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Text Chat Culture & Why MMORPGs Died
Plasmicredx
Member Posts: 629
In many discussions over the internet about MMORPGs I've run into people that are unaware that there are people who prefer text chatting in video games or even people who don't know what text chat culture means. I've even been told that text chat culture doesn't exist or that it is a minority among the billions of players that play MMORPGs. The idea that people aren't familiar with text chat culture or that they think this way is amazing, since text chatting is everywhere. You can even do it on your phones now. Apparently a great number of people were under a rock before Cable Modems became a common household item so allow me to educate you some!
I know of a good way to explain it to you WoW gamers. Most MMORPG gamers know about the two major Server Ruleset Types. There's the Roleplay ruleset types and the Normal rulesets. Players that want to stay in character join Roleplay servers and I know the popular thing to do of you all is probably think Roleplayers are all sad, anti-social and depressed nerds, but you'd probably be wrong (I say probably because I don't actually play on roleplay servers myself so I don't know), and Roleplay servers are a good thing because it provides an environment for people who are interested in that and yes I am here to lecture you all a little about that. No, I'm not here to make you play on one of those servers, but to enlighten you to knowing that we all have different tastes and to respect that. When I'm done then you can go about acting like only your tastes in everything are superior to everyone else's. Then of course players that want to be able to stay out of character join Normal servers. People that are sort of in between usually just join Normal, as they can do in character things with there being no rules against it and still be out of character most of the time. The point being players will be communicating with each other while they play an MMORPG and it's not always about organizing a game strategy.
The main vehicle used to communicate in this form is your text chat box. The text chat box can perform all sorts of functions, like game commands or sending messages.
In online gaming, voice chat didn't really come around until later once technology got good enough to handle it (Cable Modem connections). During the era of 56k modems, a generation of people grew familiar to talking to people only using text chat without knowing anything about the other person and only over time revealing age, race, and gender if they felt like it. Even now people are learning to use text chat every day. The reason being people find text chat has its own set of benefits that voice doesn't have, and vice versa.
Ever since people started using voice, games gained a more competitive quality to them that sparkled (WoW Arena, Counter-Strike Clan Matches or other FPS, etc), but in doing so have also lost their immersive qualities that come with text chatting (Adventuring through Old MMORPG Worlds like Dark Age of Camelot, EverQuest, Ultima Online, etc, Meeting and making friends in a fantasy setting - meaning you know them as their character in-game more than you know them as the person IRL so you might not even know their real gender, race, or age).
-This is why the Traditional MMORPG is dying, because people do not understand fantasy any longer, and only cater to Competitive Raiding and Arena style MMORPGs with Voice as the primary vehicle of communication like WoW
-This is why the Traditional MMORPG used to be so satisfying without good graphics and fast connections, people could truly live out another life as another person in a fantasy or science fiction MMORPG setting
-This is not a Voice Chat Culture bash, the two cultures can co-exist and both have MMORPGs made for them, but I think it's time a good Text Chat Culture MMORPG came out or for more MMORPGs like WoW to stop leaving text chat culture in the dark like they forgot about us and give better support for Group Finding (World of Warcraft patch 4.3 will include a Raid Finder but it comes with Strings Attached)
Anyway my post is getting too big for me to handle. I'm going to stop here even though I have other relevant things to say but there you have it. This is why MMORPGs are in a state of downfall - constant identity confusion: A lot of people don't know how to properly play them anymore because they think it's all about Voice these days. Nobody wants to pretend anymore. We're constantly worried if there's going to be good enough Arenas or Rated BGs or class balance or Raids to slay or story that doesn't make us get into character too much or if there's enough activities to voice chat with people that we don't feel the game anymore. The bottom line is there needs to be a balance for both and people need to respect each other's decisions. Thanks for reading!
Comments
This seems...unlikely.
...coming from someone who very rarely speaks on voice comms in games.
I guess the question to ask is, Do you really think a non-trivial amount of players care about the immersion they're missing? Or do you think perhaps the majority prefers the social experience of voicechat raiding, and continues to subscribe to such games in greater numbers than early games ever had?
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
Actually since I have more insight into text chatting this would enforce the value of my opinion.
