What do I mean by contradictory? Well, here are just a few examples:

I want large, open, living, breathing worlds that lets me set my own goals.

But I guess I don’t. I like having some sort of a goal to work towards, as much as I’d really like to say that the journey is what I find fun. And, really, I think that is a very truthful statement, but without some sort of a goal, I seem to be unwilling to go out and have fun for the sake of having fun. Yet, if I’m allowed to choose my own goals, I have a very difficult time doing so. That’s why I never enjoyed Star Wars Galaxies much, because I could never figure out what I wanted to do.

I want players to be the ones that I’m working with and against to change the world, and share a dynamic setting that is far from dull and static.

But I guess not. EVE Online is a fantastic game that I highly recommend, and as much as I love the basic idea of the game, it has real issues for me. One of the biggest is the ‘atmosphere’ of the game. It is set in cold, harsh, uncompromising, and uncaring space: exactly like the game itself. Even when I am teamed up with with other players, there is always the fear of betrayal, and there is always the constant undefined conflicts. While it is very interesting, I know deep down I prefer a more cooperative environment.

Playing off both of those combined, I would like to see PvP that is more realistic and open, instead of artificial scenarios.

But I know that isn’t true. On some intellectual level, yes, I love the idea of open PvP. Yet, similar to the reasons above, I prefer a more cooperative environment. More importantly, it is extremely rare for any open world PvP fight to be anything remotely fair. I prefer my fights to be fair and fun, and not one-sided.

I want to have a high level of interactivity and dependency on other players.

But I guess not to the extent I use to think, at the very least. I like soloing often enough, simply because I like to play much more casually these days. I love grouping all the same, but I actually have never cared for raids. Yet, if I’m mostly concerned with playing in small (although frequently changing) groups of people, I almost question why I play MMOs to begin with. Ultimately, I guess what I mostly want is to have some sort of meta-game-esque thing that I’m working on with other players. For example, building a city in Star Wars Galaxies was pretty cool.

I would like to see MMOs incorporate more story into them.

Which… yeah, that one is pretty much true. Yet, it seems like most MMOs that try to do that do it very wrong. I don’t want to be the lone hero – because I know that a few thousand other people also just rescued the princess and defeated the big-bad-dude. Ultimately, I want a story that makes me feel like I am among the heroes, and the other heroes are the players – and I don’t want to feel like every accomplishment I make in the game is what everyone else has done as well, as near-impossible a it is to avoid that. Basically, I don’t want to be the lone hero, but I don’t want to be just some other random person.

Ultimately…

I want a game that is a themepark, so it can give me some sort of a goal, but is also an open world, and gives me the freedom to go out and do what I want. It should have open and more realistic PvP, but PvP that isn’t one-sided and unfair. I want to be heavily tied into playing with other people and have what they do affect me in a way that makes me feel like I am playing a game with thousands of people instead of a single-player game – but I should be able to do things on my own as much as I want. I would like to see an MMO with a real story, but one that doesn’t revolve around just me. It should make me feel like I am participating in it with many people, and in a way that still makes me feel like I am impacting things.

So, basically, I want something similar to this:

All styles of games, be they sandbox, themepark, open pvp, battlegrounds, or whatever, they all have problems. I idealize open, sandbox worlds, but I’ve never played one that I actually liked. Again, I love EVE on an intellectual level, but I know it isn’t for me. I think themepark worlds are pretty dull and far from an ideal, but I’ve spent more time playing them than sandboxes, and I’ve enjoyed some of them quite a bit. However, I always get bored with them rather quickly.

I imagine I’m not all that alone in my desire for this game of great contradiction, but I also don’t think that it is really feasible to create something like it. The only contradictory part that I think could really be fixed is the story one, and maybe the player interaction one. Neither would be easy to do.

When it comes down to it, many Free-to-Play games are not well designed for the consumer. You can probably see that in games like Allods, which despite apparently being a very solid MMO, has been taking a lot of flack because of their microtransactions. I think this isn’t because people aren’t unwilling to pay, but rather because people aren’t willing to pay for certain things.

