The Business: How To Fail At MMO Design w/ Josh Strife Hayes

Alas, no Geek Gab today, so here's Josh Strife Hayes with your weekend geek talk.

Oh look, a old grindfest MMO.

This is meant to be an Everquest competitor. It failed.

It's not hard to see why. It's a grindfest where you're clearly expected to group up to do anything, and you do that grinding in a group for hours on end since there's nothing else to do and that's the only way to gain Experience Points and loots--what you're in this for--making this a very tedious and boring gameplay loop.

Now take away the grouping and you have Josh's experience.

Nevermind the mechanics, this game failed out the gate; Normies would quit within minutes when the grindfest became clear, and it's obvious that they did. For its faults, Everquest was a marked improvement over its competitors which is why it ruled the MMORPG world until World of Warcraft dethroned it.

Why? Josh gave you the answer: "There is nothing to do."

The Revealed Preference of Normies is not self-direction. They want to be pointed to a goal, handed a checklist, put on a path, and told to get running while removing as much tedious and irrelevant bitchwork as possible- including grindfests and forced grouping. Every major MMORPG trends in this direction, and the dominant one is the one that best fulfills these criteria once awareness of that satisfaction reaches critical mass; this is how Everquest, World of Warcraft, and now Final Fantasy XIV seized and held that dominant position.

You see this mirrored in single-player RPGs, and it is the basis for the resistance to Mobile Trash monetization tactics (make it tedious bitchwork, sell the lubrication that greases the wheels). You're even seeing it reflected in tabletop RPGs now, given that Official D&D exihibits these preferences even after excising Death Cult pozzing influences.

Keep this in mind for your own commercial RPG projects; satisfied Normie preferences reliably generate profit.