Ten Years of World of Warcraft
raphkoster.com
raphkoster.com
Ultima Online, on the other hand, was such an expansive and interactive world. You didn't choose your interactions based on personal preference. There was always the threat of another real life player coming to kill you, which created a sort of camaraderie in hunting grounds. You may not know someone, but suddenly he'd come to your rush if a murderer approached, and if you were lucky you both ended up outnumbering the murderer and you'd walk away with his loot. You wouldn't even know the person but you'd end up sharing an intense experience together where the stakes were high (if you died, you lost EVERYTHING). So many friendships were made that way.
It was a different experience that was about more than levels and raiding groups and elite loot. It was a true social space where your actions affected other players experiences, for better or worse. To me, this is the soul of the MMO, and exactly what WoW lacks.
I've been playing EVE since about 2007 now and it's the only thing keeping me playing MMOs let alone video games.
Then again EVE isn't really a game it's just a strange branch of real life.
True, in that it's very complex, and it does reward an analytical approach, which may or may not accord with one's own real life. Eve is a fantastic hobby, in that it is intellectually demanding, time consuming, skill rewarding, and an emotional investment. I can't recommend it but I'd certainly suggest it for whatever it is that ails ya.
That's a statement you can make about every game.
I'm just disappointed in the options available.
It is a new trailer CCP (makers of Eve) made with real player communication.
That spaceship thing is just a graphical representation to a very complex social simulation. Most people would keep playing EVE if CCP changed it into "Goat Simulator Online".
As someone told me once: EVE online is about spaceships like astronomy is about telescopes. (Of course he butchered a famous quote there).
Safety. You were safe to play without having other people purposefully ruin your game play. In UO it was PvP, in EQ it was training mobs, and there were means in other games as well, where a person could interrupt another endlessly.
Was it a step back in some cases? Sure, I came from Asheron's Call, you could pvp, pvp lite, or just pve. Yet it was such an open and expansive world filled with housing of all sorts that WOW initially felt like a step backward (zones? Really???). Yet WOW made sure you knew what you were supposed to be doing.
cater to causals and cater to hard cores (even water cooler types) and they pretty much covered the two markets needing to be served. One thing MMO companies over estimate; at least for Western markets;is the desire for PvP. Oh initially you will find games that offer both server types with populations nearly split but age and the PvP ones fall by the wayside.
People will accept guidance, but mostly they want a safe and fun experience. Safe meaning other people cannot just ruin your day.
Blizzard did an excellent job solving MMO problems that were major problems at the time, and they solved it so incredibly they completely dominated the market and squeezed out any room for new concepts.
Not everyone needs or wants the hand holding and artificial barriers that are put up between players and see some see that as a detriment to the experiences that could be created in this type of game.
And this gets to the other point, I'd argue that if a player (not character) only finds a game fun if there are 'victims' to exploit that they are in fact the problem. IMO a true fan of such things would enjoy the 'hardcore players who enjoy this brutal setting', but we've seen time and time again that these games fail because the majority of people who say they want these games really just want to be at the top of the food chain.
Random side note: The 'care bear' term erupted on the CoB board. The LS roleplayers tended to be very PvP heavy. The Chessie roleplayers were generally PvP averse. We called them care bears and they called us the biker gang. This lead to things like them making throwaway chars on LS to give us a "care bear invasion" at Silks, us making chars over there for impromptu events (some involving Koster himself), etc.
Basically they had a lot of abilities that weren't fun, and a bunch of stats that made the game suck. Most people were going to Ask Mr Robot to figure out which piece of gear to put on, and Icy Veins to figure out what button to press when.
They needed to carve out all the old cruft before they can add the new and exciting back in. I was equally cynical when the shattering happened, but after a few content patches was quite happy with the change.
This is a common gripe but I fail to understand it. I've been playing since BC and I never found it "fun" getting my gear hit-capped, or watching gear drop that wasn't useful for anyone in the raid, or having skills I never used.
There is tiny chance that I might play WoD but I don't get the time to play WoW as much as I used to get in my college days.
But if you are really sure about playing, I would be more than happy to join you.
Edit: I'm only playing casually.
