what a player focuses on, leveling and new equipment will either be the end result or a necessary step along the way.

When I look at a sandbox, I find it more difficult to generalize all the goals with a single end as I have with WoW.  Although I have heard it said that the goal is still more power, the difference is in the definition of power.  In WoW, power will nearly always refer to character level and gearscore.  Some might describe power as the amount of gold they possess, but again this goal is governed by character level (higher levels acquire more gold and more valuable crafting materials) and just like character level, there is even a cap that forces players to cease pursuing gold as a game goal.

So far the difference between a sandbox and a theme park MMO seems related to choice, the nature of those choices, and the limitations placed on those choices.  This is far from the complete definition I’m searching for that clearly defines sandbox while excluding theme parks.  But this blog is the longest I’ve written so far, and if anyone is still reading I’m amazed and impressed.  Next, I will take a closer look at how “gaining power” is not a sufficient generalization for goals in a sandbox, or at the very least, how many different ways one can define “gaining power,” all while continuing to work toward a meaningful definition of sandbox.

No promises as to when, I still have a draft of WoW Hate Explained Pt. 1 to finish, and I started thinking about that months ago.

WoW Hate: Introduction -or- I’m sorry but you’re a doody-head

I usually do not have difficulty stretching my mind to the perspective of another person when I actually try. Imagining the perspective of someone who has enjoyed WoW nearly continuously since launch, however, is a difficult exercise for me.  Or at least it’s difficult to imagine that perspective without making a bunch of negative assumptions about the person.

Let me be clear: I find myself thinking WoW players are stupid.  Or that they’re children.  Or both.  I know this isn’t fair; I know it isn’t universally true.  Yet it’s my instant reaction to articles and comments that rave about, support, or defend the game.

It’s something I actually try to suppress, but it comes through on bad days.

Over a few posts, I’m going to look at my hatred for WoW.  I’m not going to bash it, necessarily — I’m going to recall as much as possible of my two experiences as a WoW tourist and attempt to explain how my opinion of WoW and its players was formed.