Design Problems With Legion/MMOs in General

Not even a few weeks into Legion's release, normals were no longer relevant content. At this point, if not at the same time, Heroics were no longer relevant content. As it is, for players who started on release day and pushed, regular Mythics are no longer relevant either. Which leads to players complaining they have nothing to do, and developers complaining that players blow through their content too quickly.

Making Content Last

Some games have lots and lots of content. Some games… don’t. MMOs, for the most part, need to have not just loads of content, but they need more content that their players can readily access. Let’s take SW:TOR, Guild Wars 1 and The Secret World as our samples.

Have We Out Grown MMOs?

That's a question that came up last week or so. Johnson makes some good points and arguments, and I don't want to piggy back too much off of what he says. So, go read it, come back, then go below the fold. Underneath is one of my rambling "thoughts on game design" posts. So, keep that in mind. It is rambling and not proofed.

Oh, before you go read it though. Remember, June 27 is a GW2 stress test. Some of us will be at work, or something close to work, so we won't be able to play it. You could say that we've out grown mid-day stress tests.

Measuring Success for Games

Since we're talking about MMOs lately, Guild Wars 2 has a good read. Now, I understand Johanson's point at making the grind of subscription based MMOs sound as terrible as they are. But, realistically, people are not going to plug away at their dailies and progression if they do not find it fun. Some people may choose to suffer a certain amount of indignity, provided the rest of the game is fun.

But, it does ask a really good question: "If we chose fun as our main metric for tracking success, can we flip the core paradigm and make design decisions based on what we’d like to play as game players?"