We MMO players are a whiny lot. We complain about everything...but then there's always a lot to complain about. MMOs are extraordinarily complex systems, systems that we try to navigate in a smooth, progressive fashion to maintain a certain amount of "fun".
Now the big things we do include such accomplishments as "reaching level cap", "acquiring legendary gear", "putting a raid on 'farm' status", and "color-coordinating our outfit".
That last one can be really, really hard to do.
Because we can't just have everything handed to us on a silver platter, the game has to "creatively get in the way", forcing us to spend time, effort, or money (which usually takes time and effort to acquire) in our quest for...whatever it is we want.
Games have a lot of different methods for "getting in the way"...making us be heroes for our heroic goals. And they also have a lot of simple, small things we have to do frequently, which have the mostly unintended consequence of slowing us down simply as a side-effect of not being well-designed.
These are often referred as "quality of life features". Little things that smooth out the sharp edges of the game that we seem to always stub our toe on. A lot of these occur in the UI because, well, we are the Users and we need to Interface so that's probably a good place to start!
Let me talk about a few...
HOTBAR LOCKS
Most MMOs have hotbars. Icons go into these hotbars. We sometimes click on these icons and accidentally drag them into the Terrible Oblivion Of Mis-Dragged Icons where sadly they are lost forever.
I can't tell you the abject terror generated in, say, LotRO when I realize there's an empty slot in one of my hotbars where something USED to be, but I can't remember what it was. Time to go through my skill list one-by-one, comparing the incredibly generic icon art (really, LotRO's icon art is pretty awful) with what's left on my hotbar, searching for the one, itinerant skill.
Historically, there has been a checkbox in most games' UI control panel for lock/unlock hotbars...but seriously, it's a complete pain and it seems that it's a 50/50 bet each time that anyone will remember to relock their bars.
And then someone thought up putting the lock/unlock ON THE HOTBAR. Just a simple button with icon next to the hotkeys. Simple, obvious, fast...cue Hallelujah Chorus.
Winner: First time I saw it was Rift I think.
SHARED STORAGE
If there is one constant among all MMOs, it's "I don't have enough room to put all of my crap!" OK, not all MMOs...in EVE you'll just end up with crap spread out amongst half the planets in space, and in Anarchy Online you can put bags inside bags, but good luck finding anything.
Pretty much all MMOs offer you a bank to put your excess crap. In fact, that's one of the big money makers for the Free-To-Play games, more bank space.
MMO players are, in general, a cross between someone with severe OCD and the scariest episode of "Hoarders" ever broadcast. Really, if we have a motto it's "But I might need that!"
Many people have alts just to give themselves more bank space. But some of us play our alts, so they need bank space of their own!
At some point we were gifted with...shared storage. Shared bank space available to all characters on an account. It's not only MORE...it's better because you don't have to mail junk back and forth between alts any more...just stick it in the shared storage. And it means I won't have piles of the same junk in every separate character's bank because I can have a single pile in the shared storage.
It's not just more...it's easier.
Winner: Lord of the Rings Online has an excellent implementation.
THE GUILD WARS 2 DOUBLE-WIN
This is related to shared storage, but it's much more than that. When I saw it in the first beta weekend I sat there, mouth agape in sheer stupefied incomprehension of the awesome I was witnessing. It's pretty fuckin' good.
First, in GW2 all storage is shared. Individual characters don't have their own bank space, it's all shared across the account. And there isn't a lot of space there either, especially since I plan on buying 3 more character slots to give me 8, one for each profession. I will undoubtedly then have to purchase more bank tabs for more space...
No, this isn't the part that's awesome. In fact, I'm unenthused about this part.
Ah, but the next part is so wonderous as to make a blind man see rainbows.
The characters also share a second "bank". This bank holds crafting materials. And it has one slot already designated for each material..."leather scraps", "copper ore", "copper bar", and so on. So no crafting material will take up any of our precious "real" bank space.
And now, for the one-more-thing to coup de gras you right in the pleasure center of your brain...you can send that stuff directly to it's pre-designated slot in the not-really-your-bank bank from your bags.
You're out in the middle of nowhere and you find an ore node...you whack it three time and have 3 shiny copper ore in your bag. Right-click it, select "Deposit collectible" and it vanishes from your bag and goes to your bank.
That easy. That slick. That awesome. Excuse me as I dab away tears.
Winner: Guild Wars 2 can I have your babies?
ONE MORE FOR GW2
Picture this: you're running about the countryside doing, y'know, adventurey stuffs, when you spot a nice rich patch of gold ore! Ooooo, shiny!
