I recently talked about risk vs reward and stumbled a bit into the notion of contested content. I enjoyed the comment discussion about whether that was an appropriate linkage or not. I’m not going to rehash that now but I did want to look at why I enjoy contested content and what it brings to an MMORPG. These days we’ve gone to great lengths to instance everything and I feel it is doing a lot more harm than good to the community.
Sometimes it isn’t about you
I generally believe that instance content has grown because there has been a shift in player attitudes. We’re becoming selfish, spoiled, children. We want to have our own area of play and nobody should ever be able to infringe on it in any way. It is safe to say we’re trying to bring a console game attitude to a community driven environment. What many see as good I see as inappropriate. Sometimes in life everything can’t be about “me” and we have to learn how to share. Sharing content isn’t always a bad thing as long as everyone has equal access to it.
Contested raids are something I talk about a lot. I’m all for them even though I have no capacity to go after them any more. I fully understand the argument for removing them. They allow a very small minority of players to take away content from the larger group. That can be viewed as negative and generally is. The current answer? Shift from 90% contested raid mobs to 5%! I call that a gross over reaction but I’m getting ahead of myself. Let me step back and ask a question. Why do I love this type of play? It is pretty simple: it creates better players and communities.
Strong like bull
When you have to compete for something you must play at a higher level. I’ve seen it over and over again as I’ve played MMORPGs. If a dungeon is contested you’re more careful, you take less risks, and you bring your top game. You focus and work harder because if you don’t you stand to lose your spot, mob or loot item. Raids are no different. If you have a competitor guild sitting behind you waiting to take your raid mob you have to play your best. Don’t believe me? I watched the elite guild that I lead become rusty as the amount of contested mobs was reduced and instancing became the rage. After you get a server first in an instance there is no reason to try your hardest anymore. There is no pressure and no sense of urgency. Players simply start to slack and sub-optimal on most fights becomes the name of the game. Contested mobs simply do not allow that. If you play poorly you lose and failure is life’s greatest teacher.
Instanced dungeons
You understand the major reason I support contested content now. I’m fully believe it makes players better at their MMORPG of choice. That isn’t the only reason for my love affair. If you ever played in the hay day of instanced dungeons you know that it gave you an opportunity to meet more members of your server. You learned who was honorable and who was a jerk. You figured out who would help you in a pinch and who was better left dead on the floor. Watching others play helped teach you skills. It also gives you a sense that the world is more than just a bunch of islands in the dark. Instances destroy community. You jump into your own little world for a short period of time, do your thing, and take off. It is the interactions that keep us in game for long periods, not running the same instance every day from expansion to expansion.
I’m not saying drop the instances but I would like to see a large increase in successful contested dungeons. EQ2 makes that effort but doesn’t do a very good job of following through. In Sentinel’s Fate the Hole was brought in as a contested dungeon and nerfed in the first few days because a few players abused it. The dungeon now largely sits empty and SOE doesn’t touch it. Why did it fail?
The case of the Hole
The Hole was a great selling point to me for Sentinel’s Fate. I was excited to get into it and work on my character’s levels. I was joyful that I could group up with my guild mates and not do chores. Unfortunately it didn’t make it and here are the reasons why;
1. The experience bonus in the Hole is decent but not good enough. Nobody will visit a group oriented contested dungeon if they can go grind chores (you might know them as quests) solo and make more experience per hour. The bonus in a contested dungeon must be high enough to ensure that a group of players grinding there will level at a slightly faster pace. If that pace is equal or less than the pace of doing chores the dungeon will fail.
2. The itemization in the Hole is sub-par to atrociously bad. Why on earth would you jump into a contested dungeon where you are, in theory, competing for named mobs when those mobs drop absolute trash? You wouldn’t. Contested zones need to have loot that is comparable to that of instanced dungeons! In all honesty it should be slightly better. Don’t hesitate to throw rare drops in to entice players to come. Ultra rare zone drops do wonders as well. Sebilis in EQ1 is a fine example of this. When you can get something awesome just by killing trash players will come even if it is as rare as a non-dead gnome in my guild.
