f13.net

http://mud.wikia.com/wiki/MUD_Wiki

It exists because Wikipedia's citation standards are just about impossible for muds to meet.

I know a lot of you were on muds. And they tie directly to MMOs (so don't move this post, Schild!)

Har. I would've moved it here from PC/Console gaming.

That said, MUD history is largely heresay. Of course it's impossible to prove and meet the wikipedia criteria. It was all people talking online and getting random things done. There's no way to even figure out if Bartle's archetypes actually came from his mind or someone else. It's all... largely impossible to prove accurate. In other words, it's a fairly epic, if overly nostalgic project.

But I will predict something: This will be the most rose-colored wiki of all time.

MUD history is the single largest reason for why the MMO industry is the shitfest it is today. Once memory of these nerd-havens dies off, then maybe we can all move on to actually playing massively multiplayer online videogames and leave this old-world diku shit behind.

So what you're saying is you didn't actually play MUDs and everything you know about them has been gleaned from Vault Network rants.  Good to know.

Who is going to write the article about why Bruce shut down FurryMUCK in 1991?   :why_so_serious:

If it's any consolation, I did log into a couple for probably a few hours/minutes. Is there some kind of rite of passage time allotment before you get to point out that something sucks? At any rate, anybody who has played MMO's in the past decade could give you the general idea behind them, because MMO's have been rehashing those same basic ideas over and over. MUD's were a small niche based around an inherently poor design and modern MMO's are being built on top of them not because they were ever a good idea, but simply because they were there first.

Uh.  No.

The ENTIRE god damn point is that WITHOUT MUDs, you most likely would NEVER had a MMO.  The genesis of the fucking idea of making MMO's was a bunch of mudders going let's make my favorite mud but with graphics.  Voila.    MMO's are a direct descendant and an iterative, not revolutionary development of text based mudding.

Yet somehow we still get crap, though its nice to know its not revolutionary crap but more intentional passes at developing crap.

Yeah, this probably isn't the thread Raph hoped for.

Goreschach: the history of MUDs is not why we have these issues. It's ignoring that history which is the root problem. The only "blame" to be cast at developers is that they didn't evolve with the industry in that the wrong types of things were prioritized against a misunderstanding of contemporary consumer expectations.

Actually, his article first appeared in an academic peer-reviewed journal. So it actually meets a regular encyclopedia's criteria for citation and credit. :)


I agree that the rose-colors will be challenging to fight off. My main interest is in history, particularly design and social history. You can look at the LegendMUD article to see the way I cast it.

That said, there are a LOT of sources out there which should help establish quite a lot in a fairly evenhanded manner. It will just take some scholarship.

I would have said that ignoring mud history is a bigger cause. :P

That's OK. You (the general you) mostly hope for more iterative crap. ;)

C-C-C-Combo Breaker   :why_so_serious:

If I could not be lazy I could write up a thing on SojournMUD Pre/Post 1st Wipe, the split to Toril/Duris and the little known DarkoverMUD.  I could also discuss Owen Emlen's Mid Point Void, the derivation to 2 and Lands of Chaos, ROP and a few others that I was a part of making.

Then again I'm lazy.

This.

You see, Gore, if you knew MUD history or devs knew it then there would be this understanding that SO MANY of the current 'problems' came up in the past and had different resolutions.  Your implication that all MUDs were DIKU or even the DIKU-using ones were at all similar shows your level of misunderstanding of what was going on in them.

Not all MUDs were combat-centric.
Not all MUDs were fantasy-based HP slugfests.
Not all MUDs were DIKU (or Circle or ROM).
Not all MUDs used levels.

There were some damn innovative ideas and game systems that have been ignored out there in MUDs.  Primarily because the ONE 3-d game that was first called "wildly successful" stole freely from a stock codebase that was 10 years behind the times when its 3-d version released.   All the 3-d guys after that have stolen freely from it instead of looking to history and seeing what other systems they could have branched off from or implemented.


Of course we do, its what we know.  :oh_i_see:  

If someone were to give us an alternate finished and complete on day 1 instead of buggy and half-assed folks will pick it up.  AOC was on the road to actually realizing part of this with the way its combat worked, but Funcom failed to deliver a finished product, again. (No surprise to me.)  

Not to mention, many people such as myself who programmed for years on a DIKU, want something different.  Been there.  Coded that.

It raises my hackles that something I was working on as a hobby in 1992 is still basically the same nearly twenty years later.  And people are paid big bucks to copy it.

I loved my hobby of world creating in MUDs.  Always tried to create areas and world that looked and felt good but offered practicality and allowed the game design to work.  And I was a teenager. Now people get to do it, get paid, and they suck at it... most of the time.  See everything WAR.  Terrible terrible world design.  Fucking Terrible.

No MajorMUD (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Majormud) article? This wiki is dead to me.

Fun.  I added an entry on softcode, chock full of Weasel Words and missing citations. I might hover around and touch up the MU* branch of the family tree.  Mostly MUSHcode and the Battletech servers.  Maybe I'll even turn over the rock under which hides the worms of the World of Darkness  branch of the MUSH/MUX family.

You write up MajorMUD and I'll write up Tele-Arena.

Bonus Points, show me where the Minotaur is and where the Cyclops is along with the Bronze, Copper, Iron keys.  No cheating!

That map isn't complete.

Edit: Or rather, you've asked a trick question in retrospect.

Yes it is.  What's missing is the Down and further on from the bronze door.

It's a trick question because there's two cyclops mobs on the first map.

this is worthwhile so I'll take a look.

If people are more worried about current and future VW designs, then this archive fever should help.  Because practically every single question or design problem has been done to death through MUD's already (MUDDev Archive (http://muddev.wishes.net)).  Permadeath anyone?

Ugh. Whenever I go MUD hopping, I always gravitate towards the DIKU. If something's even slightly different from bashing monsters and geting loot, I get confused and log off. I'm such a victim.

Actually 3!

Two that drop keys.

Anyway, IRC.

Gore may not be right exactly, but he's bitching from that same stomach-lurching feeling that I get whenever a lot of MUD talk kicks up. Namely the feeling that nobody drawing from the usual MUD circles is ever going to develop anything worth playing ever again. You start talking about MUDs, and without being able to help it I immediately start thinking about how punishing EQ was, and how hard UO tried to slit its own throat, and how much ass SWG sucked, and so forth. I think of a bunch of turn of the century monstrosities that achieved modest success in spite of themselves, and because there wasn't anything else around.

Forced grouping promotes socialization.
The PKs are only winning because they're more organized.
Hey forced downtime promotes socialization too.
No seriously adding a PK switch would compromise my woooorld.

Remembering that we didn't get a non-ass-scented MMO until a celebrated developer of single player and small-scale multiplayer games came along and exactly copied all their ideas, minus the dumbest parts and plus professional production values, doesn't help.

biggest point for me is that MMO's/VW's didn't begin and end with WoW.  Hard to believe, but there are some kids and adults who see everything in terms of WoW and no other game.  Seriously.  That alone makes MUDs and early history worth remembering.  Not because WoW is bad, but because it's not everything.  And shouldn't be.

I remember when a friend of mine went to pick up Pirates of the Burning Sea when it first came out. The attendant pointed her to WoW. He literally could not comprehend any other online game.

To imply that someone f13 doesn't think there was online games before WoW is stupid. But even if you truly want to make that point you'll be implying that the pre-WoW mmo-industry was at some point in time fun. Mmorpg's have been trash before WoW and are still trash 11 million subs later.

That was you? I left a note saying "hmm" basically. The line between softcode & scripting is interesting and should be clarified. :)

Forced downtime DOES promote socialization. You just don't care. There's a difference. :) (It's been widely observed -- not just by me! -- that WoW is one of the least social virtual worlds ever made).

Look, of course things have evolved. But evolution and progress are not synonymous. Losing sight of where we have been is a mistake, and there are many alternate paths of evolution that are compeltely orthogonal to those four observations.

No need to use the past tense. There are still hundreds of MUDs out there, though the overall market for text MUDs has, unsurprisingly, shrunken. The market for them peaked sometime in the early part of this millenium.

The funny thing is that I rarely see a game feature asked for by MMO fans that isn't already available in MUDs, though I fully understand why MUDs are of no interest to most game players. Also worth pointing out that of the most popular MUDs, only one is DIKU-based.

--matt

Matt and Raph just posted in row. The prophecy has been fulfilled.

