As an avid casual gamer and an MMO player who likes to watch movies on one screen while playing in a virtual world on the other, I have enjoyed playing Sony Online Entertainment's new MMO FreeRealms.
Despite a rocky launch, missing jobs, missing features, and some fascinating bugs, the game has a core of familiar, fun gameplay that should appeal most to traditional MMO players who enjoy the slower, more social aspects of virtual worlds.
Alas, SOE has made some decisions that hamstring the social aspect of the game for those players, by having turned the tradition of making friends in an MMO into a resource that has direct benefits. This has created a divide amongst social players in a way I have yet to witness in an MMO.
When a friend is online and on the same server, you can instantly teleport to their location. Even in this game-world filled with teleportation nodes ("Warpstones"), there are many locations that take a few minutes to get to.
Thus, the lightbulb goes on - if I have many friends, then the chances that their usefulness as a portable teleportation target goes up! This is especially true because there are three important requirements that must be fulfilled:
- Friend is online.
- Friend is on the same server.
- Friend is somewhere you want to be.
And the fact is... I accept them all. And I do the same in reverse - people who happen to be standing around in a location that I know I will need to get back to quickly are apt to get an exploratory friend invite from me. If they accept and stay put, I just shaved minutes of running off my schedule!
When you think of other players as resources like this, then the inherent rudeness of sending these requests begins to fade before the rationality of efficient play.
Traditionally, social requests such as duels, friend requests, and guild invites have been relegated to risky behavior. Without clear signals from the recipient you are just as apt to be reported for harassment as you are to make a friend or have a fun mock battle. With FreeRealms, the sheer usefulness of the friend-resource greatly outweighs the riskiness of making the request. And the friends list grows.
With the Warpstones and the ease of teleportation, even a two minute run in the world carries the harsh feeling of wasting time and the boredom that only overland travel over familiar territory in a game world can bring. Sure, it's great fun to run around a new area, but when you've criss-crossed this area for hours, any simple technique to speed up the process is embraced.
In a way, the ease of teleportation makes the desirability of friend-resources very high. The easier it is to travel through most of the world, the worse you feel when you do have to take to running.
So... to the controversy. In a recent thread on the FreeRealms forums, I observed the battle lines get drawn - between players who saw friends as a ticket to ride and thus sent them out en masse, and the players from the older mold that took friends lists as "serious business" and actively disliked anyone sending these requests out.
The social realm had been invaded by gameplay.
As a friends-resourcer myself, I can't help but wonder if pure labelling would fix this. Basically, in FreeRealms it is very difficult to chat with other players - and if the other player is a minor, then they can't read what you're saying to them anyway. Being on or off the list doesn't ease communication in any way whatsoever. The only tool that a friend gives you in this game is that of "teleporter target."
Another twist on this conflict is how generational it feels. Younger players - the Facebookers, the "frenemy"-havers, the social networkers, do not see a friend as any form of commitment. These socially facile people are more open because the costs and benefits are lower than that of the older players, who equate friendship with commitments to adventure together, share loot, even share account information. Seen in this light, you can feel more sympathy for each side - if having a friend gives vulnerability, then trust is important. If having a friends list member is the social equivalent of saying "hi", then numbers are important.
So really, this friend-resourcing seems logical in terms of the target audience of this game. Players who would have no issue with handing out their name and location to hundreds of other players are definitely going to benefit - less travel, more direct gameplay, more... fun?
1 comments:
I guess after playing games where travel meant a real time investment, I find FR to be a very small world. with the spacing of the bind stones it's even smaller. I don't see the need of having a friend army just to make travel easier.
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