MMORPG Motivation: Is Adventure Not Enough?

February 11, 2008 – 6:45 pm

This is the first post featuring contributions from The Greenskin’s newest writer, Bo! We thought this collaborative piece might be an interesting way to introduce him to the community as it will highlight some of our similarities and differences of thought and opinion. Say hello in a comment!

So close… After reading an interesting article over at Massively entitled, MMOGology: Gear of War, I was left with a burning question: Why are MMORPGs so obsessed with a gear model that introduces such an insurmountable disparity between the haves and have-nots? I can’t think of a single MMORPG I’ve played or followed that didn’t include gear as the ultimate deciding factor in a 1 vs. 1 or group vs. group PvP battle. Levels and skill were always important, but if you had the gear, you were almost always certain to win…

Take the two most highly skilled 8-man raiding guilds in DAOC. Give one group pre-ToA gear and the other group post-ToA gear. Who do you think is going to win?

Take the two most highly skilled level 29 rogues (or any class) in WoW and face them off against each other in WSG. Give one the basic gear he’d earn from questing and the other a full auction-house set bought by a level 70 alt with deep pockets. Who do you think is going to win?

The same goes for SWG, EQ, PotBS, and all the other mainstream MMOs I can think of. I haven’t tried CoH or LotRO but I would guess they’re the same. The only MMO I can think of that values skill over gear is Guild Wars, which is apparently more about the abilities you’ve unlocked and brought into combat. Then again, GW also removes all barriers to entry by allowing anyone to create a pure max-level PvP character from the get go, so they’re obviously not too concerned with the standard RPG progression model.

Bo: CoH/CoV doesn’t have equipment in the normal sense. You learn an ability and then add enhancement token slots for it as your level. All equipment is in the form of enhancement tokens for your characters abilities. Your gear then is in the form of bonuses given to the skills you have, be it a shortened reuse timer, increased damage, longer duration, ect. By the time you hit maxed level you basically have the best equipment you’ll ever need. This creates a problem at the end of the game. You end up with nothing to work towards. Gear isn’t visible on your character so it has zero aethsetic value (this is a thing many CoH/CoV players enjoy because they can have they toons look exactly how they want them without having to use inferior gear). I found myself with no goals to persue at the end of my leveling. If you enjoy playing a game for the sake of playing it, its great. However, if you play the game to progress you find yourself not at a road block but simply with no road at all.

Guild Wars has the same issue: the gear is more of an after thought to the game, or atleast it was when I played. I can’t speak for the newer expansions. Skills became the new gear as my colegue said. You played the game to acquire skills. You then equiped your best skills and went into battle. It was a very fun game for a relatively short amount of time, then the aspect of your character looking like every other member of that class kind of sets in. Also, games like WoW may be ridiculed for having imbalanced PvP or arena combat, but Guild Wars at times feels like playing a game of Poker with the hand of your choice but the dealer keeps changing which combination of cards beats which. No one likes walking into a game with a royal flush only to realize two of a kind beats all.

The way most MMORPGs look at gear these days is the same way they look at abilities, health/mana, levels, and at the very basic level, experience points. You build up increments of XP until you reach a new level. For each new level you gain more health and mana points. Additionally, each new level (or couple levels) will allow you to practice new abilities. This is the standard progression that almost all MMORPGs are built upon and it goes back to the pen, paper, and imagination days of Dungeons & Dragons. I don’t see this changing any time soon because it’s a fundamental concept upon which most RPGs are built.

But why must gear follow the same progression, or if it must, why does it have to scale to such great heights? Why must there be such a huge difference between the trusty bronze sword and the flaming, bejewelled, mithril greatsword? A bit of difference? Sure that’s acceptable, but giving the latter +100 to all stats, +300 DPS, mana-sapping, and 10% chance to insta-kill all enemies within a 12km radius? That’s a little extreme…

carrot on a stick I know the reason behind creating such powerful gear and I don’t really like it. They want to motivate you to experience their end-game content and without the chance of earning great rewards, they don’t think you’ll bother. In other words, they don’t think the “sense of adventure” is good enough. One would think an MMORPG whose primary endgame is to have their players locked in perpetual, never-ending RvR (WAR) wouldn’t need to fall back into old habits, but you have to wonder…

What kind of expansions could EA Mythic introduce for WAR that didn’t include new PvE content for you to experience and new gear for you to obtain? Think about it… The easiest way for them to revolutionize RvR combat every year is to put out a new expansion that forces you to gain better gear and abilities (through PvP and PvE). Will they add a new tier (10 more levels) with each expansion? I sure hope not, but it isn’t very likely anyway given that capitol cities are all in the T4 zones. What would a T5 zone include if the primary goal is to capture your opponent’s capitol (master levels again… now that’s a scary thought)? They could introduce new races and classes, which I’m sure is in their expansion plans for the future, but aside from that, it may all come probably down to a gear grind again.

