I’ve been playing MMOs for roughly twelve years now. So I’ve definitely seen my share of blunders and successes. I’ve also come to realize what I like and don’t like. Here’s what I don’t like:

1. The grinds. It sounds like something that could send you dashing to the bathroom, and that’s not far from the truth. It’s not that grinds are inherently evil. It’s that companies tend to implement grinds merely for the sake of giving players something to do. The problem? A lot of them are required and boring.
2. The stories. There are no exceptions to this rule for me, when considering all of the MMOs currently in full release. Some have no stories. And those that do are poorly presented, written, paced or any combination of these.
3. The lack of flexibility. Countless times I have wanted to change classes, specs, professions, skills, etc. For every MMO, it is almost always a daunting task. Some games have made the process easier, but most of them still have major issues.
4. The importance of the user interface. I used to be a staunch supporter of elaborate and customizable UIs. These days? I hate them with a passion. Because, usually, when a game requires a complex UI, it means you’ll be spending most of your time watching the UI instead of what’s happening in the actual game world.
5. Generally boring game play. I don’t think anything else needs to be said about this one. Who would disagree?

Here’s what I like:

1. Well-written and well-presented stories.
2. Fun game play.

But that’s oversimplifying things, isn’t it? I could end my argument here, and walk away from this article knowing everyone but the sadomasochists would agree. That’d be cheating, and no one likes a cheater! (Sorry, Tonya Harding!)

Specific Changes I’d Make

So here are some of the changes I’d make, and why.

1. Reduce Emphasis on Mathematics and Risk vs. Reward

I immediately run with what I know is incredibly controversial. Play focused on information and risk vs. reward is what keeps people playing an MMO, afterall, right? To some degree, this is true. When you’ve already killed a boss, what’s left for you to do? Well, you could kill the boss faster. And that could be done by optimizing your gear to the fullest extent. But why can’t it be something much simpler? Like, you know, actually playing the game better. The better you play, the faster you defeat the boss or complete the dungeon. It doesn’t always have to be about the gear, or rather the way it’s worn.

Also, sitting around for half a day crunching numbers or putting gear into spreadsheets sounds about as fun as dipping my hands in battery acid. Of course, for those mathematical wizards who make a career out of this type of stuff, they might disagree with me. And, unfortunately, that lot often includes programmers and, consequently, game designers. If anything, complicating your game’s stats just makes class balance about as easy to manage as standing a pencil on top of a pinpoint.

As far as risk and reward goes, we’re talking about MMOs. There should be some reward for the risks you take. I won’t dispute that point. While people playing an RTS feel rewarded by wins, climbing the ladders and making personal improvements in play, this is not always the case in MMOs. Some people don’t play the game for competition, and they rely on being rewarded for the time they put in. But the problem is that a lot of companies take this concept to the extreme, and then the game becomes focused so much on risk and reward that the designers lose sight of what’s important on a fundamental level. And I’ll give everyone I hint on this one. It’s a three-letter word. It starts with ‘F’ and ends with ‘N’. No, it’s not fan or fin.

2. Get Rid of the Holy Trinity

This is another proposal I expect will be controversial with the MMO flock (“Bah! Bah!”). If you’re not familiar with what the holy trinity is, it’s when an MMO’s character system is focused on having people in the three traditional RPG roles: healing, tanking and damage.

This setup has three problems.

First and foremost, games that use the holy trinity expect groups to have a specific percentage of people in each role. Unfortunately, the expected percentage almost never matches the actual percentage of people available to fill each role. So you end up with shortages in one or more of the roles. For example, in WoW, the typical five-man dungeon group expects you to have one tank, one healer, and three damagers. Unfortunately, however, there is almost never one tank and one healer for every three damage dealers in the dungeon queue. So damage classes often wait up to forty minutes to be placed in a group using the dungeon finder.

If you remove two arms of the holy trinity, this problem goes away entirely. And then you only have to worry about the style of damage people put out.

Secondly, having three different roles requires dungeon and boss design to accommodate all three of the roles. This handcuffs a designer’s ability to create truly interesting encounters, and makes it difficult for coders to take liberty with how mobs interact with and react to players (since they have to focus the majority of their attention on tanks, by virtue of how the role is defined). Typically, mobs tend to stomp around and directly follow the tank with aggro, and then attack them when they are within range. This alone makes mob movement awkward, unrealistic and hardly dynamic.

