Decoding Dragons

[GW2] Guilds, friendlists, and social media – social apparatus in MMOs

When I talk about social apparatus, I mean the functions within games that we use to communicate, coordinate, and structure our social interactions. I think this is an area that is often under-developed in newly launched MMOs, and is sadly stunted in established games due to the complexity of improving legacy systems. This is not about social engineering, or telling players how they should interact with each other, but about giving players the tools to organize and communicate effectively.

This is a long-standing bug-bear of mine, ever since the Real ID debacle in World of Warcraft, but has been brought to the front of my mind by the rudimentary systems available in Guild Wars 2.  The game has only just launched, and the design teams will be focused on fixing all of those bugs, rather than building new features. I fully do not expect any MMO to launch with perfect social apparatus, but it still astounds me that the social apparatus so often seems like an afterthought.

Always online, always connected

ArenaNet have  implemented a BattleTag style account wide friendlist. This is a step in the right direction – keeping friendships and guild linkages at the account level instead of on the player level removes a lot of redundancy and adds much convenience. Players will also post on the official forums under their tag, meaning that their contribution to the wider community will be much more visible. This unified friendlist is mostly awesome, except that the ability to hide from guildies and friends on an alt is completely missing. That said – is the ability to hide relevant in this day and age of being always connected to social networks, email and IMs via Smartphones? ArenaNET has avoided most of the Real ID weaknesses – the service is global, has statuses, and does not use your real name.

Just as Blizzard wised up and made remote guild chat an integral service rather than a premium extra, the ArenaNet team announced prior to launch that they plan to bring GW2 to smartphones and tablets. Rift still has the gold standard in mobile apps, but the more MMOs give their customers useful mobile apps, the better it is for you and me. ArenaNet has always been about removing the barriers that stop people playing together, and other MMOs are falling in line with this reasonings. By enabling players to be connected even when not at their computer, and centralizing identity via the Tag system, MMOs are finally catching up with the way that people actually play their games and connect with their gaming friends outside of games.

Reaching out – Social Media and MMOs

ArenaNet shows a lot of social media savey in general, and this is very obvious from the way in which the CMs quickly stepped up to the plate on Twitter and Facebook in response to the headstart problems that Guild Wars 2 faces.  Their zero tolerance policy may or may not yield results in the long run, but the attempt makes me want them to succeed (I have similar ~feels~ about the Trion team.) During development, the CMs kept the game in focus through engaging with GW2 bloggers and tweeters, and generally supporting community, so it was something of a surprise to me that the game did not launch with something similar to RIFTconnect. Players in Rift are able to tweet, facebook or tumblr from the game with a simple inline command – and can even send screenshots straight to any of these social services. This feature was initially very successful for raising awareness of all the cool stuff in Rift, and allows players to communicate with their twitter friends seamlessly from the game.

The feature isn’t without it’s downsides. If you follow a lot of people, then twitter easily drowns out in-game chat in the chat window. If you forget to adjust your defaults, you run the risk of spamming your twitter/facebook/tumblr followers with achievements and discoveries.

I think a lot of GW and WoW players may well respond that they don’t WANT social media in their game. I know many MMO players who are openly disdainful of social media, so I can understand the lack of motivation to spend development resources on such a feature. I’m also hoping that they’re the sort of thing that ArenaNet will add in later, once launch wrinkles are finally gone.

Multiple guilds – not so multiple

The idea of belonging to multiple-guilds does not live up to what I was hoping for. I understand that it is not fair to allow players to garner benefits from all guilds they are a member of, and that it would be unbalanced for a character to contribute influence to multiple guilds at once. I do. I just wish that the communication/social functions of guilds were not tied to the ‘Represent’ toggle.

Currently, Guild membership is held at the account level, but active participation in a guild is controlled by the player at character level. This means that choosing to Represent your PvP guild while you arse around in the Mists results in cutting off your access to the guild chat of your RP or PvE guild. It’s fantastic that a player can treat their guild choice as a kind of running buffet, while removing the administration for guild leaders. It’s fantastic that I can ‘be in’ multiple guilds, but frustrating that it creates a social barrier.