My face hath instantly sprung a beard.

I clearly need to make Ingmar write up an Ancient Anguish article, since I am far too lazy to do it myself.



Also, without MUDs, I'd probably be a spinster aunt.  :ye_gods:

Hmm, I know Raph is full of beardy goodness, but I couldn't grow a beard to save my life. All I manage is a little bit of perpetual stubble that would resemble some sort of mangy, post-chemo werewolf were I to try to grow it out.

I hrmed back.  It's a nontrivial distinction, as long as we agree to kick out tinyfugue macros from the discussion.

I'm not seriously arguing that documenting all this MUD history isn't a good thing. I'm just saying that the whole old-school "straight outta MUDs" developer culture needs to produce something unequivocably awesome before people will stop throwing the occasional tomato at it. Right now it mostly gets associated with the stone-age of MMO development and the mistakes that were made back then, unfair as that may seem.

Or to put it another way, less telling me what it has to teach, more showing me what it's learned.  :wink:

Edit: Er, in general that is. Not in this thread, since it's, you know, explicitly all about history.

Yes and yes. To the former: it's a magic circle thing. Players don't want to know when the game is gaming them. To the latter, WoW provides a valuable insight into just how much interaction the average player actually wants. WoW is the Facebook of MMOs: almost entirely self driven voluntary outward facing interaction. And where it's not (Raiding, Arenas) is also probably where the least percentage of players are.

Honestly, this seems like an impossible exercise in masturbation. There aren't enough people on the internet to really, REALLY document all the weird and crazy shit that has gone on in the mudworld. Considering the weird and crazy shit is far more interesting than the mundane well-known (around these parts) bits, it's probably safer for everyone involved to not create the dinosaur exhibit for the Natural History Museum of Gaming. Also, it's too easy for people to avoid work when nostalgia strikes them. :grin:

BattletechMUX was unequivocally awesome a decade ago.  You had large factions warring over resource points, salvaging each others mechs, a resource/repair system, a fully functioning economy with defendable factories, dynamic weather (that actually had an impact on gameplay), detailed comms system that supported range effects and decoding, etc, etc.

The problem is that the feature that led to that incredible amount of productivity and experimentation is the same feature that prevented it from ever growing beyond a small userbase:  the text interface.  It turns out most people would rather play Mechwarrior 2 with maybe 1% of the functionality of the MUX if they could get some 3d rendering on top of it.  And as soon as you do that, every feature has to run through the fucking art department, and you're done.  I wrote a chessboard in MUSHcode for kicks in about 2 hours.  An official chessboard in World of Warcraft would take 100 hours to implement, mostly in animations and rendering the board.  All the fun stuff in WoW is going on in Lua, like the holdem poker mod that plays over chat (which is. . a text interface).

In short, text ftw.  Now excuse me while I play some Dwarf Fortress.

As someone who is still intimately involved in text MUDs (as opposed to, with all due respect, virtually every other commenter on the topic, including Bartle and Raph) the funny thing is that I agree, sort of. I think the whole kerfuffle over Threshold is misplaced because I do think that Wikipedia's rules are fairly rational and I don't think that Threshold (with all due respect to its admin, who I consider at least a casual friend) is really all that notable. It's been a moderately successful commercial MUD (by MUD standards, obviously, not by MMO standards) but beyond that it hasn't really done anything first or had much influence, as far as I can tell, on other games that became bigger. That's the case for almost all text MUDs (of which there have been thousands) though.

At least one of Iron Realms's MUD listings was removed and I expect the Lusternia listing will be removed at some point too, though I suspect Achaea is safe (otoh, who knows). I also don't care that much whether or not they're on Wikipedia and think that the effort on Wikia is a much more appropriate place for almost all info about text MUDs, minus ones that have done something particularly notable and documented.

That and - mmog developers aren't even learning from mistakes or new things from MMOGs in the past 10 years, let alone yesterday. Why should we go back to text games? Is 20 years of rosey colored bullshit necessary? Particularly during work hours? :why_so_serious:

Art is a huge part of it. So is needing a UI. If you want 3d as well, the problems compound quite a bit. Beyond that, just having a heavy client is an inhibitor. Text MUDs that are client agnostic (almost all of them, even if they have "pretty clients" alongside them) require no client patching and thus allow for incredibly fast iteration. Just update the server and boom, everyone's code is instantly updated. Achaea probably gets updates four or five times each day on average, every day, 365 days a year. Most of them are small fixes, of course, but as you point out, it's wonderful to able to implement a new feature and have it in the players hands in the space of hours.

Before I started Sparkplay (doing 3d MMOs) I figured that a 3d MMO would be about 10x as much work feature-for-feature, but now I'd estimate it's somewhere between 100x and 1000x as much work/cost when you factor in all the systems that have to be there on a 3d MMO to support simply existing in 3d. I was amused at first (in a "this is new and interesting" way) by having to worry about stuff that is irrelevant in a text MMO like clipping, shadows, texture memory, performance, etc. Can't say I find it very funny now, 3 years later.


--matt

Well, if all you want is an evolution of WoW, I don't think there's any big reason to look back at text MUDs except as history. EQ and WoW already did that for you.

--matt

But is it desirable socalization? Or is it people getting bored and yakking at each other. Why should they play "your" game when they can just log off and hit the bar/anime expo/cyber on myspace?

The problem with forced socalization through downtime and grouping is that other games don't have to feature it, and will drag your players away where they don't have to put up with it in order to do what they signed up for... play the game. (See: Our favorite example, EQ around the time of WoW's launch.)

On topic: My only exposure to MUDs was CalvinMUD when I was going to community college. I can see why and where a lot of DIKU ideas come from, but MUDs never really grabbed my imagination.

We don't want to learn from past MMOs. Like Matt said, EQ and WoW have done that for us. We want to learn from other genres. But I suspect you think the same way so this is borderline insulting to tell you this  :oh_i_see:

This doesn't diminish the need for a MUD history. Because even if you take the fun combat from a console game and mix in the itemization of Diablo II, you still have social conditions that already have been explored and should be learned from.

I always felt it the socialization was brought about by shared misery. Like when a subway car stops in a tunnel for a long time, or a elevator gets stuck, or that really long line at the checkout or even just the damn weather while waiting outside.


Little difference between:

"Fuck it's cold out, hope the bus gets here soon!"
"Fuck this spawn takes forever, I hope it shows up soon!"

In both cases the socialization is forgotten as soon as the situation is resolved. I remember that guy at the boss stop I was talking too no more then I remember the dwarf that was camping the spawn with me.

It saddens me that in the games you're playing the only socialization you can imagine is in downtime between spawns and that it is utterly meaningless regardless. (Not meant as an insult towards you, but an expression of disappointment at how small the box is in MMOs.) Modern MMOs are richer than MUDs in some ways but this is one way where MMOs may as well be in 1975 by comparison to even mediocre MUDs.

--matt

Pft. People do the same thing in muds. Using an example from this thread, waiting for the griffon in telearena when you were on a new toon always resulted in talking to whoever was there. It's as if developers have developed a case of stockholm syndrome and their systems and established practices are the ones holding them hostage.

Why do so many people go around saying DIKU all the time? It was DikuMUD, not DIKUMUD.

I've been trying to work this question in without looking like a moron for something like a year now.

Datalogisk Institut Københavns Universitet

Who says that's the only socialization available?

What I was saying is the socialization provided by the old school 'downtime' is crappy and forgettable.  

Hmm, okay. I just wasn't sure if there was some other connotation there - it never seemed quite right that the place name should be synonymous with the legacy of one particular product developed there in the early '90s, but whatever works.

edit: there. their. they're. damn.

Interesting point. I hardly remember any conversations I had waiting for spawns in WoW or EQ, just as I hardly remember any conversations I had while braiding hair in the cantinas of SWG. And yet, SWG is considered quite different than WoW or EQ. Hair dressing was meant for the socializers...and yet it had the same effect as waiting for spawns.

However, I remember many, many details about a conversation I had in UO, in a tavern on the Lake Superior shard in the Grey Company village, far to the east of Yew. A young man had been dumped by his girlfriend earlier that day, and was telling us all about it, tears in his eyes, while a couple was flirting in a corner and I was sitting there drinking ale. The flirtatious man was reciting poetry to the lady, while she emoted *blush* and so forth. The scorned young man made sure we knew he was crying in real life. I was drinking and burping yet listening to them all. Orcs spawned outside, and nobody cared.

