Also, on the way through the level treadmill, maybe make crafting a more creative thing (freestyle recipes) and actually grant experience? Grant experience (and loot?) for map exploration?

…this is just me brainstorming, and possibly covering old terrain. I also suspect that the ideas I’ve got rattling about aren’t really for shoehorning into WoW, but more of a way to address future design.

MMO’s seem to have a strange paradox: the bigger the world gets, the emptier the world feels.

You are correct when you say there is a vast “world” in WoW that is largely underused and empty. With each expansion the same number of people will be scattered across more areas and of course we’ll have the usual top heavy numbers of people at the level cap grinding away.

Categorically, investors are the bane of progress. They are a cancer impeding innovation, the choker on commerce, and key instigators of the inflation death spiral.

Ahem. With that out of my system, as a solid Bartle Explorer (200% if allowed), I find little in existing MMOs to interest me. WoW has a beautiful world, ripe for exploration, but it is sorely underutilized. A quick peek at a server census shows a glut of players sitting on the level cap, grinding away in raids and PvP. The “world” of World of Warcraft is all but dead, a virtual ghost town, waiting for Northrend to juice things up a little before the next “endgame” cycle.

As a confirmed solo player, I don’t mind it when I have an area mostly to myself, I’ll admit. Still, it seems that the “world” has been abandoned not only by the players, but by the devs as well, and that’s the true tragedy.

Blizzard’s contribution was the idea of polish to the extreme. That was enough to propel it to heights of success previously unheard of. Maybe the next big MMO will find another facet and focus on that and grow the player base even further.

I think what many of us want is thrill of something completely new and revolutionary to knock our socks off. MMO’s have been deconstructed ad infinitum by first the expert players and power gamers and finally even the average player has figured out the “game”. The sense of repetition and familiarity is causing the tedium and shorter retention spans of titles released after MMO’s like EverQuest. You feel like you are playing the same game except with fresh lore and a different skin.

Pausing to examine the impact of EQ, it was a pivotal moment in MMO’s as it made a quantum leap from what came before. The leap from a text world to a 3D graphic world and the leap from a single-player game to a massively multi-player game. For me, EverQuest was a completely fresh experience that took a few years to fully comprehend. There was a sense of newness, wonderment and discovery is that ever elusive “magic” that many of us are trying to find in these new MMO’s. Koster talks about this in his book A Theory of Fun, where he says that we stop having fun when the brain stops learning.

So if MMO’s are going to be produced like EQ and WoW but with small evolutionary advances, I have to ask: are those basic mechanics enough to keep people interested year after year? I’m not so sure. However, WoW’s success is that it brought new players into the fold — people who know nothing at all about MUDS, Ultima Online or EverQuest. For them the MMO mechanics in WoW are just as *new*and fresh as EQ was to me 10 years ago.

I think the point that Bartle and others are making is that MMO’s need to be more ambitious then they are currently. It’s really a wake up call to developers to stop playing it so safe and take some chances. There are many ways that these developers could be doing much more to advance the MMO genre. I do think that most current devs are set in their ways and the “next big thing” paradigm shift will come out of nowhere from an unlikely source.

Maybe virtual world advocates are like the 1960’s hippies hoping for a society of progress and justice that have found our way to the 1980’s but now we are jaded and resigning ourselves that things will never really change. Say what you will about him but Bartle woke up the MMO community and made us all think. At least for a few weeks.

At the same time, why fuss about companies going for something with mass appeal and a wider commercial success? It is not the responsibility of every game developer to innovate or turn a genre on its ear with every project. One could argue that evolving a successful idea is the foundation of the vast majority of businesses in the world.

We debate whether games are art, but hell, it’s not even the responsibility of bonafide artists to revolutionize with every creation. Even the most avant garde artist eventually establishes a style that people can relate to and build expectations upon (though many such artists also enjoy reinventing themselves, but let’s not take this metaphor too far).

Making games is a commercial endeavor. Sometimes that means doing something revolutionary and new, but more often than not this involves producing a variant on something that already works. And that’s okay, because the mass market tends to gravitate toward improvements on the familiar.

Let’s face it; there are times when you want to go to a McDonalds or a Wendy’s because you know exactly what you’re going to get. And of course there are other times when you want to try something new and different. I surely want to live in a world where both those options are available to me.

“Success is 10 percent inspiration and 90 percent perspiration.”
– Thomas Edison

“Life is pretty simple: You do some stuff. Most fails. Some works. You do more of what works. If it works big, others quickly copy it. Then you do something else. The trick is the doing something else.”
–Leonardo da Vinci

I think that the successful MMO makers such as Blizzard have been willing to “do something else” whenever they reach the point that whatever they do already, they do well enough for others to copy.

The ones that have failed have been the ones who didn’t take to heart what Thomas Edison had to say, believing that merely having great ideas, they had already done the hard part. The iteration of getting it perfect is the hard part. The new ideas part can be taken care of by a five year old child.

We are in a time period when MMOs are starting to look and feel much the same. The next big success will not be the one that does exactly the same, nor the one that tries to change the entire equation. It will be the one that does something else well enough for other people to copy.