So the question I have is whether there's any way to take that type of hard work ethic and get people to apply it to something more productive. Heck, I just gave a presentation at a barcamp style thing at a school on how Starcraft is actually a really intellectual game. But one thing I couldn't answer was whether it was possible to take the complex thinking that happens in a high-level Starcraft 2 game and see it blossom in everyday life for everyday tasks. :(
It actually really translates well into software, and most engineering disciplines, but not well in less productive professions like law or business. Your quest tracker is the issue tracker, your gold reward could be a bug bounty or bonus or team praise. Your sense of accomplishment is in shipping products, the way a guild has a sense of accomplishment for slaying a boss for the first time or clearing a raid.
I think the greatest barriers to this kind of thinking, at least in the domain HN is concerned, is that your goals and objectives are not always discrete and manageable (ie, your quest log has an unknown mob kill requirement) and figuring out the next boss to kill can be difficult.
If you had that information, I think software can really play out like a video game. When I bug fix in the KDE projects it really is a quest, the goals are discrete and the payoff is seeing my changes in the software I use every day. And I have the same feedback loop I had playing WoW from 2005-2009.
I started leading relatively large guilds and alliances (1000-6000 people) in a few MMOs at age 15. The experience and wisdom I gained from those experiences helped me greatly in my adult life. The games I played were very cutthroat and modeled off real-world politics, diplomacy, espionage, and warfare (the games in question were inspired by EVE and UO; I've also played those two, but not with leadership positions).
I'm now 22 and I frequently see parallels in my working life. I can think of many times I've leveraged some of my past experiences to help make decisions, especially when it comes to big-picture strategic problems.
Yes, it is easy to become extremely addicted to these kinds of games and it's tempting to sacrifice aspects of your personal or working life, but they can also offer a ton of fun and a ton of great learning opportunities. People just need to practice impulse control, and they need to set boundaries ("I won't login until I finish my homework for tomorrow", etc.).
I think MMOs like EVE should receive more study and writing in the scientific community, because it's a perfect example of a microcosm of some of the more "base" nature of human psychology and behavior.
By contrast, WoW requires ample access to a computer and the internet, which may not be yours or not primarily bought for the game, plus subscription fees. Not for the poor, but does not scale with dedication to the game.
At the pro level, not that many players actually own the cards they play with. They're borrowed from collectors or loaned from shops. The cost of a deck is basically not an issue at the pro level. At the grinder level, yeah, the up-front cost can be.
Most pro players probably do come from a reasonably privileged background, because you need to be able to spend the spare time to get good and have the resources to get to higher-level events to get good and qualify for the Pro Tour (the Online version mitigates travel costs somewhat, but it itself comes with costs). But I doubt most people trying to get to the Pro Tour are not any more wealthy than an average WoW player. Most grinders are college-age guys living on the cheap.
Money is not the differentiating factor. IMO not being all-consuming is a factor (you think about it all the time, but you can't play it all the time short of spending $10/hour Online). If you're a pro performing well enough to be invited for an entire season, you technically only have to play four one-week events per year. Being physical and physically social is a factor. Being more analytical is a factor; notable numbers of pros have gone on to careers in stock trading, gambling odds-making, etc.
Yeah, but only technically - in practice, intense preparation before each pro tour greatly increases your chances, so that's what most pros end up doing (esp. since the introduction of magic online, where they can practice, test out ideas etc. 24/7).
Say what you will about CCGs: they do, at least, provide you with tangible property that is unquestionably yours. That is not something WoW can claim.
Hell, we even track magic cards: http://www.mtgprice.com
So instead of skinner boxes trying to get people addicted to pointless tasks and extract money from them for worthless virtual attributes, they'd actually be useful ways to earn a living. Probably instead corporations will find ways to make gamers work for them and earn them more money.
You learn to use analytics tools (like worldoflogs.com which creates performance graphs based on raid event data) to be able to go up to people and say "hey, I think you can improve by trying X" without making things personal... much like agile startups use data-driven approaches ("velocity" and other metrics) to compartmentalize interpersonal relationships and team performance. With loot distribution, you learn that transparency and trust are key, and that you can set yourself apart in the community as an organization people want to be associated with. You learn how to recruit, how to hire, and even how to fire. And you learn to overcome the stress of making mistakes.
