Today, MMO publishers believe that in order to keep players, they need to regularly update the shiney with content patches and expansions. To some degree it’s true: players have already explored the game world, many several times, and need something to keep them playing the game or bring them back for a time. However, the publisher’s deeper motivation will be to bring back that revenue source. Character power isn’t capped, it’s increased, and the “challenge” is increased to match, all in an attempt to keep the players paying a little longer. New graphics engines, new models, new continents: those are just the shiney features to get the veteran player’s attention and incentivize them to buy the box and re-up the subscription.

It makes *sense* to expand the game world concentrically from the newbie area(s). Things get tougher the farther outside those areas you go, and the rewards get larger. Commercial expansions and mudflation, instead, posit that rather than designing a smooth character power curve with a definite ceiling, the game should cause a jump in a graph of character power between those who purchased the expansion and those who didn’t. This encourages players to make their characters more powerful. And then, to keep those more powerful characters in-game, to keep the players from getting bored, they have to increase mob difficulty (from small group to full group to small zerg to full zerg) and item drop power (from “does decent damage” to “kills entire newbie zones instantly”). A few days or weeks after the release of the expansion, it’s obvious who has purchased it and can continue to be competitive in-game, and who hasn’t. It’s a vicious cycle, and you’re right to criticize it.

I just want to make sure that a smooth progression of character power and expansion of explorable areas isn’t dismissed because of how commercial MMOs have mudflated their offerings. The older areas need not be considered “junk” if the new areas are designed with care and consideration of what they do to the overall game.

I’m against the “mudflated” development simply because it kills the game world. The development is always planned to replace a part that is ALREADY in the game. New content is usually added at the “margins” of a game. As a new “limb”.

What I’d like to see (and it’s extended to the whole game, not just the content) is a development that uniformly considers the game to improve it.

Right now “new content” and explansion packs are added to the margin of the game even when the “core” is still broken, not functional, unfun or unused. The fact is that this new content keeps derailing the development on something irrelevant.

My idea is that you can add and expand the world by keeping a cohesive approach. To consider the game world as a “whole” instead of an amass of stuff you pile up randomly and that keeps growing without a sense.

Instead of creating new zones with new mobs and new quests, you can also re-consider what’s already in the game, add more paths and quests, add interactivity, adjust something that isn’t working properly and so on.

With this approach you do not need a brand new zone with brand new monsters and quests in order to keep the game up to date and the interest of the players alive. The development can reuse, adjust and expand what is already available and add more “space” only when it is truly required.

Mudflated games finish to become just patchworks of more or less successful development. In 90% of the cases something broken or terribly unfun isn’t properly addressed and refactored. It just lies there as a “museum” while the developers work on something completely new in order to replace that part.

This is an approach that is strongly eradicated in a CULTURE. We produce JUNK. Nothing is reused because we throw everything away and buy something brand new. It’s the consumer society.

I do not like this because as in the real world this approach is killing the place where we live. We destroy the world because we have the illusion that everything can be replaced. If something is broken or has problem, we do not fix it: we throw it away. We do not face the problems, we simply dodge them.

We bury them like we do with junk. We hide.

I believe that a game world should be respected as we should respect our real world. Like we do with a “body”. Instead of producing junk and hide it from the view in order to not feel guilty, we should address the real problem. We should face the situation and plan the actions to go back at the root.

I don’t imagine a mmorpg like a cemetery of old and obsolete content. I imagine it as a continue development that keeps adjusting its content. That keeps fixing and improving what doesn’t work. That listens to feedback and that doesn’t ignore or hide the problems.

A world that won’t ask the players to move on a sequel in order to clear the junk that was laid around. A world without a Damocle’s sword hanging over its head.