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Why Do You Hate Friendship, Mr. MMO Designer?
By Cameron Sorden | July 19, 2007
How often have you seen this happen:
Someone buys a game that just came out and sinks 40 hours into playing. He has a mid-level character and a decent amount of money and items, and then he finds out that a friend of his is also playing and has a similarly-leveled character… on a different server. Neither of them wants to re-roll and spend another 40 hours doing what they’ve just done, so they just stay on their respective servers and don’t play together.
Or this:
You’ve been playing an MMO for a long time and have a max level character, a bunch of money, and a solid guild. You meet a new friend in real life and you strike up a conversation about your favorite game. Hey, they also play and enjoy the game, and are in a similar situation as you! All is well until the dreaded question, “What server do you play on?” This is usually followed with, “Oh, too bad… guess we can’t play together.”
Why do character transfers have to be the headache that they are? Even if a company does offer transfers and you are in a position where you’d be willing to transfer your character, the fee and logistics are often a significant barrier for players. Why should I pay $25-$40 to a game company just for the privilege of playing with my friends? How do I know they won’t burn out and bail in two months? How do we decide who has to pay and move (if either of us could)? Since character transfers are usually locked for a while after you do one, what happens if I hate my new server (for whatever reason)? Now I’m stuck…
I recently started playing WoW again, this time on a PvP server with my brother. I’m in kind of an MMO slump, as I’ve mentioned, so I thought it would be fun to just blow off some steam and go back to WoW for a few months while I waited for something shinier. I rolled up a little rogue and got leveling. Within a few days I was almost 20. Go me! But sure enough, as soon as I told my friends I was playing again on a PvP server, one of them said, “Really? Which one? I’ve been playing on a PvP server too lately… but not that one. You should come play with us!” If there’s one thing that’s critical to PvP, it’s good friends. Also, the idea of having a higher level friend that can supply gold and items on a new server is attractive…
However, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve played the pre-20 game in WoW. I know it doesn’t take long. I know I’d be up and running in a few days. But the thought of having to do another 12-14 hours of the exact same stuff I’d been doing for the last few days and have done dozens and dozens of times before was so repugnant that I could already sense the burnout looming. That left me with the choice of convincing him to come re-roll on my server (and he’s level 39 with regular friends there), or shelling out the $25 for a character transfer when I’ve already spent $15 on WoW this month to resub (and convincing my brother to do the same). I can’t justify that to myself for a level 20 character, anyway. So we just ended up not playing together and being disappointed.
I’m with Razorwire. It seems ludicrous to me that in this day and age, with the level of competition out there rapidly growing, MMO companies aren’t doing everything they can to facilitate real life friends playing their games together. When friends play together, they draw in more of their friends, play longer, are more likely to get past the 30-day mark, and generally have a more positive game experience. So why does it cost me half the price of the game to play with my friends when all it takes is a database entry moving over to another database?
I should be able to hop from server to server at will, free of charge, within the context of the game itself. Don’t make me go through complicated forms at a website somewhere. Don’t make me talk to a CS rep. Don’t go digging in my wallet. Just let me play your game that I paid for with my friends and don’t punish me for choosing the wrong server. That makes me want to not play your game.
I’ve heard the arguments against allowing this and I’m not dismissing them. Community. Economy. Reputations. But come on… I want to have fun in these games, and at the end of the day, you know what isn’t fun? Having to choose between playing alone or doing it all over again. There are games that have made and do make this work. It boggles my mind that companies can still get away with this in their games. Why would you not readily facilitate people’s enjoyment when they want to have fun playing with their friends? That’s a rhetorical question, by the way, so don’t be telling me smugly that it’s to make a quick buck. I know that. What I want to know is why wouldn’t they rather make the money up by keeping five or six people subscribing for longer because they can fluidly join new people they meet while staying with old friends?
Some games are starting to figure this out, and I suspect that the next round of successful MMOs will be the ones that offer the best service to their players— you know, in conjunction with an awesome game. The best services in the world couldn’t have saved Horizons. My point is this: we play for entertainment, and we pay for entertainment, so it’s in the best interest of the game companies to keep us entertained for as long as possible if they want our cash. Making sure that we can play with our friends is one of the best ways to do that, especially when we meet new players that we didn’t know when we started playing.
I shouldn’t have to count on knowing everyone I’m going to want to play with for the next two years when I start playing a game and pick a server.
Topics: Random |
July 19th, 2007 at 11:34 am
One of my major pet peeves. Lump this in the category of unforgiving talent/skill/attribute allocations before you know what you’re doing with a game/class.
Ironic that the first decision you make in the game literally controls your destiny.