Finally, the existence of healers tends to shift focus from play existing in the game world, to play existing in the interface (more on that later). Playing a healer can be fun for certain people, sure. I did it for several years in WoW. But having them also causes the game to become one big exercise in constantly keeping an eye on yours (and often other people’s) health bars. Even if you’re not a healer.

3. Reduce Emphasis on the User Interface

Naturally, I follow the last part of the previous section with this point.

I used to be a staunch supporter of having huge banks of information streaming to the players and giving them the ability to customize their interfaces to call on said data. But that is because I used to play MMOs that didn’t provide you with enough information for how they were designed.

As I’ve continued to play MMOs, I realize the problem is not with the amount of information the game provides its players, it’s the fact that most MMOs are so information-oriented to begin with.

This isn’t to say I want health bars abolished, nor a character’s power to remain static. It means the style of play should be more important than how much damage you do and how much health you have. If someone’s throwing a grenade at you, you should probably take cover, right? For some games, this isn’t the case. It’s more about how big of a dent it’s going to make in your health bar and if you can recover from it (or whether or not your healers can heal through it). I say put the kabosh on this design approach. Reacting to what’s going on in the world should take precedence over how much damage you do with or take from a single use of a given ability.

4. Make Game Play More Dynamic

Aren’t we at a point now where we should be able to slash a sword in a general direction and hit whatever is in its path? Aren’t we at a point where we can launch a projectile at a general area and watch it bounce around before it explodes?

To me, there’s nothing less exciting than the continued use of the targeting and automatic ability-resolution systems found in the majority of today’s MMOs. Over ten years later, I think these systems are archaic. But because a lot of people are so familiar with them, they continue to be used, no matter how awkward they are.

Of course, not every game is designed using these systems. Some have attempted to break the mold. And some like TERA plan to break that mold to some degree. But I’d like to see it happen more often, because the more I’m forced to tab-target and pick out mobs or players in a huge pack, the more I hate this system and want to see it changed.

5. Reduce the Class Count

This is another controversial suggestion. One of the big problems in MMOs is class balance, and this partially has to do with the fact that some of them have so many different classes. Furthermore, when you consider all of the possible ability and spec configurations, class balancing becomes something that haunts the dreams of every MMO developer. It gets to a point where they spend so much time balancing and re-balancing the classes with each patch and expansion, it detracts from their ability to design other systems important to making the game enjoyable.

Of course, the most balanced game I’ve ever played had only three classes. Granted, it wasn’t an MMO, but the fact it had only three classes meant the development team could spend more time putting care into the map design. This was a little-known game called Nox. And by referencing balance, I speak nothing of its terrible single-player campaigns, and only about its awesome multiplayer.

One might think that with so few classes people would get bored of the game quickly. But each class actually had a sizable spell book to work with, and some of the spells and abilities were downright hilarious. Also, many of the spells worked in combination, and some countered others. For example, a warrior’s shout could disperse spells in flight and silence casters in the area. But the silenced casters would still be able to use their weapons, and the warrior performing the shout would be immobilized and drop his defenses for a split second, providing opportunity for the silenced caster to counter the shout. To make the game’s class balancing even more interesting, the type of armor and weapons you wore determined how strong your defenses were against specific abilities and other weapons. So people were constantly changing their strategies and various players used different and mutable combinations, keeping the game fresh and exciting.

Overall, this design made the game’s classes feel incredibly dynamic, despite being only three in number. Though it wasn’t an MMO, some of these concepts can easily translate to one, just as having three different factions can work for an RTS (hello, my dear friend, StarCraft).

6. Make Respeccing or Rerolling Less Painful

I’ve yet to find an MMO where respeccing or rerolling isn’t a pain in the ass. Actually, that’s not true. Rift does this incredibly well. But too bad it sucks at everything else.

To be clear, I am not someone who’s never capped a character in an MMO in my life. I’m someone who often caps several characters and puts some effort into playing the end-game with at least a couple of them. I’m also more than willing to do what’s necessary to succeed, even if that means completely rerolling my main, because the last thing I want to do is play a mediocre class for what I want to accomplish.

