Opinion: Is bigger really better?

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By James Matson
Jun 30, 2008

You’re reading the words of an unashamed RPG fan. I was brought up on the old school world of pen-and-paper RPGs, oddly shaped dice and character sheets worn by repeated erasing and re-writing of skills and statistics (don’t forget becoming see through from spilling greasy take-out –ed). When MMORPGs started popping up I was as happy as a Wyvern in a Gnome nursery; finally developers had taken the concept of the role-playing game and switched on the social aspect by connecting many players within the same world. There’s never been a better time to be an up and coming Dragon slayer.

It dawned on me the other day however that something just didn’t feel right. I had come upon a dungeon that the friendly NPC by the roadside had told me was home to a powerful wizard, who few have dared to face and even fewer had survived encounters with. This guy was a robe-wearing incantation-smoking can of fantasy whoop-arse who’d take Gandalf out with a single surly look.

Except, when our brave band of adventurers got there, we weren’t alone. There were a few warriors there, some Mages, a handful of Druids, a smattering of Rogues and one or two Warlocks milling about the entrance. This wasn’t inclusive of the characters coming out of the dungeon in a steady stream. In fact – looking around – the entire landscape was saturated with player characters running here and there in a land supposedly desperate for heroic types to step up to the plate and take on the evil of the aforementioned dungeon.

Welcome to World of Warcraft.
Blizzard isn’t shy about throwing around the numbers behind its subscriber base, and why not? 10 million accounts is a sure-fire way to paint a picture of an incredibly popular game; it’s a strong selling point and one that shouldn’t be hidden away. MMORPGs – including WoW – work off a distribution of player accounts across several servers, but rather than the standard FPS model of say 32 or 64 players per map, MMORPGs allocate players in the thousands across each server. Population is a critical issue to an MMORPG, because of the social dynamic and the inability to complete some in-game objectives without the support of fellow players. People generally look to WoW as a major success story thanks to its high population, but I’m starting to wonder if you can have too much of a good thing.

There’s a couple of technical annoyances that come with the high population of WoW (the annoying ‘server queue’ you’re stuck in waiting to access the game world during peak periods for example) but what grates on my delicate role-playing sensibilities is something that strays closer to an ideological argument.

I’ve always imagined the fantasy landscape to be one where heroes are few and far between, and the forces of evil and chaos are oppressively choking the land (regardless of which fictional land you’re talking about). When running around World of Warcraft’s land of ‘Azeroth’, I get the impression that being a heroic spell caster or mighty warrior is something of a standard, no-brainer job.
We’re all running in and out of the same epic dungeons that have apparently never been breached, we’re all wearing the same armor and wielding the same weapons that are supposedly made with such powerful magic as to be nigh on impossible to obtain. There’s little actual fantasy going on. Anywhere I go so many players surround me that as a collective I reckon we could give chaos and evil as a whole a complete spanking in about five minutes flat.

Everything that can be done has been done, a billion times before. Google is burdened under the weight of strategies for dungeons and bosses, guides to building your characters and exact co-ordinates to find every single item that exists in game. Exploration is an in-game misnomer and the mystique of the world is crushed under the weight of so many people having already experienced everything the game has to offer. In some ways this is great, don’t get me wrong! There are millions of people out there playing the game; this is all an expected result of high population. But for me, well it kind of spoils the magic of the unknown that’s synonymous with my selfish idea of a fantasy world. I’m supposed to be one of those few brave souls who ventures out into a largely unknown and exciting world, and maybe I’ll spot an adventurer or two on my travels, but it’s a case of a handful of us against almost unsurmountable odds.
At the other end of the spectrum – going by the population figures from www.mmorpgchart.com - is Everquest 2. Sony Online Entertainment is understandably more tight-lipped about their subscriber base than Blizzard, but at a rough estimate there’s around 200,000 Everquest 2 subscribers.

To the untrained eye, this would represent a dismal failure in the MMO world, Everquest 2 and World of Warcraft have been out roughly the same amount of time and with those 200,000 subs spread across 22 servers my experience in Everquest 2 is at times a lonely one. But it’s refreshing in so many ways; not least of which is that my relationship with the world is one of importance.

I’m an individual and my character design and adornments feel somewhat unique, and whatever my character class I’m in demand somewhere because there aren’t a million more of me waiting in the chat channels. I’m not privy to in-depth knowledge of every single square centimetre of the environment. With fewer characters running about, the mystery is still there. The other night my RPG homies and I fought a lengthy battle against an archetypical Dark Lord at the end of a dungeon, and we died repeatedly before forming our own strategy to defeat him. Information on past exploits in this dungeon were thin on the ground, and we (or at least I) came away with a sense of achievement.

I can ride across the countryside and not bump into another character for a decent length of time, giving me that incredible sense of being ‘out there’ and on some kind of frontier. These are all things that make my gaming experience better, at least from an immersion point of view.

Of course a lower server population comes with its own set of quandaries, finding a group of players in the right time zone can be a freakish nightmare, and admittedly the economy has holes in it thanks to an imbalance between supply and demand. In-game mechanisms like ‘Guilds’ to group players together in a quasi-family can ease these pains nicely though, though what’s important for me is the immersion factor – the feeling I’m playing in an awe-inspiring fantasy realm where the brave are few and the perils unknown.

I don’t want to play an MMORPG version of Melbourne’s public transport system at peak times. Maybe I’m just a stuffy relic of those pen-and-paper RPG days, but the fact remains that a staggeringly high population in an MMORPG can easily be as damaging to the atmosphere as one that’s too low. A happy medium seems to work best, so don’t discount an MMORPG just because it doesn’t have the massive subscriber base of Blizzard’s monster; you might be missing out.

And now – if you’ll excuse me – I’m off to ride my mount through the crazed and unmapped wilderness in search of the next glowing artefact or sword of +10 thumping in a world that’s not quite so massively multiplayer.

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