Mischiefblog designs the next generation of MMOs March 29th, 2006 (Visited 8410 times) Tags:

Here’s the full post, but my abbreviated excerpts are:

• As players mature, play multiple MMOs, and repeatedly experience very similar games, they can be expected to look for different game styles or even to look for worlds.
• Games-cum-worlds should begin to offer player creation and stronger community building tools.
• What will a next generation MMO look like? A lot like it did in 1997 when Ultima Online was released.
• It won’t be about new mechanics as much as about empowering players to have an impact on the world.
• assume that the game will be solid and that in itself, it may not be very revolutionary or evolutionary–those tend to have problems in the real world (witness DDO). Further, consider that the game should be able to be removed from the world and replaced without breaking the world.
• Above all, the game should not break community or friendship ties
• A next generation game will have rapid releases.
• Game customization will go from beyond the client to the server.
• A next generation MMO will be incredibly sticky.
• The fourth or fifth generation game is hosted by the player

It’s easy to argue with many of these; for example, will the new worlds truly be stickier, or are the days of long subscriber lifetimes gone forever? Will anything ever look like UO did in 1997? Do we really want it to?

And perhaps a key point: will players mature, or will the market grow? The two are sort of on opposite ends of a seesaw, in a way. Market growth generally comes from players not versed in the market, and they’re going to continue to want entry-level experiences.

A common pattern we saw in the text mud days was MUD burnout. A mudder would enter the community, and get badly hooked on a game, often after sampling a few. The one they would get hooked on would almost certainly be the one where they “clicked” with other people who were around — be they friends who brought them in, or new friends. Then they’d play obsessively for a while.

But usually, they would drop out — not of the game, of the entire hobby after a few years, usually two or so. Other games would pale. Either they’d move on to work on making or running a mud, or exit altogether. The percentage of diehards who played for years and years and years really was fairly small.

I’ve been predicting for a while that the same would happen with MMORPGs, but it doesn’t seem to have the same trajectory. Yes, we see the jaded types, but they seem to gamely keep trying new games. I think there’s a valuable market research question to be asked, which is “how many folks sampled these games and silently exited the genre long ago?”

And then, the question of what next generation brings them back might be easier to ask…

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61 Responses to “Mischiefblog designs the next generation of MMOs”

1. categories | The Cesspit. wrote on March 29th, 2006 at 5:08 pm:

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2. Faith wrote on March 30th, 2006 at 12:45 am:

   [...] Comments [...]

3. Grimwell Online :: View topic - The Playstyle Scale wrote on March 30th, 2006 at 7:57 am:

   [...] Yeah I like this too. I seem to be “sub-casual” or maybe one of the jaded many Raph mentioned today. Anyways, there’s a couple of thing I think worth noting: 1) time-in-game may not equal game worthiness or knowledge or skill, but it’s all there really is without a lot of more nuance or a lot of specific details that probably only relate to a game under study (e.g. unlocked Jedi with only 6 professions, 4 weeks work. Someone may deduce Jedi unlocking method then needs tightening up.). 2) time-in-game is all designers really work with I think. As such, it’s probably the cause of a lot of the crappier MMO’s we have out there and endless DIKU clones. People won’t innovate because the biggest metric they look at is time in-game and that drives their treadmill designs. Time in-game also is easiest to use with business planning for a subscription based business… so 3) time in-game drives business plans. Also used in marketing concepts like stickiness (cf. Raph today). So the people planning the business like time in-game as well. I don’t think time-in-game is the greatest choice but it’s a reasonable one to try and abstract behavior from. I also agree the Bartle models are way expired and need updating. [...]

4. Sierra Kilo wrote on March 30th, 2006 at 9:32 am:

   Raph Knows Me

   …

5. Mischiefblog wrote on March 30th, 2006 at 7:41 pm:

   Raph posed a few questions about my ideas about a next (and further) generation MMO: It’s easy to argue with many of these; for example, will the new worlds truly be stickier, or are the days of long subscriber lifetimes gone forever? Will anything ever look like UO did in

6. Mischiefblog » Considering the next generation of MMOs wrote on July 3rd, 2007 at 7:10 am:

   [...] Raph’s Website » Mischiefblog designs the next generation of MMOs Says: March 29th, 2006 at 6:56 pm [...]

1. Wolfeee said on March 29th, 2006 at 6:45 pm:

   SWg was my first MMO and my wife and I had 4 accounts for 2 years, give or take. We left after major changes in the mechanics of the game intself changed gameplay.(CU skill based to level based)

   Since then I have played (in random order)
   Runescape
   Eve online
   EverQuest 2
   Dugeons and Dragons Online
   Saga of Ryzom
   Guild Wars
   Auto Assault (beta)
   Sims Online
   A Tale in the Desert 2
   Face of Mandkind (beta)
   Project Entropia
   Roma Victor (beta)

   I won’t go into detail about my likes and dislikes about each one…
   Main point is none out that list moved me, entertained me, Keep me interested like Pre CU SWG.

   I don’t think the days of long term subs are over……
   Once someone does something more than a clone or has many aspects of the game on a higher level.

   I know SWG was not perfect…but it had so much in so many areas…that when you got bored with one type/style of play….you didn’t have to go to another game…To fufill that urge.

2. Wilfried said on March 29th, 2006 at 7:01 pm:

   As having played MUDs, coded MUDs, run a MUD Server, played (graphical) MMORPGs, worked as Community Coordinator for a MMORPG, Story Designer and World Builder, and still playing, for much more than 10 Years now - No!

   MUD burnout is not going to happen with MMORPGs.

   MMORPGs are games, not MUDs. So as long as there is no general Gaming burnout, there won’t be any MMO burnout either. People will grow up and lose interest in games at all - and of course some will lose interest just in MMOs - but others will follow to take their places, as it is in the whole games market.

   I even expect to see the coming generations still (or again) playing MMOs when they have retired from their jobs and live in old people’s homes. (Actually it would have ever been quite interesting to me to see a study with aged people given the oportunity to play a MMORPG together instead of another knitting course - “like to be a young hero again fighting evil in a world with lots of even younger heroes? instead of waiting for your grandchilds to finaly visit you again all day long?”)

   We will see a burnout of single player games long before we will see one of MMOs. I’m sure this will happen one day. Ok, I know that sounds contrary to what I said above but this day will just be the day when something else will take the place of MMORPGs and/or the whole internet. I would guess that’s still quite some time ahead And even then, I’m sure the MMO Communities will be there and meet again in whatever takes it’s place.

   In some sense MMOs are MUDs, in another they are games, and sometimes they are none of both. Not everything that ever happened with or in MUDs will happen with or in MMOs. MUDs are very special, MMOs are more like TV or Movies.

   But… if I would happen to be a psychologist, I would be in danger to suspect another kind of burnout syndrom when I see you bringing up a “burnout” topic so shortly after the recent news o.O Well, I’m not, so I don’t.

3. Raph said on March 29th, 2006 at 7:20 pm:

   I have trouble parsing this sentence:

   MMORPGs are games, not MUDs.

   Perhaps because I completely disagree with it. You probably just sparked a new blog post!

   I don’t see any difference in the factors that cause burnout between MUDs and MMORPGs. Of course, I don’t think that they are actually different things.

4. Wilfried said on March 29th, 2006 at 8:02 pm:

   I have trouble parsing this sentence:

   Perhaps because I completely disagree with it. You probably just sparked a new blog post!

   I hope you don’t have touble parsing it just because I’m German and sometimes miserably fail in playing around with words in a foreign language? ;-/

   If not, I would be honored to having sparked a new blog

   MMORPGs and MUDs have very much in common for sure. But MMORPGs and typical computer games of today have a lot in common too, that’s what MUDs have not.

   Just take a random kid from school and put him in front of a modern Single Player Game, then in front of WoW and after that in front of a MUD. If you ask him which of the three does not fit in, I’m sure no kid will say “the single player game”. “WoW ist like my friends playstation at home, that’s fun!”, I wouldn’t be surprised about some quite rude comments about the MUD, and would forgive the child.

   I guess you could even ask the same question to 1000 random people from the street and at least 950 would say “the MUD does not fit in”.

