Overly Positive

I check out a lot of other blogs in my spare time and I probably should respond to a few of them a bit more – there’s lots of talented folks out there who write about subjects that I’m interested in, and beyond that, quite a few that I can inject a bit of responsive optimism into. Today I poked into one such post by Keen, who writes that most if not all MMOs post-WoW apparently have only 3 months worth of shelf life and are built to “achieve failure”.

Whoa there, cynical train, stop pulling into the station. The idea that MMOs these days are built, consciously or unconsciously, to fall on their face is a bit of a sad analysis of affairs, is it not? I feel bad for Keen, as it appears he’s fallen into a pattern of creating positive posts about an MMO only to be dashed against the rocks and end up disliking it. I wouldn’t say that MMOs these days are built to fail within a time period of 3 months, per se. Rather, I think that MMO developers in general are finding that making a game such as WoW, or Everquest, or anything else for that matter is a work in progress rather than a finished product.

Players, however, don’t quite follow the same mindset. Some of this may come from the fact that the playerbase is larger, which means that the old school MMO player finds themselves surrounded by folks who were not raised on games like UO and EQ, but rather on things like console games and modern online play, which provide a mostly finished product with additions and bug fixes being the only thing that needed changing. The issue is that the mentality is transferred to MMOs, where finished products are expected of virtual worlds that are always changing and never quite set in stone. When these players crash up against the fact that an MMO is not only persistent but not something that has a closed end to it, they’re not willing to be as forgiving as they good be. The mass migration and practice of MMO tourism is pretty much based in this mentality.

The other fact is that the mentality of a finished product that is able to provide years of entertainment infects old school MMOers like Keen, too. There’s a bit of selective memory in some of us folks who’ve been around for a long time – we don’t really remember the fact that UO took years to fix some core bugs and player-killer issues or that EQ raids sometimes had issues that crippled encounters. We don’t really remember that in FFXI you used to be able to (accidentally or not) run a mob who was chasing you to the end of a zone for some poor adventurer to die to upon entry. We don’t even remember that WoW’s release  had a couple classes that were arguably not fleshed out and a  dungeon system that shouldn’t have, but did have some busted pull issues. We just remember when it was fixed, polished, made easier, or otherwise was made to be more fun, more engaging, and yes – more of a finished feel. That’s the stuff that takes more than 3 months.

I don’t think I’m saying that people should change their playstyle if they like to rush to level cap, prefer to take their time, or yearn for the increased difficulty and dynamic sandboxing that Keen does. You can only really stand in the way of that flood for so long. Nor am I advocating that developers release unfinished or unpolished products that they can use for a quick buck, either. What I am advocating, is a little bit more of a positive outlook and perspective on MMOs that last, persist, and have a community that sticks around for 3 months or more. A sort of idea that MMOs have bugs, have balance issues, have only a limited amount of content based on game design constraints, and most of all, that things can be changed, updated, or worked on. A chance for something like an MMO to evolve and grow with its interested playerbase, that understands and can commit to things being a work in progress and not an immediate failure.

I think if people adopted more of this attitude, both on the player and developer side, that we’d have less MMO “failures” and more MMO successes in the market – or at least a bit more shelf life to today’s MMO market. They say hindsight is 20/20, but I’d like to say that when it comes to foresight, you can only hope to get as good as 80/40, or worse. Why is this? MMOs, as I’ve said, are a work in progress, always persistent, always changing,  and always affected by its players in new and unique ways, whether through innovation, or through bugs and exploits. There’s no real good way to test for the dynamic nature of human player interaction on a large scale. It’s why developers rely on meaningful feedback that isn’t a rant to fix and change things.

If the players were more positive on the long term outlook of a game that inevitably has to be changed and fixed, and the developers were more positive on the right kind of player feedback that can make their game better (even if it undoes the design a little), we’d have happier folks overall, and not ones that have a contentment level lasting 3 months.