That all said, in order to be at the level where you're leading and learning these lessons as a leader and not a follower, the time sink is necessarily huge. Is the benefit worth the reward? Not for people who already have opportunities to get this experience in "meatspace." But I'd like to think that as technology improves, coding becomes widespread... people who are educated on leadership with the next generation of MMOs will naturally shift towards starting their own startups, and they'll be more successful because of their MMO experience. It's a scalable education system, and as other posters commented, everyone needs fun.
WoW, of course, is optimized for addictiveness, not optimized for teaching these lessons in the shortest amount of time possible. I never played America's Army, nor have I done much research on it, but it seems like at its best moments it became such a leadership training environment. There's a lot of room for exploration of this space.
Further works:
http://www.academia.edu/1317272/Leadership_Style_in_World_of... - plots a spectrum of leadership styles and how different guilds display those traits
http://www.businessweek.com/stories/2009-01-14/how-world-of-... - a bit of a stretch, but has some interesting ideas
1) She was productive. She just wasn't productive at being a college student.
2) She doesn't sound like she was being entertained. She sounded like she was handling logistics and leadership roles with great competence. To me, what I hear is "job satisfaction", except without pay. That's not entertainment.
3) Needing to entertain yourself is an excuse for not graduating. Probably not a sufficient one, but it's a valid one. Honestly, I think it's more accurate to say she dropped out due to burnout from working effectively two jobs.
For me it was the Battletech 3056 MUSE.
I was in charge of a major faction (for BT folks, I was Thomas Marik). It was more than a 40 hour job, and on top of that I both had to still be a college student and maintain my secret character for fun having purposes.
I managed a group of people which at the time seemed huge (still large by modern guild standards, but not enormous), complete with resource management, politics (who gets the good stuff?), etc.
It taught me a lot, although it did lead to lesser grades at the time. And really, that taught me a lot too :)
Mostly what I did was training new people in our pilot school, and we had a fun roleplaying based approach to it. I spend a lot of time at work helping people out too, I think it's just an expression of my personality no matter what the situation is.
I had a lot of fun playing that game. I think one of the highlights was one of the server-wide tournaments that was run, with the prizes being "legendary" character names (and stats). I almost won that. In one of the final rounds, my opponent fell into a hole on a treacherous map with level 9 cliffs on it before a single shot was fired. I took a "role playing" approach to it and allowed him to restart because it wasn't an honorable win. I was winning the re-match until I got taken out by a BS engine crit. Oh well.
To my knowledge I was the 2nd Thomas Marik and stuck around almost to the end.
It was really too bad that game never really got off the ground, but it was way too ambitious.
As a kid, it meant you would play hours and hours and get beaten repeatedly. You'd lose everything and then you'd have to find motivation to do better next time. You would find friends and nurture relationships because you needed and later because you found you really enjoyed them. Eventually, you would find you can kill for fun and profit, completely destroying weeks or months of a fellow player. It's a sort of Bottom-Up introduction on how civilizations form, because some time you realize the instabilities associated with violence (or, depending on your personality, just compassion from your repeated deaths). Protection networks formed -- killing someone might get you hunted. Guilds were the next step in this protection network, with huge political intricacies such as necessity of protecting some members which may or may not be in a morally justifiable position to maintain the position of power of the Guild.
I could go on. Some of the smartest people I know and many of my best friends played the game in their youth; I wouldn't say it made who they are, but if it didn't it surely provided an amazing opportunity to learn some thing you don't really do until a much later age, if ever.
It also happens to be a fun game. But it's super easy to make a simple, badly timed mis-click and lose your stuff to a random gank trap. (And no, ship insurance really doesn't help all that much.)
Edit: Feel free to disagree with me, but personally I wouldn't see WoW on a resume and think, "This person has experience doing hard work in the face of adversity".
I played on a PVP server, and the spontaneous PVP that occurred was almost never fair. I'd often explore the world alone, and get attacked by groups of enemy players. I fought back despite near-impossible odds; not giving up allowed me to improve. So when the game's arena system came out, and the playing field in PVP became more fair, my team attained the top rank (gladiator) in the most competitive battlegroup (bg9). Only the top 0.5% of teams earned that rank. I was one of only a few (less than 10 IIRC) hunters on US realms to get the gladiator rank for the first 2 seasons when they were underpowered and still had a dead zone. Most of the matches I played were against pros who also played WoW in e-sports tournaments.