   When talking about burnout, it’s a topic that does not fit in the mathematical definition of MUDs or MMORPGs. It fits in what the people see, what the people think and what the people feel. That’s not always what a definition sais

   So yes, MMORPGs are not MUDs. But they are games. Ask the kids on the streets And that is the reason for MMOs not facing the MUD burnout.

5. Morgan said on March 29th, 2006 at 8:18 pm:

   MMORPGs are games, not MUDs.

   Say, what? In my opinion, the games provided on the MMO platform today are nearly indistinguishable from games provided in the MUD environment, but I’ll elaborate after you clarify your statement and after Raph publishes that new article… That new article is probably under which I’ll post my comments.

6. Raph said on March 29th, 2006 at 8:29 pm:

   What people see is not always what things are. People see dolphins as fish, but they aren’t.

   Similarly, if we took a kid and put them in front of Colossal Cave and Tomb Raider, they’d likely say that they’re not very similar. but they actually share quite a lot of game DNA.

   Take a random player who has played both MMORPGs and MUDs, and they will likely tell you that experientially they are actually extremely similar. They feel the same when you play them.

7. Janey said on March 29th, 2006 at 9:09 pm:

   I fit the “tried a bunch of MMOGs and exited” demographic, but I’ve already told you what I’m looking for. But just in case I didn’t say it all at once:
   - There has to be a mac version.
   - I need to be able to play it either solo or in a group of 2.
   - I need to be able to play only a couple of hours a week and not feel like I’m missing out on a bunch of stuff.
   - I don’t want to have to (or feel like I have to) read the dev boards in order to keep up on the rules.
   - I don’t want to leave for a month and have to relearn the entire game to get back into it (even if there was a mac version, I wouldn’t go back to SWG just because I’ve heard it’s changed so much), or have all my friends advance so much that I can never play with them.

   NWN is a great game for us retired folks. Sincerely. The idea of it has soooo much potential! If someone could make “NWN but better,” that would be fan-freaking-tastic. As far as stickiness goes - I could see myself playing NWN for YEARS, so long as they kept pumping out modules. That’s actually a better subscription plan for us retirees too - pay for content, rather than pay for time. We feel gypped when we’re paying the same rate as the 19 year old college students.

   *sigh* … I’m such a dreamer.

8. Wilfried said on March 29th, 2006 at 9:41 pm:

   Raph, if I would be cynical, I would say, that’s probably a player who had his own share of the MUD burnout already But it’s not this player who decides if MMORPGs will face the MUD burnout, it’s the kids on the streets, who buy these games in masses, that decide.

   As stated above, I’m not a psychologist, but I would think of MUDs being text based as one of the main causes of MUD burnout. It’s not the game in itself. It’s more the lack of human senses being stimulated while playing a MUD. It also requires more imagination than MMOs do. While that is something many MUD players actualy see as an advantage, it can also be more exhaustive in the long run.

   While you play with friends and have fun, it can still cause a much more intense feeling of being socially left alone than a colorfull and noisy MMORPG does with all the action going on.

   Another reason for that might be the far larger scale of the MMORPG Player Base compared to MUDs. Like with TV shows, everyone is talking about the next day at work, MMORPGs are about to become something similar in the schools. They do not only have a broader acceptance than MUDs, they don’t impact just the real life of some players, they actualy impact the society in general and the surroundings of the players real life. As did single player games already before. Hell, lately I even had a talk with my dentist about MMORPGs, because he’s playing WoW and knows that I’m working on something similar. That ever happened with a MUD?

   I could think of many more reasons, but the headline that “MMORPGs are games, not MUDs”, fits pretty good with most of them. Don’t look too much into the technical definition. Take a look at the market. Take a look at a kids eyes, when it plays them. Take a look at the society surrounding them. Take a look in the peoples living rooms, where the games are now played already. Even take a look at forums that are not about games or the classrooms in schools. MUDs never took these steps. MMOs did, as did single player games before. MMORPGs aren’t MUDs anymore. At least not if you look at MUD burnout.

9. Juuso - Game Producer said on March 29th, 2006 at 11:16 pm:

   “Take a random player who has played both MMORPGs and MUDs, and they will likely tell you that experientially they are actually extremely similar. They feel the same when you play them.”

   “MMORPGs are games, not MUDs”
   There’s different. MUDs are games. But MMORPGs are big business. MUDs aren’t. (yet ;))

10. Michael Chui said on March 29th, 2006 at 11:20 pm:

    I would think of MUDs being text based as one of the main causes of MUD burnout.

    I started playing Dragonrealms in seventh grade. Played so much my parents shut me out because it was affecting my grades. A friend lent me their password and I played on her account for a year before she quit (and thus, by default, so did I). We migrated over to a startup. I’ve played on roughly a dozen different MUDs, which I burned out of because they were boring leveling crazies. Two years ago, I convinced a friend of mine to play with me. My character’s in the game right now.

    Have you ever experienced that? Most MMORPGs would burn me out pretty quick, I think, not because it’s graphical, but because they have the same system as the other MUDs I’ve burned out of.

    Granted, I’m just one guy, and I’m a weird guy at that, so I probably don’t match any useful demographics.

11. Michael Chui said on March 29th, 2006 at 11:25 pm:

    MUDs aren’t.

    You mean they aren’t famous. I would have thought Simutronics Corporation would qualify. But regarding burnout, I still think it has to do with absolute numbers, rather than percentages. I think the burnout rates aren’t different.

    Take a look at a kids eyes, when it plays them.

    Oh yeah, I should also add: I stayed up, for the very first time, until 6am in the morning, because I liked playing Dragonrealms that much. That was the first time I ever played; I also made a friend, and that’s probably what really sucked me in.

12. Raph said on March 29th, 2006 at 11:27 pm:

    I think it’s the gameplay that burns people out, personally.

    I’ve also seen people burn out because of the sheer attention the games demand — again, something that hasn’t changed.

13. Arrakiv said on March 30th, 2006 at 12:11 am:

    “Most MMORPGs would burn me out pretty quick, I think, not because it’s graphical, but because they have the same system as the other MUDs I’ve burned out of.”

    I’ve been burned out of a lot of MMOs. I’ve been burned out of MUDs (although, I’ll freely admit I haven’t played a great many). I’ve found them both to play in extremely similar ways. I would say that there are differences that can be used to seperate them, but I would say it is obvious that MMOs did evolve from MUDs.

    To Raph, “I think it’s the gameplay that burns people out, personally.”

    I agree. They have very similar gameplay styles from what I’ve seen. If you can get burnt out in one, you can get burnt out in another. However, there’s still that little nagging question of why there are less people who seem to get burned out on MMOs.

    For one, people do. I’ve known people who’ve gotten burned out of them and swore them off for good. Of course, I’ve seen many do that and fall back into playing them anyway.

    I do believe MMOs have some possibilities that might help them… For one, they’re more accessable to a wider audience. By this, I mean most people don’t want to play a text based game. They would end up with a wider market, a wider variety of people, and likely more people playing. I’d wager that MMOs benefit a whole lot from being able to access and build larger and more varried communities (I would say it takes a certain type of person to really get into text based games, more so in such a visual-heavy industry). I could quite probably be wrong, but I do believe the ability to interact with a larger, wider group of people could retain players longer, more so since MMOs seem much less ’specialized’ as a type of game now. I blame a lot of positive things on community though.

    I suppose I’m mostly just agreeing with one of Wilfried’s earlier posts by stating this.

    I also figure that the graphics play a big part of it. With new, prettier looking games coming out, people are willing to plop down some cash and try to ’stick with it’, because a game looks so visually appealing. Same with anything graphical coming out on the market, just about.

    Well, hopefully this made some sense and was at least somewhat on topic! It is 3am, though…

14. Michael Chui said on March 30th, 2006 at 12:19 am:

    However, there’s still that little nagging question of why there are less people who seem to get burned out on MMOs.

    Actually, there is the factor of, “I paid money for this.” This was not generally true in the old text MUDs. There’s a rule of thumb I was recently introduced to: you should use your shoes for a year for every ten dollars you spent on them. It’s a thought.

15. Antheus said on March 30th, 2006 at 12:49 am:

    As a rule of a thumb (proven not to be a fact) is that a creature’s life will last for 560 million heartbeats.

