Breaking the Mold: Looking for Innovation in MMORPGs

"Breaking the mold" - that phrase gets used a lot, but what does it mean?  Most MMOs do things the same way because they are built on the same, subscription-based business model.  MMOs that use the cash shop or real money models are a bit different. 

The cash shop model is very popular in Asia, but so far the EQ Station Exchange is closest thing to this model in the US market.  Real money games such as Second Life or Project Entropia don't break the mold; they're cast from a totally different one.  As such, they are beyond the scope of this article.

World of Warcraft is the biggest success in the MMO industry right now, but it did not get there by breaking the mold; in fact, Blizzard embraced the mold wholeheartedly.  WoW does nothing new or innovative, but it does it very, very well.  It does it so well that, when I asked some co-workers who are also MMO players what "breaking the mold" meant to them, one reply I got was, "Like WoW, only not."

The overwhelming success of WoW demonstrates clearly that there is nothing inherently bad or wrong with adhering to the mold.  What is the mold, anyway?

To begin with, there are a couple of things that are universally true for any subscription-based MMO:

1) Profit is in the long-term.  Box sales do not make money.  MMOs get their income from subscriptions.  The box sales at release will (hopefully) cover distribution and marketing costs, but the development costs themselves will (if you're lucky) take 2-3 years to pay off.  Lots of game companies have huge layoffs at launch; fewer people=lower overhead, allowing the company to show greater initial launch profit.  A smaller live team can continue to fix bugs and create content after launch, and if subscription numbers permit, people can be hired or rehired later. 

2) How many subscribe is more important than who subscribes.  In order for a game to grow and prosper conversion must exceed attrition and retention must be maximized.  Conversion is the percentage of people who try your game and then become subscribers.  Retention is the number of current subscribers who continue to play.  Attrition is the number of current subscribers who decide not to keep playing.  The gaming industry calls the relationship of conversion, retention, and attrition ‘churn'.  The thing with the MMO industry is that, oddly, sometimes your long-term customers have less ‘value' than a brand-new customer. 

If change A will make a number of long-term players mad enough to quit playing but will also convince three times that many potential subscribers to convert, the fact is that, from a business perspective, A will be good for the game over the long run.  If those long-term players have reached the end of your elder game content, they're going to be demanding a constant stream of new content and they are going to burn through whatever you throw at them far, far faster then any dev team on the planet can create it.  New players have a couple of years worth of content ahead of them, and the dev time has already been spent on it.  You still have the same development costs, but the new players see new content as an added value they can look forward to, not a long-overdue entitlement.

3) The best subscriber is the one who pays you but never logs in.  Logged-in players are consuming your content, running up your bandwidth costs, and causing wear & tear on your servers.  As an MMO operator, you don't want people spending hours logged in grinding; you want them to log in, get their entertainment needs met, and log out as soon as possible.  Hardcore players who can spend hours grinding add to your expenses, not your income. 

This is one reason so few games have good crafting systems, complex and intriguing quests, or housing that is worth a darn.  You want people to be able to accomplish something quick, feel good, and log out. 

4) Grind = profit, therefore grind is good.  All MMOs have grind; some are just better at disguising it than others.  Any task a player performs repeatedly in order to obtain a reward qualifies as grind.  If you can keep people grinding, you'll extend the life of their subscriptions indefinitely. 

Wait, didn't we just talk about how MMO operators DON'T want people grinding?  If that's true, how can keeping people grinding be good? 

The answer is this: repetitive tasks are good because people doing them are not consuming existing content or demanding new content.  They are raising your bandwidth and maintenance costs, but those expenses are fairly small compared to the cost of a large development team.  What you don't want is a player who spends so much time logged in that the expense of maintaining them exceeds the income generated by their subscription fee.     

