MMO Elitism – A Major Problem for the Industry
While often fodder for amusing videos and funny jokes, the way “noobs“ are derided in MMO culture is a very disturbing thing. While it is nothing new for insular hobbies or communities to be hesitant to embrace newcomers, MMO Elitism seems to take this to new levels. “Leet“ (or 3l33t, or elite) players take newbie abuse to an extreme in some MMOs. It is obvious that for many of these established players, trashing or humiliating “noobs” is clearly an act of compensation for some hole in their otherwise unfulfilling existence.
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?
Yes! I totally think this is a problem. I have played on MUD’s for years and years, but mostly in friendly environments and among friends who I know will be patient with me. I’m not completely incompetent as I often joke, but I do take a while to pick up on strategy, and don’t always have quick reactions to video-game style play.
My husband plays WoW and enjoys it, and has sometimes tried to convince me to give it a try. The reason I won’t is because of MMO elitism. I know it is inevitable that I would make some mistakes, and in an environment like the hostile design you mention, I am likely to spoil a situation like a raid for everyone. I don’t want that kind of pressure or the bad feelings that would result from it, so I don’t even bother trying.
Carebears.
You need to realize that in every facet of life, whether virtual or real, there is elitism. It exists in the workplace, it is present in schools, it is simply omnipresent. So please, dislodge your head from your anus and say hello to reality.
Sincerly,
Someone who isn’t a complete fucking moron.
So every game should consist of mediocre content geared towards the casual player? Who cares if people want to min max their game, or don’t want to spend five hours clearing content they’ve cleared a hundred times before. There is end game content for a reason, and it’s not intended for the casual gamer. It’s not there for the people who feel threatened by the “elitists”, and casual gamers need to realise they can’t expect to match people who can play 3 or 4 hours a day.
Seems as if someone wasted 12 minutes of his life to post some comments that relate to genitals.
Simon Hill has some links in his article that explain this kind of behaviour, so much about that.
There is a problem in mmo design nowadays, you do not need to be good. “Good” means you did not do wrong, nothing more. Most raids function not after the principle of rewarding someone playing very good, but they rather punish the whole raid if someone does a mistake.
It is also interesting how different communities create their own identity and understanding of themselves. This often leads to some kind of self-fulfilling prophecy that people behave in the way they imagine themselves to be. But this leads to an elitist attitude, too. The LOTRO community believes itself to consist of elder gamers and to be mature, and it is most of the time.
Today I noticed how a younger gamer who compared some features to WoW and said the landscape is great, but the characters cannot walk properly got bashed badly as a total idiot, because he is 1. young and 2. WoW player. One even started congratulating others for keeping the server clean from idiots. I could not resist to ask why he thinks he is acceptable for the high standards he claims to have. This caused half an hour of discussion, after some 5 minutes I did not participate anymore, but it still went on as they discussed about the quality of the community and what measures are appropriate to handle unwelcome trial players, and how to determine who is welcome and who not.
Why does everyone immediately get so hostile when someone defends so-called casuals? Why does there have to be such a great divide? It’s amazing how vehemently people react when someone suggests there is a problem here.
Fact is, game designers are in the industry to make money, and when the casuals outnumber the elitists, developers will start to cater to them. Don’t believe me? Look at the direction WoW is headed in. Mounts at lower levels, less experience necessary to reach max level, all design decisions that allow players to get to endgame stuff without putting in as many hours.
I got to 60 back in the vanilla WoW days. I used to raid four nights a week. Now I have a family and much less time to do these things. I totally think it’s unfair that new players don’t have to walk all the way to level 40, but I can see the logic behind the decision to change it.
Casual gamers are becoming very lucrative consumers to recruit. The Nintendo Wii is the perfect example of this, catering to non-hardcore gamers quickly catapulted Nintendo back to the top of the gaming world.
Basically, I think the MMO industry is eventually going to fragment. Developers will alienate hardcore gamers by continually dumbing down their games. These gamers will eventually gravitate toward whatever game offers the best hardcore experience, leaving “casuals” to take over high-profile games like WoW and “hardcores” as an elitist minority existing in their own small corner of the industry.
Elitists need noobs. How would everybody know how cool the elitists are if they weren’t pointing out how badly noobs suck?
Most elitists don’t actually have much in the way of skill to set themselves above the noobs. Thus they gravitate to games like WoW, where they can simply invest more time and mindless repetition to prove their superiority over the noobs. While there are some skilled players in WoW(ie raiders that get world firsts, arena teams with 2200+ ranking), the average WoW elitist is a glorified square dancer that only has what they’ve got because they play 6+ hours a day.
