I tend to use EQ2 as my example game a lot, which makes it the butt of my attacks. But I prefer it over WoW or Lotro, so my griping is not intended to dissuade people from trying it.

In fact, since most MMO players have never tried EQ2, they have no idea what they might be missing. And far too often, I find that MMO designers haven’t played any MMO too seriously… except the one game they happen to really like. That’s a tragic newbie mistake, because you end up reinventing far too much.

So I figured I’d talk about a few of the aspects of EQ2 that are very well done.

Guilds

Leveling Up: Guilds in EQ2 have levels. As they level up, they earn all sorts of neat privileges, like more guild bank slots, discounts on items like mounts, and access to more prestigious houses. Players level up their guild by collecting special items and turning them in, or by completing special quests that raise the guild’s XP bar (as well as your own personal XP bar, of course). This is a great way to bring the guild together, and the leveling mechanism is a lot of fun. This also helps to keep guilds together longer, which means that guilds in EQ2 tend to be larger and more structurally sound than the ones in WoW.

Shared Experiences: Whenever a guild member finds a treasured item, completes an epic quest, earns a level, or so on, everyone in the guild is notified via the guild chat channel. This helps build community, because everyone can see what you’re doing and chat with you about it. It’s also a great way to get “gratz!” type messages without having to prompt for them. All in all, it just feels nice.

Management: EQ2 has had guild banks for far longer than WoW, and its guild banks are still superior. It also has neat devices like an easily-accessible log of all the guild’s activities — so you can see at a glance that your friend Bob won the fabled Book of Dread while raiding, and Sue leveled up to 75 last night. EQ2’s guilds have lots of other little touches and polish that should really be emulated in other games.

Housing

Customization: EQ2’s housing is probably the best I’ve seen. You can decorate your house, fill it with books and knick-knacks, change the wallpaper, even set up crafting stations in it so you don’t have to leave the house to make some new sandals or swords or whatever. The customization possibilities are extremely deep.

Interactive House Stuff: The game is full of interactive trinkets to put in your house, like talking statues, genie bottles that whisk you away to hidden dimensions, or seasonal items like the halloween skeleton that sneaks up and surprises you.

House Pets: You can buy or earn pets (not unlike the non-combat pets in WoW) that can run free in your house and interact with people and things there. They will interact with other house pets, too, sometimes fighting each other or stunning one another and so on. It definitely adds a lot to the experience.

Reasons For Visiting: Players can optionally buy special “display cases” to sell items directly from their home. (When selling from your home, the items are also on the auction house, too.) If buyers choose to visit your house and buy them directly from you, they save the 20% auction-house fee. This can amount to quite a lot of money for top-end items, so picky buyers are willing to trek to somebody’s house and visit their home in order to buy the item. (The owner doesn’t have to be online in order for someone to visit their house, of course.) This is a neat mechanic because it gives you a reason to decorate your house and make it impressive. And I’ve seen some really impressive houses. Many players take this very seriously.
 

Group Play

Options Galore: Although EQ2 has tried to graft a deep solo experience onto the game (and has succeeded to some extent), the core of the game has always been the huge, epic dungeons designed for a six-man group. There are a whole lot of these dungeons — some instanced, some not — and grouping in EQ2 is fun and very rewarding at almost any play level. This isn’t true in WoW, where there are many levels that are just simpler to grind through rather than trying to run instances. I also find EQ2’s group PvE experience to just be better — more polished, more rewarding, more fun than WoW or Lotro.

Difficulty Curves: Although EQ2 has a fair number of instanced dungeons that are similar to WoW’s group experiences, it also has more free-form areas. These are typically community dungeons — meaning lots of people can hunt in the same instance, and can find each other and group up while there. These dungeons have a wider range of monsters in them, and generally have very good layout and flow, so multiple groups can explore the same vast dungeon.

These less-directed, community-accessible dungeons are important because they allow groups to scale their difficulty on the fly. If you’re missing some people, you can just hunt the weaker monsters. If you’ve got a really strong group you can forge a path to the tough monsters deep in the bowels of the dungeon. If somebody leaves, you can stay right in the dungeon and start advertising for other people to join you. In the meantime, you can kill weaker monsters while you wait for replacements.

Collection-Centric Gameplay

The game really rewards collectors and offers strong incentives to people who like to explore nooks and crannies.

Collection Quests: Shiny objects on the ground can be picked up and added to your personal collection GUI panel. When you have all the items from a particular, you are rewarded with XP. If you find duplicates, the extra items can be placed on the auction house to earn money.

Named Monsters: The world is riddled with NPCs and monsters that have unique names. The first time you kill each named creature, you earn bonus XP (and alternate-advancement XP), so it is worth going out of your way to kill these creatures.

Recipe Collection: The first time you complete any given crafting recipe, you earn bonus craft XP. This gives you a meaningful incentive to collect all the recipes in the game (for your crafting profession).

Numerous Discovery Locales: Like many games, EQ2 rewards players for exploring the world map. EQ2 takes that a bit further and has numerous rewards for reaching off-the-beaten-path locations; for instance, if you figure out how to get to the top of a hill, you may be given bonus XP for discovering it.

Conclusion

There are a lot of other strong areas in EQ2, such as the intricate and rewarding crafting experience, the recent racial revamp (they did a good job “balancing for awesome” on the race abilities), the alternate-advancement XP, and the built-in collectible card game. I’d also like to discuss the difference between EQ2’s and WoW’s combat model in more detail, because the subtle differences are very revealing. But another day.

Of course, EQ2 also has serious drawbacks and lacks a lot of polish that WoW players expect. It’s very easy to accidentally pick a class that can’t solo well, for instance. Many of the outdoor zones are banal and uninspired. In the older areas, the graphics are extremely ugly. The solo questing path is disjoint, so it can take some work to figure out what zone you’re supposed to go to next. And there’s not a lot of people to group with on many of the servers.

But EQ2 has lots of clever and unique game systems that are well worth exploring. If you’re thinking of making an MMO, you owe it to yourself to spend a few months in EQ2.

Some good news on the EQ2 front; I noticed this tidbit: mentoring bonus increased for the summer. This is great news! So what does this mean for us EQ2 players? It means that for the summer,

“Mentors do receive viable amounts of experience and advance toward their actual level while mentoring, though at a slightly reduced rate.”

Woohoo! Viable amounts of XP! Yes, you can read between the lines too: mentoring normally returns unviable amounts of XP. I am honestly excited about this, because I like EQ2 and this gives me some more opportunities to group up. But really now… this is just another example of outdated balance methods.

We systems designers need to start balancing for awesome. Traditionally, we balanced for perfection. Older games like EverQuest or Dark Age of Camelot show this most clearly: they have tightly-controlled classes with an extremely limited range of effective verbs. Most classes have a “right” way to build the character and myriad “wrong” ways to do it. The systems designer makes sure that the classes’ “right” ways are all reasonably in sync, at least at max-level. Everything else can go to hell, and does, but hey, these particular best-case builds are balanced!

