MMO Weekly: Questions For The MMO Gamer

14 Sep 2010 at 12:30:20 by Jeff Hollis

Hey there, my virtual friends and neighbors, and welcome to this week's interrogative edition of MMO Weekly. In this week's installment, I'll explore the “secondary services” market available to MMO gamers. These are services that you undoubtedly use, although you weren't necessarily aware of their importance. More than anything else, I'll be asking for your input, as an MMO gamer yourself, in regard to the services you find most important, and the ones you'd like to see in the future. 

Old School Secondary Services

Back in the early days of MMOs, you had the game itself, and that was pretty much all you had. It was a fun, heady time. However, first generation MMOs had a way of driving you crazy. Imagine an MMO in which there were no in-game maps, and no compass. There was no quest text to refer to. There were no question marks above quest givers' heads, and there were absolutely no indicators whatsoever to help you find an NPC or some sort of essential quest object. Looking back on it, things were pretty bare bones, but that was cutting edge ten years ago.

A “secondary services” market sprang up rather quickly to support these first gen MMOs. These were websites like the now defunct EQAtlas. EQAtlas did something that really helped gamers: the site admin drew up maps (by hand, mind you) of every zone in the game, listed the locations of all the towns and NPCs (even the ones stuck out in the middle of the wilderness), and generally helped players find their way around.

There were other services as well. Essentially, these were databases. Some helped you locate quest givers, and then walked you through the steps to complete the quest. Others listed items in the game, and the locations where these items could be found, or they told you what monster you needed to kill to get the item in question. I realize these things seem pretty rudimentary at this point in time, but they sprang up to meet a need. Back in the day, these were critical services, and players flocked to use them daily.

An odd side note: I distinctly remember some of the early developers actually speaking out against these kinds of services. They wanted gamers to play the game their way. They felt strongly that, because these websites ruined the “joy of discovery” or some such nonsense, services like these actually harmed their MMOs. Pure poppycock, but that was the state of play back then.

Then DAoC came along, and built some of these services right into their game. This shook the industry a bit. When WoW came on the scene, they made it a point to make the game as easy and convenient as possible. Blizzard built a lot of services into their game – maps, compasses, exclamation points and question marks that hung conspicuously over the heads of quest givers – you name it, they built it right into their game. In a radical move, WoW had allowed player-designed mods and addons to be used for their game as well. Whenever one of these mods turned out to be particularly good (i.e., Quest Helper), a similar service got built right into WoW during the next big patch. A few of the other services that websites offered (i.e., talent building tools, etc) also soon got added to the official WoW site, too. As new games follow WoW's lead, this is definitely a trend in the MMO industry overall. 

Contemporary Services

In the modern era, it seems to me that the secondary services market fits into several neat niches. These include 1) item databases, 2) talent/spec building tools, 3) addons, 4) current news for that particular MMO, and (more rarely, nowadays) player guides. There are also general WoW sites, and these provide several of these services in one location. There are other secondary service sites out there, but these are the most common ones. The quality of these services varies by a lot. However, if you are currently playing any of the to-notch MMOs, you are probably visiting websites that provide one or more of these services. 

The Future 

I have two questions, thrown out to you, the MMO gamers out there. The first is this: what “secondary services” do you use to help you get ahead in the MMO you are currently playing?

1. Item databases

2. Talent building tools

3. Addons

4. News (generally, this includes podcasts)

5. Player Guides (class guides, profession guides, etc)

6. Other

My second question is related: what secondary services, currently lacking or under-provided, would you like to see? Obviously, this is a request for you, the reader (and MMO gamer), to express your own thoughts on what is needed. At the risk of stuffing the suggestion box with my own ideas, here are a handful of possibilities.

1. Build analysis (a site that's devoted to talent builds/specs)

2. Guild services (assisting players to find guilds that suit them, guild recruitment, etc)

3. Video walk-throughs of quests, dungeons, etc

4. A guide service (i.e., priest guide, shaman guide, Jedi guide, whatever) that is actually kept up to date

5. A “tip of the day” service

6. A daily e-mail newsletter service of some helpful kind

So there you have it. Two questions, MMO-heads. What services do you use now? And what services would you like to see in the future?

I realize I'm something of a freak, but I find myself thinking of these kinds of things often. The needs of MMO gamers have often predicted the future of the genre, and I'm curious if there is a need that is unmet (as of yet), which will likely be met in the near future, as the genre evolves. I'd love to hear your ideas, so please share your thoughts in the comments below.

And, as always, if you enjoyed this little geeky tidbit, feel free to visit us over at Coolorama, where we bathe in this kind of nerdery each and every day. For now, ciao!

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