Overly Positive

Oz of Kill Ten Rats had something short and sweet to say about detractors who dismiss an MMO for being “just like (insert game here)”. The familiar argument of imitation being a part of evolution (everyone steals, essentially) was used, and it is, if nothing else, to the point and direct.

But the argument that everyone copies from everyone else more than a Xerox machine isn’t really the only good thing about an MMO that has elements that are recognizable from other titles. To be perfectly honest, the good thing that an MMO with familiarity has for people that play it is simple comfort – the kind of comfort you get from a bath or shower at the right temperature, a familiar spot on the couch/recliner, or worn clothes that fit well. Why do I say this? Well, part of the reason why comfort is so important in MMOs, at least among my geek friends, is that despite the (legitimate) desire for innovation and new features, folks are really most at home in the MMO genre with a backbone of expected, familiar features.

Part of this is probably due to the fact that as MMO players, we do expect to do a bit of repeated, grindy-type tasks. Whether it is reputation, a bunch of fetch quests, or the ever-present leveling treadmill, people who play MMOs know that at some point they’ll be doing something over and over for a particular goal of advancement. In that respect, innovating a notion that you might level, say, through juggling wild badgers rather than gaining experience might not be the best thing to introduce to people. Knowing and expecting the grind makes people feel at least a bit more at ease about playing a game.

Another reason is for the casual player market in general. Now before the hardcore geeks dismiss me outright for the fact that casual players aren’t “real” players, I do want to say that aside from championing more people playing the genre in general, there’s a level of practicality to my positive argument for casuals. From what I’ve seen, if you have an MMO that has an amazingly innovative feature that seems fresh to the obsessive MMO player that has played it all, but which looks like the DaVinci code to an average player, you really aren’t going to get the casual, average player to buy in. If a casual player is comfortable with sitting down and picking up a title with features they’ve come to expect in an MMO, it’s more likely that they’ll decide they are willing to keep playing it, even if it is only for a few hours a week. It’s nice to have a high learning curve for innovative features if you have a certain kind of player, but there is something to be said to having features from other games that people can identify with.

Lastly, to return to Oz’s evolution argument, even the familiar and comfortable can sometimes breed a bit of unexpected evolution. Just as the next generation of species down might have a variation in color, feature, and overall adaptive ability, so too do MMOs with features from other games tune and evolve them. If you don’t believe me on that one, there’s Blizzard, who have made it a bit of a lucrative career of taking features from other titles and polishing them to their sort of sheen, with some rather successful results. Even excusing the current MMO king of the hill, if you think about how something like quests work, from the addition of an onscreen count, to circles of areas where to go to NPC identification, the old and familiar has been taken by title after title and made better. It really just boils down to the core of why people shouldn’t be so worried about how a game “is like this other game I played”. Ultimately, it’s a process of improvement regardless of whether or not the MMO succeeds, and is, if nothing else, one example of how other developers can improve.

It’s a comfortable evolution that I’m more than happy with – even if I can’t stand recliners.

The other day I had the sort of disturbing idea that I would go ahead and read other forums in an effort to see how to improve relations with ones I work with. Of particular note was observing how new people, or the term by which they are (mostly) affectionately named, “noobs”, were treated in the grand scheme of communities and games, specifically with regard to MMOs.

Now, I’m well-traveled and even though I’m an optimist and an idealist, I know there are bad places on the interwebz where people aren’t so nice. Still, I was a bit taken aback to see in other places how unwelcoming people were to new folks. I’m not just talking about being straight up mean to someone – that’s, well, unoriginal. I mean someone asking a question and getting all manner of sarcastic answers that don’t lead the noob to the proper pasture.

I think it’s safe to say that the cultivation, not the destruction, of noobs is how we should be behaving. Any character or any hero was a noob at some point, after all. Link had to get that crappy first sword from the old man, Mega Man started out with just a pew pew pea shooter, the Onyxia Raid Leader and Leeroy Jenkins were all level 1 – you get the point. The thing is, while new people should have some meaningful expectation to do a little research, a new question is a question we’ve asked of ourselves or others at some point when learning a game, and especially an MMO.

I suppose this is why I understand why elitism happens but I don’t necessarily agree with it as a long term solution for any MMO. There’s a certain level of appeal to any community that remains small, but any community does need to have some way to grow and add to itself. This is why successful MMOs are able to thrive and continue to appeal to players – they’ve got a way to turn their noobs into players and eventually, for some, into elite community members. But there’s always space for a new person to be the next hero. I think that’s what people miss when it comes to treating noobs with sarcasm or just plain rudeness in MMOs. The noob you help today could be the world’s top player in a few months, and not helping them and putting them off means you’ve lost something that could potentially elevate the state of your own community – all without having to do something beyond being pleasant and understanding.

So the next time you want to join in on the noob sarcasm bandwagon, be kind and rewind the “stfu noob” vibe. You’d be surprised at how far it takes you, eventually.