So, Patrick’s had a chance to think about it for a little bit, and he’s decided that he doesn’t like items very much. In fact, ’suck’ is the word that he used. I used to be one of those ‘items are unimportant’ guys. In fact, the Meridian 59 item system he designed so lovingly was designed by me. Confession: our low item count was caused more by a lack of art assets than any desire to make a spartan experience.

There are some very good reasons to have items in your game. Brian covers the obvious, which is that it gives Blizzard a way to keep the game going.

Equipment also provides a way to extend the advancement of characters. Instead of having infinite levels (you have to save something to sell the expansion with!), you can just have infinite advancement of equipmet. Getting another +1 to a stat is what it’s all about. Or, getting all purple items to show off to your friends. The equipment treadmill is just another way to keep people playing.

Or put it another way, players profess to hate items. But if you were to take them away, you’d have a few million WoW players saying, “Well, okay, what do I do now?”

Items appeal to each of the four player types, in a different way:

  • For socializers, it’s a way to build a persona and roleplay, as well as a social driver for instances and raids.
  • For achievers, it’s a new plateau to climb for.
  • For explorers, items mean new potential trinkets with wacky powers to play with.
  • For killers, it adds to his raw power.

And lets not forget that items give the crafters a market. The player type who dislikes items the most, incidentally, is the killer, since it means he has to play the achiever game to be a disruptive presence. This is usually fine with the other three groups.

Players who hit level 70 don’t want to stop. They want to continue to grow and improve the character they’ve devoted so much time and energy to. They don’t want to be told that their character is done. Done to the explorer means no new trinkets to build wacky builds around. Done to the achiever means no new plateaus to climb. Done means no new goals for the socializer to organize a raid to go pursue.

Done is bad. When the game is done, people leave. This isn’t just a subscription revenue issue – it also results in attrition to the guilds and communities in the space. We call this ‘bad’ in design land.

One would-be designer in this thread called the decision to lean on items as ‘lazy’. Lazy is, of course, fan designer short-hand for ‘any decision I disagree with’. Blizzard’s ‘lazy’ solution requires, and I shit you not, a full Itemization Team in order to build new items and balance existing ones. Items aren’t lazy. They’re a simple solution, which is good, because the sheer mass of content any MMO title requires takes any simple solution and makes it complex.

The poster lists ‘Alternate Advancement points’ (or AAs) as a preferred solution to all that laziness. And may Everquest players think of AAs very fondly. But items have some advantages on AAs that can’t be totally discounted.

  • Getting an item feels better than spending a point (due largely to their negative reinforcement schedule).
  • Items have a visual component that make for better bragging rights.
  • Items are mutable – a player can switch between a DPS set, a dungeon set, or a healing set of gear on a per-fight basis. Most advancement schemes are not, or require heading to town to rearrange.

Are items perfect? By no means. But again, they do a lot of things well.

Interestingly, WoW made the decision with their next expansion to increase the level cap and, as a handy side effect invalidate pretty much all of the level 70 items in the game – a repeat of what they did with the Burning Crusade. This really shouldn’t be a surprise: items ARE the game’s alternative advancement scheme. If they didn’t put in new toys for the masses, the majority of the players would be ‘done’ with the expansion before it shipped.

Original comments thread is here.