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How Design can Help Build Meaningful Relationships within Games
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Was actually tempted to post the link myself.
EDIT:
The actual post is actually pretty long and insightful (click the link). Not posting a TLDR, or the OP actually discussing anything is kind of a disappointment IMO.
Practice doesn't make perfect, practice makes permanent.
"At one point technology meant making tech that could get to the moon, now it means making tech that could get you a taxi."
To those who believe that modern MMOs don't value community and are being badly designed with community in mind, this article is well worth a read. For me, its just sorted of added formal names to things I'd already considered.
The only thing I think it's missing is discussion of the importance of friendships in online games. They mention at the top that on top of making the world a better place, it improves player retention (and thus income) and improves monetisation (because the game is providing more value to the player through meeting emotional needs). However, they don't back this up with any further theory or research, or even discussion.
For me, thats fine because I'm firmly in the community camp but I know that for many, they just want to login and kill some stuff, explore a beautiful world and wave at the occasional passer by. For those people, they don't see the value in promoting online friendships as they see it as something distinct from the game, rather than being something critical for the games success.
Beating a dead horse.
Crazkanuk
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Very interesting snippets in the OP. Glad to see the potential for community building in MMORPGs is being recognized by those in the industry!
The other thing which this paper really didn't directly address is the games tendency to segregate the population by function. Sure, you can get manipulate the population to put them in groups, but when your 6 man group ends up with 3 identical classes filling a single role, and none in critical functional roles (tank, healer, etc). And when the entire population online in any single hour is the same class, no nature of game engineering is going to turn 6 enchanters into a viable successful group.
Logic, my dear, merely enables one to be wrong with great authority.
I think the analytics tied to this would be more interested in tying people together that use/abuse the content in the same way. For instance getting people together that want to do the extra content, or getting people together that will stop to gather optional resources. Also would care about getting people together that like to talk/BS during the raid or not (I feel silly tossing out a Scooby Doo joke at the start of a haunted house raid, just to have no one reply or try to one up it with a higher effort joke, or worse get yelled at by the extreme grinder to go faster).
I could really see someone mixing GW1 and a PvE Overwatch type of game play. Then mixing it with some sort of Facebook Analytic clone to control which people enter the zone/city with you and similar. Some cases doing a traditional build your own group content, in others entering multiple people into the zone while rigging content up so that they end up meeting in some areas (tied to predictions and similar so that you meet in an interesting spot). Devs already have a lot of data collected to make broad assumptions. Likewise there are a lot ways to drive players where you need them with quest generation, adding diversions like a lock picking game if someone goes too fast, and similar.
Practice doesn't make perfect, practice makes permanent.
"At one point technology meant making tech that could get to the moon, now it means making tech that could get you a taxi."
shared adversity breeds community
The only way making friends ingame would work would be if they did it like everything else they want you to do. Provide some kinds of rewards for doing it.
Actually I found it pretty easy to make friends ingame. The very easiest was a camping spot for level grinding that took the player from lowest level to highest over time and couldn't be done alone but you didn't have to group, only tag the mob. Met some good people standing around waiting for the spawn timer to reset at the tusken village in SWG. Didn't know it at the time but it was like the very first dynamic event in an MMO. The Devs didn't know it either because they nerfed it to hell after a while.
"We all do the best we can based on life experience, point of view, and our ability to believe in ourselves." - Naropa "We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are." SR Covey
"We all do the best we can based on life experience, point of view, and our ability to believe in ourselves." - Naropa "We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are." SR Covey
So, what is the goal of this? Is there a new game being developed with these principles, or is this just a group of people fantasizing what they think should be done? What game is going to adapt these ideas anytime in the next 5-10 year time frame?
Logic, my dear, merely enables one to be wrong with great authority.
The genre started as a way for as many people as possible to play together in a virtual space. Meaningful relationships are a cornerstone of a good MMO. As they mentioned at the top of the article, in addition to making the world a better place (friendships make you feel good and happy people cause less harm to others), it is much better for player retention (social bonds keep you playing long after you're bored with the game itself) and thus much better for generating money. Players are also much more willing to spend money on your game (because the game is not only providing fun gameplay, but is fulfilling emotional needs too, thus providing great value).
From personal experience, I played LotRO for nearly 5 years in total but the game was severely lacking in endgame content. Without the ingame relationships that I had, I would have quit so much quicker. That's not to say the game was bad, it wasn't, it just simply lacked content. Vice versa, SW:TOR almost completely ignored the community and was setup to be a soloers paradise. There were no natural ways to form relationships outside of my existing guild. Even then, my guild kept me playing long after I ran out of content, but I still only lasted 1 year (I would have quit after 2 months without my guild).
I think the goal was just to set out a set of principles for how to foster good relationships within a computer game. We, as the community, probably aren't the intended targets. Game designers is who this is aimed at.
As to who is going to use this article, or who is developing games with these things in mind, pretty much just pick an MMO and take a look. Everything in this article can be applied to every MMO already released or in development. You can work through the article, pick the features that are promoting relationships and pick out the features that blocking relationships and make an assessment. Hopefully, some game designer out there will read the article and it will influence the next round of development.
