I've always been a bit confused on several aspects of MMOs. The only one I was going to bring up in this thread was the amount of time so many of them require you to invest to do things that don't necessarily need to be huge time sinks. World of Warcraft is an easy one to pick on considering it's huge playerbase and monopoly of the market at the moment, so I'll start with it. Flight paths are a handy thing to improve travel time, are they not? I'm sure anyone who plays/played WoW would agree that the game would absolutely be horrid without them, but why is it you have to wait and watch your flight through it's entire process (easily 10 minutes in a lot of cases). If nothing else, there could easily be a button/option somewhere to skip the wait time during a flight. That's a LOT of time, completely wasted (especially if you've taken that flight before and seen that scenery before). FFXI would be another good one to complain of wasted time through game design, but anyone that has played it would most likely know of what I speak. The easiest thing to point out, and most notable for me while trying to play it, was the travel times. Walking was always horrid, distances needed to cross were usually vast, mounts were not achievable until a quite large amount of time was invested into the game, and I never noticed any kind of improvements like WoW's flight paths. Are these kinds of things truly limited due to design problems that are difficult to overcome because of programming limitations or artistic limitations? Are these kinds of wastes only tolerated because players simply expect them? Perhaps they only exist to increase the duration of time a truly dedicated player has to spend in the game before they've completed the game and/or grown tired of it? I've at least tried 10 or more of the more popular MMORPGs, and nearly every one of them has many many of these kinds of 'problems' in them. Any other thoughts/comments? I only gave two examples, but feel free to add more.

I haven't played WOW, but I would suspect that the reason they have have you watch the flight is that they don't want you to be able to jump across the map like crazy. If you skip the flight then you might as well have jumped into a portal and warped over.

If you can just warp around the game then its possible to camp a bunch of spawn locations and quickly cycle through them only stopping when you have something to fight.

Forcing players to spend long periods of time doing things in-game is precisely what current MMORPG developers want. Since the only way they can make money is from players actually playing the game for extended time periods, it works in their favour when things take a long time to do - since it means people will pay for their subscription for a longer time too. Level grinding, quest grinding and even travel take time because of this. This isn't bad design. Sure, it detracts from the player's enjoyment, but it is a profitable design which will help the business stay afloat.

Anyway, being able to warp instantly from place to place can be somewhat game-breaking for a game with a continuous world. Some first-hand examples are the many Ragnarok Online private servers which include free town and dungeon warpers to every location in the game. What ends up happening is certain location (like the starting town, Prontera) are absolutely packed with players of all classes, levels, guilds, etc. because they can instantly travel there to meet people. Say a guild wants to organise a meeting, they will always choose Prontera since it's easy for every member to get there. Without this capability, they'd have to choose somewhere as their HQ (perhaps the major town in the desert) which allows them to have access to dungeons they normally visit and so on. The same occurs with dungeons - some places are packed with mobbers, and some with noobs, because these places offer the best amount of experience for the difficulty the enemies provide. It no longer becomes a case of trekking somewhere special to level but, rather, searching through a list and teleporting to a place you will spend 20-30 hours for grinding.

The original Ragnarok Online featured warps to a small set of locations for a price, which is a far more balanced way of dealing with long-distance travel.

Basically, instant teleportation ruins the spatial and logical distance of all locations in a continuous world. Flights do this to a certain extent too, but at least they aren't instant and without repercussions (i.e. you are "punished" for removing the element of distance by being given 10 minutes of boredom :P).

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Original post by Bravepower Forcing players to spend long periods of time doing things in-game is precisely what current MMORPG developers want. Since the only way they can make money is from players actually playing the game for extended time periods, it works in their favour when things take a long time to do - since it means people will pay for their subscription for a longer time too. Level grinding, quest grinding and even travel take time because of this. This isn't bad design. Sure, it detracts from the player's enjoyment, but it is a profitable design which will help the business stay afloat.

