Play’s Republic

Recently I installed the Burning Crusade. (Honestly, 10-day free trial one. yay!) And I created two additional characters to experience WOW’s new races. As a person who already played with 4 characters, I found myself concentrating ‘just’ on leveling during first few days. Well, maybe it’s true that we can’t fully enjoy the characteristics of race (and profession) before our level get high enough to represent the uniqueness of each race. But my obsessions about level made me think about one common issue in MMORPG: the gap beween game developers and the players. In 2004, when WOW first opened the beta test service in Korea, I heard about lots of players who got level 70 (the highest level in WOW) just during the beta service period. After commercializing WOW, Blizzard Korea had hard time with lots of dissatisfied gamers who were complaining like “there’s nothing new to enjoy!” Even though WOW has a huge worldview, there were lots of gamers who some swam across the ocean and got into the cities that had been still under construction (waaaaa, this sounds funny), some others finished quests so quickly with level 70 players and achieved high level just in few days. Which company could have imagined this sort of crazy play?

‘Uncharted Water Online’ had some similar problems. It surely has great and large-scale worldview, too. But just like WOW, lots of gamers got the highest level before the game was actually commercialized. I even read some posts of gamers who finally visited the North Pole and Southeast Asia that were not opened to public during the beta service period!!

(1st expansion of Unchared Water Online ‘La Frontera: 1. Aztec’)

In the situation like this, the programmers and game designers must have difficulties to develop their game. The playing speed of gamers is getting so higher that the developers become stressed and try to follow that speed by constraint. Then it might lowers the quality of the game contents and causes lots of bug in the game. In Asia, for example, not only domestic game distributors but also international companies consider this fast play speed of players when they schedule the releasing date of new games. But of course it must be so hard to follow the play speed of gamers who might spend more than several hours online. Well, there still is one solution: the game designers can make the leveling very hard. But then? The gamers will lose interest and leave the game.

Moreover, if you are good at using macro, you can consume potions when your health and mana get low. Using macro, you can even automatically spell some kinds of buff magic that make you easy to hunt monsters; it might speed up your leveling speed, don’t you think so?

Big international distributors might be able to take it not very seriously. But for some developing companies that just have few programmers and designers, that situation can be an emergency. Actually in Korea, due to the fact that the online game market is huge and so popular, there are lots of online games and game contents companies. But except several major companies, the game developers are not usually can manage this gap of speed. “Then it must the only way that I cut down the sleep,” “I’ve not been home for a superlong time and now I can’t fall asleep unless I rest in the bunk bed at work.” These are the reality for some small-sized companies.

I’m not saying that these ‘passionate’ gamers have caused something just bad. They surely have contributed to game market, online game culture and business. Well, I have a funny example; maybe you’ve never assumed that marine can kill lurker in Starcraft. Trust me. That happens among Korean pro-gamers. (If you have no idea about pro-game league, I’ll post something about it later.) This miracle also comes from the power of gamers!

But as you might guess, higher level and better items don’t guaranty the FUN. From stories of each quest, from successful dungeon playing that your party thought that it would be impossible for you then, you can get fun experience of the game world. Honestly I fully understand the online gamers’ desire to showoff their overwhelming strength, high-end items, and luxurious outfits. But fast leveling is not a solution, definitely.