The Free Zone: The Rising Influence of Casual and Social
In this week's column, Richard Aioshi takes a look at casual, advanced casual, social MMOs as separate varieties of games. But is that categorization right? Do we keep separating, categorizing, adding sub-classes of games or do we do something else? Find out what Richard thinks in his column this week, The Rising Influence of Casual and Social.
Column By Richard Aihoshi on July 12, 2010
Last week, one of the reasons I noted for the free to play's current good health was that as a whole, the category tends to be more accessible, partly due to "the greater presence of casual and quasi-MMOGs". Some dispute their inclusion, most often using some variant of the argument they're not "real" MMOGs. They are, of course, entitled to their opinion. I simply choose to adopt a broader point of view that also encompasses another important, growing sub-type I didn't explicitly name, social.
It can sometimes be easier to treat casual, advanced casual, social et al as separate varieties of games, but doing so isn't entirely accurate. There are no hard and fast categorization rules, and even if there were, that wouldn't rule out hybridization. And what do we do then? Create more and more sub-types? Using a comparatively straightforward and familiar example, is Atlantica Online an MMORPG or a strategy MMOG? And if it's the latter, do we continue by differentiating between real-time and turn-based, or lump them together?
The more different any two games are, the easier it is to put them into separate groupings. However, as the degree of similarity rises, this approach gradually breaks down. So right now, it's not difficult to put many games into sub-types. But the lines are blurring, and I see no reason to think this won't continue. While I certainly don't expect sub-categorization to disappear - I do it myself - both casual and social influences are increasingly affecting the entire range of MMOGs.
The former is probably easier to see since it has been around longer, and has thus had more time to spread across the entire spectrum. As a result, even the hardcore end isn't what it once was. If we glance back 10 to 12 years ago, it wasn't very practical to play games like UO, EQ, AC or Lineage unless we were ready to put in an hour, and preferably more. But this time barrier has eroded considerably. Now, even in releases that are undeniably serious MMOGs, we can generally accomplish something small by logging in for 15 minutes or less. If that's not evidence of a casual influence at work, I'm hard-pressed to know what is.
As for social, my expectation is that can expect it to follow a similar path. Of course, MMOGs have always had social elements built into their designs. No surprise there since it's pretty much universally taken for granted that playing with others is a cornerstone of the category's appeal. Looking into the past again, this was once even taken to what would be widely considered an extreme now. As characters advanced through the middle and higher levels, it became more and more difficult to solo them. This strongly encouraged - some would say forced - people to group.
To varying degrees, not everyone liked this, myself included. Consequently, developers started to make their games more soloable. World of Warcraft gave this direction a lot of impetus. But perhaps inadvertently, this led to a style of play that is less social, one I sometimes refer to as massively single-player. In my case, I usually adventure alone because I prefer doing so to pick-up groups. I'd rather group with friends, but for a variety of reasons, this isn't practical most of the time, and my second choice tends to be going it on my own rather than with strangers.
But what about other forms of interaction where friends can cooperate and help each other? This, I believe, is an area where MMOGs have substantial potential to do more. Yes, we can communicate as well as send items and gold via in-game mail. But I've long felt we should be able to do more... a lot more. I don't have the imagination or design sense to come up with bunches of good ideas, but some developers do. And since it's obvious that fostering more and better contact with friends is highly appealing, I'm eager to see how we'll move forward in this regard. And I doubt I'll have long to wait.
This week's MMOG trivia
From memory, name at least six commercial MMOGs that have pirate themes. Any revenue model is fine. Different regional titles only count as one game, but sequels are separate.
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He is the former Editor of RPG Vault and his column, focusing on free to play MMOs, appears on MMORPG.com every Monday.
This made me think of something, with your comments about 'friends', that you'd rather group with friends than a pick-up group, and more and better contact with friends.. But what about the people that don't have friends that play MMO's, such as myself?
This is the problem with soloable content, it doesn't breed a community. Unless you have friends in game to group with, it's going to be very hard to get a group and, nine times out of ten, you probably wouldn't need one to complete the content anyway.
So while it's nice to increase the amount of things you can do with friends in game, you need to have things put in place for people who are alone and looking for people to befriend in game. It comes back to my previous comment, we need games to create a community, not just opportunities.
