Right away, I am going to answer the question in the topic: No.

People love games. People love computer/video games. The number of people who love computer games continues to grow. The gaming industry is thriving and will continue to grow, expand, thrive, and include more and more people. Television and movies need to look out because computer/video games provide almost everything they provide, plus interactivity. (However, they don’t have to fear for their lives. Just like casual/social games won’t kill other types, television and movies provide a type of entertainment that is unique enough that many people will continue to enjoy and prefer it.)

Very few forms of legitimate entertainment get wiped out when something new comes along. The new just adds to the old, and the overall quotient of happiness increases. As I noted in a previous blog post, the Rubik’s Cube just turned 30 years old and has sold 350 million units. People still love the thing. I play Uno with one of my kids almost every day. I watch TV. I watch movies. I read books. I listen to the radio. I go for walks. I play catch. I ride my bike. The fact that we, as a species, have more and more entertainment options as our planet spins upon its axis is a GOOD THING.

Zynga is a wildly successful juggernaut that uses a variety of questionable business practices to succeed in the market with products of dubious quality. Right now, many (if not most) people think they are an unassailable titan that will continue to dominate its sector of the industry and perhaps crowd out others. Their own staff are becoming increasingly arrogant about it (perhaps as a defensive mechanism). When a Farmville developer was booed and heckled during his acceptance of the social game award at GDC, he fired back with “we’re hiring” and various other snide comments that amounted too “when you chumps are done being artists, come work for us and make money.”

I don’t know about you, but that sounds a lot like AOL to me. How many of my readers are viewing this blog while logged onto the internet through AOL? Zero? Yeah, I thought so. AOL’s primary profitable business now is TMZ if I am not mistaken (yes, that’s how far they have fallen).

The power of social games like Farmville is that it let people play games with people they like (friends, family, etc.) that they probably never thought they’d game with – ever.  Parents gaming with their kids, grandparents gaming with grandchildren, and people gaming with high school friends they haven’t spoken to in 20 years are all pretty amazing things. The fact that some of the actual games that accomplished this are weak from a game design standpoint is not really the point.

Competition will come to this space, and crappy (at least in my opinion) games like Farmville won’t be able to compete. Zyngas will have to raise their standards. The same thing happened to AOL. In AOL’s case, they didn’t evolve so they died (as far as their ISP business).

Core games will continue to be made. AAA, multi-million dollar budget games will continue to be made. FPSes and fantasy MMORPGs will keep getting made. As long as there are people who like them enough to spend money on them, they will get made.

Farmville has grown the market for games, and in the end that is a good thing. This is similar to what The Sims did to help grow the gaming market – though admittedly The Sims is a high quality game in its own right. This is a good thing for us, people. Relax.

I don’t expect every, or any, MMO to be a WoW killer. But it strikes me as a pretty dang sad indictment of the genre that time after time, big budget, major publisher MMOs come out and fail miserably.

Read on for examples that include Age of Conan, Warhammer Online, and Champions Online.

Age of Conan – Over a million sales. Now hovering around 100k subs on life support. Main reasons: horrible system performance, soul crushingly boring post Tortage content, knee jerk nerfs. For more details, see: Review of Age of Conan and Age of Conan is a Hot Mess.

Warhammer Online – Over 1.5 million sales. Now hovering below 100k subs most likely, and may be shut down at any time. Main reasons: only 2 sides in an ongoing realm war game, extreme population, class, and realm balance problems,too much crowd control, and atrocious end game RvR design. For more details, see: What Went Wrong with Warhammer?

Champions Online – Exact sales numbers are not out yet, but CO lost BADLY in September to Aion despite releasing 3 weeks earlier. Aion finished 1st and 5th (5th being the Collectors Edition). CO finished 3rd. The Sims 3 was 2nd. WoW: WotLK was 4th, WoW Battle Chest was was 8th, and vanilla WoW was 10th. But the bigger problem is the fact that usage in CO is down by about 50-70% since mid September, and is currently estimated at about 30k subs.