Some people out there want to play a lot of characters or multiple specs with one class, but it’s difficult to do so if it takes so long to get their characters up-to-speed. Some companies have made strides to improve their games in this area, but they still have a long way to go. You can make respeccing itself easier, but if it takes forever to re-optimize your gear for the new spec, what’s the point? You can switch from pulling molars to pulling incisors, but you’d still be pulling teeth.

It’s amusing to me that the games that make it the most difficult to reroll or respec are typically the ones with some of the lowest subscription numbers. I realize these games fill a niche for the hardest of the hardcore, and if that’s their goal, they should keep their games the way they are. But most normal gamers care more about having fun than being that guy with all the best gear on several characters because he plays the game twenty-five hours a day, eight days a week.

If I were to design respeccing, I’d probably do it like Dragon Age II. To respec, all you have to do is buy a relatively cheap tome and then use it. The result is a system that grants players a great amount of flexibility. You can respec your mage to be a healer, and then respec back for damage. And then I’d make sure the gear each class wears could do the job for any sort of configuration a single class chooses.

For rerolling, I’d offer players who already have a character at the cap the option to roll a new class at a higher level. This wouldn’t necessarily place the new character at the cap, but close enough to it that they don’t have to spend another 50+ hours playing through the lower levels if they don’t want to.

Alternatively, you could give players a squad of characters that share experience. The catch? They can only play one character in the squad at a time. This solves the issues of rerolling. But it does mean people are inexperienced if they switch to a class in their squad they haven’t actually played, and that can frustrate seasoned players.

7. Reduce Grinds and/or Make Them Fun

If there’s one thing I absolutely can’t stand it’s simple-minded grinds. The ones that make you go out into the world and click on arbitrary nodes, watch a progress bar, rinse and repeat. The ones where you pull mob after mob and beat each down with the same ability rotation over and over again, with very little changes in mob behavior to keep the task fresh. The ones that make you spend the majority of your time traveling across the world instead of actually playing the game. Etc.

If I’m supposed to go out and collect something, I want it to be fun. If I’m supposed to mine some ore, I want to go out to a mine and actually do something like manage the operation. Or I want the mine to be a full-on dungeon or instance with unique game play that allows me to collect ore as I progress.

As it stands, many grinds in MMOs involve just sitting there and watching progress bars. This is not fun whatsoever. And if it’s not fun, it shouldn’t be in the game at all.

8. Write Better Stories and Present Them Well

I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’m tired of reading quest windows to catch the gist of a game’s story. I’m tired of doing banal tasks, like helping some random shepherd protect his flock from wolves, tigers, or wombats that shoot lasers from their ears, when all they do is disrupt the flow of the game’s real narrative. These types of quests should be optional and shouldn’t get in the way of actual plot progression.

For that matter, when I do come across an actual story arc in a game, I want it to be engrossing. It doesn’t have to be a personal story for my character. I can tag along as part of an army, watching the major NPC drama unfold as an eyewitness. But how can it be interesting if I watch them walk around doing nothing for ten minutes before I finally finish escorting them? How can it be interesting if they aren’t voiced and don’t have interesting animations to support the drama? How can I remain interested if their dialog is fucking terrible?

We’ve seen what Bioware is doing with Star Wars: The Old Republic. They’re finally bringing fully-voiced cinematic storytelling to MMOs. And from what we’ve seen in the videos out there, it’s top notch. So now it’s up to the rest of the industry to hop on board.

Of course, to accommodate those with short attention spans, the ability to skip lines of dialog should exist. Some people are in it just for the game play, and there’s nothing wrong with that. But developers shouldn’t neglect the storytelling in their games. People who appreciate it are not as small in number as some people seem to believe. If this was the case, no game would be driven by a narrative. Ever.

What Do You Think?

I realize not everyone is going to agree with my ideas. Everyone has their own preferred style of play. But I do wonder what others think. Am I alone in my method of thinking? Am I old-lady-on-the-porch-waving-her-cane crazy? Or do you agree, even with merely one idea?

If you disagree, how would you design an MMO?