4 ms·

One problem with MMORPGs is that they just take so much time. As a young adult working full time and trying to maintain a reasonably balanced lifestyle, I don't

One problem with MMORPGs is that they just take so much time. As a young adult working full time and trying to maintain a reasonably balanced lifestyle, I don't know how to find a guild or establish friendships in a game while acknowledging that I'm only gonna be putting in a couple hours a week. Heck, I can't imagine how people with children manage to pull it off. I know I'm not going to be that good, since I'm only interested in playing for fun. I also find playing for long periods of time gets a bit exhausting. This means that in recent years I've started to gravitate towards more linear stories. I'm not usually interested in collecting stars or points, I just want to shut my brain off for a few hours and kill stuff. If you play with friends, it can become a bit frustrating too if some of them are more in the "hardcore" side of things. Nobody wants to fight constantly against someone they can never get a chance to beat. It can be fun when playing certain co-op games, but anything highly competitive just gets too overwhelming.

mhd 10y ago
Isn't MMORPGs taking time very much a design issue? Not even inherent in the genre itself, but enforced intentionally to bind users? Tabletop RPGs have been getting by without "grinding" for decades, yet this is the current focus of most CRPGs (even more so than some past examples). There are plenty of activities that could be done with a more occasional time investment (quests/dungeons that don't require groups/guilds, fiddling with your own house/manor/hold etc.).
- lloeki 10y ago
  > Isn't MMORPGs taking time very much a design issue? This is what I liked in the original Guild Wars, because quickly enough you were reaching the level 20 cap, and then while you can acquire more loot and skills, this basically just increase your abilities through player skill by increasing possible tactical possibilities, not through a monotonic increase of avatar power basically based on play time, so you could readily rejoin friends even after a month without playing.
  - Already__Taken 10y ago
    The first design of global agenda has a similar system. Everyone had 40(?) equip slots, that's it. Each item is level 1-4 of power. It's your choice to rock a top level shield but lowest weapons because you can't fit both. I can't remember what levels affected in that, maybe playzone access. It's nice because your skills as a player were you not the hours in the character. They ripped that system out for a traditional system.
- Elhana 10y ago
  Activities that could be done occasionally is basically a single player game - go play skyrim or fallout 4 - you don't need MMO for that. MMORPG should be left for the kids with enough spare time to raid 4+ hours a day. Many would disagree, but from my experience it is friends that keep you coming back every day and you can't make them this days with all this casual queues and playing few hours a week.
  - Fnoord 10y ago
    > MMORPG should be left for the kids with enough spare time to raid 4+ hours a day. 4 hours a day raiding is bullshit. Most guilds raid 12 hours or so a week. The very competitive guilds traditionally only raid a lot in first 2-3 weeks (w/first week being split farm). They take time off work/uni then. Sco, for example, from best guild Method, is a Scottish fellow who worked in finance for various years (he's now full time earning money with his guild). With Legion, its the stuff outside of raiding which takes up a lot of time. The endless grind of artifact power, legendaries, and rare epic upgrades. It is possible to play casual though. I raid 6 hours a week (less than 1 hour a day), and out of 10 we're only 2 bosses behind on Mythic (the toughest difficult). With the last boss being exceptionally hard.
  - sgt101 10y ago
    This - sorta... There are several different types of community that MMORPG's can sustain, but the multi-player bit is the big ingredient. Folks can be selling crafts, raiding or questing, but the critical bit is that n-people should be needed. The bigger n is the more compelling the driver (I think). WOW lost a lot of luster when 40 mans got retired...
    - marcus_holmes 10y ago
      I hated 40-man raids. They just weren't fun. Cat-herding 40 people, the endless waiting, dc's, egos and fights. No fun at all. My best memories of WoW raids were the drunken Friday night guild runs through UBRS. We knew the bosses well enough so that they didn't really require any effort or co-ordination and we were free to chat and talk crap amongst ourselves. Our tank usually got so drunk by the time we got to the end that we were glad the hunter had to kite the boss away. I had to stop playing because the time commitment required to be an active member of the raid group got ridiculous. Literally every evening and most of every weekend. If you couldn't do that then you couldn't compete. Stuff that, this is a hobby not a job.
- mfukar 10y ago
