I’ve talked about this before, but there seems to be a bit of a glitch in the way gamers look at MMORPG development; for that matter, there seems to be a few glitchy devs running around as well.

Consider this the official release of patch 1.1 for your MMO gaming brain; it’s mostly a bugfix, but those are important. I’ll work on new content for 1.2. (Keep in mind that what I’m about to say applies to all MMOs, from Illutia to Age of Conan.)

Ask ten people (developer or player, it makes no difference) what the single most important thing about any MMO is, and you’ll get a minimum of eleven different answers, but rarely will you get the correct one.

Fun.

That’s it. Period. End of list. If your MMO doesn’t have that one key element, nothing else matters.

Of course, there are as many different definitions of “fun” as there are people, but that’s the target a game must hit. Not “great PvP,” not “excellent questing,” and not “awesome graphics,” not even “all of the above”…those are all things that inject the key element of “fun” into a game. They’re not an end, they’re the means to an end.

Visit any MMO forum on the internet, and you’ll see reviews/complaints about any game you’d care to mention. These usually take the form of “weak PvP,” “It’s too buggy to play” or “(insert class here) is too underpowered, I’m out of here.” Every single complaint about a MMO that you see anywhere translates to “I’m not having fun when I play this game.”

In the next couple of days, I’m going to do two things; I’m going to post an open letter to devs from the viewpoint of the players, translating the typical complaints you see around the internet about various games, saying to developers what players want to say.

And then I’m going to post an open letter to MMORPG players, saying what the devs would love to say, but they have families to feed.

Yes, I am a player, and no, I’m not now (nor have I ever been) a game developer. But I’ll bet you a 50-stack of Lebethron wood and a turtle mount that I’ll hit that nail fairly close to the head.

This should get interesting.

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Tags: fun, games, gaming, mmo, mmorpg