I’ve seen a few other bloggers criticising ArenaNet for going so far with a great feature, but not carrying it on to the next step – mainly in regards to the Bank/Collections system and crafting. The guild interface and multiple guilds is another example of that. Perfectly functional, but it could have been just that bit more often. Just as you can view multiple guild rosters at once, I think you should be able to access multiple guild chats.

There are some minor interface tweaks that could be done as well, currently I find the interface doesn’t really make that much intuitive sense. Plus you get guild management functions popping up in bizarre places like the party interface. Hopefully the UX team will be taking a look at that in due course.

Social cues

Guild Wars 2 is also missing a few other things which are odd. Things I didn’t even realise I would miss. Things like guild/officer notes that help guilds sort out just who is who in this brave new GW2 world. As I throw a mix of new guildies together from a variety of sources, it would help if I could add identifying marks on the guild roster.

For me, what made Guild Wars 2 feel a bit lonely with regards to connecting with friends, was that the ‘always online’ nature of the account-guild relationship means that player presence is not telegraphed to any of the people they might be connected to. Think about things like guild achievement spam, the ‘welcome to the guild’ wall of text that often greets new recruits, or even the simple act of saying ‘hello’ to someone when they come online. There is none of that. There’s no sign of these social connections unless you’re looking at the guild or friend pane every five minutes.

Couple that with a simple thing like targeted emotes not doing anything, and the complete lack of /hello, /bye /thank, and GW2 is missing both some basic opportunities that prompt players into talking to each other, and the apparatus to encourage micro-interactions out in the field. What GW2 lacks is not co-operative gameplay opportunities, but the framework for conversations created by guild and social activity information. ‘Person X has come online’ is not a requirement for talking to a friend, but it’s the sort of nudge that has made Facebook successful, and World of Warcraft into the critical mass of players that it is.

(Please note that I understand it is early days yet for Guild Wars 2, and I’m loving a lot about the game in general)

 

[GW2] Guilds, friendlists, and social media – social apparatus in MMOs was published on August 31st, 2012, with the tags , , , , , , , , , , , , under the Analysis, Game Development, Games, Guild Wars 1/2 category. There are currently 6 comments on this article so far.

[GW2] Some quick thoughts from early access

Just a few things that have been on my mind since I started playing on the live servers.

Save up for that 3pt Healing Skill

The default one is fine, but man alive, the 3 point one will kick it’s ass and make your life so much easier during early levelling. I am playing a Norn warrior, and the 3pt healing skill is a regen passive with a flat rate heal. The default scales with your adrenaline.

Buy gathering tools immediately

Not only is it an easy way to make money, once the Trading Post works, but it’s necessary for any of your eventual trade skills. This is probably obvious to most veteran MMO players, but worth remembering if you’re a disorganised person like me.

Be wary of levelling your trade skills immediately

Don’t do what I did and blow a wad of silver (which is in tight supply to begin with) on trade skill items. You’re basically paying to level (and the buff food is lovely, but it does only last for 15 minutes.) If you’re going to do it, set a budget!

The Digital Deluxe Edition was not worth it

So I got some cool stuff, but I didn’t read the fine print while I was in the throes of saving my characters name and have in the process lost a lot of the ‘one off’ buffs available. Why? I’m rather used to Rift and other games, where you get the ‘buff’ items on all your characters whenever you create them. Hmm.

I’m really enjoying this ‘do anything’ thing.

Like, one minute I’m protecting a lady chasing a Jackalope, the next I’m a Snow Leopard. And then I might wander off and throw some snowballs at kids and it all COUNTS. Helping to ressurect someone during battle nets you experience. Going back to an earlier area and helping with events nets you karma, copper, and experience. And then there are vistas, and skill challenges, and points of interest! If you talk to NPCs you get to work on your character traits too!

