by Jeff Woleslagle on Sep 25, 2009
Loading... is the premier daily MMORPG news, coverage, and
commentary newsletter, only from Ten Ton Hammer.
Everyone refers to accessibility like it's some kind of cosmic
mentor on how to make a great MMO. The logic is straight out of a
freshman course: WoW is accessible, accessibility means a broader
audience, therefore it has mind-boggling numbers of subscribers. But
getting an exact definition of accessibility from anyone except Merriam
Webster is a challenge. Does it mean min-spec, soloability, how
compelling the source material is, or all of that and something else?
With your help, we'll work toward a definition today in Loading...
Accessibility Defined as we prepare for a discussion next week on
whether accessibility is necessarily a good thing for games.
You vote with what you view at Ten Ton Hammer, and the
result is the Ten Ton Pulse (
href="http://www.tentonhammer.com/thepulse/" target="_blank">What
is The Pulse?).
Here's today's top 5 Pulse results:
href="http://www.tentonhammer.com/taxonomy/term/41"Biggest movers this past week:
href="http://www.tentonhammer.com/taxonomy/term/39">JadeImportant
Dates
More praise for NCsoft today. In Wednesday's Loading... we joined many
of you in asking NCsoft to enforce inactivity rules regarding AFK
player stores to ease queue times. Players were setting themselves up
as vendors not just to sell stuff, but to camp a server slot in order
to skip the queue on their next play session. With today's early
morning patch,
players in store mode will be logged out after 30 minutes of
inactivity. No doubt the shadier element of the player community are
already working on scripts to circumvent the rule, but it's a big step
in the right direction.
And, though the news is a week old now, I also want to applaud NCsoft's
fan-friendly decision to
href="http://www.tentonhammer.com/node/74533">jettison
GameGuard, though it undoubtedly makes things a bit tougher
in terms of bot and exploit detection. GameGuard is trouble, both in
terms of the negative interactions it has with Steam and other
gamer-focused applications (including apps geared to
href="http://www.tentonhammer.com/node/74315">help disabled
gamers), and I've been nothing but impressed with the
decisions NCsoft has made with Aion so far.
The TTH staff has had an interesting ongoing discussion about
accessibility this week. The interesting thing was, though everyone
says that WoW's greatest achievement is its accessibility, all of us
had different definitions of accessibility. For some it was min-spec,
for others it was how much they wanted to play the game before seeing
assets or logging in, and for others it was
soloability and how far they got in the game before hitting that first
frustating roadblock (and whether the game had developed that initial
connection enough to overcome that roadblock).
Thanks mostly to Machail, we arrived at something that seemed like a
serviceable defintion of accessibility in MMOs. He proposed a
three-pronged definition: 1) how low the initial barrier to entry is
(min-spec, simplicity of the early game, and the attractiveness of the
IP), 2) how enjoyable the march to endgame is, discounting the
"level-up pressure" from friends and guildmates, and 3) what's waiting
at the endgame, i.e. how compelling the ultimate prize is, and whether
or not the endgame, like a movie in a good trilogy, leaves room for
what comes next - the theory being that no one wants to spend the
mammoth amount of time it takes for these games if there's little
promise of more good stuff to come.
Accessibility, of course has much broader application than games. Just
about every job starts small and grows in terms of responsibility and
complexity. Military officers command platoons for a long time before
they command companies and battalions. Exercise programs are all about
how you start, too. If you can't do a chin-up to save your life,
starting with an assisted pull-up machine at a local gym to step into
your full body weight will be more productive than simply floundering
under a bar. There's a huge accessibility component to
travel, too. When I went to Singapore last year, expats referred to the
country as "Asia light" - meaning that the though you were undeniably
not in Kansas anymore, the language and culture was familiar enough the
least adept Western traveler some traction. Something similar could
probably be said of Dubai, that it's "Middle East light" - an
Arabian nights feel without the fear of IEDs.
We haven't addressed the topic of whether or not accessibility is
necessarily a good thing. It sounds like a good thing, especially for
mass commercial appeal, but there's a certain logic to being tossed
into the deep end to learn how to swim, too. This is something we hope
to address in greater detail next week, but what do you think? Are
today's games too accessible? Are we drawing a less sociable, less
loyal kind of audience into our game worlds as a result? As always,
your thoughts are welcome in the
href="http://forums.tentonhammer.com/showthread.php?t=46604">Loading...
forum.
From our
href="http://forums.tentonhammer.com/forumdisplay.php?f=589">Aion
General Discussion forum
style="font-weight: normal;">"Creative" Aion Character Names
Savanja brought up the topic of off-the-wall names in today's
Ten Ton Hammer Aion community newsletter,
href="http://www.tentonhammer.com/node/74793/">The Daeva
Weekly, and I thought it was a timely one. Savanja's favorite
so far? "Krumbles," she says, "sporting the legion name 'A Gang of
Toast.' Best name ever, sir!"
I've
spotted a number of oddball names in Atreia. Too bad I wasn't taking
notes. A couple memorable ones are Assbandit and Ohgodwhereami. Surely
you've seen some names that would make a true roleplayer cringe.
href="http://forums.tentonhammer.com/showthread.php?t=46594">Share
them with us, in the name of fun and mockery.
==============================
Awesome Quotes from the
Epic Thread
No quotes yet.
href="http://forums.tentonhammer.com/showthread.php?t=46594">Make
some!
==============================
Have you spotted an Epic Thread on our forums?
href="http://forums.tentonhammer.com/showthread.php?t=32559">Tell
us!
Today's New MMO Coverage and Features
FinalHottest Content:
Final- Jeff "Ethec" Woleslagle and the Ten Ton Hammer team