In terms of upcoming games specifically, I know Camelot Unchained makes use of a lot of these ideas and has been designed to foster a very strong community. They have specifically designed their game with player retention in mind. Whether they used research like this as part of their design process, or whether they just knew what works and what doesn't from past games I don't know.
When you essentially have 0 chance to see that player again, it's no longer a person behind the avatar. It's just a really intelligent NPC. That's missing the entire point of grouping in these RPGs. Hell, we make it a point to evaluate singleplayer RPGs by how interesting our NPC companions (which is largely communicated through, surprise surprise, dialogue) are, but for some reason when it comes time to replace those NPCs with actual people with actual personalities, we balk at the idea.
But the problem with most of after 2004 MMORPG (age of WOW) is you can't share anything , or sharing option is very limited .
One time tasks , bind items , instances ects
The hard forced group don't work well , so they have to create easy forced random group lol
As for ragnarok online and lineage 2 , they are "let share it and enjoy together" type of game . You can solo in those game , but because it easy to share the contents (mostly mob combat grind) so player naturally group together .
Think about it , if you play ragnarok while run after quests , will you able to keep your newly meet friend close ? They also do they quests and you level too low to play same quest as them or you ready did the quest cause you have higher level .
- Interactions with friends. The success of F2P games relies on their strong viral dimension. The game must encourage the player to draw his friends' attention by inviting them to join him. But this "virality" has a two-way function. Not only are friends invited to play the game, but it is them who remind the player later and motivate him to continue playing. Thus, with many F2P games, a player is frequently reminded to ask for "virtual" help from his friends and give them a helping hand. As a result, the user no longer plays for his progress but for someone else's.
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/134920/the_design_of_freetoplay_games_.php?page=3... lots of them.
“Microtransactions? In a single player role-playing game? Are you nuts?”
― CD PROJEKT RED
Encouraging people to become friends is great for longevity and player enjoyment. MMORPGs aren't being built for longevity or player enjoyment currently.
The benefits are more obvious in a sub game but keeping people around in the general vicinity of your shop is also beneficial in F2P games.
“Microtransactions? In a single player role-playing game? Are you nuts?”
― CD PROJEKT RED
Of particular interest to me were the bits detailing how the design can make live players disposable and therefore abusable to other live players, instead of creating systems as in the older games like UO, where those that enjoyed being the biggest dick in the game, also were mostly held to account for it with undesirable penalties, instead of the current situation where games seem to be glorifying negative behaviour.
I get the whole "other" thing and agree that a rpg needs villains and heroes, but imo making other live players the "other" is just wrong and can and has led to some real life tragedies by those who have been so influenced that they have let it affect their real life. This is where I believe those that design mmos need to take responsibility for the in game societies they create, it's not like in a rpg where it's just a single live person battling some artificial enemies in an artificial world, they are now playing with real people's psyche.
At least this paper shows that they're aware of where much of any community building is broken and recognizes that this is a missing step(and therefore an opportunity) between a solo experience and one that fosters a desire to belong to any kind of grouping.
"In particular, we focus on the transition from stranger to acquaintance. This is the step that most often falters in modern game designs."
Some people will naturally join others because they're either socially dependent and need/want the chitchat and constant affirmation from other players or the game itself makes it somewhat advantageous to do so, but there are also many people that find groups challenging because of past bad experiences or even just because they're not able to use the voice chat systems that most groups demand, let alone the time requirements that some entail.
All these community features, which all do increase retention and monetisation, are hard to reconcile with traditional RPG features. So, for example, the article strongly advocates horizontal progression (because vertical progression creates gear gaps and thus imbalances between players and barriers to cooperative play) and yet RPGs pretty much always use vertical progression - a leftover from pen and paper RPGs.
Same thing with grouping and reciprocity. The article is basically saying that if you design classes and content so that players need to group together and work as a team to beat it, the chances of forming friendships increases. Whilst this is true, this increases the difficulty of the game which will drive some people away. Groups also need leaders, but most people are sheep, so if you need to complete group content in order to progress then a large portion of your community are going to be spending their days waiting for leaders to turn up and form a group.
Finally, you have to consider what "success" or "good" means to the business. All the things discussed would result in a great community and thus much better retention, so long term success is much more likely. However, that is only one form of success and one route to get there.
An MMO could be just as successful (financially speaking) by focusing on initial box sales, rather than retention. Focusing on flashy graphics and strong advertising could generate enough initial box sales to make a profit, so they don;t have to care about long term success. Or, like ESO, they can focus on simply releasing a lot of content so that players always have something to do.
Whilst I believe it is possible to create an MMO that does everything (solo, community, pve, pvp, sandbox and themepark features etc), it would be extremely hard to do and a big risk which is why most developers take a narrower view and why most publishers insist on the "safe" route.
I self identify as a monkey.
By all means construct areas for like minded people, absolutely I'm all for it, think it's a great idea. Just don't expect anything more than a very casual not even friendship, maybe more than acquaintance, a mate maybe or a companion maybe?.