Why MMORPGS suck

If you're into MMORPGS and find yourself wondering why your game of choice sucks, here is some insight. This was originally posted on the VNBoards located at vnboards.ign.com.

Edit: April 15th, 2004: There has been some confusion over the authorship of this piece. I am *NOT* the original author of this article. It was originally posted on the Vault Network boards located at http://vnboards.ign.com. I'm sorry for not making this clear in my original post, but it has come to my attention that people are erroneously crediting me as the author. I am not. I am searching VN for the author's name and will post his contact info as soon as he permits me.

Why MMORPGs Suck

You want to know why MMORPGs all suck so much? I’ll tell you why: in a word, players. The fucking players are single-handedly responsible for fucking up every MMOG since Everquest. Until they are silenced or eliminated, MMOGs will continue to be the bastion of mediocrity they have always been.

The evil is borne unto the message boards of any given product. These may be the company-run boards, or they may be third-party boards run by a stupid news site with its lips too firmly planted on the developers’ asses to say anything interesting or meaningful. On these message boards, you’ll find every kind of no-life retard you could possibly imagine, as well as a few even Tim Burton couldn’t imagine. You’ll find twelve-year-olds, twelve-year-olds claiming to be thirty, thirty-year-olds who have the functional intellect of a twelve-year-old and live in their parents’ basement, men claiming to be women, women claiming to make sense, and everyone claiming to have ideas that are actually worth a damn, if only someone would just listen to their unique, innovative, and exceptionally important idea that is, in reality, none of those things.

In short, on the message boards you will find degenerate wastes of oxygen that a more civilized society would have euthanized years ago.

These fucktards’ implement of destruction is constant, unrelenting, obsessive whining. There is no issue about which you will not find thousands of people whining on all sides.

Imagine for a moment that you are a developer.

Now, consider graphics. If you do not improve graphics with your new product, you’ll find thousands of fuckheads whining that it looks like crap on their brand new KForce 99000 Ultra Platinum Gold Silver MCMXVIII video card, on which they just spent their entire life savings: $75.

On the other hand, if you do improve graphics, you’ll find thousands of different fuckheads (and, bizarrely, some of the same ones) whining that they can no longer play your game on their overclocked Atari 2600. Those whose systems can run the game will complain about the poor performance of your bleeding-edge graphics engine with all the settings turned up. Or, they’ll complain that the new graphics are ugly. Or that they’re too different from [other games / the last game]. Or that they’re too similar to [other games / the last game].

Planning to have sound in your game? You poor bastard. Half of the budding Beethovens on the boards will weigh in with their “extensive musical knowledge” (read: they bought a CD once) and complain that you don’t have enough music. Or “good” music (read: Marilyn Manson). Or that the music is not sufficiently “dynamic”. The rest will bitch about the music being “intrusive” or “disruptive”, but will refuse to exercise the option to turn it off. They will repeatedly demand you put an MP3 player in the game.

Gameplay. Woe is the MMORPG developer who dares touch gameplay in any way whatsoever. Make combat slower (or, heaven help you, turn based) and tens of thousands will whine that the game is boring. Make gameplay faster, on the other hand, and some Vietnam veteran with no arms who plays by hitting keys with a stick he holds between his teeth will complain that he can no longer keep up. (You heartless son of a bitch, you.)

Don’t even suggest anything that could be considered “twitch” gameplay, lest you summon the very demons of hell to set the message boards light. “Twitch” is a word used by shithea^H^H^H^H players that, when applied to gameplay, means “having to press a key or look at the screen during combat.” In fact, you’ll find a remarkable amount of outrage if you even suggest that players be at their keyboards while “playing”.

The bottom-feeders inhabiting the message boards form quite a few different cliques. The most obnoxious, vocal, and smallest of these are the self-appointed “roleplayers”. These are people who claim to have cut their teeth on pen-and-paper RPGs ­ though almost to a person, have never actually played one and who are appalled, absolutely appalled, at the concept that people might “disrupt” their roleplaying by committing such atrocities as discussing real life, not saying “thee” and “thou” frequently enough, and naming their characters “Hitomi” when they must know that there were no Japanese people in medieval England!

Another pile of human excrement you’ll encounter is the “purists”. They will insist regularly and loudly that your game is not a “real” RPG. They are entirely incapable of defining a “real” RPG when pressed to do so, but will point out that, like pornography (a subject on which they’re well-versed), they’ll “know it when they see it.” These people will “invent” witty new acronyms for your game like “MMOSUCS” and use them over and over, oblivious to the fact that nobody else cares. Do not mistake these people for the roleplayers; these people were weaned on Final Fantasy 7 and consider roleplaying “ghey”.