Why should a game force some one to make friends? Shouldn't that be the choice of the players? I only like to play with my friends whether they are offline or online friends, because I get frustrated over random people asking things I don't want to answer. Whether it's a personal question or a game related one, most of the time I don't want to waste my time.
A teacher of mine in High School told me this once, "Never miss an opportunity, because if you do, you won't get a second chance." This could also apply to the launch of new games. First impressions are everything.
I did like this article. It's very true. I consider my time to worth a lot and I'd much rather spend 15 minutes to do something substantial than waste an hour. I have a hard time staying logged into a game that long anyways either do to the boredom or personal life matters.
The key difference between social gaming and traditional mmo gaming tends to rely on one key difference usually. For social gaming characters have a 'life' outside of questing, killing, and grinding for loot. People who can do something other then kill can spend time relaxing with friends. Social games tend to have bigger elements of crafting, building, and interacting.
I'm a player of Guild Wars and Mabinogi. My guild wars account has become mostly a title grinder for gw2. Not that I can't have fun with a real life friend going out and wacking things, but it has lost a lot of it's excitement. In Mabinogi I completely ignored the combat because I could. I make potions, farm holy water and herbs, I compose music, and can explore the world without worrying about fighting. That's not the case in GW.
So Guild Wars is my killing perspective, and Mabinogi is my personality and storyline aspect. I could easily lose myself in mabinogi for weeks at a time and almost did, leaving GW behind.
The big problem I see is mainstream mmos tend to only focus on killing things, pvp, or competing with other players. I don't blame them but that's not my idea of fun.
Welcome to the team, buddy. I just see things differently. They take away literally everything social, they make crafter NPCs, no more clans, everything is automatic like find group. You dont need to say anything. Just keep going and grind as much you want like robot, just perfect victims for MMOs, everything is automatic. Recently tried Aion and Champion Online, you dont even need clan there. They are just perfect example of the future.
We've gone so bad from games like SWG. What was truly amazing game.
No game has ever forced people to make friends, that's up to the people involved, though they do implement tasks that require other people to complete. Or at least they used to, that's becoming less and less common as the solo aspect of MMO's takes over. And has been seen from the recent stock, the more soloable the MMO, the more the community suffers.
Your reply is a common theme among people who prefer to play solo, that they become frustrated with random people or don't want to waste their time with them, and that they have very little time to play these games. To me, when I hear that from people, I wonder why they're playing MMO's. Even the author of the article admits that social elements have always been built into the games, so you're obviously going to have to deal with random people, and these games always take more than a few minutes to play.
Surely if you only have 15 minutes or so to play, you would be better off playing Soiltaire or something. Why log into an MMO where you deal with people you don't want to, to do something that you haven't got time to do? Makes no sense.
I never said I don't want to group with people. just when I do we don't usually become friends. We tend to part ways once the objective is complete. I don't mind social interaction and always join a guild, but I never want to feel forced into a social interaction unless the reward is substantial enough to warrant any frustration. I can talk to my friends through ventrilo and explain anything there while playing the game at the same time, and I can't do that if I have to type in chat. But if some noob runs up to me and asks questions on how to make money or where I got such and such armor, I just don't feel like bothering with some one that can't use google or the game forums.
I also never said I only had 15 minutes to play. I think of my time being worth more than going through a dungeon for an hour to kill 1 boss at the end. Why spend all that time killing trash mobs? Instead of trash mobs they should replace them with puzzles. Though, even puzzles become just as predictable.
I do play solo a lot, though. But that's because my friends don't play nearly as much as I tend to play. And since most of the experiences with random players has usually been for the worse, that stereotype of the noob player has only been set in stone. Not everyone plays the same and that's just how it is. There's no need to defend your opinion, but if you can't make friends in a game it could be because of something your doing. Expecting the devs to force friends on each other sounds like a government conspiracy. You can make friends by grouping with them, chatting, and then *gasp* adding them to your friends list. If the player doesn't want to group with you, then don't expect them to want to be your friend either.
In fact as I was typing this 1 of my online friends is sending me messages about playing AoC with me and it's getting annoying. Here's what i notice from all the frustrations I encounter with new players.
1. They don't want to explore on their own.
2. They are afraid to make mistakes.
3. They want you to hand hold them through it, so they can just copy later.
What I'd really like to see is a AAA MMO that includes a phone app so that when I don't feel like logging on or can't I could use my phone instead to do something in game that isn't just checking on stats and items.
