Massively Multiplayer?

The game aspects of MMORPGs have been widely discussed here and elsewhere. But the success of MMORPGs is not based on their offering better game play than single-player games. Rather it is the interaction between players which gives the game the additional kick. An MMORPG is a wonderful 3D chat room as well as a game, but the chat aspect has often been neglected. Is a game really "massively multiplayer" if the players can't interact much with each other?

Chat

It is surprising how bad the chat interface is in the majority of MMORPGs. Far too many games have only one message window by default, which holds both the game messages of the type "Orc hits you for 3 points of damage" and all the different forms of interplayer chat messages. Whenever you are in a group fighting one or several monsters, the amount of game messages makes this message window scroll far too fast, and you are more than likely to miss messages from other people.

Some games make it possible to open several chat windows and then choose which types of messages go where. But that only works well if you can arrange those windows as you like, including stacked all together in one corner, with tabs to chose which window is readable at the moment. If you can't stack the message windows, they simply take too much space on your screen, blocking your view of important elements of the virtual world.

Another big problem is the number of chat channels. Most games have channels for your immediate surrounding (/say), a wider area (/shout), direct communication with one other player (/tell), a channel for your current group (/group), and one for your guild (/guild). Other channels that would be equally important are not always present, for example a trading channel, or a channel where people can ask and answer questions. Far too few games allow players to create new, specialized channels, for example a channel for players from one country, where they can speak their native tongue. And even games that allow such custom channels often do not have a way for other players to list them. So a group of Swedes might create a Swedish language chat channel, but other Swedes on the server are quite likely to be unaware of that channel, because they can only find it by word of mouth.

The final problem with chat windows is that there is an inexplicable tradition of making them the least intuitive part of the user interface. Often the majority of options are only accessible via slash-commands on the command line interface. Options might be there, but they aren't explained in the tutorial or the manual, so most players just miss them. Many are needlessly complicated, even in otherwise user-friendly games.

A series of tabbed chat windows, which is already organized in a reasonable way by default, easy to manage, and offering the possibility to create new public channels, would go a long way to create stronger bonds between the players.

Guilds and Groups

A lot of the social interaction of a MMORPG takes place in temporary groups or more permanent guilds. Sometimes, though, the user interface or game play elements get into the way of these important social interactions.

Guild chat is one of the places where players are most likely to have the feeling of chatting with "friends". It is often a sense of duty towards this guild that keeps people playing a game which in itself wouldn't hold their interest any more. So restricting guild chat is a bad idea. Several games (City of Heroes, Lineage 2) have caps to the maximum possible number of guild members. As players typically have several characters, such caps can easily be reached, preventing communication and thus the formation of social networks.

Communication and groups is a totally different problem. Group chat works reasonably well in most games. Where the communication often breaks down is in the formation of groups. I haven't seen a single game yet with a "looking for group" chat channel. Many games have LFG flags, but these are far from perfect, as they give little information beyond level and class. Often a zone wide channel like /shout is used to look for a group for a specific task or quest. But as this channel is not very specific, the signal to noise ratio is low. If you are able to look for groups outside your current zone, the problem is often one of travel time to then reach the newly found group.

Trade and Population Centers

Beyond groups and guilds, a frequent sort of interaction between players is the game economy. Players craft or find items they want to sell to somebody else, while others made money which they want to invest in items. There are a lot of different systems how the various games handle trade, of widely differing quality.

A trade or auction chat channel is certainly helpful. But if you make that channel server wide, buyer and seller might be divided by a distance too large to be worth traveling for a minor deal. On the other hand, more local trade chat channels often have too small an audience.

Sometimes players solve that problem spontaneously by informally agreeing on a place or zone which becomes the main trading spot. Game developers can aid this process by arranging for natural population centers. If all the players regularly need to visit the city for training or quests, the higher population density soon results in trading activities.

The best case is some sort of auction house or bazaar, where items can be bought and sold between players on a slower time scale, enabling them to trade when elsewhere in the virtual world, or even offline. The area in front of such an auction house can then easily develop into some sort of market area, where other deals are made face to face.

Less good is a trading system by individual vendors, whether they are NPC vendors or the players avatar in away-from-keyboard mode. Finding the one vendor that is selling what you want is often difficult. If the vendors are distributed over a wide area, they are even harder to find. And if all the vendors are standing in the same market place, they often cause lag and frame rate problems for other people approaching that space.

Summary

To have the positive network effect of a true massively multiplayer game, the developers have to improve the communication and interaction possibilities between players. That becomes especially important with games that are following the current trend of enabling players to fight monsters on their own, without a group. If players are fighting solo, they need other communication channels to enable social interactions. Otherwise a game can easily turn into a single-player game in disguise, and it is doubtful that this would justify a monthly fee.

This article has also been published on Grimwell.

- posted by Tobold @ 8:19 PM Permanent Link