I’m alone

There has been a thread of conversation in the blogosphere lately about individualist vs collectivist. Guild Wars 2 is at it’s heart individualist – but this often what a lot of MMO designers say they want. They want the player to be the hero. You can only do that if the experience for the player is as smooth and ‘you centric’ as you can make it.

While I think the omission of a /thank emote is a glaring oversight (as pointed out by Siha) I have noticed that I am more willing to throw myself into a fight involving others. Early on it was a big free for all, and very confusing, but as I mastered my skills and figured out how things worked without the triad, I found myself grouping up wordlessly and working well with strangers.

This fella wants bunny food. You can carry the food and get knocked over by bunnies, or you can scare bunnies away from someone carrying food. You can help. You both get credit. Someone has bitten off more than they can chew and is now a jam stain on the road. I see their ‘dead player icon’ and run across the map to help. Most of the time. As our understandings of conditions improve, we find ourselves paying more attention to positioning.

It all adds up.

Am I still alone? No, I’m in a world filled with thousands of players. Just because I’m not talking, it doesn’t mean I’m not playing with anyone.

Siha also pointed out that you can’t help anyone complete quests in the same way that you can in WoW (group kills and the like) and this is true, but I think it might just be a different way of defining ‘helping’ and ‘working together’ in MMOs.

[GW2] Some quick thoughts from early access was published on August 25th, 2012, with the tags , , , , , , , under the Games, Guild Wars 1/2 category. There are currently 4 comments on this article so far.

[MMOs] When is a digital world a soulless world?

I’ve used this phrase a couple of times. I’ve seen it used in others. Why does a particular MMO ‘feel’ soulless to a particular player? Casting an eye over my initial reaction to the game during release week, I seemed to feel positively about the world.

All the little elements I’ve mentioned – the lore that gets deeper as you look, the rifts themselves being connected to the zones, the ability to skip quests you really don’t like without losing the greater thread, the artifacts (what archaeology should have been) it builds up to a satisfying whole. The game has heart.

I’m not sure if I’d agree with that at this point, but both ‘games having heart’ and ‘soulless MMOs’ are very very odd ways to talk about games and gaming, at face value. Let’s take a look at a couple of quotes from bloggers who have used such phrases more recently.

Guild Wars 2 lacks soul, in my opinion. And, while I mean this affectionately, if I’m going to play a soulless MMO with a great development team then it’s going to be RIFT.
- Liore, Herding Cats

This is the quote that prompted me to asking “Why do I feel this game has a soul, and Liore doesn’t. Also what the hell is a digital construct doing having a soul?” Thus, an exploration of ‘soul’ in MMOs was born.

To me, SWTOR feels like another predictable and soulless experience. It’s akin to a slick Hollywood blockbuster movie with cardboard good guys and bad guys with copious amounts of explosions and special effects thrown in for good measure.
- Wolfshead, Wolfshead Online

Wolfshead can always be relied on to dislike a theme-park MMO. Although all the quotes I’ve included here focus on Rift, SWTOR and Guild Wars 2, I think we can assume that Wolfshead probably has the same criticism of the behemoth that is WoW.

I hate Rift as a game. The content that was around when I left was soulless (get it), dumbed down, and just not what I wanted out of an MMO. What was an interesting evolution of the themepark model in beta ended up being a 2011 version of current themepark design at launch.
- Syncaine, Hardcore Casual

Syncaine is another critic of theme-park MMOs. I’m not sure what changed between beta and launch to prompt such hate for Rift, but at least there was a pun involved. In any case, from the above three quotes it is possible to see that there is this conception that games need to have ‘soul’ in order to be an attractive proposition for a player. I doubt most of us would articulate this need in such a way, so I’m going to say that I think for a game to have soul, the player needs to be able to forge an emotional connection with either the virtual space, or the characters and other players within the game. At least for the purposes of this rambling article.

