Why do we like MMORPGs?

[Praetorian]

I have to admit. I play MMORPG's. Currently, I'm going to play World of Warcraft again. I know its a shit game, way too easy, and the community is full of dipshits, plebs and other moronic people. Then why do I like it? Simple. Loot. To whore fat loot.

Its the same reason people go for gambling, really. It's not that I like teaming up with dipshits around the globe only to utterly betray them in the end and walk away with all their loot. Once you kill a monster there are two possibilities.

1. The chance was very slim, but you won. You got yourself a unique and amazing epic weapon. Congratulations, you're now mediocre and in line with the rest of the server.
2. You lose. Your life summarised.


That's it. That's all there is to most current MMORPG's. That's basically all MMORPG's have to offer. Besides, you know, fighting monsters to gain experience to some day, hopefully, fight even bigger monsters with the same dipshits you fought the inferior monsters with. Maybe one day you too will be a bored moron with a max level character.

If there was any kind of material reward or even a strategical challenge and a plethora of different tactics to use against mobs, I'd understand why I'm playing my life away rather than exploring the splendours of life (drinking, dancing to hip hop, being dipshits) my peers are enjoying. But there simply isn't any challenge in World of Warcraft. At all. You either fight an amount of mobs that you can handle, or you flee only to try your luck on a creature of lower level than you are.

Thank God there's always ebay. Not just to actually make money from MMORPGs like I enjoy doing, I simply enjoy the gratification of thousands of people hating my guts for ruining their so called 'economy'. What little is left of it in World of Warcraft, anyway. Let me get it through your heads you proletariates; Selling gold ruins the community the same way as people passing gold along to their lower level alts does. Basically, it hardly does so. There are way more people giving money to their low level alts than there are idiots buying pretend money on Ebay.

I'm going to stop writing now. Tell me why you enjoy pissing your life away in a virtual pissing contest in this very thread whilst I'll be doing something more entertaining, like trampling ants or stealing candy from random toddlers.

[Balain]

I use to play them lots. It took a lot for me to give them up. Social interaction that other games didn't have made it fun for me. I some how managed to avoid dipshits in Everquest. Well for a long time I did. I will ahve fond memories of My old guild. Hard to forget Drunken Brawl I, II and III.

I could go on and on and on about the negatives but I won't lol

[Lateli]

Sony caught on to that Ebay thing, they now have a couple "Station Exchange" servers on EQ2 where you can sell money and characters. I remember selling my account on EQ for like $1000, people are nuts.. :)

I hate raiding though, in any MMORPG, I prefer to hunt alone or with a close friend.. Too much effort to keep 40+ people in line. Then I have to share the looties?! (My favorite WoW loot wasn't even that great, it was an Easter Dress, I wonder if that's rare now.. I stopped playing a long time ago.. :/) Pfft.. And you can damn well be sure that some slackass gets the really good stuff, the one that comes once a month, or the guild whore. I got a lot of stories from EQ about that, good ol' Cazic Thule, server of drama!.. I love it :)

I'd rather stay in and be a geek on the comp, then go out though.. :(

[co_delphi]

I am one of those lucky individuals who gets bored quickly with slow gameplay. The only MMO I could even be construed as addicted to would have been Ragnarok, but even then I only found entertainment in programming my BOT to play the game for me and not get caught doing it. Although I did also find it very entertaining to buy large amounts of dead branches and release them all in one area either typically visitted by low level characters or by highly specialized people not equipped to handle what I presented them with. (my favorite was like the 5th level of Bybilan dropping 100 DB's. All the high level characters would only have wind weapons and not be prepared for high level wind resistant monsters attacking them). As a high point, I had once managed to level a character from beginning to level 89 within the one month free trial period.

[Citizen]

I don't play MMORPGs. Closest thing I play is Diablo 2.

I'd like to get into WoW at some point.

[Daishikaze]

My theory is this: People like to spend money every month to sit around their house and hang out in a video game setting.

