Here are two of the reasons listed in the article.
4) The problem: aggro
Aggro ranges and the aggro amount players get for certain actions like healing.
What needs to be done to fix it: Search me. Someone hurry and invent a new gameplay model that doesn’t rely on aggro.
As far as aggro ranges go: If you are within visual range and not in cover you will be attacked, rather than a highly artificial and immersion breaking ‘aggro range’ mechanic. Of course this would require much larger game worlds.
1) The problem: you can’t play with the people you want to play with
What needs to be done to fix it: Something. Anything. For pete’s sake, if I can’t play with my friends, I’m just going to go mess around with horde mode in Gears of War 2.
Exactly. Having to grind for hours to try and keep up with more dedicated friends so you can play with them feels like more like work than fun at times. What happens when one group of friends quits the game and you find out some buddies at work are playing on another server? Doh!
What can be done to fix this? All I can think of is some type of leveling scheme where you become powerful relatively quickly. Perhaps a trade off of more flexibility as you progress in levels as opposed to raw power. If I can play with my buddies that have been playing for a few months without them having to play low level alts it would be great. Sidekicking and mentoring systems cover this issue to an extent. Oh yeah, have a server-less game or allow fast, easy, and fee server transfers.
I am suffering MMO burn out due to many of the reasons Tom lists in his article. I am switching to single player games until the burn out ends or MMOs change their ways.
I have to agree with all of the points made in the article. If looked at objectively, MMOs are fairly boring, tedious, monotonous games. The carrot on the stick of leveling and the social interaction have to be the two things that keep people playing. To me, the limiting factor on the success of all non-WoW MMOs that have come out since WoW is the montly fee. Tom nails it when he points out that people can only pay for one or two MMOs at a time. There has to be some way to have a top tier MMO without a monthly subscription.
Complaints like this quickly go from “what’s wrong with MMO’s” to “what’s wrong with MMO players”. In other words: why don’t other players demand the same things that I want. There are good reasons for most of these “failings” that have to do with the success of the genre or technical/design limiations.
Mostly Tom just seems to fall into the “immersive” crowd. I.e. a crowd for which MMO immersion fails. It’s quite understandable, and certainly there are other people for whom this “breaks” the MMO model, but you have to understand that you’re a minority. Aggro, for example, just happens to be a very successful game mechanic for organizing multiplayer PvE content, and it’s only a small minority of people who are bothered by it’s lack of immersive quality. The gains in terms of cohesive, sensible gameplay that enables archtypes such as warriors and wizards, far outstrip the small minority of people who have a problem with it.
#1 has already been fixed in CoH with the Exemp/sidekick ability. Why Wow/LOTRO and the others have not adopted this is beyond me.
Really my biggest gripe about the MMORPG model is the GRIND. I think instances for the most part are very well done in most of the games, but the busywork in between sucks.
Go kill 4 boars…bring this food to bob…What? I’m standing there armed to the teeth and you think i’m the pizza guy? Sorry this is just lazy bullshit.
To break the mold someone is going to have to a. not do leveling, making the game skill based and b. having compelling enough content to have people play for some reason other than dinging 80.
And there may be things that people find wrong with MMOs, but I find plenty wrong with, say, first person shooters, but I don’t go saying the entire genre is terrible, I just don’t play them.
NO ATHRYN THEY’RE ALL BROKEN JEEZ READ THE ARTICLE
So Tom is more interested in worlds than games, as far as the current crop of active titles and ideas is concerned. Utterly, massively shocking, given his tastes in gaming.
Not that that makes him wrong, or anything – the points he brings up are legitimate criticisms of some of the genre norms. “Broken” may be wording it a little strongly, though ;)
But that’s the thing, and this is my “One reason MMOs are broken” list: MMO does equal WoW, for almost every MMO released after WoW. They keep knocking it off, and they keep failing as a result. Meanwhile, they keep perpetuating all of the old flaws of the genre, because the only innovation has to come from Blizzard, and lord knows that they aren’t a pack of innovators over there.
So no, MMOs aren’t necessarily all WoW, but every new MMO that comes out sure is.
While I find a number of the specific mechanics associated with aggro in MMOs problematic myself, this statement is entirely incorrect. Not only is aggro not unprecedented outside MMOs, it’s present in every videogame that involves AI enemies. Every game has some sort of contrived formula for when enemies will attack you–shooters, RPGs, RTSs, etc. Often it’s based on some sort of line of site mechanic, which I agree makes a lot more sense. But I can also understand why MMOs, which need to populate their worlds densely enough so that hundreds or thousands of players have things to fight, don’t do that. Claiming that this makes MMOs “broken” seems akin to claiming that the contrivance of building units and vehicles on the battlefield makes RTSs broken. After all, that, too, is a mechanic that has no real-world or literary analog, and which is sort of awkward and silly if you spend too much time thinking about it. In both cases, I don’t mind the contrivance because I recognize that there is a good reason to have them in the game.
Aggro management is an unavoidable component of making a game in which a cooperative group of players fights AI opponents. The only reason most other types of games don’t have aggro management is because most other types of games don’t offer co-op play. A co-op game has to decide which AI attacks which player somehow, and in this case I think the whole concept of threat actually makes a lot of sense. The idea that, all else being equal, enemies will assess which player represents the greatest threat and attack them is pretty intuitive. I’m not sure what makes that seem like a invisible, under-the-hood mechanic to you.
I will agree that I don’t particularly care for the tank mechanic–not because I think there’s anything wrong with a tough warrior-type class that specializes in protecting softer targets, but rather because I wish they would implement the specifics of that using movement and positioning rather than the “taunt” contrivance. But again, I understand why most MMOs don’t do that (for the most part, the technical challenges of implementing collision in a massively multiplayer environment). I suspect more will in the future.
Taunting aside, the general concept of tanking is hardly unique to MMOs. Sturdy characters keeping enemies away from soft targets has always been a big part of D&D combat. It’s pretty hard to avoid the concept when mages get 4d hit points and can wear no armor. And remember when Boromir tanked all of those orcs to keep Merry and Pippin alive?
But that’s the thing, isn’t it? A lot of people (myself included) really want to play an MMO and get into it and have a good time doing it. A massively multiplayer fantasy or sci-fi game was a common daydream of mine as a young gamer. I just can’t get into MMOs as they exist commonly today because there’s nothing compelling to me as a gamer. The gameplay sucks, the immersion is non-existent due to a combination of game mechanic requirements and people running around calling everything by cryptic in-joke nicknames, and the only real yardstick of success is how much time you’re willing to dump into it.
I’ve tried most of the major MMOs on the market and every time I either get bored and quit by level 30 or so or I end up with real life commitments that leave me hopelessly behind my friends who play constantly every single night and there’s no reason to try to play catch-up. I’m basically waiting for an MMO that rewards twitch skills in some way and not just how little I have to do in the evenings.
I realize that I am (apparently) a minority in the MMO player community, but I maintain that whoever can nail an action-oriented MMO game on a console with broad appeal will attract a heretofore untapped market of WoW magnitude.
Or within a smell range (accounting for upwind / downwind), or hearing range (again, wind will affect this), or what-not. Monsters that hunt by other than sight = win. =)
I am sure the millions of people that plunk down subscription fees every month would love to know that the games they are playing are ‘broken’.
Whats you next story? Top 5 reasons why FPS’s are broken? Whats with all this pointing a crosshair at stuff and pressing the mouse button, come on people, duck hunt was 20 years ago!
