We are going off on weird tangents? Looks like, so wheee tangent time. I suppose this is something I could really post in my editorials thread, but ehhhh. Who knows.
WALL OF NERD TEXT ABOUT MMOS AND HOW THEY ARE TOTALLY GREAT IN A WAY THAT WILL BAFFLE AND CONFUSE LAGGIES AND TRANCIES
The stuff you guys are talking about there is exactly the reason I love Triple A theme park MMOs. Not for the grinding or anything stupid like that. The fact that it exists and is a very core game mechanic. People love it and hate it. It is hard to do the model without the randomness, but people despise it. It is a fun thing to watch a developer design around. When they are trying to be all things for all people it leads to some really crazy meta balance and design choices. Watching them falter is almost as interesting as watching them succeed.
What I am trying to describe is, MMOs are fun for the meta game involved with someone trying to design around the core principals that bring people to the genre and playing consistently for extended periods of time. It is a tight rope between burning players out and making the approach entirely impenetrable to newer markets and still trying to drive that Conditioning effect that the genre has so strongly tied into its EQ roots.
All that stuff with randomised drops and how to minimise the impact you have described above you see implemented into your WoWs, SWToRs, Rift, Age of Conan and even in places like Terra I believe (could be wrong there though!). There is stuff like collect 5 Basalisk Brains quest mobs not being such volatile random drops any longer in them where you used to have 20% drop rates sometimes on the notorious ones, WoW trends more towards like 60% at worse and normally has low numbers there. So during the required questing you see RNG not being nearly as harsh. Also obvious but I feel I should point it out, questing still has that grind that MMOs kind of run on, but it gives you a fixed target. You know what you are dealing with. Mix it with the less volatile rando drops and it is a much less egregious grind.
Loot drops are still super random though for world drops. They tend to fall totally into the "nice if it happens, but whatevers" category, while dungeons and raids and the like will give you a 20% chance at a given piece of loot each time you kill a boss. Now that is pretty transparently there to keep you coming back, but more and more games are experimenting with ways to curb how cruel that can be.
The super obvious one is, quests. Wheeee. Do quests, get loot around the level of the dungeon. Super simple and obvious, but it means that even if a player wasn't lucky in the dungeon, they get something out of it without failure. Not repeatable in most cases, but still, helps ease that gear curve.
A super common one is loot tokens, that can be traded in for something that the player who gets the drop can decide (Tier sets in WoW function off this and it is pretty common), So while individual token has say a 33% chance to drop, someone always can use it. It cuts down on the fatigue of unusable items dropping.
Another one that is similar in functionality, is have bosses and the like drop a kind of universal currency as well as the rando loots. WoW itself has back and forthed on whether it wants these to act as a concession prize for "Sorry buddy you missed out on that drop you wanted for 6 weeks in a row, have a more minor upgrade to fill in the gap" or if it is a parallel/alternate progression path entirely. It started off as an alternate gearing path in the first expansion of the game, then became bummer prizes for hardcore players and alternate progression path for everyone else. Next expansion it was all over the place starting off as bummer prize/progression path, then turning into the primary gear source with the rando drops actually feeling kind of supplemental for most slots, then still in the same expansion... they kind of went to a weird place where they were the primary gear source for some people, required and upgraded with and supplemented by the random drops. It was a strange place. In the latest expansion it has yoyoed all over the place. It is a really fascinating tuning knob that they can turn and shift up the dynamics fairly unilaterally without actually changing core game mechanics while having massive impacts on core gameplay since they have control over the income of the currency and what is available with it.
I really like that one because it is an elegant design solution to a complex problem and it gets used with all the finesse of a baseball bat. Players also HATE it because it makes it feel like a mandatory grind rather than an optional one (although if you are going to be playing the game, attending raids or whatever your equivalent gameplay progression isn't really optional!) and because it removes that random factor. MMO players actually actively seek out those randomised chances, which is why they are commonly paralleled to poker machines what with their addictive traits and history of ruining lives. I will come back to this in a second.
Yet another kind of classic form of the same idea is reputations. Also a classic grind in MMOs. Have a faction that you gain reputation from killing things in a raid. Boom, instant possible loot stream for players that is gated and causes them to be playing for X amount of time. Also acts as a gold sink. Less interesting than the above.
