Before I start I want you to ponder a moment on a maxim I’ve heard a thousand times. It has been said by game designers, studio leads, guild leaders, exasperated raid leaders, common players and just about anyone who has ever played an MMO at end game.
The leveling game should teach players the skills they will need at endgame.
Now, you being smart, already know that I plan to tell you gating is the solution but please follow my reasoning. Even better, FF14 is currently giving us a masterclass on how this works.
A warning, this is a very long rant and it will probably piss off a lot of people… funny how liberating it can be when you don’t care about blog statistics.
Community, accessibility vs endgame
The big debate started in WoW, first in Vanilla and then continued in Burning Crusade. The caveat was this, players loved the game but when they reached endgame a disconnect happened. More casual player suddenly found themselves without anything to do and felt locked out of great content because of very real obligations like time-constraints.
Blizzard agreed for the most part and worked to make the game accessible for everyone. This happened in a number of ways but one of those was making the endgame content easier so people with less time could complete it. There’s logic here, someone with less playtime should normally be less skilled if you believe that more practice equals more skills. As a long time raid leader I can tell you it’s far from an absolute truth but generally speaking, the more you play and the more challenging encounters you do, the better you become.
This touched other aspects of the game too. With a more top-heavy game, it became a necessity to get players at endgame and barriers were removed or made easier to make sure the max-level population stayed at a healthy level. And you need more players for a bigger community.
Most important were the financial reasons. If more people are playing the game, you make more money and it would stand to reason that more people will play your game if they are feeling less frustrated. To resume, bigger happier community = more players = more money.
It then all becomes a number game. Every decision you make will create a number of happy players vs a number of unhappy players. Evaluate which costs you more and you end up with the decision you should make. Since Blizzard has stated a few times that the most important factor was to make new players stay from a revenue perspective, it stands to reason that most decisions are made to cater to a more casual crowd with less experience in the game.
The famed “dumbing down” of WoW is not a dumbing down, it’s simply the game slowly changing its target audience.
The state of WoW
So WoW got up to 11.5 millions people, which is insane money. Now, let’s go back to the original statement, The leveling game should teach players the skills they will need at endgame.
Well , Wow and some other games like it don’t. In the name of being accessible and friendly to new players, it’s now possible to get to max level without ever talking to anyone or setting foot in any kind of group content. Since all frustrations and difficulties have been removed from the leveling experience in order to speed it up and make it more fun (open for debate), it’s not uncommon to find players with very basic skills at endgame. And why should it be different? At no point did the game require more from them.
What happens? These people reach endgame, start doing LFR, LFD and are generally very bad at it. Again, frustrations! So they make the content easier and figure that the more dedicated players will find guilds and set the difficulty level at what they want. That’s all fine and dandy as long as the old guard remains but over time there’s less and less of these old players remaining and not a lot of replacement coming up.
And why would there be? For the new player coming up, he doesn’t need to step up his game to see the content. He can access all of the story with minimum effort. Why join a guild with schedules and more demanding skill requirements when you can have everything you want with a lot less effort and at the time you want? So unless you find a player who really wants to challenge himself and has a lot more time available, you won’t see him make the switch and the more classic types guild are slowly all becoming ghost-towns.
But that’s not the only effect. By slowly killing off the guilds and established communities, you’re reducing the game overall community. By making your entire game accessible without the need to ever get involved in its community, you are in effect destroying said community. Remember when I said better community = more players = more money. Well, you’re working against that and I believe WoW numbers to be showing that right now.
One last thing before moving on, how long do you think it will take for a player to quit the game at endgame once he’s done the raid if he’s not part of any group?
Sacrifice players along the way, build a better community
I’ve said it often, what is the main difference between an MMOrpg and a classic single player rpg? The fact that you can play it with others.
What is the main condition for an evening dungeon or raid to be fun? agreeable people with a hint of progress.
How do you get progress and people to remain agreeable? By not having a bad player ruin it for everyone else.
Again, I’ve been raid leading for years and the quickest way to destroy a raid and the guild along with it is to have a few bad players prevent all kind of progressions. It might be fun for a week or two but sooner or later the constant failures will sour everyone attitude, especially when the main point of failure is so obvious to everyone. The solution?
The leveling game should teach players the skills they will need at endgame.
