Does anyone else have an aversion to MMORPGs?

The Game Room
21

I really enjoyed WoW for a few months, after a friend convinced me and another friend to get it when Cataclysm came out. We all created new characters and leveled them, which took a decent amount of time to get through all the content in Outland, Northrend, and the new Cata zones. We then got pretty involved in dungeons, gearing up for raids, and PvP.

This was all fun. Being able to interact with real people made it less lonely than normal video games, and since it was all new to me, learning all the mechanics, professions, plot, and stuff from scratch was tons of fun. It was a huge, virtual world to explore. I didn’t mind the repetitive quests, since I always did them with a friend and we just chatted on Skype or whatever while we killed the requisite 50 butterflies. And for several months, there was always something new to try, some new place to go, some new ability to get, a new profession to learn, whatever. Eventually I created second character with a totally different playstyle (melee vs magic), and had fun leveling that one as well.

But once I got seriously into the end-game content, consisting of grinding out the same dungeons again and again, and “capping” our PvP points each week so that we could save up for another piece of imaginary gear, I found it boring, tiresome and ridiculous, and quit after about a month. I didn’t like the dungeons because they were all so repetitive, and it was frustrating to spend six hours grinding through a bunch of them and not get any loot, and I didn’t like PvP because I knew I would never care about it enough to devote enough time to it to get any good (memorizing each class’s abilities, counter-abilities, counter-counter-abilities, etc.) At this point, I had also mastered playing the auction house to amass massive amounts of gold, so there was no challenge left in that either. So I just terminated my account and quit. I haven’t looked back.

One thing I really liked about WoW was the design and art direction. It was a bright, happy, cheerful, fun place to be. It was pleasant to log in after a long day at work, in the middle of last year’s cold, dark winter, and spend an hour chatting with friends in Stormwind, queueing up for battlegrounds. Other MMO’s seem to try for a more “realistic” or gritty atmosphere, and it turns me off.

22

Missed the edit window.

I forgot to mention the other major thing that turned me off WoW, and MMO’s in general I guess - I realized that not only was everything I had accomplished in the game fake, it was transient, and subject to change at Blizzard’s whim. After I spent weeks grinding for some fancy item, the next patch would always bring another set of gear that was better than mine. Staying on top required hours upon hours of effort. Furthermore, Blizzard could and did change major aspects of the game’s rules and gameplay in an attempt at balance, or to “force” players to play parts of the game that were not as popular as the others.

For instance, I really enjoyed PvP arenas, but never had the patience to deal with rated battlegrounds and the organization that was required to play them well. Blizzard at one point changed the point system so as to force players to do a certain number of rated battlegrounds each week in order to get the maximum number of points (whereas previously, you could achieve the cap solely through arenas). They made similar changes to tanking mechanics that made it less fun for me to tank. These things, and the realization that they could make a similar change to any part or mechanic of the game at will, made me decide it wasn’t worth putting so much of my time and effort into something that was not just fake, but subject to someone else’s control.

23

This. You put a lot of effort into it, but for what?

24

Theoretically, entertainment. If you find the game entertaining, anyway.

After all, what do you get by spending $15 to go see a movie?

Trying to stay out of this thread, since technically pro-MMO posts are threadshitting, but you did ask. :stuck_out_tongue:

25

I think this is it for me too. I played WOW for a few months but after that thought “why am I doing this? It’s not achieving anything”. Yes you could say this for most computer games, but at least they have an end and you can say “I completed that”. That’s kind of important to me.

26

I’m ambivalent about them. I find their gameplay simplistic, repetitive and boring ; yet I’m still very easily hooked on them. Addictive personality and/or innate fondness for Skinner boxes I guess. Plus for a while a majority of my friends were playing them, so I played them to be with them as much as for playing the game.

These days, I just don’t want to get anywhere near MMOs any more.

27

hate the grind
love the pvp
hate the grind
love the pvp
hate
the
grind
so
effing
much
you have no idea
how much
I
hate the grind.
give me a game like EQ or WoW only with no grind and 100% pvp and I would be in heaven.

28

Dark Age of Camelot, though not so much these days…Game’s dead, sadly.