This is dumb. I can say this with hard-earned experience, because I did this very thing in my first year as a system designer for Asheron’s Call 2. I did real damage to the funness of that game by balancing it. Those were rookie mistakes which I deeply regret. But I learned my lesson. AC2’s expansion pack balance was a whole lot more fun than my earlier balancings. It took a lot of beatings for me to get it through my head, but I got it. And I’m here to tell you to stop making the same mistake I did.

There are little lies we tell ourselves, we system designers. “Making the game perfectly balanced is key tothe long-term sustainability of the game.” “Without extremely tight balance, PvP will not be any fun.” “Only a handful of forum whiners will even notice this nerf.” That’s all rationalization. Truth is, we’re just being anal.

It grates on you, those imperfections. It looms so large that it seems like it’s ruining the game. “This class is 10% too powerful [in the right builds, with the right equipment]. 10%! I have to fix this now before this class becomes Flavor of the Month and everything I’ve strived for disintegrates before my eyes. We have to hotfix this nerf NOW.” I’ve been there. And I guarantee that EQ2 suffers from the same thing. Their game systems designer(s) are too close to the game, too anal-retentive, and too controlling. They need to get with the times, or move to a more old-school game than EQ2 wants to be.

Why would mentoring need a boost just to become “viable”? And why on earth is this a temporary bonus, something just being done for a while lest it ruin the entire game? There are answers, and I’m sure they are plausible ones. Let’s see, how about, “mentoring already has valuable benefits like alternate-advancement points, and mentored players are more powerful than regular characters of that level, so we don’t want people to mentor all the time.” So what’s the fix? Make mentoring utterly useless… except this summer, when it’s sort of usable. Mentoring doesn’t need to be controlled this tightly. And even if it did, the answer is not to make it useless for 9 months out of the year. That’s the easy way out.

Another example: about a year ago, my low-level Templar character got all of his meager crowd control powers nerfed. These were not awesome powers — they were cute emergency powers. His mez ability used to last 9 seconds, usable every 5 minutes. Then it got nerfed so that it lasted only 3 seconds. I had to take all of those nerfed powers off my power bar — they were rendered useless. (They are slightly useful again now that I’ve leveled the Templar to 65… but still not really worth using anymore.)

Why did those mildly useful powers become useless? Because some Templar build at max-level was too powerful… at least on paper. So they nerfed all Templars down the line. Cheap, lazy, and very detrimental to the game. If you’re going to nerf, you owe it to your players to find the very least amount of nerfing necessary to achieve your goals. Yes, that means you need to play-test characters at multiple levels, and you even need to playtest characters without optimal gear (*gasp*) because not everybody has optimal gear. Really! I know, nobody on the forums is wearing crap armor, and the ultra-hardcore people in your guild are wearing awesome stuff, so it sure seems like everybody is wearing awesome stuff. That’s another rookie mistake. Use your data analysis tools! As a systems designer, they should be something you refer to every single day. Don’t guess. Check.

It’s also critical to get a perspective from some distance away from the problem. This is incredibly hard to do on a live team, but it’s the only way to do your job well. All the end-of-the-world scenarios we tend to imagine are crap. For instance, suppose an overpowered class really does end up a flavor-of-the-month class as thousands of people reroll. Oh no, you have flavor-of-the-month classes. What ever will you do?! Huh, would you look at that? It doesn’t reduce your populations at all, and it even encourages players to reroll alts. It’s not a particularly bad problem. You don’t need to hot-fix for it. But it feels soooo wrong. It feels like failure to a game systems designer. And what will the board trolls say? They’ll start talking about how stupid you are! You’ve just got. to. fix. it. NOW. Even if it makes more of a mess than you started with.

But what’s important is that your game is fun, and you need to make that the primary goal of everything you do. If you have to nerf something, nerf the particular scenario, not the underlying system. Over-nerfing is the easy road, but not the road to fun. Having a cool mentoring system and then making it give only pitiful amounts of XP is a cop out. Maybe some games can only afford to balance the cheesy way, because they have a live team of six people. But games like EQ2 have plenty of time and money to do it right.

Anything else in my little rant here? Let’s see… oh yeah, as a whole, can we systems designers agree to stop copping out on verb breadth? I know it’s a whole lot easier to balance a class when they have only a tiny range of options. But that isn’t very fun. It’s a lot more fun for every class to have a lot of different things they can do. That probably means the game will never be truly balanced, but that’s okay. Better fun than balanced. It’s okay for a Templar to have a couple crowd-control powers. It’s fine for a Guardian to have a neat DoT ability. Do what it takes to make them fun, and don’t get hung up on whether or not you’ll be able to perfectly balance it. Because you won’t.

This is my rule of thumb for game balance: if all the classes feel really fun, then I’m doing a good job.

If somebody’s only interaction with a game were reading its forums, they would come away thinking just about any game in existence is terrible. Not just terrible… a blight upon the world, a source of misery and death, the reason video games should be banned. The game’s crime? Bad balance, down time, not delivering features on time, bugs… you know, life or death stuff.

It’s a frustrating problem for developers because so few of your users are actually using your forums. On Asheron’s Call 2, we determined that about 10% of the playing audience read our website or forums (it spiked on patch days, to a whopping 15%).

This small percentage of people are not randomly pulled from your userbase. They tend to be very similar to each other and not very representative of the rest of your player base. That means you can’t use them to judge the quality or merit of ideas or implementations. But of course, the ones who do post are your most vocal users, and it would be foolish to ignore them.

Every product in the world has forum issues, but MMOs have it worse than usual because forum-goers are often playing “the forum game”: they like the game so much that they want to keep interacting with the game even when they’re not playing. The forum game is so fun for some people that they keep playing it long after they’ve quit playing the real game. Part of this is because of the community of like-minded people. Part of it is caused by the relatively close level of developer interaction on most MMO forums. Whenever a developer posts something, it means the dev is reading what they say! That means they have sway over the developer, and they use it by complaining. Complaining is also fun because other people will join in, either to commiserate or to rebut them. Either way, it’s all content for the forum game.

Let’s go over some classic problem scenarios and talk about how to deal with them.

The Classic Scenarios

The Outrage Escalation: “This new improved quest reward is a slap in the face to the thousands of players who completed the quest last month but aren’t retroactively getting extra compensation!”

When players make comments like this, they aren’t being rational human beings. They are legitimately outraged, but they are so close to the problem that they can’t be reasoned with. Instead, their rhetoric grows and grows until eventually somebody likens the developers to Hitler, and the forum thread is closed.

This tends to make developers nervous, and rightfully so. The first time a player suggests you’re worse than a murderer you laugh it off, but the first time somebody threatens to find where you live and ”teach you a lesson,” it makes you think twice about your choice of occupation.

The key here is to keep things from getting overblown in the first place. A well-trained forum moderator knows when a thread is starting to get out of hand and closes it. That’s the right thing to do. Don’t let people get frothy with outrage. Don’t feed the fire, either, with snappy comebacks or even well-nuanced explanations. Save your posts for another place or time: never post them in an outrage thread.