Don’t charge for small things that people don’t value beyond the fact that they make the game more convenient, playable, or are considered required by the player-base.

Ultimately, a lot of Free-to-Play games charge for the wrong things. That is to say, they charge for things that the player-base considers to be ‘required’ to play the game, such as the ability to get rid of massive stat-loss from death or extra bag space in Allods (sorry to keep picking on you guys, but you’re timely!).

Bags usually aren't awesome enough to charge for.

Honestly, I don’t think a bag is worth ten cents. It is just a bag. Heck, I have a hard time spending money on a bag in real life, much less a virtual one. That isn’t something that people value. It also isn’t something that adds to the game experience. Rather, it is something that they feel they need to buy to keep playing. It is a requirement to buy, not a fun thing that enhances their experience.

While many games that have items like these in their cash shops, they do tend to provide ways to get these items using in-game means. The in-game means are often gruelingly difficult to actually do. I understand why that is the case, of course. If it is just as easy to grab the item in-game as it would be to pay for it, then certainly no one would pay for it. But this highlights the other flaw:

The purpose behind games are for them to be fun and enjoyable. Your core game, without any add-ons, needs to be that. If your game is free-to-play, I shouldn’t have to engage in microtrasactions to enjoy it.

That might seem extremely unfair to the developer – and it is! A lot of work goes into creating a very polished, good, and fun game. However, I’m only going to drop money down on a game that I actually like and find enjoyable. If I have to keep shelling out real cash for upgrades that keep my character viable, I am probably not going to have fun with the core game, so I am less likely to keep playing.

I do think that there are ways to implement microtransactions correctly. While I haven’t spent overly long playing Dungeons and Dragons Online, and while there are flaws, I think part of their cash shop is a good example of Doing It Right. While they still have items that you can buy which buff your character somehow, generally speaking, their core game experience is playable and fairly fun.

While players shouldn’t have to pay to enjoy your game, they should pay for things that extend and broaden their enjoyment of the game.

Dungeons and Dragons Online provides a decent core experience. You have a character that can be all but two of the available classes and races. The things you cant be aren’t really overpowered. You can play through a fairly decent amount of quests and adventures that are supplied to you, free of charge, when you first install the game. You can, if you want, live off of that content and nothing else – although you will probably repeat dungeons often enough for lack of content, but they are, in theory, designed to be fun enough that you can repeat them. That’s fine, and I can live with that.

Wait, why would I want to pay to be like this guy?

However, if I’m a little bored of the content, I can buy a new module. A new module features new quest lines, new things to fight, new traps to work past, and new puzzles to solve. It is, effectively, a mini-expansion at a mini-price. I already pay for expansions to subscription-based MMOs, and I have a hard time saying that extra content isn’t worth money. It is obvious to me that someone took the time to craft dungeons and write plots, and it gives me a few more hours of fun times in the game. A “+5 Longsword of Ass Kicking” on the other hand may sound cool, but it doesn’t give me anything new to experience after I’ve worn out the content of the game. Why would I waste money on that?

Players need to be able to decide when they want to spend their cash on their own terms. You shouldn’t be deciding that for them. Let the players have as much control as possible.

You know it sounds like an epic adventure.

When I reach level 20 I don’t want to feel required to buy the “Bag of Carrying More Worthless Junk”, because more things drop from mobs at that level, and I’m expected to carry around a boat-load more stuff than I did a few levels before. However, I’m totally cool with purchasing the “Adventure Through the Grue Infested Caves of Darkness” adventure pack because I like the sound of it and I’d rather like to play through it. I don’t have to, but it sounds, well, fun. That’s the point of gaming after all, right? The freedom to decide when to drop my cash is important to me. Sometimes I can afford it, and other times I can’t. I also like the ability to choose what content I want to buy, and what content I don’t want to buy. I can tailor the game to my needs – which is actually really unique to Free-to-Play models.

