An Anecdote of Social Dynamics In-Game

As an on and off player of World of Warcraft, City of Heroes/Villains or any other MMORPGs, it has always been challenging for me to blend in easily into the game as I would do in an online first person shooter. To my credit I have played most of the good MMORPGs and RPGs out there, but I just cannot hang on to it long enough to build a completely loaded character on level 60 or something. That said, I have some friends who just swear by them and like playing MMORPGs (Guildwars in this case) over anything else and they do it for more than five hours every day! There are those small elements that attract me to play these games and unfortunately, many that drive me away from it after I start indulging into these.

Starting with the good bits, what fascinates me is the choice and options you get to create your character. I would say out of all the MMORPGs out there, World of Warcraft employs the most number of character customization. The game has nine character classes that a player can choose from, though not all classes are available for each race. Each class has a set of unique abilities (general skills and spells available to the entire class) and talents (allow players to build their character and further refine their role). Every class has a set of three talent trees, with which players may choose to build their character's talent trees for damage-dealing, healing, etc. Characters can also equip different weapons and armor, either to customize their character or to improve abilities, as and when they acquire it. In addition to all this, it will let you change the head gear, skin color, hair style, facial hair, etc. Now this seemingly results into an enormous number of customized player characters. The sense of uniqueness in my character is what makes this part interesting and makes me give this a shot. The character is ready and unfortunately that’s the end of good times for me!

I think, game balance and design is one of the most difficult tasks when it comes to MMORPGs. Open ended gameplay, un-anticipated human behavior, huge number of player, weapons, levels combinations lead to a lot of un-expected situations. And to make the gameplay smooth and playable on most computers, you cannot expect eye-candy of the highest order from these games. But that’s a personal opinion, or else you won’t have millions of gamers playing this game every now and then.

Almost every game starts with a message stating that game play experience may change when you play this game online. WOW doesn’t have any difficulty level to choose from. Thinking it will be difficult to play against computer by default, I decided that playing against other humans on a PvP server (the interaction within the game in a PvP server occurs between other human players) would help me grasp faster as there would be other humans on the same level as me. But this theory backfired real bad and real quickly! My level one paladin stood no chance against the bunch of rogues I ran into. Every time I went back to my body (after they killed me) they used to lurk around, waiting for me. And me being a grade A World of Warcraft noob, did not realize it for the first eight times they killed me! I don’t know how level 52 rogues can stoop to such low levels by assaulting a level one paladin time and again. I later found out that this distasteful practice was described as "corpse camping" in Wikipedia.

"Corpse camping is where after killing another player, that player then continues to camp at the enemy's corpse (either by using stealth or other means) and kills them when the player resurrects themselves. Although this is frustrating to the camped player, this is not considered griefing by Blizzard and is not subject to punishment by Game Masters."

That said, I quit that server and hopped onto a PvE server. I get to create my player character once again from scratch. Unfortunately (or fortunately) I cannot take the same character that I had created in the PvP server to the PvE server, not for free at least. Paid transfer was an option, but my character was not worth it!

Player vs. Environment, commonly referred to as PvE by most online games and gamers, is the player-controlled character competing against the game world and its computer-controlled denizens, as opposed to Player vs. Player. A player must complete a pre-defined task without fighting other players. To my surprise, Blizzard usually calls them "normal" servers. Since it would seem that, a PvP server would be a normal server in an MMORPG. For a casual player like me, who just wants to play the game and train with less interruption, then PvE may just be the place for you. Some players like the thrill and risk of random player vs. player combat, and would consider PvE realms to have a difficulty that is too low. But in its defense, in a PvE server corpse camping, ganking, and griefing tend to be less prevalent.

Ganking and griefing have several meanings. When an overwhelmingly large or more powerful group or party kills you and/or your group or when a single player attacks a player of equal or lesser level who is in the middle of a fight with something else and is handicapped by that fight, its ganking. Griefing is the term used to describe the act of one player hassling another player. This can be as simple as someone trying to obscure someone else's view with their own character, or as bad as pulling mobs onto someone, or even preventing someone from achieving their goals like killing quest-givers or other NPCs.

But then I ran into a different kind of problem in the PvE server. I was only able to interact with players who were near about the same lever as I was i.e. level one! Other experienced players who were on much higher levels than me, would not either have the time and patience to speak to me, or maybe I did not initiate the conversation in the right manner. In any case it leads me to ponder about in-game social dynamics. I was later helped by a level six player who got me up to level three by directing me what to do and which quests were to be take. Should there be etiquette for in-game conversations too? In my opinion there should be, but I don’t see any courses educating you in schools for that in near future.