29

Game time is “me” time. If I want to interact with people I go to the pub. But one time I did download a WoW trial to see what everyone was raving about. The things that put me off were the rubbish (compared to HL2) graphics, and the 3rd person point of view.

30

The economic model put me off, but as alluded to in the thread that’s not entirely rational. It’s largely based on what I’m used to, but I’d say nothing about catching one movie a month or buying a CD (what are those?). In theory an MMPRPG offers more (and more convenient) hours of entertainment.

The kids thing is a major factor. Though I’ve never even loaded one, the impression I get is that the things that keep me from playing HL2 multi-player are exponentially greater.

What the hell is the grind. I get the impression that every once in a while (regularly?) you need to do some horribly repetitive task. I’m pretty curmudgeonly about my fun. I liked the ‘pipes’ mini-game in Bioshock. I think it was my second hacking attempt in Bioshock II that I said “fuck that noise, I want to play a plot-centred FPS, not some twitchy carnival game.” After wondering what the hell I meant by “fuck that noise,” I went out to find a cheat. Didn’t use it to change anything but allowing me to hack past that annoying distraction. So something described as a grind? Yeah, probably not my cup of tea, particularly if it’s unavoidable.

Then there’s the apparent commitment. Maybe I’m wrong, but it sounds like to keep your stuff and get anywhere you need to join a group and not suck. Screw that. If I get a few hours at 3 AM I want to behead some monsters at 3 AM, not meet at some particular time to go raiding. If that happens to be a month apart, so be it.

Ach, just not interested, but have never tested the theories.

This was a tragic mistake and a profound loss. I wonder if I’m making the same one with MMORPGs?

31

By their very nature, MMORPGs require a lot of repetitive actions. If you want to level up, you need to kill 350 monsters. If you want to skill up your blacksmithing, you need to acquire 150 copper ore, etc. Part of what happens is the player’s fault: the grand design was that you would explore various dungeons, travel about and kill/collect things along the way. Players said “Pfft, that’s wasting time” and proceeded to sit in one spot (“camp”) and beat down the monsters there whenever they appeared. Some games have tried to mitigate this by making monster-killing less profitable for leveling than questing. Instead of killing 200 goblins in one spot, you’re asked to travel here or there and collect this or that and given bonuses for doing so. In theory, this would add variety to your experience although the core “kill things” part doesn’t change.

The other grind aspect is “material” rewards. A magic sword may drop only from the Rat King. The Rat King only spawns once every 20 times you kill A Rat Noble. When the Rat King does die, he has a 5% chance of dropping the sword. You can guess the result. On a larger scale, you can have “raids” where 10-30+ people get together to kill one boss-type monster who then drops two pieces of armor. guess what the raid is doing for the next five weeks until everyone has their armor.

The name of the game, of course, is to keep you invested and paying. Hopefully (to them) you’ll say “I can’t quit now. I already have the Celestial boots, breastplate and gloves after 3 months work – I just need the helmet” or “I can’t ditch my level 85 knight, it took me 3 years to get him here”.

On the other hand, people who started Everquest in 1999 are pushing 40+ by now and don’t have time for that nonsense like they did in college. So developers are promoting “cash shops” where you can play the core game for free but directly purchase perks and equipment to make your game easier. Don’t kill the Rat King fifty times, just buy his sword for $5.75. Don’t have time to kill 300 monsters to level? Buy a Double XP potion for $2.50 that lasts an hour. Of course now you’re not thinking “I have a month’s worth of time in that sword and shield” but rather “I have ten dollars invested in that sword and shield that’ll be ‘wasted’ if I stop playing now.”

32

The “high” I got by killing Lich King the first time after MANY attempts was worth it.

33

Thanks Jophiel. That sounds … tedious.

34

I prefer single player games for many reasons (not the least of which is they end and I can put them away) but right now I play two MMOs:

I joined City of Heroes because I wanted to play a Super Hero/Villain game and it was the only option. I found I liked it. It is so heavily instanced and has a relatively low population making it barely an MMO. It also seems to have mature user base which makes when I do team a fun experience.

I also joined SWTOR because it was my only shot at playing Knights of the Old Republic 3. While it is “MMO-y” and at first I was annoyed, I found it plays a lot like a single player game if you want to.