3. It must be large! The Hole is large in some sense. It just feels big with its wide open spaces. In reality there just aren’t a ton of mobs and the zone could not support very many groups. This never became an issue because nobody cared to go. If you have a popular dungeon though you need to have a lot of real estate with a lot of mobs or high reward mobs with a lot of hit points to slow down the grind teams.
4. Lots of named and super-named are essential to success and the Hole failed miserably here. If you’re going to crawl a dungeon or hang out in a certain spot you need named to keep you going. Grinding good experience is awesome but the chance at loot at the same time is all the better. Having a bunch of average named pop up in various spots is important. Adding in some super-named that are semi-rare is all the more awesome. Finding one is like winning the lotto. Attempt to explain why they’re there or let players use their imaginations. Don’t just randomly create “Bob the Elemental” and stick him in the zone.
5. If you’re going to use factions, make them matter. Once more the Hole comes up short. The zone has three factions that players can work and they don’t matter in the least. There is virtually no reward for being loyal to any one of them. The items you get are pathetic! If you’re going to use factions in a zone make them matter and make the rewards worthwhile. Force players to choose and make changing your mind possible but not easy.
6. Include some quests and at least one that spans the entire zone. Players are so locked into the notion of quests. Give them some! Include long over-arching quests that explain the story of the zone and why the named are there. Make the reward something players will want. This is why the Hole didn’t do well. Most of the quests were lame. They’re nothing more than go here and kill ten of that. I could do that outside and get better loot, money and experience. See a problem?
Those are just a few of the reasons I identified for the failure of the Hole. There was so much potential but it was all squandered and the zone is a desolate, sad place. I’ve gotten long winded here today so I’ll stop there but I also want to look at raiding contested mobs in detail in the future!
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I completely agree and miss contested content as well. Instances make it easier on the player and the developer and that is why they have become overly prevalent. Sadly, MMOs have become more about making sure there is as little hardship and competition as possible because they believe that opens up the market to more people. This may work for WoW, but games like EQ2 (and EQ1) thrived on competition from their conception. Everything used to be contested in EQ2, from Kra’thuk and Nagalik to Runny eye and Cazic. Instances have gone from niche parts of the game to overwhelming domination.
The core issue you bring up is the destruction of the sense of community in a game, and I could not agree more. Why are we playing an MMO when in reality many are more like Diablo used to be? Cities/guild halls are like chat rooms and the dungeons are the instance that a group has chosen to play. When they are done, they go back to the chat room. This fracturing has led to an increasingly disparate experience for most players. You interact with your guild and whatever group you happen to form for a given instance but no more than that. There is no longer any feeling of an expansive world filled with lots of other players all working together or against each other.
Unfortunately, I don’t see the trend changing. If anything, recent games have shown it will only get worse. I will pass other people on the way to my instance, or just simply queue up for a dungeon and not bother interacting at all. MMOs are becoming like old school multiplayer LAN games that are only made into an MMO so they can continue to charge you.
Nice article. I enjoyed the debate in the comments last time as well.
Let me see if I follow you here. “We’re “becoming selfish, spoiled, children. We want our own area of play”. Yet you fully admit that on Oasis during classic EQ, your own area of play was the contested mobs. You “denied everyone else the opportunity to raid” these mobs because you “kept every contested mob dead”. May I remind you of your own words, “Sometimes it isn’t all about you”.
It may have been better for you when 90% of the raid mobs were only killed by one guild per server but I doubt it was for the rest of the server population.
Instanced raids actually allow those guilds just starting out to try and fail repeatedly without being ridiculed across the server. And as you said, “failure is life’s greatest teacher.” These guilds can work their way up by taking on the easier raid mobs in their own instance without the competition breathing down their neck. It allows them to schedule raids for certain times rather than resorting to a call list or timing raids around when the mobs are scheduled to pop next. Instanced raids have added a lot to this game and have been around since when? Launch? So it can’t be instances in general you’re against since they’ve been in the game for ages. It must just be the ratio of contested vs. instanced raid mobs.
The sad reality is though that it comes down to a finite amount of time and a finite amount of resources. The dev team has to make the call on where to spend the time and resources. Spending a lot of time and resources on raid mobs that less than .5% of the players on a server will ever even pull probably seems like a waste of resources. That same time could be spent developing content that a much larger percentage of players will actually experience.
