MMORPG’s: The High’s and Lows of Community Online Gaming

by Stephen Taft, SUNY Cortland, December 23, 2004

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Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPGs) have become a new wave of gaming in the past few years. These games, which allow hundreds to thousands of players to simultaneously exist in the same game world, create a new type of online community. These communities are not without its problems, though, and while these games are meant for fun, there are some serious problems that develop with this new form of online gaming.

MMORPGs have evolved by leaps and bounds over the years. The first of such games was UltimaOnline; its small community soon bloomed into over a million users in the span of a few years. But even back then there were problems with the game. UltimaOnline was a Player vs. Player (PvP) game. This means that characters could kill other players. Now dying in Ultima works like this. When a character dies, he/she resurrects in a town, almost completely naked without any of the gear or money they had on them. They have to run like this to wherever they died to get any of their stuff back. A very arduous experience to say the least, especially if the person died in an area near high-level monsters. Some players would go around with the sole intention of player killing (PK’n) lower-level characters who could not defend themselves against higher- level people. What also became a problem were players complaining about how one class or type of character was more powerful than the other. This would lead developers to patch the game and “nerf” or weaken certain things about classes that were complained about. Then those classes “nerfed” would complain and the cycle would continue ad nauseam.

Soon after, other games came out in a similar theme of Ultima Online. A fantasy setting seemed to be the basis for most of these games, with the more popular ones being games like EverQuest, and Dark Age of Camelot. These games were both plagued by the same design flaws as Ultima, though some improvements were made. For example, in Dark Age, the developers designated areas for PvP fighting--that way players would not be attacked for just being low level; they had to enter the combat area on their own volition. Travel was also changed, for EverQuest players could learn spells to teleport them places, and in Dark Age there was a system of travel by horses. This also had repercussions in the case of EverQuest, however, because new people would ask higher- level characters to just teleport them around, to many players’ annoyance.

Recently, there have been attempts by developers to take the genre in a new direction. Games like Anarchy Online and Star Wars: Galaxies have put players in a more sci-fi oriented universe. Those games as well have their flaws, and in fact one of the most memorable of these bad events happened in Star Wars: Galaxies. The developers had discovered a cheat in the game that was being used by players to make duplicate items without doing any work or paying for them. Instead of finding the items and fixing the problem with the game, they began to ban any players who had duplicated items in their account. The problem with that approach was that some of these people just bought these items over an open market system set up within the game and had no idea the item they were buying was duplicated. When word got out, there was a massive rally on one of the planets in the game. There was actually a protest inside a virtual world. The developers went in the game, told the protesters to disperse, and when they did not, players at the protest were either shot into space, where they couldn’t move until they were un-stuck by the developers, effectively ending their accounts, or just banned altogether.

One of the more interesting takes on the MMROPG genre of late was the game City of Heroes (CoH). This game lets the player design their own superhero, and pick their own super powers. It offered mulitple options for choice of costume, and it gave players a huge sprawling city to fight crime in. This eliminated one of the problems of its predecessors, which was not having enough enemies to fight, or too many people looking for one particular type of enemy. In CoH a player just needs to hit the streets and in a matter of moments they will find one villain group or another up to no good. It also featured specialized mission areas where only people involved in the mission could enter, thus eliminating the chance of someone else coming by and messing a player up. Not to say CoH is without its problems--some of the powers are definitely not worth getting and some of the super villain groups are vastly more dangerous than others, but CoH is definitely a step in the right direction.

Another odd take on MMORPG’s came in the form of PlanetSide. This was actually not so much a role-playing game as it was a first-person shooter. The cool thing about this game was that huge battles involving hundreds of players could take place with vehicles and weapons and mechanized battle suits all attacking each other. It was quite a sight to behold--when it actually happened, which was very rare. However, the repetitiveness of the genre was much more evident in this game (go here, shoot, be killed, repeat), and it is one of the least populated games that are available.

The biggest trend to catch on in MMORPG’s is that of franchises. Square-Enix put out Final Fantasy 11, which is actually a multicultural game. Both Japanese and American players are on the same servers, and there is small built-in translator to allow Japanese and English speakers to play a game they both enjoy together. The game works off the Final Fantasy franchise, which many gamers have loyally followed in its console versions. Blizzard seemed to also want to capitalize on its huge following of the WarCraft franchise but putting out Worlds of Warcraft just this year. This game has apparently found a way to eliminate the monotony of the genre (kill, kill, level up, get new stuff, kill, kill, level up, etc.) and make a player feel like they have accomplished something no matter if the spend an hour or ten hours online a day.

MMORPG’s are nothing with out their player base, because all these games are pay to play, meaning that a player has to pay a fee, usually monthly. If there are no players, the game would cease to be. This makes developers very eager to please their subscribers and occasionally lets popular demand ruin something good in the game.

As for the community itself, it’s sometimes hard for players to be in a community with others because of the differing play times. One person who plays for an hour or two a day will be far behind one that can put in five to six. This gap in level can make it hard for friends with different schedules to stay together in the game.

MMORPG’s have come a long way, and in the process created many new communities of gamers. Although these games have their flaws and some people who play them have flaws (social interaction, for example) as well, the idea of a game where thousands of people interact together is going to continue to evolve and take on new forms. It’s the new future of gaming and it’s only getting better.

DESIGNER: Greg Montano, New Media Design, SUNY Cortland, USA

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