5) Content is a necessary evil.  Without new content development, a game is doomed.  The servers may still be up and people may still be able to log in, but there is no life, no change, and nothing to look forward to.  Eventually, entropy will win, and the number of subscribers will drop below the level needed to pay hosting and bandwidth costs.  New content is vital to keeping existing players and attracting new ones.  New content is also expensive.  Creating it requires designers, artists, writers, several different kinds of programmers, marketing personnel, quality testers, and an IT team capable of responding to all the ways a gaggle of sleep-deprived, over caffeinated code monkeys can devise to bork up the development servers.

What is content, anyway?  Most of the time, content in an MMO means quests.  What's a quest?  Well, the answer to that depends on who you ask.  The MMO industry defines a quest as "any activity the player can perform".  Depending on their quest engines, different games define quests in different ways.  Players tend to differentiate tasks and quests; tasks are usually very simple (talk to an NPC, kill X of Y) and have minimal dialog or lore, while quests are usually longer, involve multiple and different types of tasks, and usually have a story tying everything together with substantial lore and dialog.  The industry usage of the word ‘quest' allows WoW, for example, to claim to offer several thousand quests even though many of them could be classified as tasks.  Any long, involved stories are broken down into individual steps, so what would be one quest in most other games becomes several quests in WoW. 

Notice that none of these principles has anything to do with genre, features, or anything else a given MMO offers.  They're about the business of gaming, and they impact every aspect of the game regardless of the nature of the game itself.  These principles are the forces responsible for creating "The Mold".  The MMO industry has responded to these principles in a number of ways, but eventually any innovation is going to become familiar and staid.  It doesn't help that the people in the industry and the players look at things very differently.  Grind, for example.  To players, ‘grind' means some terribly boring task you're forced to do when you'd much rather do something else.  To the industry, however, grind is a necessity because it pays the bills.  Unfortunately, each group is talking about something totally different.   

Grind, as stated previously, is repeating a task in order to gain a reward.  If that task is something a player enjoys, though, they don't think of it as grinding and they certainly don't object to doing it.  In fact, the vast majority of players can safely be said to have no objection to grind itself; what they actually dislike is tedium. 

Suppose you were required to sit in one place for hours on end, staring straight ahead and waiting for a button to flash so you could push it, and that your compensation depended on the quantity and frequency of your button pushing.  Would you like doing this for hours and hours?  Would anyone?  Judging by the hundred of thousands of people who play slot machines and video poker in Las Vegas every year, the answer would probably be ‘yes'.

Casinos, like MMOs, make their money off of getting you to grind.  A casino might only make a nickel off of every dollar you wager, but if they can convince you to wager 20 times, they will wind up holding most if not all of that dollar.  Casinos get slot players to keep grinding by using small, intermittent cash payouts.  These payouts make the player happy and excited as well as reinforcing the fantasy of hitting a jackpot & getting a big payout.  It's just as much a grind as doing fabric turn-ins to improve your faction standing in WoW, but it's not tedious.

This would be a good place for someone designing a mold-breaking MMO to begin.  It's not possible to remove grind from the game, but it is possible to remove the tedium from the grind.  Intermittent rewards, mini-games, quest content rather than task content - any or all of these could substantially reduce tedium and add fun to the game.

Tedium can also be reduced by implementing systems which encourage subscribers to log out, play alternate characters, do different activities in-game, etc.  The double XP bonus for being ‘rested' in WoW is an example of such a system.  In Horizons, accumulated death point time is removed whether you are logged in or not, allowing player to sleep off (or craft off) death points without any penalty to level, items, or experience gained. 

Another frequent complaint is the lack of individual distinctiveness and/or options for characters - the "cookie cutter" effect.  Some games offer a plethora of character appearance options, others are more limited or depend on equipped gear to provide a distinctive appearance.  Very few games allow players to create characters who are portly, unattractive, or old. 

Most classes are variations on the classic fighter/mage/thief/cleric standards.  Even in non-fantasy genres or skill-based systems, these roles are recognizable.  How can a game break the mold here?  How about by giving the players multiple possible activities and multiple areas to attempt to excel in?