I was a long-time member of a great guild, and although I wasn't the leader, I was chosen to be the player pursuing the Scarab Lord quest line for the guild. The quest took weeks to complete, and many parts required the help of my entire guild. I was one of two players out of 10,000+ to complete the quest on my server and open the AQ gates.
Initially at least, there were some parts of the game that took hard work and collaboration of an entire team in the face of adversity to reach some elite achievements. I don't disagree with you about the resume part though. Most wouldn't view WoW accomplishments on a resume as positive, and that's why I've never included them on mine.
I'm also surprised Raph didn't bring up Eve at all. It's a pretty successful and significant sandbox that takes its lineage from Ultima Online. It's nowhere behemoth level that WoW is but it fills its niche.
Edit:
> Edit: Feel free to disagree with me, but personally I wouldn't see WoW on a resume and think, "This person has experience doing hard work in the face of adversity".
Many people would see a positive, depending on what you were applying for. Excelling at a game would almost always be a plus worth mentioning if you were applying to a gaming company, be it a developer or Twitch. It's no different than any extracurricular, only mention it if it's likely to help you.
Excel enough at a game, and you can start your own business based on the game (as much as businesses started by young gamers tend to flame out very quickly) or get unsoliticed job offers (as much as they tend to be shady). Or now, between Twitch and Youtube, make playing the game your job.
I can't disagree with a single thing said here.
I tend to think of WoW as the Buy-N-Large generation ship of gaming.
It created an entire word that was in some sense a paradise, but at the exclusion of all the awesome, frustrating, exciting, tedious richness that came before it.
I would, however, say that UO was the first mainstream MMO and the game which brought the genre into people's minds.
I always felt that the largest problem of UO was that it was too successful. IMO if the target audience had been the primary player pool it'd have been a lot better. I remember in the months before the beta release I started seeing it hyped to FPS type players as a place where you could go kill people and I knew it wasn't going to be quite what they intended.
I did the EQ thing until the betas of World of Warcraft (WoW) arrived. I had enjoyed my time in EQ, but it was getting tedious to do anything, especially leveling. I was in a good guild (Dragon Army of Tribunal /represent!), but you pretty much had to devote 100% of your time to advance, especially in a raiding guild.
Along came WoW. It was a perfect out for me. I no longer wanted to commit myself to serious raiding and rely on a guild to simply level. I wanted an experience that was fun (i.e. non-tedious) that I could advance in (i.e. Quests were much more structured and fun) and I didn't have to rely on a group to advance. Life was good.
Until raiding began at the highest levels. Raiding was fun, but in some ways was worse than EQ. You had to have the perfect raid compensation (mostly to accommodate weaker players, but sometimes not) to finish a raid. So guild recruitment became hard core, if you didn't represent a class of need for the current expansion, it could be hard to participate. Luckily, starting over and leveling up wasn't so hard, so if a guild's live was for you, you could change your class pretty easily (compared to EQ).
And WoW raiding became the game. You had to level to the max (as fast as you could usually) so you could get into the good raiding guilds, bypassing all the good story line that was there for you. It became the same competition that EQ had become. And it was not fun.
I was lucky, my last forays in WoW were with a group of people mostly made up of competent friends from EQ and their friends. We were able to start fresh, ramp up and take on Karazhan in the Burning Crusade while BC was the current expansion. Yes, we weren't the top guild, but raiding Karazhan with a good group of friends was probably my best experience in an MMORPG.
That said, though, once my daughter was born, I was done with MMORPGs. They were fun, but too time consuming for the dedicated parent. I have since played here and there on Skyrum, but my duties as a parent take precedence.
That all said, though, Raph has a screenshot of Minecraft as the ultimate sandbox. My kids (now 6 and 3) love interacting together through Minecraft. Even the soundtrack is a staple of our lives.
I don't know what I intended with this post, but MMORPGs have been a good experience for me and I'm carrying that on, I hope, via Minecraft and a more sandboxed experience. WoW and EQ were fun, but as I've grown and have had kids, something like Minecraft makes much more sense to me.