You said “Instances destroy community. You jump into your own little world for a short period of time, do your thing, and take off. It is the interactions that keep us in game for long periods, not running the same instance every day from expansion to expansion.” Can’t really disagree but the problem is the alternative. The alternative is for a very few number of guilds per server to camp the mobs and the rest of the server grab a box of popcorn and watch. The rest of us don’t enjoy popcorn that much and get bored quite easily after seeing it once or twice. I know you said “I’m not saying drop instances” and I’m guessing that’s because you realise the alternative wouldn’t work either.
And you’re right about The Hole. Agree with pretty much everything you wrote.
As for making players better, I’m kinda on the fence on that one. See my next comment…
Let me see if I follow you here. “We’re “becoming selfish, spoiled, children. We want our own area of play”. Yet you fully admit that on Oasis during classic EQ, your own area of play was the contested mobs. You “denied everyone else the opportunity to raid” these mobs because you “kept every contested mob dead”. May I remind you of your own words, “Sometimes it isn’t all about you”.
It may have been better for you when 90% of the raid mobs were only killed by one guild per server but I doubt it was for the rest of the server population.
You’re not wrong but that only relates to raid content. We did not go in and destroy all of the group content and deny the server that. In addition to that, while you’re right, we weren’t really denying content to the entire server. Only raiders of our caliber. That is a far smaller number. They also had a chance to defeat us.
As far as your other arguments I agree. I normally quote them. The resources thing, etc. This is why I never argue contested content only. I argue less of this all instance junk we have now. We’ve effectively eliminated contested content. I’m not asking to go back to the way things were. I’m asking for a compromise.
For your comment you got a bit deeper into the raid side of this than was intended. This particular bit was mostly about dungeons.
You claim that contested raid mobs makes players better. I’m a bit on the fence on this one so let me explore this a bit. I’m assuming this is what you mean:
When you are competing for a resource, you have to step up your game or else you may lose the resource to your competitors. Makes sense. There is only one gold medal per event in the olympics and if you want the gold medal, you have to step up your game. So far I’m following. But lets look a bit deeper and break this down into it’s components.
Taking down a contested mob has several components:
1. Having the players available to be online when the mob spawns
2. Being able to form up the raid and make it to the location of the mob
3. Being the first one to pull the mob (If you’re not the first to pull it, it doesn’t matter how good you are, only matters how good those who DID pull it are. If they kill it, your skill doesn’t come into play.)
4. Being able to kill the mob on the first pull without wiping
That’s really all it comes down to. I can’t imagine that 1-3 have anything to do with becoming a better player. I just find it hard to believe that people are playing an MMO because they want to get better at logging on, joining a raid, and running to a particular location. So 1-3 can’t have anything to do with why raiding contested mobs make you a better player.
If we agree to that, it just comes down to #4. So lets compare pulling a contested mob and killing it without wiping to pulling an instanced mob and killing it without wiping.
There are two aspects to this: Learning the strat, and Killing the mob. Learning the strat means you have never actually killed the mob so you may not know what you need to do. You’re learning what to do, reading through the parse, etc. Once you’ve killed the mob, you’re trying to execute your proven strat without wiping. I’ll look at these two separately.
Learning the strat
Contested – Learning the strat: You only get to pull the mob so often depending on how many other raid forces are sitting around waiting to pull it if you fail. So when you’re working on your strategy and checking the parse/logs, you’re also seeing other guilds pull the mob and possibly learning what not to do by seeing them fail. When you get your turn, you have to be at the top of your game to give your guild the best chance of success.
Instanced – Learning the strat: You can pull the mob as many times as you want. You can try things that you know aren’t going to work just to prove one way or another how something works. The amount of times you can fail at pulling the mob is only limited by your ability to pay your repair bills and how long people can stay online. You can come back again and again and know when the mob will be available. When you pull the mob, you need to be at the top of your game to give your guild the best chance of success but that doesn’t mean everyone will on every pull. Of course, you can’t guarentee everyone will be at the top of their game on a contested pull either, but you probably have a higher chance of it happening.