The “programmers” are a truly pathetic bunch of imbeciles. All of them claim to be seasoned coder veterans. Meanwhile, back in reality, it turns out that the extent of their programming experience consists of glancing through “Teach Yourself to be Bjarne Stroustrup in 30 Seconds Flat” at the bookstore. They’ve never written a line of code in their lives, and if they claim to have worked on games, what they mean is that they managed to compile some source code for an asteroids knock-off that they found on the internet.

The programmers get into long, heated, stupid technical arguments over subjects about which they know absolutely nothing, and which are not even relevant to the game. Often, they’ll be arguing about different programming languages without even realizing it. (Visual Basic “users” are notorious for this.) Programmers also incorrectly diagnose every technical problem they perceive, real or imagined, using vague, generic terms that demonstrate their utter ignorance of not only the game’s code, but fundamental concepts of programming.

Their analyses are usually about as reliable as reading tea leaves. If you’re foolish enough to publicly speculate about the cause of a problem, you can be sure that every one of the programmers’ diagnoses will present a different mutually exclusive and utterly impossible conclusion, centered on your hypothesis.

There are the realism and anti-realism camps to contend with. The realism retards argue for permanent death, unrestricted PvP (which occasionally makes them allies with the PK camp ­ see below), requisite eating and drinking, “realistic” loot drops from monsters, and absolutely no rapid means of transportation. The anti-realism crusaders (who will call themselves “advocates of gameplay”) support light death penalties (and would support removing death altogether if they thought there was a chance in hell they could get away with it), no PVP, no eating or drinking, plate armor dropping from rabbits, and no travel whatsoever. These groups clash frequently and violently, and never accomplish anything but to prove that yes, they really can be that stupid.

As if it weren’t bad enough that literally thousands of people will whine every time something deviates from Everq^H^H^H^H^H the norm, there is a group of meta-whiners to contend with: the anti-whining whiners. These people, very last one possessing no more than the intellect of the average eight-year-old, will shriek and gesticulate wildly any time someone dares to question any aspect of the game, whether or not the complaint is legitimate. These people are almost palpably desperate to prove how “mature” and “wise” they are, so they often quote bogus credentials, misquote famous people, and say things like “It is a B-E-T-A”, “If you don’t like it, then leave! Less lag for me!” and, ironically, “Stop whining.”

This “whining squared” group, as I like to call them, would be the first fucking dumbasses to read this essay and make a “joke” by saying “but you’re just whining about people whining about whining!” It’s a miracle that these people can find their way out of the child pornography sites long enough to reach the message boards, let alone figure out how to operate them properly. On second thought, it’s less of a miracle and more of a sign of the apocalypse. The real miracle is that they’re even able to operate a computer without opposable thumbs.

Changing class dynamics really causes the vermin to come out of the woodwork. The whining is based on the same psychological principle as being stuck in traffic: you think all the other lanes are moving faster than you. Any decrease in the perceived “power” of a class results in no small amount of bitching and moaning from that class. Increase the power of that same class, however, and the roar of jealousy from every other class is deafening. There is no way at all to avoid this situation when making changes to the game, so expect to see it regularly.

The Playerkiller/Non-Playerkiller crowd create an interesting dynamic. The NPK group is generally comfortable with PKs, as long as they’re on their own server. The PKs, however, are infuriated at the prospects that (a) not everyone enjoys PvP combat, and (b) they will not have the opportunity to make these people “enjoy” PvP combat. This leads them to insist upon unrestricted PvP on all servers, at which time the overwhelming NPK majority proceeds to tear them new assholes. Any rational person knows that few developers would willingly bring upon themselves the fury of the “carebear brigade”, so the argument is pointless, having already been decided a year ago by the developers. The PKs never learn their lesson, and move from game to game, demanding “hard core” PvP, not getting it, and leaving frustrated and screaming, “see you in Shadowbane, n00bs!”

There is a special breed of imbecile that only lurks message boards, rarely posting anything at all. How do they cause trouble, you ask? These people are “professional ranters”. Confident in the knowledge that being a writer for a website gives them a “unique perspective” and makes them right about everything, they do not hesitate to spit out the most inane, mind-numbing tripe you’ll ever have the misfortune to read.

Some ranters were genuinely insightful and funny, but all of them have retired. The only function now served by the ranters of old is for people to falsely claim some sort of connection to them ­ as a “guest writer” or, heaven help us, an “avid reader” in a desperate attempt to gain even the tiniest scrap of legitimacy for their site and/or message board posts. Naturally, these claims
are, in a word, bullshit, and the Great Ranter of yore wouldn’t be caught dead associating with these inbred degenerates.

