On rose-tinted glasses

Telwyn is discussing his notion that most people in the MMO blogosphere have rose-tinted glasses and are "idolising the past". I'd like to point out that many of the "classic" MMORPGs like Ultima Online or the first Everquest are still around. The fact that not many people play them any more tells me that they don't compare that well to modern games. Having said that, everybody has his first MMORPG, and that one is likely to have a profound impact on the thinking of that player. Because every MMORPG after your first is a mix of new stuff with features you already know, and thus is somewhat less impressive.

Old MMORPGs serve one important purpose in the context of blog discussion: They tried out a lot of ideas that ultimately didn't work. The experience players and game companies had with this classic games had a strong influence on how later games were designed. If you played Ultima Online early on, you will have a very different understanding of why in modern games PvP is often so limited. If you played Everquest 1, you will have a very different understanding of why modern games have flight paths, teleports, and other forms of fast travel. Everquest 1 is also fundamental to understand the quest-driven gameplay of World of Warcraft and beyond. So it is not so much "idolising" past games as being able to quote them in the context of brilliant new ideas that were in fact already discarded a decade ago. If we don't remember the past, history repeats itself, "first as a tragedy, second as a farce".

But of course those rose-tinted glasses exist. People say the "remember" those old games, when in fact they have a curiously selective memory that blends out anything that doesn't fit in their world view. Thus instead of remembering how after the split of UO nobody wanted to play in Felucca any more and Trammel was overcrowded, they choose to remember how "great" unlimited player-killing was before the split. If only the devs hadn't allowed all the potential victims to escape to safety! Ignoring that if the devs hadn't done that, the game would have died, because those victims were already running away by quitting the game.

Curiously people also sometimes forget the things that did work. How often have you heard that "forced grouping" doesn't work? The developers of several quite successful games before WoW would beg to differ, it worked quite well at the time. The negative effect of lone wolves not wanting to play such a game is compensated by the positive effect of people enjoying to play with others and making friends. Social bonds are stronger if you actually *need* other people to progress yourself. You might get less players on day 1, but then you don't have two thirds of your players quitting the game on day 30, which overall might be healthier for the game.

Games can serve as huge social experiments, but that only works if you compare the game with itself, before and after a change. You can't take the fact that people tend to flock to a new game as proof that a specific feature of the new game is better than a specific feature of the old game. Even the fact that World of Warcraft had a peak subscriber number 30 times higher than the previous games doesn't mean that *every* feature and design decision of WoW was better than the equivalent of the older games. People tend to like game for the overall impression that game makes on them, it rarely boils down to one specific feature.