So yesterday I spent most of the afternoon weeding my garden. I know you’re all shocked that I would, in fact, spend my free time with something non-videogame related, so I should fess up to the fact that, while I was weeding, what I was actually thinking about was how much I wanted to be playing Rift. Also, I was thinking about (MMO blogger) Tobold.
Or, well, more correctly, that post of Tobold’s about how Back in My Day We Had to Do Corpse Runs Naked Through Elites… and We Were Alive!
I’ve been trying to pinpoint why, exactly, that post rubbed me the wrong way since I read it. I get what Tobold is saying — and the point he’s trying to make about hardship bonding and tribalist community-building — and I don’t think he’s wrong, exactly, but…
But.
Here’s the deal; I don’t think any of the things Tobold describes as making vanilla EverQuest hard as, well, being hard. They certainly make the game take more time, but time ≠ difficulty. Time is the luxury of students and retirees; demographics most modern gamers apparently don’t fit into. Suffering significant negative consequences for actions you have no control over — for example, getting killed by a mob train and forcing a corpse-run — isn’t “hard” in the way most people mean when they talk about videogames being hard. Requiring luck isn’t building difficulty; it involved no skill, just circumstance.[i]
This gives us a problem, though. If time and luck are examples of Fake Difficulty (TVTropes warning!), then Tobold’s original question still stands.
What, for MMORPGs, is “hard”?
In most other game genres I can think of, difficulty equates to skill. FPS difficulty revolves around twitch and accuracy; how fast can you react, how precise are your shots. RTS difficulty revolves around tactics and macro-/micro-management; how efficiently can you execute your build, what strategy is your opponent not expecting. Platformers are twitch. Sim games are long-term planning and resource-/time-management (even “casual” sim games like, well, The Sims). Puzzle adventures are creative and/or logical thinking.
What about RPGs? Things like Dragon Age or Fallout 3.
I think, for an RPG, difficulty is split into two streams; there’s combat difficulty and then there’s story difficulty. Combat difficulty requires long-term planning (what skills should I take), resource management (which gun should I buy) and either twitch or strategy, mostly depending on whether you can pause combat and queue actions or not. Story difficulty requires creative/logical thinking; what can I say to NPC X to get the best outcome for myself.
I think we’re getting closer. MMORPGs don’t, as a general rule, have story difficulty so we’ll ignore that one, but looking at our RPG difficulty model, what can we extract? What is it, in fact, that makes MMOs “hard”?
#1. They require long-term planning
What race should I pick? What playstyle will I still enjoy in six months? What class does that mean I should be? What skills/talents/stats will get me there? Should I put one talent in this tree to get a cool ability now, or five in this tree to get an even cooler ability in a few levels? Which faction should I get rep with?
I’m sure we’ve all experienced the First Character Blues: You’re new to an MMO (or MMOs in general). You pick a class because it looks/sounds cool. You get a level, assign some skills. Then another, then another. You have no idea where you’re going; you’re just picking things by gut-feeling. Eventually you get to the point where you’re struggling against even green mobs and you see some other guy your class tearing through groups conning orange. What did you do wrong?
You didn’t plan for the future.
The requirement in MMOs for long-term planning is why we have talent calculators. It’s why most experienced MMOers will Google for things like “best solo class” or “best group healer build” before the game has even finished installing. Since we’re explicitly not counting time as difficulty, I’m not talking about what it takes to remake a wrongly-chosen class or build; whether it be re-rolling from scratch or just throwing some gold at a trainer. I’m talking about knowing you need to plan in the first place and about the ability to discern which class/build will give you the best gameplay experience. That talent that slows enemies on hit sounds pretty cool — and everyone likes having more buttons — but it’s really not that useful when all you ever really do is solo melee against PvE mobs.[ii]
I think it’s sort telling that we almost never hear the requirement for long-term planning — whether the “long term” is relative to you or to your character — in MMOs as being described as “difficulty”, and yet it’s still just about the number of thing that trips newbie players up.
#2. They require short-term strategy
What button should I press next? What synergy can I get between skills? What gear should I equip? Is there a spell this mob is particularly weak to?
Firstly, and in combination with the above, this manifests in situational gearing. Less-skilled players have one set of gear, consisting of either what looks coolest or whatever the latest piece they’ve received in each slot happens to be. Better players will know what gear advantages them in what fights; usually nowadays this manifests as having multiple gear sets per group role (tanking/DPS/healing), since individual gear-dependent encounters are somewhat out of vogue.
Secondly, and more importantly, the requirement for short-term strategy manifests itself in rotations and priority orders. Good players know what order they want to push their buttons in during a fight, as opposed to the less-skilled player who’s just mashing at random. More importantly, great players know when to break their normal button-order; they know when to stop DPS to aggro-dump or switch to off-healing/-tanking. “Situational awareness” is a sub-set of short-term strategy and what it really requires is, a) that the player is able to concentrate on more than one thing at once, and b) that the player can demonstrate adaptability and creativity under pressure.
In MMOs, harder fights are not fights that just last longer; they’re fights that require adaptability and awareness. The problem, of course, is that traditional raid-style boss encounters only require this sort of skill for the first few kills, before they turn into rote “memorized dancing”. The fact that when the memorization is is done — that is, the requirement for adaptability and awareness has diminished — the fights are considered “easier” I think only proves my point.