The pretend quitting: “This is the last straw. The new updates on the test server are a mockery of everything this game was supposed to be about. If this change goes live, I will be forced to cancel all three of my accounts forever. Since I am guild treasurer, I’m sure most of my guild will quit too, and we’re the only decent PvP guild on our server, so PvP on our server will entirely die out. I wish I didn’t have to do this, but they’ve forced my hand.”

This is a classic. On AC2, I did my best to correlate people who said they were quitting to people who actually quit. Almost nobody who said they were quitting actually quit, and the few who did didn’t stay gone long: they entered a rebound cycle and came back pretty quickly. Most often, they didn’t leave at all.

Here players are using the last ace up their sleeve: they are trying to appeal to the developers’ wallets. But developers aren’t in danger of falling for this gambit. After six months of somebody saying they’re quitting but never leaving, devs learn not to believe anybody who says that. And it’s not like most developers are involved with the money-making operations of the company anyway. The CFO does not read the message boards.

But this is noteworthy because it is a desperate act by a frustrated player. They feel like they have no sway over their game and they care about the game SO MUCH that it’s infuriating. (Most people who quit will just quit. The majority of them don’t even care enough about the game to fill out a “why are you quitting” questionnaire, so they certainly aren’t going to go to the forums to post this information.)

Treat these people as angry customers. Do your best McDonald’s manager impersonation. Give them small things if you can, or just be sympathetic if you can’t. Don’t encourage these people to “Go ahead and quit,” and don’t taunt them when they inevitably come back, either. Basically, you need to just ignore that they said that at all. Often times they have a legitimate complaint, and you should handle it just as if they hadn’t suggested that the game will crumble if they leave.

The unhelpful fanboy: “Yes it’s a slap in the face. I understand your pain — there’s no way that Feral Intendants are going to be any fun now that they’ve been nerfed by 6% of their damage output. But look at it this way: Turbine knows what it’s doing. This is for the good of the game! You’ve got to trust that they know more than you do.”

These posts are pro-developer, so developers automatically give these words more weight. But these fanboys are just as myopic as the people they’re responding to. In many cases, siding with them is going the wrong way, because they’re still pushing a devs-versus-players mentality… they’re just on the dev’s side. But falling into thinking about things in terms of devs versus players is a trap.

Forum moderators will rightly treat these as flame-bait. The thread will get locked and things will cool off. But the danger here is that developers will start to think in terms of black and white. We’ve all met devs who are “out to get” players. They’ve lost their direction. Fanboys like this help reinforce this stupid world view. A random suggestion: tell developers not to read locked threads. Maybe that would help. Aside from that, just be aware of the danger of turning players, who are paying customers, into your adversaries.

The burned out moderator: “Okay, if anybody else posts ANYTHING about the rogue changes, I am deleting the thread and banning their account!”

Being exposed to the forums causes real damage to developers and moderators. For instance, the QA employee in charge of WoW’s test-server forums is so badly burned out that he routinely deletes threads full of information and bug reports because users just sicken him. It’s obvious that he needs a vacation from forums. This one person seriously lowers the value of the WoW test server. I’ve watched as Sandra will spend hours testing and gathering data about a bug for them — basically doing their QA work for them for free, which is the secret goal of any test server – and then Hortus will delete the thread because he’s in a bad mood. I find it pretty funny, but Sandra tends to think it’s less funny…

Moderators face the most severe form of burnout in the game industry, so they must not be exposed to the toxic hell of the message boards too long. In fact, this is why most forums are a failure: the moderators are burned out.

In order to ensure they can sustain a long career as a moderator, they need to take on additional tasks part-time — for instance, updating web pages, proofreading game text, speaking at public schools about getting into the game industry. Obviously what they do needs to be tailored to their skills and interests. (Be wary of letting them create game content, because they may lose the last shreds of detachment they could previously muster. If they make content, it needs to be full-time: maybe a six month stint as content creator without any forum interaction at all.)

Don’t let moderators burn out. They will cause more damage than having no moderation at all.

Plummeting team morale: “Sometimes I just don’t know why we bother …”

The trouble with forums is that there is just enough actual value for developers that they can’t quit reading them. Somebody will post a really interesting bug, or give a really insightful view on balance, or post about a clever way to beat a quest that nobody on the team had thought of. But those are the gems in the big forum cesspit. The rest of the cesspit is full of cess.

If your developers read your official forums, encourage them to also read forums elsewhere. Players tend to whine and moan most loudly on the game’s official forums, because they are putting on a show to try to convince developers to change things. Behind closed doors in guild forums or fansite forums, posters tend to be considerably more upbeat. It’s very surprising to see the change of tone. It helps put things in perspective.

Don’t force your developers to read the forums. Instead, have the community send a weekly digest of posts to the team. Make sure the digest has as many upbeat or informational posts as it has complaints (even if the actual ratio on the forums is much different). Remember that forums are not representative of the user base so there’s no reason to expose developers to all the hate and anguish there. A taste is enough to get the idea.

The inappropriate dev post: “I see what you mean, TrollSlayer471, but you obviously didn’t read my explanation about WHY this change was necessary. I countered every one of your points in my first post, and if you can’t be bothered to read it, I can’t be bothered to keep responding.”

Most of your developers were not hired because of their amazing writing and speaking skills. You didn’t pick your engineers because they could moderate forums. You don’t expect your artists to have to deal with customers. But they probably think they’re pretty good at all these things. They are probably wrong. The most common problem is that developers will start playing the forum game themselves, responding emotionally or taking troll bait.

I don’t recommend banning all devs from posting, because the community interaction has many benefits. It can help keep the community happy, it has obvious PR benefits if done well, and it can make your developers feel like celebrities, which is an important perk of the job. But developers need training before they can be expected to post well. Have your community moderator run a course for all employees, veteran and newbie alike. Teach them the basics, and lay out ground rules. Among other things, it should include all of these rules of thumb:

• Never post while angry
• Never post when distracted
• Never post when a user dares you to respond to them
• Never post while drunk
• Never post when you don’t have all the facts
• If you have nothing insightful to say, don’t post at all — it’s better to be silent. (The only person who should post just to calm things down is the forum mod… not the developers directly.)
• If in doubt, mark the thread and wait 24 hours before responding. Odds are you’ll have a completely different response.
• Remember that your words will be taken out of context and posted on other forums, fansite news boards, and repeated in game chat. Act like you’re representing the company at all times.
• Make sure each post stands alone and tells a complete story, rather than being part of a thread’s conversation. (When your post gets copied to some guild forum, people will misunderstand what you said if you left out crucial details that seemed obvious to you at the time.)

Producers need to enforce these rules by removing developer’s posting privileges if they post poorly. Posts by devs are candy that feed the “forum game” players. It makes users feel special and loved, which makes devs feel useful and loved. But when developers get caught up in playing the forum game themselves, they aren’t representing your company well. Don’t let them become an embarrassment.

