It seems time spent is the nature of the MMORPG.
No.
Time spent is the nature of WoW. Since the main reason why everyone and their mothers are making MMORPGs is to try to get a slice of WoW’s pie, this means modern MMORPGs have focused on time spent as well.
In the context of a pay to play game, rewarding time spent makes perfect sense:
- It allows players to grind, increasing the game’s longevity through content that is easy to build – it doesn’t have to be fun, just make it give a reward and people will do it.
- It keeps people playing, and thus paying, for a very long time. The more successful someone wants to be, the more he has to play, and thus the more he pays to continue playing.
- It caters to the lowest denominator. Not everyone is skilled, and not everyone wants to bother with becoming skilled. Rewards for skill won ’t ever be reached by all players. Meanwhile, rewarding time spent means everyone could, sooner or later, have access to those rewards.
The thing is, rewarding time spent requires a very specific mindset. Most people, when going to the movies, don’t say “I’m going to watch whatever is there, as long as I get paid during the credits”. Most people go to the movies to have fun, not to get a tangible reward.
In other words, rewarding time spent caters to grinders, and not many others. This strongly limits the target audience of MMORPGs – if you take a look at subscription numbers, there are very clear patterns hinting that it’s basically the same players jumping from MMO to MMO, as opposed to new players entering the genre.
ArenaNet knew this. They mentioned they wanted to make a MMORPG for people who don’t like MMORPGs. IMO, they failed – whenever people talk about other games they have played here, a lot of people describe having played half the AAA MMOs released in the last years.
I would begin by not rewarding time spent, and by making challenging content. Assuming game designers cannot make challenging content is, IMO, the same as assuming they cannot make fun content – which means they aren’t that great designers in the first place. Single player games have always had multiple examples of challenging content.
“I think that players are starting to mature past the point of wanting to be on that
treadmill, of being in that obvious pattern of every time I catch up you are going to
put another carrot in front of me” – Mike O’Brien right before Ascended weapons