I have played many MMORPGs over the years, switching and jumping between games. With the influx of Free-To-Play MMORPGs powered by mirco-transactions, suddenly the online RPG market has opened up significantly, giving gamers aka. me, a lot more choices. I have spent money on buying stuff in the past, but right now, I have seen some game releases that made me go WTF; That is, certain shortcomings of the game is so shockingly shoddy that I can't imagine myself ever spending a dime on it.

My point of view is that: If I find a game that I enjoyable, I would go ahead to spend money on it, showing that I support the game and the developers, and I want to do my part to keep the game. But it has to get some things right. Some short comings are forgivable but others are just not. No matter how high the hype about it is, I would not bother with it if it doesn't show itself to be worthy of my time and money.

Now for my very first blog article, I present to you the Signs that MMORPG is not interested in earning my money.

1. Bad translation

These days, a plethora of MMORPGs originates from S.Korea, China, Taiwan, Japan etc. The game developers usually license the game to other developers in other countries, so they could develop localized versions for it in their own region. Now this is not a bad thing, especially for english speakers (so as to speak) like myself.

But sometimes, the "engrish" in the game is so bad, its horrific. Typos errors aside, some of the dialogs which the NPC spouts just doesn't make sense. Typographical errors in names of certain quest places, NPCs, or items make quests near to impossible to do. Some times you wonder why that lvl 150 NPC quest giver that looks so bad ass, can't even say a simple right and clearly. You would think that after spending millions of dollars bringing a game over for release in their own regions, they could spend a little more to get a half decent translator to translate in game text and a proofreader instead of just using Babelfish

2. Widescreen Resolution

This bugs me alot, as I currently am using a wide screen monitor. Running a 4:3 resolution on a wide screen monitor just looks funny. Characters look short and fat and sometimes the toolbars gets obscured. So here is my message to the developers:

STOP PRETENDING THAT THERE IS NOT SUCH THING AS WIDE SCREEN MONITORS IN THIS WORLD AND NO ONE USES THEM.

Make the games support Wide-screen resolutions please. For goodness sake, if you are too lazy to do it, at least add some black bars to the screen picture so that it will look right on widescreen monitors! There is no use boasting about how amazing the game looks graphically if you can't get a thing like this right.

3. Private Shops

Nothing is more disheartening than to start a new character in a city, and be instantly lagged out by the millions of Player Character (PC) private shops littered on the streets. I mean those guys are everywhere. Besides the lag, frame rate of the game lowers SIGNIFICANTLY, making moving through a city a chore. Its made even worse if the only way to move around is to click on the location you want to move it. Nothing is worse than trying to move to a NPC to turn in a quest, and you end up buying something you don't need from a private shop on top of him. >_<

Use Auction system, or make a zone where players can set up private stores to sell their wares. Or come up with some other way. Just don't make a visit to a town a struggle as it is.

4. PVP

Not everyone likes PVP. I do dabble in it sometimes, but I don't appreciate, or see the funny side of being ganked and getting corpse camped for a long time by high level character(s) while doing a quest. Sometimes PK penalties just isn't enough of a deterrence. Give me the freedom to choose to PVP. I mean you guys literally made WoW clones one after another so why not make clone this feature out of it too? Create PVP or PVE only servers to allow the games to keep their players paying out the dough. I play games to relax, so the last thing I'll need is more aggravation from a game.

5. Anti-Hacking

Watching your character sit down to heal is not very interesting after all, so I prefer to surf the net and do other stuff while I am not doing anything active in the game.Sometimes, when I'm playing a game, I will often find myself needing to switch to another application to do something else, for example, listen to MP3s, send an email, or reply to a IM message. That is why I hate games who don't allow you to switch to another window when you need to, and automatically closes the game client when you try to do so. The purpose of this is to prevent hacks, but surely there is a better way of doing it. Inconveniencing your customers (or potential) is not the right way to do it.

Neither is Gameguard the right way to do it. Put it simply, it caused alot of problems on end users. Just google for gameguard related issues and marvel at the number of hits. The idea is to make your game compatible with as many systems as possible, with few as few problems (running the game) as possible. But at the same time, cheaters are aplenty, and so including anti-hack systems can prove to be a double edged sword. For my case, it has caused me plenty of issues in the past and I made it a point never to play a game with Gameguard in it.

6. Gold-selling spams

It is getting rarer, but this issue still plagues a number of games. Several times, when I first started a new character, first thing I will see on my chat log will an advertisement for gold for RL money. Not the kind of image you want to relay to a first time player for your game. Many games have made RMT a bannable offence and so it is ironic to see this. Some games have taken a very aggressive attitude to gold spammers, which I totally support. Not that I don't mind having gold farmers around, but since it is rather inevitable, I have gotten used to it. And since banning a gold farmer requires the authorities (GM) to investigate more throughly, I can understand the delay in action taken, but gold spams are all too easy to get rid of, so there is no excuse that the same toon can gold spam for hours and not be banned..

And so concludes my article. Drop me a line if you wish to comment. Thanks for reading!