    Could this be equaled to player’s life span in an MMO, where heartbeats are the interesting/fun actions taken in game? Could repeating the familiar actions lead to using up more “heartbeats”?

    Going back to tic-tac-toe example, people will learn the pattern, making the game completely uninentersting. Depending on experience with pattern matching games, some will get bored sooner, others later. Offering a similar, yet improved tic-tac-toe will apeal to players only for the duration of the improvement, but the core game bears no fun anymore.

    Todays MMOs contain more “content”, but the same problem apears. There apears to be a dominant familiar pattern (the grind/leveling, the pvp, the “best” item). Despite lots of dressing, players have learned the pattern, it’s all about disguising it to keep them from realizing it. Players burn out or “die” much sooner, despite having quantitively more content.

    Could this be one of the factors to consider? The UO-like sandbox may apear like the final solution, but even there the patterns will emerge soon enough. For most of current player population, this aproach would be extremly apealing, since most everything about it is new, but to former UO players: “bah, UO did this better, those were the days, this new aproach is not new.”

    Instead of going for the proverbial next generation, instead realize all content that can be provided in any form, there should be more though given into providing finite content, that can be “completed”, and instead work on providing successors fitting the theme? Should the player burnout be considered at the very core of the game? Not unlike what single-player games do? And moving from player to creator is just when the apprentice becomes the master?

16. Riechman said on March 30th, 2006 at 3:24 am:

    I had played pre-trammel UO and pre-cu SWG, and I must say, “those were the best days of my life! Summer of 98 and ‘03″! I don’t mean to sound like games are my life, but they are a part of it. Pre-Trammel Uo was by far the best in gaming that I have ever had. In fact UO is still installed on my system and I haven’t played it in over 3 yrs. I’m just waiting for that miracle day to happen,a roll-back, but it probably won’t. Darkfall will have to be it.

    Raph, I’m sorry to hear that you left SOE, but if I were you, I would have done the same thing. I told some of my MMO friends that you were probably the main talent behind UO and SWG. I’m wondering what your plans are now or have you already discussed that and I missed it somewhere? Please tell me that you are going to do another game like pre-trammel UO?

17. Cael said on March 30th, 2006 at 5:10 am:

    Janey said

    >- There has to be a mac version.

    No. There doesn’t. I don’t know what planet some people live on but there is literally no way i’d consider duplicating over a million DirectX art assets to work on a Mac and an entire graphics engine to work under that fake version of BSD they’ve currently got the Mac window manager running on. My team doesn’t have Blizzard’s money - thank you very much for writing off the Indies, Janey. Because that line alone prices us out of your market.

18. Craig Huber said on March 30th, 2006 at 5:15 am:

    Some comments (most of it seems spot on to me):

    It won’t be about new mechanics as much as about empowering players to have an impact on the world.

    I’d agree in general, but I do feel new mechanics would be helpful as far as creating/enabling that empowerment. They could also speak to the burn-out concept (at least, for a time).

    assume that the game will be solid and that in itself, it may not be very revolutionary or evolutionary–those tend to have problems in the real world (witness DDO). -snip-

    I’m curious about the DDO comment: how is that revolutionary, or even evolutionary? De-evolutionary, maybe…

    It is a near-perfect clone of _every_ other MMO (with 2 notable exceptions guided by someone everyone here knows about, I would hope), only slightly regressed back toward the pen-and-paper version of the game/mechanics…

    …and since that ruleset was designed for a completely different situation/purpose (small generally-cohesive groups, largely simultaneous time in play, human-moderated), I’m not convinced that was the best choice to begin with. Same old situation: building a skyscraper on the foundation for a two-bedroom rambler. Pray for calm weather…

    Anyway, anyone willing to take the time to explain the revolutionary/evolutionary perspective on DDO to me?

19. Darniaq said on March 30th, 2006 at 5:45 am:

    The thoughts at Mischiefbox are fairly straight on in my opinion, a nice compilation of a lot of different conversations.

    However, I disagree with three elements:

    1) Daily updates. It’d be very interesting to see a game where each zone was so discrete, upgrades to one have no impact at all on another. But just creating the tools to guarantee a 99.96% reliability after pushing an update to one zone while leaving everything else untouched is no small effort I imagine.

    2) Player-hosted games. This is a dream as old as NWN, and I think it’ll eventually happen. But I can’t see a company with scores of millions to spend entrusting the players to handle important intellectual property. How a company gains that much money to develop something seems to be at odds with the willingness to let go of control, particularly in a subscription-based model. Now, take away the subscription and there’s more latitude, but that mostly means requiring even more upfront capital to push the thing live to critical mass. So there’s still a question of monetizing player modification in order to keep the central servers live, or not bothering (a P2P system, as mentioned there) but being able to afford to launch something huge in the first place.

    3) Player-created content. This has been a Panacea for veterans and dedicated MMOGers. However, the tools for micro-world creation are already out there, and have been for awhile. Lowering the barrier of learning doesn’t magically turn talkers into do’ers, nor does it guarantee good results. If NWN and FPS modding taught me anything, it’s that the truly interested are already doing and learning.

    Maybe Mischiefbox wants to skip ahead a few generations, but I’m really interested to see the process itself

    Raph wrote:

    Take a random player who has played both MMORPGs and MUDs, and they will likely tell you that experientially they are actually extremely similar. They feel the same when you play them.

    But this assumes you got them into both games and taught them both the UIs. Both sides have different barriers to entry. You’d almost need someone experienced in both already to make a fair comparison.

    Craig Huber:

    I’m curious about the DDO comment: how is that revolutionary, or even evolutionary?
    Evolutionary in my opinion. The combat and the puzzle-based nature of the zones are both big departures from convention. That maybe the game won’t hit WoW numbers isn’t that important if someone is looking for inspiration from game systems. Unfortunately, it does become important to someone trying to justify expensive innovation

20. chabuhi said on March 30th, 2006 at 6:07 am:

    If an MMORPG comes along that is 5 parts pre-Trammel UO, 3 parts pre-CU SWG, 1 part EQ2 graphics, and 1 part Sid Meier’s Pirates! (the first one) fun, then count me as a lifetime subscriber.

    I think the days of long-term subscriptions is over so long as publishers are looking to make a quick buck. It’s like professional sports — the passion is gone. People are in it for the money now, and until that equalizes (if it can) we are going to be in “churn ‘n burn” mode when it comes to MMORPG development, imo.

21. chabuhi said on March 30th, 2006 at 6:12 am:

    sorry for the double post, but just to clarify before I get raked over the coals: I’m not saying that developers don’t have passion, you all very clearly do. I just mean that the “business” of MMO’s is losing its passion (if a thing can be said to have emotion).

    Also, I’d like to correct my grammar above: “…days of long-term subscriptions is over…” should be “…ARE over…” — I plead cold medecine on that one.

22. chabuhi said on March 30th, 2006 at 6:13 am:

    MEDICINE!! Gah!! Okay, I’ll show myself out. Sorry.

23. Janey said on March 30th, 2006 at 7:49 am:

    My team doesn’t have Blizzard’s money - thank you very much for writing off the Indies, Janey. Because that line alone prices us out of your market.

    For me, there does have to be a Mac version. My husband has a mac, and I’m not playing a game without him sitting down playing next to me. It’s just not what I want to do in the evenings any more. I’d rather watch TV with him, go for a walk with him, or read a book with him. Playng a computer game with him is also an option for entertainment, but only if there’s a mac version.

24. Wilfried said on March 30th, 2006 at 7:54 am:

    I think it’s the gameplay that burns people out, personally.

    I guess you might be right with that. And if you reduce MMORPGs and MUDs to just the gameplay, you are right with both being the same. Yet still we have the question why there is no MMORPG burnout so far?

    When people get burnedout of MUDs, they don’t play MUDs anymore. They don’t care for MUDs anymore. They go on with their lifes and most likely rarely think back, if at all.

    When people get burnedout by a MMORPG, they are sitting in the millions of fan communities around the world, waiting for a new MMORPG to come and draw their attention. And no, that is not all about marketing.