Star Wars Galaxies originally offered a huge number of classes and activities for players.  Entertainers and beast handlers and medics, as classes, were just as viable and rewarding as fighter pilots or bounty hunters.  Ryzom forgoes classes entirely, opting for a massively detailed skill set that integrates combat and crafting into a single system. 

Giving players more options for activities does increase your development costs, true.  However, if well implemented, these additional options could provide players with entertaining, immersive grinds that prolong subscription length without costing a fortune in development time.

Example: give priests the opportunity to establish temples and attract worshippers.  Players could have options for what kind of sermon they want to give or what kind of activities the temple performed in the community.  Good sermons and activities could bring in more worshippers, making new activities possible.  Perhaps the temple is very patriotic and wishes to send the military large numbers of weapons which have been blessed; the player owning the temple could post job notices, offering to buy weapons from player crafters. 

Farming or breeding livestock could be mini-games all their own, but even without such things, farming presents some interesting opportunities for player interaction.   Perhaps the temple mentioned above is opening a soup kitchen and the player farmer donates some crops in exchange for a blessing for an abundant harvest.  If food helps players recover from death or combat fatigue, a class dedicated to food preparation (such as the confectioner in Horizons) might buy crops, process them into usable food, and sell that food to other players.

The key to making systems like this work successfully is the ability of the players to create, advertise, and meet demand.  Once the development work is done on the system itself, the player base will create the content.  Aside from adding enhancements and fixing bugs, the developer shouldn't have to do much else with the completed system.  

The same system of advertising demand would make it possible for a veteran player to post missions for up and coming players to work on.  For example, low-level predators could be attacking a rancher's herd.  The rancher could advertise for adventurers to patrol the area and pay a bounty on predators killed.  Killing enough predators could result in a significant improvement in herd productivity.  A mason building a house could advertise for bricks and lumber, giving low-level crafters experience and income.  Eve, a space-based MMO, has a system very like this in place already.  The majority of the missions players encounter in the game are player-generated, leading to a very dynamic and involving gameplay. 

These ideas are examples of something which I believe will revolutionize the MMO industry: player-created content.

Publicizing missions as described above is a good beginning, but such missions are temporary as best and do not have much lasting impact on the game world.  By providing players with access to design tools, the developers stand to gain a great deal of persistent content while saving a fair amount of money over traditional development costs.  Ryzom and Horizons both have systems in place for players to create quests and encounters, then submit them for review and possible implementation by the development staff.  The Horizons quest editor helped automate formatting and entry of the steps, actions, and dialog that make up a quest, while the Ryzom Ring goes a bit further, giving players access to a limited version of the developers' world building toolkit.  NPCs, mobs, and world objects can be placed as the player desires and then linked together as needed to follow the storyline.

The key to making player-created content successful is accountability and clear, consistent standards of acceptability.  Contributions must be reviewed by the development team and approved before being used, though in time players who prove their ability and trustworthiness could be asked to do blind peer review of submissions, thus freeing up more developer time. 

Nearly all of these suggestions are based on technology and systems that either currently exist or are announced features of forthcoming games.  It's easy to suggest an idea, but putting that idea in a box and putting the box in a store is a complex, expensive process.  As games evolve and improve, though, ideas that seem unrealistic today may be touted as features in a new game tomorrow.  One day, we may see a game that has rewarding grind without tedium, characters that are distinctive individuals without being overpowered, unbalanced or unplayable, and a system whereby players with the talent and willingness to contribute to the game world can do so and be recognized for their contributions.  That game may do far more than we can currently dream - but will it break the mold?

No.  Whatever molds it breaks will be recast in that game's image.  Breaking the mold is incentive for every designer and every player to look for new, innovative ideas.  Some will succeed, some will fail, but the willingness to make the attempt is what will keep this industry growing, changing, and moving forward.