The Value of Forums

The early AC/AC2 forum moderators at Turbine had a drinking game they’d play sometimes when reading forums late in the evening: drink a shot for anybody who says “slap in the face”, chug if someone says their guild is quitting, and if somebody predicts the game will be dead in a month, the whole room has to drink. I’m sure versions of this game exist at many companies.

So if your forums are a cesspit, what’s the point of keeping them? Indeed, many game teams have come to the conclusion that it’s not worthwhile, and have shut down their forums for months or years at a time, hoping to “reboot” them into something more useful. This sometimes works, but it doesn’t look good to new players: “The forums are gone because people said too many bad things? I’m not playing this game!” So don’t close your forums.

The most valuable role a forum can serve is to let players get advice amongst themselves. It’s best to try to foster this sort of interaction. There’s a very strong temptation to use forums to gather information about your game, but you have to remember that forums are dramatically non-representative. Certainly you can spot trends in posts that can help you improve the game: forums are a great way to bring problems to light. But they are not a good way to tell how big a problem is. Even the most vitriolic topic may really only be affecting 10% of your player base, with the rest blissfully unaware of that issue. Reading too much into forums is dangerous.

A very skilled moderator can dramatically improve the value of a forum by plugging the spigots of vitriol, collecting the new ideas and complaints, and encouraging players to be helpful amongst themselves, rather than making every post an “I want this feature changed!” post. However, an unskilled or burned out moderator will make things worse, so be very vigilant about that.

Conclusion

Forums are dangerous because a tiny percentage of the player population uses them, and many of them use posts as a way to change the game in their favor or to get other people to react to them. It is easy to understand this on a conceptual level, but it’s much harder to keep this in mind when somebody says the new quest you made ruined the game and you ought to be drawn and quartered.

Treat forums with a healthy respect, like you would a tiger.

An MMO dies when its population no longer reaches critical mass.

There is a point in any multiplayer game where the world suddenly feels barren and empty. And then suddenly people start disappearing even more rapidly, and then the game boils down to the most dedicated of fans only… and then you’re stuck with just those people forever.

It’s often very sudden. Your game is just cruising along, losing a few hundred people per month, and then suddenly the number of people leaving your game goes through the roof! It doubles, triples, quadruples all of a sudden.

The first instinct is, “OH MY GOD THE LAST UPDATE RUINED THE GAME!” and then there’s panicking and freaking out. The level designers are saying “I told you we needed to add three new instances each month, they got bored and they’re quitting!” And the systems designer is thinking, “I must have done the math wrong when I redid the taunt aggro system! Where’s the error?! I have to find it so we can hotfix!” and the producer starts yelling at the marketing guys because obviously the ad campaigns are less effective this month…

Odds are everybody’s barking up the wrong tree. This is one of those places where being on a live team gives you tunnel vision — it’s nearly impossible to see the big picture when you spend your day creating the tiniest details. But odds are, you need to step back and fix a really big problem. If you’re losing critical mass, there’s only one fix. You need more players on each world, STAT. If you have an expansion coming out in a month, maybe you’re going to be okay. Otherwise, you have to bite the bullet and merge worlds.

For the record, EQ2 needs to merge worlds. I know what the ramifications are in terms of publicity. But the fact is that there are fewer and fewer players of the game every day. The expansions help certain level ranges (either the <40 range or the > 70 range) but there are virtually NO people playing the game between 40 and 70. It’s a black hole where people disappear forever, and it’s not about lack of content. It’s about lack of critical mass.

There are plenty of other games that need to merge worlds, too. But EQ2 is the one that is closest to me, since I like EQ2. I would love to be playing it nightly, but it’s too dispiriting to live in a world where there are only 20 other people within 10 levels of you. Especially given that my character class, like over half the others, is only really effective in groups.

Don’t let a game die because you can’t see the big picture. If you don’t have critical mass, nothing else matters until you fix that.

I’ve never been one to idolize world size or travel times in MMO games. I don’t really believe that ’slow travel makes the world seem bigger’. But I put up with travel in MMO games because, however much it annoys me, it rarely rises into my list of top ten concerns.

But … I’m finished reading all the new blog posts in Google Reader, I’m all caught up with both Salon and Sinfest, and I’m considering starting on next year’s taxes — and I’m not even halfway done with this quest. If you are familiar with WoW, here’s a quick sketch: Wintersping to Eastern Plaguelands to Azshara to Eastern Plaguelands to Un’Goro … and after that to Feralas and then back to Eastern Plaguelands.

For those of you not familiar with World of Warcraft, here’s the summary: I’ve been traveling for the past 30 minutes, I’ve had to kill one creature, and if I continue I have another 30 minutes of travel ahead of me before anything else interesting happens.

But I’m stopping here. Ultimately I don’t care about the reward or future quests in this chain or even, really, saving the world. I’m bored. I’m leaving.

So be careful when you ‘make the world seem bigger’: because it doesn’t matter how big your world is if I’m too annoyed to play.

This is an intervention. I’m not blaming you. I know how you got here and I want to help.

Look at this list and tell me if you recognize anything that applies to your company. (This is not a complete list, but I think it will give you the general idea of what to look for.)

Give yourself a point if your game has finished pre-production and…

• Your company has hired a half-dozen level designers already, but the level-design tools aren’t finished being coded yet. So those level designers are ”working on paper” or making mock ups in 3D Max. And playing lots of games on the clock.
• You still don’t have a playable demo version of your game that supports even 50 people. (”We’ll add the ‘massive’ part during production! It’s just a matter of scaling.”)
• The only part of your game design that’s actually fleshed out is the back-story. Most of your system design docs just say, “implement this more or less like WoW does it.”
• You’re still trying to decide the right “look” for the art style so you can get the final assets started.

Give yourself a point if your game is more than a year out of pre-production and…

• Nobody’s ever discussed things like “customer support tools”, “live development cycle”, “expansion pack infrastructure”, “billing system”, or “login interface”. You’ve just assumed that’s the publisher’s job.
• You’re desperately pitching your game to prospective publishers each week.
• The design team and the engineering team don’t talk to each other. The animosity is growing constantly, but nobody can quite understand why.
• Lunchtime conversation inevitably degenerates into “such-and-such idea is insane, and there’s no way that’s gonna work,” but despite this, the team just keeps their heads down and does the best they can.
• The team is on its third Lead Designer (or Producer)… and you’re not sure how long this new guy will last, either.
• Your “lead designer” is actually a committee of five people, only one of whom is an actual designer.
• The engineering and/or design teams don’t test their own work at all. “That’s what QA is for!” However, everyone constantly complains about how many bugs QA is missing.
• QA has no specs to work from, and the only bugs they enter are things like, “Wouldn’t this font look better if it was blue?”
• This is your company’s second game (or attempt at a game). The first one failed, but nobody has addressed the reason why, and you’re seeing the exact same mistakes made again.
• This is your company’s second game, but the engineering team decided to throw out all the old code from the first game because it was too crufty, so they’re starting from scratch again.
• The very core of your game has recently been fundamentally changed by forces outside of your team.

