The repetitive and boring gameplay in WoW is probably intentional. | Hacker News Reader

The repetitive and boring gameplay in WoW is probably intentional.

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34 pointsamichail37 comments

I came to the conclusion long ago that the only effective way to have effective non-grinding gameplay in an MMORPG is to base the game around competition between players. It is infeasible from a monetary perspective (development costs) and a practical standpoint to have interesting, custom-built content to fill years of gameplay.

What can break this barrier is interactions between actual people, which are far more interesting and variable than anything a developer can put together himself. The purpose of the game world should be to facilitate competition between players as best as possible.

Finally, a game should also be based around an activity that is inherently enjoyable without the existence of progression. For example, Team Fortress 2 is a lot of fun to play even though you're not "leveling up" or getting "epic equipment". World of Warcraft, by comparison, wouldn't addict anyone if there were no levels or equipment.

I can recall many games that have done either (or both) of these to some extent and were far more fun and interesting than any WoW clone:

1. Planetside. Not merely an MMOG first-person shooter, but one in which the primary content of the game consists of player combat. Shooting people in multiplayer games is fun, and doing it for territorial control with your friends in a persistent world is even moreso. Global Agenda looks like it might be bringing this concept back in 2010.

2. Shattered Galaxy. One of those games that got great review scores in every magazine and then disappeared off the map. A somewhat flawed but still very fun MMORTS, it was a blast to play even ignoring the progression aspect, and consisted entirely of player-vs-player team tactical combat with territorial control aspects. Incredibly addictive despite the pretty minimal progression system.

3. EVE Online. Failed miserably at the "base itself around fun activities" moniker, but based itself almost entirely around player-vs-player combat, empire-building, and market-based competition. To this day, it has set a bar for epic-scale player competition that no other game has gotten near. Basically all of the game's content was entirely player-generated: wars between player-run alliances over player-built space stations using player-built spaceships constructed using player-mined minerals.

In short, make it fun, and make it about competition between people, not between people and Orc NPCs.

What's interesting here though is that grinding seems to be a great way to build a successful (MMO)RPG. This is counterintuitive.

I don't think it's counterintuitive.

Which is easier: making a slot machine that will keep someone gambling for 30 minutes or making an interesting game that will keep someone playing for 30 minutes?

I would guess that people who play slots don't find them boring. The contradiction seems to be that grinding could be both boring and addictive at the same time.

>It is infeasible from a monetary perspective (development costs) and a practical standpoint to have interesting, custom-built content to fill years of gameplay.

Huh. Autogenerated MMORPG content seems... remotely plausible. Or at least, some of it could be autogenerated. The terrain, at least, and names. Maybe some of the quests. I haven't seen anyone trying this though, I guess it's hard to make autogenerated content pleasant.

EVE Online did autogenerated content for most of the base universe: the devs even noted that the random seed they used for the universe was "42". Of course, quests and such were hand-crafted later, this was just for the names, star systems, connections between them, NPC-controlled space stations, planets, moons, asteroid belts, resources, etc.

The real problem IMO is that autogenerated content can't be any more inherently interesting than the algorithm that created it. In EVE, this wasn't a problem, because the autogenerated content was merely intended as a "playing field" on which other events happened, but if the autogenerated content is the content itself, I think you'll have serious problems making it non-repetitive.

The compelling part of a RPG is the process of discovery - discovering the world, the story, monsters, powers, etc. If the content is hand-crafted, there's always something new around the corner, which keeps the game fresh.

The problem with autogenerated content is that the process of discovery changes to discovering the algorithms used to generate the content. Once the player has discovered those algorithms, it's impossible to continue having a fresh experience. So "autogenerated" is, at best, taking hand-crafted content, repeating it a few times, and changing some details in the hope that the player won't notice the repetition right away.

This is, of course, only in the context of traditional RPGs - more sandbox-style games, like Dwarf Fortress, or Love (or, hell, at the other extreme of auto-generated content, Tetris) can do just fine.

One of the problems with auto-generated content is that the setting is typically extremely static. If you could build a properly robust dynamic environment, the auto-generated content would depend hugely on how players actually interact with the (dynamic) gameworld.