The part in red bothers me. MMO's are social games. Thanks to games like WoW people seemed to have forgotten that. UO was largely a social game. It was more of a virtual world. There were practical items and social items. You could grow a garden on your roof. We held shard (Server) festivals.
To make it even more of a social game, we even knew the devs and GM's because they ran events for us every month for a long time. Even Garriott would come in game as Lord British and deliver announcements in an RP'ish manner.
UO recently returned to this practice with Stygian Abyss, they had a whole RP story line that they acted out in game that players could participate in to justify (In game) the things the Stygian Abyss expansion brought.
Just because developers somewhere along the way forgot players cared about more than combat and crafting, doesn't mean that MMO's aren't social games. Most of the current MMO's aren't though.........
Hell even Age of Conan worked harder on making boobs visible than they did on the social aspect of the game lol.
But .... to me MMO's are supposed to be social games lol. Combat and crafting as well as advancing shouldn't be the only focus.
Persistence. This is why I like MMOs. I prefer to go it alone most of the time, but I like the feeling that there's a world around me that's dynamic; that things are happening and life is going on without me actually having to be there to witness it. I'm more than happy to move through a world like this at my own pace, stopping to smell the roses whenever and wherever I feel like it, rather than having to worry about whether or not my dallying is inconveniencing someone else. It has nothing to do with shortness of time, but about having the freedom to follow the beat of my own drum. In RL, I don't stop someone on the street when I want to catch a movie on the spur of the moment. I just go. The same principle applies in MMOs.
Grouping can be fun and does offer a completely different play experience, but it's one that requires you give up some of your personal freedom in order to participate, basically letting your desires subsume to the will of others. I don't relish curtailing my own wants in that way unless it's to others who are, quite frankly, worth it. Amongst close friends, it almost always is. But I rarely get to spend time with my friends in a game in this way since my interests rarely coincide with theirs when it comes to to online gaming. So the alternative is to chance it with strangers. Sometimes this pays off big time. But that's damn rare. Most often, it feels like a waste of time afterwards and I have little desire to look for them again to foster any kind of ongoing friendship.
Count me as a massively single-player enthusiast.
I usually try to make friends with the people I play with. I talk to other people while adventuring, pariticipate in zone banter, all of that. I get to know the people I'm playing with, and become friends with them. If you try to play a game alone, you will stay alone.
This is when I think GW2's idea of dynamic events works for the best, you can solo to your hearts content but as long as people are on the map you can go join the fight with them at any given point too, no need to party, just join in, that choice is the important departure from what we mostly see.
I play a game to play a game, the added bonuses are friends I make along the way and the experiences I have. I, at no point, am required to be part of some social bastardization of facebook or other social sites. I can think back to a recent SouthPark that made reference to being "sucked in to" this world. I don't want to share with the server my thoughts, nor do I care to be inundated with the stupidity of what sometimes happens with open cross server chat social bs. There has been a rash of this popping up as of late, I understand it is a generation of Facebook and Twitter where it is the cool trendy thing to tell everyone you just made a sandwich. Why must this be a part of a game? When I want a group I will group, when I want to communicate with my guild/legion/LS I will, and when my friends come on line I will talk with them. Don't try to force anything beyond that on me without the option to turn it off completely.
END OF LINE_
~V
lol, If you don't have a clan or at least a good bunch of friends you won't make it too far in Aion.
I don't see any problem with the systems that have come out to help get a group together. I've met a lot of great people after being thrown together with strangers. Even pugs aren't always that bad (unless your a healer of course, then there is always that one tool...).
Thats it basically. Dynamic is the future, or automatic whatever. Just like I said, it sucks to be so uber.
Sociality and casuality isnt rising, its fucking dead.
The social aspect of MMOs is a multi-faceted problem created by the rise of audio based chat (primarily ventrilo these days) but no corresponding advance in audio chat mechanics.
Basically - today's voice chat makes us anti-social.