Killing the mob
Contested – Killing the mob: Once you have a working strat, it comes down to executing that strat each time you pull the mob without messing up. Lot of adrenaline, lot of excitement, an audience of a few other guilds waiting for you to fail so they can get their shot. Also, less flexibility to adjust your strat if you’re not certain of victory.
Instanced – Killing the mob: You already know how to kill it and have proved you can do so. Now it just comes down to doing what you already know how to do without screwing up. However, what if you just barely killed it when you did it the first time? If thats the case, you can try a few other strats to see if any of them work better. If it turns out none of your ideas work, you can fall back on the strat that DID work, even if it barely worked. You’re a lot less inclined to do this if another guild may steal the kill from you if you fail.
So what’s the difference between the two? In contested, you have to be at the top of your game each time or else you might fail and lose the mob. You don’t have the abiliy to try multiple strategies though if you’re not positive they will work once you’re into the Killing the mob/farming phase. What I mean by this is that it would be kind of silly to pull the mob with an untested strategy with another guild breathing down your neck if you already had a strategy for killing the mob. I’ve seen this done numerous times even on instanced mobs. “Everybody has to stand right here when we fight this mob. Why? Because the person we got the strat from said we had to.” Or “because when we stood here, the mob died and we never bothered to see if it was coincidence or not.” In instances you can try different things, see the results, and adjust as needed.
So does taking down contested mobs make you a better player? I’m not sure it does. Here are the flaws I see in that argument:
You’re only competing with other guilds for server firsts. This happens with instances as well. The difference is that the playing field is even in instances whereas numbers 1-3 above come into play for contested. Having to wait for another guild before you pull a mob doesn’t make you a better player.
You’re not competing with the other guilds when you’re fighting the mob. You’re competing against the mob. It’s like downhill skiing in the olympics. You try to get down the course as fast as possible without wiping out. You’re competing against yourself and the hill. Same thing. You’re competing against yourself (don’t screw up) and the mob. Same thing happens in instances. The gold medal goes to whoever killed the mob first.
The argument could be made that in instances you can be sloppy because it doesn’t matter if you wipe 3 times on each named, you don’t lose anything but the repair costs. But honestly, what raidforce doesn’t work on taking down the mobs without wiping, even in an instance? People may slack here and there but it doesn’t mean that can’t take down the mob, just means they know they can and may not be giving it their all. Kinda like running Deep Forge with less than your full attention.
So, you might ask, if I’m right about what I’ve said above, why is it that the best players in the game are those that take down contested mobs? Doesn’t make sense does it? If taking down contested mobs doesn’t make you a better player, why are they always the better players? With the evidence presented so far, I can understand this question. I do, however, have an answer: Traditionally, contested mobs are harder and drop better gear.
The players taking down the hardest mobs in the game are going to be the best players, obviously. Also, the players with the best gear MOST of the time are going to be the best players (a few get carried along sometimes). Now if the gear and difficulty were reversed, I fully believe that those taking down the instanced mobs would be the best players in the game. Imagine if the mobs in Veeshan’s Peak were tougher to kill than all the Avatars back in RoK and dropped better loot. And I don’t mean lowering the difficulty of the Avatars, I mean upping the difficulty of the mobs in VP. If that would have happened, then the best players would be the ones taking down the mobs in VP instead of the Avatars. And it would have nothing to do with whether a mob were contested or not.
So, my very long winded conclusion is:
Contested mobs are quite exciting for the small portion of the players that ever take them down or even pull them. (I remember being trounced by contested Mayong quite well and it was a very exciting experience while the top guild on our server watched us try. Once we wiped, they destroyed Mayong.) Does the fact that they are contested make you a better player? No. Taking down the toughest mobs and getting the best gear does that. That’s what makes you step up your game and that’s what gives you the gear to be the best. Not because it’s contested, because it’s tough.
The challenge makes you a better player. One reason people go for the challenge is because of the reward. Move the best challenges and best rewards to the instances and that’s where you’ll find the best players. I’m not suggesting they should DO that, I’m just saying if they DID, that’s where you would find the best players. And it would have nothing to do with it being contested or not.