I'm sure some would figure out the algorithms involved in such a game, but if you add enough fuzzy logic in, it could potentially keep the wool over most of the players' eyes..

Nethack seems to succeed with generating interesting automated content. It is even fun to just read the "elevation stories", each of them is different.

I think in theory interesting automated content should be possible to achieve, for example by simulating a "real" world. Most MMORPGs I have seen so far don't seem to simulate much at all (some prices for goods at the most).

The counterargument is probably that it is too difficult to emulate the entities in a MMORPG well enough to make it interesting. To which I reply: Conway's game of life is interesting, and it is just a very simple cellular emulator.

One of the game ideas I have considered: imagine the players have landed on a huge alien planet, and somehow must figure out how to survive. To survive, they have to cooperate with the alien life forms, for example figure out how to farm them, prevent their extinction, mutate them to become nice herd animals, and so on. So the life forms wouldn't have to display human intelligence - they could be plants and animals, and perhaps it could still be interesting. Besides, players should be allowed to program robots to work for them. Maybe they would have to struggle with environmental hazards and what not.

Personally I think I would be interested in such a game, probably seeing it more as a platform for research and experimentation than a mere game. But I grant that it might never get a following remotely as big as WoW :-)

As the creator of a MMO, I can tell you it's absolutely intentional. Our initial design document had the word "grinding" it in many times; I'm sure theirs did too.

If you want people to sink hundreds of hours into a game, the gameplay is going to include a LOT of repetition. The tricky part is to keep it fun and engaging despite this.

If a design document of mine had the word "grinding" it in many times, I'd do something else instead.

Another way to make people sink hundreds of hours into a game is to make it play well competitively. It's surprising that one of the prime examples of this (StarCraft) comes from the same company as WoW.

MMORPGs and RTSs aren't directly comparable. Due to nature of the genre there's no long-term reward possible in RTSs outside of self-improvement, whereas this is generally the focus of RPGs, massive and online or not.

There's a fair amount of rote and practice involved in becoming good at StarCraft. The "grinding" in WoW can also lead to subtle and gradual improvement at the game that makes you better at it.

Sure, Blizzard made Starcraft, but everyone forgets they also made Diablo. Diablo II was grind central.

I doubt you can extrapolate from your experiences on a single MMORPG to the industry as a whole. Grind may well be intentional in your case, or in WoW; but in (many) other MMORPGs, the designers put a lot of work into reducing grind. Grind is always a double-edged sword, and rather than focus on grinding for grinding's sake, I recommend you focus on creating a compelling gaming experience first; worry about metastructure when you've managed to do that.

I never said I focused on grinding for grinding's sake.

Our game is a parody, and our main focus is on creating a universe that is funny and engaging. It would simply be bad game design if we didn't recognize that grinding is part of the MMORPG experience.

You obivously know this because you used the word "reducing" when referring to it.

"If you want people to sink hundreds of hours into a game, the gameplay is going to include a LOT of repetition."

Which is probably why I find it difficult to play most video games as I quickly get bored at any task that involves mindless/near-mindless repetition.

I also find it difficult to muster much interest in being involved in working on these kinds of projects because I find it sad that many people's pursuit of distraction/passtime would be something that involves massive repetition (work) with little tangible benefit.

I look forward to seeing MMORPGs developed that require a far greater degree of creativity and open-endedness in them.

Pretty much all modern video games are designed to exploit the same four or five cognitive flaws. The best way to see this in action is to sign up for Idle RPG:

http://idlerpg.net/

The one thing video games are good for is learning to recognize these patterns. That way at least you'll have a fighting chance at avoiding people who use this stuff to try to exploit you in real life.

IdleRPG sounds like http://progressquest.com/

Can you list those cognitive flaws?

A full explanation would take a while, but here are a few points:

1) Reality is generally continuous. Anytime you see a discontinuity in life, it means someone is probably skimming off the top. (e.g. leveling up)

2) We're all basically the same. Anytime you do something in return for social status, you're probably getting fucked in other ways. (e.g. going to law school)

3) Wealth is generally abundant. Any time you're doing work to get something scarce, someone else is probably making money off what you're doing. (e.g. buying limited edition stuff.)

Thanks. Do you know if anyone has written about this more extensively?