I’m just not buying any of the gameplay preservation arguments. Powerlevelling, farming and gold selling make those distinctions meaningless, so its simply population management which is easy. I really don’t think the PvP, PvE distinction would matter that much either.
Check the server population, transfer ok, transfer not ok, press enter, done. How hard is that?
July 19th, 2007 at 11:46 am
Oddly enough, I just posted about that very thing, with the added hassle of EU vs US servers that by and large you can’t transfer between at all, even for $10.
July 20th, 2007 at 12:34 pm
Okay, I’m willing to grant to your average dev/publisher the fact that unrestricted transfers (along with name changes, for that matter) can and most probably will get messy sooner than later. As anonymity that this medium provides - and we all thrive in that anonymity to different degrees, some for good, some for evil - there are still a few things for which you need transparency and consistency.
So yeah, I’m perfectly willing to shake their right paw and not ask for unrestricted transfers. I could be once every three or six months. Whatever fits.
What I don’t agree is that it shouldn’t be free. Nobody buys there’s a significant cost on the business side to transfer characters between servers. Or, at the very least, nobody buys that cost usually being between $10-$25. It’s stupid that we can access the world, and be hanging from that world all day long if we want to, for 50 cents a day, but we have to shell $20 to move a character (more than a month of service).
They put that price barrier there, first to make money, and second to discourage the compulsive transferer/shady guy that transfers so often that he’s surely up to something.
I say restrict transfers in other ways. I can live with a 3-6 month wait between transfers, but don’t make me pay you through the nose on top of that wait.
July 20th, 2007 at 12:48 pm
Here’s what I’d prefer:
1) Make names global so you don’t have to worry about people having the same name on a server all the time.
2) Don’t allow name changes. If you pick a stupid name or do something incredibly stupid and develop a reputation, live with it or reroll.
3) Allow players to hop servers whenever they like, as often as they like (free of charge), and link all commerce between all servers (mail and auction houses).
4) Allow friends and ignore lists to travel cross server (since names are global) but force guilds to be server specific. You can be in several guilds if you like, but only on specific servers. So every time I log into Skywall I’m in my guild X there, but if I log into Shadow Council I’m in my family guild there. That way you can have a raiding guild AND a friends guild on different servers.
With this system you still have some transparency and can’t escape a genuinely earned bad reputation without re-rolling, you can always play with your friends wherever they might be, and no one cares if people transfer all the time because it’s automated and you can’t screw up the economy. On new servers, you’d have to restrict transferring for 6-12 months to allow their economy to balance out a bit before bringing them into the system, or come up with a better solution. But hey, it’s a rough idea.
It’s got kinks, sure, but nothing insurmountable (I just don’t feel like designing a whole system right now). The key is fluidity. I should never feel like I have to work to go have fun with my friends, whether I start playing with them at day 1 or meet them 2 years down the line at a fan faire. Any excuse you give me for why I’m not allowed to use the character I’ve spent months or years advancing to have fun with my friends is tired and no longer holds water these days, IMO.
July 20th, 2007 at 11:05 pm
@Cameron
I’m not sure that what you suggest is feasible. The whole reason for multiple servers is that servers can only handle so much information. Linking commerce between servers basically erases some of the the lines between the servers, increasing load for every one of them. Same with friends lists and guild rosters, etc.
The main hit to server load is always the characters themselves, which I realize, but I think cross-pollinating them at all is A)non-trivial from a networking and coding standpoint, and B)would have negative effects on server load.
July 21st, 2007 at 7:15 am
Commerce isn’t really the important part of the suggestion (I know that my proposal has design issues– it was an illustrative example). The reason I suggest linking the AH is to prevent manipulating the economy of individual servers. This is only one of several ways you can accomplish that goal.
You could choose not to do that and instead prevent the transfer of tradeable items between servers, or just decide that you don’t care and let enterprising merchants server hop as they like. It might even make for a fun metagame for the business-minded players.
As for cross server contact, many games already let you do cross-server whispers to your friends. If you have global names, it doesn’t seem like it would be too difficult to do a global friends list as well.
I’m not saying any of this is trivial to accomplish, but it’s certainly feasible, especially if it’s built into the game from day one. As for negative effects on server load, I’m not sure what you mean… do you mean over-population of individual servers? You would just set a target population for each server and not let people transfer to it once it capped out. If people there want to play with friends, they’ have to move off, which would reopen the transfers there eventually.
July 23rd, 2007 at 7:19 am
I think we should get two free server transfers on characters over level 20 (at least 30 days between them) While this does increase the possibility of theft and generally under-handed acts, its better for everyone else.
