Common complaints about MMOs

The Game Room
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In another thread that I do not wish to hijack, the NY Times review of Star Trek Online was posted. It states a couple ideas about Massively-Multiplayer Online games (MMOs) that I’ve seen repeated in many places. But I don’t understand them. Given the troll-filled forums that are typical of actual game boards, I’d like to discuss them with my reasonable friends here on the SDMB.

First, quoting from the linked article,

This is a strange complaint to anyone familiar with MMOs. Every MMO can be described as repetitive and the vast majority are combat-oriented. The difference among them is whether or not an individual enjoys what is being repeated in a given game. And yet it is very common for players to complain that a specific game is repetitive, as if some MMOs are not. Saying a game is boring is a meaningful opinion, calling a game more repetitive is not.

While some games are not combat-oriented, every game with conflict has some resolution system. Combat is what most players enjoy and so that is what the game designers put in the game. Quests in every MMO (and most single-player adventure games as well) consist of variations on collection and delivery missions. Logic puzzles and platform tests are the only alternatives, but are typically not used because they require player skill (rather than the in-game character skill) to accomplish. So calling an MMO combat-oriented is merely describing the state of the MMO genre, instead of distinguishing among games.

Next,

This is a meaningful comment to make–STO does split up the gameplay areas in a way different from games like WOW. But to think that this makes the game less massively multiplayer is strange. While WOW only has a single “instance” of each play area, there is still a maximum number of players that can effectively be in that area. It’s typically about 100-200 players–more than that and playability suffers dramatically as the server strains to keep pace. This is very noticeable in player hubs (for example Ironforge’s nickname of Lagforge).

STO automatically splits a play area when it gets too crowded–but that doesn’t prevent players from interacting with each other. All players can still talk together in the zone’s chat channel. The limitation is you cannot see or bump into every player in the area, only the 50 or so in your instance. However, you can easily manually switch between instances, and the game will preferentially put you in instances that have your teammates, guildmates, or friends. So, you will see the same players again and again, assuming you make social connections.

And a fact that the this article doesn’t point out, and is often overlooked by those who complain about automatic instancing, is that STO does not split players among servers. In WOW, the game is divided among a myriad of servers, each with only a limited number of players and typically no more than several (certainly less than ten) thousand players on at once. STO puts everyone on the same server. So if 100 thousand people are playing, that’s how many people you can interact with. If they were all in the same zone, you could chat with all of them at once, although you could only see about 50 of them at a time.

And we have the complaint

This is precisely because the game is massively multiplayer. If you see the same players again and again in WOW, it’s because that game has fewer players (per server) than STO. It’s contradictory to make this complaint while saying STO is not massively multiplayer enough.

Calling STO less than massively multiplayer shows a lack of understanding of how instances, zones and servers work in common MMOs. Now, from what I understand about EVE, they really do cram in every player into a single instance, using a very sophisticated server system. But if STO should not be called massively multiplayer by comparison to EVE, then neither can WOW or any other “MMO” I know of.

Now, all of the above is my (hopefully informed) opinion. Am I missing things important, or are the complaints I called out as ill-thought as I believe? And while I’m singling out these specific complaints about STO, I’ve seen similar complaints in the forums and reviews of other games. I don’t want to limit this discussion only to STO.

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Even EVE, which does not have instances, has zones. Sure there’s only one Jita, and one Amarr, but they’re not running on the same node and the players in each location have different local channels. There’s also a practical max number of pilots in a system, even on the hardened (best hardware) ones.

As for the review, all it really tells me is that the reviewer didn’t like the game. Unfortunately his reasoning boiled down to it “seems to have little of that special pixie dust”. I’ll likely never play STO, but I don’t know what issues there are in the “buggy client software”, and how those issue may impact “meaningful social interaction”. Then again I don’t know if I’d call “LF2M 4 UP” or “Red in 28Y” meaningful social interaction either.

The elements that you mention are, indeed, shared by all MMOs, even back to the days of MUDs. It’s basic to the CRPG, you need to something to earn experince and/or money to make yourself better so you can earn more experince and/or money to make yourself even better. Between that and the social interaction, how your chat works, and how you support player organizations, that’s all there is to it. The art to making a good MMO, it seems to me, is making those elements interesting and exciting enough to do repeatedly with people you’ll never meet face to face.

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though i did hear a kid at the sub base exchange unit bitch about EVE Online when he heard I played

But there are no women with tits to watch

:smack::rolleyes:

Can’t be everything to everybody…

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Some games are more repetitive than others. For instance, I spent a few weeks playing this horrible game called Maple Story. Although the game actually did have quite a few different areas, with completely different mobs and environments, the game progressed so slowly that it would take you months, if not years, to see most of them. Level progress was reeaaally slow, so you stayed in one area forever and it made the game feel extremely repetitive. Every 2-3 levels you got a new piece of gear, but the improvement was so slight it was usually barely noticeable. So you spent a very long time to finally get that new hat, and guess what? It’s almost exactly like the old hat. Most skills were kind of worthless unless you maxed them out, so it would take 10 levels of samey-ness (and using the old skills) to actually get any benefit from a new skill. Also, there wasn’t really anything to do other than kill monsters. No cool mini-games, no crafting, not much pvp, etc. Towns were small and uninteresting, all of the quests were the standard “fetch me 10 x’s from this monster”, boring and unimaginative.

Some other games switch things up more often and make it more interesting. You’re not stuck killing 100,000 pink slimes before you can move on to the red slimes (and kill 1,000,000 of THOSE to move up to the green slimes…). Some games have cool mini-games, interesting quests, the ability to get powerful gear or character builds and take on stuff that would normally be beyond you. It’s also worth noting that the typical MMORPG takes much longer to “max out” a character than a single player offline RPG. Most single player games can be beaten in a couple weeks at most. Most online games require a monthly fee, so they stretch it out longer. It’s a tricky balance. Too few things to do, and the game seems repetitive and stale. Too much, and development costs soar, plus any new content has the potential to create imbalances, bugs, and whatnot.

I think the authors bitching about instancing is nonsense, but I haven’t actually played STO. With the instancing system described, he’s thinking it would take a lot longer to get to know people, because you might be thrown in with a different random group of 50 people every time. But in the instancing system they use, it sounds like you can still chat with everyone, it’s just that you can’t actually see everyone’s character. It sounds like a pretty elegant solution to the overcrowding problem. Again, I haven’t played STO, nor do I plan to, but I don’t see what his beef is.