Not really. Alfie Kohn does have a book called No Contest, where he mentions in passing how competition is used to control people. But it's not really more than a couple pages out of the whole book. And there is another book called Measurement in Psychology that talks about how what most people think of measurements aren't; but that's not really about social control either.

The topic really deserves its own book, but none exists as far as I know.

In MMOs it's easy: go look at the psychology of rewards. Psychologists found that if you rig up an experiment where you take rats and give them a button where they get food when they press it they'll more or less do the sensible thing: when they're hungry they press it and then eat.

However, if you rig it up so that if they press it they some times do NOT get food they'll immediately press the damn button until their tiny paws fall off. (No joke.) Even though they could do the same thing (press it until they are no longer hungry), the inconsistent rewards makes them freak out. It's the same thing with MMOs--that's why MMOs have loot that you have a better chance of winning the lottery than getting: because it makes people play 24/7 until they die of exhaustion.

As for myself... i prefer to play games that aren't quite as blatantly copied from psychological experiments. Once you buy into the internal logic of the MMO you're done for until you crash and/or quit.

This is also why gambling is so addictive: intermittent reward.

I discussed this a long time ago in a comment: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=226688

The reward treadmill is the secret to retention. Get 'em hooked with quick rewards in the early part of the progress curve, then string them along at the highest levels. Otherwise people will quit in droves before the expansions come.

I remember someone mentioning that WoW (and other good MMOs) have a 30 second rule, in that you can run 30 seconds in any direction and find something to do (even if its killing more mobs) in order to keep the player's attention

Bungie, the Halo developers, as well as many other developers follow this philosophy. How can you take 30 seconds of fun and repeat that throughout the entire game? That's what many studios strive for.

That's true too, but what I meant was more specifically for MMOs (and games that have the player move in similar ways) - any bits of fun in the game should be not more than a 30 second drive/walk/run from another one.

Imagine, for instance, a map of Elwynn Forest (if you've played WoW) and construct a graph over it of all the quest-related things to do or see - none of them should be more than a 30 second run from the nearest neighbor. Whether this is actually the case is an implementation issue :)

"Thus, by creating a direct correlation between in-game power and time spent grinding, every player will at least have the potential to reach the top 20% (although the Pareto principle will still apply to the amount of time spent grinding)."

This is like translating your time and effort into worthless in-game currency (reputation in game). At least if it was based on real life skills like accuracy and response times, you could train these real life skills and get benefits in and out of game.

Call of duty rocks, no need to grind (as long you're not trying to level up). I can just hop in and dominate. I imagine that people who play Call of Duty online are the least likely to also play World of Warcraft regularly.

Given my experience with many solo RPGs and with a couple MMOs besides WoW, I'd say modern WoW is actually pretty gentle on the grinding curve than most games. (Try playing Etrian Odyssey or FF XI, gads...)

I stopped playing after WoW after about a year not due to boredom, but frustration with end game content and game play emphasis during holiday events due to the new achievements system. It really ruined what really was, for me, a laid back, semi-relaxing game turning it into a grunt fest.

For some, the "boring" content is more meditative instead.

Grinding is only boring and repetitive if you just try to be average while doing it allowing for a huge margin of error. Compare this to playing chess or poker, is it "grinding" there to play the same thing over thousands of times? If you are just mindlessly shoving pieces around a board, going "all in" every hand without looking at your cards, or if you just randomly "grind" -- yes all 3 of those activities sound horribly boring to me.

While it is certainly possible to grind in WoW, it's not mandatory or necessary. You can get well along doing instances, quests and player-versus-player, and even get good items on the way. No need to grind 1000 trolls to get a good sword or staff ;-)

I myself prefer doing instance groups more than anything else in WoW.

Aversion to grind is why I prefer Diablo 1 to Diablo 2. First one is hard enough to be adventure. Second one is just a grind.

My aversion to grind might be also the reason why I don't seek daily job.

subscription fees + time invested in leveling = sunk costs

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunk_costs#Loss_aversion_and_th...

players will spend more time playing than they would otherwise want to due to their perception of sunk costs, hours of gameplay provided expands to meet this demand with a grinding mechanism being the cheapest type of gameplay to offer

I can't stand WoW. I try playing for 30 minutes and just quit.

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