To SWG's credit, however, I vividly remember the day I learned about /bandflourish, fuck yeah. Sometimes we make the choice to socialize, and sometimes someone else (the devs) makes that choice for us.

Exactly. Downtime is not creating interesting socalizations regarding the game space, it is dead time to be filled up with trivia and fart jokes.

People don't play videogames for downtime.  Downtime is  CRIMINAL.  Hell, when I want to socialize and shoot the shit I hop on IRC and hope the channels aren't full of lurkers.  I post on forums.  Making me sit in one point for more than 30 seconds while I med or wait for a black bar damage to heal or some such fuckery doesn't make me start socializing.

You know how RP broke out in UO?  Tools to build places to hang out, and gamers actually INTERESTED in roleplaying there. 

Guess what almost every other MMORPG fails to have?  Cool player made, easily reached buildings to hang out in.

You know what RP WoW has?  People chatting over guild chat in RP guilds.  And WoW has almost zero downtime outside of traveling time.  But it still happens with the right players and the right guild.

Forcing players to spend 20 out of every 60 minutes with a thumb up their butts doesn't do it.

Here is where I suggest people have different ideas of what they mean by 'downtime'.

This, a thousand times over. I used to code on a number of MUDs, and one of them had some of the best socialization I've ever seen in an online game. It did not cause this through downtime, purely, although there was some of that. The game mechanics themselves made the most efficient and predictable methods of character advancement (use-based/skill-based system) to interact with other players.

Fighters had to find other fighters, know how to work the fighting system (which was ridiculously complex) and then spar with each other, taking care to take breaks if either combatant got too badly hurt. If they did it right, both participants would gain skill quickly. An advanced fighter who really knew how to work the system well could act as a sort of "master" for one or more students, and both the master and student benefitted.

Mages had to find other mages of similar skill levels, set up properly, and then perform certain magic actions at each other with fairly precise control over their environment.

In both cases, you could find NPCs to fight with, and "progression lists" of NPCs to use for advancement were written up and circulated among the players. However, it was never as efficient as having friends to practice with.

There were boring, slow tasks that were sped up significantly through cooperation - particularly cooperation between crafters and mages. However, again, both sides benefited from this equation - the mages could practice their magic by refreshing the fatigue of crafters, and thus the crafters could practice more quickly.

All of this synergy drove cooperation and socialization, but none of it "forced" grouping. You could call it "forced" if you were a crazy achiever sort who only ever wants to follow the most optimized path available. Those people, however, will never be happy anyway.

So, what exactly are we talking about? One player spamming "make chicken fajita" for 3 hours while another one spams "cast stamina spell" the whole time? Man, people praising shit like this makes me think that maybe this whole MUD culture really does deserve to disappear into obscurity. Everytime people start talking about it, this "promoting socialization > providing fun gameplay" attitude comes bubbling to the surface.

Downtime socialization is ass.  Downtown, as many people have said already, is terrible.  No one wants to sit there and do NOTHING.  I want to play the game.  It's sad that devs still think in a video game that contains 99% fighting, looting and winning at something that sitting down and recovering during trivial moments is a good thing.  Stop it.  Fire yourself.

I socialize pretty well all the time on vent with my guildmates and friends.  Or barring that in IM windows with people I'm playing the game with, or in guild channels.  So what if I don't talk to other people in the game on a regular basis.  Hell I don't talk to strangers when I'm out and about in my daily life.

I never got the argument of the "death to the community" argument people bring up about WOW vs. a game like EQ.  There is no community in WOW!  It sucks!  Why, I remember back when I was camping a spawn for 42 hours in EQ I had the greatest memories of..."  Your rosy memories were induces by lack of sleep and to much Mnt Dew. 

Sorry for the rant, I hate this argument.

Not precisely, there were some variables that had to be tweaked sometimes, but it boils down to the equivalent of that. However, did I not note at the beginning of that paragraph that this was a boring task as opposed to some awesome system that everyone should copy?

Don't be more of an obtuse douche than usual.

Funny, my wow server has a great community.   You just have to be young enough to chat on the forums all day or know someone who'll tell you the right chat channels to join.  Alternatly you can do enough PUGs to meet up with folks, drop them on your friends list and run more stuff with them later.

However, it takes a desire to socialize and be a part of a community and the time to dedicate to forming relationships, just like in real life.   The proclivity of older players (which everyone here is.) to quit general chat because of "the damn kids" probably also adds to thoughts that the community sucks.   It doesn't suck you're just 10 years beyond the peer group of the greater community.  You'll have to seek-out folks of your own age group, which will be a problem since most of them ALSO have quit general chat and hate running PUGs.  :awesome_for_real:

No, forced downtime just means your players will find something else to play.  As has been mentioned, I have plenty of other options these days.

Yes, I R retorded to think you considered it a good system. Should I have quoted a different part than the one where you describe some boring tasks and how this system (yay!) sped them up?

The difference, I think, is that you're playing a game whereas a lot of people playing MUDs don't really look at it as playing a game. Instead, they're existing in a world that has some game elements within it. When there's downtime, you're not spending your time making fart jokes or whatever. You're talking about the issues of the day for the most part - "Should the city of Shallam go to war with the alliance of the cities of Ashtan and Mhaldor? Does Shallam have the manpower to resist them?" "Are the forestals really going to put an herb embargo on the Occultists?". Whether this kind of thing sounds painful or fun to you probably depends on how interested you are in roleplaying and participating in the larger plots/schemes/story threads going on around you. It's really a completely different mindset from the "bash monsters to get equipment to bash more monsters" model that WoW devolved to (not that I blame WoW for doing that, as it's clearly fulfilling the desires of a lot of people).

--matt

I thought the way the fighting system encouraged social interaction by making sparring partners the primary method of training - and how properly training required fairly deep player-knowledge of the system - was a good aspect of it. There was no downtime inherent in the system unless one of the players screwed up and injured the other player.

Since it was text based, it was obviously not twitch-intensive. This left some time during the combat free to chat with your sparring partner(s).

Further, for the antisocial, there were NPC sparring partners available, but they were suboptimal compared to a good player opponent. Player cooperation here didn't reduce downtime, it accelerated advancement. Further, if you knew someone was a good opponent for you, you had an incentive to make friends and seek them out again.

(Aside: Twitch-intensive stuff in MUDs tends to encourage the use of macros and triggers instead. Text, while easy to develop for, is also just as easy to parse mechanically. While I can't say it for certain, this may have also contributed to the development of macro-like UI mods early on in WOW. I recall hearing about a mod that automatically parsed a priest's raid to find a heal target, for example.)

The magic system was interesting but flawed, and it ended up being grindy. (Albeit one requiring careful player manipulation of the system.) The crafting system, which is what you seized on, was clearly a grind.  In those two systems, player cooperation reduced tedium and downtime. Should they be tedious and grindy from the outset? Not necessarily, no.

The fact that a MUD is inherently a smaller system than most MMOs probably also contributes to the community and socialization aspects. It's a lot easier to get to know almost everyone when you're dealing with PCUs under 100 and total active userbases under 1000.

But that's only if, during that "downtime" (what i am taking to mean, no combat, or questing going on) there is nothing else to do but chat. I'm going to duck after i say this, but i think that UO and SWG were the best examples of giving people things to do during this "downtime".

I agree with you if there is nothing else to do, but if there is.. its a great thing, chat, socialize, work on something non_combat_related.

I miss the SWG cantinas......

/runs off

I think MUDs will remain a victim of nostalgia.  I think back on my MUD design/development days with great fondness, but wouldn't want to relive them.  I feel exactly the same way about being a participant in the early EQ years.  

I never saw much RP in MUDs that I played, but I never played LP-Muds, MOOs or MUSHs either.  MUDs may be different because everything is imaginary and I think more immersive than a 3d rendered world.  MUDs also didn't require you to have a hand on your mouse and fingers on WASD either so it lent to a more relaxed atmosphere.  Plus everyone macroed everything anyway.

There's definitely kneejerk reactions around words like "downtime" -- I agree we're using the word in different ways.

