The One Character Fallacy

Many of the character advancement problems that we encounter in modern MMOs are caused by the one-character philosophy. Single-player RPGs adhere to this philosophy for good reason and originated it as a metaphor. As with the blind adoption of many of the other tropes of single-player RPGs, MMOs have taken this one blindly and not done adequate work to adapt it to fit the realities of massively multiplayer gaming.

The one-character philosophy exists and has persisted because of these design decisions:

1. Player characters do not age.
2. Player characters cannot actually die.
3. There can only be a limited number of PCs per player.
4. Character advancement is very time-consuming.
5. Character advancement is almost entirely vertical.

The one-character philosophy doesn’t need to be a static emplacement in MMORPG design. There are several well-documented issues with expecting the players to stick with one character throughout their journeys:

1. Grinds are necessary to keep players playing if they are meant to stick to one character. Developers want to milk as much play time from characters as humanly possible.
2. Vertical character progression has to be long. This means that level barriers lie between you and having fun doing what you want in the game world.
3. The wild swings of the nerfbat turn your favorite max level character into a useless sideshow in your favorite style of play. You’ve put 150 days of playtime into your character, but now it’s all rendered moot because the balance has tipped out of your favor.
4. Making an alt means repeating the whole grind again!
5. Lots of vertical progression means lots of content strewn across the game world that is only accessible to narrow groups of players at a time. 90% of the game world is useful to less than 10% of the players at a given time. Making good content is difficult and uneconomical considering the low number of total hours players will spend with that content.
6. Max level boredom is the result of grinding your way to max level, then looking out over the desolate landscapes of useless locales and wondering “now that I’ve climbed the mountain, what do I do next?” This is less a problem is World of Warcraft, because the game is very top-heavy, but in other games this is brutal. (Warhammer)
7. Death has to be meaningless or half of the players will run around naked, sit in town and macro all day, or become exploiters due to inhuman risk aversion.
8. Permanent decisions are anathema because characters have to live with what might be cripplingly bad decisions for the rest of eternity unless the player wants to throw away the time spent on that character.

MMOs refuse to stick to this metaphor wholesale (aside from Darkfall and other games that force you to only play as one character on one world) when they allow alts. This allowance is the first down the road to mortal characters in MMORPGs.
Problems with perma-death:

1. Discourages character investment.
2. May overly reward excessive play-time.
3. Character progression may be overly repetitive.
4. Managing too many characters at once.

Design responses (off the top of my head):

1. Focus on horizontal character progression.
2. Ensure there are important activities that a character can only do when the player is offline. Characters may have to sleep for a certain amount of their lives to not face penalties. Such penalties make it optimal to play multiple characters while not necessarily making every one of them uber.
3. Reduce vertical progression to the side-effect of good and skillful play. A 10% cap on vertical ability gain would be reasonable. Ensure that vertical progression is no longer the focus—speccing well and having a strategy for your character should be more important.
4. You don’t need to be logged in as particular characters to perform certain actions. Perhaps web-based or otherwise out-of-game interfaces would be more effective for managing the auction house, trade goods production, and other repetitive activities that can be more effectively managed from a dedicated interface outside of the game engine.

Discarding the one-character philosophy has its own problems, but it’s impossible to fully grasp the potential of a multi-character system until it’s actually implemented, and I don’t see any games giving it an honest go yet. One-character thinking has reached its natural conclusion; we need to move on. MMOs have proven their marketability, it's time to make game mechanics that leverage the nature of an online game instead of shoe-horning single-player mechanics into multi-player games where they do not belong. I believe the one-character philosophy is one design stumbling block past which we will find much better MMOs.

Outrageous Tasks Revisited

Building on some of the "outrageous tasks" (long travel times, forced grouping, harsh death penalties, grinding mobs for money) I mentioned in my previous post, I'd like to talk about what they accomplished in terms of dynamics, and thus what MMORPGs have lost over the years. I would be an interesting exercise to then reinstitute these mechanics and discuss methods to improve them rather than cut them.

Long Travel Times

The first journey into unknown lands is thrilling, but that excitement suffers extreme diminishing returns. The 80th time you fly from Ironforge to Stormwind, that mock Drawf battle isn't cool anymore. So to pass the time to chat with your guild or party. This is downtime for the player: a time to stop and smell the roses. Problem is that not everyone has the time to have downtime. Casual gaming is coming to the forefront and players want to get in, play the game, and get out.

Exploration should be a part of character progression, not a hurdle. Make the player undergo memorable sojourns to a new town, but then accelerate his trip thereafter. I think WoW's travel system is near perfect. A change I'd make would be to require players to have been at a teleport destination (much like the taxi system) before they are able to teleport there. I think the Summon spell needs to be tossed out the window also.

Forced Grouping

I've already commented on forced grouping and how to lubricate party creation.

Harsh Death Penalties

Games need to have a losing condition and some risk and reward. MMORPGs have gotten soft though. There is no more loss of experience or that terrible experience debt system (seriously, how did this even get past the alcohol-saturated napkin is was written upon?). Players praise Blizzard for removing these Draconian practices yet curse the newbs in their end game content. Guess how these baddies got to the level cap? Insufficient death penalty which failed to properly teach the players.

In Mario Bros. or Portal if you can't learn how to use the tool, you don't progress. If you don't understand that you must run full speed nonstop in order to cross the series of tiny pits, you have to restart the level. If you don't get the hint to "fl...ing you...your...elf", you don't get to hear GlaDOS' next snide comment. In WoW, if you don't understand how the threat system works, don't worry about it, you'll be level cap in no time.

(My first level 60 was a Tauren Warrior. I had come from FFXI in which tanking was done primarily by spamming an ability called "Provoke" every 30 seconds. Think of Provoke as Taunt. So when I was tanking Scholo for the first time, I would spam Taunt and watch my party die mercilessly. It was then that a kind soul informed me to use Sunder Armor because it generated Threat. Sunder Armor wasn't even on my hotbars. I had gotten to level cap and tanked various dungeons along the way without even a basic understanding of a very important mechanic. That is design failure.)

A resolution would be to change the attitude toward leveling systems. If players are in a Diku-style MMORPG, the mobs need to get more challenging. As players get new abilities, AI designers must present situations in which those abilities must be used in order to advance. The fun comes from learning how to use these tools. Leveling in an MMORPG becomes monotonous if players can succeed using a only tools from the beginning of the game and they aren't tested with the possibility of failure.

Grinding Mobs for Money

This actually hasn't gone away. WoW's daily quest system has reduced its importance slightly, but grinding is still grinding, whether you are just killing mobs or "killing with a purpose". I find there is a meditative quality to grinding mobs for money, but perhaps I'm just insane.

I don't know how to reconcile this. There has to be a mechanic to inject money into the MMO economy, and you can't just toss out the MMO economy; that's a major feature in MMOGs! Perhaps economic advancement can be the main attraction, and players play together for resource gain rather than Experience. Now we have issues with illegal gold farming and selling.

Maybe this is just one of those "real life" lessons where you hate your well-paying job but do it to pay the bills... Yea, I didn't think you'd buy it.