The Business: How To Make Normies Quit Your Game In Droves

So, how can you fuck up your MMO for the Normies you depend upon to succeed? It comes from violating their expectations of entertainment.

The MMORPG has relied on instance group content--dungeons and raids--for 20 years or so now. In that time, as with similar developments in First Person Shooters (also reliant on Normiebux for the AAA titles), the need to retain Normies meant turning the exploration and exploitation of a hostile environment into a virtual theme park ride with some audience participation at specified intervals- and getting some novel rewards at the conclusion.

One way to fuck up your game? Put in a required dungeon with mechanics no Normie would have ever encountered before before, and give no explanation or warning about any of this. Here's a very obvious example.

The second boss in particular is a gross violator. The Normie player had heretofore never encountered a dungeon boss where their normal character interactions where wholly disabled, and only if they were warned by a considerate veteran player--and FF14 has fewer of them than you'd expect given its reputation--would they not automatically fail every single step of that encounter. If the Normie was in a group of first-timers, they would hit a hard wall and not pass it.

This dungeon is a required dungeon--you have to complete it to finish the game--so if, like every other Normie, you come into this blind and no one warns you before hand (when it would be useful) you hit a very sudden and jarring violation of your expectations into Nintendo Hard territory. You can't overlevel this dungeon; you're automatically level-synched if you try. You can't outgear this encounter because you can't exploit your gear to act normally at all. You can't skip this dungeon; it's required to finish the game. You're a Normie, so "Git Gud" doesn't even enter the picture. If you can't get a friend to carry you, you can't brute-force the random group tool to get a random to carry you, and you can't afford to buy a Story Skip from the cash shop, then this is where you quit and never come back.

(Note: The Story Skip doesn't skip the most recent expansion; you still have to--as of this post--do the story for Shadowbringers, and I expect the next iteration will skip you to the start of Endwalker.)

The first boss isn't good either because of the charge mechanic. A Normie player will not have done any of the optional content; they will be Main Scenario only until they run out of MSQ to do. You don't run into Charge mechanics otherwise unless you did optional dungeons and raids before this, so the odds of a Normie--especially now--being familiar with it is slim to none. If that Normie is the tank or healer, you're going to wipe more often than not and thus you may hit that brick wall here instead of the second boss.

The final boss--if you get there--is very busy, but by this point the Normie will have seen Gaze attacks and know how to deal with them; they have to deal with other bosses and trash mobs using Gazes before this point, so the question is overwhelming them with information. This is a very busy fight for a Normal node dungeon, tolerable only on a final boss, and you're going to get complaints over a fight this busy in a required dungeon, but tone it down by about 20% speed and you're good.

But there is another way to fuck up your game, and now we turn to another game at what is considered its peak.

Yes, The Oculus from Wrath of the Lich King, over 10 years ago.

The other major way to piss off the Normie is to make him not play the character he's paid to play and put in time to level and gear up, and the Oculus forces this on the entire group right after the first boss.

No one likes being forced to drive someone else's shitty stock car. That's what compelled vehicle mechanics are in MMOs, and WOTLK is when Blizzard learned the hard way this very lesson. (An error repeated in one of the first raids, The Nexus, for the final phase of the boss fight.) Not only do you need to drive this shit stock car around, totally eliminating the power of both character level and character gear (so Normies can't brute-force a solution), but you have to use it to fight the final boss and you're likely to need it to deal with certain trash mobs.

What was the resulting reaction? Normies skipped this dungeon like it was a Child of Nurgle. You couldn't bribe them hard enough to do it, and it wasn't required to beat the game, so they refused to engage at all.

A similar violation of expectation resulted in the same reaction to another WOTLK dungeon, the last of the 5-mans added: The Halls of Reflection.

This was the final dungeon of the expansion; you had to have top-end raid gear to overgear it enough to brute-force it. You were level-capped in a top-level dungeon, so you couldn't overlevel it. There were quests that required completing it, so most Normies did it once and noped out the rest of the time; they always chose to skip after their one run suffering through it.

Why?

You couldn't actually fight the final boss. If you got within reach of him, you automatically died. If you didn't keep up with the waves of ads and bust down the ice walls then the boss would reach you and you'd wipe and have to do it again. This is a huge violation of Normie expectations. Normies expect to rush right in, dogpile the boss, bust him open like a pinata and get loot as a reward. (This is also why the trash waves routinely wiped groups; they wouldn't bait the trash around corners or follow the kill order.)

Normies hated this dungeon. It is telling that Blizzard never did another like it; they got the memo, and even as the company is now they still haven't done this fuckery again in a dungeon encounter. They also stopped with the forced vehicle mechanics in dungeons after this expansion; there's been non-standard interactions, but never wholesale "LOL, you don't control your character!" moments.

Finally, and I mentioned this in my Stormblood review also, you can force the player to lose no matter what they do or how powerful they are.

Absolute horseshit.

The Normie plays games to enjoy a thrill ride. That ride always comes to a successful conclusion. If you set up the Normie, as 14 does by the point of Stormblood to be a literal godslayer and worth more than a hundred veteran soldiers on the battlefield--a real Musou hero--then you will never have a Normie accept defeat at the hands of anyone who is not established as being on the same tier of power and performance as his character. If you set up the Normie, as WOW did by WOTLK, to be a literal godslayer (remember Cthun and Yogg-Saron?) that smacks around godlike being as an equal then running like a bitch from the Lich King is a bitch move and everyone knows (and rejects) it.

Let the Normie get his wins, moron.

Sure, you can make him work for it, but if you cheat at your own game to force him to lose no matter now high his level is or how powerful his gear is and you require him to do that fight to beat the game then don't be surprised when your user metrics show that you made that fight into a Normie filter and your unsub rates track well to hitting that fight and meeting a brick wall.

Those fights can work, if you adjust the Normie's expectations before he does it to accept the outcome. You have to tell him before the fact what factors the NPC has in his favor that put him on or above the Normie's level, not after and not during. (e.g. Xenos's very powerful Echo should have been revealed before the fight at Rhalgar's Reach, not after Ala Mhigo's liberation) If you don't, it feels like you pulled a bait-and-switch, and bad feels lead to ragequits that stick. Your investors will notice and have your head on a platter if you don't handle it fast.

Normies expect to show up, do the thing, punch the boss's ticket, get their reward and move on until they finish--beat--the game. If they show and up and do the thing, but the boss doesn't fall over as expected then they get mad and they quickly decide (as I said yesterday) to skip, force, or quit depending on if they need to do this to beat the game. The revealed preferences over 20 years show they will skip unwanted difficulty if they can, force what they can't, and quit if they can do neither.

If you need Normiebux, you need Normies, so you need to cater to their expectations of entertainment. Give them what they want: virtual thrill rides that fulfill their fantasies. Save the Git Gud for the gamers.

And remember, Games Journalists as a class are even worse than Normies.