"When Change Comes Knocking"

[Lili Birchflower]

Change is never an easy thing to take though it is a frequent visitor to the MMO space. In today's Devil's Advocate, we take a look at change and how the communities of the games in question have reacted.

Interviews By Victor Barreiro Jr. on November 08, 2013

It’s been around three weeks since the last Devil’s Advocate, and I’m lucky enough to have an editor who was cool about my asking for a brief hiatus. While some of you may have expected me to disappear, and while I still haven’t really found a lot clarity regarding life in general, I have realized that I do enjoy writing my thoughts out and reading thoughtful responses to issues.

Today’s Devil’s Advocate deals with a recurring theme in MMO gaming: the reception a fan base has to change. Aside from a short backgrounder on games that have changed some intrinsic part of their systems and received some backlash, there are two main issues regarding change I wanted to discuss.

The first thing I wanted to talk about was The Lord of the Rings Online’s upcoming Helm’s Deep expansion and how word of the class changes might appear to people who are casually observing the forums for a short period. The second thing I wanted to discuss, also related to LOTRO, is how their community management team has appeared less than stellar in handling the reactions.
NGE and Cataclysm

While there are likely some other games that have garnered a negative reaction due to changes in their systems, few have had such differing reactions as the changes made in Star Wars Galaxies’ New Game Experience/Enhancements and World of Warcraft’s Cataclysm class changes (which also got changed further in Mists of Pandaria).

I’m going to shorthand the history of SWG a bit, so bear with me. Prior to the release of the NGE (Pre-NGE), the game had a 12 main professions that you could specialize in and then gain further expertise in, with some subprofessions thrown in, such as a politician that could create and manage player cities.

In the NGE, released nearly eight years ago and whose patch notes are outlined on the Star Wars Galaxies Wiki, the class development systems were altered rather significantly from pre-NGE. You were more or less given the option of being shoehorned into a particular class, and some classes weren’t exactly combat friendly. The struggle of becoming a Jedi in pre-NGE, which I’ve been told required some doing, was replaced by a button click to simply become the class.

These changes came two weeks after an expansion, leaving many unprepared for the changes. People left, communities died out, and the game simply wasn’t the same as before because the fundamental changes to class systems were so drastic.

Regarding World of Warcraft, we have a less drastic scenario, but it was one that also needed to be discussed. By Wrath of the Lich King, the WoW class advancement systems had 61 points to distribute across three trees. This seemed like the norm for numbercruncher s, but it also created a bit of skill bloat for players, making gameplay a bit more difficult for us less than speedy keyboard users.

Cataclysm addressed overfamiliarit y with the world and skill bloat, revamping vanilla-mode Azeroth and culling the talent trees into 31-point systems which were a bit like the systems in Vanila WoW. Mists of Pandaria changed that even further, but to focus on Cataclysm, let us just say that in comparison to the NGE, the changes were not to the liking of players who reveled in complexity, but enough people stayed because the game offered something that people liked.

A mix of other factors likely led to a decrease in the game’s playerbase – not enough to slay the Deathwing that is WoW perhaps, but enough to leave the naysayers with a long-standing “WoW is dead and the sky is falling” vibe (though hasn’t that always been the case?).

Reaction to Helm’s Deep
Helm’s Deep is a curious beast to me because it’s the game I’m currently playing. While I know class changes are coming and the non-disclosure agreement for the beta dropped recently, I didn’t engage in the beta because I was just busy learning more about the story (I had abruptly ended my last soujourn upon leaving the Mines of Moria, and a minimum of 100% more experience on just about everything is a great motivator to reach cap).

The situation works like this. LOTRO currently has a rather open system of play. Depending on your class, you can do a lot of things adequately because you have a ton of skills and part of the fun of play now was being able to shift your use of skills accordingly depending on the need for a particular role in party or solo play.

Helm’s Deep changes this by introducing RIFT-style talent trees for classes. There are three distinct trees, and choosing a main tree for a class grants you an inherent bonus to a particular style of play for that class. A Guardian picking a tanking tree, for example, would naturally gain more threat without needing to do anything aside from picking that tree add skill points in.

This specialization is perhaps a poor man’s RIFT soul tree, but according to the breakdowns made public by forum goers, the 8 classes and their general playstyles are all there and their fundamental playstyles have not changed; you just can’t do everything willy-nilly like you can now. Skill bloat has also been addressed, leaving newcomers to the game with fewer skills to worry about as they develop their characters because of how the trees are designed.

The reaction to Helm’s Deep has been mixed. Vocal detractors of the changes made to character development started talking after the NDA dropped and comparisons to the infamous NGE have been made. There are also people who are cool with the changes; they’re not ecstatic that things are changing, but they’ve accepted the changes or are happy with the remedy to skill bloat.

To someone who isn’t as strongly invested in the game, but is interested in trying it out, the way people are acting in the forums outside the New Player Help zone looks less than inviting. When negativity is perceived as a strong source of zealous discussion, passersby are less than enthused about being a part of that community.

