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Profile: Meltdown
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UsernameMeltdown
Rank: 58/100Rank: 58/100Rank: 58/100Rank: 58/100Rank: 58/100
Real NameJ Z
RankAdvanced Member
JoinedAugust 9, 2003
GenderMale
Age23
LocationMilton, NH, United States
Last VisitSeptember 8, 2008
Post Count416
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4 Most Recent Threads by Meltdown [more...]

Latest Blog Entry - Feed Your Head
From my blog The Secret MMO-Life of Walter Mitty [Meltdown]

It is my firm belief that if an MMORPG is to become successful it needs to take a closer look at the deep psychological reactions that occur between game environments and the players. We don't need amazing coders or big name producers we need connections on an emotional level which can only come from a psychological background. Here is something I recently read on the subject...

www.nickyee.com/daedalus/archives/02_04/Yee_Book_Chapter.pdf

I will briefly talk about a few of the points mentioned within this study.

First is collaboration. The article mentions different types of collaboration created by different circumstances. For instance the "crisis situation". This is the typical MMO-encounter. Life-or-Death situations. This only applies to group encounters. A solo encounter may trigger some of the same "fight-or-flight" reactions from the user, but there is no collaboration and therefore no connection on an emotional level.

Entrepreneur collaboration. Some like to call this "interdependence" and hate its guts. But the truth of the matter is it is a large part of the community/economy/emotional building blocks.

Both the negative and positive aspects of gaming were touched on. Saying that some person comes along and overwrites all your buffs and talks down to you (because they are higher level) is part of the emotional experience. When a game creator goes out of their way to create solutions to these problems they restrict the emotional response of it's players.

Instances would be a good example of this. People were overcome with rage/anger that they had to compete over limited resources (named mob spawns, resource spawns, etc) and the game creators invented the instance. There, your problems are solved... as they placed each kid in their own sandbox filled with their own toys instead of telling them to "play nice".

Of course motivations were discussed as well. What motivates you to keep playing? 90% of the gameplay we see today revolves around a system called "risk vs. reward". If you risk your life you are rewarded. This has real life application too, seen more as risk taking or gambling. The problem is the risk is greatly reduced in a virtual world and the reward is greatly increased.

You can read the finer details yourself. But the main point here is that when game designers sit down and want to make a new MMORPG do they say "What emotional experience should we provide our players?" or do they say "What would be cool?"

Read more from my blog [Meltdown]

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Recent Forum Posts [more...]

    • Worst 5 MMORPGs

    • I can't believe that so many people rated AoC as a worse game than Vanguard... AoC was lightyears beyond VG at release, granted it still paled in comparison to other games out there... but cmon !!!

      I should say that I feel like this is a loaded "Top 5" since really there are SO many POS F2P games out there that "top notch" stuff like Vanguard and AoC really shouldn't even really be considered for Top 5 worst. But with that in mind I'll take a stab and give you the top 5 worst MMOs... in the "Released Games" list on the left that I have played.

      1. Anarchy Online

      2. City of Heroes

      3. Pirates of the Burning Sea

      4. RFO

      5. FFXI

      I should also note that this list is also proportional to the amount of time it took for me to give up on the game.

      AO - Barely made it past character creation. Looked awful, felt awful. Maybe if I tried it 10 years ago I would've felt differently.

      CoH - Barely made it past character creation (which was about all I payed for). Once I found out there was no itemization and lack of minor upgrade really turned me off to this game.

      PoTBS - Actually made it to the mid-30s. Then I realized I was lvl 32 and using a lvl 4 boat, upgraded and fights were either impossible or way too easy. I should've stuck with my dingy.

      RFO - Grindfest and although PvP was exciting with such large chip wars it was always 1 amazing player with maxed PTs taking on 80 newbs. Not to mention point-and-click with 200 players on your screen is FTL.

      FFXI - I always felt like FFXI hated me. It didn't want me to level. It didn't want me to KEEP my levels. It didn't want me to have fun... at all. If you started having fun it kicked you square in the groin to remind you who was boss.

    • Posted: 8/12/08 4:30 PM
      General Discussion
    • LF a good game for a 2-boxer

    • Tough to say, I tried to multi-box games a while back but I ended up giving up because it seems like most games nowadays tries to make it difficult for multi-boxers. WoW requires too much individual attention, games like AoC don't have auto-follow. EQ was probably the easiest game to dual-box, heck I knew people who played their entire own groups.

    • Posted: 8/11/08 4:44 PM
      General Discussion
    • Play 100 Plus Hour and I hate the game
    • Originally posted by faldlou

       

      I have noticed that a lot of players will tell you,that they leveled to the cap or played for 6 months and now they hate the game and it sucks. If a game keeps you entertained for 100 plus hours and then you got bored of it is not bad game. You just need to move on and play something else right? 
       

       

      Well in a way yes, compared to single player games 100 hours of gameplay is quite a success. For an MMO I would say 100 days of gameplay keeping a player entertained is a success. Mostly because MMOs depend on active subscriptions to continue being in business. 100 hours of gameplay is toast in that first month. Sure, they sold 800k+ copies (not that I'm refering to a specific game), but if they cannot hold player-base then it fails as an MMO.

    • Posted: 8/11/08 3:00 PM
      General Discussion

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