A friend of mine once said that the best part of chaos is being right in the middle of it as it flows around you. Ok, granted, he was a dude who was the type to annoy people in crowds by stopping, but still, the quote has relevance.

Launch of something when it comes to MMOs is a unique experience. I say unique because of the fact that unlike something you might see in the annals of Black Friday or a midnight game or device release, it’s one that is lived entirely online.  The curious part about that is that you still get the same kinds of archetypes you do when you have someone waiting for an actual release at an actual place. These include – the Guy Who Can’t Stop Whining, The Fanboy Who Knows Too Much, The Random Girl With No Interest In The Game, and Frazzled Staffer With No Sleep. The behavior is the same – people standing around talking about what they’re going to do, folks who’ve probably been camping the place since hours beforehand, at least one person who is yelling just a little too loud for someone’s benefit.

But more than that there is anticipation and excitement. An eagerness, if you will, to get your hands on something and experience it. A need to be the first to experience it. And above all, to share that experience with others. Yeah, it’s packed, and its crowded, and there are long waits and not everyone gets what they want on day one. But the fact of the  matter is that you were there when it started, you suffered a little bit, but eventually you got to do what you came for. In MMOs, that holds even more power because of the fact that you’re sharing the experience not just with someone who is local, but with others who are all over the world.

No one can predict these days what will happen in the weeks following the launch of an MMO. Some succeed, some stay afloat, and others sink. But it’s nice to know that at least for a few moments out of the day, the madness of launch and shared excitement is something that no self-respecting geek gamer wants to miss. I hope everyone holds onto the excitement of logging in for as long as they can for their favorite MMO of choice on launchday. In the midst of the inevitable pain of patching, balancing, nerfing, and crashing, it is something worth remembering.

Geeks are usually smart people with a good head on their shoulders. Ask any geek to rationally explain to you why you shouldn’t be afraid of cellphones giving you disease, computers being able to see that you visited the Hello Kitty fansite 450 times in the last week, or anything else that would normally freak you out, and they’ll be able to do it with typical aplomb.

Ask them what they think about one of their favorite games receiving a hotfix because an ability is broken, though, and they immediately become an irrational whirlwind of rage – crying, pounding the ground, and generally having an outburst online that John McEnroe would be proud of. Read any forum, check any fansite, pop into the comments section of any video, and you’ll find these tinfoil hat wearers everywhere. To them, any explanation leads to a definitive conclusion, any set of words can be connected together to fill a hidden agenda, and even a seemingly innocent update about the inclusion of in-game donuts is evidence of some larger scheme designed to do something else, whether that is good or bad.

I’m kind of not sure what makes the tinfoil hat so comfortable to wear, but I do know that it is certainly something that an optimist like me isn’t really interested in putting on my head. For one, it’s a lot of effort. Tinfoil is light, to be sure, but the weight of reading between the lines at any possibility of finding something is a heavy and stressful job. It’s also exhausting, too. If for some unknown reason I was to run around in circles waving my arms around whenever someone said something to me about lunch plans, I think I’d have very sore arms and aching legs. Multiply that by a few days and a few hundred posts and you’ve got someone for whom it is a literal mental strain to actually read anything. Rough stuff.

I think that removing the tinfoil hat is something that will go a long way towards simply enjoying a game for what it is, what it could be, and what it inevitably always has to patch to be. Yes, there is a reason for doing and saying a lot of things, but finding out about them along with everyone else, right from the horse’s mouth, isn’t necessarily a bad thing. To be perfectly honest there are more important things to worry about other than the fact that the latest and greatest something is going to put you to the road to ruin. Games have so much more to them than what the developers tell you about them, whether that is how you personally enjoy them, how your friends perceive them, and how they change the industry overall. Worrying about the methods and design of how they get there, or hidden motivations or agendas is ultimately just has a negative effect – so I say, enjoy those in-game donuts. I know I am.