This isn't meant to be sarcasm, but would it not be better to have a faster paced enjoyable game rather than a time consuming dull one? I get that they wouldn't want you to get through the game quickly and just quit at end-game, but a more enjoyable game would also promote replay... I would think. I don't know that there's but one or two MMOs I've played that I felt I could accomplish much of anything within only an hour or two.


Regarding not wanting players to just hop around the world all crazy like, I can sorta kinda understand that. I may not be able to provide a better alternative (I have some ideas, but none with other issues as well), but it just sounds like taking the easy way out to add in such silly time based restraints.

There are lots of other time consuming processes that bother me as well that I didn't list, such as games requiring 5 seconds per item you craft when you need to craft hundreds to potentially level your crafting, extremely slow player movement, not offering alternate forms of transportation JUST because a player is lower level, etc.

When it comes to mounts the developers essentially lure you into playing more. You know that as you level up you will have access to more things ("rewards") such as new spells, more money, equipment, mount, etc. It gives an incentive to play the game longer and thus pay more for the subscription.

I can think of two explanations:

The first is cost. The game creators are expected to provide players with enough playable content to allow players to play as much as they want. If the players run out of fun things to do, they'll get bored and quit. If you're running a subscription based game, you really want to avoid that ever happening, which means potentially thousands of hours of content. Fun content becomes boring content if repeated enough-- the reward of flying turns into the tedium of... flying. Since all games, even large MMOs like WoW, have finite budgets, they have to pace their content. Which means there must be some dull, repetitive content.

The second is psychological. People perceive rewards with a higher cost as more valuable. Effectively all costs to players in a computer game equate to time spent. So your players will enjoy the fun bits of the game more if they are suitably punctuated by dull bits.

This is not to say that you couldn't build a game without time sinks, but it might end up being substantially less popular than one developed using the same number of man hours and used them appropriately.

As Bravepower said, and I would have to agree, the developers want and above all need the users time to be occupied.

Taking WoW as an example, observe how fast content is completed as soon as it hits the live servers. Part of the issue is allowing users to figure it out on test realms, but ultimately it is hard to actually create a completely full time experience.

Creating time sinks like grinding, limited drops, real time flight paths and repeatable quests is necessary to make the game feel lively, long and worthwhile.

Do I think this is the best developers will ever be capable of? Absolutely not! Things will get better, there will be more to do and the tedious activities can be made more engaging but that will but up to the next generation of games.

Some good points raised in this thread. :)

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Original post by Mythics This isn't meant to be sarcasm, but would it not be better to have a faster paced enjoyable game rather than a time consuming dull one? I get that they wouldn't want you to get through the game quickly and just quit at end-game, but a more enjoyable game would also promote replay... I would think.

Mythics, I agree completely. I'm of the opinion that the majority of current MMORPGs are plagued by lazy design decisions, and the top few ones manage to survive because there are those players who, above all else, value the community aspect inherent in this type of game.

Perhaps I'm a little jaded, but I believe they've set a low gameplay standard for MMORPGs from the beginning and thus we have come to expect a subpar experience when playing them. Either that or we don't play them at all. I've read a few testimonials and articles where ex-MMO gamers said they felt like the game was more like a job than fun. Personally, I think an MMOG which has actually fun gameplay would be a blast, but right now that's something the future holds.

Something else I wanted to point out is the faster the game lets you do things the faster you can get through content. If fighting a rabbit takes 1 min, then in order to get experience from 60 rabbits is going to take you an hour, that means the rabbit area is going to capture your attention for atleast that long before you can safely move on and forget about it. But if you can instantly kill rabbits in 1 sec then the rabbit area is only going to last for a minute or 2.

Also an MMORPG is a RPG so I personally think having things take time adds to the atmosphere and make the world seem more real.

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Original post by Bravepower Forcing players to spend long periods of time doing things in-game is precisely what current MMORPG developers want. Since the only way they can make money is from players actually playing the game for extended time periods...

That is one business model, but it is not the only business model. Perfect World is freely playable, and yet it turned a tidy profit of US$29 million, on sales of US$56.2 million in these economically troubled years.