Give yourself a point if your game is six months away from beta and…

• You can’t point to five people on the team and say, “These five people are truly EXCITED about how this game is turning out.” I don’t mean five people who are accepting of the design, or amenable to it… I mean EXCITED. They want to play it so bad RIGHT NOW that their enthusiasm comes through all the time.
• The production schedule requires you to create content and add features during the beta process.
• The engineering team still hasn’t stress-tested the server to prove it can support 1000+ people.
• If you’re looking for the assistant producer (or some other middle manager type), you no longer even check at their desk… they’re more likely to be found at the foosball table in the break room.
• It seems like management (and anyone else who can get away with it) is taking longer and longer lunch breaks every day.

How many of these apply to your team? One? Two? God help you, three or more? None of these are made up. I’ve seen every one of these problems… many of them repeatedly. These are all symptoms of a game that will end up being mediocre to poor… if the game launches at all.

And my list is far from complete… are there other looming problems that nobody’s addressing?

Every MMO development cycle has troubles. This is a massive undertaking and it’s harder than anybody expected. But things aren’t going to magically get better if you just wait it out. You may end up with a game to your name, but you aren’t going to end up with a game you’re proud of. And it’s going to cost you three to five years of your life.

So you either need to identify and FIX these problems NOW, or you need to walk away. Don’t keep doing something that isn’t working. Have the company form a “tiger team” or a “cross-departmental group” or have an “emergency meeting” or whatever you have to do, but you need to address these issues this week. By Friday you need to have some plans on how things are going to get better. You need to PUSH to make things better now, before it’s too late. This is way more important than your next made-up milestone.

If nobody is letting you push…

If nobody is willing to change, and you can see the problems are growing…

Then you need to leave.

Go find another job. Look at it this way: on one of the games I was indirectly associated with, the team had to crunch for so long that by the end, their effective hourly wage was $4 per hour. Their souls were beaten too: they were angry and sullen and miserable. These were not people who were having fun, and they would have been making more money as a Burger King shift manager. The saddest part? The game didn’t even ship. The team wouldn’t address their fundamental problems. They kept their heads down and worked really hard at their particular areas and tried not to think about the looming failure. Guess what? Ignoring the problems didn’t work.

What are you doing?! Either you fix the problems, or you get the heck out of there. Decide!

Okay, you’re a PC MMO developer and you are in dire straits. World of Warcraft has ten million paying customers… but everybody else just has a few hundred thousand. Sure, that means you’re making tens of millions of dollars a year. And five years ago that would have made you the darling child of gaming. But now those investors don’t want to hear about your petty $15 million a year in pure profit. They see WoW generating hundreds of millions annually, and you suddenly seem pretty tiny.

What do you do? You change your spin. We’ve seen this everywhere: “subscriptions are out. The real way to make money is with ad revenue!” This is a pretty old-school thing to say, and not very likely to be true. But let’s leave that aside — you feel you can’t compete on a subscription basis so you’ve decided to make a free ad-based game.

Who is your game for?

If you answered “the internet! It’s free!”, you lose.

As game developers we tend to think of people as “hardcore gamers” and “casual gamers”, as if people magically fit into these two buckets. So if subscriptions are for hardcore gamers, then your free game should target ”casual gamers”, right? And there’s a whole lot more of them than there are hardcore gamers! You’re gonna be rich!

But there’s no such thing as a casual gamer. It’s not a real target audience. Here are some of the things people might mean when they say “casual gamer”:

• People who don’t like games very much, but would if they played my game
• People who are really bad at games, so need easy games
• People who only play games at work during lunch breaks
• “Soccer moms” who play during the afternoon
• People over the age of 40 who play on the Wii
• People who didn’t buy our last first-person shooter

And we could go on and on. If your target audience is just “casual gamers”, you have no idea who you’re making a game for. And it shows in your results. You’ll make a game nobody likes, and you will fail.

Let’s look at some audiences you can try to hit with your PC game. (Note that a console game would have a very different list.)

• Traditional gamers. Skewing younger (18-35) and male, these are savvy gamers with decent-quality computers. They buy games from game stores. They are reasonably likely to have played an MMO before and paid for a subscription. When they play games, they tend to play for at least an hour.
• Moms. Skewing older (30-50) and female, these are people with free time (because the kids are at school or because the kids moved away). They do not upgrade their computers very often. They do not buy games at game stores. They like web games, and occasionally download casual games. They enjoy a 30 minute diversion on Pogo.com or Yahoo Games.
• Slacking White-Collars. Skewing younger, and with limited gender information, these are people who play games from work, or between classes, or in the library at college. They can’t install software on their PC because it may not even be their PC. They enjoy a quick 15 minute game session at Kongregate or NewGrounds.
• Older gamers. Over 30 and with a family, these once-traditional gamers no longer have time to play like they once did, but they miss it. They can’t afford to upgrade their computers very often, but they still know the difference between good graphics and bad. They can sometimes find an hour or two on the weekend to play a game.

We could go on making groups of reasonably large PC gamers.

I’m not saying you need to pick one of these groups. If you’re big enough, and ambitious enough, you can pick several target audiences. But you have to do it consciously, and you have to create your game to appeal to those groups. Naturally, the more groups you pick, the exponentially more difficult this job becomes.

Here are some hints.

If your game:

• requires the purchase of a $50 game box at a game store,
• involves a 20 minute install process,
• requires a better 3D card than WoW does, and/or more RAM and CPU power,
• doesn’t run in a web browser

You’ve already narrowed your options for target PC audiences dramatically. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. Just know what you’ve got to work from, and plan accordingly.

Man I swear I am going to start pointing out each game that launches without a clear understanding of their target audience. People just are not understanding this basic core concept. And they inevitably fail, because they just make a random game for random people. How do you market to random people? You do not.

A recent post by Tobold on virtual property rights was interesting to me because it’s a very common player perception. His argument, roughly, is that it would be great if the courts could rule on virtual property, so we know whether we “own” what our characters own, or if game companies do. If a character is worth $10,000, should we be allowed to sell it regardless of what the game companies want? The courts should rule on this.

Well, actually, that’s a terrible idea — given the level of knowledge the courts have, they couldn’t possibly make an informed and nuanced decision. Hell, we as an industry can’t do it because the rules are changing all the time, and forming a meaningful question is impossible.

But the interesting thing to me is that this argument exists only because of how successful MMOs have been at veiling their true nature. By tying into concepts players are already familiar with, they hide the game.

“Virtual property is property. It’s my stuff. Shouldn’t I be allowed to keep it regardless of what the game company wants? Virtual land is land, so somebody owns it — and if I paid for it with virtual currency, why should the game company be able to take it away?” These are the questions of someone who has bought hook, line, and sinker into the fiction of the virtual world.