The rumor is that most of the staff have been moved to Star Trek Online, and CO has a skeleton crew now only. They have been releasing almost weekly knee jerk nerfs, the respec/retcon situation is still a mess, and the Champions Online cash shop/C-Store that opened up this week is a disaster of greed and Roper-style bad ideas.

In total, these three games have 200,000 to 250,000 subscribers or LESS. What a disgrace. These games have major publishers (especially Warhammer – EA, and Champions Online – Atari). World of Warcraft never even has to compete. These pretenders to the throne repeatedly kill themselves.

In light of that, it was a real head scratcher when Cryptic hired him and made him Executive Producer of Champions Online. I must admit, while I enjoyed a lot of things about Champions Online, I’d been waiting for and worrying about Roper’s influence.

With the full opening of the Champions Online microtransaction cash shop (C-Store), those fears were apparently well founded.

I never understood where the heck Cryptic got off adding a cash shop to a full price + monthly subscription game. That’s not just double dipping, that’s triple dipping. I am fine with meta-game functions having an extra cost (server transfers, character renames, etc.), but actual game content should not have a fee in a subscription based game.

Cryptic’s constant resistance to making a decent respec system for Champions Online had boggled my mind since the beginning. Any kind of build/spec type advancement system needs a good respec feature. CO’s fully open ability system absolutely REQUIRES it. The flexibility is great, but with flexibility comes the ability to easily and quickly screw up your character.

When I read the details of the C-Store, it all became clear: $12.50 for a character respec. They designed a system that effectively requires frequent respecing, and then charge $12.50 per respec. Amazing. And with almost weekly patches that dramatically change (nerf) abilities, it is impossible to know how a power you have today will perform tomorrow.

In most MMOs, respecing your character either has quests or a gold cost equal to an hour or so of game time (or less). But in Champions Online, you pay $12.50. Unreal. Absolutely unreal.

If CO were a stock, I’d be selling short right now. The population is plummeting, and the decision making behind this C-Store does not inspire confidence at all. One can only hope that Roper will go back to voice acting and writing manuals after he kills this game.

When people read that article, they often get the wrong idea. I don’t hate quests (or missions). I don’t think a 100% mob grinding game is the way to go. What I hate is when a game simply replaces mob grinding with quest grinding and actually thinks it did something noteworthy or worthwhile.

Replacing one mindless grind with another ultimately solves and accomplishes nothing. You will simply piss off and alienate a different set of people. You will still alienate everyone – just at different rates and to different degrees.

Champions Online, a game I generally like, is a full on quest grinder. Mob xp is almost worthless.  This simple design mistake creates a cascade of problems that many of you are probably already predicting: what happens if you run out of missions? And yes, right now, that CAN happen in CO.

The key, in my view, is to provide multiple, alternate paths to character advancement and development. When someone wants to grind mobs, they can. When someone wants to do quests, they can. When someone wants to defend or assault bases (Tabula Rasa had a brilliant implementation of this), they can. When someone wants to PvP, they can. The holy grail is to create these different ways to advance and develop a character and make them available to people at all times (or nearly all times). The sooner we realize that as developers, the better.

As always, I look forward to your thoughts on the matter.

The game is down to 6 servers and population continues to fall. Aion and CO both delivered additional subscriber hits to the game.

So the logical question is: How much longer does Warhammer have?

I predict 6-12 months. I think in about 6-8 months they will announce the game is shutting down 2-4 months later. At some point they will give people 1-2 months free to login and participate in a last hurrah. During those final 1-2 months, people will at first wonder why the game died, then shortly realize how broken it still is and say “oh yeah, that’s why.”

What are your predictions?

Take raid heavy games like World of Warcraft as an example:

• Players who want meaningful character advancement but are uninterested in pressing the “1″ button for 20 hours a week in repetitive raid dungeons are callously told to “l2play.”

• If they express a desire to participate in the end game content Blizzard focuses most of its development resources on, they are told “gear up noob.”

• Experienced players look up prospective party members’ WoW Armory profiles and reject them if their gear doesn’t measure up.

