MMORPG/FPS/etc developers have been innovative in areas that were, once, highly important in creating a successful game. They have gone through great efforts to ensure that the average MMO gamer gets an enjoyable experience out of the game. However, in the past four major titles to be released, they have been lacking… leaving me with a “more of the same” taste in my mouth. The four major titles I speak of are World of Warcraft, Vanguard, Lord of the Rings:Online, and Age of Conan. Each of these titles had the chance to be huge successes(one of them was, and continues to be), but fell short in their own unique ways.

Given the failures or shortcomings of these games, I have given careful consideration to a list of ten things that MMO developers should learn from me, the average MMO player.

1. Take lessons from success

Why was WoW successful? It was likely a combination of things but here are the keys that were sung upfront and continue to be sung: it runs on extremely old computers without looking bad, the interface is smooth and chrisp, and the plot is immersive and well-written.

MMO devs, please stop making these monstrosity games that require you to have the uber-deluxe graphics card with 56 core processor and 80gigs of RAM. Sorry, but the average joe-blow consumer is not going to have this computer and the average MMO player isn’t going to come back in three years when they finally have a decent computer and no one plays anymore.

2. Optimize your interface

My biggest issue from MMO to MMO is the complete and utter failure to make a smooth interface. Many games seem to be locked into an interface that is too big, too clunky, and too much of a hassle to modify. Age of Conan is one fair example, even though they have been working to improve it. Why are the boxes for my talents, by default, half the size of the screen? Give me some credit please, I am not blind – at least not yet.

3. Tune your bosses

Don’t insult the community by releasing half-assed bosses that either don’t work or are so impossible that we have to wait for a patch for the boss to even begin to be beatable. Spend an extra week before releasing the patch and make sure the boss is properly tuned. Don’t worry, the fans won’t go anywhere and they will thank you when its finally out.

4. Cut back on trash

Trash clearing sucks, cut it down to a reasonable level. I can understand having to learn trash and making it a challenge, but once I have it on farm, the 45 minute clears from boss-to-boss is a little over the top. I would rather take on two or three challenging trash pulls than fifty mind-numbingly boring ones. If you really need to put in trash, give us just a couple challenging ones.

5. Throw away the big book of quests

I am tired of killing 50 jack rabbits to get 50 jack rabbit ears and, oh yea, only one jack rabbit out of every ten actually has an ear. I would rather fly around town carrying messages for an hour than kill jack rabbits for 30 minutes(or more if the drop rate is against me).

Please be a bit more creative with your quests – you have a team of guys that do it. Surely they can come up with something.

6. Stop making me run everywhere

Is it so much to ask for the ability to move fast right from the get-go? What is the real danger of me not having a mount or at least something that increases my movement speed? Stop artificially creating ways for me to have to stay in your zone longer than I need to. If you have to force me to stay artificially, that means you did a bad job of designing the zone.

7. Kill the off-tank

The off-tank is probably one of the most boring, unrewarding, and unappreciated jobs in the history of MMOs. You don’t get the glory or the respect that the main tank commands, and when there is nothing to off-tank you might as well have just left the dungeon. Your DPS is low, thanks to your lack of DPS gear and misplaced talents, you often get less priority on new gear so that the main tank can get decked, and you have to re-talent any time you want to partake in PVP.

Devs: please come up with some other way to tune encounters to make the off-tank a bit more crucial role… or at least let them get some kind of DPS capability.

8. Make me do more than fill up green bars

Some will say that they enjoy healing. I have no doubt that, after a hard day at work, you would love for nothing more than a relaxing raid where all you do is fill green bars. However, on 90% of days where you are ready for the game to be entertaining, standing in the back and healing is boring. How many times has this conversation occured in your raid:

Raid Leader: Ok, Helix, you tank the boss over here and watch out for the flame breath. Make sure you turn when he casts it so that you don’t eat the whole thing. Caster DPS, make sure to spread out and when hes about to breath, jump on the mages so they can do the nova and protect you. Melee, back out at five seconds to prevent getting aggro when it resets. Okay, lets do it!
Healer: What do the healers do?
Raid Leader: Oh, healers… stand in the back and heal. Make sure no one dies. K lets go!!