Probably the strangest one to combat the randomness is random loot drops that are able to be sold on the open market. These are not normal world drops that can come from anywhere, but specific to an area that a lot of people are likely to be doing (like a raid or a dungeon obviously), they normally have a fairly low drop rate, but high enough that you see them with some consistency. The key thing is that they are able to be sold and traded making them available if you badly need to fill that slot (and has added benefits of fuelling in game economy and stuff). These are pretty cool in a vacuum. They run into some serious issues when they are actually a very good item and everyone wants them. Then you get crippling RNG burn out for people that want them and they just won't drop. Lower odds each week than a normal boss. They also tend to be massively inflated in price which has adverse effects on the economy with random spikey fluctuations in the player economy and even lead to abusive play of people trying to do content in ways that the developers did not intend (trash farming has always been a thing where there is random drops or reputations to be had from raid instances in WoW), such as soloing content intended for multiple players. Doing so over and over again. This also obviously attracts gold farming and the like. More unintended load on the servers if the content is in an instance. The spiralling effects for it are pretty amazing just because you made a 1 handed sword with Strength, Hit rating and Haste drop like this. It is fascinating stuff for me.
That is the last of the loot systems I can think of. So back to that interesting point about how players love that Poker Machine effect and actively seek out. I think the most fascinating part of the Triple A games actually ties back to the much maligned subscription model. That monthly fee is a really fun thing for many reasons. You get to watch people do mental gymnastics about how paying that monthly fee actually saves them money you see because it is the only game they have to play. Some lucky MMO gamers actually do this and save a fuck load of money. I envy these people. It is also a great source of entitlement to players. Great times with many a stupid thing said. None of them is the actual interesting thing. Those subscription MMOs don't need to actually have you playing the entire month. They just need to be fun enough to keep you paying that $15 a month. Let me repeat that and its implication. MMOs are interesting games to me, because they don't actually have to be fun games. They just need to be fun enough often enough to keep people playing them. That is such an alien concept to gaming I find. Most games that aren't traps actually try to justify their price point in one way or another. $15 tends to set the bar pretty low, especially when you figure you have a whole month to do it in (maybe 2 or three!). That isn't say that MMOs are designed for mediocrity, they just have a completely totally alien design goal post to most other games.
Now the best part on this that I still to this day haven't actually settled on. I tend to bounce between "well that means they don't even need to implement the grind in there! You could just let people play the fun bits every so often and be done with it!", which is all well and good, but then you run into problems that seralised fiction does. Miss your date for content delivery and you are going to start losing people. Also game content is much harder to do in episodic content (we are getting there! Point and click stuff does it great. Story based RPGs aren't doing to bad either), but the standard MMO gameplay doesn't really lend itself to episodic delivery. I mean the thing I complain about the most with WoW when I cave to the addiction? Content releases are always to far apart. Always. So I guess that means that I think they need the grind? Not really. Whenever I am in there I am constantly rebelling against it "Errrrgh I hate feeling like I have to do X every day or do it 50 times over a given period to get my Y". So I concede that I think they need some grind to stay relevant to the players and keep them there, but I don't want any grind. I suppose what I really want is some token minimal grind (other than the raiding grind which was the only thing that actually gets me playing them other than an interest in meta balance and wanting to see things).
What do I think the answer is? Something WoW actually tries to do all the time and then fucks it up horribly. You give people a target to meet. You let them do it in their own time. I hate dailies. I love weeklies. Blizzard moved a lot of the mandatory grind from the past expansion from a daily thing to a weekly thing (the currency for gearing up), then they made it kind of irrelevant. Then they made it super relevant, super easy to get but grindy as fuck to do without raiding (so you wanted to do it so you could catch back up to raiding really easilly which was the best source of the currency...). Then the introduced daily quests you should do to get good gear so you are back to square one again.
So yeah. MMOs are terrible but are really fun thought experiments. They can do everything right in the world and still not get it right because they inevitably fuck it up again somehow. It is a roller coaster of constantly shifting and changing meta balance, theory craft and social engineering.
Which to tie it all back in to this stuff I blame entirely on Adventurousness 71 / Intellect 91. That is why I play so many of the games I do. So for anyone that has ever asked why I play shitty games that I hate? It is because thinking about them is fun, or thinking about why I think about them the way that I do is fun. Or thinking about the way that other people think about them is fun.
Fun for the same reasons this thread is fun. This is what play looks like for me. It always stuns me when I remember other people don't think like this. You don't realise that the world is your clam. You should totally fuck the shit out of it you guys.