Game companies reject these questions at a more base level than these players can even see! From a game company point of view, it’s like a FPS player demanding that they should be able to keep the shotgun from the map they just played, because they “own” it and the game company shouldn’t be able to take it away. It’s so illogical to game companies that it doesn’t mean anything at all: players are effectively talking nonsense.

Suppose that the company had instead chosen to make an epic single-player RPG. But the storyline has a tragic twist (not unlike the one in Ultima 6 or Final Fantasy 7): about 100 hours into the game, one of your most powerful characters dies. Did the company take away something you owned? Can you sue? Most gamers instinctively know the answer is “no” — they no more own the character’s possessions than they own their favorite character on Lost. They are playing through a story told by the game developers. If Mr. Eko dies, you might feel sad, but you didn’t suffer material loss.

But what if you were about to sell your copy of the game, along with your save file? You could have sold it for $100 yesterday on eBay, but now that you’ve overwritten your save game, you lost your most powerful character and your account is now only worth $70. Does the company owe you $30? Again, most people understand that the answer is “no”: even though you found a sucker who would have paid you $30 more for your old save games, that value was tangential on something you didn’t actually control. (Leaving aside your idiocy for overwriting your saved game; or perhaps the game only has one save slot, like Nethack.)

What if the answer was “yes”? Well, then games could never have bad things happen. If the value of your saved game can only go up as you play it, then there can be no losing. This would destroy games as we know them.

From a game company’s point of view, you don’t own your character any more than you own Aeris in Final Fantasy 7. You license a copy of the game in order to enjoy it, but you don’t own what happens in the story.

The neat thing is that players think they do own their characters. The sense of identity is so strong, and the open-endedness of MMO games is so broad, that they perceive things differently. They aren’t in a story, they are in a virtual world where they (the player, not the character) should have rights not unlike those in the real world. Nevermind that those rights would have devastating effects on all of gaming. It just feels like players are being abused unfairly. This is a case of MMO companies being too successful for their own good. If only games weren’t so open-ended, if only the character wasn’t so customizable and nameable, then they wouldn’t have this problem. The very illusion of open-endedness is what creates the belief of ownership.

In fact, the very open-endedness causes some people to feel that it needs a new categorization. “It’s not a game,” some argue — “It’s a virtual world, and should have different laws to protect it!” That argument is hard to defend because nobody can agree on when a game becomes a world. Final Fantasy 12 was a single-player virtual world, and had very similar mechanics to an MMO. It was just offline. Or would you argue that a virtual world can only happen when a LAN cable is connected to your box? What makes MMOs more of a virtual world than FPSes? Is it the persistence of your character? Okay, fine, let’s make an MMO that resets every three months. Is it still a virtual world? How about an MMO that resets every week? When does it stop being a world? These and other questions are very hard to answer because we don’t have enough concepts and definitions to even pose particularly meaningful questions, let alone get answers to them.

The very worst thing that could happen would be for a judge to step in and try to rule on virtual property, because they’d have to define what that means. First off, they would have to distinguish virtual worlds from games somehow. Next, they would have to distinguish designer intent from game player intent. Finally, they would have to rule on how much control game developers have over their own game rules. Imagine Parker Brothers having this trouble with Monopoly and you can see why game companies fight this tooth and nail: they are unwilling to give up any aspect of creative control.

Are there questions a judge might usefully rule on? Sure, someday. For instance, at some point we might need a clearer picture of who owns the rights to player-created content. But questions about player-created content are a million miles away from questions about who owns your level 70 Troll Shaman with all epic gear. The game developers made every aspect of your character and allowed you to license it.

Maybe after twenty or thirty more years of game creation, the distinctions will be clearer, and we might see our way to asking more meaningful questions. Right now, there aren’t any questions that a judge could usefully answer.

It can be difficult to discuss MMO design in the complete abstract — there are just too many variables — so today I am going to deconstruct and analyze a specific design in an existing game. My target: Noblegarden, a small holiday event in World of Warcraft. First we will look at how the event is designed, then reverse engineer its probable goals and look at how it meets those goals. Finally, we’ll take a look at how some modifications to the event might improve it — or not!

Basic Design

Noblegarden is the in-game representation of Easter in the World of Warcraft. It lasts only one day and has only one activity: finding Brightly Colored Eggs!

• The event starts at 12:01am (server time) on Easter day and lasts exactly 24 hours.
• During the event, Brightly Colored Eggs spawn in the racial homelands (i.e. the newbie zones).
• These eggs are essentially tiny treasure chests. Players who open them receive a token amount of money and either candy or special holiday clothing.
• Each egg has a small chance of containing either a White Tuxedo Shirt (~1%) or Black Tuxedo Pants (~1%), both of which are identical in appearance to tuxedo clothing produced via the tailoring profession, or an Elegant Dress (~0.5%). The Elegant Dress can be obtained no other way; it is essentially a peach-colored version of the wedding dress.

Probable Goals

Of course we can’t really know what the designers’ goals were in creating this content, but we can make some pretty good guesses by examining what they implemented.

First off, Noblegarden was intended to be a fairly small, low-key event without a lot of hoopla. According to the WoW event calendar, Noblegarden is one of only two major events that last only a single day — and the other is New Year’s Eve, which is arguably part of the Feast of Winter Veil. In addition, there are no city decorations for Noblegarden, nor any town crier-style NPCs to let the players know what’s up. And this makes sense: a goodly number of WoW players will likely be spending Easter with family, not in-game. Although Blizzard wants to commemorate the holiday, they don’t want to make players who are spending time with family feel like they are missing out.

Secondly, Noblegarden is an event aimed squarely at new and low level characters. The Brightly Colored Eggs spawn in newbie (level 1-10) zones; the money inside is a token amount for a new character but literally only pennies (worthless, even) to a higher-level character; and the candy inside is equivalent to the lowest level food — again, worthless to anyone higher level.

Based on these factors, it seems likely that new players were intended to run across this content as they played through the low-level areas in a normal fashion. Noblegarden seems to have been planned as a low-key bonus for newer characters, an enjoyable but not especially involved reflection of a popular real-life holiday (albeit without the religious trappings).

Observed Behavior

Unfortunately, our plans as designers last only until they meet the players. In this case, the actual behavior of players during Noblegarden differs rather a lot from what we might hope for from the presumed goals.

• The holiday clothing — and most especially the Elegant Dress — is the real draw in this event. Even though it has no gameplay stats, its rarity ensures a high price on the Auction House — and that means that lots of players of all levels converge on the newbie areas to look for it, whether or not they want it themselves.
• The eggs are widely scattered. Based on my personal experiences and polling random players I ran across, it seems that a player with a mount in an area that is not too overpopulated can find about 20 eggs an hour. But the count goes way down when the area becomes heavily populated with egg-seekers. The more seekers in the area, the less happy — and less polite! — any of them will be.
• The eggs are really hard to find. They can only be identified visually — they can’t be selected with the keyboard and they don’t show up on the minimap. They are small, and although they are bright blue they don’t stand out terribly well against WoW’s over-saturated palette. And for some reason the eggs do not use WoW’s normal quest-item sparkles to draw your attention. To add insult to injury, many of them are also hidden behind bushes.
• Because of these factors, the event quickly devolves into a race for eggs. A low-level character will generally be at a disadvantage: they are unlikely to have any speed-increasing abilities, and they will also have to spend more time dealing with hostile creatures in the area. For higher level characters, it’s all about quick eyes and memorizing the locations where you’ve seen eggs before.