It’s not a perfect solution mind you but it would go a very long way. If the leveling game teaches you how to play your class, how to play with other people and how it’s necessary to participate in its community to succeed, then you dramatically reduces the number of bad players at the end. Why?
Because those players will have either quit or they will have stepped their game up.
It sounds callous in 2013 to say such a thing but here we are. I believe WoW to be proof of what happens if you don’t. Endgame is a mess right now, guilds are dying left and right and it won’t be long before WoW becomes simply an RPG that happens to be playable with others when you feel like it.
And if you think that it would be a bad move then take a moment to think back to how WoW became the giant it is now. There was a time when WoW servers were full every night, when I would wait over an hour in the queue to play and when it threatened to turn into a full-blown addiction. That time also happens to be when WoW was at its less friendly, when there was no LFD, LFR and when certain quests and milestones required you to actually talk to other people. WoW did not begin its ascent to 11.5 millions people during Pandaria, it did so in Vanilla.
Proof that losing some players due to difficulty might be wort it.
Gating and FF14:ARR example
The recent FF14 is doing really well at the moment and is close to breaking 1 million players if it’s not already done. There’s queues most nights and people are having a blast. I find myself playing for long hours when I didn’t mean to and that’s something that has not happened since Vanilla WoW. I’m not alone in this and I think its proof that FF14 is onto something here.
And that one thing that jumps to my mind is that it uses gating. FF14 has a main storyline that you need to progress through to reach endgame. It’s not an absolute necessity and someone dedicated enough can grind to max level but he will be missing a lot of features. He won’t have access to the dungeons and raids that make up endgame. He can’t cheat either by overleving the dungeon content since dungeons will scale down your level to the appropriate one.
There’s the first gate. In order to reach endgame you have to do the main storyline and surprise, the main storyline features mandatory dungeons, a few of them in fact. Please bear in mind that you can’t overlevel this content, so what level of skill is needed is decided by the game.
And there comes the second gate, the skill one. FF14 can roughly be split into tiers with corresponding required skills.
- 1-15: being able to play your own class. WoW skill level
- 15-20: being able to play your class in a group setting. Dungeons with minimal mechanics. About one per boss. About WoW standard level
- 20: Ifrit trial. Single boss, involves more complex mechanics (staying out of bad, target priority). In WoW this would be in line with heroics bosses and some raid bosses.
- 20-35: Advanced class mechanics. Resource management, changing battle conditions, being able to know when to take a hit and when to avoid. Being aware of surronding. Dungeons difficulty is around WoW heroics
- 35: Titan trial. Raid difficulty encounter. Multiple phases, abilities, tests all roles.
- 35 and onward: Increasing difficulty and we’re not even to max level!
If this sounds good for you right there, then you might want to look into getting FF14. But let’s continue first. What do you think happens when a bad player stumble upon something he can’t overcome? In this example, Titan is a particular roadblock for many players right now. Well, the bad players has two choices. Either he quits, or he find a way to step up his game.
How does he step up his game? Maybe he’ll go read about the game, improving his game and mechanics knowledge. Maybe he’ll join a guild to find “better” players to play with. Maybe those same players will teach the bad player to be better… it could happen no? And finally, maybe teaching a new player who’s leveling is not the same experience as teaching someone who’s making an entire raid wipe. In either case, the player will get involved some in the community which is ultimately better for the game because it’s that same community that will keep him playing at endgame.
He could even tell other people about the game and how great it is and maybe these people will join… sheer insanity… oh wait it’s not. It’s exactly how WoW got to 11.5 millions people.
I’m not saying that improvements like LFD, pet battles or a slew of others things Blizzard did are bad. I’m saying that not forcing player to play together and work together is the wrong way to go in an MMO.
Let not confuse topics here
Before anyone start saying that gating creates entitlement, that it excludes players, that your 15$ is worth as much as mine and that you’re life doesn’t allow you to commit to long sessions, etc… etc… well you’re right. I often defended that time should not be the deciding factor in your access to a game. That you should not have to be a super skilled player to see the content a game has to offer. I still stand by that.
But I’m going to change my stance a bit here. There’s a limit to how low the skill level needs to go. There’s also a limit to how short meaningful sessions can be. If I only have 15 minutes to give to a game, I shouldn’t expect to make much progress in dungeons. Also, not every game is for everyone and that’s okay. Dark Souls is a very difficult game that’s not for everyone. Most people accept this and the game is stronger for it. Why couldn’t it be the same for MMOs? Why are we having so much trouble accepting that maybe an MMO could cater to a more hardcore audience?