Bo: This is a very interesting idea and one worth talking about. How do you add to a game where the ultimate goal is burning your enemy’s capital to the ground and killing its fruit venders? Would adding another zone and more levels shift the ultimate goal of the game? In my opinion, No. We can only assume if an expansion is released, then the storyline will advance. This means that someone made headway in the WAR, brought in bigger guns or new races joined the war effort. If any of that occured there is nothing stopping Mythic from raising the difficulty level of raiding the capital cities. If the cities are meant to be raided by max level characters, then when the max level increases the might of the capital cities should reflect this increase. Keep in mind that games like WoW’s end game problems didn’t come from increasing the level cap. It came from releaseing more gear that built ontop of previous gear. The difference between a Molten Core level 60 and a Naxx level 60 was incredible. When the expansion came and raised the level cap the gap became less and less very quickly. It is easier for people to get another 10 levels than it is to try to wade through high end raid content. Many people can’t even devote the amount of time needed to be able to accomplish the task let alone want to deal with some of the individuals that do have the time.

Ideally, here’s what I’d like to see (Snafzg):

Between the low-end T4 gear and the high end T4 gear, I only want to see an increase of 5-10% in overall improvement. Why? The gap is large enough to be worth seeking out for yourself (to improve your character) but not so insurmountable that superior skill can’t overcome it. Even if players are of equal skill, there’s still a chance to beat someone in better gear if it’s only 5-10% better.

You can seed these items on the toughest of bosses, in the deepest and most frightening of dungeons and people will still go after them. Why? Because contrary to what most MMORPG devs believe, many people still play these games as a form of escapism and for a lot of players, the adventure IS enough. An item that is only “slightly” better than what they had before is just icing on the cake. The casual players and hardcore RvR-heads won’t be completely gimped for ignoring this stuff, but they’ll still be at a slight disadvantage. This system would please the most amount of subscribers IMO.

Mythic should already know this. After all, the most popular cluster in DAOC right now is the one made up of CLASSIC servers. Many of their subscribers spoke up by abandoning characters they had spent years on, accumulating all the necessary gear it took to compete in a post-ToA RvR environment and threw up a middle finger to the system. They rolled new characters on servers that went back to simpler times when the gear disparity wasn’t quite as bad. A bigger middle finger would have been quitting altogether, but then, people did that in droves too…

Bo: Games like WoW have increased the player expectation of what gear should be. The days of UO and Everquest items are over. You can’t simply give a player +1 damage for 3 weeks of work and expect him to be happy about it. However, even WoW doesn’t really give as much people give them credit for. Yes, a season 3 gladiator geared toon will competely dominate a starting 70. However, the difference becomes much less noticably between season 2 geared and season 3 geared. Expecially if you consider the amount of time required to obtain the new set of gear. Many times while raiding I found myself going into a 25man raid every week for a chance of getting a chance to roll (if your guild did dkp then it gets even funnier, raid for a couple months just to be able to afford 1 item) on a piece of gear that really only gave me a couple of more points of damage or 5 to a skill. The first time you down a boss adventure is enough for me and many of the people I’ve played with to dive into high end content. However, there is no sense of adventure that would make me throw myself at it every week for a year. Sitting down after wiping for 5 hours straight and having to farm later to pay your repair/pot bills, you then wonder if the “glorious” gear is even worth it.

My collegue gives the example of a twinked level 29 versus a level 29 with only the gear he can get out of his normal leveling, this is a perfect example of what WAR is already taking steps to overcome. The non-twinked character is at a loss because 95% of the gear he comes into contact with isn’t for him. The problem isn’t huge differences in the gear itself. The problem is a lack of itemization…period. One of WoWs faults has been the following claim, “The game doesn’t really start till you hit level 70.” and its true. You can’t really make “sets” of gear untill the end of the game. Otherwise, you either outlevel instances to quickly to get some of the gear you would need or the gear flat out doesn’t exist. There are large gaps in the game where they are no tanking gear, or fury warrior gear, or feral druid gear available at all. Also, many of the items you do have access to from quests while leveling are simply worse then an item you were given from a previous quest. At end game is where these sets of gear finally come into existance. Also, you do quest after quest for gear your character doesn’t even need. I have a warrior that has received more Paladin gear from quests then warrior gear, let alone tanking gear.

This is where WAR’s new ideas come into play. Public quests that keep you from having to build a group and run an instance for a couple hours to have a chance at getting something you might be able to use from one of the three bosses if and only if another class doesn’t beat you on the roll IF it even drops. You finish the public quest. You win the roll. You get to CHOOSE what reward you would like: an item you can use, gold, or both. That’s right. The team over at Warhammer Alliance were nice enough to post a log of a recent dev chat that has this little gem:

<DelmarWynn> muffin: How is loot alocated between the classes when it comes to quest, dose all classes chose from the same choices, or are the quest rewards diffrent for every class?

<[WAR]Josh>: We’ve been very careful to try and guarantee that players get rewards they can use. This comes in the form of relatively standard things like career-tailored quest loot, but also comes in more unusual forms like the PQ loot system that ALWAYS gives you a choice of an item you can use or gold or both. Nobody who earns PQ loot will ever get junk loot from the process.

They have hinted, in other posts as well, of there being many different sets of armor to obtain throughout your leveling career. A game without massive gaps in itemization means a game where gear disparities will play less of an important roll. Yes, the person with the “I play too much” gear will probably have an advantage over you but at least you won’t be running around in gear that was only decent 8 levels ago.