The Business: Friction Is The Special Sauce of MMOs

Stupid Irvine Game Company has a proposed subsystem change that might not such for its flagship game.

Bellular's comment that this proposed change to how item crafting will work, and its criticism by the key demographic driving the game's business on terms of efficiency, is why Bellular made the crack about "Do you want to play a MMO?"

He used the word "friction" to describe that necessary element of a successful Virtual World game, as it gives the game more things to do and more ways for players to participate other than constantly farming the battle content and engage in player-v-player combat, something Stupid Irvine has been lousy about for over a decade and competitors have constantly shown them up over.

This is not confined to the economic sphere. Friction indicates a lack of processes automated into the game's code that smoothes out the information flow, demanding less effort and dedication from the player to attain success in their endeavors; the live game now tells you where to go, what to do, and even how to do it at time in no uncertain terms- and before that it allowed third-party addons do all that as well as automate picking up and turning in quests.

Then there's the well-known fact that Irvine has always allowed for third-party addons to automate the information flow of combat encounters, both against NPCs and against other players, allowing players to perform far beyond what the native user interface and their own native ability would allow- and we see proof of this when top-end raiders come to games that ban such tools like Final Fantasy XIV.

Automated group formation tools negating the need to solicit other players to perform group activites, such as running a dungeon or dealing with a hard overworld NPC, turn the game into a glorified lobby where other players might as well be NPC bots- and often don't play as well as those provided.

All of this removal of friction happened incrementally over time in response to common player complaints, complaints themselves born of the developers' own incompetence and intransigence in fixing it (e.g. Irvine implenting automated dungeon group formation because too many players playing off-meta races, classes, or specializations got benched and thus hit a hard wall in gameplay progression; this could be avoided if that meta problem got properly addressed).

Yet each step further turned the game into Action RPG With Extra Steps, and away from a MMO.

The answer, as with tabletop RPGs, is to accept that many players are Normies and reintroduce the friction anyway. Then do your jobs and put forth a game that actually works, a process that will necessarily have a development time of multiple years in Alpha and Beta status before launch; we're looking at no less than five and easily ten or more.

And Corporate just can't accept that, which is why AAA will never be the ones to do what must be done.

The irony here is that tabletop shows the way, and I don't be Current Year by Wankers or their across-the-street fellow travelers Baizuo. I'll expand on this tomorrow.