I think it is a problem, and it isn’t MMO specific. But there are MMO specific ways to help tackle it.
One of the ways is to accept that elite experienced players may want content that is angled towards them and that’s OK. It is not necessary for every player to be able to do absolutely everything in game as soon as they log in.
But there are ways to make it advantageous for experienced players to recruit and teach new ones. For example, mechanics that favour large numbers (in DaoC we were keen to recruit new players because we needed the numbers for some of our keep taking and it didn’t matter if the new guys weren’t brilliant players right off the bat as long as they could follow simple instructions), or that encourage factions to compete with each other to recruit people.
Generally, any kind of content that favours zergs makes it easier for less experienced players to do /something/ alongside the more experienced ones without penalising either. I think Warhammer got this down very well with the way their PvP and public questing worked. It’s actually very easy for a noob to go show up and help in a PvE or PvP quest and be nothing but beneficial to the rest of the players there, which encourages them to be nice and encouraging to the new guys.
Dear Mr. Tron,
The post never said elitism does not exist in other facets of life. In fact, the second sentence of the post states that elitism is nothing new or unique to MMOs. I’m not sure if you aren’t reading carefully, or if you are speaking from experience when you say “dislodge your head from your anus.”
Dear Mr. Moron,
In the post, I actually state that I wish MMOs rewarded skill more than they currently do. Raid heavy MMOs only reward enormous time investment. Skill is barely a factor in raiding – unless you consider “read raid guide #27, watch youtube video #11, stand on spot A, press button 1 for 10 minutes, roll on loot” to be skill.
Dear Everyone Else,
Isn’t it interesting how this post got turned into a L33t vs. Casuals argument, thanks to the arrival of a few folks desperate to prove Penny Arcade’s Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory?
Personally, I am a hard core gamer. When I play a game, I absolutely play to win. I want to crush the game. I look for ways to push the game mechanics to the breaking point. I don’t abuse bugs, but I definitely walk the razors edge of “unintended combinations of abilities.” But due to work, life, and family constraints, my play time often makes me appear to be a casual gamer. I cannot play every day. I can rarely play for more than a couple hours in a row. I think this combination gives me a decent, multi-faceted perspective on the issue.
I have my own term for “noob” that I have used for close to 10 years: DA (Drag Along). The difference is, I like games that allow me to bring my DA friends along. So what if they aren’t as good at the game as I am, or don’t have time to invest in following some web site’s gear progression analysis to max out their character. If I can push my own abilities to the limit so we can all succeed as a group, that makes me happy.
And that is a huge part of my point here. Part of the fun in MUDs and MMOs for experienced players used to be the joy of helping noobs. MUDs had Newbie Academies and Newbie Helper Titles and those were things of pride. Helping newbies was actually considered a form of END GAME CONTENT. Shocking, isn’t it?
But somewhere along the line, things changed. In part, I blame leveling up solo through quests, massive emphasis on personal gear, and raid centric game design for polluting the well. But players themselves bear the majority of the blame for simply being dicks. Noobs are seen as a plague, and experienced, 3l33t gamers run them off at every opportunity.
That is bad for the industry and bad for the market. We need to cut it out for our own good.
Muckbeast, you talked about helping newbies.
This is not possible anymore. The only help you can give newbies in most MMOs is to run a lower level instance for them. They take a nap in the meantime or quarrel about the loot…^^
If you accompany a friend, you are stealing them XP. They will not level up with you around, so piss off, dude! :>
Now I am going to make myself unpopular, but the EverCrap DikuMUD design has to die a quick and horrible death if we want to have better MMORPGs in future.
I’m not sure how you would change a natural by-product of a community. It’s natural for a community to become insular and to aggressively “protect” itself by not allowing the uninitiated or unworthy (whatever the judging criteria). We would have to grow as an entire species for this problem to be resolved.
This problem I think is deeply tied to the whole “time = advancement” culture. Fact is advancement in MMOs is no real accomplishment these days…even though people desperately want to think it is. As a result anyone who comes along with ideas to make the game more skill based or actually “playable” is ridiculed….let’s face it, if you spend 4-6 nights a week raiding that doesn’t leave much time to have any other “accomplishments” in your life.
I spend most of my time on more skill based games where noob is used in it’s proper form for people who never get any better at the game and probably should be playing something easier. Like the people in Halo 3 who try to melee with rocket launchers rather then firing them.
But by and large in skill based games if you’re remotely capable of playing and put forth an effort that’s respected in any decent clan even if you don’t have the highest k/d ratio kill points ect.
I see a couple of things contributing greatly to this.