Back in the day, there was only text based chat, which differentiated who was chatting by color, so grouping with a non-guildmate was no big deal. Most people now join guilds of like-minded folks and connect to voice chat with their guildmates. This makes hooking up with non-guildmates a chore due to the typing lag of the chat interface. Forcing people into a game-based voice chat room would be impossible. People want to stay hooked up via audio to their guild and don't want to break from that just because they join a group. However, computers can't differentiate between which stream is more important and humans can't deal with a computer presenting multiple audio streams. Imagine, for example, hearing barrens (or dalaran) chat, your group's chat, and your guild's general chat all at once with no prioritization. You'd feel like you were in a crowded room with several people talking over each other. Unless and until the audio problem can be overcome to allow both group and guild chat (and possibly general area chat) without overwhelming the end user, I'm afraid that social MMO gaming will be stuck in the anti-social text box.
In addition to dealing with the mechanics of multiple streams, game companies need to deal with the social aspects of abusive people that think it's their right to curse everyone and everything up and down in a manner that would make the drunken sailor of yore blush. Basically, there needs to be a chat filter for voice chat that works like the text chat filter in most MMOs today with filtered out words, abuse logging and reporting, and ignore functions.
Push to talk needs to be mandatory, too.
One possibility would be a speech-to-text function that made text based output quicker and easier. You could even have a text-to-speech function for reversing the process at the destination. The destination user could toggle the channel being listened to and catch up on that channel or pick a point in time from which to catch up. There would have to be some voice differentiation based on the original speaker in order for the destination user to figure out which person said what.
For MMOs to return to being social, they'd actually have to have some depth and content again.
When all there is to do is grind through levels or raid, and the game mechanics make it so that you can LFG, group and raid without ever actually communicating much...no wonder there is so little socializing.
I also maintain that the gameplay pacing of most modern games discourages socialization. Complain about "old auto-attack" systems or "forced down-time" all you want, but in a game like EQ you could TALK to people in game without feeling like you were missing combat or not playing properly. People are a LOT more willing to chat via text than they are go dealing with strangers on voicecomms...which every modern game seems to try and force you to do.
Way too many clueless devs out there too - look at how many people played or did those things that "no one" would do in SWG...entertainers, miners, prospectors, hunters, shop owners even mall management.
Give people OPTIONS of what to do and systems that give them the time to chat and watch the socialization flow. Keep giving them frantic button-masher games with nothing but raids and levels and wonder why no one socializes.
Oh and to the rabid soloist complaint above...so what? First off not every game has to appeal to soloists, secondly no one is talking about forced grouping here...want to be a soloist, np be that lone wolf prospector out in the wilds or an anti-social hunter or whatever...you can be as reclusive as you want if the game actually has any real options to it.
Well said, and you are right on target. Just looking at some of the "me-centered" responses posted in this thread goes a long way to explaining the current poor social environment of most modern MMORPG's.
Extend a helping hand to a fellow stranger folks, might just turn out to be the best thing you ever did. (and yes, it is possible to do things for other people without obtaining an equivalent return on investment)
I think this is symptomatic of modern MMO's, in that the game is just one mad soloable rush to the end. The path is laid out for you through quest after quest, giving you a direct line from A to Z, and group quests come up rarely enough that this is what we see. People group up to do that one quest, rush through it, then disband and are never seen again. You'll find this is also why players tend to be so bad when it comes to grouping, because they simply haven't had the experience of it to be any good. If the whole game is solo based then suddenly they're forced to group, it's very likely they're going to play exactly the same way as they were when they were soloing. Hence, they appear to be 'noobs'.
A lot of people who say they don't want the social aspect and prefer to solo I can bet started with WoW or later, if they saw the interaction and community of early EverQuest, DAoC or SWG I'm sure they'd change their tune. It'd be nice to have some of that community back in a new game.
This. Best post on the subject yet. Me-centered is so right, it's exactly what I was thinking when reading through them.
I loved SWG Pre-CU (First MMO for me), but I also enjoyed the CU and the NGE. However, I did quit 6 months after the NGE. The population was so small there wasn't much interaction at all. PvP got dull as you fought the same people night after night.
I had more of a social experience playing on my ZombieMod'd Counter Strike Source server after that. Made many friends and a few enemies. And even though the server we ran has been down for well over a year, I still get the occasional steam message asking me if the server is still up. :)
Kind of surprising now that I think about it, I made more friends through a FPS game than I did an MMORPG.
I played MMO's to work with people. As has been said in EQ there were things that encouraged being social. With games like WOW you seem to be encouraged to stay alone. I recently quit WOW because of the way groups were in the dungeon finder. Most of the time people would say nothing. That to me was insane. I mean here you are in a team fighting together and no one would say anything. Everyone was always in a hurry to finish, and a lot of times people would quit in the middle because they got the item they needed for a quest and to hell with the rest of the team.