The things you sell should encourage you to keep providing new content to your players.

It takes no time at all to create that “+5 Longsword of Ass Kicking” but it does take a while to create a new set of dungeons and quests. When you’re selling the latter, you’ll be encouraged to invest the time and effort to actually create new content for the community. When you’re doing the former, you have much less motivation to do so. Heck, I’ve played a ton of MMOs with subscription fees – which partly exist to fund live teams to keep producing new content – only to get nothing out of them until a $30 or $40 expansion comes around.

While I’m certain this isn’t a complete list, these are certainly key things that I would like to see future Free-to-Play MMOs work to implement. Also, this isn’t to suggest that Allods is a bad game, or that DDO is some sort of gaming Messiah (it isn’t). Rather, the former is just one of many games that I don’t think handle microtransactions correctly, while the latter is an example of a game that partly does it right – and partly does the same stuff that every other game seems to.

Serving up new adventure packs isn’t necessarily the end-all-be-all, but is rather one idea that I think works pretty well. What are some other ideas? Well, I’ll worry about coming up with them if someone pays me to do so. But I like being a community manager, so you’ll have to figure that out yourselves!

Still, there are a few games I’ve played that have had some good ideas that, if taken further, and if combined with some other systems I’ve seen, could actually come out with something interesting. I’d like to explore some of these things in respect to some of the challenges MMOs have to overcome to get an interesting crafting system.

The Market
To put it bluntly, the economies in most MMOs are awful. That’s fine though, as they’re rarely games focused on economies, simply using trade and money as a means to an end, and not actually a source of enjoyment. This is true, except for one major exception: EVE Online.

EVE is a weird game. The gameplay systems within it are far from exciting when looked at on their own, but there is an amazing metagame instead. Part of that metagame that addresses the problem of economics in MMOs: the player controlled market. A number of games have implemented player-run markets before, but EVE Online has it down to a science – literally, they employ an economist. The economy works for a few reasons (and this is a hugely watered down answer): players have a constant need to consume goods, play is focused around the accumulation of wealth instead of character advancement, just about every playstyle revolves around the market and everything is interconnected. Miners gather resources, others research and build objects, traders ferry goods around the galaxy to be sold, and everyone – more so the combatants – buy goods. It runs very similar to how an actual economy works.

Of course actually building things is boring.

Crafting Gameplay
Most games feature pretty simple crafting systems. You look at a recipe, get the resources required, put them together, hit some button, and wind up with an item. There isn’t much to it. There’s very little thought, very little strategy, and very little of interest in the activity itself. A few games have tried to take crafting beyond this, but none of them have ever succeeded, in my opinion.

EverQuest 2 got it the closest in my opinion. They basically presented crafting in a similar way to combat. As you crafted, the item had a bar – well a few bars, but that isn’t really important – that represented how much progress you’ve made. It had another bar that represented the quality of the item. You had to finish the item before it ran out of quality – kinda like getting your opponents HP to 0 before yours does. You also had a number of abilities to help you out with this, including things that would increase progress (damage spells?) and others that would increase quality (heals?). Complications could arise, which required you to throw in certain abilities to stop them from taking effect and causing something bad to happen.

It was a pretty amazing system and for a long time, I actually liked crafting! … Then I realized spamming various abilities and ignoring complications was just as effective as actually paying attention and trying. Incidentally, combat was the same way, so perhaps there was a reason for that. It broke the system and the fun for me, regardless. Still, I think with some alternations, this system has a lot of potential.

Vanguard tried doing some alterations to it, including making it turn-based, which meant that you couldn’t really just spam anything. It was a good effort, but it left players with a system that was very slow going, very, very repetitive, and somewhat akin to the eight circle of Hell.