Again, MMOs and group content are, or should be, inseparable. Not all of it all the time but they should be aimed at providing engaging for groups firsts. Or at the very least involve you in a living world and community. If not you’re better off with single players RPGs.
How do you provide great group content, which should be the main aim of an MMO?
Again, my raid leading experience is speaking here but the times I had the most fun in groups were when I was playing with groups of the appropriate skill level for the content we were attempting.
Again, to obtain that you need to train your players.
This means that if someone refuses to improve, then he should not have access to whatever I am attempting to do. Either he will improve and participate in the game, or he won’t and leave.
But if the game doesn’t do anything for that player, not only will he end up at the same spot later, faced with leaving or engaging the community but he might ruin my experience too and end up making two players leave.
So I hope you enjoyed this and thank you for your attention.
The only quibble I have is the unfortunate tendancy to confuse “max level” with “end game.” In fact you actually SAID that Vanilla WoW *required* gated content to get to max level … which as you are probably aware, is untrue. What you probably meant is that gated content was required for end-game content.
Of course, whenever someone says “end game content” one thinks “raiding” (or whatever it’s called in whatever game you play). People insist that “mmo” means “group activities”, but that’s just a filter we’ve adapted to the concept. A lot of the primeval “MMOs” out there (i.e. MUDs) didn’t require group interaction, even if that was pretty much the point. Impose constraints, and you’ll end up corrupting the concept. One of EQ and WoW’s biggest disservices to the genre is that endgame == group content, and that’s just too bad since it either alienates a whole bloc of people not interested in raiding, or the game starts to lower the bar.
At stake here is that so much of the game’s lore is locked behind that “group content’ door. I was pretty damned bitter, let me tell you, that I couldn’t even get a GLIMPSE of 25-man content in BC, as an example. And why? Because my guild could only really muster 10-man raids. Choose between raiding with my friends … or abandoning them to raid with strangers? OH WHAT A LOVELY LOVELY CHOICE HERE LET ME GIVE YOU MY MONEY BLIZZARD.
The changes in Wrath to make all raids universally available to 10 and 25 man raiding guilds was brilliant, and I have to say that anyone that grouses about THAT is in fact being elitist for no good reason.
I would not defend LFR with the same zeal 🙂
Anyhoo.
CONTENT is king here. If there was an alternative route into Black Temple content, at the time it was still relevant, there would be a lot of people that would stick around for that, and still allow the elite 25’s go have their moment of glory.
But of course that takes a bit of innovation, intelligence, and hard work to bring about. No, I’m not being critical of Blizz in this regard. I don’t know how to fix that, either! I’m saying that if one wants to have that particular cake and eat it too, then that’s the core issue that needs resolved.
“In fact you actually SAID that Vanilla WoW *required* gated content to get to max level … which as you are probably aware, is untrue. What you probably meant is that gated content was required for end-game content.”
errr you’re not wrong there but since I was ranting I’ll put that mistake to a rage induced mind mixup… yeah…. that’s my explanation… /whistles
To answer you more directly now. I don’t want people to mix accessibility in the form of group required numbers or time needed or even difficulty with what I’d like to see. It comes back to what I was saying that “the game needs to prepare you for endgame”.
If I take your Wrath 10man example with friends example, gating is not exclusive with your goal. Let’s take Naxxramas which was relatively easy and allowed for quick sessions. Thinking about it quickly, Naxxramas needed few things: Understanding your class enough to know basic rotations, basic awareness to move out of bad and switch targets when appropriate and endgame dungeons quality gear. Nothing fancy to allow you and your friends to play.
So how do you gate that to make sure that your friends are prepared for that? It could be as simple as making them do a string of dungeons as part of a storyline, make sure the bosses have mechanics similar to what you might encounter in the raid and you’re already pretty well covered. Just make sure that the dungeon are challenging enough so that one really bad player cannot be easily carried through by random strangers. Worst case, the bad player will have to do it with friends who will probably try to coach the player.