    That could be compared to movies for example. It’s not the “gameplay”, to meet up with friends, sit in the cinema, drink a coke, eat some popcorn, watch the screen and talk about it afterwards in a pub, that catches the people. If you would say so, you would leave out a quite important aspect, the movie. The content, if you like so. Even the newest special effects, or the most lovely new holywood actress. Maybe even just this fat man called Marlon Brando, they read so much in the yellowpress about.

    While books are much like movies, I have never seen people going to the cinema to read together the newest book on the big screen scolling upwards. And a computer screen qualifies only very little for just reading text either.

    If you say MMORPGs are MUDs, you miss out a hell of lot of what MMORPGs realy are and MUDs are not. MMORPGs are a medium, as MUDs are. But MMORPGs are a completely diferent medium than MUDs. As diferent as movies and books are. Well, luckily we don’t see a book burnout, so don’t look too much into this comparison.

    If you ask why we don’t see a MMORPG burnout so far, you could also ask why we don’t see a movie burnout? And I’m personaly looking forward for MMORPGs becoming even more than movies are today. They have the potential for that, MUDs don’t. And again, I’m not just talking about fancy graphics, while they are in fact a part of the experience.

25. Raph said on March 30th, 2006 at 8:17 am:

    But this assumes you got them into both games and taught them both the UIs. Both sides have different barriers to entry. You’d almost need someone experienced in both already to make a fair comparison.

    Well, yeah. We’re talking about burnout, right? That’s experienced players in both. I am not disputing that the beginner experiences are hugely dependent on interface.

    MMORPGs are a completely diferent medium than MUDs. As diferent as movies and books are.

    I have actually had the experience of logging into a virtual world that supported both text and graphical display at the same time, with both types of clients interacting. I can tell you that based on that experience, this is simply not the case.

    The medium of virtual worlds does not reside on the client, any more than the existence of Flash means that the Web is now a animated medium. In fact, I think the Web analogy works very well; the shared commonality between virtual worlds is certain characteristics about how it presents data out of its database. The way a client parses and displays that data is beside the point.

    The UO-like sandbox may apear like the final solution, but even there the patterns will emerge soon enough.

    Perhaps we should be looking at this the way Richard Bartle does, when he discusses natural arcs to a player’s involvement with a virtual world, stating that every player come to them to learn something about themselves, and they depart once that learning is complete.

    Another way to think of it is that the muds provided a clear next step beyond maxing out a character: the notion of becoming a wizard. For those who chose not to do it, it was an exit opportunity; it was a huge filtering mechanism. For those who did, it was a new “game” to play.

26. tuebit said on March 30th, 2006 at 8:28 am:

    I can certainly attest to, at least a form of MMO burn-out. UO became such an attraction for me that I purposefully quit to reclaim my life … and left the genre for a time. After a while, I returned, tried quite a few games, but found none that really appealed to me as UO had.

    Until SWG! This brough me right back to near addict levels. I was beginning to consider leaving the genre again. Thankfully, other developments (or should I say major patches) made it relatively easy to quit the game.

    For me, burnout is related to:
    - Wanting to focus more on RL.
    - The disparity between how I would like to play the game, and how I am permitted to play the game eventually gives rise to a desire to seek greener pastures. Has anyone else noticed, when one goes in search of the ‘better’ game, you never find it. A ‘time away’ between games seems necessary.

    With regards to player hosted games. There’s a general trend, I believe, away from local storage. And it will be many years before BIG (as in population) worlds are hosted by a player, for reasons of limited bandwidth. Rather, I suspect we’ll see more games like Second Life. Players don’t host their own game, but they do create it (or at least, tweak it).

27. Amaranthar said on March 30th, 2006 at 8:28 am:

    I agree that the senses input from MMOs make them something quite different from MUDs. Vision and hearing are our two primary senses. I don’t think the same could be said if MMOs, instead of having visual and sound input far surpassing MUDs, had smell and touch input. Think about his though, if an MMO had smell and touch factors added to it, somehow, would it be better? Yeah, I’m sure it would, imagining going into a dungeon and smelling damp, moldy air, and feeling the walls on some magic pad and feeling the wet, hard, course surface. There’s a point here.

    The closer to realism a game can get, the more interesting it is. And the more interesting it is, for as long as that lasts, the more likely it is to maintain interest (of course), which means continued subscription.

    That realism goes in all directions. Of course players want the fantasy aspects added, but that also is much more interesting if it’s added in a “realistic” way. Would players expect a fireball to put out a fire or start one?

    Players like being ably to dye their cloths, cook food and eat it, open doors, sit in chairs, etc., etc. The more realism coded into a game, the more interesting it feels. The more complete it feels. This is why I see such a huge difference between MUDs and MMOs. MUDs lack basic completeness in the lack to our primary senses.

    Extrapolating this completeness to realism would seem to me to be the number one thing to do in a MMO. After that, then comes the rest of the game features, which must not tear away from that complete feel. Of course a game is always going to be limited in how far it can go towards realism. But the farther, the more complete, and the more interesting, and the more numbers of continued subscriptions.

    Yes, the fun factor is more important. But the fun mixed in with the completeness makes a game world more whole. And fun, when it’s done repeatedly, becomes less fun. But in a more complete game world, players can make their own fun. UO showed this. Look at all the player events that were run. You can’t do the same in more recent games. And players are complaining about boredom. They never complained much about that in UO.

    Would we want another UO? Not as it was, due to other problems. It took several extremes to drive players away from UO.
    -Rampant PKing. (And griefing is not just being killed by the same player over and over. There’s also grief felt when your killed by a hundred different players every time you step out of a safe zone.)
    -Looting, stealing, and the abuses used to set up PKings without taking a murder count.
    -Cheating with macroes and scripts (static spawns)
    -Going to the grind game play, like other games, while staying with old graphics. (Doh!)

    On the other hand, UO was far more complete as a world, and this caused all kinds of player added content, the kind that code alone can’t give a game. Socially, UO was far ahead. There weren’t stations of godhood among players, and they “lived” (banked) in their choice of cities, and knew the others there very well. Guilds had much more glue to them. Players could always do “something different”. Communities formed. Players lived in UO, where they only play gamey features in the other games. Hell yeah, I’d want UO again. Even with the old problems, but very much prefered with them fixed properly.

28. Max said on March 30th, 2006 at 9:55 am:

    Hi guys and sorry for my bad/poor english

    The best MMORPG what I have played is Star Wars Galaxies PRE-CU

    - 30 mixable profession with combat, crafter, doctor, entertainer!
    - Crafting superb (with variable resources)
    - Fantastic community system (with house, city, major, ecc.)
    - Place like cantina, hospital or camp needed for the gameplay
    - Great PVP with knockdown, dizzy, ecc.
    - Large player groups (20 or more!)

    I think what this is the way: SWG PRE CU

29. Wilfried said on March 30th, 2006 at 10:04 am:

    I have actually had the experience of logging into a virtual world that supported both text and graphical display at the same time, with both types of clients interacting. I can tell you that based on that experience, this is simply not the case.

    That sounds like going to the movies to read a book. You missed the point I’m trying to make. Ask Stephen Spielberg what he would think of the idea to make his next movie in a way that you can watch and read it at the same time (I don’t mean just subtitles). While of course that would be possible, he might ask you if you are crazy

    The medium of virtual worlds does not reside on the client

    I can tell you exactly what a musician is doing with his guitar. I can describe what the music is about and even describe what it feels like to hear the music. Maybe a good author could even cause similar feelings to what I feel when listening to certain music, by writing a wonderfull poem. Yet still, what’s the point about trying that? Just listen to the music and get entertained by what it is. What would be the point in replacing the “Mona Lisa” with a text explaining what the picture looked like?

    The way a client parses and displays that data is beside the point

    Quite the contrary is what my point is all about. It makes no difference how the data for the client is made up. All what counts is the experience for the player. MMORPGs are (or at least should be) all about entertainment. If you plan to entertain a player, you have to use all you can to do that. And you have a hell of a lot more tools for that in your pocket with a MMORPG than with a MUD. You simply can’t make the assumption that you can cut away everything a MMORPG is made of, see there is MUD under it, and say, MMORPGs must equal MUDs then.