What makes a game soulless?

How can a digital construct that doesn’t even lay claim to imitating personhood be talked of in terms of a soul? Strictly, it can’t, but like most people I could easily talk about the soul of an old house. The old house has character and all the cracks and bumps and bruises contribute to that, the marks of humans living out their lives within the walls of the house. It’s a way of feeling connected to a building. Alternatively, a city centre tower block will often be seen as a soulless construct, despite the thousand of people living out their lives within it’s offices and public spaces. An ancient church in the middle of rolling english fields is romanticised due to generations of focus on the community rituals and experiences shared within, yet now it lies empty due to the secluarisation of the country and it can still be said to have soul.

What does a game share with a building? It’s a construct, though digital, created by many hands. The NPCs and animations are figuratively created and moved by the will of the animators and designers, the feel and function and mechanics of the construct are created by massive collaborative effort for the consumption of thousands of customers. A building is created through the artistic vision of the architect, and then modified by the owners, the project managers, engineers and the thousands of workers that make the initial plan a reality.

So is it this plurality of creators that renders a virtual world ‘soulless’? Videogames, with their narrative elements, are more often compared to films as the ‘other narrative popular medium’. Now, the videogame industry exceeds the film industry in terms of revenue these days, but films have a greater tradition of popular criticism. Film industry traditionalists  criticise the new technology of CGI for being ‘soulless’, so the completely computer generated gaming industry is already fighting a rear-guard action when it comes to the percieved authenticity and emotional heart of a game.

Creating emotional heart

This post came about mainly because of Liore describing Guild Wars 2 as soulless, and then going onto describe RIFT the same way. No piece of digital media can hope to please everyone, and her comment got me examining my own perceptions of Guild Wars 2 (having played the beta) and Rift.

To take a closer look at Guild Wars 2 – the art work and lighting is absolutely stunning. The game is beyond beautiful without trying to be photo-realistic. One of the original trailers for Guild Wars 2 had one of the developers talking about how the game should feel ‘hand-crafted’. In terms of having an emotional centre, that feeling of lovingly created environments is a very good start. Every time I pan the camera around, there are beautiful vistas almost every angle feels like a natural world. The game is huge, and the snatches of conversation I hear as my character wanders around, the way the wind moves through the grass, it feels like a wonderful MMO.

But didn’t I say similar things about Rift? Well, yes, but by the time I got to the end of the levelling curve I was tired of  desert, and the lack of social interaction. After the visual clarity of WoW, I started to find the pretty graphics of Rift inaccessible. The more disconnected from the game I felt, the less heart and charm the game seemed to have. To give a game heart, players need to feel an emotional connection to the world. To say that a film, whether big budget or indie, has charm is to say that the film has succeeded in charming the viewer. To say that a game has heart is to say that it makes the player’s heart (or emotional swell) respond.

The emotional heart of a game comes in part from the central vision of the game, the themes explored by over-arching plots and the atmosphere crafted by the game creators. Diablo 3 is an incredibly monetized game, with emotional connections forged by players who have been waiting for 15 years, yet the emotional heart of the game comes not from the rather simplistic story, but from the atmosphere, music, and the attention to detail displayed in the character animations and the addictive gameplay.

Warcraft has the home advantage

As with many things, WoW has the advantage in that millions of players have already forged emotional connections with the game, the community, and the game world. After not logging for a while, the soaring music of Stormwind as one flies through the front gates still tugs at the heart strings. There’s a lot to be said for the emotional centre created by the veritable mountain of memories created by raid triumphs and failures, by RP moments, by silly guild events involving ogre suits and fireworks. Rift, Guild Wars 2 and The Secret World have to fight against 6 years of emotional highs and lows, of the rituals of WoW raiding and PvP (at least in my case.)

