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This is part of an ongoing series of articles on Player Types in AAA MMOs aimed at the American and European market, such as EverQuest®, Dark Age of Camelot®, World of Warcraft®, Lord of the Rings Online®, Eve Online®, Warhammer Online®, etc. My first goal over the next few months is to develop a comprehensive list and description of unique player types. To accomplish this I will need your input and observations.
I recently revisited World of Warcraft® (WOW) latest expansion Wrath to see how the gave has evolved. I initially noticed that the player vs. environment (pve) portion of WOW has become more focused, with quest hubs linked by flight paths, and quest locations usually just a couple minutes away from the hub. When a character has completed most of the quests at one hub, the character is given a quest to go to a different hub. I leveled one of my avatars from 70 to 80 just doing quests. At the level cap of 80 there were over 250 quests that avatar had not done. In effect the new WOW continent, Northrend, introduced in Wrath has become more of a theme park game than WOW’s older content.
More and more Massives have this type of gameplay. In Star Wars Galaxy it is called Theme Parks, In World of WarCraft it is called Quest Hubs, in WarHammer Online it is called Chapters. What they have in common is that a player goes to a location, does some or all of the quests provided and is rewarded with not only experience and loot but also some advancement of the game’s storyline.
To participate in this Tourist-style of behavior does not require much effort on the part of a player. Additionally, by its nature it can be done in short game sessions. I have noticed it makes players less involved with the game world, as they assume a quest will guide them to anything important.
Back in vanilla EverQuest there was a zone with two sphinxes on different sides of the zone. I spent hours with my guild trying to figure out why these sphinxes were there, and to get a response from them. To this day I don’t know if they were broken or we just did not figure them out. A Tourist-style player might make note of the sphinxes but not interact with them, waiting for a quest to send the player back to the sphinx.
The Tourist
Build a theme park and tourists will come. At first I tried to make a real world analogy between Massive Theme Parks and guided tours, and failed. In a Massive once a player is directed to an attraction/quest s/he must still take action to participate/complete it. I finally found my real world analogy with live-aboard dive cruises. On a live-aboard a diver is taken to a destination, then briefed on the dive by a dive master.
In a massive a player is directed to a destination, then given instructions on what to do (quest). After completing a dive (30-60 minutes) a diver is rewarded with a hot cookie and a warm towel. After completing a quest (15-30 minutes) a player is rewarded with experience and loot. Perhaps a better term than simply tourist, would be Adventure Tourist to define this new player type.
Although I have identified a real-world analogue of Tourist-guy I am not as confident that Tourist-guy is a unique Player Type. When you look at who participates in end-game raids in WoW, you can find all four of the Bartle 4-axis model Player Types. Explorers may raid to see the content, Achievers may raid to beat the content, Socializers may raid because the nature of raids leaves plenty of time down time to talk and, Killers may raid to acquire a piece of gear. So, just observing some players participate in Tourist-style behavior does not make it a unique Player Type.
From EverQuest to Dark Age of Camelot to vanilla World of Warcraft to the latest WoW expansion Northrend quests and how they are presented have naturally evolved. It is easy to see how the current Quest hubs or Attractions have come about. That is, they may have come about through a natural progression of game design and not in response to player needs.
All the unique Player Types I have identified I can find on the Bartle 4-axis model. Raid-guy is an Achiever-Socializer, Duel-guy is a Killer-Achiever, and so on. I can’t place Tourist-guy on Bartle’s model, which makes me uncomfortable.
Looking at the WoW expansion Northrend quests with the Bartle 4-axis model we find that leveling up is easier in Northrend through quests, which should make it less satisfying for Achievers, as their leveling achievements are trivialized. Quests are much easier to find in Northrend, making it less satisfying for Explorers. Quests are mostly solo-able in Northrend, making it less satisfying to Socializers. These changes do not affect Player Killer types.
One could simply say that Tourist-guy is playing the game as intended or designed. Another way to look at it is that Tourist-guy is simply a beginning player of Massives, and doesn’t yet have the experience to play in a different manner. I think a key here is that Quest Hubs, Attractions, and Chapters, are essentially solo games within a Massive. One way of looking at WarHammer Online’s Public Quests is that it allows one to solo a group quest. Another data point is the recurrent WoW forum complaint that some quests require groups to complete. Emergent game design has created a Massive solo game with other people around.