Variation in Goods
In EverQuest 2, as your quality degraded, you would eventually be lowered to a lesser grade product. If you turned out a Grade A product, it would generally be better than a Grade B, C, or D one. It would usually provide better stats, work more effectively, etc… This was nice, but when it came to variation in goods, Star Wars Galaxies was king – at least in the pre-NGE era, I can’t speak for it now.

In Galaxies, the effectiveness of a product could range widely. The same good from one person could be barely usable, while made from a master craftsman could be absolutely amazing. Variations in goods were not divided into grades like EverQuest 2, but rather ranged fluidly based on a number of factors. The skill of the crafter helped, of course, but so did the type of resource he used, as you did not have to use very specific resources to make items. You could use any type of bone, for example, but certain bones were better at making certain products. Each resource had its own properties, and having a firm understating of those properties could enable you to make far better items. Through experimentation processes, you could find just the right mix of materials to make the ultimate product. Heck, you could even name it with your own brand too.

Certain crafters gained a reputation for being particularly good at their trade. I remember wandering across the Dune Sea of Tatooine once to track down the quaint home of a master armorsmith once – now that felt pretty epic. It was the level of complexity and the variation in goods that allowed that to happen.

Plus, Galaxies had harvesters and factories, so you didn’t have to mindlessly grind out items. This is good, given the actual crafting process was dull as any other game.

Getting the Materials
…I haven’t found a game with a real good way of getting resources and making that somehow fun. I hear Free Realms has mini games. I haven’t played it yet, so I haven’t a clue.

Shy of that though, if you could somehow combine the aspects of all of these different games, you might well wind up with a pretty epic crafting and trade system, unlike any a gamer has seen before. Of course, if you did so, you likely wouldn’t have much time left over to create a combat system or content. Then again, you could make a pretty amazing crafting-only game, which … actually might work.

That question should never arise. Everything you can do in a game should be “worth the effort,” as a game should be, you know, fun and entertaining. Now, before I go down this train of thought any further, I need to clear up a few things quickly: When I say that everything should be “worth the effort,” that doesn’t mean that I believe all games should be extremely easy. I have no issue with games requiring me to spend a long time on certain activities to progress further, or whatever. However, those activities should be fun to do. It shouldn’t be a question whether or not the end result will be worthwhile, I should want to do those activities for the sake that they’re enjoyable to do.

If you’re including gameplay systems, they ought to be fun. If I need to kill a thousand enemies before I level up, that’s perfectly fine. However, those battles should be enjoyable. If I have to create a thousand wooden boards to progress in crafting, creating those boards should be fun, too. It shouldn’t be some arduous task that requires some special reward to be worthwhile.

Mind you, that’s all easier said than done. I have played MMOs with fairly fun combat systems (PlanetSide – I never specified MMORPGs – and, oddly enough, Vanguard). I’ve never really played a game with fun crafting, but I would say that EQ2 came closer than anything else (before I realized that spamming random abilities was just as effective as paying attention). So, I believe it is possible to create fun systems. This isn’t just limited to crafting and combat though – any activity that players do, should be designed so that they’re having fun doing the activity. I think the primary question that a designer should be asking is “would I do this if there was no reward attached to it.” If the answer is an emphatic “heck no!” then why is it being included? Find the fun – a guiding principle in game design that I sometimes wonder if MMO designers actually remember to focus on, instead of just creating expansive games.

It doesn’t matter what the genre is, it just matters that the gameplay is fun – the addiction to getting some sort of reward shouldn’t be the main motivating force behind players actions. This isn’t to say that all MMOs are entirely unfun, after all, everyone has different tastes and what one person finds fun, another will not. Yet almost all MMOs contain activities that are, without a doubt, not designed to be enjoyable. That shouldn’t actually happen, even though it can be difficult to avoid such pitfalls.

I bring up EVE every so often here. This is largely because I play it every so often – although I’m not currently – but also because I find the game genuinely fascinating. Six years after launch, few games can say that they haven’t just had solid retention rates, but that they’ve actually added to their subscription numbers. Significantly. Most games do exactly what Warhammer Online did; get a big launch (750k subs) and drop off after that point (slightly less than EVE now). Some also pull an “Age of Conan” and build up an awful lot of subs… then drop hugely significantly.