    I remember an interview a long time ago with someone from Magnetic Scrolls, when they started what I would call the first realy graphical adventures (The Pawn, The Guild of the Thiefs). He said they had a talk with people from Infocom about using graphics in Adventure Games. They agreed that you would need about 10,000 words to deliver all the information of a single picture from “The Pawn” in a text base game. Of course Magnetic Scrolls did just the same as Infocom. The games where all adventures with the same gameplay and the same kind of code under the surface. Now let me ask, where would be the point in doing 10,000 words to describe a picture in a text based game? There is no point. That’s why you simply can’t ignore that MMORPGs aren’t MUDs. While they are technicaly, the experience for the players is made up by completely different things.

    And they don’t share all the same fate just because they share a lot of the same code.

30. Matt Mihaly said on March 30th, 2006 at 10:38 am:

    I’m not actually aware of any purely graphical or purely text MUDs/MMORPGs. Well, it’s possible there are some pure text MUDs out there, but I’ve not seen them. Our text MUDs, for instance, contain some graphics, and every graphical MUD contains text.

    MMORPG = annoying synonym for MUD.
    –matt

31. Darniaq said on March 30th, 2006 at 11:31 am:

    Raph wrote:

    I have actually had the experience of logging into a virtual world that supported both text and graphical display at the same time, with both types of clients interacting. I can tell you that based on that experience, this is simply not the case.

    A new project or one of the old ones? If new, I’d love to hear more! I like that whole platform-independence commonlity thing

    Wilfried wrote:

    All what counts is the experience for the player.

    Exactly. However, this appears to be at odds with your assertion that there’s a fundamentally different experience between players using different UIs. I will agree there’s obviously some difference at a certain level of immersion; however, how we plays these games is both sometimes unique per person and sometimes unique per situation.

    There are people who sit at the WoW AH all day buying low and selling high. They do not even need graphics to do that. In fact, this was part of Sun Microsystem’s pitch at GDC when talking about their Project Darkstar, a platform-independent multiplayer environment. Someone could play the WoW stock game on a Blackberry

    Eve is arguably similar. Heck, if you just want to run Courier Missions, you can do that all day long, only occasionally pulling up the client if you hear you’re under attack. For some, Eve is the ultimate semi-AFK experience (though of course there’s ways and needs to be active too).

    So I don’t see it as black & white (well, nor do I see it as Black & White ). It’s a question of the sort of experience someone wants while also delivering an experience that scales to a wider playerbase. Except for the initial up-front investment, how would it hurt, say, EQ2 to grow into a wider playerbase by launching a cellphone edition, a PSP edition, and so on. This would need to not be like SOE’s prior EQ brand extensions, because those were world independent experiences. Rather, if you pulled a Habitat on WoW, allowing all these different platforms some access to the game (Blackberries for conversations and AH, cellphones only for AH trades, mobile games are only for solo missions, Wi-Fi laptops for small groups, consoles for some large groups, PCs for everything), I really think we’d see that most players would love this. Greater accessibility trumps immersion, particularly since it’s likely the people who’d partake of this accessibility would have that greater immersion as an option anyway/

32. Wilfried said on March 30th, 2006 at 1:00 pm:

    @Matt, a 40 year old scottish single malt whiskey is just an alcoholic drink. But it makes it a lot easier to order one, if you simply agree on the name

    @Darniag, actually I absolutely agree with you. I don’t see it “black and white” either.

    But the question was about MUD burnout. Of course MMORPGs share a lot with MUDs on the server side. But they also share the clientside with 3D computer games - sometimes literally by even using the exact same Engine. So if you say they are MUDs because of the serverside and games mechanic, you leave out a lot of the equotation, and that’s exactly why MMORPGs == MUDs == facing MUD burnout is wrong. There is too much possible on the clientside for that to happen, also causing other effects like I already said.

    Your AH trades, while they don’t need a 3D client, couldn’t work without lots of players playing the game with the graphical client. That is (partly) what decides about the success of a MMORPG. Again, I’m not talking of fancy graphics, I’m talking about what exactly reaches the player and how. That’s not only the client, but it is for sure not only the server either.

33. Amaranthar said on March 30th, 2006 at 1:58 pm:

    Your AH trades, while they don’t need a 3D client, couldn’t work without lots of players playing the game with the graphical client. That is (partly) what decides about the success of a MMORPG. Again, I’m not talking of fancy graphics, I’m talking about what exactly reaches the player and how. That’s not only the client, but it is for sure not only the server either.

    It’s important to understand too, not only does the trade-game play rely on the other players to make it work, but the very trade oriented players themselves mostly wouldn’t be doing it if they didn’t have the rest of the game to play with too. Unless, of course, they are simply farming gold for eBay sales.

34. MikeRozak said on March 30th, 2006 at 2:37 pm:

    It won’t be about new mechanics as much as about empowering players to have an impact on the world.

    I have a problem with this concept. If players are empowered to impact the world, then some players will be more empowered than others. At the moment, there are three ways of determining who is the most empowered: Time commitment, skill, and/or RL money.

    If the market is to expand, most new players won’t be willing to commit even 20 hours a week to the world. I’m guessing 5. That means 5-hour a week players (the vast majority in the future) won’t like games that empower players based on time-commitment. They may baulk at spending lots of RL money for something they only spend 5 hours on. Skill is also a possibility, but 10% of the players will completely dominate then.

    Therefore, I assume that worlds targeted at casual players won’t empower ANY player to have an impact on the world. Worlds targeted at niche players who spend 20+ hours a week on a game might. But seeing as these games (such as SL and UO) don’t have the majority of players today, I wouldn’t expect this to trend to change tomorrow either.

    A next generation game will have rapid releases.

    The larger the group working on the game, the more difficult/impossible it is to have a rapid release.

    A next generation MMO will be incredibly sticky.

    I disagree since I think that MMOs will increasingly be targeted at casual players who will refuse to stick. An aggregated package of worlds (ala cable TV) might be sticky.

    The fourth or fifth generation game is hosted by the player

    This is a possibility. Design wise, there’s no reason I couldn’t host Oblivion on my PC and play it with my friends. It’s not massive though.

35. Michael Chui said on March 30th, 2006 at 3:08 pm:

    It’s also worth noting that MUDs using the same codebase made a lot of things become ubiquitous; in other words, there’s nothing left to learn.

    To draw your analogy further, Wilfried, do people burn out of books for the same reason?

36. Raph said on March 30th, 2006 at 3:25 pm:

    All what counts is the experience for the player.

    OK, I’ll go further and assert that at least today, a very very small part of the moment to moment experience in MMORPGs is driven by the graphical presentation.

    You simply can’t make the assumption that you can cut away everything a MMORPG is made of, see there is MUD under it, and say, MMORPGs must equal MUDs then.

    OK, let’s do the exercise. Name every piece of an MMORPG, and we’ll see how many are present in MUDs too.

37. Wilfried said on March 30th, 2006 at 4:13 pm:

    OK, let’s do the exercise. Name every piece of an MMORPG, and we’ll see how many are present in MUDs too.

    How about the Unreal 3 Engine, Speedtree, Bink, Dolby Surround Audio and PhysX? All pretty popular for upcoming MMORPGs at the moment (except of Bink maybe) and pretty much top of line for computer games in general too.

38. Raph said on March 30th, 2006 at 4:25 pm:

    Those are largely terrible examples. Let’s rephrase away from specific middleware or protocols and go back to experience a second.

    You cite graphics, pretty tree graphics, movie playing, audio, and physics.

    Graphics is an unclear difference, IMHO, which we need to dig into deeper.

    Pretty trees are mechanically superfluous — I have never seen an MMORPG where it matters what the tree looks like. They are a collision obstacle, and occasional resource source. Both of those functions can be done in text (and have been).

    Movie playing is outside the game proper altogether, generally.

    Text muds have supported audio for over a decade.

    I don’t know of any MMORPGs making significant use of physics yet outside of vehicle physics in a couple of games. But I think the same question needs to be asked as with graphics: how central is the physics to the overall experience? I think the answer is “not very” usually, with notable exceptions like Planetside.

    That said, there have actually been physics implementations of various levels of accuracy in muds as well, such as PhysMUD.

39. Wilfried said on March 30th, 2006 at 5:55 pm:

    But I think the same question needs to be asked as with graphics: how central is the physics to the overall experience? I think the answer is “not very” usually

    That’s exactly the point. “not very” and “usually”. When I was a kid and watched “Star Wars: A new hope”, I can assure you, the special effects added so much to that experience. “Jurassic Park” or “Independance Day” may be other examples for that.