July 24th, 2007 at 6:10 am
This is eerily similar to a conversation that occurred prior to WoW releasing their paid character transfer service. Blizzard had just announced the $29.95 price tag and people were going nuts.
Of course it does not cost Blizzard thirty bucks to move a character between some databases, but that isn’t the point of the price. The price sets a limit of who will be transferring characters. Only people that are fairly dedicated to the move are going to pony up the cash for it.
It would be very broken for Blizzard to just allow transfers whenever for some really cheap price (or free). Players are notoriously wish washy. For every person transferring to be with a friend, there are ten players transferring just because they are bored or they are looking for a “winning” team.
For all the good reasons to have unrestricted character transfers, there is an equal number of bad reasons. In the end, the headaches unrestricted character transfers would cause outweigh the minute percentage of players that would be helped.
July 25th, 2007 at 5:17 pm
Cameron, as for your list of preferences: (City of Heroes/Villains warning)
1) Global names
I like the way it is done in City of Geroes/Villains - you have a global name for your account which is separate from your character names. You can name your characters with a fitting name, but your friends do not need to keep track of all your character names, just the global name.
2) No rename
I think it is perfectly valid to change the _character_ name at some point, with some restrictions, e.g. let people pay a fee for it. A global name should, if it exists, should not be changed that easily.
3) For auction houses and mail that is currently global in Coh/CoV and shared between all servers in a region (US is one region, Europe is another)
Cryptic also said that they were looking at making characters serverless and that you could hop on to any server with a character. That is not happening anytime soon though, sometime next year at best.
4) Friend and ignore lists are global in CoV/CoH, as are chat channels, supergroups (i.e. guilds) are not. This means in practice that different global chat channels is what links groups of people together, rather than supergroups and their chat channels - you can always talk to people though the global chat channels, but if you use a supergroup channel you are restricted to a particular server and faction (hero or villain).
July 25th, 2007 at 7:48 pm
[...] Random Battle from last week fought over why MMOs use servers to keep you from playing with your friends. I have [...]
July 25th, 2007 at 8:43 pm
I don’t understand why games can’t just have only 1 world, Guild Wars or Eve Online style. It might not be possible in a seamless world, but for games such as EQ2, why can’t they just have different zones located on different servers?
Especially with advancements distributed computing, clustering a bunch of servers together (database on one, different zones on different servers) for one huge world doesn’t seem that all impossible.
July 26th, 2007 at 12:30 am
Mythokia,
The games already have different zones located on different servers, the term “server/realm/world/shard” that is used is not represented by just a physical server, but rather a bunch of servers.
Most games will likely have one zone running on a just a physical server though, which will limit how many players the game can handle in one zone.
Games like EQ2 and CoH/CoV can bring up multiple instances of zones to try to accomodate too many users, so that they will spread out over many servers.
My guess is that the main challenge with a shared world is the data storage and its performance. If you have one shared world you would have a common database for all characters and what is happening in the world and that need to accomodate a huge amount of operations every second.
July 27th, 2007 at 11:23 am
One idea I just thought up to deal with the whole “good reason”/”bad reason”/”join my friends” reason - have the character transfers sponsored by a player on the destination server. That way, it also becomes a whole lot easier for the game company to examine if there is a trend of some particular player grabbing money/item farmers or just someone that’s extraordinarily good at convincing others to leave the “birth” servers (e.g., the cute chick you’ve been chatting with on Myspace for the past three months…).
I think the real issue here, is that these game companies are missing an opportunity to provide a significantly higher level of service, and capture expand or (*cough* Blizzard *cough*) maintain an unbreakable hold on their market share. One interesting point about this concept is that it would be an excellent selling point to any of the companies that are either just starting up an MMO, or to others that have been in the market for a while, but are losing players to newer, “shinier” games that aren’t significantly better by game mechanics standards, but do have better customer service.
July 27th, 2007 at 3:53 pm
I feel your pain on not being able to play with your friends. It totally sucks.
I think the fees are there to slow down the rate of transfers such that a server doesn’t get overpopulated. You could achieve the same effect by simply shutting off transfers after a certain point, but a fee helps insure that only people who -really- want the transfer get one of the slots.
The overpopulation issue has two parts that I see. One is hardware capabilities, which can theoretically be addressed if the software can allow one server to be hosted across several boxes.
The design issues are a bigger obstacle. Unless you want to instance -everything-, there’s only a limited amount of content to go around. You’d run into problems finding mobs to kill for a quest (they’re already dead!), having performance problems in most cities, and losing some of the atmosphere when burning steepes looks like a street fair because there’s 500 adventurers around.