Writing for MMORPG.com, Dana Massey has an insightful article up this week. In his piece Dana explores the relentless grind to reach maximum level that the vast majority of players seem to be obsessed with, and how that effort is often less than engaging.

Almost all MMOs revolve around maximizing experience and loot en route to some mythical endgame. How people do it really doesn’t matter. Players, even when given the choice, gravitate to efficiency over fun.

Sanya Weathers mentioned this last week in her article on low level quest design. Many of the industry professionals she spoke to talked about how they tried to make more involved quests, but players reacted negatively, as these tended to slow down the XP gain rate.

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Fact is, the players are as broken as the games they yell about.

Emphasis mine. Dana is correct, but only to a point: players whose sole goal is to reach the end game (whatever that may be) will often rush through all of the content as quickly as possible in order to get there, ignoring quest text, time consuming (although epic) quests, socializing, and other core MMO features along the way.

I witnessed this phenomenon first hand recently when Wrath of the Lich King was released for World of Warcraft: the vast majority of my raiding guild power-leveled their characters, grinding as efficiently as possible in order to be among the first to set foot in Naxxramas and conquer the content. Although playtime was certainly a factor, those of us who used our limited in-game time to read every quest and explored Northrend more completely missed a few weeks of raiding and seeing guild-first kills as a result of our less efficient play style.

Self-directed goals
While Dana may be correct in stating that the majority of MMO players - or at least the vast majority of vocal players - skip content in order to experience the end game, their chosen play style is not the only possible way to experience a virtual world. Tobold recently touched on this truth in his discussion of microtransactions and competitive gaming:

[I]n World of Warcraft you set yourself personal goals, whether that is reaching the next level or killing the next raid boss or hitting the gold cap, and you get a positive feeling of "winning" or "achievement" from reaching that goal.

This is by no means restricted to World of Warcraft - in fact personal goals can be set in any video game, MMO or not, to add an additional layer of enjoyment that was not necessarily hardcoded into the experience by the game developers.

Instances of players setting non-end game goals for themselves can be found everywhere. A few Warcraft-inspired examples are: explorers, pet/mount collecters, twinks, role-players, achievement whores, traders, fishermen, altoholics, PvPers, or even in-game catering services.

Why the emphasis on quests?
Interestingly enough, with the possible exception of exploring the virtual world, none of the activities listed above involve a player enjoying the in-game quest lines for what they are: stories and lore.

In fact, developer-created quests offer the least amount of enjoyable replayability in most MMOs. While players often run the same quests over and over again, it is rarely because the quest continues to be fun, engaging, or fresh (if it ever was in the first place).

In WoW, players re-run quests on their alts because the experience they gain is superior to that obtained through grinding. Similarly, in Pirates of the Burning Sea players were constantly repeating quests because the loot was superior to what could be found in the open world (until the developers patched that issue). EVE Online and WoW offer (drab and boring) repeatable quests that allow players to gain enough currency and faction points to fuel their other adventures. In WAR, public quests and scenarios drop loot and tokens that are needed to gear up in order to perform effectively in RvR combat.

It seems clear that the element of MMOs that the developers have created to drive the plot line of their game is instead being perverted by the player base and used as a means to an end more often than not. What should be an enjoyable and engaging part of our games is simply another part of the grind.

Questing for the sake of questing
As a paradigm shift, Dana Massey suggests that the emphasis on levels should be reduced and instead players should be forced to complete epic quest lines in order to unlock access to gear, skills, and other goodies:

Make quests, dozens of quests, just like now. Let people have fun, explore and get little bonuses by doing side quests. But make your level, your access to items and areas totally based on where you are in an epic story driven game. It would require 100+ hours of content to even be viable, but once complete players would have access to the “endgame” content.

Players should not be forced to grind out a bunch of quests to move forward. They should have one core line to follow and the rest should be up to them. They move forward when they resume the core story.

These are kind of anti-MMO principles; I am aware of that. Everyone would be doing the same quest or a variant of it. Likely, it would also mean that the difference between levels is not how strong the player is, but how much different stuff they can use and where they can use it.

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Make the difference between level 1 and 50 what areas you have unlocked and how awesome you look while killing things, not whether or not it’s worth your time.


Although certainly an interesting idea, I believe that implementing a system like the one that Dana suggests would only serve to turn quests into more of a grind, not less. Instead, consider Syp's much more elegant solution:

I have a proposal for a MMO that has yet to be made, and that proposal is this: separate tedious quests from story. Sure, still include the staples of kill/fetch/escort quests, but cut out the story from them entirely — just have players go to a bounty hunter NPC or mission vendor to pick up one of these odd jobs to fill some time. Then pledge to make all quests have a real story, a unique path, and a satisfying — perhaps persistent — conclusion. Forget MMOs that boast of 14,000 quests on the back of their box; I’d rather play a game with 50 meaningful, moving, exciting quests than 14,000 dull, trite and tired ones. Put a long timer on these quests once you complete them, and when the timer is up, offer players the chance to revisit them if they so wish.

Splitting plot-driven quests away from the level-up grind, if done properly, could allow players who are intent on maxing out their levels as quickly as possible to enjoy their favorite end game activity without necessarily missing all of the game's plot in their hasty rush. The journey would not necessarily be compromised by the final goal. Similarly, players with alternate goals (e.g. collecting mounts, exploring, etc.) could continue to approach the game at their own pace. Perhaps the biggest win would be for quest-driven players; with the main plot divorced from the leveling treadmill, they could enjoy a more thoughtful and inspired experience if the developers took the proper amount of time to craft compelling stories.

Parting shots
While it is tempting to claim that the vocal segment of the MMO community represents the views of the whole, not all gamers are focused on end game activities to the detriment of all other content. A large number of players are quite content to set their own personal goals, and work away at them at their own pace.

That said, since the main levelling mechanic in most western MMOs is questing, it seems like the time is ripe to start to reconsider how story line should be integrated into the gaming experience so that it can be enjoyed by as many people as possible, regardless of their specific goals.