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So It Begins Again
By Cameron Sorden | September 21, 2008
Even though I’m not playing Warhammer Online right now, I’m definitely intending to go pick it up eventually. I’m focused on getting my WoW mage to 70 for Wrath, but once I do that I’ll go buy it and give the full retail version a go so I’m not just basing my knowledge on beta, assuming I still have motivation and time to do so. I have a problem, though: I don’t know where to play.
There are two or three servers that most of the blogging population seems to be spread over, but I also have a group of friends from Minnesota who all rolled together on a single (different) server. What’s more is that some of my immediate family members just bought the game too, and they’re playing on yet another server. Since I’m not even sure I’m going to stick with the game for any length of time, I can’t really ask anyone to reroll on a different server on my behalf, just on the off chance that I do like it enough to play it long term. I don’t like playing on multiple servers, either — I usually pick one and stick to it.
So once again, I’m stuck with this dilemma: I need to make choices about who I’m going to play with, and it sucks. I’d love to jump into a group with some of the other bloggers once in a while, but I’d also like to play with my brother. The Minnesota people are a group of guys I know and like and I could see playing long-term with them. Why is this an issue in the first place?
Because despite the capability to build seamless transitions between servers or large single worlds, new games are still using the archaic shard/server model with rigid rules about switching between them. This is really frustrating for me, as someone who has a lot of friends in different places that play online games. I’m sure eventually I’ll be able to pay for a transfer like every other game out there, but I play online games to have fun with my friends. Split servers with paid or no transfer rules make that really hard sometimes.
You can’t even tell me that better planning on my part would fix the problem. I make new friends all the time. Sometimes they play online games. Inevitably, they play on different servers than I do. This is a problem I’ve had since all the way back when I was playing Ultima Online and EverQuest. I talked a few posts ago about race and faction as the final barriers to letting people play how they want to in World of Warcraft, but the problem of servers splitting friends is more of an issue and a barrier for play than levels, factions, and race combined.
There’s no reason that we still have to do things this way. It’s just easy, familiar, and convenient. But why does anyone in this business still think it’s a good idea to throw up barriers between players making new friends or playing with their friends? Friends and community are what keeps players playing these games, by and large.
You come for the rat killing, but stay for the raiding (or realm PvPing). Developers should be facilitating that, not obstructing it.
Topics: Game Design, Personal, Warhammer Online, World of Warcraft |
September 21st, 2008 at 6:58 pm
Guild wars certainly proved that.
September 22nd, 2008 at 1:31 am
“There’s one very big factor in shardless/serverless virtual worlds which is often overlooked. That is that there are only so many conceivable variations on the names of Aragorn, Zaknafein, Drizzt and Terminator. With 60% of any MMO’s playerbase incapable of coming up with something slightly more original yet spurning the use of name generators…”
The other one is server-rule sets, like Core, Open RVR and the RP servers. But, I would’ve preferred a few “spheres”, constituting what would normally be 10 or so servers myself.
September 22nd, 2008 at 8:42 am
On the first point, I don’t necessarily see how forcing people to be a little more creative is a bad thing. Less name options just means more original names. People will just have to make use of those name generators they usually ignore.
On the second point, I can definitely appreciate the need for different rulesets — especially with PvE and PvP playstyles. There are two ways to handle that, though: You could easily have several “spheres,” as you mention, but still limit the player population dispersion to 2 or 3 areas with various rulesets (and still allow for fluid movement between them). Isn’t this sort of what old-school Ultima Online did with the portals to the mirror world that was PvP-enabled?
The other way to handle it, at least for PvP and PvE (less so for other alternate rule sets), is to offer zones that specifically cater to PvP playstyles within a larger PvE game.
It seems to me that alternate ruleset servers are pretty rare these days, anyway. Most games offer core and RP servers, and the ones where it makes sense also offer PvP servers. EverQuest classic is the last MMOG I can remember that really had multiple rulesets with their several variations of PvP server styles.