Seriously, I don't know. All I know is I'm not shelling out good money for something like that, that can get really expensive.

[hapacheese]

Here is the uber-uber-short version:

It's psychology, really. It's all about dangling the carrot in front of the gamer just close enough to keep them interested, but far enough away so they have to work a long time to get it.

WoW/EQ are based on the same mechanic that made the Diablo series popular, which is a finely-tuned reward structure. The reward is multi-fold:

1) Character advancement: Diablo 2 is still king here. The level of character skill customization is pretty unrivaled at this point. Each level was a strategic decision in how to invest character points because even two characters of the same class could end up very different, depending on where skill points and attribute points are placed.

2) Loot: Loot affects two things - enhancing the character advancement, and showing off status. The first one is pretty easy to understand in that your loot further enhances your characters abilities. Getting better loot makes your life easier. The other added effect is that it displays to the other players how "good" of a player you are and how much of a veteran you are.

The meta-game of collecting loot doesn't appeal to everyone, hence some people simply don't understand the appeal of these kinds of games. They often prefer less peripheral rewards, and prefer more immediate rewards (death match). And some gamers, however rare, simply prefer to experience the journey (adventure game lovers).

:)

[co_delphi]

As for reasoning why people enjoyt them I know that I used to enjoy them as a way of distracting me from the fact that I had nothing better to do and no actual social life. But now that that isn't the case I am not playing any..... funny how that works isn't it?

[Pierrot le Fou]

I have never gotten into MMORPGs for the reason that hapacheese is talking about, though I loved MUDs. Because MMORPGs are predicated upon getting another month out of the players, they will get shellacked if they decide to make REAL challenges with REAL consequences to losing -- people who lose months of effort will likely quit rather than have to go through it all again, considering how long it takes to get that good, and how frustrating it is to have to do it again.

MUDs, without the concept of making a profit, could create super challenges, and allow people to try, or not try, if they want. If they go for it and lose, there's no whining, because they aren't consumers, they're guests, and it's not like they just lost any money (through months of effort) to make them truly bitter about it. Sure people get pissed off and quit, but pretty-much it's kept to a minimum. Such ain't the case in WoW or somesuch, which means that it has to be easy enough for people to succeed without much risk if they DO fail...

I miss MUDs. Most of the players fled to MMORPGs, and that makes me sad.

[PopCulturePooka]

Role-playing.

[baslisks]

I like my guild. fun people good to group with and not bad shots in bf2. I know each one almost to a persoanl lvl without knowing anything about them. I can rely on what they are going to do. I know what their alterior motive is before they tell me.

[Sbabbari]

Although not exactly an MMORPG, I absolutely love Guild Wars. No monthly fee, a great game, relatively no grind, i've never had any lag, great gameplay, Devs listen to everything said on the fansites, etc. What more could I ask for in an online game?

[h2orowe]

Guild Wars gets sooooo boring. I got bored of it right before the ascending missions. I think it might've been cuz I was a N/W. -.- bad combo.

[Varia]

Replace MMORPG with any other thing.

instathread
________
PORNO MOVIES (http://www.fucktube.com/)

[Praetorian]

Replace MMORPG with any other thing.


I don't really slay Succubuses with my Über Zweihander Of Doom in real life.

[Collapse]

I got into MMOs about two or three years ago, starting with Priston Tale. I got to 47 and got a full-body armor covering the legs. Finding no good reason to progress (because really, I could care less about weaponry and advanced armory. Just that full armor did the work), I stopped. Couple of months passed after I stopped, the full body armor was removed and all that shit. Still never played.

Three months ago or so, I played Guild Wars. Good at first, but after I finished the last mission.. bah, nothing to do (I could care less about weaponry and additional skills. Much more of the same grind to me, just a different class), so I quit.

I suppose people like them is because they're time consuming with lots of skills to unlock/weapons to acquire/stats to brag about and so on, but it all did not appeal to me and lasted that long.