    Why is there no MUD Burnout with single player computer games?
    Why do people buy a new PC every few years (some even sooner)?
    What are players constantly talking about when new games are announced?

    What seperates a MUD from a MMORPG is the high end client technology. At least it should be (I know, some MMORPGs may prove me wrong ;)).

    That’s my point when I say MMORPGs are not MUDs.

    I can’t believe you realy think it makes no difference if the player logs into a new world in a breathtaking forrest panorama, NPCs running around and birds singing in dolby digital, compared to just a green plain surface with the word “Trees” floating somewhere in the distance?

    Again, “not very” and “usually”, when it comes to the reason why MMORPGs are such a wide success, and especially to why MMORPGs don’t face MUD Burnout, it is exactly the unusual point where the client makes very much of a difference. And I would say, not facing MUD Burnout and seeing 6 mio players in a MMORPG makes quite a huge difference. So I think you underrate the importance of the client.

    Evolution does not only happen with game mechanics. The same evolution that kept the single player games market alive for so many years does it with MMORPGs. That’s not about games mechanics. At least not exclusively.

40. Raph said on March 30th, 2006 at 6:00 pm:

    Hang on — first off, I think MMO players DO suffer burnout, bigtime. Just not in the same timespan. I also think that it’s quite likely that the fancier display technologies assist in reducing burnout, so I am not saying they make no difference.

    I also think there IS burnout with single-player computer games. Or rather, I think there is often a “moving on” at any rate. There’s little doubt there’s attrition via age from game playing, for example, with a demographic peak reached in the last teens and early twenties.

41. Antheus said on March 30th, 2006 at 6:03 pm:

    Given the recent thoughts about mySpace and web relations to MMOs, maybe there’s something missing in today’s design which inevitably separates the both.

    MMOs are about progress and character development. There’s different presentation, but that’s about it. And this development is defined by mechanics themself, seting the bar exactly the same for everyone.

    Web on the other hand has presented different media. It’s more about “Look what I did”. Could there be any future in a virtual world, completely open and undefined in terms of mechanics, where users can simply express themself not in terms of achievement, but merely by making miniscule contributions?

    When people think about content, they compare it to epic designs of what is offered in the market. And yet the blog explosion proves, that simply giving people the chance to leave a small mark is considerably more apealing than having them go through the horrors of some predefined artificial development. Would blogs really be popular if they required 650 hour intensive course that would require them to be familiar with every single web technology in depth. Or would myspace really take off, if users were required to study the individual web 2.0 modules and languages that comprise it?

    Isn’t that something that would more likely apeal to the proverbial casual/mature player? I believe that current models of forced competition is what is in conflict with casual aproach. If blogs were designed to be competitive and would not even apear in browser until you reached a certain level (oh, you’re only a level 88 blogger, sorry, this is level 90+ subnet, you need 55 more posts), they would never take off.

    Accesibility and time investment have little to do in common (people will invest large ammounts of time into mySpace, forums, blogs), the true values would most likely be persistence (I don’t want to lose my achievements, no matter how small - mySpace changes daily, but individual contributions remain intact) and the oportunity to leave a mark in the social environment - when subscription runs out, you’re gone from the world, along with all the achievements, but not gone from the memories.

    Compared to the web, I’d consider the persistent content in any of current MMOs to be extremly fragile and volatile, a simple patch can make months of hard work worthless, yet web goes from HTML to CSS/XHTML and yet nobody is affected.

    Afterall, it’s a vital part of human existance to try to build a legacy, pass on our experiences. If searching for patterns is “how” we like to do things in life, isn’t making a legacy considered “why”?

42. Wilfried said on March 30th, 2006 at 7:21 pm:

    Raph, now we are getting there, thank you

    Yes, I agree with you. But I’m not yet sure if it is MUD burnout. As you say, it’s not unusual that you go on with your life or grow too old for games.

    It’s not unusual to look for something else to do with your spare time either. That happens with bowling, people you meet in clubs, parental projects in schools and even with hobbies like painting or photography. Sometimes you just find something else, that attracts you more.

    But when I see people, that left MMORPGs, still hanging around on guild forums, not just for meeting with old online friends but still talking about MMORPGs - and when I see them talking about screenshots of upcoming MMORPGs, I know they don’t suffer from MUD Burnout.

    We will see if MMORPGs will become a regular recreational thing like TV is. I think they have a fair chance. Much more than MUDs at least.

    And btw. I still would love to see the mentioned study in an old poeple’s home!

43. Arrakiv said on March 30th, 2006 at 9:59 pm:

    “OK, I’ll go further and assert that at least today, a very very small part of the moment to moment experience in MMORPGs is driven by the graphical presentation.”

    True-ish. Graphics don’t necessarily play a big roll in gameplay. They do play a roll in immersion for players. They also can change how you interact with the world. A lot of how players interact with an MMO is not with text commands as much anymore, and they are also able to freely move around the world (as opposed to entering a different area to move around). This can make it possible to incorporate traps and puzzles more easily into a game–something not often done, but it has been in games and seems to be more of late. Graphics have been used to enhance gameplay–but not enough yet, but I think it’ll get there. People are obsessed with the visual after all.

    Now, I was doing some thinking earlier tonight. It occured to me that I really do indeed classify MMOs as games. Well, a lot of them anyway. This is somewhat independant from the MUD = MMO? argument in a way, although not totally. However, it seems to me that MMOs are played as games. A MUD might be different–I haven’t played enough, and it has been a while–but, it doesn’t seem to be the case as much.

    When playing an MMO, people focus on loot, they focus on levels… they focus on advancement. They play to reach max level and get the best stuff, like they would a linear, single player game. I mean, why does the term ‘endgame’ (as much as I hate it) even exist in MMOs if they are not played this way? I feel that as long as that is how they’re designed to be played, then they’re games. If someone plays it that way, to them it is a game. If someone does played for that purpose, then perhaps it isn’t a game for them, but something more. I just don’t see a lot of MMOs reaching out to be something more, but instead to be a game.

    Community seems secondary to me in most MMOs on the market now, at best. Many have you group together and form guilds, but that doesn’t necessarily equate to community when they are only in existance because the player wants to use them to advance, not because they want to form any bonds or any other greater reason. I would largley say this is the case because of design and the mindset of most players.

    I largely feel that there isn’t any real depth (community-based being an example) to most MMOs to truly call them a virtual worlds insteads of games.

    So, in a way, I wonder if MMOers can last long because MMOs have been made as simple games that largely revolve around repeated gameplay and updated technology. That seems to be what holds people to other genres. And after all, the average MMO player doesn’t stick with an MMO for to terribily long before finding another one, much like a gamer waiting for the ‘next great FPS’.

    I don’t like to think of MMOs as games… But, I’m finding that I’m falling into feeling that, as of now, for the most part they are. However, they don’t have to be. But, that’s probably another topic.

44. Morgan said on March 30th, 2006 at 11:13 pm:

    From an article I’m preparing for my upcoming blog:

    Perhaps the most obvious difference is the implementation of the “virtual world”. The common MMO platform implementation of the virtual world is a three-dimensional environment in which players can experience immersion through interactivity. The common MUD platform implementation of the virtual world is a cognitive environment that enables players to experience immersion through imagination.

    Take what you will from that somewhat obscure comment. The article is incomplete, unready for publication, and unpolished, but I couldn’t resist throwing this idea out there — that there is a difference between immersion through interactivity and immersion through imagination. The former immersion method in the context of the MMO platform logically seeks to capture a market, increase time spent involved with the virtual world, and thus, capitalize on the player subscription lifetime. I view the MMO platform as primarily business-driven, which isn’t necessarily bad. The latter immersion method in the context of the MUD platform should be fairly self-explanatory. I don’t think there have been fair comparisons of the two platforms since both platforms cater to different interests using different models of play.

