Suggesting Solutions for Solving Player Interaction Problems in Online Gaming

[ZenX]

Disclaimer: Fellow World of Warcraft players, this is the parent topic for a group of surveys I’m conducting for an academic work, where I’m proposing solutions for solving player interaction problems in Online gaming and World of Warcraft is my designated case study where the audience is assumed to have limited knowledge of the game.

These surveys will be kept open for two weeks, in addition to your votes, I would appreciate your constructive criticism on the work, problem definitions and suggested solutions.

Following are the links to surveys, where the needed infomation on the suggested solution and the respective criterion is given in their opening posts and the respective problem definitions are given after the links to the surveys.

Survey Links:
Survey on Solving Problems of Item Quarrel with Dropped Item Revision
Survey on Solving Problems of Player Abuse with Instance Points System
Survey on Solving Problems of Experience Disparity with Layered Progression Model

Problem Definitions

Item Quarrel: In WoW, players participate in killing of monsters which drop items essential for a player’s personal progress in the game as better items help the player to grow in power, resulting in an enjoyable gameplay that drives them to play more. Depending on their difficulty, these monsters are encountered in instances, requiring a minimum of 5 players’ participation. However, players needing the same item, fight over getting it. This goes as far as either of them leaving the group or performing actions out of scorn that ends up disturbing other participants. However, other than a social agreement between players, there is no form of measure taken to solve this problem. Thus, the current dropped item system leads to quarrels between players leading up to an unpleasant interaction model that yields a bad gameplay.

Player Abuse: Forming groups to access game’s content is a lengthy and sometimes unfruitful process. Therefore, to solve the problem of forming groups, the game had a function, namely the Looking for Dungeon (LFD) tool implemented for forming such groups to do instances. As the participants of these groups had been randomly chosen and were from different servers, they would attain a degree of anonymity. This had resulted in various types of player behavior to arise that ranged from insulting or bullying, to kicking others out of the group that of which has resulted in a medium of bad gameplay. However, there is no apparent solution to orient players in behaving properly against each other except a social agreement. As a result, the unavailability of a system to orient players to behave yields communication problems that negatively impact players’ game experience.

Experience Disparity: Even though there is a minimum gear level requirement for using LFD to access instances, the system can be cheated by equipping irrelevant items of higher level. This is done to access the higher level of content quicker as it awards better items. This results in players to step into a level of content that they are not ready to experience. Moreover, the experienced player playing at this higher level feels as being held back by the inexperienced, which leads to a fight between these players, yielding an undesired form of player interaction, resulting in a bad gameplay. Hence, the difference in player experience results in communication problems that negatively impact players’ gaming experience.

Thank you for your cooperation.

[ZenX]

I have opened topics in the official forums, to make my surveys more accessible, here are the links:

EN-EU: http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/3553608405
EN-US: http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/4254459876

[Mormolyce]

The new rules for LFR are designed to eliminate "Item Quarrel".

These are all a part of the wider issue covered by the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory.

[ZenX]

The new rules for LFR are designed to eliminate "Item Quarrel".

These are all a part of the wider issue covered by the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory.

The problem is similar to what I have provided it has not been tested, and furthermore, the problem may have the possibility of shifting from a player-based one to a game-based one, even though it might get it out of the definition of a problem involving player interaction, it may still break the quality of gameplay.

Still, I appreciate your comments.