The promise of UO was limitless - a complete sandbox where anything could happen, but in a world where the Ahole didn't exist. Within a month it was obvious that wasn't going to be the case.
I still had tons of fun in the 2.5 years I played UO because I embraced the aholes - while I wasn't one of them I definitely played their game in an attempt to combat them continuously. For the UO players I was 99.9% red because often the biggest turds were blue, but really I didn't care - I only fought turds regardless of the situation.
It was still an amazing game, I have friends to this day that I met there, and many of them had specialized stories - e.g. the person who was an "interior decorator". That's what she did, she took in game gold to design the decor of your in game building. I haven't seen a game since where that was really a viable occupation.
Second life
In the first couple of months I had a lot of advantages. I'd already been playing for months so was familiar w/ the ins and outs of the game - this led to me being one of the first GM mages on the server (when magery was the only way to really fight). I had a fast connection and single digit pings when most people were just starting to get 28.8 modems - I was often accused of cheating as I'd appear to warp around people's screens (from my perspective I could easily overtake people who were riding horses when I was on foot). While I wasn't particularly good at PvP from a player skill perspective, I had enough advantages that I could count on 2 hands the number of people I actually feared.
At the time many new players would find themselves dastardly due to clicking on the wrong thing once or twice - they didn't even mean to do anything wrong and half the time it was due to lag. So what I'd do is dress up in newb gear, hang outside the dungeon near Britain and pretend to be very lagged. At the time you couldn't see people's skill levels (stuff like this is why they put that in) so you'd just see my character name, that I was dastardly, I appeared to be a n00b and I could barely move.
So then these brave souls would attack me, often in a pack - not because they actually thought I was a bad person but because they a) could and b) I was an easy target who couldn't fight back. I'm sure you can see where this is going, after I'd wipe the floor with their whole crew they'd come back and call me a cheater and a horrible human being. Sorry, I wasn't the one attacking a defenseless n00b.
And yes, one could argue this from an RP perspective that in fact my char was a criminal and they were meting out justice but approximately 0.1% of people actually were doing that despite what they'd claim, the rest were just being turds.
The implication of his post is that aholes, to use jghn's term, like you ruin MMO games for everyone else. So the 5% like you, who are impossible to manage, are the ones who cause heavy restrictions on what exactly you can do to grief or PVP.
Because it's not that you sometimes grief other players, it's that you constantly grief other players. And there's almost always no consequence, unlike real life where even the most violent societies acting like that there'd be a good chance you'd end up hanging from a tree, "game over", so you wouldn't act like that. In an MMO you just respawn.
Your fun is to make other people miserable.
Unfortunately the number of people who said that's what they were doing and were really just buttheads far outnumbered the real ones.
I'll agree that "looter" could be understood to be a scavenger and not an inherently anti-social player.
So if you just said looter I'd agree with you. When you say griefer I don't - IMO a griefer is inherently a jerk (player, not character)
I'm not going to do the math but I'd wager that on a typical server in the late 90s the proper amount would have been 1 small group of PKs, but instead that was the primary occupation out there.
Yup, that's unfortunate but I still prefer that to games where basically everyone is sheep. Also, I had sheep characters as well as wolves where I was the victim so I don't think it was as black and white.
"Would you have killed me?" results in "Yes, I would have" or "No, I would not". Not really an interesting place to take the thread
I didn't really care about looting in general (my char viewed it as simple scavenging), unless you were doing it to my friends.
In practical terms, generally griefers, PKs and NPKs were my enemies.
Agree completely with the closing statement - WoW will be the king until a different medium replaces the current one.
The game has given me the feeling that... now that I've grown older, it is the game that I can drop my weekly hours into and gain happy, lasting reward.
What reward do you get from WoW exactly? I used to play 8 years ago and quit because of the fact that the experience wasn't rewarding to me. My time in game was mostly spent doing repetitive tasks. I realised that I wasn't gaining any skill or ability that I would otherwise when playing a strategy or FPS game. The skill ceiling was just way too low.
To be fair, though, that's the draw of any MMORPG I try.
Deleted comment