Massive Multiplayer Online games (roleplaying or otherwise) have their own flavor of human interaction about them. The nature of it is different from one game to another, but they all have a common feel that mixes latent hostility, anonymity, altruism, and a care-free attitude. Much of this nature is borrowed from the fact that the games are inherently online. The Internet behaves in its own way and MMOs are a part of that. However the interaction in such games is itself different, the other individuals being communicated with may be enemies, allies, or a neutral party to the player.
MMOs have been historically absent from console systems. Recently that has started to change, we’re seeing more console based MMOs such as Grand Theft Auto Online, Destiny (FPS), Elder Scrolls Online, Black Desert Online, Neverwinter, DC Universe Online (RPG), The Crew (Racing), and more to come. As long as a list as that may seem, the number of PC MMO games can easily number in the hundreds or thousands (depending on how loose you are with calling something an MMO.)
Console MMOs
The significance of PC vs console MMO games is in the way players communicate. Typing into a text chat while on consoles is either impossible (disabled in some games, such as Destiny) to difficult (enabled but rarely used, such as in Elder Scrolls Online.) This difficulty means that if someone wants to lash out with a slur of insults they must put more effort into sending that message. Often enough when people are upset they’re not willing to work to insult someone, so those messages will rarely get sent.
Individuals here are more likely to communicate non-verbally, through action or inaction in the game world. Having built-in emotes (the ability to cause your character to move in a certain way to emulate an emotion such as waving, applauding, kneeling, striking a pose, so on and so forth) helps communicate ideas. Where emotes aren’t used someone might vaguely gesture in a direction in order to play a sort of pseudo-pictionary-like game of communication.
Console MMOs become somewhat more like PC ones if spoken chat is enabled. This is often some setting that can be toggled on or off, depend on being in a formal group or just being near other people by coincidence, being in certain types of areas that have it by default, or some other game-specific constraint. Once you can hear and speak to people, then you’re talking to random individuals on the Internet and can expect them to behave the same as any other public forum, that is for better or for worse.
Group/Solo Play
There is a wide variety of ways with which you can tackle an MMO. Your personal playstyle will often not be discouraged, but if the developers of the game want to encourage a different playstyle it may feel as if doing anything else is a waste of time. A truly well-made MMO will allow for a myriad of gameplay styles to progress and reward the player.
The game can reward people for grouping up as much as possible or it can reward grouping up whenever it is convenient. The game can reward people playing alone, but it is more common to reward players playing cooperatively. This shouldn’t come as a surprise when the second letter in the genre’s acronym stands for Multiplayer.
If the community behind the internet or MMOs scares you, makes you think of such horrible stories, or recall videos, of players being unbelievably unkind that typically comes as a result of a time commitment. More on that later, but for now just know that if players aren’t punished for you losing them time, then very little anger will likely be directed towards you.
Grouping Up
One of the directives of MMOs that I hit on in a previous blog post is the fun in overcoming impossible odds through teamwork and cooperation. This comes in different scales and can vary widely in how enjoyable they are.
The most common is known as the 5 man instance. The first time I encountered the idea of instancing was in WoW, where you and your party of 5 enter into a location that is virtually isolated from all other players. It presents challenges you must overcome as a group and you are rewarded appropriately. The time frame can vary wildly, not only from game-to-game but from instance-to-instance within each game.
The more intense version of this found in WoW was the 25-man raid. They are similar to instances, except the difficulty is ramped up, and cooperation between such a large number of players is heavily tested. Not much needs to be said here, it is really an extension of the 5-man. The largest group I’ve ever seen in WoW was in 40-man raids. The largest number of people that could participate in a raid at one time. These were meant for the toughest of tough, every dial was put to 11 here. The biggest and baddest bosses often required this many people to defeat.
However, these raids, though large, were still instanced. That is, they were virtually divided from the rest of the playerbase. Multiple 40-man raids could occur simultaneously in different virtual copies of the same raid space. To my knowledge there are no open-world bosses, or rather there are none in WoW. I haven’t played in a few years and this may have changed, but it’s not likely. WoW players might point out the presence of legendary monsters in the wild, but since only the first person to attack it gets the loot and experience I don’t consider it a true public encounter.