I don’t entirely blame the experienced players for all of the above. The game design is such that carrying a noob is rarely even possible. A single weak link can pretty much ruin a dungeon run. Game design that is hostile to the idea of experienced players playing with “noobs” is poorly thought out. The ability for highly skilled players to carry less skilled ones is actually something I miss. That used to be a huge part of the fun and reward for getting good at a game. But I digress…

There are estimates that over 50 million people worldwide currently play MMOs. That’s wonderful news, but for the industry to continue to grow and mature we need to first mature as individuals. If we want a wide variety of MMO games in all sorts of genres with all sorts of gameplay options, the industry needs to get a lot bigger. By bigger I don’t mean 1 or 2 successful MMOs launching every year. I mean 10-20 launching per year (including niche MMOs). Until we reach that critical mass, you can expect to see  little more than a steady stream of generic monster bashers with minor gameplay tweaks and graphic reskins.

Game designers need to avoid design decisions that discourage experienced players from playing with “noobs.” Players need to cut it out with the outright hostility towards inexperienced players, and they need to stop equating character power in a game with self worth. Considering how little skill is involved in most modern MMOs anyway, the sense of superiority these 3l33t jerks feel is probably misplaced anyway.

In running Threshold RPG I have battled with this for years. Elitism has driven off more great players that I could count, and it really depresses me. We try to be hyper vigilant in stamping it out, but MMO Elitism is a powerful force that plagues the entire industry.

What do you think can be done to ameliorate this problem? Do you even agree it is as big of a problem as I claim?

This story has been reported in a few places, and of course EA makes it sound like they just parted ways, but the ugly truth is pretty obvious. Warhammer grossly underperformed, and as a result Mark Jacobs has been sacked. While I feel he and EA/Mythic did a horrible job overall with Warhammer (despite it being a decent and playable game), I can’t help but feel bad for the guy. He built that company, starting with MUDs, then DAoC, the failed Imperator, and then Warhammer. And now he is out. I am sure he made a pile of money when Mythic sold to EA, but still… It has to be a little tough to know you no longer have any input or contact with the games you and your company made.

What do you think of the firing? Will this be good for Warhammer? Will it have any effect? My thoughts below the fold.

I think it will have little or no effect. I think Jacobs’ direct control over the design of Warhammer had become minimal at this stage, and I think the institutional fear within Mythic won’t go away just because one guy leaves. There are some glaring flaws in WAR’s design that have been there from release, but after they crapped the bed so badly on subscribers they are too afraid to fix those things.

If they gut crowd control and give Bright Wizards and Warrior Priests the nerf they desperately need, they are worried they’ll lose too many people. Also, they know they screwed up having 2 realms (and 1 of which has horrible looking character models), so they have to be worried that the overpoweredness of BWs and WPs is the only thing giving them some semblance of realm balance.

So basically, I think WAR is pretty much hosed unless someone takes over with the guts and the nerve to really make the changes the game needs.

1) Massively gut crowd control.

2) Restore some semblance of balance between melee and ranged. Range has been king since day 1.

3) Nerf Bright Wizards massively. No more morale 2 AoE disable. Less CC in general. Less damage.

4) Nerf Warrior Priests. The only class with AoE cleanse is a huge problem. The fact that they are nigh invulnerable and can heal forever is an obvious flaw.

5) Add a third realm.

6) Figure out some way to make end game RvR not so boring.

That is a tall order for a released game.

(NOTE: That’s Dr. Cuddy, from House, M.D., if you are wondering about the girl<->topic connection.)

The Stupidity of this DPS Healer Phenomenon

World of Warcraft, Age of Conan, Warhammer Online, and more… all of them do this. And in every game, the combination eventually resulted in nerfs. But for some reason, probably the same short-sighted laziness that resulted in giving nukes to healer sin the first place, the nerfs always seem to slaughter the heals first. Why can’t these developers understand that some people LIKE healing. They like playing support. They like making sure their friends and allies are kept alive. They get their kicks from the appreciation of their teammates rather than from the cathartic joy of slaughtering their enemies. By turning healers into partial-DPS classes, all you do is attract people who want to be everything, and you can’t make them happy – ever.

