How are people addicted to MMORPGs?

[gurugeorge]

I can't seem to get addicted to them no matter what. I played WoW for 2 weeks and I barely got through the first week before dropping it. I am trying to get back into Lost Ark and it just seems like work. I can get into Path of Exile fairly easily, but dear God MMORPGs just seem really boring.

is it just me?

MMOs are only good if you play with other people. I've always found them pretty boring to play solo (unless they have nice immersive scenery that you can LARP in for a while, or a good story - but then you might as well be playing something like Skyrim or a proper RPG).

The trouble is, some MMOs have pleasant communities and some don't. If the game has a high asshole quotient, then it's not fun either. But if the community's got a high percentage of people who want to play together and enjoy doing so, it's a lot of fun to chat with people while you're playing, and to feel like a merry band of brothers who've got each other's backs.

Fact is, I think the heyday of MMOs is over really. Hardly any of them are actually conducive to playing with other people now unless you already have a bunch of friends you play with, which rather defeats the object of the damn things (at least as they were originally envisioned). They neither go with the model that most MMOs used to follow, of making the game hard enough that you have to play with others to progress at a comfortable pace, nor take the road less travelled that City of Heroes took (and did very well) where the reward for playing with others is worth it. Most of them nowadays seem to lack any real incentive to meet up with and play with strangers.

I'm talking about PvE MMOs here - PvP MMOs are a different kettle of fish. The only really successful one is EVE Online, the rest come and go like mayflies and can sustain only tiny hardcore fanbases. However, they can be the most fun experience if you're lucky and find a good bunch of people to play with.

The other thing that's great fun is going the full roleplaying route where you're literally doing improvisational amateur dramatics either in a full-on MMO or an NWN/2 persistent world. That's actually just about the "highest" experience you can get in a videogame, the adrenaline rush is terrific, beyond even hardcore PvP; and when you add top notch PvE (as in an NWN/2 persistent world where you have a team led by a DM in-game, or the kinds of complicated tricksy dungeons/raids you get in the best MMOs) and/or hardcore PvP to it, it's pretty much the peak of what's possible in videogaming IMHO.

 

[Berengar]

Everyone I know who plays MMOs is severely depressed and I always assumed there was a correlation there.

 

[FriendlyMerchant]

Based on the numbers, terrible games sell well. It's why people buy Larian games.

 

[CarbonCarousel]

Everyone I know who plays MMOs is severely depressed and I always assumed there was a correlation there.

MMO's allow people to escape reality and to meet other likeminded folks.

 

[Sykar]

Simple we love our

 

[vonAchdorf]

Do ERP like the rest of us.

 

[Late Bloomer]

You played WoW and Lost Ark and wondered how people get addicted. That like wondering how people find CRPG's fun and playing Divinity Original Sin and Solasta as your examples.

 

[Norfleet]

Everyone I know who plays MMOs is severely depressed and I always assumed there was a correlation there.

I'm not severely depressed. I play MMOs to fulfill my workaholic need to be engaged in work-like activity while retired.

 

[Black]

 

[anvi]

Only the early MMOs were good, then they became McMMO's and became shit. And the early ones are now dead, even the emulators are miles away from how it really was.

 

[anvi]

EQ was all about playing with other people. You could solo but only in easier places, the best rewards came from the harder content which needed a group. And the way you interacted with each other, the combat/gameplay is still better than any other game I've seen, and by a big margin. Besides that it was a huge virtual world to explore full of interesting stuff, way more content than Bethesda games, and far more depth and meaning. The gameplay also changes often as your class develops. It's still my favorite game of all time, nothing else comes close. But the whole genre went off a cliff after WoW.

If you are someone who can see the decline from say Morrowind -> Oblivilolz -> Skyderp in terms of being an actual RPG, then decline in MMOs was like that only far steeper and far further. It would be something like:

UO/EQ/DAOC/Etc > WoW > McMMO1 > McMMO2 > McMMO3 > McMMO4 > McMMO5 > McMMO6 > etc..

There are probably 1000+ MMOs at this point if you include all the Asian trash ones too.

 

[Gastrick]

These are a few good links analyzing what makes MMOs addictive. Search engines are so shit nowadays that these were difficult to re-find.

http://www.nickyee.com/eqt/skinner.html

http://www.nickyee.com/hub/addiction/mapping.html

 

[Perkel]

Becuse you don't have asian gene in you. Also i wouldn't call poe a MMORPG.


The answer you are looking for is that MMORPGs are shit. There was string of interesting ones back in 90s but since then everything is garbage created to maximalize player retention instead of providing good gameplay.

90s mmorpgs were much more open, less rules and more sandboxy which lead to player interaction with community, personal trading and other fun stuff. There were also no meta builds because internet barely worked, no walktroughs and so on so you had to talk with people.

modern mmorpgs are zoomers garbage with numbers going up, 0 interaction with other players other than let us team up to kill x thing for split rewards.

