How to make a MMORPG successfull?

Community General Discussion
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Hide information, encrypt information, make the game impossible to simulate or analyze, and let player discover the game by themselves. Break all player effort if they try to metagame or minmax, don’t provide any single API for player to help them to beat the game.

When everything is already “solved” before the game is released, the player base can’t be satisfied in any way. See Shadowlands ? Before the game or patch is release, you know everything. You know what to do, you have multiple video and guides that tell you what your journey will be, the amount of surprise is small, and there’s no revolution possible. Everything is already linearized by PTR and Beta, where streamers and players can test and analyze everything before it’s release for the public.

This is what happened in 2004, everything was new, nothing was solved, everything has to be build from scratch, and player was bad, because the flow of information was slow due to 2004 internet connection and lack of player skill.

If I had the power and money to create a new MMORPG a-la-WoW/Wildstar in 2021, my first focus would be to make most thing hidden like the “The Scepter of the Shifting Sands” quest chain (AQ Opening Event). This is a perfect example of how something that start as a simple quest available for everyone, can become an adventure that you’ll never forget.

I wonder if this is possible in 2021 with the current flow of information, the amount of community (Discord, forums, Reddit, …), but I guess this should be the focus #1 for game developer, in my opinion. Break the flow of information, break any tentative to “beat and solve” the game with minmax, and you’ll have a successfull MMORPG with a very healthy community.

From Retail to Classic, you can find the common denominator of player angryness : everything is already solved before it’s released, and that cause a tons of issues like faction imbalance, minmaxers that don’t want to play with lower skilled player, 3rd party website that try to fracture player base, and so on.

And this is why 2004 to 2009/2010 was the peak epoch of World Of Warcraft. Nobody told you how to play, you discovered how to play by yourself.

Hidden phase in Mythic Boss ? Do you remember the “Woaaah” when you saw that first time on Method live ? This is it.

In my opinion, No Beta, No PTR, NDA clause. Internal tester should be the developers, that’s all.

1 Like
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You say all this despite WoW having been successful for over a decade, being able to do all that. :roll_eyes:

And no beta or PTR? Are you daft? Those things exist to iron out bugs and exploits! And even then bugs still get through…

If you want to play spoiler free, don’t frequent the forums and sites like Wowhead and MMO-Champion, and turn off Trade and General chat in-game. Go play raids and dungeons blind never looking up on them. Etc.

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I do think we know too much in advance now. I don’t know how they can tackle that. Unless I put myself under a rock and don’t use any social media, I am always going to know lots of stuff that is coming.

It’s not a simple case of avoiding some key websites. The news is everywhere, it’s discussed everywhere.

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it’s up to you to look up every guide, prerelease info, quest guide etc. before you run the content yourself.
if you want a blind challenge, just stay away from wowhead

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OP, so basically you want to play FFXIV?

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They’d have to encrypt any prepatch data that is downloaded to the players client.

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One of the biggest problems with WoW is the PTR imo, Blizzard relies on the playerbase to be free testers, and in turn they spoil everything by letting people play the patch 3 months before it launches, so by the time it does launch everyone has already seen everything.

Sure, test raid bosses to make sure their mechanics work as intended, but they could just take a few devs to test the minor content internally. This isn’t just the case with 9.1 either, most patches are like this, everyone knows about everything instantly when the patch launches.

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At some point it’s put on a PTR for testing though.

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True, and that does end up with things getting out there when you include all the datamining on top of that.

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