High profile MMOs like that tend to build up a lot of hype that can’t be met. Once people see that the game can’t possibly live up to their hopes and dreams, they’ll drop it and move on. Building hype isn’t a bad thing, though. Getting a huge user base right off the bat is going to help an MMO, but it is basically expected that you’ll lose a huge amount of your subscribers post-launch. It makes sense, given that not everyone is going to be pleased with their purchase. The sad part is that they never build up a strong enough marketing machine to reel in more people to get their subscriptions up.

Then, most models are built from the same mold. An awful lot of them are more than just a little bit similar, which presents a major issue. MMOs are more costly than most types of games, and tend to suck up more time. Only a limited amount of people are willing to play more than one at any given time. So, we have all these games competing over a very finite resource of players, but they’re doing little to differentiate from each other. So, when you have a Juggernaut like World of WarCraft, with MMOs trying to compete with it… You’re going to see a lot of fail. Yet, development studios are sticking with the strategy and adding more titles to the Fail Brigade (which isn’t to say that they’re turning out bad games).

Throw in yet another problem that many of these games are designed as very, very linear theme parks, and people will feel the sense of accomplishment for beating the game. That isn’t necessarily bad, but it also isn’t good for strong retention rates. If you get too high in something, there’s a greater chance of dropping out as you find yourself running out of things to do. I don’t see a lot of MMOs providing all that terribly much to keep people around these days either.

Then you have a game like EVE. It is an extremely niche game. It didn’t have any prior-existing IP behind it. It came out of a totally no-name developer from Iceland. It is also often enough jokingly referred to as “Spreadsheet Online” due to the general gameplay style. It has very, very little in the way of quest content and the like and other theme-park like features. By all means, it has a recipe that is built for anything but success. Which is why it succeeds.

It is extremely niche. To steak a metaphor from Raph Koster, it isn’t a sapling trying to grow in the shade under the tree of the largest traditional MMO (ie: currently WoW). Rather, it is off somewhere else, getting enough sun to grow much larger than everything else below that giant tree.

Not every niche game is going to be an instant-success either, though. Jumpgate, which came out before EVE, is a very, very tiny game. A Tale in the Desert isn’t exactly supporting giant numbers either. They do still exist though – and the former is even getting a much higher profile sequel. Still, it is definitely a risk, one way or the other. As I’m sure Tabula Rasa and AutoAssault will verify.

So, a niche game can work, provided it is, you know, good enough.

I’ve been interested in mythology for most of my life,  so when I had a chance to jump into Arthurian, Celtic, and Norse mythology with Dark Age of Camelot, I jumped at it. I found myself immersed in a world that I had some connection to, and it was interesting to me. EverQuest 2′s Norrath is a fairly deep and complex world, and the presentation of the game combined with that really drew me in. I read all 450 pages worth of short stories that were written before Vanguard was released, and even through the problems of the game, I still felt drawn into a very detailed world. Star Wars Galaxies drew me in because of the setting, but also drew me out because of how different it was from what it was based on. With Runes of Magic, I just found myself jumping into some world that I knew nothing about, and was presented with a bunch of quests that did nothing to explain anything about the world, other than some mushroom men and wolf pups needed to be slaughtered.

When I think about it, this makes sense to me. I’ve not only been an avid reader in my life, but I’ve also been a roleplayer for a long time too. Even while I have a hard time roleplaying in MMOs, I still always like being immersed in the world and have an understanding of not just what is going wrong, but how my character fits into the world and why they are motivated to do what they’re doing.

That isn’t to say that this information isn’t at all present in Runes of Magic – it might well be, and there is some information on the world on the RoM website. So, I might have to try reading through that and see if that helps any, if for no other reason than for the sake of experimentation.