Riddles and Puzzles

What has roots as nobody sees,
Is taller than trees,
Up, up it goes,
And yet never grows?

This is one of the riddles Gollum asks of Bilbo in The Hobbit. So Bilbo whips out his trusty iPhone, and googles the answer: "mountain". Or he asks the answer in General chat. The Secret World, which has quests with riddles even helpfully provides in in-game browser which opens automatically with Google. Found the hints "music of the seasons", "favorite composer", and "1723", but can't think of the answer to Dr. Bannerman's computer password? Just google it! In any case, it isn't something you could just figure out, unless you already know something about composers of classical music. And once you know the answer, the riddle is trivial for your next character doing the same quest.

Now this is the carpentry puzzle in the MMORPG Puzzle Pirates. The pieces you get are random, so you can't google the answer to this. And you do not need any prior knowledge of a specific subject to solve this puzzle. Unlike a riddle, the puzzle is replayable and doesn't become complete trivial once you solved it once. There are lots of different puzzles in Puzzle Pirates alone, and there have been lots of other games, multiplayer and single-player, that used puzzles as gameplay elements as well. Bejeweled clones are frequent. Puzzle Pirates even has sword fights simulated as competitive Tetris-like puzzles.

I don't think that riddles are a good idea for MMORPGs. If you are already expected to google the answer based on hints, then why bother to search for the hints in the first place and not just google for "Dr. Bannerman's password"? On my The Secret World beta impressions post a commenter said that Funcom had turned investigative missions off for that beta weekend, because General chat was just too full of spoilers. MMORPGs are collaborative multiplayer games, and riddles just become trivial if solved by a collaborative multiplayer effort.

I think that puzzles would work a lot better in MMORPGs. They do work in Puzzle Pirates, and they would work just as well in a bigger game. They aren't trivialized by outside help, and you can reuse them several times for different quests. They even come in varying degrees of difficulty, if one would actually want to put something really challenging into a MMORPG.