It could be that Tourist-guy is not really playing a Massive so his Player Type does not fit into our conventional thinking.
This ties in to an observation I had about WoW end-game five-man content. First this 5-man content has been redesigned in Northrend. Where previously each mini-encounter in a dungeon required communication between group members, in Northrend it does not. It is not unusual to use the in game looking-for-group function, get auto-invited into a group of four other players, run a dungeon in 30-45 minutes and never talk to your group-mates. I have observed this same behavior in 10 and 25 man end-game raids. And by not communication, I mean not even "congrats" when someone gets gear upgrade. So again Tourist-guy is playing a solo game with other people around.
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I write to help clarify my thinking. In this case I can see I was wrong. What I had been calling Tourist-guy is actually Solo-guy. The problem with getting to know Solo-guy is that he doesn’t talk, (except maybe a little on the forums) you must infer that he is there. But rethinking my observations I can make a case I have seen Solo-guy in all aspects of game-play. Now I can fit Solo-guy into the Bartle 4-axis model. Solo-guy’s socialization is practically zero, and he may partake of any of the other Player Types. So Solo-Guy could be a solo-achiever-explorer, or a solo-killer-achiever, etc., etc. From what little I have read about Star Wars the Old Republic it appears that it may be aimed at Solo-Guy.
Having come to the conclusion that Solo-Guy is a unique Player type that leads me to identify another similar Player Type, Dual-Guy. Dual-Guy is typically a husband-wife, bf-gf, father-son team, which treats a Massive as a two-player cooperative game.
Furthermore, I can now see that Tourist-Guy is actually Story-guy. Since the game story is typically embedded into quests, Story-guy has strong motivation to finish all quests, and Quest Centers and the like ensure that Story-Guy does not miss any of the story.
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So what are your observations about Solo-guy? And how do we begin quantifying him?
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EDIT: One might also want to consider a minor variant: the educated tourist, who is similar in all respects except the reliance on quest hubs, since they would research online for quest locations of note. I would assume that this variant would be somewhat more social due to the lower reliance of hand-holding, and more skilled due to background research.
In other words, this comment -- "just observing some players participate in Tourist-style behavior does not make it a unique Player Type" -- applies to all game content: just because people interact with some piece of game content doesn't mean that everyone who does it does it for the same reason. (As the comment on raid content implied.)
What do you think about the possibility that the "Tourist" (I'm mostly going from the name here) is related to the "Wanderer" style proposed by Chris Bateman in his Demographic Game Design (DGD1) model of playing styles? (See http://onlyagame.typepad.com/only_a_game/2005/07/the_state_of_th.html)
it is the old Bird in the hand and 2 in the bush model. MMO companies have been trying to get the birds in the bush at the expense of the birds in their hand. it is in the end what the whole SWG NGE was about.... making a MMO accessible to Star Wars fans that weren't necessarily MMO fans.
The shift has been going on fro a long time, and a lot of people blame SOE for it about the time they made the Planes of Power Expansion and nuked long travel from EQ1.
EQ2 shifted from a heroic mob world (group oriented play) to solo mopbs in outdoor zones years later.
Tabula Rasa was designed from the ground up to be for a tourist player. It was probably the first of the MMOSRPG (S solo),
The trouble is the Solo or tourist player is not a customer that is friendly to MMO longevity. Yes we all show some of their traits, but you are right they really aren't Bartle measured in most ways.
They tend to "win" games and move on. With WoW being Disney World and most other games being The Grand Canyon. Tourists go to Disney every year in October or whatever, but tend to go to the Grand Canyon only once (they enjoyed it, toook 10,000 pictures... but don't come back). So WoW hangs onto some of them, although a lot will quit until a new expansion and play somthing else in the mantime.
Tourists aren't the backbone of a game community. When the tourists pack up and go home.. that's it.
Their impact on the industry is huge. Not jsut for TR which became a ghost town, but in all releases.
Look at the modern MMO release. Large numbers play for a few months then massive numbers wander off and there are server merges. The companies MUST have those servers at launch because of demand, but have to plan on getting rid of them in a short time. Those tourists will leave.
Quick, hub style gameplay, no downtime (where I met all my friends online playing EQ1 while medding), fast leveling, XP boosts (rested or P2P potions etc.) all conspire to attract these players and then send them back out the door as quickly as possible.
