Let me recount an old joke for you. A man goes to see his doctor. He says that he feels depressed and that life seems pointless and full of misery. The doctor exclaims immediately, “Well, the solution to that problem is simple. The great clown Pagliacci is in town. Go to see his show. That’ll cheer you right up.”

The man becomes agitated. He jumps up from his seat. “Do you think that feeling depressed is just being sad?” he shouts, edging closer to the doctor as his eyes narrow. “I don’t want to watch some clown strut around on stage for a couple of hours! Oh, sure, it might make me laugh a couple of times and bring a smile to my lips, but how does that fix the fact that I have a gnawing anxiety in my gut and a sense that everything in my life is only ever going to get worse? What does Pagliacci do for me there?”

Was that not the joke you were expecting? Probably not. But this version isn’t just talking about the great clown Pagliacci; it’s talking about simple solutions and how almost everyone has one for MMO problems that crop up. And they’re basically always wrong.

Simple solutions are appealing because, well, we all like simple and elegant solutions. It feels very good when you can point to a big cascading network of problems and say that you fix all of them with the equivalent of a cheap pair of screws, for example. But it’s easy to forget that part of the reason we like simple solutions is that simple solutions so rarely crop up when it comes to complicated problems. More often than not, complicated problems require complicated solutions.

MMOs are complicated. They are complicated games on several levels, usually having a whole lot of different systems in play with wildly different intents and design goals in addition to being always online and trying to give players reason to engage with an ever-ongoing stream of content without becoming boring. That’s a pretty tall order even when you lay it out like that, and I’m leaving out a whole lot of additional complexity while also leaving out the individual elements that make specific games complex.

Hence why basically every “simple” solution comes down to some combination of overestimating your own cleverness, something being a simple concept without being a simple plan, and deliberately ignoring some degree of consequences.

The first one sounds mean, I know, but the thing is that we all have a tendency to overestimate ourselves at times. Some people try to modulate it, some people don’t, but it crops up no matter what. Heaven knows I have sometimes sat back, thought about some MMORPG problem, and come up with what seems like an incredibly elegant solution that it surprises me no one else has already thought of.

But then I think for a moment longer and I always come to the conclusion that, like… which is more likely? That I, one person sitting on a couch, have come up with a solution in half an hour that dozens of people who are paid to work on the game on a daily basis never came up with? Or that those people did come up with this solution and for whatever reason it wasn’t workable? I feel like the latter sounds a lot more plausible than the former, if we’re being quite honest.

Some of this also comes down to the definition of “simplicity” as well. I love to joke that something can be simple without being easy. For example, by that definition it is very simple to accelerate to nearly the speed of light. Just keep providing additional thrust as mass increases! How do you do that? That’s irrelevant! I came up with a simple solution; why are you being mean?

Just because your solution may be simple doesn’t mean it’s reasonable. It’s very simple to say, for example, that a developer should drop everything to rework a game’s character creator or develop a sequel to the game or whatever. But these things are actually hard to do, especially if you have the expectation that the existing game still gets the same update cadence as before.

And that ties into ignoring consequences, as well. To use an obvious example, I’ve frequently been critical of World of Warcraft’s refusal to embrace deterministic gearing, and you could say that putting it into the game is a simple solution. (I don’t, but you could.) However, I also say that knowing full well that this does have trade-offs. If you can just get tier sets easily by acquiring currency and spending it, that does impact the rewards and the drive necessary to take part in endgame raiding.

Now, I would also say that I consider that a perfectly fine trade-off, but that isn’t actually the point. Claiming that it’s a simple solution with no trade-offs would be a lie. The fact that I consider the trades to be completely good doesn’t change that they exist.

My point here is not that fans should never try to think of solutions or there are never good solutions that come out of players thinking about things. It’s far from common, but I obviously think that thinking about potential solutions is a good thing. But I also spend a lot of my columns stating that even as I come up with solutions and proposals, they are put forth with an understanding that I have not stumbled onto the One Neat Trick that has all upside and no drawbacks. Even if I consider the drawbacks to be worth it, they exist.

And I think that is, ultimately, a more healthy attitude to have about most things. I am a big fan of thinking about things (it’s kinda what I do), but I’m also a big fan of recognizing my own limitations and preferences. Those inform everything that I do and think about. And while those don’t prevent me from having clever solutions or workarounds, they also do mean that I’m as likely as not to come up with solutions that map perfectly to my limitations and preferences and to then naturally decide that it sounds great to me, so I must be a super-genius.

Just to be unambiguously clear here, my super-genius brain also at one point decided to cut a pat of butter off to grease a pan and then immediately throw the knife and the butter into the sink. I am not a super-genius.

So if you’re going to chime in and say that you’ve come up with the simple solution or you’ve found the perfect answer and that perfect answer happens to overlap exactly with your stated or observed premises, well, I’m not likely to agree with you. What you have probably done is observed a thing you want to be true and that is simple to state without being simple to do, and then you’ve decided that it’s self-evident. Maybe the solution to a complicated problem is, in fact, complicated. Maybe the reason no one has embraced your simple solution is that it’s not actually simple or a solution.

Sometimes you know exactly what’s going on with the MMO genre, and sometimes all you have are Vague Patch Notes informing you that something, somewhere, has probably been changed. Senior Reporter Eliot Lefebvre enjoys analyzing these sorts of notes and also vague elements of the genre as a whole. The potency of this analysis may be adjusted under certain circumstances.