Some low level characters do indeed participate in this event in the manner that we imagined: they find a couple of eggs, enjoy their candy, and go on their merry way. But for many players, the lure of the dress is too strong. They spend hours running in circles desperate to find one more egg. The competition, the difficulty of finding eggs, and the low drop rate of interesting rewards all combine to frustrate many players, and the clear divide between “winning” (finding a dress) and “losing” (finding nothing but candy) makes it easy to feel that you have wasted hours of your life for absolutely no reward except a nasty eye-strain headache.

Since a dress shows up in only one of 200 eggs, the majority of people hunting dresses won’t find one even if they hunt eggs for eight solid hours — and will consequently feel like they “lost” at the event.

Modifications

So let’s pretend for a moment that we are able to make some modifications to the Noblegarden content in order to help it better suit our goals as we described them above. It’s clear that the event as it stands isn’t quite there, but what can we do?

Well, it’s the rare and unique Elegant Dress (and, to a lesser extent, the other holiday clothing) that’s causing all the trouble. So let’s remove the clothing! Without these rewards, there is no reason for higher level characters to flood into the newbie zones in search of eggs. And if they don’t go searching for eggs, they won’t get frustrated. Problem solved! Let’s go home!

Except …

First off, the content is already in the live game. Removing these rewards after the players have already seen them and come to desire them is a bad idea. Secondly … well, let’s face it. The clothing rewards are the only thing that give this event a little flair. While the goal of a laid-back, newbie-friendly event is a good one, a laid-back, newbie-friendly even that also has a little something for higher level characters is even better.

So if we don’t remove the clothing, maybe we lower the demand for it. We could provide an alternative method of getting a dress that looks just like this one, even if it’s named differently (as is already true for the tuxedo shirt and pants). We could just add a tailoring recipe for a similar dress. That will remove a lot of the impetus for grinding the eggs (unless we do something silly and make the new dress recipe too hard to get!). But it won’t remove the demand for all players since some of them will still insist on the original, and it won’t solve the frustration issues for the ones that remain. Plus, we risk taking the sparkle out of our Noblegarden event. We don’t want to spoil the feel of the event we’ve already built, we just want to make it less frustrating.

Of course, we could remove the clothing from the eggs, then add a Noblegarden vendor who sells recipes for making the clothing. This would allow the creation of the clothing all through the year, but still make it Noblegarden-special. The Festival clothing from the Lunar Festival works in a similar fashion. But that leaves the whole looking-for-eggs thing somewhat pointless, and since that’s the holiday activity we’re riffing on that’s not quite ideal.

Okay. So let’s make the clothing rewards less rare. We’ll up the drop rate! Before we do this, though, let’s have a sanity check with other team members to make sure that a more common dress fits our goals — and not just our goals, but the goals of the overall game. For some reason, rarity is one of those factors that can make the most congenial team want to kill each other. What seems stupidly rare to me seems stupidly common to you, and sometimes there’s just no explaining why. The best we can do is try to place the item and its rarity within the context of the broader game.

And once we’ve done that, we’ll need to consider questions like these: Should we let you stock up on dresses? That’s not really an issue now, but it might be if we adjust the rarity. What will happen if we let you stock up? Presumably you sell them in the fall for a profit. Is that bad? To counter stockpiling, we could make the clothing bind on pickup (although that would affect existing items, which is somewhat rude). Or we could make them unique so you can only carry one of each type. Or we can make finding the clothing pieces contingent on a quest, so that you only ever find one. Would that be one ever, or one per year? One ever didn’t work out so well with the Lunar Festival, so probably one per year. But maybe we should just let you stockpile the damned dresses — unless that encourages people to stick around using up all the eggs and being all competitive.

And you know, none of things things fixes the basic underlying issue with the eggs themselves: that they are too scattered and too hard to see.

So we keep tweaking and thinking and trying to predict player behavior. The actual results in this theoretical case aren’t nearly as important as the process of analyzing the situation and thinking through the potential modifications. In the end, my own suggested changes would be something like this:

• More, more, more eggs! Triple the spawn rate of the eggs. The main goal here is to lower competition, although the changes to the rewards will help with that also.
• In addition to money and candy, add an Egg Fragment to the loot contained in each egg. Also remove the chance to drop clothing. You’ll be obtaining that in other ways.
• Make the eggs easier to spot. Two actions could help here: First, the eggs can use the normal quest-item sparkle to draw players’ attention. Second, allow players to buy a buff from the Noblegarden vendor (see below) that let’s them track eggs on their minimap for 30 minutes.
• Stick a Noblegarden vendor in each newbie zone town. In addition to the egg-tracking buff, this vendor would also trade a certain number of Egg Fragments for the White Tuxedo Shirt (20 fragments), the Black Tuxedo Pants (20 fragments), and the Elegant Dress (60 fragments).
• Finally, the Noblegarden vendor also trades Egg Fragments for the recipes to make the clothing: Recipe: White Tuxedo Shirt (60 fragments), the Black Tuxedo Pants (60 fragments), and the Elegant Dress (180 fragments).

Goals: Reduce competition and frustration of finding eggs. Increase utility of finding any one egg. Increase distribution of rewards to all players.
Total new content: 1 generic NPC, 1 quest item, 1 buff, 3 recipes.

I want to emphasize, though, that my suggestions here are really just self-indulgent navel-gazing. Without knowing the actual goals of the content, I’m just guessing. But it’s still fun (and educational) to go through the process!

Conclusion

This little deconstruction exercise shows how we can analyze and modify existing content: determine the goals, observe actual behavior, and then brainstorm methods to make the behavior better fit the goals (or else change the goals!).

I hope that it also shows some of the many skeins of thought that go into MMO design. The point is not Noblegarden, of course — the point is to think about the factors that go into the design of good content — and the number one factor is always going to be the players.

Of course, if I was really a Blizzard designer I would have a couple of follow-up tasks here:

1. Make sure that the goals of the Noblegarden event were clearly documented so that future live team members could more easily evaluate the content’s performance. (This is especially important if the goals have changed. Otherwise it becomes a matter of tribal lore and team politics, both of which are notoriously unreliable.)
2. Document the reasoning behind any modifications I decided to make as well as any modifications I decided not to make, so that future team members can more easily avoid mistakes that seem obvious now but may not in a few years. (They will have to deal with the mistakes that I end up making (because they don’t seem obvious now) on their own.)