This thread is "downtime" for many of you. We speak of "forced downtime" but let me reverse it for a second -- what's forced is UPTIME. Players can choose downtime whenever they want. It's the default state -- lounging around doing nothing. Uptime requires action. And you need to nudge people along the curve to get them to take action, because of simple inertia. A body at rest tends to stay at rest. :)

So games have developed incentives to get you to go do stuff. The payback for this is direct jolts of fun. Users are perfectly capable of taking actions on their own and getting fun. But if your objective is to have users get that jolt often, then you force them to have fun. You throw them into situations where they have to take action. You make them get off their lazy butts and make tough choices. You push them constantly, via all sorts of signals, to feel like staying still will make them feel bad, insignificant, inadequate.

The culmination of this, of course, is constant action. But here's the thing... humans get tired. The body itself, the human mind, has natural thresholds. Laziness may be bad, but lack of rest is worse. And in this, I include mental rest. Every arc of human activity has periodicity to it, with ramping attention, peak action, flow, gradual decline, story sharing, evaluation, rest, and then repeat.

Simple empirical test: name an intense game with naturally long sessions. Sure, you see some crazy people who do play intense games for hours and hours on end. They usually need to depend on stimulants to do it. In general, the more sustained high action and attention a game demands, the more exhausting it is, and the shorter the game is. That is because the game itself has architected downtime BY ENDING. A high-intensity game that lasts eight hours would have few players precisely because people wouldn't be able to handle it by and large.

A side effect, of course, of constantly incentivizing action is that those who try to choose to have downtime within the environment will often fail. There will be no "quiet spots," and they will either get sucked in or decamp.

This human cycle is pretty much inevitable. This whole forum is premised on the "ramping attention" phase ("come check out this new KRPG!") phase and the "story sharing, evaluation, rest" stage of activity. It happens on long cycles (the still active SWG forum) and on session-level cycles (your various guilds).

Arguing about whether a game should have downtime in it is arguing whether the game should have those phases within itself, in the environment, or have them elsewhere, in forums and other communities. There are benefits and tradeoffs to each. Either way, socialization DOES require downtime.

Leaving aside design mistakes of the past, those of you who want none in your MMO are basically saying you want it to be a game more like Quake -- a game where the other phases exist outside of the game framework. Those like me who want it in the game want the virtual world to be a setting, a space, a place, and be able to at least be able to choose it. And when we did architected downtime, we were just trying to make sure that the world didn't force out the quiet times.

I'm not in the Quake camp because virtual worlds ARE places, spaces, persistent, and encompass way more than gogogogogo.

The problems come if people are forced into downtime when they're still in the gogogo phase, or they feel they have to stay alert and contributing when they either want to rest, or for the Quake types want to log out.

I certainly want the option of staying in the world for my rest and relaxation, but not everyone does.  It's not perfect, but I think WoW actually does this pretty well until you get to the Raiding part of the game, which is why there is a lot of complaining about it.  Allowing the player to make the determination of when to be active and when to be resting instead of forcing it on them would go a long way towards making a successful game.

Excellent point.  Players want choices and gameplay options.  I think there are a great many players that would take advantage of downtime if they saw some benefit to it.  Giving huge bonuses for in-game downtime and the development of social activities that are also fun pastimes, would go a long way toward the goal. 

Yea, I agree with this completely.  I found that in my time in WoW the community was extremely vibrant.  Sure it was a lot of shit talking kids who allowed the anonymity of the internet to exercise their inner twat weasel.  But after you get over that, it's pretty funny sometimes.  There was a lot of fun to be had, and for the most part, the kids want to win.  So when it comes down to actually playing, they'll do what needs to be done.  But I am ten(ish) years older than the college kids.  So it is annoying sometimes.

But if the alternative is trying to find some poor slob Necro to camp Lord Bergergle with because he has the literally one support spell on his hotbar that I don't to spend hours upon days underwater by our lonesome, then you can't really tell me you're pointing me in the direction of the fun.  That didn't make me want to play more.  It made me get KS'd like three times after which I pretty much said 'gay' and quit.  And then WoW came out which I played nonstop for three years, met WAY more people, and had way more fun.

So yea.  Wow not being the most social game...  I guess I need clarification and I can't be arsed to read what Raph wrote.  But it seems like that's kind of sour grapes.  No offense, man.  But there's 11 million people not being social I guess.  And I'm pretty sure all of them would play a WoW clone skinned with Star Wars.  But you know.  Dancing Wookies get you immediate furfag street cred.  And who doesn't want that, really?

Okay, Raph pretty much clarified while i was posting.  So are dancing Wookies uptime or downtime?   :awesome_for_real:  I kid.

I guess my problem with what you are saying, Raph, is in how to manage the 'story sharing, evaluation, and rest' stage of activity.  The usual proclivity of most WoW players, if I may be so bold as to speak for the teeming horde, is to spend this time on vent.  It's not something that is really coded into the game beyond the fact that there exists the opportunity to experience content in groups, and some content cannot be accomplished without others.  In other words, I don't need you to hold my hand to reach the conclusion that other players help me, and that by socializing with them, I better my chances for success.  I knew that coming it.  And I did all my story sharing, evaluation, and rest on Vent or in the Battlegrounds Mortal Striking people's faces off with my friends.  So you're right it does require downtime.  But it doesn't require a hard coded conductor, unless you count the guys who wrote Ventrillo.

Waiting for that dude who is late every week is enough downtime for me.

If you incentivize downtime too much, you run the risk of people catching on that they're essentially paying you a monthly fee to wait around for stuff. This is relatively OK, when what you're waiting for is other players to make a gameplay decision; example, taking a keep in the Alb frontier and waiting the half hour for the Albs to get their act together and come try to take it back. It becomes a much harder sell, psychologically speaking, when you have to sit around because the game is forcing you to (or incentivizing you to the point where it would be stupid not to sit around), whether or not it gets you some in game advantage.

Incentivizing (is that even a word?) downtime isn't what I would suggest.  Give a lot of things for people to do if they want is wonderful, however if they feel they are losing out by not participating, it's no longer downtime but a necessary activity.

I agree, and I think a better term when talking about this would be 'Pacing'. Everquest, for example, had shitty pacing. Too much downtime build into the system.

Fising, crafting, collecting minipets, achievements, all are examples of activities that do not require laser-beam-focus attention while still playing the game.
And that is why I resist the concept of 'twitchifiying' crafting with sub-games BTW. That's my idea of a low-impact game activity. Whenever someone suggest using Tetris to forge swords, I usually go "Can't I just craft, here? Leave me alone!"

This is why I think UO doesn't have any downtime at all, even though it has plenty of opportunities for rest. In UO, I can relax with friends in a tavern if I want. Or if it's action I'm after, I go to the orc fort or a dungeon or whatnot. In EQ, relaxing happens between pulls, so if I want to relax, I...raid the Plane of Hate? WTF? I HAVE to fight shit first? Or...if I want to fight shit, I have to relax a bunch of times? WAT WAT BIZARROGAMEWHAT?

Edit: Quoted Lant cause I accidentally deleted it. >.<

Give people game play options at all times.  If they want to sit around and have downtime it's their choice.  But there should never be just one choice that is "wait".

And don't use the term "forced uptime".  It's rediculous.

Yep. Makes perfect sense. I don't use Vent. (Most people don't, I suspect?)

The reason why I & many others say that WoW is not very social is because it is HUGELY geared towards "people who all know each other already." Anyone who joins without a guild or group of friends finds it very hard to meet anyone, because everyone is moving all the time -- running from one quest to another, etc.

But the whole "meet strangers" piece has gotten hugely de-emphasized over the years, until now the assumption is the reverse: you come in with friends.

Just trying to make the actual dynamics clear. :)

When people who never played UO ask me what made it so special, one of the examples I always use is this... 

In most recent mmogs, my friends and I would always figure out what to do and where to go before we logged in. Usually on the forums or in e-mail. And of course, there were only a few things to choose from (at level X you can go to locations Y or Z). Once in game, we rarely failed to go to the arranged location and complete the quests/tasks.

But in UO, we always decided what to do and where to go IN the game once we all arrived at a tavern in one of the towns. We could have done the same thing on the forums or e-mail, but we didn't. And sometimes, we'd decide to stay where we were and just hang out. While we were there, we'd run in to at least a half-dozen people who we didn't know and some would stick around and hang out with us. That never happens anymore in my experience as a player.

You'd be very, very wrong.  It's mandatory for most PUGs I've ever been on.  Again, this is an age thing. The 25 and unders I've encountered never have a problem "Vent Hopping" for pugs and chatting away on their guild's vent otherwise.  It's been the married and 30-somethings who won't talk or login to vent other than when "forced to" during a raid.