(Disclaimer: Throughout this I’ve used the term “best players” in a way that I disagree with but felt it would get the point across in a clearer manner. There are many players in the game that are really really good at their characters and play them better than the “best players” in the game. They just don’t raid. Doesn’t matter how good you are at your class, you’ll never stack up to what I refered to as the “best players” without having comperable gear. I recognize this and wanted to clarify that my use of “best players” really refers to those taking down the toughest content in the game. This doesn’t always mean the best skilled player.)
You’ve constructed quite an argument here and I’m not trying to downplay it by responding shorter but that is inevitably what I’m going to do here. You list four criteria for winning a contested raid. You ask if we can agree on the first three as “little effect on player skill.” I’m afraid we cannot. You’re comparing two unlike things. Let me reflect on number one and use the comparison.
A contested mob does not wait for your schedule. It does not let you choose the ground on which you will compete. It is the home team and will arrive when it chooses. You seem to suggest that having the available players has no impact on skill. This is far from the truth. How might you ask? In a contested encounter with a competing guild you have to work with what you’ve got. You can plan an instance raid. You cannot plan a contested raid. If you only have 22 players on you still have to go. Does it not follow then that those plays MUST play better to make up for the missing two? Of course they do.
You combine forming a raid and getting to the location. Getting to the location is, I agree, little to no measure of skill. Lets drop it. Forming a raid, however, does/did involve skill. Knowing class synergy well enough to make crucial group decisions in minutes versus the infinite time before a instance raid is the mark of a skilled leader. Group dynamics used to be complex. Perhaps these days that is not as true but it still factors in when you reduce the amount of time. I also return to my previous point. In an unscheduled raid you don’t get to build perfect groups. You work with what you have. If your scouts are used to gaining 2,000 DPS each by having a dirge in their group but suddenly don’t do they not have to make up for that loss? Of course they do.
There is a skill to being the first to pull. It isn’t an issue of just engaging first at all. It is an issue of knowing before you pull whether you can actually succeed or not. In my history we FREQUENTLY won on the second pull. Why? The guild before us was so terrified of us they would rush their attempt to be sure they got an attempt. This virtually always ended in failure and usually a bad failure. This is once more a question of leadership skill but simply saying it has no skill ramifications is not exactly accurate.
Finally we look at the point that you wanted to content. You make a lot of points that really suggest contested mobs do improve your skill. I wont repeat them but I want to hit on a point or two:
You’re not competing with the other guilds when you’re fighting the mob. You’re competing against the mob. It’s like downhill skiing in the olympics. You try to get down the course as fast as possible without wiping out. You’re competing against yourself and the hill. Same thing. You’re competing against yourself (don’t screw up) and the mob. Same thing happens in instances. The gold medal goes to whoever killed the mob first.
I’m afraid this just doesn’t ring true at all for me. You are competing against the mob but that is almost minor. You are really competing against yourself. You’re competing against your fears and worries. No raider fighting a contested mob is only thinking about the mob. They’re thinking about what happens if they fail. You said that but you also said the same is true in instances. I can’t agree. I never can agree with that. If you fail in an instance you lose nothing. There is no punishment. The degrees between an instance and a contested mob in this area are extreme. When you wipe to a mob that you own you pick yourself up and do it again. When you wipe to a contested mob and another guild kills it you feel it for a while. The same thing most certainly does not happen. You have now lost your income and are behind another team. They get stronger and on the next contested mob they have an advantage. This is not an isolated event. It is all linked. A failure here, a failure there and the next thing you know you’re in second place. That cannot be replicated by an instanced mob.
Contested mobs usually are the hardest mobs in the game but they aren’t always. I can think of old EQ2 mobs that were much harder than the contested ones. Darathar and Tarinax to name two. Harder mobs do obviously make you play better but by virtue of the fact you can slack, can build perfect groups, can engage in perfect conditions, you can never make the argument that it is equal ground.
Why do contested mobs make players better? It is very simple. You have to think, adapt and work with what you’ve got. Your raid will almost always be suboptimal, the pressure is greater, and if your leader is unskilled it shows far more.
You’ve got some good points there and I think you may have clarified a bit of your argument for me.