The final, most contemptible group is also not to be found on the public message boards. This group is the “cynical veterans”. These people can only be found posting their pseudo-intellectual crap on the tiny, hovel-like forums of their rant site of choice. They turn up their noses at the “great unwashed masses” on the mainstream boards, yet somehow manage to actually be more ignorant, cliquish, and childlike than any of them.

The cynical veterans’ claim to fame is that they have played every MMOG since UO and probably read “The Rantings of Lum the Mad” regularly. Typically, these people submitted dozens of articles to Lum, none of which were even remotely coherent enough to be published. After the departure of Lum, they scurried off to various wannabe sites authored by their fellow rejects. Having failed to achieve fame on the front page, they take to the message boards, where they write rambling, disorganized posts with many long sentences and big words that they had to look up in an online thesaurus. You will often see them parroting “I disagree with what you said,” in reference to a very old post made on the LtM boards by someone with an actual job. It was a tired insult almost immediately, but lacking a triple-digit IQ to call their own, the cynical veterans still consider it riotously funny and clever.

Every last one of the cynical veterans professes to be tired of the “xp treadmill” and repeatedly threatens to leave the genre entirely. As a rule, however, they are emotionally incapable of actually doing so, and will continue to purchase every new MMOG released without fail. It is, in fact, the only thing in their lives at which they have not failed.

On the bright side, fully 3/4ths of the posts and sites will be almost entirely unintelligible, thanks to the rampant ignorance of their authors. You will be treated to a mauling of the English language on a level that, before the internet, could only be achieved by throwing a book into a wood chipper.

There are a few people (four, to be exact) who can legitimately use the defense that English is not their native language. The rest, however, can only blame themselves, having read nothing for the last ten years besides Harry Potter books and “you hit the oozing bandersnatch for 50 points of slashing damage!” What is genuinely terrifying is that many of these people really did graduate high school that stupid. Do you really think it’s a good idea to allow people this inept to pump gas?

Over time, you’ll begin to realize that every dickhead on the boards believes that he (and make no mistake, it’s always a “he”) is the only person alive who knows how to make your game “right”. But the real problem is not that they all think they know the solution; the problem is that they’re all alive.

“Fine,” you are thinking to yourself. “You’ve accurately and fully addressed the cause in all its sundry forms, but what are the effects?” That’s an easier question to answer. The effects are twofold:

First, the publishers read all this crap. Now let’s be honest, the publishers aren’t any smarter than the fuckwits writing this drivel, or they wouldn’t be working in publishing. So they see this overwhelming pressure from the screaming retar^H^H^H^H^H players to maintain the status quo, and it slowly dawns on them that every time something deviates from Everq^H^H^H^H^H the norm, the players squeal like pigs being slaughtered. So what do they conclude? “For God’s sake, don’t touch anything!” The result of this is out-and-out refusal to fund or even entertain any proposal whose title is not an anagram for “Everquest”, and nothing changes.

The second effect plants the genre suicide where it will work the most harm ­in the very offices of the developers themselves. They are the real victims here. Left to their own devices, they are more than smart enough to create a good game. But in addition to caving to pressure from the publishers, the developers commit the cardinal sin: they listen to the players. They see literally thousands of people whining about everything and suddenly, their faith in themselves is shaken. They don’t feel qualified to make rational decisions on their own. How could they possibly be smart enough to even consider, much less understand, all the effects of any one change? They can’t fathom making any sort of change without getting the permission of the players first. They’re terrified of the consequences of any attempt to do so. “What if they don’t like it?” they think. “We’ll have spent all this time and money for nothing!” So they do the only thing that seems safe: exactly what they did last time.

What are we left with? A bunch of sameish-looking, sameish-playing, sameish-sounding games that haven’t put forth an original fundamental design concept ever. Bullshit level schemes laying down artificial, ridiculously steep barriers to progress because after all, “what will we ever do if they’re able to see right away that we have no content?” Players who get pissed off when things don’t change, and even more pissed off when they do. Developers pulled in all directions, moving in none. And publishers insisting that the chicks’ breasts be made bigger. How fucking great for us.

If you read this far, you’re probably nodding to yourself in awe of the clarity I’ve bestowed upon this subject. Maybe you even laughed about “those stupid players” I described.

Well, news flash, jackass: I was talking about you. That’s right, you are the problem. So are all your pathetic “friends” online. And so are all the shitsticks in your “guild”. And all those dickheads on the message boards you troll every day of your miserable, worthless life. You are all responsible for making the MMOG genre suck. Do you want it to not suck any more? Here’s how you can help:

SHUT THE FUCK UP.

Keep all your “bright ideas”, all your “concerns”, and all your “thoughts” to yourself, dumbass, and for the good of humanity, cancel your internet service or just go kill yourself. Your parents would like their basement back.