Divisive Discussions
Divisive discussions are not new to MMORPGs. No MMORPG is going to wow everyone, and that’s fine. If Helm’s Deep is not someone’s cup of tea, they’re welcome to leave and come back when they miss the feeling of being in Middle Earth, like I did after a year’s hiatus.

That said, the other thing I wanted to discuss about Helm’s Deep is something that happened after the NDA drop occurred and people started talking about it on this thread: lines of communication.

As I understand it, the marketing push (or at least the honest discussions from devs regarding how things in Helm’s Deep worked and if LOTRO will continue past its license renewal date) has left many people anxious about LOTRO’s future. The lack of openness about Helm’s Deep when it’s two weeks away from release also doesn’t put people at ease.

One line of communication was recently crossed out when Fredelas, a player known for his Riders of Rohan Hytbold reconstruction guide, was permanently banned without much explanation. Part of the discussions led people to think that this was the result of Fredelas noticing and pointing out a factual error in a comment by community manager Sapience.

What’s been noted in his exchanges is that the some forum goers have been receiving “sarcastic, paternalistic communication from the community team throughout beta,” which eroded the foundations of a perfectly good line of communication that existed.

While someone named Fredelas_The_F ree made a comment elsewhere asking people for understanding and acceptance and for people to not quit LOTRO and use him as a rallying cry, a point of contention still stands: why isn’t the community management team trying to better foster the community?

While I can understand stress and the sinking feeling of dread from reading through page after page of depressing commentary, that shouldn’t prevent some sort of respectful manner of discussion from springing forth. I can sympathize with reading through a ton of disheartening thoughts, but I certainly hope Sapience and the mods, as well as the players who enjoy LOTRO, can bounce back from negativity and manage to find enjoyment in what they’re doing, assuming they all care for the game as much as I think they do.

Change is coming in LOTRO, and while it can be disheartening, this is no time for dread to get the better of the players and the people working at Turbine. Here’s to hoping they can stand together to fight the encroaching horde of uruk and goblin-kind. They certainly have my spear and shield, at the very least.

http://www.mmorpg.com/showFeature.cfm/feature/7926/page/2

What do YOU think?

[Grei]

That only touched on part of why a lot of us left SWG.  The class changes were one thing--it did ruin how flexible the game had been.  Grind your way up as a Droid Engineer and find that it wasn't too your liking (as in my case), you could 'forget' what you learned as a DE and start learning your way through Musician or Bounty Hunter.  A lot of us would've forgiven the Devs that in the long run, even though we saw Jedi everywhere when before they were relatively rare (though becoming more common with a definite quest to become a Jedi instead of the original Master 'X' of the right classes for your character--every character had a different path).

But the biggest change was in the gameplay.  Battlefield had just come out a few months before, and caused the inevitable hit to the playerbase which nearly every new game causes.  And the vocal minority were wanting more Battlefield-like gameplay in the game instead of the traditional MMO-style target lock and cycle your skills.  So you take a game where, up until that point, you were playing an MMO and then suddenly change the game into a 1st/3rd person shooter and say that it's better for everyone.

So of course a lot of us MMO players just up and quit.  My entire guild decided the game wasn't the game they had joined and we up and quit.  Had one last party, used up all of the ultra rare stuff we had sitting around, and shut down our city.  At times, I miss the old SWG.  Especially my party starship.  

These were the biggest changes that were the death knell though, through a game rife with major and unexpected changes that weren't advertised.  An early indicator of what was to come was during the transition from Beta to Launch.  In Beta, Musicians and Dancers were a really big thing (I had gone Musician) and you could easily find a group of 4-6 people, or even 2-3 full groups of people playing instruments or dancing, plus a number of people hanging out and chatting.  Every Musician and Dancer had control of their character, able to go off on a 'solo' before slipping back in with the rest of the group.  We had a lot of fun roleplaying this out, of course.   It's how I met my guild, in fact.

On Launch though, the whole Musician/Dancer system was entirely different.  Instead of free to control your character, your actions were locked to the Band Leader's.  If they decided to go do a solo, they could, but you were just a automaton unable to do more than play the supporting music to the leader.  Dancers were made the same way, though I was told in time that they were given a bit more flexibility--but the musicians weren't.  Which totally destroyed the entire fun that we'd built during Beta, the roleplaying, the community.  I ended up going Droid Engineer because they had destroyed a very fun part of the game for some nebulous reason of avoiding 'macro players' by encouraging people to join a band and do nothing to earn their XP.

*chuckles* Ooops, guess I still have a lot of repressed feelings about the way we got jerked around in SWG. 

[Urragra]

Me too Grei, me too.  I was the Company CO in SWG when the Combat Ungrade hit and then the NGE hit.  It was horrible.

I don't understand why companies feel the need to so radically alter the way their games work.  Seriously, SWG was a totally different game after CU and NGE.  I guess I am not thinking about he business side of things, but alienating your player base doesn't seem like a good business move...