I dont know, maybe because I am 64 and this younger generation does seem to be so ME centric. Sad really. A stranger is a friend you have not met.
Those of us who played MMOs for interaction with people have gotten the shaft.
I find it totaly amazing how so many MMORPG have gotten away from the social part of what was supoed to make the MMO's.
I can point at STO with it very very instanced systems, LOTRO with it skirmish system, wow with and eq2 with its dungeoun finder battle system.
IT is amazing how so many mmo's are diong what they can to segregate the players or mash a bunch of them together who dont know each other in hopes of it being fun.
Heh, there have always been a lot of selfish people out there. The problem is more that generic multi server dungeon finders take out the worst in many people. If someone acted like that in one of the earliest MMO their rep would hunt them and they wouldn't find a group.
But I agree, playing together should be fun. I blame the game and not the people, kids aren't that different now compared when I was a kid and even if I'm 25 years younger than you I doubt things were that much different in tour time either.
As I wise man once said: "Everything is the same but different".
Hopefully will GW2s system make playing together fun again. I hope it wins compared to TOR, because in this aspect might TOR make current things even worse.
MMO's as I knew them are already dead.
These days you can solo everything you need to and never have to contact anyone in game to acheive anything.
This encorages the, as somone else put it nicely, the "me-centric" attitude displayed in the replies to this column and widespread in gaming today.
"What's in it for me" sort of attitude that is reflective of society as a whole not just gaming, and really makes me sad.
I really wish a great MMO would come out that (as they used to) more or less forced you to do mid content and up in groups only, and you would have no hope in hell of seeing end game content solo.
This current gen of gamers, as opposed to old gits like me, play MMO, but they don't want to interact or help other players, want everything laid out for them with a little dot telling them exactly where to go and do what next, and above all else god forbid they should actually have to be reliant on a group of different classes to get anything done other than the most top end of encounters.
used to be to take on normal mobs you would need at least 2 of you from mid levels up, and the higher you got the more people you would need.
Oh for the days of killing trees together in DAoC. Not the actual killing of them. That drove me nuts even back then. ;)
But the fact you couldn't even really GET to them without a group never mind kill them, and while killing them for HOURS to get any xp, you would all have to do your job, and you would have a lot of social interaction while waiting for the spawn or while resting up.
Lots of things were wrong with MMO's back then, but the social aspects were what made them MMO's and that has been lost while pandering to the solo players. This generation of players has never really experienced an MMO.
Well said. Grind-generation is here and I dont think theres not much to do. Grinders are perfect victims. I'd almost put my penis on table that what NCsoft is offering with Guild War 2. That socical acvitity its nothing more than more grind. Hell, they probably give you macro-tool so you can play your violin.
Give us the fucking pure pvp MMO so we can even kill each other!
The point you are missing is that to be a true virtual world if you want friends you need to go and find them yourself, there shouldn't be an artifcial constraint forcing you to be "friends" with random people. It is the same as being forced to hold hands with random strangers and sing Kum Bay Ya in order to use the bus. In a true virtual world you should be able to achieve something meaningful yourself but surrounded by others going about their "lives", some of whom are your "friends" but most random strangers.
When I play I usually like to solo for "fun" for a personal challenge, and see raiding as "work". Grouping is like a "night on the town with some buddies", but I see that as the least serious activity of all. A game should reflect that, the primary rewards should come from soloing and raiding (but neither should give you an advantage doing the other), while grouping rewards should be things of a more frivolous nature (after all, the purpose is to socialize when doing that, not earn rewards).
You know, I think I blame this completely on World of Warcraft. What we had pre-Warcraft were group based games with great communities and awesome raids. When Warcraft came along they sucked in all the people who had never played an MMO before, people who were used to single player games and so took quite happily to the solo play of Warcraft. Being that the majority of players are used to single player games, it's obvious why the community is so awful.
Now, a few years on, those people have decided that they're tired of WoW and want to try a different MMO, the problem being, they've never played a real MMO with community and group focused gameplay, most of them hated having to group and raid in World of Warcraft. So they think they know all about MMO's but really don't understand the core principles, hence why you see so many 'me-me' posts asking for solo-centric games and equal rewards for soloing and raiding.