How do I forge a connection with a world that is completely new to me? Despite the gorgeous graphics, as an MMO veteran, a game world of a new MMO is always seen as a construct first, and a ‘digital world’ second. Despite the ratty graphics and legacy designs of Warcraft, the landscape of Azeroth has left an indelible mark my history as a gamer. For many others, previous and concurrent Blizzard games will mean that the emotional connection to Azeroth goes even further.

Questing to create a connection

And this is why the ‘questing’ and social aspects of new games really are the make or break features of a new MMO. Firstly there is building on and evolving a system that has bridged from game to game. Secondly there is the relaying of narrative that helps players connect to the stories of NPCs and to their own tales. Guild Wars 2 eschews the linear narrative approach in the way that players interact with the world. A renown heart, on it’s own, has very little story connected to it. Instead the Renown hearts, the continuing events, create the overall background of an area. I’d even go far as to say that every single zone is a quest, and how a player interacts with the Hearts determines how much or how little of the zone narrative you chose. For me it harks back to the early days of questing in WoW where there were some quest chains, but many individual quests that could go in any order.

Which is not the same thing as min-maxing travel time and XP.

The Hearts definitely appeal to the explorer, but they could appeal to the narrative junky if the player takes the time to talk to the zone scouts.

So emotional heart? Well Guild Wars 2 does that for me whenever it starts to tackle issues of gender and parenthood, because those are the issues that matter to me. Whenever I hear a female charr growling “Kitten’s got a sword too” in answer to a patronising male charr, I cheer inside. For me the game has heart because it’s clear that the developers and artists really believe in what they’re doing. The game feels designed with a gamer like me in mind, and I’m not even that much of a PvPer!

On the other foot, Star Wars: The Old Republic hinges it’s emotional connections on how well the storylines are written, and on the playerbase’s emotional connection to the Star Wars IP. Rift was always going to be battling against the lack of established IP, and the juvenile nature of it’s storylines let it down in the early days. My initial reaction on hearing about the dragons and planes was “Seriously? What happens when they run out of dragons?” Trion have managed to balance out a shallowness of concept by setting the gold standard in terms of content release and response to issues. Yet the dynamic content doesn’t really connect with players on an emotional level (at least not in my experience), and the questing is questing we all know and love. Players who love and enjoy the game, and it’s souls, will have found and made those emotional connection with other players  and the stories of the game. I still have fond memories of solving some of the various puzzles and discovering caches, and those moments of triumph helped  me to forge that connection with the game and start to see it as a game with soul.

What is ‘soul’ again?

I seem to have defined it here as ‘having an emotional centre’, but that is a very ambiguous phrase. Does a game have soul if it was crafted and created with love and passion, or because the designers created a stage suitable for the enactment of ritual, friendship, and emotional highs and lows? I suspect it’s a little of both. There is a tendency to see large companies as faceless entities, with games created by committee with revenue models in mind, and to forget about the passionate individuals that want to create games they want to play. Yet the biggest MMO of all probably has more soul in it, invested by millions of players and thousands of developers and contributors, than the smaller game that is attempting to evolve the MMO genre.

Hence the magic of social features. Rift remains quietly successful and has fabulous social features and connectivity, and many MMO bloggers continue to praise Trion, and I suspect I would find the game a much more emotionally charged experience if I were to start playing it again now. At the moment the personal story in Guild Wars 2 leaves much to be desired, and the emotional connection for me comes from discovering a more motion-based combat style, and hearing of the struggles of Charr females and Norn women. I have no clue if that will persist for me once the game goes live, or if I will find the launch day game lacking in emotional centre. Whether a game is Soulless or not is certainly not an objective thing, in my opinion.

I haven’t touched upon the ‘soul’ of expansions, or on The Secret World, Wildstar, or any number of new MMOs. Do you think my conception of a ‘soul’ for a game is the correct one? There are certainly other things that one could mean by it!

 

[MMOs] When is a digital world a soulless world? was published on June 13th, 2012, with the tags , , , , , , , , , , , , under the Analysis, Game Development, Games category. There are currently 16 comments on this article so far.