    That said, I also do not think three-dimensional graphics are necessary for immersion to occur; however, the type of immersion should be considered when describing that which is necessary. I don’t know if I’m making this delineation clear enough. Consider fiction and the number of those immersed in the fiction. Words are sets of symbols, which are graphics, that we interpret as relative to a model of reality that we personally engineered. From that perspective, there exists little difference in context between a photorealistic environment and a text-driven universe. We operate in both environments using the same perceptual mechanisms; although, that which enables immersion may differ (e.g., from interactivity to imagination.)

45. MikeRozak said on March 31st, 2006 at 12:37 am:

    Actually, the 3D graphics provide some gameplay that can’t exist (cleanly) with text, and vice versa. Since my world straddles the two, I keenly notice these. On the whole, text MUDs and graphical MMORPGs have more commonalities than differences.

    For example:

    - Archery can be a fun element of combat in a 3D world because you can see enemies far away, can aim, etc. Archery in text is of questionable utility since a bow turns into a sword when the enemy is in the same room, and long-distance sword when enemies are in adjacent rooms.

    - Jumping between moving platforms works in 3D, but not well in text. “The platform is 2.3m away. Do you jump?”

    - “You walk into a room smelling of freshly baked bread, and the slightest whiff of incense.” Sure, a 3D world can display this in a text box, but no one will read it. (If it speaks it, players will take notice.)

    - “Tina gave a slightly curtsy to King Leopold, and glided away with a momentary look of disdain.” Pixar animators could animate this. MMORPG animators can’t because of the expense. You could speak the phrase while showing a stock animation, but that would create a disonance between what was shown and what was described. It’s like someone smiling while they’re saying they’re sad… it doesn’t work.

46. Lobosolitario said on March 31st, 2006 at 4:52 am:

    Wilfried, there is *definetly* burnout in MMORPGs, bigtime. And it’s not just MUD players burning out either - I myself burnt out of both SWG and WoW, along with many friends and work aquaintances, and I have never played a MUD (well, I’ve tried, but as has been mentioned, interface is a big thing when you start up a game, and I could never get into them).
    And there *is* burnout in offline games too, those that are replayable. Monkey Island, for instance, doesn’t suffer burnout for the simple reason that, once you’ve finished it, it’s finished, and you move on to something else. Things like Unreal Tournament burn out pretty fast - you play it for a few days, weeks, months at most, and then get bored and drop it. The difference with MMO burnout is generally to do with the emotional investment - dropping UT is easy, since it’s “just a game”. Dropping an MMO however, isn’t just dropping the game itself (which if you were playing as an offline game, you probably would have dropped in a matter of weeks), but is also a case of dropping a community that you have joined, and leaving friends that you have met. Some of these may well move on to a different game with you, or even migrate to the fabled RL(tm), but the experiences you shared with them in that particular MMO, and their character (who is subtly different from the person themself) will be lost.
    I’d also like to mention that burnout from a game doesn’t imply burnout from the friendships within that game - I still look over guild forums, and game forums, partly out of curiosity over where the game is going, but mainly because I am still a part of the community, even though not an active one - being friends with the people (and therefore posting on the forums) and playing the game are two different things.

    Now, having stated that I myself firmly believe in the existence of MMO burnout, and having had a chance to think about burnout in general while writing this post, I’d like to have a quick stab at the mechanics of it…

    Firstly, while the effects of burnout are generally the same (leaving the game, and not going back for a long time, or never returning), there are different types of burnout.

    1)Recognized addiction burnout: The player realises that the game is taking up too much of their RL(tm), and gets out while they’re thinking clearly. I’ve seen someone here refer to this already.

    2)Addiction induced emotional burnout: Where the player doesn’t realise how much the game is eating into RL(tm) but spends so much time and energy playing it, that they eventually give themselves a minor nervous breakdown, realize that they now hate the game, and leave. Fortunately most people addicted to MMOs seem to hit 1) before they hit 2).

    3)Out Of Content: When the player exhausts all the available content in the world, and has explored every little cave and every strange ruin in existence, played every class, and basically gets terribly bored, having fought the same monsters time after time.

    4)Bored of mechanics: Similar to above, this however is where the player has gotten to know the underlaying mechanics of the game so well that they find most content boringly predictable.

    5)Lost community: Everyone else the player knows, or at least those people most important to them, have moved on, and the world now feels empty and hostile without them.

    6)Reaction to changes: The player has become accustomed to the game the way it was, and now it’s been changed (again)! Tired of relearning how to play their character, they move on.

    7)Exasperated with bugs: The dev team has been promising to fix bugs for two years now, and yet the same old bugs remain, with new ones being introduced by all the “new content”. Tired of waiting, the player leaves.

    Those are all the types of burnout I can think of for now, although a few others may turn up with some more thinking. They seem to fall into three fairly neat categories: Addiction problems, game related boredom, and state of the game issues/community. Whether all of these can be classed as burnout is another issue, some could perhaps be seen as legitimate reasons for moving on, rather than “burnout” per se. From personal experience, the decision to leave is backed up by a combination of several of the above reasons. For instance, I left SWG because I’d seen everything there was to see, anywhere, seen/killed/tamed/milked/catalogued most of the wildlife, and got to the point where I’d log in, then wonder why, since I had nothing to do that I hadn’t already done umpteen times before. About then I realized I was addicted as well, so it was time to call it a day. WoW had many more times the content than SWG superficially, enough to keep someone occupied for years, but the underlaying mechanics of it were so similar that even totally new monsters/dungeons/lands were a case of “oh, it’s got a new skin, a new model, new stats, but it’s still the same old monster I’ve been fighting since day one” plus a lack of real emotional investment in the game made it fairly easy to leave, since most of my friends had already left, and it wasn’t like I had a house/commercial empire to worry about… So, addiction/boredom with SWG, and boredom/community with WoW.

    Having looked over these reasons, and having thought for a bit, it seems likely that burnout is pretty much inevitable - a good game will suck you in, and you’ll play it so much that you will sooner or later burnout for one of the above reasons, however much content, or incredible game systems. Which is fairly old news, I suppose - everyone gets bored sooner or later.
    (I’m an explorer all the way, according to the Bartle test, whether you consider it to be accurate and/or valid, it may influence the way I view and play the game. I’d certainly be interested to hear a socializer and a killer comment on this).

    As this is my first post, I’ll take the opportunity to say:

    Ralph, congratulations on SWG, it was a great effort, and I hope a stepping stone onto greater things. I’m enjoying your blog immensely, and looking forwards to seeing where you go from here after SOE. Having worked for EA, I can fully understand your reasons for leaving - big producers just aren’t geared towards creativity, at least not the experimental kind. Still, it’s good to remember that they’re made up of people, often very nice people.

    Wilfried, congratulations on making me post, even if it was because I disagree so strongly with what you’re saying I look forwards to your answers, it’s nice to debate this and get a chance to think clearly about it. Nice to meet you too

47. Lobosolitario said on March 31st, 2006 at 4:53 am:

    Wow, that was longer than I thought…

48. Athela said on March 31st, 2006 at 5:54 am:

    This guy at mischiefblog has it all absolutely right! I think he sums up perfectly what people are looking for who have played multiple mmorpgs, and where the new mmorpgs need to go to not only attract new people, but maintain a solid player base.

    Also, I can’t stress enough that player tutorials need to be deep and explain not just the mechanics of play, but they need to explain the world and its backstory, and draw you into the story right away.

    There is also a huge need for the makers of the games to keep frequently updated documentation and in game help files for players to access so they do not feel lost or directionless or “dumb”.

    Athela

49. Craig Huber said on March 31st, 2006 at 7:12 am:

    Darniaq: I agree, the emphasis on puzzle-solving probably does count as evolutionary: I think my perspective lumped it in with NWN and the like, a been-there-done-that from non-MMOs, unfairly applied.

    I’d guess the combat differences you reference are the parry/tumbling options… I’m not enamored of the implementation specifics, which leaves me less appreciative than I probably should be of their merits.

    Thanks for the additional perspective…

50. Darniaq said on March 31st, 2006 at 7:53 am:

    Wilfried wrote:

    Your AH trades, while they don’t need a 3D client, couldn’t work without lots of players playing the game with the graphical client. That is (partly) what decides about the success of a MMORPG. Again, I’m not talking of fancy graphics, I’m talking about what exactly reaches the player and how. That’s not only the client, but it is for sure not only the server either.

