The Business: The MMO Problem Stems From Violated Expectations

As a follow-on to yesterday's post, here's Josh Strife Hayes talking about tutorials as a vital element of bringing players into your game.

To summarize, the objective is: "...the goal isn't hold the player's hand as you force them to have fun. It is to make them aware of what they can do, give them a chance to do it and combine it until they eventually know everything." How?

1. Introduce a new mechanic in a safe play and let the player use it at-will. Then present a challenge that must be overcome using said mechanic.
2. Stack previous mechanics together into increasingly complex situations. Give them the opportunity to see how everything they previously learned works together in harmony with that they're learning now, giving them that "Ah-hah!" moment when they realive how things work together.
3. Present this information to them in the same way that the rest of the game is presented, keeping narrative and media cohesion.
4. Integrate this entire process into the opening of your game so that it doesn't feel like a tutorial, but the natural opening of your game. If they say "Ugh, tutorial", you failed.

Josh's video shows very easy-to-reference examples of good and bad introductory experiences, and you should heed these if you are a videogame designer because if you don't snare a prospect right away you'll lose them over four out of five times, closer to nine out of ten. While there is applicability for tabletop gaming here, that's for another post.

What a tutorial does is not just instruct a player on how to manipulate the controls and navigate the playspace, it sets the expectations of required effort to succeed. This is what all those MMOs having issues with players skipping or quitting are actually reacting to: a violated expectation.

This is because MMORPGs, by and large, are terrible about the New Player/Early Game experience. Even the better ones don't have good tutorials, if they have them at all. You may learn how to use the control and move about, but you do not learn how the core gameplay content actually works due to not being in it much until you're near or at the endgame. What you play, aside from a dungeon or two here or there, is so easy that it is effortless and so the player comes to expect this as the norm.

That may be tolerable in a single-player experience, but it is not in multi-player. Other players are not there to train you; they are expecting you to be competent and just slide into your chosen role, doing what you are expected to do at the level you're expected to perform at, as revealed by over 20 years of Revealed Preference. If the game doesn't train you to meet the expectations of endgame, then you won't and that's when that sudden difficulty jump slams into you and you hit that Quit Moment.

Now couple that poor establishment of expectation with the following things: most content in a MMORPG is at endgame, most players are at endgame, and the top levels of prestige and power are at endgame. The result? Disdain for, and discounting of, everything short of endgame; the "Ugh, tutorial" sentiment is applied to everything before endgame and thus is born "The real game starts at the cap."

(Note: This problem varies greatly across the sector, with World of Warcraft being the worst; others, such as Final Fantasy XIV, are far less riddled with this cancerous meme but all MMOs are still afflicted by it because most players will quit if there is no endgame- again revealed by over 20 years of Revealed Preference. No players, no revenue, no business, no game, no paycheck for the devs.)

The way out of this is not just to make a competent tutorial, but the entire game must be consistent with the tutorial. Everything you intend for endgame must be present from the start and introduced in the same consistent manner aforementioned. Do you want a mechanic where the entire group stacks together to split the damage? Have the player do this with a NPC group first, and make this visual and audio cues consistent thereafter. None of this "Use red this time, blue the next, mark with a star, then with a circle" nonsense that just makes players mad- looking at you, World of Warcraft.

It's not enough to make your early game a natural part of the entire game. Your entire game must be treated like a competent tutorial. The best games--as Josh notes--do this, and the best franchises do this consistently; it's why the Souls series and its close cousins (Demon Souls, Bloodbourne, Elden Ring) remain popular and the older games still get played to this day and most complaints about games are traced back to this failure to establish and maintain expectations of what is required to succeed. Fix this shit or get left behind.