+1
Just unbelievable we have come to this point, but lets see the worst case scenario. Devs know they're fail. So they start to make this MMO-single-playing-RPG games, just like SWTOR. Probably shitload of grind too. Man, I cant believe they are so dumb. Its so easy to make MMO based around clans for example. You are part of clan (community) you need then and they need you. Anything basically.
I'm hoping ti will go full circle, devs will grow some balls and tell these solo demanding players to go do one.
Since the older MMO that demanded socialisiation, and grouping, to acheive anything meaningful in the game has gone, I have not taken part in one single MMO that held me for more than about 6 months.
Most much much less. Only exception since playing DAoC for close to 5 years, was EvE that had me for a couple of years.
Actually, despite it's faults, that is why I like playng APB. To get any meaningful fun out of it you need a group.
One day a dev will grow some balls, and make an MMO from the old days without the faults, taking the good bits from todays genre of MMO, while also putting back the community and grouping aspects. And when the cries start coming from those wanting solo content, tehy just give them the finger and say this is what an MMO is about. Don't like it go play your XBox. Or something like that.
Who knows, maybe Mythic will redeem themselves for ruining Warhammer Online and make DAoC 2, as it should be, which is to say DAoC, without the crazy ass PvE grind to get into RvR, without the healbots, without all the crap they introduced to it through expansions and ruined it. If they did something close to that, where if you got a bad rep on a server for being an ass, you would never get a group or a guild, and eventually be forced to make a new char or join a different server, then maybe, just maybe, an MMo would bea round again that got me paying for years and not months.
And maybe, just maybe, some of these solo-centric short sighted people will experience what an MMO was really about, and saty for years also. Or they can go play single palyer games or back to so called MMO that will pander to their solo desires, and leave a nice profitable long running niche MMO for those who yearn for the old days.
Ive started to respect SOE so much more. They've really made awesome differnt MMOs than anyone else like SWG, Planetside then Pirates of whatever it was, what I know of.
Too many devs are just like this, grind is money, grind is money, grind is money, give them fucking macro-tools if they get tired, grind if money, grind is money, they sit behind the desk drinking whiskey and while some young guy is fucking his wife.
I wish the two models would break away from each other completely. Casual play, and group-centric play. I know it will never happen because developers will continue to produce the watered-down, generic, drivel we've been getting for the last 5 years, as they quest to achieve WoW type subscription numbers.
As someone said up above, MMO's as I knew them (and came to love them) are dead. And I don't see a ressurection in their future.
Casual games = mundane, mindless, tactless content (so it can be solo'd and so that large guilds have no advantage). And because it is mindless and tactless, developers resort to forcing grinding on us in an effort to throttle those who aren't mindless or tactless. I won't even get into how much casual detroys the true social aspect of MMOs and any sense of decorum among players.
I would rather see games rated as;
casual / solo (what we're getting now with 90% of the games)
dedicated / group oriented (some solo, but not casual and requires some grouping).
hardcore multiplayer (you know going in, you are going to have to dedicate time to it, learn the game and your class, and you are going to have to be a part of a guild or a least a dedication group of players).
Not ever going to happen ... but one could wish.
There should be both soloable and multiplayer content in an MMO.
There. I win the forum.
It shouldn't all have to be about either teaming with friends or playing solo, teaming with strangers is also fun, and can be fun and rewarding, as CoX showed. In that game, teamplay was neither so intricate, nor penalties so great, that PUGs were horrible experiences (most of the time - of course there are always going to be a few entertaining horror stories! :) ). In that game (by my experience) PUG-ing was the order of the day: a way to be a casual player, yet also play with people. In that game, within 5 mins of logging in, I could either quickly form, or be in a 6-8 member PUG, and you'd usually stick together through a few missions (usually a couple of hours), maybe dropping a few members and picking some up as you went. I'd say that was the average type of gameplay for a majority of the playerbase. It's why a game that lacked so many MMO tropes (such as crafting and endgame) and was predicted to fail because of that, lasted for 5 years.
Just think what a game that had CoX's puggability PLUS all the usual MMO tropes would be like!
The equation of casual=solo is terrible, and should be banned. CoX showed the way. Sadly, Cryptic themselves forgot their own lesson (no doubt in an effort to make their recent offering, Champions Online, more WoW-like). But maybe someone else will grok it and develop it further.