One of the main problems with running an online game is being truly in touch with your community. We sit in our ivory towers, we look at (usually insufficient) data mining, and get our community leads to compile reports, but sometimes, we don’t fully have our pulse on the problems.

One possible pitfall is being led to confront “High School Problems”. Remember when you were in High School, and that girl you liked told you to suck eggs? Remember the obsession with Pink Floyd and razor blades? In the long term of things, turns out that the problem just wasn’t very important in the grand scheme of things.

Any time a design team makes a decision that takes away the fun factor in order to solve a problem that really wasn’t that big a deal, you have a ‘high school problem’. For example, Everquest 2 and Final Fantasy both have variations of ‘kill locking’. No one else can help you kill a monster unless you give permission. When I play other MMOs, I’m always the kind of person to help out people in trouble, and often friendships can flower from the interaction. But the community and dev teams got obsessed with kill stealing and other problems, and instead reduced the fun factor that comes from the positive experiences. Could it be that this problem was a High School Problem?

The flip side is when a dev team doesn’t REALIZE there’s a problem that’s glaringly obvious to everyone else. I posted in December about how the UO Team actually posted an article on their web site about how you could lead guards out of town so you could kill newbies inside of town.

Similarly, WoW has posted on their front page a Penny Arcade cartoon pointing out the biggest problem with the game – No Man’s Land. Being perpetually unable to play with my friends because they’re too far below me and the code limits me from helping is certainly not a problem unique to WoW, but it is the thing that seems to have caused the most people I know who have quit to do so. Why remind us of that on your front page? Could it be they don’t know how frustrating it is?

The real problem, of course, is that your dev teams don’t get feedback from their casual gamers. The best, most consistent feedback comes from your community, but really only a small fraction of your readers posts on the boards:

  • The really pissed off. If they were happy, they’d be in game. This leads to High School Problems rising in priority.
  • The hardcore. Casual gamers don’t spend all day reading message boards and fantasizing about their characters and where to take them. Thus, the casual gamer problems get underrepresented. This leads to, for example, the problem of No Man’s Land to not be seen as important as it actually is – the hardcore care less about the problem.