One of the main excuses developers give for this is they are worried about attracting enough people to healer classes. Here’s a clue folks: making crappy healing classes is not a good way to attract people to them. For decades, people have played healing classes in RPGs. You won’t trick people into liking healing or support. Players either like that style of play or they don’t. If you want to make sure your game has enough people playing healers, then make those healing classes robust and interesting. Give them a lot of different ways to heal or support their team. Give them more than 1 or 2 spells to cast a thousand times per raid. Give them a variety of ways to heal differently, generate aggro differently, protect/buff differently, etc. Create spells that have pros and cons so actual decisions have to be made. Instant heals, long cast heals, HoTs, damage shields, group heals, big-high threat heals, small-low threat heals, efficient slower healers, inefficient fast heals, pre-heals, regeneration buffs, and more. Give them a lot of buffs but a limited number they can use at one time. Give them CHOICES. Give them strategies. Give them alternatives. There are a lot of possibilities.

You can make healing interesting if you just put a little effort into the design. Giving a healer a few nukes and hoping that will make them happy is just dumb. If someone wanted to nuke, they’d play a nuker. If they want to heal, they’ll play a healer. Reward them for that choice by making it interesting. Good game design requires thought, planning, and creativity. Good class design requires figuring out the types of thigns players like to do, and creating classes that deliver those opportunities.

1) Wikipedia is full of people gunning for an administrator promotion. In the current climate, the easiest path is getting articles deleted and getting players banned. These acts somehow show you understand what is best for Wikipedia.

2) An editor and his admin buddy put Threshold in their sights, and rules and policies went by the way side. Innocent people got banned and their efforts to improve the article were systematically removed. Once everyone involved with the article was banned, they proposed the article be deleted (an AfD or Articles for Deletion recommendation).

3) People who participated on the KEEP side of the AfD were frequently banned for cooked up reasons and their arguments stricken. The AfD was possibly the longest in Wikipedia history. Most people voted KEEP. In order to delete, the rules state there must be a CONSENSUS TO DELETE. The closing admin deleted it anyway, for reasons that have nothing to do with the actual policy.

4) When possible, other retaliatory action was taken against KEEP voters. When the owner of Top Mud Sites showed up and argued for KEEP, links from other MUD articles to Top Mud Sites were deleted. He would re-add them, but they would get deleted again.

5) A Deletion Review happened. I have not checked the tally recently (I am banned again), but at my last check most votes and arguments were to overturn. I highly doubt that will happen. Once the wikipedian insiders are against you, you are done.

6) My first ban was for edit-warring. What was I doing? Researching citations and then adding back content that was removed because of a “lack of citations.” My second ban was for “sock puppeting.” The people who were supposedly my “sock puppets”? They included: my wife, who has a 4-5+ year old account with active edits in many varied topics, someone from Alabama, someone from California, and others. My third ban was for pointing out that people with confidence in their beliefs are not scared of arguments from the other side (and therefore, don’t delete them just because they have the power to do so).

So, what is wrong with Wikipedia and how can it be fixed?

1) Wikipedia has too many people desperate to become administrators for all the wrong reasons.

2) Many Wikipedia “editors” are horrendously full of themselves, and believe they possess skills they actually do not.

3) Many Wikipedia “editors” are perfect examples of the expression “a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.”

4) Wikipedia has little or no respect for experts.

5) The obsession with deleting obscure topics is a slow suicide. Obscure topics is what Wikipedia does best, after all.

6) Too much of Wikipedia’s leadership is corrupt.

How Can Wikipedia Be Fixed?

1) Delete WP:N (notability).

2) Make all adminships temporary.

3) Stop deleting obscure or niche topics.

4) Hire a paid staff to be the “real administrators” who oversee the volunteer ones.