Sounds fun, eh? Hows about giving healers something interesting to overcome other than green bars slipping away.

9. Implement a usable voice chat

No one wants to have to pay for ventrilo or run a teamspeak server at home. WoW tried but their voice chat is buggy, crushed by a bad codec, and generally is useless. Implement a voice chat system that we can actually use so that we don’t have to buy ventrilo servers.

10. Get rid of leveling

Yes, I said it. Get rid of leveling. Its boring, it sucks, its a waste of time… how much do I need to say about how much it sucks? Here is the single biggest reason that leveling should be tossed: its arcaeic from a time when leveling was the game. Back in the MUD days, leveling was the only thing there was to do. Since then, we have evolved a bit.

With the idea of “end-game” content and PVP, there is really no need to level anymore. Gear is the new leveling. My sole source of scaling up should be done through gear. If you want me to have more stamina, make the content between “end-game-dungeon-a” and “end-game-dungeon-b” scale up my stamina appropriately. If A requires a minimum of 120 stam to get the beginning of the instance done, and B require a minimum of 240 stamina to get the beginning of the instance done, put dungeons in that scale my gear up to 240 stam. I will gladly do a few 5-man groups to scale my gear from dungeon-to-dungeon. I will agree that in some cases its not beneficial to always have the end of dungeon A be the same as the beginning of dungeon B.

Now, I can hear the cries now: “oh, what will we do without leveling, there is no way to experience content!!!” Let me address the common concerns of the leveling junkie one at a time:

Q: How will we get new talents and stats without levels?
A: The same way I already described: gear. If you need to add new talents and new talent points, simply add the new talents and new points. Using WoW as an example, figuring out my talents at level 70 is no different than it was at level 60, I just have 10 more points and a bunch more talents to choose from. I wasn’t thankful that I leveling from 60 to 70 and earned those 10 points through mind-numbing quests and grinding.

Q: Leveling is a great way to learn your character, cutting it out means you will be a worse player overall!
A: I would gladly spend a couple of days learning my character rather than a month or two leveling it. Not to mention, most players don’t have a clue how to play their character these days. The most common and effective method that people use now adays is reading a forum or watching a video. Do you think that the three-hit combos of the vanilla WoW days were a miraculous thing that all players learned at once? No. One guy figured out the maximum combo and everyone else copied it.

Q: I am casual, what will there be for me to do?
A: If you want to cruise around the game and quest all day, go nuts. I won’t be the guy saying that non-raid content shouldn’t exist. I am just saying the leveling shouldn’t exist. Developers should put in content that is based on the world for you, the casual player, to do… but not two months worth of boring, bad, leveling.

Q: How will I get world plot if all I ever do is grind instances?
A: Did killing 50 rats to save the farm from rat epidemics really make you feel better about the world your character exists in? Probably not. Quests and content should still be developed for the world, but cut out the non-sense garbage.

Developers: think about the time and money you can save (or, hopefully, reinvest) by not having to develop all the leveling content. You could spend more time developing successful PVP games, creative and finely-tuned end-game content, and immersive end-game world content. Think about it; take all the time you spent on leveling and reinvest that time into at-release end-game style content: you’d be an instant success. Your models and characters would be entertaining, immersive, and appealing.

Conclusion

All-in-all, I think the future success of MMOs rests in continuing to fine-tune the wants of the players. The MMO market is a small subset of the game market and it relies heavily on many players jumping into the same game at the same time. Love it or hate it, WoW did pretty good at collecting the masses. The more players there are, the more fun the game is.

As of late, devs have taken for granted the fact that they need to continue to fine-tune their developments. You don’t want to copy another game and give it new skins, but at the same time you don’t want the only differences between your games to be that one is popular and the other is massively-multiplayer-boring.