A gripe runs through it –

By Julie Whitefeather

First, my apologies for the lateness of my column this week - All I can say is “mia culpa”. When real life didn’t intervene this week I engaged in escapism to escape from when it DID intervene.  This week I discuss why people quit mmos, and why some remain loyal even through a rough opening for a game.

Read on…

A gripe runs through it –

By Julie Whitefeather

This is is very much a companion piece to an article I did last week for Virginworlds.com entitled “50 ways to leave your mmo.” The crux of issue that article brought up was to heighten an issue that seems to have become all too common amongst people who write about videogames in general and MMOs specifically. You may have notice the trend I shared with you in that article. Specifically the internet is rife with authors who seem to feel that just because there is some aspect of an MMO they don’t enjoy that a particular game is therefore doomed to failure. We saw this last with Pirates of the Burning Sea announcing it was consolidating some of their servers.

I mean, seriously, a developer or publisher has to guess at how many people that are playing their open beta are just there for a freebee and how many are there to keep playing the game when they have to pay to play. If they guess wrong it means they have to consolidate the servers or expand the servers. Rare is the developer/publisher that can it the number of servers right on the money.

One thing comes to mind while authors across the internet are busy casting aspersions of doom at whatever game happens to be the “hate of the moment” - because lets face it, some of the people who like to hate games like Sony’s Star Wars game haven’t even played it. But how does a game become the “hate of the moment”? How does a game engender a bad reputation? All one has to do is say the word “Vanguard” and tremendous fiasco that Brad McQuaid created (along with a equally cumbersome mess which Sony rescued) comes to mind. Was the game buggy at first? Was it rushed into production? Did the game have system requirements in excess of common systems at the time?

The answer to all of those questions is yes.

Does that make it a bad game? Not to everyone – not in the least. Vanguard still has a small but dedicated community who are willing to give the game a chance and enjoy it. I will admit to being one of the ones who bailed on the game but not because of the game itself. In my case, at the time, I had about as much as Brad as I could stomach without vomiting on my shoes. Only a fool would say the game didn’t have a rough start. Then again EQ2 had a rough start and it came through with flying colors. I speak to players that played back then and they all tell me it isn’t the same game now.

There are as many reasons as there are players why someone might not want to play a game to begin with. My sister, for example, doesn’t play EQ2 because she doesn’t like the way it looks. She prefers the “cartoony” look of World of Warcraft, as do many people – in fact over 10 million many people. Some people don’t play a game because some imbecile in a beta violated an NDA and started bashing a game before the devs had a chance to improve it. Still, in an industry where “polish” has become such a buzz word that the average dev must hear it in their sleep, why do some players stay and some quit? Is there a common thread? Of all the people slamming a game is there a “gripe that runs through it?”

It seems to me that there is. In fact I have discussed this same issue many a time over morning coffee. On the face of it there are many reasons why players don’t stay with a game – but not all of them have to do with game mechanics. I left Ultima Online (UO) and World of Warcraft. In fact I have left World of Warcraft twice now. I must like the abuse. In both those cases (at least initially) my reasons for leaving involved the reaction of the gaming communities associated with those to the game itself. In UO I began to see so much guild drama that I felt like I was in a really bad Ingmar Bergman movie. In World of Warcraft (where endgame was aptly described as a system of “Inventory Management” by Richard Garriott of UO and Tabula Rasa fame) time and again I saw people tossed aside for greed.

But sometimes it’s the game itself.

In Eve Online the combination of the whole “you are your spaceship” coupled with the extremely hard death penalties drove me away. In World of Warcraft I became frustrated with end game instances that are keyed to such exacting mixes of character classes that now players get turned down for pick up groups if they don’t have the right equipment or talent build. But there is operative word in that last sentence and that word is FRUSTRATION. In the end that is why people don’t stay with a game that has a rough start. It may be frustration with system requirements, game mechanics, faults in programming, or even with the community that a game attracts that drives people away.

But I have always said, hell hath no fury like a gamer whose game has been scorned. What is it that creates such fierce loyalty in some players? Let’s exclude virtual universes like Second Life from the mix where there is the real possibility of making real money. There are people who would stay where they could make a fast buck even if the game were garbage. Let’s narrow it down even further. Every game that has a small and loyal player base is there because they continue to enjoy themselves – it may be they simply enjoy the people they are playing the game with (as is the case of why I still play Lord of the Rings Online). Perhaps the game just simply has that certain “je ne sais qua” that please them, but the game is just fun to play – so they stay.

But why do players stay with a game through a rough start? How does a game like Vanguard survive? Is there a common element, as there seems to be when people quit a game?

I think there is.

Even if a game lacks polish it may also have promise. Perhaps there are some players with patience enough to get past the frustration, and foresight enough what it may become. Yes, there is an old adage that says “fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.” But if a gaming community sees that even if a developer or publisher stumbles a bit that they learn from their mistakes and deliver in the end; there won’t be a need for a “shame on me” situation. Until next time,

See you online,

Julie Whitefeather