Icarus Studios News

A common complaint about MMOs is that they are too-heavily built on slot machine-style reinforcement methods, effectively turning them into a kind of Skinner box for humans. In the typical MMO, the monthly-subscription model encourages the design to be geared for maximum time involved in the game. To keep players in the game for months on end, the solution is to create enough content that it will take months to consume.

An efficient way to create this much content is to require players to repeat actions more than once: the classic “kill 10 rats” quest. Each time the player kills a rat, his or her experience bar increases slightly, with a bigger boost once the quest is completed. Collection quests typically go further into the slot machine mentality: when collecting ten “pristine rat tails,” one person may complete the quest by killing ten rats, while another may have to kill many more. These types of quests are so common that they’re incorporated into standard lists of possible MMO quests.

This style of game design is so effective that it’s not likely to be overturned any time soon (unless procedural systems make it easier for a designer to create a plot-based level than to spawn a field of monsters and a guy that wants you to kill ten of them). But they do have a couple of significant drawbacks that designers also need to account for.

The first of these is advancement fatigue and the grind. Put simply, reward and advancement mechanisms tend to focus players on attaining them over time. Even if many of your players enter the world thrilled with the environment and story, and enjoying the subtle interplay of your game systems, it won’t take long before they’re really playing to get their next advancement fix. It’s inevitable: the design applies rewards and advancement to the actions the player likes to undertake, eventually the point of the activities seems to be to get the reward, and eventually the player is grinding out monster kills rather than participating in the story because the grind is a more efficient way to get levels. Many MMOs eventually increase the experience from quests to counter just this problem, but that paradoxically makes it worse (by even further emphasizing the reward from the quest rather than the story).

Ultimately, the focus on rewards means that players will drop out of your world if the rewards stop coming, even though there remains lots of story content that they haven’t seen yet: the designers walk a tightrope of making leveling slow enough that players don’t quickly reach maximum level, but fast enough that they don’t give up. But your most dedicated players will hit this cap more quickly than most, and at that point you have to have an endgame that continues to slowly reward them as well. The cycle is self-reinforcing, and virtually inescapable.

This, of course, leads to the other banes of MMOs: gold farming and power leveling. Since a time-consuming grind arises between parts of the game the player genuinely finds interesting, many players will opt to cheat to artificially speed their reward and advancement process. The game is disrupted by efficient traders constantly “camping” lucrative areas, preventing normal players from using them as intended, and continual requests on the chat channels for assistance in power leveling. These are natural repercussions of the grind: once players have accepted that the entire point is getting rewards, it begins to seem useful to get these rewards in even more efficient manners. The end result of time-saving design decisions is headache-inducing player actions.

Obviously, there is a lot more that can be said about grinding, level curves, endgames, gold farming, and power leveling, but the essence of each is the original decision to extend gameplay by adding easy-to-make but player-time-consuming systems. Keep the ramifications in mind in the earliest stages of your design: obvious strategies for player retention require less obvious strategies down the line.

-Stephen Cheney, Virtual Worlds Team