5) Get rid of the stuff titles. Administrators become editors, and editors become users. Stop pumping up the users’ egos with names that inflate their illusion of talent.

6) One method of reporting bad behavior is plenty. You don’t need 20.

What should fans and developers of MUDs/MMOs do now?

Again, I direct you specifically to the full article about Wikipedia’s war on gaming history and Threshold :

We need to start recording MUD and MMO history now. We need to do it in an organized fashion that will be respected not just by the hacks at Wikipedia, but by an academic or other legitimate researcher. MMOs seem huge and mainstream now, so it is hard to imagine people considering them insignificant. But that is how we felt about MUDs 10 years ago, and nowadays many gamers don’t even know what a MUD is (or they are dismissive of them in the extreme).

This is a cautionary tale for people with interest in any obscure or niche topic. Wikipedia cannot be relied on to preserve history or information about non-mainstream topics. The current culture actually discourages it. It is our responsibility to find better ways to preserve such information, lest it be lost to the vicissitudes of time.

The first step is establishing the Mud Connector and Top Mud Sites as reliable sources. We need to help the owners of those sites do what they need to clean up things, codify policies, and write a coherent history of their site. Ideally, the two sites will keep a history of the OTHER site, so the historical information is not “self published.

Once we have that, other things can start to fall into place. Staff reviews will count again (hopefully). Articles will count. Mud listings might even count.

Then MUD owners need to really crank it up a notch and work every connection they have. Get mentioned in every newspaper, magazine, or journal article possible. And when they get mentioned, SAVE IT.

I had so much fun trashing raiding as it exists in current graphical MUDs over here, I might as well take another hack at it. I will explain how raiding as it is generally implemented in graphical MMOs provides a false, deceptive, and personally damaging sense of accomplishment.

False Sense of Accomplishment from Raiding

One of the very serious, negative effects of the current design of “raid content” is the false sense of accomplishment it gives people. I was checking a couple of WoW blogs recently, and many of them have gigantic, gushing stories about the enormous sense of glory and accomplishment they felt when they finally downed some boss that had been wiping them for weeks or months on end. The way posters glowingly patted themselves on the back you’d think they had just earned a huge promotion at work or won the Nobel Prize.

Accomplishment is Good to a Certain Extent

Now, it is wonderful when games give people a sense of accomplishment. In fact, this is important for a well designed game. But raiding really exaggerates this feeling in the way it sucks people in. All the guild drama, arguments, roster debates, loot arguments, planning sessions, strategy sessions, video viewings, strategy readings, experimental tests, and wipe after wipe make it seem like something far more important is happening than a pile of pixels being killed.

The Effects Can Be Very Real, and Very Negative

Why does this matter? Because this is one of the ways MMOs can actually cause real harm to the lives of its customers. According to Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, self actualization is the ultimate need that people have. They need to feel successful in life. Most healthy people fulfill this need through accomplishments with their family, marriage, child rearing, career, education, etc. These are very productive ways to fulfill this need. People that get massively sucked into raiding fulfill this need through raid success. As a result, they often have less of a drive to work on their family, friends, children, spouse, job, or school. So the actually important things in their real life suffer because this crucial need is being satisfied through MMO raiding.

My Own Personal Vortex

I experienced this phenomenon myself in Dark Age of Camelot. The Realm vs. Realm combat was so incredibly engaging, and felt so meaningful, that successful RvR nights actually made me feel “good about myself.” My work suffered, and the time I spent with my family suffered. It did not just suffer because of the time commitment, it suffered because I felt self actualized through the game. That’s bad.

What Can Developers Do to Limit This Effect?

There is not much game designers can do about this. Their job is to make the most engaging game possible. But the one thing they CAN do is not foster an environment where raiding is looked upon as some Holy Grail type activity. In many MMOs, if customers peep up on the forums saying they’d like to do something besides raid, they get shouted down. Raiding is held up as the most awesome, challenging, uber thing you can do. If you don’t want to raid, you suck, and if you are good at raiding, you are a god. Developers should squash that type of mentality whenever they see it start to grow.