MMORPG ranting
If, like me, you’re a horrible video games nerd (if it makes you feel better, I work in the industry, so I probably need more help than you,) then you’ve probably heard about Sony Online Entertainment’s Station Exchange.
This is a service for Everquest 2, which acts as an official service for selling in-game currency and items for real-world cash-moneys. This has been going on unofficially over Ebay and other sites for years, and was always frowned upon by SOE, who could theoretically ban players who traded items (and we won’t even start on the issue of companies paying people real world money to players to farm in-game money to later be sold for even more real money.) So the big change is that SOE are now allowing it, and are taking a cut of any transactions.
There’s been the usual Internet outcry about it, as you would expect, but I’m really not interested in whether it’s ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ for SOE to be doing this. You couldn’t pay me to play Everquest and to have to deal with the legions of sociopathic children with God complexes. (From anecdotal evidence they seem harder to ignore than in some other games in this genre.) SOE are free to bring in a system like this if they want and to exert whatever control they like over games they developed and are running on their equipment, and people are free to vote with their feet if they don’t like it. Games companies, like all other companies, are inexorably drawn to the scent of money, and if they think there’s an opportunity to make more then I don’t mind if they try to take it.
What interests me more is what this is saying about the game. It’s tacitly admitting that they’ve created a game that’s so boring that people will happily pay extra to skip straight to the end. The players like the social aspect, and the feeling of having an all-powerful character in the game, but don’t derive enough fun from the game to actually play all the way through it.
Believe it or not, SOE will be perfectly happy with this state of affairs. It costs them more money to have lots of people actually playing the entire game, both in terms of customer support and in the number of machines they need to buy to support the players. When EQ1 first came out, they were shocked by the amount of time that people spent online in the game. They were expecting that people would play for maybe 4-5 hours a week, and had to rapidly expand their server hardware after discovering that people were actually playing 30+ hours per week. (I was in a SIGGRAPH panel on MMORPGs where a Sony designer described this exact scenario, and how they coped with it.)
Since all players pay a flat monthly subscription fee, SOE would ideally like to minimise the amount of time they spend online. Same income, less expenditure. Viewed in this light, their auction system makes perfect sense. Rather than grinding for 10 hours to be able to afford a piece of equipment in-game, players can essentially pay real money to get the same item. Less load on the servers, and SOE gets a cut of the cash into the bargain. Genius!
So it’s more baffling as to why they invented the /pizza command. This allows the user to order a pizza for delivery without ever leaving the game, they don’t even have to go and get the phone. Buried deep in this article is a mention that the service is hugely popular, and little wonder. The surprising part is that it seems to be directly opposing the previously stated goal of making the player play less. Not only is it letting players spend more time in-game, but it’s also potentially helping to create future shut-in cases, where some unfortunate person would be unable to do anything else.
So, to the point of this rant (yes, there is one.) How about creating a system whereby players are rewarded with in-game items or currency for doing things in the real world, like ‘going for a nice walk’ or maybe ‘talking to a girl/boy face-to-face’. If the player was able to send in something like a concert ticket stub, or a recent photo of themselves with a group of friends in some outdoor location, then they get some fixed in-game reward.
Everybody wins! SOE would require less support/server resources, obsessive players would get some exercise, and the effect of all of these more socially-adjusted players would mean that the game would be an infinitely more pleasant experience for casual players. Imagine if you could play games like these and know that most of the other players you met would be friendly and pleasant to talk to. People would join together, nations would unite, the world would…
Gah. Where’s my Gin?!