Game Journal Entry 1 - Sat, Jan 10: WoW Grind

[oni_anne]

Background Info
I've been playing WoW since Dec 6 with a static group. we decided to to create our characters on an RP server and selected Hoard for our faction. We wanted to create comical evil characters, and so selected Turens as our race for our band, The Nerd Herd. We play every Saturday 1 to 4pm.

Nerd Herd Visits the Orcs
My friend Dennis is

Comments

[shteevie]

grinding and travel will always be part of MMOs. The 'Explorer' gamer archetype wants to see new scenery and go places they have never been, and they are part of the primary target for these games.

Similarly, content takes tome to develop; on an order of magnitude more than the amount of time it takes to complete it. Thus, the games need to add activities to the games to keep you from using up all of the custom content too quickly. Travel, aggressive monsters, and killing 20 of the same guy using the same tactics when you don't get much from the repetition.

Random spontaneity comes from the amount of detail we have in the real world, and the ease of communication we have in it. MMOs have neither. The only method we have to interact with the world is killing monsters [or talking to NPCs about killing monsters], and the only interaction we have with each other is text chat [or more combat]. There's nothing to talk about but killing monsters, and chatting takes away from time that could be better spent killing monsters. So, that's what you get.

[sigtrent]

I was pondering the last bit... what if there was an incentive to talk and RP with people... kind of like a reverse venereal disease, something you wanted to contract from contact with strangers. Pokemon has a mechanic like that.

More practically I could see a system where characters can trade info like waypoints or hidden whatever nodes or secret doors and such. So either you have a skill that lets you find stuff or know someone who does.

I'm falling into the roll of making work for programmers very well these days :)

[irishninja]

"I'm falling into the roll of making work for programmers very well these days :)"

I hear some of them are only working 80-hour weeks. Some might even be... *gasp* sleeping! Screw that, ya slugs, get back to designing the next monster for me to kill... 8,000 times...

;D

[shteevie]

A few games give a lot of content-free ways of wanting to talk to other people in-game. FFXI, for example, had absolutely no tutorials for combat, quests, crafting, or anything forf the first 5 years it was around. I learned everything I know about the game [and I'd like to think that's a lot] from the playerbase.

FFXI also has some quests or areas that can only be completed / accessed by certain races or jobs, so you need to find the right people to help you if you are not what they are looking for. One quest requires that you gather up 5 red mages, for instance, and there are weight-triggered secret doors in one dungeon that the big Galka characters can open by themselves.

Most games provide group content that requires that you go find some people to play with, but that's about the end of it.