My point was that raiding contested mobs doesn’t make you a better player just because they are contested. You disagree.
You use the example of having a mob pop whenever it feels like it and you have to go with whatever you have. Since you don’t have the optimal setup, you have to step up your game. I’ll agree that not having the optimal setup makes everyone have to play harder and better and may even include people using spells they normally don’t use just to fill some of the gaps. But that doesn’t JUST happen with contested.
You said that forming a raid involves skill and that having to do it in minutes makes you step up and get better at it. I’ll definately concede that raiding contested mobs will make the raid leader/leaders better. The time crunch involved will definately do that. Agreed.
You said “If your scouts are used to gaining 2,000 DPS each by having a dirge in their group but suddenly don’t do they not have to make up for that loss? Of course they do.” How? They don’t play any different with a dirge than without a dirge unless they’re trying to time things with COB. They’re squeezing out as much DPS as they can as it is. What are they going to change when they don’t have a dirge? My main is an Assassin and there have been times that I’ve ended up in a less than optimal group in a raid. The worst it has come down to is swapping out poisons for some that gen power and do less damage because my group had no power regen. Regardless, this comes down to having a less than optimal group setup. That happens in instances as well. If you’re simply saying that raiding contested mobs puts you in less than optimal situations more often which causes you to step up your game, I’m with ya. But it’s those less than optimal situations that are doing it, not the fact that it’s a contested mob.
For the point I was mainly discussing, I can see a little of what you’re talking about. I’ll continue my downhill skiing comparison and see if I can get to where you’re at. You can practice all you want at downhill skiing and will reach a certain level of skill. When you take that skill and apply it in a competition in front of an audience, it takes on added pressures, emotions, and other intangible aspects. Your first few times, you’ll probably screw up just from nerves. Eventually, you’ll settle in and get confortable with the new added pressure and this adds to your overall skill. If you compared yourself to what you were like before you started competing, you’d see that you’d come a long way. If this is what you’re refering to, I’ll concede again. In that aspect, it probably does make you better.
And in your closing, you said: “Why do contested mobs make players better? It is very simple. You have to think, adapt and work with what you’ve got. Your raid will almost always be suboptimal, the pressure is greater, and if your leader is unskilled it shows far more.”
I remember reading your posts about 10 manning the new Icy Keep raid zone. That is going in with a suboptimal raid. This is the sort of thing that really makes you step up your game and learn to play your class better. But it’s an instance and not contested. That’s what I’m getting at. It’s the situation of trying things with suboptimal conditions or trying to kill the hardest mobs that make you better, not simply the fact that they’re contested. It may simply be that we’re saying a lot of the same things. These situations are what make you a better player. Contested raiding just puts you in those situations, for most people, a lot more frequently. (Unless you’re like your guild or mine where we often take on things we have no buisness trying and often manage to pull it off.)
From a raid leadership perspective though, contested definately makes you step up your game and get better.
In my view, the issue with the hole had very little to do with either the one exploited encounter or a general lack of understanding of how to build a contested space. The core problem is that leveling in TSF is already so fast that there was no room for it to go faster in groups. The game just isn’t set up to deal with players gaining 2 or more levels in a single grinding session, which is precisely what happened when the game went live with the much-requested “faster than solo” leveling path.
(And no, the fact that they’re also in the business of selling exp boosts did not help the already bad situation.)
I actually think you could have a faster than solo path. Players were able to level that fast due to the potions (which you mentioned) and refer a friend. I mean, don’t get me wrong, we love it, but you shouldn’t be able to use RAF on a current tier brand new expansion. That needs to be off limits for at least two months. I just don’t think the hole is really to blame so much as the bonus experience options.
My solo experience without either RAF or potions (forgot to use vet reward potions) but with vitality was 2-3 hours /played per level when I was actually focused on gaining exp to get levels (as opposed to messing around with events, old group content, crafting, etc). How much faster than that does it make sense to have players ding? I didn’t sit there with a stop watch, but I’m pretty sure the ding time in TSF was faster than the ding time in WoW these days.