Hell, Vent is so ubiquitous these days it's joined "We have a tabard" "we have a website" and "we have 2 guild bank slots" in the "yeah big deal, you SHOULD" category of guild advertisements.

No game mechanic will ever turn WoW players into people who played MUDs and MUSHs.  There is a profound, categorical difference in personality between people who were and are willing to interact with a world entirely through text through an interface that was difficult to obtain and install and those who pick up WoW at a Gamestop because all of their friends are playing it.  Just as there is a categorical difference in personality between people who chat through IRC and those who chat through AIM.  At the apex of MUD popularity they still required that people go out of their way to seek the experience that MUDs offered, and therefore selected for people interested in that experience, and therefore the likelihood that any random person I run into on the server is going to be that sort of person and I might enjoy interacting with them.  They were a self-selecting community.  WoW has no selection criterion.  Neither did SWG.  In fact, the more popular a game is (a trait that the developers and publishers very much want) the less successful at selecting certain types of players that game will be.

Attempting to turn WoW players into MUD players with some game mechanic is akin to thinking there's some feature you could add to the vault message boards that would transform them into the f13 forum.  There is no such feature because the population isn't up to it.  And attempting to jam the productive social experience square peg into the Madden-competing MMORPG round hole just causes grief and lost investment for everyone.  If you want the MUD socialization experience back, create an invite-only server.  The mechanics are mostly irrelevant.

You know I'm tempted just to let it go.  But I really think you're wrong here.  I didn't know anyone before I started my WoW guild.  None of the people I recruited knew each other either.  I really think you're on the totally wrong track with this.  In my experience it's EXACTLY the opposite.  I would say that MOST people don't come into WoW knowing people already.  Maybe one or two friends or something like that.  If there's one thing I learned leading a guild it's that the only constant is turnover.  And while most guilds may seem intimidating for outsiders looking in, that's just part of the internet initiation process.  In reality most guilds dream of having a random warm body show up and fill the slot of that asshole who's always late for raids.

After all the increase in the MMO subscriber base in between EQ and WoW came from somewhere.  They weren't all just a bunch of Counterstrike clans that came to pwn noobs.  Of course there were those, and to be honest, the organized guilds at the beginning of WoW did have an advantage.  But it only lasted for so long.

While it's true that WoW doesn't emphasize meeting other people in the process of leveling up, I really think that is more of an advantage.  In WoW, leveling up is meant to be relatively painless, and the true group dynamic doesn't kick in until after the leveling is done.  There are exceptions of course.  But that's pretty much what I think what people are saying.  Most WoW players don't think of leveling up in the same terms as older MMO players did.  You can either group, or not.  But you never really have to wait for a group if it's not your thing.  Thing is, that's exactly WHY I think it's much more easy to meet other people.  Because after a while, I think the solo players realize that there is more fun in finding other people to play with.  But it sounds like you're thinking of the leveling up process in terms of an EQ like time commitment.  A kind of time commitment where it would be sad to never meet anyone.  But it's not the same with WoW.  Leveling up in WoW is about 7-12 days played of learn2play, after which the real social aspects of the game begin.  Or not.  You can always just PvP and enjoy gearing your dude up like you were playing Diablo.


Like I said, In WoW it's just different.  In WoW our 'Tavern' is Vent.  You kill a guy, you hop on his vent and say, "Hi there!"  You want to join a guild, ask if you can join their Vent, and say "Hi fags!"  Want to lead sucessful PUG's?  Buy a Vent server and ask people to get on it.  Pretty soon your vent has regulars, 'cause you're such an awesome guy.  In a year or so, you've got yourself enough dicks swinging to start a guild.  OMG Onyxia died, server first wtf.

And yes, Raph, you gotta have Vent.  It's a free download, dude.  Hell I haven't logged into WoW in over six months, but I still occasionally hop on Vent to say what's up to the guys.

How do you jump around to peoples "Vent"? Last i used it (the other day) you need an IP address, and possibly a user name and password. Unless you are talking about the current trend of built in VOIP (Wow, LOTRO, others...)

Ah, let me back up.

I don't have a guild either. Nor do I want to join one. That's my point.

Edit to address some of what you say above:

All you're saying is that you use vent for the other phases. That's basically exactly like what i said about using forums. You're not using the game, you use something else.

You're part of the problem.

See, Raph, this is the issue.  I do not want to be friends with people who jump into Vent servers and say "Hi fags!" and no game mechanic will encourage me to want this.

Also the whole figuring out what to do in game vs. emails/forums is that communication and information handling is incredibly different from UO to today.

--

If you don't want to join a guild then it you're own fault for not participating in functions that bring people together.  I chat on vent all the time with one or groups of people.  And Schild is right, to many of you are looking at "communities" of MUDs with really rosy glasses.  Most MUD communities held 10's or 100's or 1000's of people.  Compare that to the millions of WOW.  Good anology is small town vs. Big City.  You know a lot of people in your small town but everyone in the Big City is a stranger.

I'm with Raph here. You and your friends are either outliers or you aren't fully aware of the way in which everyone came together. In general a lot of community nucleation happens outside of the game and before logging in for the first time. Especially in this day and age where there are a lot of multi-MMO veterans with existing social networks that transcend individual games. It's by no means universal and there are of course individuals who buy a game without knowing anyone in it, log in and randomly blunder into a guild or two but these people are almost certainly a minority.

In a new game, a community tends to form prior to launch and guilds form before the servers open. Unguilded players who are part of the initial metacommunity very often gravitate towards these proto-guilds and things snowball from there. I would say it's pretty unusual for a player like this to enter the game without some rough affiliation already staked out. After launch, the biggest marketing asset for a provider is word of mouth and people generally want to hook up with the guy they know who turned them onto the game in the first place.

Churn is universal as you say but not every player who is new to your guild is necessarily fresh off the boat.

Yes and no. We had forums, ICQ, and e-mail in 1997-2000. In fact, we all still use the exact same e-mail list from UO right now. And yet, we didn't use them to plan ahead of time. We could have just as easily as we do now, but we didn't.

But that wasn't really the crux of my point. In UO, there was no pressure to "level up", no pressure to "go here and do this", because it didn't really matter. I could game with my friends and with strangers without being the same level. So hanging out, staying in the same place and just chatting with people, never felt like a "waste". In newer mmogs, it does to a lot of people.

As an example...

I played DAoC with largely the same people I played UO with. People who together we spent days doing nothing but chatting in the taverns in UO, talking to people as they stopped by, and doing things that had no bearing on character advancement. Basically hanging out. In DAoC, after a little bit of hanging out, inevitably someone would make the comment in chat "how is this helping me level?". It was said sort of jokingly, but funny enough, within a few minutes of someone saying it, we were on our horses riding to the spot the game told us was best to fight in order to level. Same people, different game. The mechanics of the game changed what was important to us, and hence, it changed our play-style.

Keep in mind, I'm not saying WoW isn't a social game. I'm just saying it's different, and imo it's different because of the game design.

Oh.  I don't know if you need to like guilds to understand the point.  We're really just talking about communication here.  Speech makes excessively forced player interaction redundant.



Yea, you have to ask people.  It's this whole social thing that Raph is advocating even though he doesn't like guilds inexplicably.


Oh come off it guy.  I didn't mean it literally.  I meant it to illustrate that the social nature of online multiplayer has left the tavern and gone on to vent.  You should always be respectful of other people's Vent servers, and make sure you have permission to be on them.  Happy?


I think it's just a matter of degrees.  You think the majority of nucleation happens outside the game.  The fact that that's possible is part of the point that I'm trying to make, so I'm not disagreeing.  But the closer a guild gets to raid time minus that one or two dudes they need to go, the lower that barrier to entry gets.  And it doesn't take a genius to figure out how to be in the right place at the right time.  Most people think they can go to some guild's website drop an app and hope to hear from an officer.  But I always required people to have a voice on my vent before I'd let them in.  I would say that roughly 75% of the recruits we added over my guild's lifespan came from guys who got our Vent by getting to know us in PvP groups, and were in there when we needed a guy.  I hardly think we are outliers in this phenomenon.

I mean if we're talking about engineering retention incentives for the 7 guys on Earth who don't know somebody who's playing WoW, I guess I'm willing to concede the point.

Your superior nostalgia is dripping all over the floor.