First is the “time=advancement” thing as Serith rightly fingers. This gives the edge to those who have spent more time, regardless of whether or not they actually have any skills to back up their mouth. (And I might note, in a more pithy moment, that those with more time to game may well have less time to develop social graces.)
Second is the huge power band that we see in the modern DIKU design. When a level-capped character can mow through scores of new players without taking a scratch, and the “newbie” content is pathetically trivial to them, they have little reason to see new players as anything more than grey-conned bowling pin mobs. The game design encourages this sort of “I am a god among mortals” design, so it’s no surprise that it carries over into interpersonal interaction.
If a new player were a legitimate threat to a level capped character, I can almost guarantee that there would be more civility between them. If a new player with more personal skill could mow through a few level capped characters with less personal skill, you’d see a far more civil and meritocratic society.
Notably, Puzzle Pirates, a game built almost entirely on player skill, does tend to treat newbies pretty well, especially once they show that they can handle themselves. Of course, players with pathetic skill are often denigrated, so perhaps it’s just trading one problem for another.
[...] Hartman just wrote up a fantastic blog about MMO elitism among communities. It was so good that a few rather “special” individuals showed up to trash him just for [...]
Muckbeast:
FFXI had absolutely zero levelling through quests until recently, and WoW’s elitism is a joke compared to it.
In any contest of skill you will have winners and losers, and people will rank differently based on their aptitude. The best thing to do is physically separate the elitists from the casuals via area, as to prevent jealousy and other negative interactions. Lock all the elitists up in a separate endgame area and prevent them from travelling to casual areas easily. The more interactions the groups have, the more hostility.
Think of it as more like xbox live’s matchmaking based on skill.
[...] Elitism. Muckbeast pwns it! [...]
I think that the biggest problem is that in any situation with a learning curve there will be people that know what’s going on and people that don’t. Those at the top have no patience for the people at the bottom because they already spent so long learning everything (or getting everything) and THAT is the problem. I think I just repeated what a few of you already said but it’s late…
I seriously, though do not believe that these two kinds of people can even coexist in a game peacefully. Every game will have some people with the patience to deal with the “noobs” but a majority of players will feel as though by learning/looting they have earned the right not to have to be bothered by the “lesser” gamers. I say that to mean that I don’t know that this problem is actually even avoidable. Just like the slow kid gets picked last for pickup games of football, so do the unlearned become shunned by the veterans.
RPGs have their roots in narrative, and as a rule a narrative has a progression. To eliminate the progression is to eliminate the Roleplaying and you’re left with just a game. I would argue that it’s easier to get people to play a progressing game than it is to get people to play a static one. Puzzle pirates might be great, but you’ll never get the WoW addicts to play it because they can’t get tons of loot to make themselves those “Gods among men” that they are ever striving to become.
“So what!” you say? We cannot forget that it’s all about the money. Developers are not going to spend their time creating something that no one will play. Even your ideas have to follow the money train- where there is cash to be earned your creative nature can be set free, but stray too far from what people will buy in a hurry and you have to rethink your planning.
Unfortunately the Elitism sells. I can’t stand it but I’m still playing WoW (it hurts to say, believe me) because it’s the only thing the guys’ll play with me (God forbid we play some Diplomacy! (Or Sword of the Stars, that’s my new favorite)) and until everyone like me that would like to see something better grows a pair of standards and drops their subscription until something better comes out the change is not going to happen.
Doom and gloom. I know. This may sound strange but I might not be right, that’s just the way my brain percieves the whole mess this late at night.
P.S. It’s good to be back for a little while and see that you guys are still going, things were a little dry when I checked back in a couple times after I left. My blog isn’t active, but my status as a reader is (at least partially).
What i absolutely hate about mmo’s now a days is the elitism. People are proud when they can do certain things all by themselves or with less and less people. I thought MMO’s were all about community and an abundance of players and the ability to play with others. I dunno… maybe its just me but if i wanted to “solo” raid bosses or “1 shot noobs” i think Oblivion or some other non Massive playerbase game suits just fine. Honestly its become a huge turn off on gaming.
MMOs were, at one time, supposed to be about the glory and grandeur of a living, breathing world in virtual space. Your avatar was ostensibly a virtual representation of yourself. As time goes on, people don’t even consider their avatar an extension of themselves any longer. MMOs are starting to feel more like RTS games than RPGs, which is a shame.
It’s only a shame in that nobody is picking up the slack. I don’t mind a diversified market, I lament the lack of options for those who are interested in a well crafted virtual world.
i totally agree with what you’re saying, nice blog!