It's pretty obvious actually that not 100% of all MMORPG players are going to care. But even if it's 1% of a billion, that's still 10 million people that care about immersion and using their imagination. Even so, every human has an imagination.
I agree, subscription are far greater then ever i the past, the problem is that the retention level, is vastly inferior for the most part.
is it only because of text chat, or immersion, maybe, but i think there is alot more to it then that. i came to accept that my generation of "complex and challenging" gaming was over 6 years ago, and not just in mmo's, but in all games. they are now made for those witha much shorter attetion span then myself. even today at age 33 with 6days off a month, i can still put in the sessions of old that i used to, butnot many new gamers care to play the same game for 8, 10 12 hours anymoe, like we all used too.
That is my 2 cents anyways.
The subscription numbers are far greater than earlier games because there is a much higher number of internet users in comparison to the mid 90s when UO came out. There is also the ability to pay for online games using debit cards, game time cards etc, where as before the only way was credit card.
Speaking as a player from UO beta test onwards through multiple games, for the emersive roleplayer experience, nothing busts the RP bubble quicker than speaking to a 10 foot troll that has the rollercoaster pitched voice of a 12 year old kid. Now in UO, through a text interface with speech floating above the head, nobody would know it was a 12 year old kid and he would probably roleplay exceedingly well.
I agree with the OP though, not all games cater for text chat very well. The lack of speech bubbles and the need to stare into a tiny text journal to see what the last person said past the gold spammers and bank hos is a bit difficult in most games.
This is not, however, the reason that MMORPGs died. The reason they die is that they become fat and lackluster. They decide that they know better than thier communities on what the direction of the game may be and to this end, they die slowly and painfully until the very last of thier highly committed fanbase give up. They also die because they are trying to appeal to way too many audiences at once and really do need to make the choice between MMO and MMORPG much earlier or atleast provide dedicated RP servers internationally (not just in the US) and enforce the rulesets in them to keep RPers as happy as the normal gamers.
The other reason they die is restrictive mechanics. Richard Garriots idea of everything in the gameworld being interactive, even if it's just a label when you click on it created the most awesome emersion even considering it is later on considered poor graphics on an isometric view. The fact that you can use a knife on a tree to scape off some kindling to light a fire to cook a steak that you've butchered from a corpse still astounds me.
When I was a noob in UO, I came across a dinning room set up in the middle of nowhere with a small chest on the table. I ate the food, drank the wine and then opened the chest. Boom, instantly killed with deadly poison. A PK then comes out of nowhere, proclaims victory and then carves up my corpse and sticks me in the chest (beside many other unfortunate souls) and then locks and retrapps the chest. I'm standing there with 8 other ghosts out of view of the living who are all saying "I lost everything but lol.. this guy KNOWs how to PK lol".
So it's a multitude of things that a RP game needs to survive, not just text chat. Lets see if arch age is as flexible as it protests, or if SWTOR can be as emersive and jump of it's rails now and again.
Vel.
Yeah, I put that in the post Title as an attention grabber. Sorry for that, it just didn't sound as important as "Text Chat Culture." I really love your response also. Thanks.
Very interested in where you are getting your vhutn and retention data. Source?
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein
"Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
My guess is he got it from how kids be acting these days. Them dang blasted pokemon games musta didit.
I've always thought of MMORPGs to be a poor place to RP. If I want to RP, I do so in a pen & paper game, not in a MMORPG.
I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been -Wayne Gretzky
I like to RP in the dark with my clothes off.
OP - I think you make a valid point, it certainly is a large contributing factor. The lack of immersion and turning a virtual world into an "e-sport" helped kill the actual RPG aspect.
Vel - that UO story was awesome. I played on Cats and in addition to the Orc guild there was a Drow clan that took up the catacombs near Yew as a base. I made a toon and infiltrated their base speaking pseudo elf dialect to the best of my ability to try and see what they do in there. I was lead down a bunch of corridors and started getting really nervous. Eventually they got suspicious and the leader asked me to be brought infront of him so they could question me. I was wearing a helm at the time because under it I actually had brown skin and bright blonde hair and beard ... not very Drow like. Well, while stammering through excuses some lackeys were snooping through my backpack where I had placed a GM explosion tinker trapped small wooden chest that I planned to place at the feet of the leader as a "gift". Sure enough, the snooper double clicked while it was still on me .... BOOM ...