I still prefer single player games. if I learn the next Fallout and Elder Scrolls are MMOs I will be sad.

35

Depending on the game and people, it doesn’t have to be. I’ve had a lot of fun evenings of sitting at a camp and pulling in swarms of monsters that challenged us and felt good about coming out alive. A lot of good chatter, jokes and teamwork that made the time feel worth it. I’ve also had times when I realized a spell I wanted was three levels off and it felt like a job to grind it all out. Or bitched that I’d been killing a placeholder monster for three nights waiting for the named guy to spawn and drop a specific items.

Like I said, I do blame both ends of the equation. While you can point to specific things game developers do to keep you hooked, the initial “vision” in Everquest was that you would just travel around and adventure and get stuff along the way. Not every level 40 warrior would have the same “optimal” sword or best +health armor. Finding a named monster would be a surprise. Players, of course, said “what’s the fastest way to have the best stuff and be the bestest player ever?” and replaced adventuring with sitting in one spot for 16 hours, grinding out levels and waiting for the Onyx Bulwark of the Righteous to finally drop. Not that games haven’t capitalized on this human nature since then.

36

I’m another person who has tried MMOs (D&D Online and Champions Online – both free to play) but who treats them as single-player games.

My two cents: At low levels, they play basically like a normal computer RPG (do this quest, beat this bad guy, etc.). But once I started to get to higher levels, I’d run out of quests that I could do as a single player; instead, one was expected to join in raids or multi-player instances with bad guys who were too tough to defeat alone. Sorry, not interested. So that meant that I’d either have to run the same quest over and over again (no thanks) or I could just give up and start a new character.

37

I fully believe that no MMO can be sustainable without some form of repetitive activity, which usually gets classified as ‘grind’.

That said, I also believe most people really define grind as “doing something you don’t really want to do in order to get something you do want.” If you’re having fun, no matter how repetitive it is, it’s not a grind. By the same token, someone else who’s doing the exact same repetitive task but doesn’t really like it would call it a grind. In City of Heroes, I dislike the pre-level 20 experience while some people revel in it. To me it’s a grind, to them they’re just having fun.

With that in mind, you can start to see how ‘the grind’ is something nebulous and difficult to pin down. An MMO has to please a lot of people, and some things that are more or less mandatory will please some people but not others. Optional objectives are even more subject, since they tend to be challenging or grueling, but because they’re optional they don’t have to be gentle. (Player views on what’s optional or not are as varied as what’s fun or not.)

It’s possible to avoid grind, of a sort. Star Wars: The Old Republic accomplishes it pretty well, but only by making 80% of the core game into something indistinguishable from a single-player RPG. And the problem with non-repetitive content is that you have to have a lot of it, and you have to make it at a pretty rapid pace to keep people playing your game. Most development teams simply can’t keep up with that pace, and in fact I worry about TOR’s sustainability for that reason.

Really, while the game is important, it’s more important that it be a social activity. MMOs are games with chatrooms and high multiplayer accessibility. What’s important is that you’re able to easily do shit with other people, and less important what that shit is. It’s kind of like karaoke in that respect. You can play most MMOs without friends, but then you’re missing out on a giant portion of what makes them fun, even if you don’t actually play together, just talk and enjoy the game together. Single-player games know they have the full attention of the player, so they’re able to focus more on providing a richer individual experience, rather than just creating an environment where folks can get together and dick around.

38

My other problem with MMO’s (and pretty much any online game) is that I’m not generally wired for hours of playing at a time. Even when I get engrossed in something and play it for half a day, I take breaks. The “Pause” feature is my favorite part of most games.

I can really only stand to play the same thing for maybe a half hour at most. Then I need to switch to something else - watch TV, do some chores, read a book, something. I’d be a shitty guildsman, or whatever; I’d be dropping off every 30 minutes.

39

Lord of the Rings: Online managed to make most xp gain quest based which helped some (although you had quests for 20 pig ears or whatever).

Then they made perks that required killing 700 goblins or something ridiculous. :rolleyes:

40

I download Startrek Online from Steam today because I remember it was now free to play. I played it for 30 minutes, remembered why I didn’t like MMOs (free or not) and quit.

I hadn’t even made it past the tutorial :frowning: