Ranting Against RMT

Okay, I'm about to go off the nerd deep end and rant about RMT (Real Money Trading). But even the Discovery channel has recently discussed this space, so maybe it's not too niche. I'd even argue that this topic extends beyond gaming. Increasingly our world is being defined by goods that are easily cloneable and have to be controlled by Intellectual Property laws and the like. With the music industry scrambling to figure out how it fits in anymore, it's valuable to look at the virtual economies happening in online video games. I'm sure there's a great discussion to be had there, but as I said, this is a rant...

Okay, so there's this growing presence in the MMO genre of Real Money Trading. RMT is the idea of exchanging real-world currency for in-game currency or services. And as a gamer, I consider this a Bad Thing. The entire draw of an RPG is character advancement; the more time and skill you dedicate to the game, the more powerful and refined your character becomes. RMT means that someone can plop down some money and instantly get the same prestige and abilities as someone who worked for them. If these were only aesthetic, or if MMORPGs weren't inherently collaborative/competitive, it wouldn't be such a big deal. But when real money gives someone an unfair gameplay advantage over other real people, it's cheating.

Raph Koster, am esteemed MMO game developer (who's blog I subscribe to), has decided to defend RMT as an unavoidable outcome. When posed with an anti-RMT solution of limiting trading possibilities, he counters by claiming that exchange of objects and services is the same, and thus the only way to prevent RMT is to remove all collaborative gameplay. I recognize that both of these are exploitable, but I definitely do not agree that they are equivalent. Yes, you could spend real money to hire someone to escort you and ease your game experience, but that still involves a time commitment on your part. You could hand over your account to a power leveling service, but that also compromises your account's security. Neither of these options compare at all to the instant gratification of items and currency purchased with real cash.

I'll concede that some amount of RMT is always going to happen. But I'm pretty sure that restrictions can be imposed to make it inconvenient and not as generally viable. Yes, you're probably going to limit some positive trade on the other side of the coin. But with the anonymity of the internet I'm far more worried about rampant exploitation than blocking the rare unsolicited act of kindness. I certainly don't share Raph's romanticizing of item gifting. You have something that you don't need anymore (either because you outgrew it or because you never had use for it at all) and give it to someone else who can use it. Big whoop. Isn't the real problem here that the item has no value to you? What's the point of the game handing you items that you have no need for, or allowing something that previously had value to become worthless? Trading is just as hollow when the items are arbitrarily worthless as when they are arbitrarily valuable.

I like Raph's blog. I like that he's willing to question assumed gameplay devices like levels and gold. But as a gamer I really can't follow him on this journey. You can certainly question the inequality incentive of the MMORPG genre, but as long as you're bought into that structure you have to admit that RMT is an anathema to honest players.

Truthfully I consider the economies of MMOs to be more annoying than appealing. I get all this loot which I have to hang on to because I recognize that junking it to a vendor might not generate as much profit as selling it to another player. But of course I generally have no idea what the value of an item is. If I'm lucky I can find the same item up for auction and use that as a reference price, but such an immediate snapshot doesn't give me any real sense of longer-term demand and value. I really need to research some sort of "blue book" value, compare that to current server demand, and be prepared to spend lots of time babysitting an auction (or soliciting a direct sale) in order to get the optimal return. And of course the game itself never gives me adequate tools to carry any of this out, so I'm fighting the system the whole time. It's in no way fun, so I generally just price my auctions to sell quickly so that I can spend less time economizing and more time having fun.

But you say there is some entertainment to be had here, right? It's great to get some drop that you realize is going to fetch a pretty penny. But of course that's really just money for you to spend on some other item that another player can't use, so why the need for a middleman? Couldn't you have just got a drop that was relevant to your character in the first place? Player crafting adds something to the trading equation, but more often than not it's just a really expensive minigame whose outputs are obsolete (nerfed out of fear of rampant RMT, of course). So is it really so bad if trading in MMOs is severely restricted or eliminated altogether? You could still collaborate on that whole gameplay part, but as far as permanent character advancement goes you'd be on your own, in an exploit-free bubble.

Where to go from here?

I blogged before about how MMO's need achievements. And it sounds like the new Lord of the Rings MMORPG is delivering just that. It also helps that it's based in the very rich world of Middle Earth. So, I'm tempted…

But I don’t know if I have the energy to start another one of these games. I've been playing WoW for two years now, and for a large chunk of that time it was pretty much the only game I played. Which is not how I like to operate. I'd rather experience a variety of different stories than be entrenched in one ongoing epic. It took me awhile to break free from its grasp, and I don't want to fall back into bad habits again.

I'm at a turning point with WoW. When the expansion came out I set a goal for myself that I would delay the inevitable endgame grind as much as possible by staying focusing on seeing all the content. This weekend I completed one of the primary goals I set for myself: run all the (non-hardcore) instances. And I already finished off my single player questing goals weeks ago (the only quests left in my log are the group quests that are impossible to find groups for). I need to decide if I want to take a crack at Karazhan, but besides that I've reached the end of the content. I've essentially seen all there is to see without spending an absurd amount of time grinding to the next tier. And I'm not really interested in taking another character through the same old stuff again, which is how I handed the pre-Burning Crusade level cap.

My plan right now is to put my WoW account into hibernate and only pop in as they bring more content online. But new stuff comes along rarely, so it sounds like I won't be playing much WoW. The question I'm posed with now is do I hang up my MMO hat or do I pursue the next evolution that is Lord of the Rings Online?

Gamasutra: Rethinking the MMO

Gamasutra posted a great article on Rethinking the MMO. If you've ever played one of these games, it's worth a good read.

I've pulled out some quotes that spoke to me:

"To make matters worse, the game mechanics do not often require players to adapt in a meaningful way, leading to repetitive encounters where the player performs the same set of actions every time."

"Players will spend hours at a time churning through feeble, ineffectual opponents rather than taking on more risk, because the game rewards them more for adopting this style of play."

"it is natural for players to want to empty the cookie jar of quantifiable accomplishment as quickly as possible, even if they get a stomachache in the process."

"Players should not have to choose between building their persistent entity and doing something fun."

"There is rarely creativity involved, and the only meaningful customization is typically a series of one-time choices made at the start of the game (character creation)"

"Although they are still constrained to the path dictated by the designer, there are few interesting experiences between the start and end, the trip is painfully slow and entirely predictable, and the whole point of the journey is to get to a destination, not to enjoy the ride."

"In the land where everyone’s a hero, heroes are commoners.
In a game where gaining power is the primary goal of the game, this design flaw is significant."

"RPGs are about saving the world or otherwise fixing some sort of hefty problem. The objective purportedly is to alter the game world. An RPG where altering the game world would break the game therefore has a serious flaw."

"While it is certainly debatable whether such games are evil, soul-consuming, life-wrecking monsters, the fact remains that they are more enjoyable when played in long stretches than when played in short ones."

"Playing with others is fun; organizing and preparing is not. "

The article doesn't pull any punches when criticizing the genre, but it's obviously written by people that love these games and really want to see them improve. And I'm totally with them. The key things that make the MMO appealing are persistence and epic scale. But the classic RPG gameplay expanded to this model doesn't always hold up.

I enjoy WoW. Obviously I wouldn't play it so much if I didn't. In this brutal genre WoW is more friendly than most. And its recent expansion has improved this even more. But there are still a lot of places where it could evolve. I hope the good folks at Blizzard are taking these issues to heart and thinking about how to give their crack more substance... while maintaining the trademark addictive aftertaste.

World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade (PC)

I held it off as long as possible, but at last I have hit level 70 in World of Warcraft (TBC reviews: GameSpot, GameSpy). I had no interest in rushing the journey from 60 to 70 because I knew that the returns diminish pretty dramatically after you hit the level cap. It's likely that Blizzard has handled it better this time around, but it's a fundamental limitation of this kind of game that at some point the content thins out and they have to string you along with a decreasing time/value proposition. So I've absolutely taken my time to smell all the flowers as I've strolled through The Burning Crusade.

The quality of content added in this expansion is undeniably of a higher quality than what was previously available. The quests are more interesting, the zones flow better, the rewards are more diversified, the instances are more streamlined… everything's just plain better. This is true not just of the new Outland 60 to 70 content, but also of the new 1 to 20 content for the two new races: blood elves and draenei. Leveling a new character through the first two zones is a much deeper experience than it used to be. Unfortunately then you get dumped off in the old stuff for the next 40 levels. Which leaves sitting here with a level 20 blood elf, thinking "do I really want to go through all that again?"

Meanwhile back in Outland, my level 70 druid has a similar dilemma: how do I want to spend my time at the level cap? For me the game is all about the locations. So in the meantime the answer to my question is easy, as that of the seven zones in Outland I've only really cleared out five and a half of them. Plus there are fifteen instances on your way to 70, and I've only visited six of those. On top of that there are the more hardcore ones that require uber gear, but I recognize that I'll likely never see those. So from where I am now I'm just going to keep doing what I have been doing: solo questing through the zones, grouping up to do an instance every now and then, and occasionally doing commando style solo runs on the instances that previously owned me so that I can convince myself that I'm a badass.

I don't feel like I've hit the wall yet, and I'm optimistic that when I do I'll realize it and have the self control to just stop and go play another game or something. My achievement point addiction and WoW addiction will continue to battle it out, striking some sort of tenuous balance. And then when my crack-riddled psyche needs some rest I can flail around like a crazy person with my Wii. Problem solved.

Perspective

One interesting aspect of the new Armory feature for WoW is that you can now go look up that bastard who corpse camped you for half an hour. Now I know that I was only one of 49514 (Contrast that with my lifetime kill count of 2372, which unfortunately I was never able to add that bastard to).

I play on a PvP server because quite frankly it makes everything just a tad more interesting. I'm one of those people that actually enjoyed Ultima Online's PvP system. Nothing made your heart beat quite as fast as having the bounty board's number one menace riding towards you. Likewise with WoW, the possibility of random PvP adds a wild card into what could otherwise just be a standard RPG grind.

However, PvP is only really fun when it's relatively even. And unfortunately the design goals of the endless MMORPG gear grind are at odds with the design goals of fair PvP. Even WoW's reward for PvP is just more gear. Which is a bulletproof "rich get richer" game design. That would maybe work if the PvP matchmaking brackets were based on gear value, rather than the mostly useless measure of Level (given that there's a level cap and everyone's at it). Supposedly they've fixed that and added a better matchmaking system for the Arenas, but those aren't "casual" friendly as they require you to form a regular team of consistent players. Essentially leaving no real viable outlet for the occasional PvPer.

But this is all part of the appeal of MMORPGs, I guess. In a singleplayer RPG, you're always the hero. You rise up and save the world. You're special. But in an MMORPG, you're competing against thousands of other potential heroes just like you. Which means you're guaranteed to be outclassed by a large percentage of them, making your digital self just as mundane as your physical one.

WoW Online Profile

Blizzard recently made a great step in the right direction recently with their new Armory web portal. It allows you to check out your WoW characters (and other's) offline (well, not offline, but rather not logged in and running the WoW client). In other words, there is now yet another way to get distracted at work.

There's a lot of people freaking on the WoW forums over this breach of privacy. I personally could care less. There are already plenty of census sites for WoW - this one just makes it official and does it better.

So, in the interest of full disclosure, here are my top 3 WoW characters:

• Fortuno (druid)
• Thalonique (rogue)
• Coikai (mage)

This whole topic of web presence for MMOs reminds me of an interesting post on Raph Koster's blog. It sounds like Lord of the Rings Online is going to have a bunch of great community features like a gamelore wiki, character blogs, and a Google maps view of the world. Which all sounds really really cool. The whole definition of an MMORPG is that it's an RPG, but with gobs and gobs of people. Any feature that reinforces that "M" is a good thing.

How to make WoW even more addictive

My name is Chris, and I'm addicted to WoW.

There, I've said it. At least I'm not alone; WoW is up to eight million subscribers. We're all willing participants, but there's no getting around the fact that we are also addicts.

It's not like WoW doesn't put out. Aesthetically WoW is very satisfying: the world is pleasing on the eyes and the monsters look appropriately fierce. By RPG standards the gameplay is actually pretty deep and entertaining. And there's certainly no end of things to do.

But WoW is just a glorified Skinner Box, and we're all sitting there pulling the lever hoping for another pellet. I know this. So why is it that lately I've been thinking of how great it would be to combine two of my addictions?

WoW, meet Achievement Points. Achievement Points, meet WoW.

One of WoW's main problems is that everything boils down to gear. You kill stuff to get better gear so that you can see new places and kill bigger stuff. Your ability to proceed through the content of the game is gated by how good of stuff you have. Skill has something to do with it, definitely. But you're dead in the water without good gear.

So what's the problem? Well, not only is gear the means to explore new content, it's also your reward. For a little while after you finish an instance, you're so excited to troll around with your new thingamajig so that everyone can see where you've been. But inevitably you'll go somewhere cooler and your fancy thingamajig will become obsolete. You have to throw it away. Where's your memento of journeys past? The game actually discourages you from holding on to the nifty stuff that you collect along the way. Gone is your visible badge of honor that you slew the mighty whosiwhatsit.

This is where achievement points come in. WoW needs non-gear related rewards for special achievements. Nothing that affects gameplay; just a badge of honor that says that you successfully downed Hogger. It's probably just another tab on your character sheet - nothing fancy. But that little piece of permanence would motivate many players (myself included) to drill into a larger percentage of the content that the WoW developers worked so hard on. Sure there would be a achievements for the obvious things, like finishing some major instance. But things get really fun when you pull out the really in-depth achievements, like soloing a boss, clearing an instance under a time limit, getting a killing spree in PvP, or exploring every zone. Blizzard has already taken some interesting ideas like this and turned them into quests, but the problem is that there's nobody to appreciate that you finished that quest except for yourself. Which is totally missing the whole point of us all playing this RPG together.

C'mon Blizzard. Give me something else to shoot for, because I'm growing tired of the endless cycle for "better stuff."