Traditional old fart MMO players like me are left with nothing to play. Nothing for us to grip onto and play for a long time. We are being dragged into the same model.
It is like FPS games on Xbox Live. Very few have longevity for online play. After 6 months, if you try and play a little deathmatch, you may find a small number of hardcore players, and a bunch of renters boosting Achievements. There are tons of new FPS games with the same modes (CTF, DM etc.) Bam, Bam bam... move on to the next one.
WoW is an old-school game that is converting.
Warhammer was designed about 75% to tourist play.
EQ2 is evoving to about 75% tourist
Champions is a model tourist game.
Stargate (which is about a show based on TEAMS!?!?!) is mostly solo.
All the proposed unreleased SOE games are "Solo friendly" with the Agency looking to be another Tabula Rasa (DC heroes may hold out because of the license, but it is basically a massive solo game).
Basically MMOs have become a turist based economy.
You guys wanna know where the money is? Someone needs to make an old-school MMO. Vanguard tried it and didn't survive the tourists in the Alpha/beta process. It started shifting in Beta, and became a solo game pretty close to release. It is hovering at 75% tourist now, and is too old to get new tourists. No expansions planned, no real budget. it is on life support.
A lot of us old and grumpy Bartle people are bored with these solo games and want to invest our time in something more long-term. A lot of us are lingering in WoW (or other games in lower numbers)... going through the motions and mostly there for the guild chat.
We want our genre back. Someplace the innovations and feature growth of the industry shifted the whole thing to a different audience.
I don't wanna be a tourist. I wanna be a townie (hrmm.. not the best image maybe).
... and as they say in Maine.. ya can't get there from here.
/cry.
They believe that they can get things done faster and more efficiently without a group. And in truth, this is rarely due to some psychological disorder; grouping in many MMOGs will actually slow down your leveling and quest completion rate. You get less XP from enemies, less loot, and usually will have to wait on respawns for collection quests -- even if you are just partnering.
The rise of the solo-guy is simply due to the solo-minded design of the modern MMO. In EQ1 days, very few classes could effectively solo. The druid, shaman, and bard could "kite" mobs around open areas and defeat them solo. This actually yielded some of the best experience you could get; so naturally people kited -- even after it was made far more difficult. Yet the "solo-guy" was a rarity in EQ after level 20. And it wasn't because players were necessarily different back then, it's because the game was different. It was far more group oriented.
Bart I plan on revisting Tourist-guy and Solo-guy after digesting comments and thinking about it some more. I believe these guys are a significant percentage of the player base and I want to get it right. Thanks for the link, some good observations there.
Thomas, I'm with you 100 percent. My feeling on Vanguard is it wanted to be Challenging but ended up being just difficult. Not really the same thing. One major problem I noticed in Vanguard beta was fan-boys drowning out legitimate concerns of testers.
Enrique, my question is a player a Solo-guy before he picks up a game, or is Solo-Guy a reaction to game play. What would happen if either the benefits of grouping were improved or the bar to get a group was lower.
I suspect there are solo forms of all the Bartle types (whether we're talking the original four or the current eight). The person Enrique describes sounds like a Solo Achiever, who makes a conscious choice to go it alone out of a belief that this maximizes his leveling experience.
That's not me.
I solo because I don't like making commitments I can't keep. If I join a pick-up group, it's not fun for me because all my concentration is on not letting the other people down. It doesn't matter if they're complete strangers -- it still feels like a commitment, and commitments that can't be honored should not be made.
Joining a guild would be even worse. I have projects I enjoy working on and places I want to explore (key word there), so having to fix my entertainment clock to what somebody else wants to do is both frustrating and worrisome. It's frustrating because what other people want is rarely what I enjoy, and it's worrisome because I can't guarantee that my time will allow me to play when everyone else in the group wants to play and my commitments matter to me.
So from my perspective, I solo because that way I don't have to worry about letting anyone down -- I can just enjoy the game as it happens.
Just one more anecdotal log to throw on the player styles fire....
I think there really is a difference between a solo player (and who doesn't at least sometime?) and the tourist as defined here. There are solo versions of the bartle people. Tourists are a new breed. They may be solo achievers, but I think they are also operating outside the traditional form of the mMO, and bending the genre to their needs, to the detriment to the other trypes ofd players, and to the industry as a whole (because MMOs rely on player longevity to keep going).