My initial reaction to your post about having a single level or two was skepticism, but I’m starting to come around to your view. With five levels, double the exp per level, and the current content, TSF would have been a better expansion while still having solo ding times on par with the competition. If you’d gone with 2 levels, basically the same content but with some of the useless Fed Ex quests that were added to inflate the exp count removed, and maybe a 3-4 fold exp increase over live (i.e. not quite the full 5-fold for going from 10 to 2 levels), you would have had possibly a much better expansion AND room for a faster but not absurd rate of group advancement.
Basically, when discussing this topic it comes down to a few things for me.
1) MOST people playing any MMO casually do not, and should not care about contested mobs / dungeons. When discussing this topic, it’s important to point out that these contested mobs should be ADDED ON to existing instanced dungeons. I don’t think, as Dresden said, that MMO’s will ever shy away from instances ever again, so it would be a moot point to say that a game with ALL contested like EQ was would be a bad idea. What most of us who champion for better or different raid / dungeon content really want is a small sliver of pie given to those of us who really truly enjoy hardcore raiding at its most visceral form. What I mean by this is that most higher tier raiders put in the extra effort to earn bigger and better things in our games, and recently it seems we have been getting the blunt end of the stick. Casuals ALWAYS proclaim their feelings when a mob is too hard for them to take down, and inevitably the mobs get dumbed down after a short time. All we ask is for casuals to look at it from the other perspective and allow a few things hardcore players can have to distinguish themselves from others in the game. Nothing hurts me more than running around in a game where I spend 40 hours a week in hard modes etc., and Player B spends 10 hours dungeon crawling but gets equivalent gear. It’s just not fair to those of us who take more risk.
2) Most of us choose to join the MMO community for the simple fact that IT IS A COMMUNITY. If we wanted to play single player RPG’s or Multiplayer LAN’s we would’ve taken that path in our gaming lives. God knows there are some great single player games out there nowadays! Anyways, this should be the case for casuals and hardcores alike. MMO’s simply offer a better social experience than other game genres out there. However, the feeling of community has long since gone away since games have become so instanced. Guild A goes in their tiny little hideout while Guild B goes in theirs and every once an awhile they will meet in a common area and chat but not very often. What contested mobs do is ENCOURAGE people to group in a single area and interact. The interaction may not be all peaches and cream and some harsh words may fly, but such is life… that is why developers invented the /ignore list right? Also, the reason I Caps Locked “ENCOURAGE” is because this is what any good MMO should strive to do. If someone wants to solo their way up to max level, they shouldn’t be able to kill elites or solo “group quests” while doing it. Somewhere along the lines, mob scaling went haywire and we as players just accepted it and went along our daily lives.
3) Lastly, I want to touch on something Ferrel commented on in his original article. This is something I’ve commented on here too in the past. Players become better with a little added pressure put on them. Now, this may not be an argument catered towards casual gamers simply because they play for other reasons (I’m generalizing this statement). This happens in every facet of life, in game and out. For example, isn’t the sole purpose of an intervention to help someone into bettering their lives by giving them ultimatums? “If you do not seek help, I will not give you money anymore.” etc etc etc. In game, if you have someone threatening to take your daily allowance, don’t you think you would want to go that extra mile to ensure that doesn’t happen? No one enjoys losing, so to prevent that you try harder… you get better. The victory or defeat (sometimes) will be much more heightened because of this effort put in. There is a reason people remember the “good old days” a lot more current happenings… simply because the highs were so much higher and the lows much lower. MMO’s are supposed to tug on our heartstrings as they are essentially a fantasy world extension of ourselves. We want to earn a better life. We want to be tested and overcome our obstacles. And finally, we want to feel alive when playing, not just some zombie mashing keys.
I know this is a lot of writing but I just get extremely passionate when writing about MMO’s lately. It has recently gotten to me that I can not participate in something I have loved for 10+ years because my style of play has been swept under the rug in recent years. Developers have basically said to the original MMO players, “Thanks for the time building our genre, but we think were gonna take our product and sell it to these people over here because there are more of them.”
“Developers have basically said to the original MMO players, “Thanks for the time building our genre, but we think were gonna take our product and sell it to these people over here because there are more of them.””
That’s a really good observation.
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