  All games require the customer to devote time. Some more than others. Tabletop RPGs require time spent not in grinding, but other tasks, most notably roleplaying.
- parenthephobia 10y ago
  It's easier - for a skilled GM - to produce engaging new content for a tabletop RPG than it is to produce the same for an MMORPG. The GM only needs to come up with an idea that works for their group of - say - 4 players, whereas the MMORPG vendor also needs to come up with artwork and code and ensure that the content is balanced for thousands - or more - of players at different stages of development and with different playing styles. MMORPGs feature grind because without it the players would run out of content before new content was available: then they'd get bored and quit. Or, if the content was produced quickly enough, it would likely lack sufficient quality control and players wouldn't like playing new content, with the same result. Of course, the more money the vendor is able to put into creating new content, the less grind the game needs to depend upon. And if the game has many social players, their social interactions provide another mechanism to keep players interested after they run out of content. Eve is a good example of an MMO where player interactions are a big part of what keeps players in the game.
  - Fnoord 10y ago
    How does a non tabletop RPG player meet other (potential) players?
tzs 10y ago
> One problem with MMORPGs is that they just take so much time. As a young adult working full time and trying to maintain a reasonably balanced lifestyle, I don't know how to find a guild or establish friendships in a game while acknowledging that I'm only gonna be putting in a couple hours a week. One thing you could do is pick a game that Gaiscioch [1] has a significant presence in and join them. Those currently are Guild Wars 2 and Elder Scrolls Online. (Previous games were, in reverse order, Rift, Warhammer Online, and Dark Age of Camelot. I believe there is still quite a bit of Gaiscioch activity in Rift, but I don't think it is getting the full Gaiscioch treatment any more). If I had to sum up Gaiscioch as a guild in a short list of keywords, I'd probably pick something like "hard-core casual social". That's a set of keywords you usually don't find for one guild, so I'll explain in more detail. What I mean by "casual" is that Gaiscioch has no requirements for how much time you have to put into the game, or how rapidly you have to advance your character, or how well equipped you have to be, or what classes you have to play, or how many alts you can create and play. What I mean by "social" is that the focus of Gaiscioch is on community. They want to create a friendly gaming environment where everyone from grandparents to children, of all genders, races, religions, etc., is welcome and can have a good time. What I mean by "hard-core" is two things. First is that Gaiscioch does have people who put a lot of effort into the game. Some of them do the same kind of hard core raiding and pursuit of the endgame that you typically see in an uber guild. As I said above, there is no pressure to participate in that, but if you want to its there. Second is that Gaiscioch's leaders get heavily into the lore of the game, and organize server-wide community events based on that lore. Let me give an example. Warhammer Online was built around the fight between two factions, Order and Destruction. Keeps and fortresses could be seized by players, and when the players of one side accomplished certain goals in that regard, they could gain access to the other side's capital city to loot and pillage. There were four "tiers" of this, organized by level range, so this realm vs. realm conflict could be experienced at all levels. Gaiscioch, which was playing Order on the Badlands server, organized an ongoing event called the Battle for the Badlands which involved weekly scheduled raids to try to take take Destruction keeps and forts. These raids were announced well in advanced, and well publicized to try to get a lot of people to show up. I believe they were also coordinating with one or two big Destruction guilds to get them to get a big Destruction turnout. These events would not just do the top tier--they would also do lower tier targets so that people who didn't have tier IV characters could join the fun. They put up a website for the Battle of Badlands, and had a scoring system to keep track of who had won each week's event. These events would draw enough people so that Gaiscioch members were just a minority of the players, but Gaiscioch had enough experienced RvR leaders so that they could generally spread them out among all the Order groups and coordinate with each other, allowing for some large scale strategy and tactics across multiple zones. (I think Destruction had a similar arrangement). For a large fraction of the Badlands population (both Order and Destruction), these events were the high point of their Warhammer Online experience. [1] http://www.gaiscioch.com/about/ http://www.gaiscioch.com/about/

