I can’t say I agree with everything Lum, the Industry Luminary™, has posted here, but it’s a good read. I do agree completely with the subscription MMO model being broken, but I don’t know if I agree with the proposed solutions:
They encourage bad design. You gotta keep those people subscribed somehow. Hey, I know, let’s jack up the XP curve, no one will notice. Oh, they’re max level? Crap, put in some other time sink - hey, “reputations” sounds fun, let’s see if that works. Now, free to play games also suffer from all of these problems. Which is kind of funny, because in a free to play game, if you’re not part of the 5% or whatever of players that is monetized, you are costing the company money when you play. Ideally your play time should be minimized, not extended! But old habits are hard to break. Jonathan Blow (the Braid designer) put this best. When his comments on MMO design first came out I was quite pissed off at what he had to say - but in the main, he’s right. It’s probably why I was pissed.
“I think a lot of modern game design is actually unethical, especially massively multiplayer games like World of Warcraft, because they are predicated on player exploitation,” Mr Blow says.
He believes players will naturally avoid boring tasks but developers “override that by plugging into their pleasure centres and giving them scheduled rewards and we convince them to pay us money and waste their lives in front of our game in this exploitative fashion”.
It’s a vast oversimplification - but that doesn’t make it less correct an observation. And that is encouraged by the revenue stream of the slow and steady MMO gamer.
Go there, read the whole thing and the links. It’s very much worth it if you’re into MMO design talk and the future of them at all.
What Would Matt Do: Didn’t I already say you should read it?