There's a little "Fluffy Weresquirrel" next to it that needs to be cleared out first, so you engage. Said fluffball is about half dead when, out of nowhere, some prick-with-legs goes flying by and steals your shiny. He may even watch you finish off the squirrel. He may even /dance at his leet skillz in stealing your ore.
Pretty much there's nothing you can do about it. Any response other than ignoring the asstard will just encourage him. And the appropriate response of discovering his actual identity, flying to his town, walking up to him and kneecapping him with a crowbar while screaming "Ninjaloot my gold again! I dare you!" is both expensive and time-consuming, believe you me.
This doesn't happen in GW2. Not because there are no asstards in GW2 (a quick look around at people's names will assure you that there are tards of all creeds and colors aplenty), but because it can't happen.
Because every resource node can be mined/harvested by each player once.
Problem solved. Is it realistic? Of course not. In this case...who cares?
Winner: Guild Wars 2 can I have your babies more?
APPEARANCES ARE DECEIVING
WoW has always had a lot going for it. It has been undeniably the most successful at pushing the MMO buttons we (mostly) love to have pushed.
But it's always had things it was slow to pick up on...and sometimes they became obvious. Really, really obvious.
As a new expansion or content patch approached, more and more of the populace had completed the content already there...and everybody of the same class looked identical.
OK, the gnomes were shorter, but other than that...identical. Wearing the same gear with their goddamned shoulder pads so huge and glowing so brightly you couldn't make out their faces to tell 'em apart.
In a genre of games where people are supposed to feel heroic, trying to look like everyone else sounds more like high school.
So...I don't know...how about you let people wear the stuff they want to, for cosmetic purposes?
Maybe it won't effect how easy it is to play the game, but it will make it easier to enjoy the game.
And some games have given us appearance tabs. An entirely different "paper doll" to wear gear for cosmetic purposes only...so you can look however you want to look without keeping a raft of gear in your bags and manually swapping. This also allows for purely cosmetic clothing to allow people more individualization.
Given how much people like to appear "different" in MMOs, and how much we generally like (at least the illusion of) individualization, it's amazing it took WoW so long to deliver even the half-assed version they have now.
Nobody, but NOBODY, does this as well as Lord of the Rings Online. You can have multiple tabs (and buy more for Real Money!). You can have huge numbers of cosmetic items, they have a wardrobe for storing them (and you can throw in differently-colored versions of the same item and it will offer you all the different colors you've tossed in [or dyed] from a single slot), and you don't even have to keep the items on your appearance tabs if you don't want them taking up space.
Basically, their implementation is just freaking awesome. A lot of other games either do similar things, or have functions to provide some of the same result, but they are inelegant at best and more often simply slapdash.
Winner: LotRO wins in a walk, having lapped the field.
IT'S A BIG, BIG, BIG WORLD
And we need to get around in it. I don't just mean on foot, or horse, or goat, or speeder, or cyberspider (srsly, Rift!)...I mean covering vast expanses in less-than-vast amounts of time.
EQ had...well, not much. Speed boosts. Boats on a 30 minute schedule.
SWG had...shuttles on 5 minute schedules on-planet and starships on a 15 minute schedule between planets (if memory serves). Watching that ship leave just as you run up...I swore more at SOE about that than everything else in the game combined.
WoW had 30 minute hearthstone and then (sometimes excruciatingly) long flights between places. Oh...and you'd better have remembered to talk to the flight master everywhere you went or you might be walking there a second time! You could also bug every mage that went by for a portal to Pick-Your-Major-City.
LotRO was like WoW except it did have fast travel between many locations or you could burn through some travel rations if you had a captain to summon you or a hunter to "teleport" you.
These all worked in their own way, but I'm going to give the nod to GW2...the first game in a while with _no_ mounts at all!
Mostly because it's not strictly needed. Lion's Arch (a neutral city) has portals between the 5 capitals. Inside each capital, and liberally scattered all over the maps are Waypoints. You can click on your map and be instantly ported to any Waypoint you've activated (oh, and you only have to get close to 'em to "learn" them, no clicky required!) for a small fee. Really fast, really flexible.
But dammit, I would like some cool mounts!
Winner: No mounts, but GW2 makes it easy.
SUMMARY
I've only hit a few of the nicer improvements in quality of life features we've seen over the last few years. Some are small things, but they are all things you miss a LOT when they're not there.
The lesson for MMO devs here is that often, small features (often easily implemented ones like the hotbar lock button) can have very large impacts on player perception.
So...make a big impression on your players...get the small stuff right.
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