End result, when it’s raid time everyone should have most of the skills they already need to progress and have fun with their friends. Yes you gated content but then again, if someone can’t meet these minimun requirements…
It comes back to that old adage to respect your fellow guildies time by being gemmed and enchanted. Why not ask people to also prove they have the bare skills needed to attempt the content you’re trying to do?
Yes, I rather thought it was a heat of the moment mistake there 🙂
I don’t disagree with you on any major point on that. I thought the various attunements were fun and interesting with friends. If I didn’t have any friends (something unheard-of in the geek world) I guess I’d go back to playing Civ5 like I was destined to all along.
If Blizz wants my 15 dolla and also wants to maintain some level of challenge for group activities, they’re going to have to find another way to do it.
On the other hand, if money alone drives their thinking, they’ll eventually realize that nobody made a buck by mollifying elitists, and you’ll get World of Farmvillecraft at some point.
The proving grounds feature has potential. Imagine if they used that to gate entry into instances based on how far along you are in the proving grounds. NOT something they can do with PG in its current state (healer gold level achievement has nothing to do with your class mastership, IMO, as an example). Identifying keys skills required for specific instances, and gating them accordingly. That would be acceptable, to me at least.
While old-school WoW leveling did not require you to run dungeons, there were very powerful incentives to do so. Leveling was so much slower, that it was either endlessly grind mobs for experience or run dungeons at some point. Moreover, there were great quests that were the culmination of zone stories, with great rewards, that required you to go into the dungeons. For example, after doing all of Westfall, you just had to go into Deadmines. Finally, I remember the hunter class quest that sent you to Sunken Temple around level 40 that gave you a great trinket at a time when you maybe had one of those two slots filled. I spent so much time in Sunken Temple trying to finish that quest.
I addition to dungeons, there were also those group quests that would require a well-balanced group to defeat a powerful elite. I remember taking on an elite in Blade’s Edge and the Warrior-tank telling me “Wait to attack until I have laid down 5 Sunders.” That was the first time I heard that, and it was a valuable lesson in aggro-management.
WoW lost much of the reason to go into Dungeons with sped-up leveling, making the game easier, and the Dungeon Finder. Now, there are fewer group quests and all of the quests for a dungeon are at the dungeon’s door. When you do a leveling dungeon through LFD, it’s rarely ever indicative of an end-game instances. Because of the effect of heirlooms and easing of dungeon mechanics, everything is a faceroll. If you doubt that conclusion, show me a leveling dungeon where the tank is not the highest in DPS for all but the longest boss fights.
By and large, some of Grimm’s posts on his blog make an excellent point – leave leveling the way it was, but let people buy higher level characters as alts if they want. It feels like the leveling game was tweaked for people leveling alts. In the meantime, it was ruined for new players.
FFXIV’s gating is not perfect and is in need of a few major tweaks. The first is to lower the level of experience you get from FATEs and raise the level of experience you get from dungeons. There simply are not enough people running dungeons right now because FATEs are the easiest way to level. I have already heard horror stories of people at max level who don’t know how to play their class because they power-leveled through FATEs and skipped most dungeon content. While they still have to go back and do it to advance the story and unlock endgame, properly-balanced incentives will get them on the right track sooner.
Finally, I do kind of hate having to wait through a dungeon finder queue to advance my story/progress in the game. this issue is blunted, for the most part, because there is so much to do. While I have been waiting in queue, I have used the time to level professions and do stuff I might not otherwise do if I was focused on leveling. All in all, I hope FFXIV sticks to the current system but tweaks the experience you get so people jump into the dungeons more readily.
And don’t forget Guildhests – the short instances that teach new players specific mechanics, like pulling groups and add management. Great idea and fun implementation.
[…] into ease of play and a casual focus is what has killed much of the social aspects behind them. Screaming Monkeys has an excellent post about the effect of casualification and that maybe a culling of certain […]
You state that time should not be the deciding factor in seeing content. While I realise that you’ve chosen FFXIV:ARR as an example of the efficacy of gating, it is, however, a poor choice for that particular point.