    I agree this wouldn’t work as the only way to play the game. In fact, I don’t even think this is a compelling launch feature. However, I’m thinking about the WoW of 15 months later, where the veterans are comfortable with the game and how they manage their real world schedule around it. Some AH traders may actually sit in the AH all day long doing high/low. But I imagine they’re rare. For the rest, I’m thinking about WoW beyond the single-PC-installed client. Something like this:

    - Play to solo, group, raid for quests or drops: PC Client required.
    - Play to solo quest in a specific instance (EQ2 here): Console or Sony PSP (processing power).
    - Play to trade: Any platform mentioned, add in cellphones.

    This is not one person doing any of these one activities exclusively. It’d be about empowering them to do all of these activities on their time. I’m thinking about someone who can maximize their time ingame based on the activity. At home on the PC, they can do anything. But if they could do cellphone trades on the way to or from work (or heck, heh, at work ), that’d free up their night-time session for other things.

    I’ve long been a fan of bringing the game to the player rather than restricting them to a medium. Technology is catching up with that. This isn’t to diminish the nightmare of complexity the above scenario would be to implement of course

    Mike Rozak wrote:

    Actually, the 3D graphics provide some gameplay that can’t exist (cleanly) with text, and vice versa. Since my world straddles the two, I keenly notice these. On the whole, text MUDs and graphical MMORPGs have more commonalities than differences.

    Gameplay elements that can’t exist cleanly, but which also aren’t often used in MMORPGs either. How often is the archer actually asked to aim, rather than rely on statistical distance and stat-adjusted chance-to-hit? How many run/jump floating platforms are out there with real penalties for missing? Heck, how many of these games truly operate in a third dimension to begin with? CoH and Planetside come to mind, but those stand unique.

    I do totally agree that what can be done in a 3D graphic space more easily delivers an immersive experience than text. I just don’t see much example of that yet.

    Craig Huber wrote:

    I’d guess the combat differences you reference are the parry/tumbling options… I’m not enamored of the implementation specifics, which leaves me less appreciative than I probably should be of their merits.

    I agree with you there. I like DDO for what they’re trying They do also take into consideration actual positioning (WoW does this somewhat, though even DAoC did it better imho), use of ammo, realtime swinging/firing, and so on. I consider it partially akin to Planetside in this regard. Most actions require a player who’s good in traditional MMORPG stuff as well as general spatial relations, with a dose of manual dexterity and quick decision-changing thrown in.

51. Wilfried said on March 31st, 2006 at 9:39 am:

    Lobosolitario, I think you misinterpret what MUD Burnout is about. It’s not about someone having simply played enough of a game and getting bored of it.

    MUD Burnout is kind of a “law” (there might be a better term for that, sorry, my english is limited ;)) amongst MUDs. It means, as Raph said, that you’ll see players vanishing after about 2 years in average of playing MUD(s) completely. They either start to code MUDs from there on or they vanish and you most likely will never see them again in any MUD.

    So if you had enough of EverQuest and move on, and after a while start playing WoW or whatever other MMORPG, that is not what MUD Burnout is about. MUD Burnout means you get burned out not only by one game, but by the whole genre of MUDs. Raph sees the reason for that in the games mechanic of MUDs (and as such with MMORPGs too). I disagree with him in this point. For me, not having a highend client is one very important key part for many reasons (see my other comments for details), why MUDs face MUD Burnout.

    Let me say it like that, two diferent shooter games most likely just differ in the clients and very little in gameplay mechanics. But players see the screenshots of a new shooter with this great new engine, and they catch interest right away. (But that’s only one point, there are many more about clients)

    That does not imply that you’ll never lose interest in all shooters - you will at one point. But that is not what MUD Burnout is about (well, maybe it is with shooters, I don’t know too much about shooter But I’m sure, if all shooters had the exact same graphics and would only slightly differ in mechanics, you would see MUD Burnout happen to them very clearly). And I think that is (one reason) why MMORPGs do not - at least not in the way MUDs do - face MUD burnout. Because they HAVE evolving clients and that changes a hell of a lot.

    @Darniag: Sure, that’s why I think MMORPGs have a fair chance in becoming a regular recreation activity for the masses. It’s not because of one thing, you could have all you said with MUDs too. MMORPGs may be still MUDs under the surface, but it’s exactly this surface that makes the diference. And that makes it possible to go on and maybe have the things like you say in future MMORPGs. Because there is (or might be) a merket for it.

52. Lobosolitario said on March 31st, 2006 at 11:18 am:

    Wilfried, thanks for clearing that up for me.

    So if you had enough of EverQuest and move on, and after a while start playing WoW or whatever other MMORPG, that is not what MUD Burnout is about. MUD Burnout means you get burned out not only by one game, but by the whole genre of MUDs. Raph sees the reason for that in the games mechanic of MUDs (and as such with MMORPGs too). I disagree with him in this point. For me, not having a highend client is one very important key part for many reasons (see my other comments for details), why MUDs face MUD Burnout.

    I haven’t really seen this happen that much - on the whole people seem to tire of a particular MMORPG, and go looking for another MMORPG to replace it, rather than dropping the genre as a whole. That said, I do think that the current crop of MMORPGs (the Everquest based ones) are prime targets for this kind of burnout - it may take longer, which I agree probably has to do with the presentation, but I think that after a few MMORPGs in the Everquest style (timesinks, level grinds) that the whole genre may rapidly start to look unnapealing - I know it does for me. SWG didn’t give me MUD burnout, because it was inherently easy and quick to pick up and play - you could create a character from scratch, and be a master in your profession in a few days, as well as having a fair amount of freedom to personalise your skill set. Even though I ended up tiring of the game, I was looking forward to finding other similar ones. WoW, however, has burnt me out. I really don’t see the benefit in picking up another similar MMORPG which requires hours of grinding for no other purpose than to grind more, however pretty the package is.

    So, given that definition of MUD burnout, I’d be inclined to agree that good MMORPGs may not suffer from it, or at least may suffer to a much lesser degree, even though they share the same basic engine with MUDs.

53. Craig Huber said on March 31st, 2006 at 1:01 pm:

    As someone who, amongst my circle of acquaintances and friends, have 4-5 examples of “MMO burnout” to draw upon, I’m going to venture to comment on the topic based on that limited data set.

    Based on my experience, I’d say that graphic clients do have an impact, but it is severely limited, and that the impact is far more illusory than real. The comment heard most often in my experience that typifies this perspective for me is “well, I picked it (an MMO) up and gave it a try. The box looked decent/the web site sounded promising/substitute whatever the “hook” was… but once I got into the game, I realized it was really just the same old grind”, sometimes followed by “40 bucks, down the drain. I won’t do _that_ again.” (and of the 3 that added that addendum, 2 have made it stick, so far…)

    In other words, the graphic client may well obscure the fact that it’s the “same old, same old”, long enough for them to try it at least, but the illusion doesn’t last very long.

    MUDs/MUSHes/MOOs/etc, those conforming to the “must accommodate vanilla telnet” standard at least, didn’t have the advantage of that illusion. I’d agree that “MMO burnout” may well be a slower burn due to graphics, but looking to graphics to “eliminate” burnout would be ill-advised, IMO.

54. Darniaq said on April 1st, 2006 at 4:29 am:

    Just a quick update about platform independence:

    I just read in issue #2 of EON (official game magazine for Eve) that CCP and Reykjavik University are collaberating on Eve for the cellphone. They’re specifically focused on functions one can perform in a space station, which makes sense. Wouldn’t want to try some 0.0 ratting on a 2″ screen

    Here’s a quote:

    A limited prototype client is already running on GSM phones, which allows users to log into the game, access characters, set skilling training and manage items

    They’re also looking to add chat functions. If they get this thing to access the Market, and “managing items” includes manufacturing, that’d be huge!

    But even with the above, this already is an example of what I (and others) are talking about. This wouldn’t be for players new to Eve, but rather veterans who want to extend their playtime beyond the computer.

55. Wolfe said on April 3rd, 2006 at 1:22 am:

    Someone might have said this already but:

    MMORPG players do indeed burn out on the community eventually. Once immersed in the socail hierarchy deep enough its very hard to not burn or break. Some player shed the skin and start over, several really burn out of the title and need to start anew within the genre.