#3. They require resource management
What should I spend my gold/tokens on? What talents should I buy? How should I manage my mana? Should I use my last health pot?
This one might be less obvious than in, say, an RTS or civ-game, but macro- and micro-resource management is still critical in MMOs. Players who spend all their gold on vanity items might find themselves SOL the next time they need to repair gear. Healers who blow all their mana in the first five seconds of a fight are not good healers.
You can’t have everything in a MMORPG,[iii] and situations that require more resource-management are considered more difficult than situations that don’t. It’s most obvious in fights — getting rid of healer mana management made healing “easy” in WotLK — but also exists out-of-combat; reducing the cost of mounts made gold management at lower levels easier.
And yes, I realise resource management is probably less of a point on its own and more of a corollary to the above two; resource management requires planning and strategy, but not all plans and strategies require resource management.
#4. They require people skills
And, see, here’s the thing; when people like Tobold say that increased “difficulty” (read: tedium) in oldskool MMOs increases community I happen to think they’ve got it completely ass-backwards. Community-mindedness — or teamwork, people skills, or sociability, or whatever you want to call it — isn’t a result of gameplay; it’s a difficulty requirement inherent in the genre.
I think one of the frequent problems with MMORPGs is the fact that people skills aren’t considered to be part of the game difficulty; instead, they’re assumed as some kind of result of game mechanics. The LFG tool doesn’t make people in PUGs any more or less asshatty; I used to PUG UBRS in the day and let me tell you, I got just as many numpties in those hour-to-form groups as I do in LFG. All LFG does is make it easier to kick and replace disruptive players when you do end up with them.[iv]
I also take issue with the fact that when people skills are identified as a skills requirement for MMORPGs it’s invariably conflated with “extraversion” or “assertivness”; that whole “if you want to solo, go play a single-player game” chestnut. Being able to yell in /2 long enough to form a group doesn’t count, nor does saying “thx all bye” at the end of LFG. That guy who always solos because he’s way too shy to start his own dungeon groups isn’t necessarily a bad player. Honestly, I’d usually much rather take him in a PUG than Captain Hero the Wannabe Raid Leader.
Point being, if you are bad at people — bad at not pissing them off, bad at empathizing with other players — you are bad at MMORPGs. Period. Even people who never group and spend their entire time soloing content have to interact with others occasionally; whether it be not ganking nodes or not parking your huge-ass mount on top of the trainer.
Weeding versus astrophysics, and other specious analogies
Some friends of ours, a married couple, are astrophysicists. Actually, they’re theoretical astrophysicists, one can only assume because “regular” (observational) astrophysics wasn’t difficult enough for them. I assume they enjoy astrophysics, too, purely for its own sake. Meanwhile, my knowledge of astrophysics is limited pretty much to “stars are hot” and “stuff orbits bigger stuff”; in the game of astrophysics, I am definitely tanking in cloth and mashing buttons in the wrong order.
I do have a point, but it’s back to weeding first. For those of you who’ve never had to weed a garden, I wouldn’t say you’re really missing out. It can be mindlessly relaxing, I suppose, but mostly it’s physically taxing (my shoulders and thighs ache as I type this; going to the gym’s got nothing on a day’s gardening), mentally tedious, time-intensive and ultimately frustrating. I can never “win”; the weeds will always grow back.
When I hear people talk about MMORPGs in the “good old days” — which always, always means “pre-WoW” — with their naked corpse runs and forced grouping and hours worth of downtime, I immediately think of weeding (except minus the “physically taxing” bit).
The other thing about weeding is that, while it’s time-consuming and frustrating, it’s not actually difficult, at least not in the same way as astrophysics. I don’t need EverQuest; I have a dozen EverQuests all over my house, like cleaning the dishes and scrubbing the mould out of the bathroom. What I actually need is astrophysics; something I can enjoy and be good at for its own sake, rather than obligation or fear of negative consequences.
To me, a good MMORPG is astrophysics. The difficulty in MMOs — the true, actual, difficulty — is intellectual. It’s devising the strategies and plans and managing your resources and not making an ass of yourself in public. Being good at the game is being good at the meta; at the theorycraft both in design and in application. And yeah, perfecting these things take time… but not time enforced by the game itself. I don’t want the game to be excessively punitive if I’m not the best player in the world, in the same way gravity doesn’t stop working if I fail to advance beyond high school astronomy or my violin doesn’t explode if I finger a string incorrectly.
This is fun; a game. Not work or a chore or a punishment or an international competition. The only amazing thing is that it’s taken game designers so long to start to realise it.
Edit: Also this.
- Tangentially, I also think the notion of “community through suffering” is somewhat bullshit. Of course people are going to remember EQ as having a “better” community than something like WoW; small communities are almost always friendlier than large ones, and even in its heyday EQ didn’t even approach the popular appeal WoW did. The other thing is that I just don’t think WoW’s community is bad… but that’s another post entirely. ↩
- Yes, I just made this exact “mistake” on my Rift Cleric, thanks for asking. ↩
- As opposed to an RPG where you can usually cheat for unlimited mana/skill points/gold/whatever. If you want to. Which I do! ↩
- Nor have I ever been in a group that has a problem with doing this, even when those disruptive players were healers or tanks. I’ve initiated kicks for both and, if anything, other group members are invariably relieved; turns out everyone would rather sit and wait for a new member than continue with a douche, but everyone is worried everyone else in the group doesn’t share that attitude. ↩