 

[Galdred]

I did play a few MMO, RPG or other:
I played Hyperiums for a few years. It was a text based Strategy game, not a MMORPG, but the mechanisms didn't feel very different from Eve Online, except for the fact that the game didn't try to hide its EXCEL origin.
What made me come back to it was the thrill of risking everything we had built during every conflict, and the fact that we counted on each other for survival. Actually, the last year I played, I had been elected president of our alliance, and wanted to leave, but I stayed because I felt an obligation towards the players who had elected me.
Of all the hours I spent, I'd say more than half were used to chat with various alliance members, or doing diplomacy.

I tried a few MMORPG, but the only one I played for a significant time was Shadowbane, for the same reasons (except that I didn't play as long, nor did I get as high on the "social ladder" of the game).
Embarking on a raid against other players with a small group of people you knew (in game) was really great, even though the gameplay of Shadowbane itself was a bit lackluster, compared to other MMORPG.

Modern MMORPG have removed this element of risk, and with it the flow of adrenaline rushing through your veins whenever you took huge risks. Now there are only minimal risks for minimal rewards, and there is a ton of competition on this front (Gatcha games, Boom Beach/Clash of Clans clones, ...), except in Eve Online, but I never could get over its slow core gameplay.

But these old school MMORPG are also something that is not very convenient to play if you are not a student, so I doubt I could get into one.

 

[gurugeorge]

There was a window of time when MMOs were the best form of gaming ever - that window of time started when everyone was discovering for the first time the fun of playing together in virtual worlds, making friends and building a sense of community, and it ended once everyone's MMO cherry had been popped.

The fun of it might have been sustained, but MMOs went in the direction of favouring solo play over mulitplayer play (except for the endgame). People stopped talking, they started just grumpily soloing through the games with blinkers on, and not communicating with each other. That killed the genre.

The absolute key to the MMO is to get relative strangers talking to each other, communicating with each other, and making it super-easy for them to play together and make in-game friends. Once MMOs stopped facilitating that, the genre was done for. The stupidity was leaning on the endgame for community, and not assiduously fostering it in the early to mid game. It's pointless just having multiplayer for established guilds or groups of people playing together who are already friends; what you want is for strangers to talk with each other and to form guilds as they go by making friendships in-game as they go. That's what really knits a community together as a cohesive thing.

They stopped facilitating it in several ways. One way was that the old school design made some quests and parts of the world so dangerous that you had to team up with strangers to do the content. Another way they stopped facilitating it was moving from tab targeting to more action-ey form of gameplay. The benefit of tab targeting is that it's easier to type while fighting; the problem with more action-ey forms of combat is that it's just a tiny bit more difficult to type and play at the same time, but that incremental, small difference makes a huge difference when multiplied over all multiplayer interaction.

Developers also made a huge mistake when thinking that people would gravitate en masse to voice communication. Sure, there's a bit of clunkiness to typing, and chat is always prone to garbage, and when people type nonsense in chat, that's a little bit immersion-breaking; but it's not nearly as immersion-breaking as hearing that lovely elf have the gruff voice of a 30 year old male, or being subjected to some 12 year old's ranting with his chaotic family life clattering away in the background.

 

[Perkel]

Don't forget voice chat problems. every mmo is now limiting voice chat only to group or some weird ass reason.

Only MMO i know right now that allows for level chat aka everyone near you hear you is Star Citizen and i fully expect that at some point they will remove it.

 

[Hag]

http://www.nickyee.com/eqt/skinner.html

Nice read, well written and concise. Not sure if I agree about the Maslow theory but that's the first time I see it used to explain addiction.

His article on superstitions in MMO is also good.

 

[anvi]

That's a weird and false view of EQ imo, it's not the way I saw it or how I played it. For a start I never did crafting even after 20 years. And the xp to level part is not supposed to be thought of the way he does. If you think like that then the suspension of disbelief is gone and you should play something else. He makes it sound like a treat dispenser in a rat experiment. To most people they aren't doing 5 clicks to level up at 1 and then 500 clicks to level up at level 30 or whatever. The higher levels involve adventures further through the big wide world, learning more about the game, the gear you want to hunt down, the dungeons, and combat evolves to become deep and challenging and requires a lot of practice. That's what I played it for, the gameplay. The addictive aspects come into it a lot but it's nothing like he describes. The later MMOs are a different story.

That whole thing reads like a sperg trying to describe a joke and why a joke works.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

http://www.nickyee.com/eqt/skinner.html

Nice read, well written and concise. Not sure if I agree about the Maslow theory but that's the first time I see it used to explain addiction.

His article on superstitions in MMO is also good.

Not superstition, conformity. Modern MMOs are absolutely full of this, players copying what they see other players doing rather than understanding the reason for doing it.

 

[deama]

For world of warcraft, there's that private server called "ascension", it's pretty popular and it's a classless private server, meaning you can mix and match all the different abilities/talents from other classes, they're currently at burning crusade but wrath of the lich king is around the corner, probably end of this year it gets released.

This should add a lot more variety, and it also has higher exp rates so it's not a slog to level up.

 

[Val the Moofia Boss]

I played Ascension's draft server. It was really fun at first, but eventually you figure out what dream build you want to play, but the draft system means that you will pretty much never get that dream build unless you dump thousands of hours into the game getting the right cards and levelling from 1-60 enough times. So you have to reroll on the free pick server, but you've already invested a lot into the draft server so starting all over feel scratch feels demoralizing and I just walked away from it.

