| Apr. 12th, 2005 @ 04:19 pm the devs |
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It may come as a surprise to find out that I think MMOG developers NEED to be responsive to their player bases. I think that World of Warcraft is still young and blizzard is still developing as a MMOG company, so a better model to examine would be SOE and Everquest since I'm familiar with them and they are obviously not new to the industry. Everquest today is incredibly different from the game that was originally released under this title. Many changes have been made to meet the players' demands, which is probably one factor contributing to the success of Everquest. Here's an example of how game play was changed in response to player demands:
Right about the time my character reached lvl 45 or 50 or so, a new expansion was released for Everquest. A particular zone in this expansion had this "safe" area right in the middle of it where no mobs spawned or wandered. Like WoW, the ideal Everquest group consisted of a variety of classes including one with a lot of hit points, one with good healing abilities, and others that either back up these two or provide a lot of damage or other specialized abilities, such as crowd control (a specialization that does not really exist in WoW). My character was of the crowd control class. Somehow, someone discovered that a group of 2 wizards (heavy magic damage dealers), 1 cleric (healer), and 3 enchanters (crowd control) could plow through the lvl 40-60 range at an amazingly fast rate. It's hard to explain if you don't know the mechanics of the game and I don’t want to spend a lot of time on it but basically one of the wizards would pull about 60-80 mobs to the group with the enchanters would keep stunned indefinitely while the wizards used their area of effect damage spells to constantly do damage to all of the mobs. It didn't always work, but if you could get a group with experienced AoEers (that’s what we were called) then you could gain the experience that would normally take at least a month in a few days. Well, we became notorious and before long there would be a long list of peoples names (enchanters, wizards, and clerics only) waiting for someone int he group to leave so that they could join next (incidentally, I always got bumped to the front of the list ;D). The same expansion that had this zone also had a new feature that allowed players to communicate cross-servers. I would actually get tells from enchanters on other servers asking me for tips on how to create effective AoE groups.
As you can imagine, everyone who was not a cleric, wizard, or enchanter was pissed off by this. For one, we took all the mobs from the zone in one pull thereby making the zone useless to anyone not in our group. We also used some pretty bad methods of getting rid of people who insisted on trying to kill mobs in the zone (the zone had a huge experience bonus) since, well, we considered all the mobs in the zone to be ours. Also, the other classes almost never had an opportunity to join in this group and were forced to continue to lvl up the old, slow way. People started getting really mad, and sure enough SOE nerfed (changed) the enchanters’ ability to keep the mobs stunned indefinitely. Of course, I didn't care since I had already leveled as high as was efficient from that method. The point is that some players felt that other players had an unfair advantage and SOE changed it just to satisfy the customers demands. The wizards, clerics, and enchanters were upset, but did not feel cheated and continued to level up the traditional way with all the other classes, who were also now satisfied.
This is just one situation where SOE changed the player classes' abilities in order to appease complaining players. I think that if SOE had not made any changes there would have been even more protests and I do not find it hard to believe that people would make new characters just to be in the AOE group. Imagine if you were a warrior and all your caster friends were quickly surpassing you due to utilizing (I refuse to use the word exploiting, here :P) a mechanic of that game that was not applicable to your class. It would suck and you might end up feeling unmotivated to play since it would be impossible to keep up anyway.
I think that MMOGs should, ideally, operate just as most other businesses do: with the customers' satisfaction foremost in mind. If you don't have your player base, then you have nothing. And even if you are the "best" game at the moment, someone will eventually come out with a game better than yours with a better customer service policy. If you want loyal players, you must meet their demands (the reasonable ones, anyway) and provide an effective means for communication between the players and the game employees. A game should not change so much that it not longer resemebles it’s original design, but it should be built with the potential to be changed to meet players’ demands and expectations over the coming years. Sorry for going over three paragraphs; I just can’t shut up when this topic comes up. |
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