mhd 10y ago

Isn't MMORPGs taking time very much a design issue? Not even inherent in the genre itself, but enforced intentionally to bind users? Tabletop RPGs have been getting by without "grinding" for decades, yet this is the current focus of most CRPGs (even more so than some past examples). There are plenty of activities that could be done with a more occasional time investment (quests/dungeons that don't require groups/guilds, fiddling with your own house/manor/hold etc.).

lloeki 10y ago
> Isn't MMORPGs taking time very much a design issue? This is what I liked in the original Guild Wars, because quickly enough you were reaching the level 20 cap, and then while you can acquire more loot and skills, this basically just increase your abilities through player skill by increasing possible tactical possibilities, not through a monotonic increase of avatar power basically based on play time, so you could readily rejoin friends even after a month without playing.
- Already__Taken 10y ago
  The first design of global agenda has a similar system. Everyone had 40(?) equip slots, that's it. Each item is level 1-4 of power. It's your choice to rock a top level shield but lowest weapons because you can't fit both. I can't remember what levels affected in that, maybe playzone access. It's nice because your skills as a player were you not the hours in the character. They ripped that system out for a traditional system.
Elhana 10y ago
Activities that could be done occasionally is basically a single player game - go play skyrim or fallout 4 - you don't need MMO for that. MMORPG should be left for the kids with enough spare time to raid 4+ hours a day. Many would disagree, but from my experience it is friends that keep you coming back every day and you can't make them this days with all this casual queues and playing few hours a week.
- Fnoord 10y ago
  > MMORPG should be left for the kids with enough spare time to raid 4+ hours a day. 4 hours a day raiding is bullshit. Most guilds raid 12 hours or so a week. The very competitive guilds traditionally only raid a lot in first 2-3 weeks (w/first week being split farm). They take time off work/uni then. Sco, for example, from best guild Method, is a Scottish fellow who worked in finance for various years (he's now full time earning money with his guild). With Legion, its the stuff outside of raiding which takes up a lot of time. The endless grind of artifact power, legendaries, and rare epic upgrades. It is possible to play casual though. I raid 6 hours a week (less than 1 hour a day), and out of 10 we're only 2 bosses behind on Mythic (the toughest difficult). With the last boss being exceptionally hard.
- sgt101 10y ago
  This - sorta... There are several different types of community that MMORPG's can sustain, but the multi-player bit is the big ingredient. Folks can be selling crafts, raiding or questing, but the critical bit is that n-people should be needed. The bigger n is the more compelling the driver (I think). WOW lost a lot of luster when 40 mans got retired...
  - marcus_holmes 10y ago
    I hated 40-man raids. They just weren't fun. Cat-herding 40 people, the endless waiting, dc's, egos and fights. No fun at all. My best memories of WoW raids were the drunken Friday night guild runs through UBRS. We knew the bosses well enough so that they didn't really require any effort or co-ordination and we were free to chat and talk crap amongst ourselves. Our tank usually got so drunk by the time we got to the end that we were glad the hunter had to kite the boss away. I had to stop playing because the time commitment required to be an active member of the raid group got ridiculous. Literally every evening and most of every weekend. If you couldn't do that then you couldn't compete. Stuff that, this is a hobby not a job.
mfukar 10y ago
All games require the customer to devote time. Some more than others. Tabletop RPGs require time spent not in grinding, but other tasks, most notably roleplaying.
parenthephobia 10y ago
It's easier - for a skilled GM - to produce engaging new content for a tabletop RPG than it is to produce the same for an MMORPG. The GM only needs to come up with an idea that works for their group of - say - 4 players, whereas the MMORPG vendor also needs to come up with artwork and code and ensure that the content is balanced for thousands - or more - of players at different stages of development and with different playing styles. MMORPGs feature grind because without it the players would run out of content before new content was available: then they'd get bored and quit. Or, if the content was produced quickly enough, it would likely lack sufficient quality control and players wouldn't like playing new content, with the same result. Of course, the more money the vendor is able to put into creating new content, the less grind the game needs to depend upon. And if the game has many social players, their social interactions provide another mechanism to keep players interested after they run out of content. Eve is a good example of an MMO where player interactions are a big part of what keeps players in the game.
- Fnoord 10y ago
  How does a non tabletop RPG player meet other (potential) players?

tzs 10y ago

> One problem with MMORPGs is that they just take so much time. As a young adult working full time and trying to maintain a reasonably balanced lifestyle, I don't know how to find a guild or establish friendships in a game while acknowledging that I'm only gonna be putting in a couple hours a week. One thing you could do is pick a game that Gaiscioch [1] has a significant presence in and join them. Those currently are Guild Wars 2 and Elder Scrolls Online. (Previous games were, in reverse order, Rift, Warhammer Online, and Dark Age of Camelot. I believe there is still quite a bit of Gaiscioch activity in Rift, but I don't think it is getting the full Gaiscioch treatment any more). If I had to sum up Gaiscioch as a guild in a short list of keywords, I'd probably pick something like "hard-core casual social". That's a set of keywords you usually don't find for one guild, so I'll explain in more detail. What I mean by "casual" is that Gaiscioch has no requirements for how much time you have to put into the game, or how rapidly you have to advance your character, or how well equipped you have to be, or what classes you have to play, or how many alts you can create and play. What I mean by "social" is that the focus of Gaiscioch is on community. They want to create a friendly gaming environment where everyone from grandparents to children, of all genders, races, religions, etc., is welcome and can have a good time. What I mean by "hard-core" is two things. First is that Gaiscioch does have people who put a lot of effort into the game. Some of them do the same kind of hard core raiding and pursuit of the endgame that you typically see in an uber guild. As I said above, there is no pressure to participate in that, but if you want to its there. Second is that Gaiscioch's leaders get heavily into the lore of the game, and organize server-wide community events based on that lore. Let me give an example. Warhammer Online was built around the fight between two factions, Order and Destruction. Keeps and fortresses could be seized by players, and when the players of one side accomplished certain goals in that regard, they could gain access to the other side's capital city to loot and pillage. There were four "tiers" of this, organized by level range, so this realm vs. realm conflict could be experienced at all levels. Gaiscioch, which was playing Order on the Badlands server, organized an ongoing event called the Battle for the Badlands which involved weekly scheduled raids to try to take take Destruction keeps and forts. These raids were announced well in advanced, and well publicized to try to get a lot of people to show up. I believe they were also coordinating with one or two big Destruction guilds to get them to get a big Destruction turnout. These events would not just do the top tier--they would also do lower tier targets so that people who didn't have tier IV characters could join the fun. They put up a website for the Battle of Badlands, and had a scoring system to keep track of who had won each week's event. These events would draw enough people so that Gaiscioch members were just a minority of the players, but Gaiscioch had enough experienced RvR leaders so that they could generally spread them out among all the Order groups and coordinate with each other, allowing for some large scale strategy and tactics across multiple zones. (I think Destruction had a similar arrangement). For a large fraction of the Badlands population (both Order and Destruction), these events were the high point of their Warhammer Online experience. [1] http://www.gaiscioch.com/about/ http://www.gaiscioch.com/about/