You cannot progress beyond Garuda HM currently (which is pre-raiding, since it’s 8-man – basically a variation on WoW heroic to use your comparisons) without darklight gear. Darklight gear (and perhaps even more so, AF2 gear) is gathered from tomes of philosophy and mythology, with a farm cap per week. A chest of AF2 for example, is 1 month, or thereabouts. No schortcuts, no steroids to improve speed or drops. It’s simply a month of farming AK 8 times a week for the 320 tomes that cap at 300. Presently, while FFXIV:ARR does an admirable job of teaching the skills players will need (as your post indicated) it’s also doing an inspiring job of teaching the truism that, sadly, almost entirely regardless of which MMO you choose, end-game (whether raiding or otherwise) = time spent. You have to farm. Long hours. While you can craft good gear, the materials for that gear need, guess what, the same tomes you have to farm for the darklight, etc.
Remember that in FFXIV:ARR, not only do they use gating in terms of skill, but in terms of gear as well. Titan hard mode is a good example of this. After all, it’s a subscription game. They need people to keep playing. So they make the rewards very time consuming to achieve.
Very interesting read.
I will only criticize one aspect of your reasoning. You attribute the reduction in subscription numbers to the gradual transition into a casual friendly game. However correlation does not imply causation. There were a myriad other factors which might have led to WoW losing subscribers chief of which is the age of the game. No matter how great a game is, players will ultimately gravitate towards other games which are newer. Having you learn new systems and intricacies is something which WoW is finding increasingly harder to do the more time passes. I would agree with you that some of the decisions Blizzard took with regards to changes in gating and difficulty had an impact on the hardcore players and may have caused them to move on to other games. However my hunch is that its not the major reason for the reduction in numbers Blizzard are witnessing.
Criticisms here on the “correlation vs causation” fallacies I see in this blog. World of Warcraft Vanilla’s growth was due to 1) the product was new, and at its market introduction stage, 2) it was a more accessible MMO compared to what was on the market at the time, 3) the audience it appealed to was largely untapped. Many people joined it at that time, when they would not have considered more hardcore games like Everquest or Ultima Online. World of Warcraft also experienced enormous subscriber churn in its early years. Many people left, but there were enough people coming in to make up for the losses. Most of the people that joined in that time leveled up a character, hit the max level, and did very little at endgame; they mostly chose to level up alts, or quit. Many people were not part of this “great community” in the game or cooperated with anyone. This has been stated by Blizzard via twitter. The decline in recent years has been due to age, an oversaturated MMORPG market and less new players coming in due to the previous two reasons. As for hardcore players leaving, World of Warcraft never had enough of a hardcore player base in the first place to account for sweeping changes in subscription numbers over the past few years. The reason for raiding guilds dying is due more to the 10/25 lockout merge made at the beginning of Cataclysm than due to the introduction of LFR. Blizzard tweets indicate that most of the people in LFR have never raided before and weren’t eligible for recruitment anyway. A great many people in World of Warcraft play the game solo, and Blizzard is merely attempting to keep their subscription longer by providing more content to them. Now I agree that finding a group of friends will help someone stick around with the game and will make it more fun, but herding people into group activities that they have no interest in will not keep them subscribed either. In my own experience, the World of Warcraft community has also been unwelcoming to new players for a while now so it could be argued that many have been pushed play solo.
Well, since you said what I said was fallacies I’ll allow myself to answer you back in kind.
1) product was new. Yes it was, so was all the other MMOs that came before or after it. Being new does help, but won’t justify high numbers for that fact alone. Other IPs have gone that had as much is not more potential (Star Wars or Lotr for example) and did not come anywhere close to WoW numbers at launch
2) More accessible. True again. But then other games since then have improved on the accessibility compared to what WoW was a launch. Swtor launched with much more accessibility in game than WoW did.
3)Audience was untapped. I have trouble buying into the magical “audience” that’s there but that we don’t see. By that token, everygame could potentially have an audience of anyone, it just needs to draw them in no? So technically, any new MMO that release now could find itself a new, bigger audience and we’d find the explanation later on…
So you do as many “correlation vs causation” fallacies as I do if you want to go that route but that’s alright because analysis of any kind is exactly that. We draw the best conclusions from the information we have and hope to hit the target. Sadly this is not science where we can easily prove what is what.
Moving on, I think that herding people into group activites is exactly what MMOs need to do. Does it needs to happen in a brutal way, not at all, but it needs to happen else it becomes just a single player RPG. It’s also what I believe will keep players in the game.
Without it, you only have players coming in and going out at a certain rate and no real growth. For growth to happen, you need something to retain players and I believe the best way is community.