That's cute, but to be nostalgia I'd have to be arguing that it was superior. That's a matter of opinion. What isn't, is that the games were played differently and that there we very good and very real reasons for those differences.

Let me get this straight. I'm saying "I want to casually meet folks, chat a bit, maybe play some, and not feel pressured or commitment to show up X days a week or whatever."

You are saying "You can do that! You just need to install separate software, ask permission to join a social group in advance of knowing the people in it so you can get the password and IP and other required info, then join the formal group that adds tribal identification to your name and profile. Not all of these formal groups have time requirements! It's as social as ever!"

We are talking past each other. :)

I don't know what these boogers are saying, but I think that socalization happens, and the first step is to make a fun and entertaining space to play in. The socalization is a side effect. (Chatting in guild chat, hopping on vent and shooting the shit, etc...)

Artifical attempts to force people to interact are usually detected as such, and thus resented as being forced upon a person. Naturally occuring social interactions that come about because of gameplay are much better.
Hairdressing = good*. Healing mind wounds = bad.

*In that no one is forced to cut hair or seek it out.

Ug.  That's fair enough, man.  But it sounds like you'd rather be playing an online RPG.  Maybe Diablo 3 is the real heir to your MUD throne.

Welcome to the forum.

I have often analogized to a village green, the gazebo in the small town's park, that sort of thing. If you are regular there you do get to know people, and end up joining a guild or whatever over time.

I am not at all antiguild. I used to be a guild leader, back in the day. :) I just enjoy more of an ambience.

By contrast, when I played WoW, i went six hours without anyone even saying hello. And nobody I said hello to stopped running to talk. Everyone had somewhere to go.

I agree with the city vs small town analogy, it has a lot of that feel to it.

Who are you talking to now?

I think there may be some demographic shift going on here as well, as noted above. (Warning, generalizations impending.) The younger set these days has no problem with being social butterflies on the internet, jumping around social groups and such. It's natural for them, because they've never known differently.

I think that as you move up the age brackets, you find people drifting closer and closer to external social groups and drawing away from internal social groups. (Partially, also as noted above, due to culture shock when faced with today's 4chan kids.) Most of the folks I know never touch MMOs on their own, it's always a group of friends from university or work or the local poker circle joining a game en-masse, playing for a few months and quitting. I'm more or less the same way these days.

Time likely also factors in here. In an advancement-based game, as Cal noted, you're pressured to move up the ladder. If you have preexisting social networks to rely on, and you're pressed for time, you're more likely to draw on those existing social networks instead of seeking out new people so as not to "waste time" sifting through the crowds for the people you actually get along with. If you've got time to spare, or have broken free of the Need to Grind, then you can waste that extra time putzing around and meeting folks.

Combine the fact that the older set tend to have less free time with the above, and you have a powerful disincentive to mix with the server's body politic.

I agree with all of this. I also think that games could do a better job of encouraging socialization in all of the age and play style brackets.

I think the issue for me though isn't about adding features to force socialization (as Ratman correctly pointed out - this is bad) but removing the obstacles or changing designs that currently limit or impair socialization. A lot of them do just that, without meaning to.

Okay so like Kant didn't realize that there were different kinds of lies, I'm not realizing there's different kinds of people who like to socialize differently. 

That's cool.  But you can't say that big city socializing isn't real, either.  You're just not used to it.  All I can say, as I've said, is that it's not as bad as it seems from the outside.  And I AM an old guy who had to overcome his preconception before he could get along with younger people than me, as I'm reading Yoru point out as I type this.

It might also be a demographic thing too.  Because the demographic for MUDs was so much smaller, it was probably much more likely for Raph to log in and find someone who shared a common play style with him in his six hours.

I don't talk to folks athe village green, the town gazebo or anything else, either.  I've got shit to do and if I'm there, i'm meeting folks or I'm with my family.  If I want to meet people I'll go to parties or join a club. If folks say "hi" to me, I'll say "hi" or "how's it going" back and continue on my way.  Hell this even happens at work, too.  In the break room while waiting on the microwave - the epitome of downtime in reality - there aren't spontaneous conversations breaking out unless there's 2 people from the same work social circle there.  People don't talk or socialize in that fashion anymore.

You're coming at things from a completely different social process than exists on the 'net or in reality today.  You're thinking small-town 1950, this is big-city 2009. If you're not there to help me you're irrelevant.  Unless fate throws people together and ONE of them makes the effort - and there's a lot of effort required - they don't socialize.  

I'd argue small town 1950 never fucking existed to begin with, but whatever. Damn old people!  :oh_i_see:

The problem with stopping to socialize in online gaming and heck, in general. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h3RsJBhhswI)

The funny thing about human behaviour is that the more of us that are around, the less we want to talk to each other. Put 3 people (MUDS) in a room and they'll probably start to chat. Put 25 (MMOs) in a room and they'll generally stand around being awkward.

Also, I feel fine about games encouraging socialisation, but a large ignore list requirement is also a prerequisite. Also, sandbox vs. game changes the social dynamics.

Good game design assumes players don't want fuck to do with each 90% of the time. Once you start from there THEN you can design for socialization. Good luck with that though  :awesome_for_real:

Um, that is what the game IS. :)

Maybe that's the gap. I play these games for the other people. You (generic you) play these games for the game? What a weird concept. The games all suck. ;)

Seriously though. There's plenty of single player games that are far more engaging AS GAMES. Without that social element, it's not worth my time, and NEVER has been, including on the muds.

I also do not think I am alone, or else "not having a friend" or "not having met someone in the first five minutes" would not be the #1 determinant of subscriber loss in MMOs.


What a sad world...


I disbelieve. Kind of a blanket statement? And i see it disproven in ordinary life every freakin' day. Leaving aside the fact that it's outright not healthy... my mind boggles.


Yeah, bowling alone, etc etc. Again, unhealthy, lonely, depressing. In fact, all those things you say are the norm are WHY we have chat on the Internet. You can't find it in RL so you come to this forum instead. :)

^^  Yeah, but some places are more anonymous for talk, and it also depends on the person.

At work some of my coworkers expressed surprise when I said something one day since I usually spend break times with my nose stuck in a portable game.  The few people I actively talk to are ones I happened to find having similar interests.  Which is a VERY small number since I am a nerd and could give a damn about popping out children or sports, or gambling.  (In fact, fuck sports.  Its the SWG of the TV world.  45 minutes or so of action spread to 4 fucking hours.  YAY.  And gambling is utterly retarded to begin with IMHO.)

Plus when one grows up being told by everyone one is shite, one learns to not be the most outgoing person on the planet.  Not everyone is a WILLLD AND CARAAZZY GUY!! 

Some of us are just naturally quiet and that's how we do things, especially when we are uncomfortable in new situations.  Or we just think surrounding people are dicks.  Or we are there hanging out with our existing social circle. 

Not everyone wants to make new friends.  These people are kind of douchey, but its their choice really.  Maybe they had situations like mine growing up, or other bad experiences that make HAAAY YOU GUYYYYS!! not their idea of fun.

Games can't force people to hang out.  And the ones that try (like SWG and FF11) don't usually do very well in the long run.  (At least the FF11 dev team admits they fucked up.)

You can never force folks to socialize.  Give them compelling things to do and it will happen naturally like it did the first time I LARPed.  The first 20-30 minutes I was ready to bolt for the door as we were left to our devices to introduce ourselves in character.  Which was kinda stupid.  Some folks did go up and talk and all, but it felt silly, and my 2 friends that asked me to give it a shot were even having looks like "Why are we here?" and I was wondering exactly why I dropped out of the 40K tourney for.

Then the storyteller came in and got a plot moving.  It then began kicking ass as we DID STUFF.  Socialization HAPPENED.  Because we wanted it to and thus it did.  We had a cool purpose and decided to work as a team and do rad shit.

We could have ignored the plot and continued sitting in corners.  We could have done things as individuals as one chick mostly did (and everyone mostly rolled their eyes at her), but we decided independently to do our adventure-y things together.

That's how you get people to socialize.  You let THEM choose to do it.  People do not like to be forced to do things, especially leisure activities.  Put some cool toys in the sandbox and some folks will start playing and others will then break out of their shells and join the spearhead of players, and then more will.

Yelling at the kids to PLAY WITH THESE TOYS LIKE THIS NOW does not work.  Because nobody will want to play with the trucks and cars then.

