Thank you so much for this post. I've been writing about MMOs for over a decade, and I've often made various arguments in favor of what you call "regularity," but they always felt partly subjective and partly intuitive. Your post explains all of this from a systems perspective. This is excellent work: a very cohesive explanation of what matters most to the core MMO audience.
Glad to hear the topic has been helpful! This article is a combination of what I've researched over myself as well as what I've learned from others over time through working with amazing colleagues in the industry. Lots of thanks should go to these people's side as well.
Thanks to these wonderful people as well. What amazes me is that in all these years, I've never seen anyone discuss regularity as a key element of MMO design.
Quite the opposite — in most cases, I see non-viable approaches where it's immediately obvious that a new MMO will never weave itself into a player's daily life and habits, and instead looks like a standard game you play through once and forget.
Yet for an MMO, merely being an ordinary game costs far more to build. You spin up server infrastructure that requires constant upkeep and spending. The game world fills with other players who disrupt the intended experience rather than enrich it.
These projects predictably fail, and then the MMO genre gets blamed. But the genre was never going to save a game that clearly wasn't designed for it. All it could do was make development harder, drive up costs, and ultimately amplify the losses from a fundamentally flawed approach.
Thank you so much for this post. I've been writing about MMOs for over a decade, and I've often made various arguments in favor of what you call "regularity," but they always felt partly subjective and partly intuitive. Your post explains all of this from a systems perspective. This is excellent work: a very cohesive explanation of what matters most to the core MMO audience.
Glad to hear the topic has been helpful! This article is a combination of what I've researched over myself as well as what I've learned from others over time through working with amazing colleagues in the industry. Lots of thanks should go to these people's side as well.
Thanks to these wonderful people as well. What amazes me is that in all these years, I've never seen anyone discuss regularity as a key element of MMO design.
Quite the opposite — in most cases, I see non-viable approaches where it's immediately obvious that a new MMO will never weave itself into a player's daily life and habits, and instead looks like a standard game you play through once and forget.
Yet for an MMO, merely being an ordinary game costs far more to build. You spin up server infrastructure that requires constant upkeep and spending. The game world fills with other players who disrupt the intended experience rather than enrich it.
These projects predictably fail, and then the MMO genre gets blamed. But the genre was never going to save a game that clearly wasn't designed for it. All it could do was make development harder, drive up costs, and ultimately amplify the losses from a fundamentally flawed approach.