Suzina hit upon a topic I’ve been pondering lately: Gated Communities.

If I’m gonna join a gated community, it better be a game. Once I’m there, I don’t want more gates to segregate me from my friends.

I can accept the extra gates if there is a significant and relevant difference in immersion as an RPG, but I’m getting tired of the artificial “you must be this high for this ride” level restrictions and whatnot intended to measure out content slowly. If the content itself is harder, that’s a more natural barrier, but gating for the sake of gating is annoying.

Any gating sits on one side of the scale, with the other side of the scale balanced by features like Sidekicking and content that’s regardless-of-level (IE: LOTRO’s music system). If the scale tips too far to the achievement gating side, I’m done.

That’s my biggest dissatisfaction with MMOs lately: They’re leveraging the achieving nature of players so much, they’re pulling friends apart in the process. Once I’ve felt like they’ve driven that wedge, I move on and that about sums up my MMO adventures for the past year and a half. I’d love to settle down in one game again, but it’s gotta be together with my friends, not just as a chat service but playing together with compelling content.

I don’t mind climbing tiers and ladders, and I love challenging content. A few carrots of “you must become part of this tier / group” are fine, they help us mix it up with new folks, making new friends. But that shouldn’t be the bulk of the game, because it’s a trap. There are so many other gameplay aspects and portions of the Bartle Test (Achieving, Exploring, Socializing and er, Killing or competing as I’d put it) that are neglected. Leveraging achieving is probably the easiest path to MMO success. It’s a little more complicated than that of course, because with the gates they’re defining restrictive social ladders as well.

I play MMOs for the social aspect + gaming. MMO design seems often at odds with itself this way, too quick to sort everyone into separate piles. I’d like the freedom to choose who I can make new friends with and most certainly I’d like to keep the subset of my current friends. In the end it still needs to be a game though, I don’t want a glorified gated community social networking app.

I might as well play a single-player game than be restricted from playing with my friends.