It’s perhaps a bit surprising, but MMOs are dense. It can be hard to find information in context: sure, you can easily find recipes for all the crafted items in a game, but how useful or common or popular are those items? That’s not something you can find out as easily.

Because of this, many designers are unaware of what’s happened in past games. The typical MMO developer I’ve met has only played two or three MMOs for any lengthy period of time. So when they sit down to create, say, the potion system for their next MMO, they can’t draw on the designs of what came before them. I don’t have a general solution for this (except to play as many MMOs as you can), but as an experiment, let’s try to add a bit of context about this one very narrow gameplay element: potions.

Potions aren’t always bottles of juice that you drink – they can also be magic scrolls or gems, or even theoretical concepts in the case of City of Heroes. The distinguishing feature of potions is that they are one-use items designed to aid or assist you in combat. Their effects are typically restorative or buffing in nature.

In order to keep it focused, I’ll ignore other consumables such as food, which have subtly different game semantics. It’s admittedly a pretty vague distinction, but I’ll do my best.

The following data is what I’ve been able to scrounge up through contacts or personal memory — there are probably plenty of mistakes and omissions. If so, please point them out and I’ll get it as accurate as possible. And feel free to provide a potion overview for other games!

UO: Potions for every occasion

In UO, alchemists could craft potions from collected raw ingredients. Certain potions, such as Night Sight, were fairly essential if you wanted to be able to see anything at night (without hacking your client). Poison-curing potions were critical for survival, as otherwise poison would quickly prove fatal. Most other types of potions were of modest value, although healing potions could be used in PvP to great effect.

Although there isn’t a notion of stacking potions in UO, players could craft Potion Kegs to store up to 100 uses of a single type of potion.

Everquest: Wussy Potions

I can’t find anybody who played EQ1 at very high levels to tell me how potions worked there. At mid-level, potions were impossibly expensive, and did very little. They could be handy for PvP battles, but even there they weren’t really worth the trouble. The lack of information on the web about EQ potions suggests to me that they weren’t particularly valuable even at high levels.

Asheron’s Call: Tools of the Killing Trade

In Asheron’s Call, there were three main types of potions, corresponding to healing, stamina restoration, and mana restoration — the three “bars” of energy that are used up in combat. Stamina potions were absolutely critical for melee classes; and it was not atypical to carry a few hundred with you into combat. (They stacked to a high number.) Each swing of a weapon drained stamina, and fights often ran fairly long, so that it was not atypical to drink several stamina potions during a single encounter. Thus, potions acted as a money-sink for most character types.

Mages typically carried stamina potions also. Though spellcasting doesn’t drain mana, mages could convert stamina into mana, and then replenish their stamina with potions. This was much more cost-effective than directly restoring their mana with expensive mana potions.

Health potions could be consumed in combat, and their repeated use often turned PvP encounters into extremely lengthy affairs.

Potions only provided restoration, but “magic gems” provided potent one-use buffs. These gems were mostly found in loot, though later they could also be purchased from NPC vendors. Thanks to their lengthy durations and noticeable effects, these were very valuable for certain types of twinking and power-leveling.

Dark Age of Camelot: ???

DAoC added potion creation after the game shipped, and I couldn’t find somebody with first-hand knowledge. If anybody can fill in the details, I’d appreciate it.

Clearly there are a vast number of potions and tinctures that can be crafted, but their importance, usefulness, and commonness are unknown.

Asheron’s Call 2: Mystery Juice

Potions in Asheron’s Call 2 could not be crafted, only found as loot. Like most other loot, potions were randomly generated, so the exact effect and potency of a potion varied very widely. Some potions had exceedingly potent effects, while others were almost useless. Because each potion was unique, potions could not be stacked in inventory. Players tended to keep only the most potent potions on hand in order to free up pack space.

Players could drink potions in combat, but a character that drank a potion performed a rather lengthy animation during which they could do nothing else. Drinking potions in combat was still sometimes worthwhile, but was very risky. A more typical use was as a buff before a dangerous boss, or as a boost before engaging in PvP.

EverQuest 2: Modest Tools

EQ2 had several types of consumable items, including potions and totems. The most typically-used potions provided modest buffs for a long duration.

There were also restorative potions that worked instantly (or near instantly) to heal damage or cure status ailments. These potions had lengthy timeouts — after consuming one, players could not use another potion for several minutes. This limited restorative potions’ usefulness to dire emergencies only. Useable in PvP, but not typically something that would turn the tide of a battle.

Totems behaved similarly to potions, but had a more unusual effect: invisibility, runspeed-buffs, or transformation into some other creature type are typical examples. Totems could be used five times before disappearing, rather than one time. Totems couldn’t be stacked in inventory, however, so in effect, totems were stacks of five one-use potions in a single inventory slot.

DDO: ???

The one hardcore ex-DDO player I know doesn’t remember how potions worked in DDO, so they can’t have played too important a role in the game. DDO has various stat-boosting and restorative potions, but my vague recollection is that they are only practical at low levels of play — at high levels, they are too expensive to be practical. Can they be used in PvP?

Lord of the Rings Online: ???

Again, my Lotro-playing friends have failed me. “Does Lotro even have potions? I don’t remember…” A quick glance around the web suggests that they have protective potions, but they appear to be rather expensive for the effects they provide.

City of Heroes/Villains: The Core of Loot

Although not called ‘potions’, CoH had ‘Inspirations’ which fill the same role. In a game with very little loot, Inspirations were the notable exception: players got lots of these, and they had a GUI bar just for storing them. Their effects were quite potent, and by using several at once, they could easily turn the tide of a battle.

They could be used in battle, and were intended for such use. They could typically be used in PvP, too. Their effects ranged from potent restorations and buffs to self-resurrections.

Although they could be purchased, the most potent Inspirations could only be found randomly in combat. High-level guilds could have Inspiration-generators in their hideouts, but I don’t know of anyone who did this, and I couldn’t say how useful that was.

World of Warcraft: Emergency Heals

WoW potions are of medium potency: they had noticeable effects but not enough to turn the tide of a battle. Although usable in combat, a player couldn’t drink multiple potions at once: after the first potion of a given category (such as restoration or buffing), they can’t drink another for several minutes or until the effect has worn off.

Their typical use is for “oh crap I’m about to die” restoration, or as a quick buff before a tough boss. Though potions can be used in PvP, their effectiveness is rather limited by the time-outs. In the past, there were numerous categories of buffing potions, so that players could have many simultaneous buffs. This was an effective raiding tactic, but this was changed relatively recently. The number of categories was dramatically reduced, so now only the most powerful player-crafted buff potions have value in raiding.

In addition to potions, players can find “magic scrolls” in loot. These behave the same as buffing potions, but their effects can stack with potions. Players can also select their target for a magic scroll: that is, they could use it on an ally or a pet, rather than using it on themselves, if they wanted to.

More Input Needed

Obviously I need lots more info for this topic! If you have experience with any of these games, especially ones marked with ???, please feel free to chime in. I’m also interested in hearing about other MMOs that aren’t listed here. Thanks in advance!