I solo maybe 1/3 of my MMO time. Quick jumps in, when I'm Beta testing and doing something a bit off center that groups wouldn't usually want to deal with, or I'm grumpy etc. In fact i tend to have a solo character that is unguilded (and often on another server) so I can retreat to a quiet space withotu guild drama and other crazyness.
I do have friends who are MMO tourists though. They consume the games the same way they play FPS etc. 1 character race to "win" then move on. With most modern MMOs that have less than 2 expansions, they can often be in and out of a game before their free month subscription ends and they have to pay a 2nd month fee (and they can afford it).
The modern MMO communities are basically people we bring in from guilds in other games. For as much as people bag on EQ1 for downtime, medding and the like. I met tons of people playing the game, debated politics, talked about fishing, learned about other countries, had 3 friends really meet someone and get married (both online and in real life).
As I tried to convey (and probably failed) in my previous post, there is a point where legitimate features, design etc. (maps, quest markers, solo friendly gameplay added up to create a place that bent the MMO universe so it was suited to a different kind of player than those that is started with. (Again I think the SWG NGE is probably the most sudden and representative case for this. (BTW Post NGE SWG is an ok game, just not one I want to play, and not the one I signed up for). It is for a completely different audience than its initial subscribers).
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Dan- the Fanboy crowd for any game is just as bad as any other group for noise.. maybe more. Devs can and do make mistakes.
The extensive lobbying in betas has gotten out of hand. In many cases every game tries to be everything to everyone. I enjoy PVP from time to time... does EVERY game need PVP and PVP servers? Crafting (which I also enjoy)?
There is also the pyramid effect of every game existing before. Everyone wants one feature that game X or game Y had. Do we really have to have them all (interactive maps, quest waypoints, the same 9 basic classes???) it is (in the end) the accumulation of all these features that created tourist MMOs i nthe first place.
Not all modern FPS has cover systems (nor do all of them have rocket launchers).
Will every FPS from now on have a Sammich (tasty as they are)?
New MMOs need to step back and declare what they are and stick to their guns.Maybe they won't be so "massively" on the MMO scale, but there will be a place for realistic physics loving cowboy game fans, or hardcore (no respawn ) PVP Ninja vs. Pirates...or perhaps the Barrens Chat word count game-o-rama (scored like scabble, but -300 pts for Chuck Norris references).
Man I'm ranty today.. You'd think this was a MMO forum :D
I would Peg your Tourist-Guy has a straight Achiever. They are there for progression. They don't care why or how. Hence the brainless 'theme park' layout.
Personally I think you are missing the real value of Bartle's article. I always felt that his taxonomy, or anyone's taxonomy, of player types or play styles, isn't much use without one core concept; Interface dictates motivation. Or at least influences it. Bartle spoke to this, and I think its more interesting to categorize interfaces than it is to do so for player types or play styles.
If you look at your own article its actually what you are doing. You are saying the level layout is defining your player. I agree. It is the interface (quest hub design) that is nurturing, strengthening, accommodating, or creating the touristy, pure progression based play style.
From a design point I feel it is a much more useful way of looking at it. Because you have control over which interfaces you employ to control which play styles are encouraged. And for that purpose I think Bartle's two axis graph works perfectly well.
In my opinion what i would define as a tourist in an MMO is someone who drops in to look at the game and leaves when his time is up. These people would most likely be stuck somewhere in the mid-levels or at least level up quite slowly without getting commited to anything except what interests them (through their quest-hub-guide).
The goal of every MMO (unlike most countries that advertise tourism) is to turn tourists into permanent residents and thats also where the definition of tourists gets very blurry. i would say that generally tourists are playing the game the way it is "supposed to be played" and in most cases that is solo play, just because that is the easiest way and also the way most games start off with.
A tourist would also play cooperative in bigger scales if the game would make the transition as easy as possible. Noone wants to have to learn the language of the country they visit on their first trip, just to go sightseeing. So if you dont have a choice as to cooperate (like in most online FPS variations for example) to enjoy the game, tourists probably gladly take part in group activities as long as they can stop whenever they want to.
Like Harold said "Interface dictates motivation" and i think thats very true for those players... They tend to go with what the travel guide, their friends at home or their travel companions suggest to them. I really think there will be MMOs especially for this group of people and i tend to think that Free-to-Play MMOs are especially going to gain from these people (if thats not what they are living off already anyways).