The Daily Grind: What single MMO convention would you abolish?

by Adrian Bott Aug 25th 2008 at 8:00AM

There are MMOs that stick to the conventions and MMOs that work around them, but we all recognise the conventions when we see them. They make up much of the vocabulary of an MMO and fuel the memes that go around: we all recognise the likes of Kill Ten Rats and Looking For Group. Conventions are those features that we expect to find in an MMO of a given genre, whether we like them or not.

But given the opportunity, which one of the various MMO conventions would you banish to the infernal regions, never to return?

There are just so many to choose from. Quests where you kill X amount of Y creature, or collect randomly dropping pieces of its anatomy? Missions where you escort the balsawood NPC to safety? Monotonous resource gathering? Endgame raids? The tank-dps-healer trinity? Long travel times? Elf-orc-dwarf mythologies? Epic loot? Gear covered in so many spikes you could use it for a weenie roast?

Tags: abolish, convention, the-daily-grind

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)

Kieffer said on 9:22AM 8-25-2008

Levels

Simon said on 10:09AM 8-25-2008

For WoW:

Grinding through mobs that are a monotonous task to do as their AI isn't that advanced i.e. you normally have to do something very stupid or take on more than 2 to get killed.

Mobs just standing around in dungeons and raids whilst a group of other mobs are getting killed just yards from them. Let's have instances more like the caverns of time ones where it actually approximates storming an instance i.e. attack waves instead of mobs standing around chatting whilst their fellow guards get murdered!

The World actually changing with time and what the player has experienced. For example with Death Knights, logically with Wrath, this will happen after the events of TBC but all DK's will have to go through Outland...

Kieffer said on 9:26AM 8-25-2008

Levels!

Erendrake said on 9:33AM 8-25-2008

Skulls on equipment. It really looks foolish on most gear. there are noted execptions (wow warlock Tier 5) but for the most part it looks childish.

Kieffer said on 9:33AM 8-25-2008

Sorry about the repeat - The email confirmation procedure were a little too asynchronous :-)

But I really do think that levels are the number one thing MMO's should get rid of.

Steph said on 9:40AM 8-25-2008

Death Penalties!!!

XP debt, corpse runs, etc. Do away with them!!! They are not fun and just take away from the fun of playing the game.

koehler83 said on 10:17AM 8-25-2008

There HAS to be a death penalty, or death is meaningless. It irritates me that you can die and just run back to what you were doing in games like LOTRO. It gives healers absolutely no incentive to do their job and heal you. Likely it will be less costly on MP (or whatever) to just bring you back to life.. or just ignore you altogether and let you run back.

In FFXI, everyone relies on everyone else because their EXP is at stake. It creates a bond between players that doesnt exist otherwise. The ability and necessity to rely on another person is something that 99% of MMOs truly and completely lack. As such, I'd confidently say that FFXI has built a truly immersive community that even WoW can't match.

Of course, FFXI has also gone too far in this respect by letting players lose levels if their EXP drops too much. That's just dumb, I won't debate it. Simply allowing EXP to drop to 0, thereby prolonging your next level would suffice. Once you reach max level, you should never have to worry about having to reach max level AGAIN. (A scenario everyone in FFXI will face many many many times.)

On Topic:

The one thing I'd like to see abolished is single class characters. If you want to level every class in the game, why should you have to start from square one every time to do it? Allowing everyone to have a taste of every class will give them more respect for those who commit to each class and will help them understand how their own chosen classes can give and take with others.

Tony said on 10:44AM 8-25-2008

LotRO does have dread, though... and in more serious areas of the game that can be a significant penalty. Hope tokens can offset this in normal situations, but if you're fighting major enemies that have dread abilities that stack on top of that it's not exactly easy to run into an area and continue on.

Thranx said on 10:57PM 8-26-2008

Death penalties are what lose me in most MMOs currently.

I don't mean to sound like an old school elitest, but I am one to a certain degree I guess. *shrug* Take me back to the days of EQ1 where death sucked.

If death doesn't suck, the achievement of living through a henious or close encounter is lessened. How many times per night can you wipe in a WoW Raid? *shrug* no biggie right? Pay your 10 gold and move on... or *gasp* 50 gold if you have nice gear or died alot.

EQ... if you wiped at the feet of The Sleeper, pray you had a second set of gear or some really good/dedicated guildies.

Thrush said on 10:02AM 8-25-2008

Time sinks. Dungeons that require 4 consecutive hours to complete. Foolish drop rates. Unnecessarily long travel times. If I really like a game I'll roll alts, or find other ways to keep playing. I don't think there's need to intentionally stretch things out to get more of my money.

MeowCat said on 10:55AM 8-25-2008

What he said! Down with instance sink holes.

null said on 10:06AM 8-25-2008

Quests

Ghen said on 2:03PM 8-27-2008

please specify type and style. I find well storied quests to be entertaining methods of gaining levels, but quests that just hide the fact that you are grinding exp are not so entertaining.

Ada said on 10:44AM 8-25-2008

Most of all I think I dislike the problem of hybrid talent specs/different gear. In WoW, I play a druid, so I have four/five sets of gear and I also have to pay a respec fee everytime I want to play differently - even if I want to just PvP resto instead of PvE. It's annoying and expensive and kind of a pain to have all this gear enchanted when 75% I use like 1% of the time. Maybe that's just part of being a hybrid or maybe it needs to be streamlined. Seems like it could be better because I feel like I'm playing the resto druid class and that feral druid and boomkin druid are two others that I only really get to play with a lot of hard work.

Not even that bothers me that much though. What I really want is just to see *new* conventions. I want to see innovation, a whole new kind of experience in MMOs we haven't had yet.

coprolit said on 11:00AM 8-25-2008

Vertical segregation of the playerbase (traditionally through levels, gear, stats).

Make progression horisontal, not vertical.

Ninevah said on 11:31AM 8-25-2008

Unrealistic loot drops. I mean, if the guy I'm fighting is wearing amazing looking armor, I expect to be able to get some of that amazing looking armor--or at least something armor-like.

How many of us has asked: how the hell does a wild boar carry an axe as its loot?

Wildhammer said on 11:31AM 8-25-2008

Gear-based progression. One of my huge peeves with WoW was that there were very few ways to get into raiding and only 1 way to progress- new gear.

If you want to do instance Y, then you have to do instance X, and if you want to do instance X you have to get gear from instance Z.

The result everytime is a seperate 'caste' of players consisting of all of the hardcore raiders that have better gear and more money than the people who don't either have the time to play specific raids or didn't get into the flow early enough.

Gear-based raiding progression creates rifts in the playerbase and makes the game over all less fun. There should be LOTS of instances that allow you to progress into the harder instances, and multiple ways to progress. It's meant to be fun, not a job. Raiding needs to be more accessable.

danarchy said on 11:35AM 8-25-2008

Kill x and gather Y quests blow. In fact how about games stop copying eachothers leveling grind?
Why the heck hasn't anyone copied asheron call 1's leveling system anyways? It was always the best out there, and it was really nice not being forced to be "class X". I could be a plate wearing sword swinging mage if I wanted too, and I loved that.

So in summary kill quests and the set in stone class system

Anon said on 12:44PM 8-25-2008

Kind of a vague idea but I'd like to see more individuality. In a way it's unrealistic because some gamers will figure out a way to do something well, and then other gamers will take on their strategy to be successful (and then troll against anyone who doesn't conform).

Getting rid of a strict class system could help with the problem though, by letting a character be something more than another paladin, another rogue, etc. Maybe a player wouldn't name his character "ICutYou" if he knows that later on he might convert his character into a healing class.