And that's where SWG failed.  All your ideas to make people hang out and talk were boring, unfun, stupid, forced activities and most people could tell they were.  You forced us to hang out and we all resented it. 
When there were finally some cool toys to play with, they were all designed for multiple people and made folks bitter they couldn't play ON THEIR TERMS.

WoW has a good 80% of its content soloable.  We can play it alone if we like, or with friends if we want to, and the cool 20% bit nudges us to make friends in or out of game to play in it, you know, if you really want to.  But its optional. 

And the cool down BS you mentioned is done by having lots of things to do.  Travel, do quests, craft stuff, go shopping where a good variety of things don't require other players, or an economy designed for the top tier catasses and nobody else.

This is what City of Heroes fails to do because there is really only one thing to do for 50 levels.  Beat up stuff for the most part.  They added in other things to do a little late in the game, but even such a 1 track mind game shows it understands what folks might want.

Raph you do seem like a nice guy, but you don't seem to understand people are complicated, and few fit whatever ideals you have.  Your ideas sound good on paper, but whenever put into practice (UO and SWG) they fall on their faces horribly.

At its simplest, 10% of the audience should not be able to dictate what the other 90% does.  Your designs both ended up falling into this trap.  Which lead to GTA Brittania and a rich Republican's wet dream in SWG.  (And basically proved Ron Paul to be full of shit too, but that's going more political really..)

It doesn't work like that, even in your own LARP story.

A codebase doesn't make for roleplaying for the most part. The service provided along with it does. RP flows from the top in some sense. If the admins aren't setting the example, it's probably not going to work.

--matt

QFT.

--matt

Really?  Just because you want to game alone doesn't always mean you want to game alone by yourself.  I think that's the point ye old rednamers are missing-you can still want people around you without wanting to socialize with them. 

It's like going to the park, or the hockey game.

My fave analogy is softball. But in any case, yeah. Just because I'm online doesn't mean I want to meet and get to know every single person on my WoW server. Hell, listening to barrens chat, I don't think I want to meet very many of them, much less play the game with them.
But it's cool to know that the community, warts and all, is out there. Without that game aspect, I wouldn't have found my current guild.

At this point it seems like you guys are just opining for the good ol' days.  And that's cool.  It's a somewhat fagged up MUD thread.  Opine away.  I used to opine for EQ all the time when I first started playing WoW.  But like... then I got over myself and had fun anyway.  I don't really miss EQ anymore.  Just sayin'.

As communities have gotten bigger, just the very fact that you are playing the same game, especially a huge game like WoW is no longer the only context you need to invade another players personal space.  The point of importance in the village green vs city analogy is that the residents of the small town feel ownership of the green and thus feel they have the authority and context to engage newcomers.  Just like the host of the party, or boss or whatever other authority figure is normally the ice breaker for people and introduces them to others, so too in games you need those figures.

All but the most dedicated soloers want some forms of human interaction within the game, they just don't want inapproriate interaction.  The guy running around saying hi to everyone expecting people to contribute conversation to their unsolicited introduction are showing a lack of social skills, not the opposite.

WAR had all the tools in the world to get players together, Public Quests, Open Parties, large RVR potential.  It was socially among the most barren online game I have played for a long time.  I think many people resent developer 'tricks' to get people together, especially with forced pve combat grouping.  You put in the effort you need to get the people around you that you need to complete your goal and then you are done with them.  All down-time like waiting for a PQ to reset was, a chance to turn in some quests or a quick afk for a drink, not a chance to ask what people think of their local sports team.

I would like that games offer more icebreaker opportunites and add more out of combat experiences to facilitate more socialisation, but I don't play these games with the hopes that I will instantly and easily find new friends all the time.

Just to throw this out there: in CoH/V, the old version of the Hamidon raid that let more than 100 heroes into the zone (iirc) was seen as a great social environment, with players chatting between rounds of knocking the Hamidon down. With the strategies being used, that many heroes were redundant, but it meant a lot could perform small tasks within the scope of the fight and still have time to chat (or just chat and leech off the rest of the team's hard work.

The revamped Hami raid limits the number of heroes to 50 and makes players work a lot harder to get the job done, thus eliminating the social element. There are players who resent the change in the removal of this social element in making something more challenging. But again, there are others who hated the leeching social element too.

All the information you need for successful design is in the thread. MMO players are far from a homogeneous  group. Some play for the white knuckle challange, the 'game', but many do not. Some play to be entertained by game type distractions in social environment, much like playing a portable video game at the mall, but many do not. Some play for an active social environment to chat and make friends, like going to a party, but many do not.

So rule number must be; Design for your audience, and they are not likely to be like you.

Isn't F13 one big downtime for all of us, where it doesn't help us level (well, except for those in the game design section, learning C) and we sit around (yes f13 has sitting!!) and socialize?  :why_so_serious:

<rant>

That observation is not only old, it's in the Laws of Online World Design, and I put it there because all the Diku-based muds were forcing only one playstyle. :P

But honestly, it's much older than that, of course. Those of you arguing with us about this are not saying anything new, but you're also not saying anything subtle. For example, you say "give everyone choice!" AND say "the world's not like that anymore"; you say "different people like to play different ways" and "you're doing it wrong."

The fact is that by and large players play the way the design tells them to. To the point where you can write a bot that acts like the average player get pretty much the same overall patterns. We don't get to ignore shaping socialization, as designers. If we put a building in the wrong spot, the whole freakin' zone doesn't work, and you just say "it sux," but you'll also say in the same breath "designers shouldn't force socialization." Well guess what, we build the world, we build the rules, we are either forcing it or inhibiting it, and we don't get to ignore the question. When it works, you don't notice. When we don't pay attention, random shit happens and players complain. WoW is architected to make you keep running around. They did it on purpose, and you are doing it because they tell you to.

The reason this thread started is because I said "we and you will enjoy this hobby better if we save some of the history so we can look at mistakes made and good ideas that panned out but that never got to an audience." In response, we get, uh,... I am not even sure. "who cares? it's all irrelevant." (Except when you throw specific mistakes back as arguments to make a point). Well, you get the games you deserve, is the answer.

Musashi, every answer you have given has boiled down to "it works the way it is." I am telling you, it does not work for me. That isn't "designing for me." It's generalizable. Otherwise, EVE wouldn't have users at all and everyone would be in WoW.

Nyght, "Do everything" is not a viable answer. Musashi's way precludes mine, for example.

Triforcer, *everyone* gets "ambient noise is neat." We're not stupid. It just doesn't answer the above two points.

</rant>

Not that you hardcore freaks matter anyway. Everyone knows the future is in simpler games that won't appeal to you. That's what most people want. ;)

Rose-colored, indeed.

Your sarcasm aside, you're right, it is.  I don't have a problem with that, either.  The more people a game engages, the more fun I have.  I'm a people watcher, which is why I play MMOs in the first place.  I have a distrust and dislike of small communities as they're insular, predictable and fall into patterns way too easily.

Yes, I see the irony posting that here.

Your comment about the games being "too easy" or "sucking" compared to single player games is amusing, however.  A HUGE percentage of players cheat single player games or use cheat books, and would willingly cheat in MMOs if there were codes.  Hell, it might almost be the majority of people at this point.  Folks are looking for fun, not a challenge. We're in the mass market days, not geeks-who-think days of 198*.  Deciding that things have to be hard, complicated or obscured is focusing on a specific mindset and userbase.  Fine if you want a niche, but you have to accept that it IS a niche, first.

I could only get to Page 3.  Sorry.  I'm just going to make some comments without quoting shit from two pages back.

Most people use Vent these days.  On every multiplayer game.  Could be a lot of people using voice in UNO on XboxLive, I don't know but I would not be surprised.  I don't, as a rule, and the executive summary is because I'm 36 years old.  Underlying bits consist of "I can't yell at people while my wife/son are sleeping" and "PTT disrupts my buttonmashing, yo" and "fucking 360 mic is shitty" but YMMV.  Effect is, if I may, that socialization can occur more frequently during traditionally non-social activity such as raiding, although in a different form.  I personally don't think you need to force socialization, but new players should be informed how to get it.

I have thought for some time now that a "good" MOG community would arise if you restrict a world population to under 150 players.  Monkeysphere.  Believe it.  The anecdotes of just saying "hi" at most, and usually only when the other guy says it first, is due to the fact that these people are at best on the fringe of someone's monkeysphere.  Hell, I don't even nod at the Indians in the hallway because their expressions are a mystery and they don't act social in the first place.  People I work with, I chat with them at various times... downtime, I guess... but I sure as hell don't know everyone in the IT dept because there are a hell of a lot more than 150 of them.

