by Ron Keith
Success. Sadly, it's not something readily available on the shelves at your local CVS. For many, success is the Holy Grail of life: You might search for it all your life, but only the anointed few actually find it. You'll invest in get-rich-schemes, buy self-help books, and schmooze with people who bore you to tears all in the vain hope they might point you in the direction of success. You might do everything right – get a good education and work hard – and success still proves as rare as finding a socialist on Wall Street.
It's no surprise, then, that over the past few years, so many MMOs have had trouble finding success. For many of these MMOs, success seemed to be within their grasp at the day of release, yet it proved little more than an illusion that faded the moment they reached out for it.
Perhaps MMO developers are taking success for granted. Did Lord of the Rings Online (LOTRO), Warhammer: Age of Reckoning (WAR), Star Trek Online (STO), and others believe their built-in fanbase guaranteed the success of their MMOs? Did Fallen Earth just presume people would line up to play its post-apocalyptic game? Did Global Agenda assume hordes of Unreal Tournament fans would pay to play their game?
Perhaps. But a devoted fanbase is no more a guarantee of MMO success than an unsinkable ship is a guarantee of safe passage across the Atlantic. And yet, so many new MMOs steam blithely out of port, ignoring the wreckage of their predecessors, only to end up bailing icy cold water with a champagne flute.
Just as with life, MMO success doesn't come with an instruction manual and, of course, there aren't any sure-fire recipes. But just as with life, there are some things MMOs can do to increase their possibility of success.
1. Give players gameplay variety.
The Everquest gameplay model is dead. World of Warcraft killed it. Please move on.
No one wants to log on and grind the same kill mob quests over and over. In fact, players don't even want to do quests over and over. There was a time when players were happy, no ecstatic, just to have a handful of quests to do. No matter how uninventive and repetitive those quests were, players were just happy to be online and playing with friends.
Those days are gone, or they should be, yet so many MMOs are so one-dimensional. LOTRO might be the best example of this. It's a huge, open world, yet it's almost nothing but player-versus-environment (PvE) questing almost all the time. The game doesn't start to open up until the higher levels, but you'll probably be bored out of your mind before you get to those levels.
Players expect more, now, because they've seen that more is possible. MMOs don't have to be one-dimensional and players know it. Players don't want to do the same thing all the time. They want, and expect, variety in their MMOs at all levels of the game. They want player-versus-player (PvP), PvE, dungeons, maybe a little realm-versus-realm (RvR), and regular in-game events to spice things up.
It seems like a lot, but it's not. The sad thing is so many MMOs add a lot of these things after the game releases, after a large part of their subscription base has already left. If they'd had all that variety in the beginning, maybe they never would've lost players.
2. Build a thriving economy
How often do MMO designers overlook their game's economy or treat it like it's an afterthought? How often do you craft something or get a great drop, put it on the auction house, and anxiously await your moolah? Don't game designers understand deep, down inside each of us there's a greedy little swine? (Depth varies according to individual.)
The auction house in an MMO can be it's own mini game. You know you love searching the auction house for great deals. And you'll put your stuff up, too, trying to eek out some extra gold for gear you don't need. You might work all night on a cool piece of armor or brewing some potions just so you can raise some cash. Then you'll take your earnings and buy that sword or amulet you've had your eye on. And you'll be happy. Depending on the item you'll be really, really happy.
It's fun, isn't it? So why do so many MMOs forget about crafting and their auction house?
An MMO that releases without an auction house or one that's dead is just putting success a little farther out of its reach.
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