Public Events
These differ from instances in that they happen “in the wild” if you will. You could be running through the forest, minding your own business, and run into a public event already in progress. Public Events happen in games such as Destiny, Guild Wars, and Neverwinter. They’re bosses (or group of miniature bosses) that appear randomly in the open player space. As such, any random player can happen across them and choose to participate. Participants are rewarded somehow so there is an incentive for participating.
Because these are limited only to the number of people in the public world, the number of people participating can reach much greater than WoW’s 40-man raids. I have participated in Guild Wars 2 public events where the number of players easily hit 3 digits. The swarms and crowds of people and mass of special effects left my older not-so-state-of-the-art machine struggling to keep up. I also found this to be one of the most enjoyable experiences. There’s something about being one of a hundred people attacking the same massive dragon, boar, troll, or some such monster felt incredible.
However, as far as the community is concerned, there is no reason to expect a public passerby to participate in the event. Maybe you have better things to do, maybe the destination you need to reach will give you better rewards than what you would get from the public event. As a result, no other player could expect you to help or blame you for not helping. You are not obligated in any way to assist. With instances, you are put into a party, a formal group. In those times, you are obligated to assist your team, to pull your weight. Not doing so can be frustrating as you bring others down with you, causing them to lose encounters, costing them the only precious resource in an MMO — time.
Player Frustration
When players of online games (MMOs or otherwise) are made to invest their time into the game they expect to receive compensation. If you give your time to a company, you expect to be paid for services rendered. In an MMO if you are grouped with someone, you are expected to fill your role well enough to achieve victory. Defeat is frustrating in an MMO because we are putting tokens into a slot machine and it not paying out. The tokens are our time, the slot machine is the game, and the payout is victory.
If it is clear that a particular team member has sunk your time, then that generates frustration. The more time required by people to achieve victory, the more invested they are in that payout. As a result, losing a raid will upset players more than losing an instance. Losing a public event won’t often frustrate players as much as either of the others, because you not being grouped with them means they have no way to know if you are responsible for the sunk time.
MOBA-style games (Mobile Online Battle Arena) such as League of Legends and DoTA are infamous for players lashing out. This is because the time investment in these matches can be as short as 10 or 15 minutes, but more often are 30 minutes to an hour. Also, they’re known for a snowballing effect, where if one team gets an advantage early on, it is multiplied and becomes more significant as time goes on. This could potentially turn a small advantage now into a sure win later.
As you might expect, if a player sees you do something poorly because you are not as experienced or you made a mistake, they see that you could kickstart that snowball effect. Any small mistake could lead to disaster in the future, so players come down on mistakes hard. They swear and curse, they throw insults and racial slurs, they will say the most awful of things because they blame your small mistake now for their loss of an hour of their time. This toxicity is what puts many players off of such games.
MMOs don’t often have such severe time commitments, save for the most intense of content that requires many people to work for a long time. This is usually a small fraction of the overall content of an MMO, which leads to less toxic behavior.
The Internet
Although players are less toxic in an MMO than in a MOBA, this rule of online games still rings true: this is the internet, the people are anonymous, they’re more likely to speak their mind for better or worse.
If you’ve read this far you may be under the impression that the MMO community is full of people out to get you, ready to hate you, and brimming with toxicity. In -I’d say- equal measures there is also altruism and a general willingness to have fun. As many people as there are that will blame you for not finishing an instance successfully there are an equal number of people that will understand that you might be new or mistakes were made and are willing to try again, no harm no foul. The people are anonymous, the bad people are anonymous, the good people are anonymous. You never know who you are going to meet, and there are entire sections of the internet dedicated to sharing, cooperating, and enjoying the community inherent in MMOs.
The thing to know about these game communities is that, like when you’re out in public, a healthy amount of skepticism will go a long way. The next person you meet might hate you for no reason, they might be your next best friend. MMOs work best when it teams people up, challenges them, and gives them the tools to overcome obstacles as a team. This works as one big team building exercise and can bring people together. Guilds, clans, or otherwise persistent teams are common occurrences in MMOs and it’s not hard to find people talking about the great times they’ve shared with people they’ve never met in person. “Our guild did the raid last night.” “Back in the day my guild did event after event only using wooden sticks and it was hilarious!” “It’s often our guild will have people in chat doing crazy things talking about hilarious stuff.”
I adore Massively Multiplayer Online games partly because of the community they encourage, and the enjoying experience of beating the odds in a team. If I have to weed out a few bad apples from the bunch in the meantime, so be it.
