MMORPGs -- State of Behavior, Art of Language, and Other things that are missing

First, for those who aren't sure what an MMORPG is, let me explain: Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Game. AKA a roleplaying game that's online only and shares the gameworld with everyone from everywhere simultaneously. Play with your pals in Russia and Texas and Scotland, etc.

What do I look for in an MMORPG? IMMERSION. That quality that says, you're playing a character in a fantasy world and you BELIEVE, it's BELIEVABLE. Your actions seem to matter, the world changes with the actions of its player-base (or at least seems to). The ability to immerse oneself in an MMORPG is first and foremost the key aspect to the RPG part of the name.

And that, readers far and wide, is the single-most overlooked and underdeveloped part of the MMORPG scene today. Such things as a changing script, events that take place in the fantasy world that actually change the geography/setting/people -- these lend credence to the world and heighten the sense of immersion. A little game called Asheron's Call, way back in the late 90s, took these thoughts to a new level, with actual seasons, changing weather patterns, world events that actually altered geography and characters. Alternately, another little game called Everquest opened up its world to the exploring side of roleplaying, letting players roam at will and learn for themselves what areas were too dangerous for them (and at what point in their advancement they might come back to try it again). Things seemed to happen in Everquest that lent credence to the appearance of a viable world -- skeleton rushes against the gates of Queynos, where players could desperately gather to defend the city...

So what if the game is okay at creating a believable, immersive environment? Is that enough? No. It isn't. The other key ingredient, which when taken with a sense of immersion and a viable environment, form the three key underpinnings of a good game, is the COMMUNITY and it's attitude.

Which brings us, in our tour of games, to World of Warcraft. What happens to the ROLEPLAYING part of MMORPG when the community is filled with people who AREN'T roleplaying at all? It sours the environment for those of us who are trying to roleplay the game. What happens to the sense of immersion when the CHAT channels are filled with juvenile cursing, idiots talking about "pWNng hz az!" (called l33t-speak, some sort of twisted abbreviated way of speaking/cursing for those who can't be bothered to speak clearly or can't type that extra one letter to spell the word), morons who run around doing everything they can to ruin the experience for new players ("hey, Noob; NWB; stupd Nwby, xxxxxxx"). What about World of Warcraft? You can choose to be "player versus player" on the normal servers, meaning that, unless you've activated your PvP flag, you can't be arbitrarily killed by other players. Well, not quite. Not when you have juvenile twits who post to the forums how they've spent days figuring out new tactics designed solely to "trick" new players into becoming PvP-enabled. When your community has idiots like that, it's a bad community, and it works counter to the sense of immersion. In another day, we would simply have called this sort of behavior rude or childish and would have condemned it as a society. Today, it seems to be the norm.

Why pick on World of Warcraft for this? A bit of this is certainly present in other games. But no other game has ever had the sheer density, the raw number of these twits in one place, as WoW. That is certainly a function of WoW's record subscriber base - more players = more likelihood of getting the "bottom of the barrel" in terms of behavior. I finally left WoW when I exhausted my "ignore" (you can choose to ignore other players by character name) list's capacity in a month's time, ignoring only the idiots who acted as described above. I left when I kept seeing swarms of these ill-mannered brats with more advanced characters continuously haunting the "new player" areas and acting as described above. It isn't unique in WoW, it's just the WORST in WoW, it's like the game has a magnet that attracts this sort of behavior.

So what happens, again, to return to the theme of this little missive, to the sense of immersion, the quality of ROLEPLAYING, in an mmoRPG? It's ruined. The playing experience for the folks who aren't running around demonstrating their ignorance and ill-mannered behavior is ruined. Forget immersion, forget being immersed in a fantasy world filled with wonder and awe when all you "hear" in the CHAT channels is this garbage. Immersed, sure -- in a foul-mouthed, ill-mannered schoolyard bully's dream. Mouth off, act badly -- and who knows who you actually are? No one. When you read how these twits make alts (alternate characters) solely to get around the fact that their first characters are being ignored by everyone, you have a bad environment.

I've played since the text-based days. I've played Everquest, EQ2, WoW, Dark Ages of Camelot, Asheron's Call, AC2, Rubies of Eventide, and more. These issues are present in all of them, but in most of them it's a small issue, the bad behavior of a few. In WoW, it's the bad behavior of the majority, or it certainly seems like 90% of the players, all the time. I left WoW with a deep sense of regret, since the game has tremendous potential in it (and some non-community-related issues, but that's another rant), but I like to roleplay in my massively multiplayer online roleplaying games. And it seems, at least in the biggest game on the block, that that one word - roleplaying - is an utterly forgotten, alien thing to most of the players there.

Next time, my rant on Everquest 2 (which I'm currently playing), and why some decisions by Sony will most likely hurt the game instead of helping it.