[nice gaijin]

I don't play them, but I did enjoy reading this: http://static.circa1984.com/the-big-scam.html

[spaik]

Personally, I think you are all mostly missing the point of an MMORPG. An MMORPG is the community. It is the guild, your ingame friends, those who you experience the game with, the enemies you make, those whos antics reverberate throughout that server. It is almost entirely the social structure surrounding the game that makes it able to hold players over the long run. Without these, you end up hitting a dead end playing with only the internal game content. Strip away all the politics, drama, economics, etc, that comes with it, and you don't have much. A lot of the people who quit these games do so because they did not like or appreciate this aspect of the game, for whatever reason. The players make the game, for any MMORPG.

Having said that, I play a lot of WoW. Endgame is boring. All the endgame big raid encounters are boring for the most part. Some are lots of fun, with scripted battles, like Onyxia. Others are just bland and uninspiring like Molten Core. The new raid content in the form of Zul'Gurub is actually fun, because it a lot less structured and controlled, and the boss encounters are scripted. Even with all that said, however, the only reason I still play WoW is because of my guild. We hang out inside and outside of the game, chatting, talking about stuff like fighting games (they are huge fighting game nuthuggers like me, and post on SRK), or playing online poker or whatever. This is the game we choose to spend our time in, that's all. When we all leave, will we play another MMO? Probably. MMOs are fun to hang out in. If we don't go to another game, will we stop hanging out? Highly unlikely.

[Trump]

To respond to the initial post, if you think it is the people who just sell gold for cash who crash the economies, you are completely incorrect. The people who crash the economy are those who do NOTHING but farm gold and then sell it for profit. They just flood the market and screw things up. Someone who just plays the game, earns money and decides to sell it doesn't hurt a thing.

But why do people play? Playing through things with a close group of friends is probably one of the most fun gaming environments out there. The feeling of advancing as a group, experiencing new things together and then talking about it later, sharing those crazy moments where you are sure you are all going to die (and sometimes you die, sometimes you live), those are the moments that keep people playing.

Level grinding, loot, all that is designed to keep those who feel the need to "beat" the game playing longer, and they eventually leave when they do beat it or realize its stupid and you can't.

Personally, there is not a game out there that matches what I want to play. I've made some good friends in MMOs, but I don't play as often as my friends so I fall behind. When you can't keep up what's the point in playing? Its a game and it shouldn't feel like work to keep up, and most of my friends don't like doing things 5-10 times (for each person that misses it). And most of the games are FAR FAR FAR too easy. If I wanted just social interaction, I'd go play sports where people people are there for a weel defined period of time. There is no falling behind, there is no getting lost in the masses.

So, until they can create a game that is provides a gaming challenge and a good social environment for me, I likely won't stay long in any MMO.

[hapacheese]

The issue with the claim that MMOs are "about the community" is, well, there are plenty of free online programs and games that allow people to form communities or do whatever. And if it were primarily about the community, the games that supported the community functions the most would be the most popular.

Now, I'm not saying that the community aspects of MMOs aren't important. Quite the opposite. It's the community that makes MMOs unique from single player games. However, the thing that keeps people in is the reward structure. I only touched on it above, but the reward can be something as tangible as an item drop, or as intangible as gaining reknown in the community. Regardless, the game's system must support that sort of reward structure/feedback for people to be interested, and remain interested enough to pay a monthly fee.

The one thing that constantly annoys me whenever reading feedback for MMOs on the various forums is that very few people *actually* give feedback to the game as an MMO. They all seem to simply want to play a single-player game where they are the hero, but there just happens to be a bunch of other people running around they can chat with. *sigh*

[Joe]

Who's we? I've played my share of them and can't get into them. There's only been one I've ever liked, and it's old. It was the best Mmo ever... *sighs* I wish it was what it used to be...

[Sardaukar]

I play Lineage II. It's my dirty little secret. :(