I liked the outlaw PvP system. The moment you walked out of a safe zone like a city, everyone was free game. Doesn't matter if they are Horde or Alliance. Keeps you on your toes constantly looking around for other players, and if you see someone coming, you begin preparing you escape just in case they attack you. Finding safety in numbers also helped.

 

[ItsChon]

I liked RuneScape a lot back around 2005 - 2007. As far as I remember the appeal was:

I will second this point.

I'm currently playing OSRS on and off, and I've been playing for a while. I go through periods where I log in a ton and grind it out, and periods where I log in once every 3-5 days and play for like an hour. It is a unique experience as far as CRPGs go, in large part due to the fact that the grind in the game is very real. It takes tens of hours of doing the same repetitive thing to level up a skill by just a single point. That being said, the game stays enjoyable because of how relaxed and afk it can be, while also being very intensive and focused depending on the activity that you're doing. If I'm browsing the Codex, I'll open the game up and chop some wood or fish or do a Slayer task. If I feel like making money and actually enjoying the game, I'll go do some bossing or PvP, which can be a ton of fun. The game also has some great potential for community interaction, as a lot of the activities that are "afk" give you time to talk and shoot the shit with the community. And when it comes to group activities like bossing/raids, you rely on teamwork from your fellow group members. It's "addictive" because all the progress in the game has real meaning, and even if you lose everything, the skills you spent hours grinding will always be there for you. Combine that with the fact that you don't really feel the need to log on daily at all, and it's the kind of game where you can just play on and off for a year or two, and actually end up making significant progress.

I will also say, one of the most fun online experiences I ever had was playing on a private Minecraft server. It was a PvP server that had a customized faction plugin, and it was great in large part due to the community, but also due to the custom rules that were implemented. Outside of your faction lands, it was a PvP free for all, and you were risking your gear and items every time you ventured out. There were anti-griefing rules put into place, so people were able to create fantastic cities and builds that wouldn't just get destroyed, and the landscape which was sculpted by the staff in world edit stayed beautiful as well. All of this created a great ecosystem, where you could log in and just shoot the shit in all/faction chat, grind resources for faction builds or needs, or go out looking for some prey in outside of your faction lands. This doesn't really qualify as an MMORPG, but it is an MMO, and I feel like a lot of the elements that made the server so great could be implemented to make an MMORPG good.

 

[deama]

I played Ascension's draft server. It was really fun at first, but eventually you figure out what dream build you want to play, but the draft system means that you will pretty much never get that dream build unless you dump thousands of hours into the game getting the right cards and levelling from 1-60 enough times. So you have to reroll on the free pick server, but you've already invested a lot into the draft server so starting all over feel scratch feels demoralizing and I just walked away from it.

I liked the outlaw PvP system. The moment you walked out of a safe zone like a city, everyone was free game. Doesn't matter if they are Horde or Alliance. Keeps you on your toes constantly looking around for other players, and if you see someone coming, you begin preparing you escape just in case they attack you. Finding safety in numbers also helped.

It has a free-pick server so you can pick the abilities/talents straight up without having to faff about with the draft system.

 

[Hobknobling]

For world of warcraft, there's that private server called "ascension", it's pretty popular and it's a classless private server, meaning you can mix and match all the different abilities/talents from other classes, they're currently at burning crusade but wrath of the lich king is around the corner, probably end of this year it gets released.

This should add a lot more variety, and it also has higher exp rates so it's not a slog to level up.

Relevant article:

https://www.raphkoster.com/2006/09/06/agc-rob-pardos-keynote/

Concentrated coolness. What this means is, rather than make variety and lots of things to do, make fewer things really cool. The best example in WoW is the class system. Lots of games have more classes, multiclassing, etc. We consciously avoided that in order to make each class as cool and different from the others as possible. This allowed us to have unique spells, abilities and mechanics. No red fireball, white fireball, blue fireball, etc. Even the two pet classes, hunters and warlocks, use their pets completely differently. We consciously avoided sharing mechanics across classes. We recently announced that the paladins and the shamans are switching sides. One of the primary reasons why we undid that rule was that we found ourselves merging them into each other for PvP balance. So we decided that it was less important for each side to have its own class than it was to have concentrated coolness for each class.

More classes are not always better. Once you get enough different units or classes, players can only handle so much. When you see someone, you might not know what they can do, and this matters because when you want to form a group, you lose track of the strengths and weaknesses. In battlegrounds, you need to know instantly what the opponent can do to you. Even if you have 50 completely different ideas that are cool, it’s still important not to use them all.

I highly recommend reading the transcript since it is a beautiful time capsule of early 00's MMO design in the DikuMUD-EverQuest lineage. Most MMOs that tried to emulate the success of WoW did not understand these design principles and eventually they eroded even in WoW.

 

[RunningWolf]

L2 and EVE are the last good mmorpgs. Because they are about player competition and PVP. Fighting other parties for the boss in a dungeon makes theme park mmos like FFXIV seem like they were made for literal drooling retards.