This has come up a lot, but it bears its own discussion point: a lot of the time, MMO players simply bore themselves to the edge of frustration.

In a single player game, this doesn’t happen. A huge part of the reason why is that the designer has total control over the player’s skills and difficulties at any given time. In fact, most sophisticated teams will draw power graphs and emotional response graphs for their single player game, in order to draw the players through a riveting experience.

MMOs, by contrast, are an open landscape, where players can go anywhere and do anything that they want. The ability to go anywhere, including back to newbietown, hang with your friends, show off to the newbs and squash the monsters that gave you hell at level 10 in one shot is, in fact, one of the great selling points of the MMO experience. But it also introduces problems.

The problems are that people are optimizers. News flash: MMO Combat isn’t necessarily boring. If you’re taking a party of other people into a zone that’s slightly too tough for you, you have the difficulty of the fight tacked onto the unpredictability of other people. You’re one LEEEROOOOY away from total chaos breaking out.

But most of the time, players don’t wander the play landscape in search of the most entertaining challenge. Instead, for 90% of their time, they pursue the path of greatest efficiency, factoring in time, risk and reward. And most of the time, that mental math will lead them to a place they can solo for relatively low risk. Once you’re soloing, you lose the unpredictability of other people, which is most of what CAN make standard MMO interesting.

How to fix it? There are numerous paths. You can offer heavier incentives for greater risk, or give greater rewards for group play. You can even make it so grouping is required if you like. But there’s a problem – a twist to the debate.

The problem (and this is, admittedly, tough to wrap the head around) is that many people log into an MMO when they aren’t prepared to play a game. They want to be entertained, be around their friends, or march along the progressquest, but they aren’t ready to do heavy thinking or deep tactics. They really don’t feel like trying to find competent strangers to take on a challenging level. Hey, they did heavy thinking at work all day, along with a healthy dose of interacting with idiots. What they want is the equivalent of popping bubble wrap, say 90% of the time. The open landscape gives them that option where other games really don’t.

The problem is that, eventually, you realize you’re popping bubble wrap, and then you do the math and figure out how much time you spent popping bubble wrap. Once wonders how many accounts have been cancelled thanks to the /timeplayed command. And most players will then blame the game rather than how they chose to play it.

Does this line of thinking resonate with anyone else? If so, is it fixable?

Original comment thread is here.