LOL! I stopped reading when I saw the highlighted text.
Well you can't have a forum discussion at all if you can't have a little fun or make mistakes can we lol.
nO NEED to create a wall of text, I know what your trying to get at. When I use to play Team Fortress 1, we didn't have voice chat, only communication was text. If a Pyro was shooting at me, it was a Pyro shooting at me. But now with voice chat instead of a Pyro shooting at me I got some 13 year old boy that has the voice of a girl shooting at me, or I'm shooting at a 13 year old boy that sounds like a girl.
Same thing with Everquest 1. Before voice chat if you had a female elf in your party, you had a female elf in your party. Now with voice chat you don't have a female elf in your party you have an Austrlian male in your party that sounds like Crocodile Dundee. You no longer see a female elf, and all you can see in your head is a can of Fosters and Crocodile Dundee in a run down bar.
First time someone attempted to PK me in UO I was a noob, and up the road someone was spamming, "Follow A Follow B Follow C Follow D .................MNOPQ," and then it changed to, "Attack A Attack B Attack C Attack D............MNOPQ." I was like, "WTF was this," then came to my senses and ran like hell out of there. I got a way as a noob, I was being chased by 20 pets and I still was able to get away as a noob. Can't do that in WOW clones.
Yeah my post got too big as I wrote it. It would have taken me hours to edit the post but I wanted to post it before it got 2 AM. Sorry.
Yeah, hard to imagine it's a she anymore! This always breaks my dreams! This is why I cry about MMORPGs! Can't you see why voice is destroying MMORPGs guys?lol
But for real, I never look for dates in MMORPGs anyways or have looked for a date in them. I do also mostly play as my own gender (Represent your own sex, people!) but I will admit I have made and played girl characters for fun. I don't think there's anything wrong with that and that people should be allowed to.
There is no source, and never said any of it is fact If you look at mmo's now, most that i remember start outwith higher sub numbers then UO, EQ, or any of the older games did. Now if i remember right EQ's high point was around 540k subs. I am hard pressed to think of a game now that has that few after the free month is up, but after 3 months you are hard pressed to find many with even that many subs.
So to me that says higher subs, lower retention rate. But you are all smarter then I, and Im sure you will show me how i am wrong.
Sorry if I gave the impression I was saying you were wrong. I was trololoing about pokemons to get some lulz but nobody is laughing at my jokes lol.
That wasnt ment for you Plasm, just put that in for anyone that felt that way, I did howeverget the joke. I remember playing pokemon when it first came out, was fun for a bit, then it lost my attension.
I'm a text-chatter. I don't even own a mic and never use voicechat.
If I had a mic, I'd be annoying everyone by screaming down the mic, "Don't get cocky, kid!"
All the time.
"subscription are far greater then ever i the past"
"the retention level is vastly inferior for the most part."
My mistake. I guess it was someone else's post that made those claims.
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein
"Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
Ok you show me where im wrong. Show me all these new games with lower peak subscrition numbers and higher retention of said subs. Im willing to put a months wages saying that you wont find more then 25% of new games that will prove me wrong.
Show me where peak subs are lower.
Dude, I'm not the one that made the claim. I was simply asking what data you were basing that on. If you don't have any, that's fine. Relax.
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein
"Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
Err ... what ? Billions of people who play MMORPGs ?!?
Even WoW has only, how many ? 10 Million players ? And thats probably about 50% of the market.
Billions of players, nope. MMO players are a small minority.
For example, NONE of my friends play MMOs.
I guess this lack of text chat culture is why kids spend more time texting each other over their cell phones instead of using them to audibly speak with each other.
People do what is simple or inexpensive. And if it's both? They can't put it down.
Well i look at it like this, 10 years ago between EQ, UO, AC and the few others that may have been around back then, and this is just a guess mind you, there were maybe what, say 2.5 million subs combined. Wow last i checked was around 9 million or so alone, and many games since have hit 1 million for short periods of time before they went down to a much lower sustained rate.
Maybe im wrong but WOW alone proves half of what i said about far greater subscriptions. and game like WAR, AOC, validate my point of retention of those subs being much lower for the most part.
So yeah this is info we all know, if you want a source that bad then find one, or just use your memory.