Of course, there's a lot to be said about people-watching.  I am a huge people-watcher in real life.  MOG avatars, however, are generally not interesting to watch.


Welcome to F13.

I wrote some more garbage but it was stupid and I deleted it.  On to page 5!

This is something a lot of people miss when they say "If you want to solo, play a single-player game." Playing online doesn't mean you should always be forced to do things you hate, with people you hate, all the time, for HOURS AND HOURS. Being a part of an online community, even if I'm minimalistically interacting with it, is worth $15 a month to me. I play EQ two or three months a year and do just that. I'm paying to watch other people chat while I do my own thing. I suspect it has something to do with the human desire to belong. Nowadays, we don't have to work our way into social circles. We can just pay 50 cents a day and belong to an 11-million member exclusive online club.

Honestly I think this thread is much more interesting now. ^_^ It's the same old shit, but it bears repeating!

Yea we get the games we deserve, and eleven million of us loved every minute of it.  It's YOU who came into the game with preconceptions and got sandy vag when he couldn't find a buddy in the fucking Barrens.  THAT's why it's not fun for you?  Really? 

And my way precludes yours?  What the fuck?  Are you serious?  The whole point here is that it wouldn't preclude your way if your way wasn't obscured with nostalgic MUD flavored bullshit.  Look, nobody's saying that MUD history doesn't matter.  But be fair.  We have seen adherence to MUD dogma ruin one or two games.  You seem to be here in this thread trying to figure out why that is.   I'm just trying to help.

I understand that you don't get to overlook engineering socialization.  And I'm fine with that.  But just don't overdo it.  That's pretty much it.  Interesting that you used EVE as an example, because I'm pretty sure Ventrillo plays a huge part in social aspects of that game too.

And finally, I read your shit all the time, dude.  I think you're a really smart guy, and I appreciate your insight on a lot of game stuff.  But you're just not looking for the social gaming villiages in the right places.  They just moved is all.

And the fact that many more millions of us are doing it, by far, than any predecessor game, should give us an important lesson about how much players, in general, want or care about downtime socialization I think. The games may force us one way or the other, but people are overwhelmingly voting with their wallets to go in THAT direction, and not in the other.

Any capital in WoW has many MANY people just hanging out.  WoW runs you around when you want to run around and gives you enough trinkets to "hang out" when you wish to do that as well. 

WoW is successful because there always appears to be something to do when you wish to do it.  The downtime aspect is a choice rather than an imposition. That's the lesson.  Today's gamer wants instant gratification.  Delayed gratification (such as was commonplace in EQ etc) is achieved in a more immediate, stepwise fashion.  Each small step is given more emphasis than anything in the past. 

It's not just today's gamer, it's modern American socieity. Oddly this is something I came to think on when I got a call from a research group yesterday.  They were asking questions about implementing casino slots and video lottery at horse tracks in Kentucky.  They want to do this because the Kentucky horse racing industry is feeling a lot of pressure from Indiana and West Virginia casinoes.  The experiences are completly different, but the casinos are getting a lot more revenue than horse tracks these days.  I started to wonder about why that is, and decided it's because of the nature of the two industries and American culture today.

Casinos: you go to at any time and have the same experience.  You know what the video machines will do, and they're always there.  You always know what you're going to get when you show up.  It's a near brainless ritual with the only variance being the payout or lack thereof.  You can almost go to the point of calling it predictable.

Horse racing:  Only happens at your local track for a 2-5 week window 2-3 times a year.  You're limited in your ability to take part. The experience is much deeper.  It's more interactive, involves more factors (is it raining/ cold, how's that horse look. Are the on the dope that day. Who's riding them?) It's also more visceral since you can see the horses. (Unless you're willing to bet on remote tracks, but that's an even more different experience. ) As such it's never the same, but it's also DELAYED.  It doesn't happen right now, when you want it, and it involves a deeper level of knowledge and intuition.  There's uncertainty and variables galore.. which scares people off. 

Ugh. I play on an RP server, and talking about stopping to socalize just reminds me of the (thankfully few) times I'd run across some players in town, usually dudes with female characters, Arr Peeing about how her frosty skin is the curse of her mad uncle and how she's the lost princess of FarFarAway.

For every intersting conversation to be had, theres 99 people out there masturbating in public over their mental issues. And that stuff just creeps me right the fuck out.

I guess my observation there is that I'm glad there's plenty to do. Like softball or book clubs (even in real life our socaliztiion usually has a context) it gives us a reason to be there, and a shared experience to relate to.

See, this is interesting, And yes, it is probably because I am simply not in the audience anymore.

WoW did NOT offer me instant gratification when i started. Not even close. It ran me around slaying wolves and kobolds for two hours. I wanted to craft or "use trinkets." I wasn't allowed to. I wanted to explore. I wasn't allowed to (the game actively killed me when I tried). In fact, I also never made it to a capital, because running slaying wolves and kobolds was a prerequisite. Saying that I can get into the social scene after however many days of levelling is not instant gratification to me.

The fact that 11m people had fun doing doesn't mean anything in terms of my personal play experience. Those people needed to run around and kill stuff for two hours, and perhaps that was even the reason they were there in the first place. Now, i am a bitter, jaded, oldschool player bored to tears with killing wolves. Would I have stuck more if I had happened to go in with friends? Almost certainly. But I didn't. And in fact, I generally don't. And I get outlevelled anyway, so...

I have had to play WoW many times -- I play it some every year. But no, I don't play it for fun, for these reasons. I can appreciate it, I think it is brilliantly designed. But it isn't for me *as a player*. It did not have a way for me as a newbie to walk in, meet someone, chat a bit, go kill when i wanted to, explore a wondrous fantasy world, choose to run some risks... it was simply not designed to do that.

I am not attacking WoW for being this way. More power to 'em. I also do not believe it is the ne plus ultra template for all MMO design from now until the heat death of the universe. If it were, then there wouldn't be so many (possibly more?) US players hanging out over in Gaia or Habbo than in WoW. Gaia and Habbo offer completely different experiences equally not for me. But jeez, if i comment "Gaia lacks sufficient directed game mechanics" I don't think you guys jump all over me. :)


Heh. And in a nutshell... you're just saying "you can't have the games you like, fuck off. The kind of games you like are invalid!" Come on... you know better than that.

FWIW, there were plenty of muds which had the same gogogogo quality that WoW does. Far less slick, but totally addicting, never pausing to chat sort of vibe. I didn't like them either.

Here's the closest analogy I can give you. If WoW is techno music going at 200bpm, and you tell me "hey, you can always a) get a private booth where the music is muffled" or "hey, you can always leave the club... we're all here to dance." There's lots of other kinds of clubs, and other kinds of music, and kinds of people. Nobody would make the claim all music and all clubs have changed, it's just the way the world is now.

Gaia and Habbo (AFAIK) aren't as much games as places to hang out and include some gamey aspects. We don't expect them to have directed game mechanics much like we expect directed game mechanics from games like WoW.

Which you already know. I think there's a lot of talking past each other going on here. I also think there's not a small amount of designing past gamers expectations in this thread.  :oh_i_see:

I can think of no reason to use any city as a social hub, except the Trade channel which is only accessible from the capitols. All other attempts to do anything besides questing, raiding, or PvP are cockblocked.

Oi! Didn't you get the memo? White is the new green.

OMG DUDE I'M SO NOT SAYING YOUR PLAY STYLE IS INVALID.  Oy.  I give up.

Here.  If it will make you happy, I'd admit it probably wouldn't bother me if WoW encouraged a little more grouping earlier in the game, so long as it wasn't foisted on people.  But the fact is that earlier in the game's evolution they actually didn't include any sort of LFG system, and were reluctant to include it for that very reason.  They wanted the zone in for dungeons to be little hubs for people to congregate around.  Then when facing outcry for a more robust way to find people who were LFG without the annoyance of actually having to speak to someone, they did what they thought was a compromise.  They enabled a decent LFG UI that would only pop up at a Meeting Stone right outside of the instance.  But nobody used them pretty much ever.  Why?  #1 We're all in vent trying to get our groups.  #2 Nobody wanted to risk running all the way out to an instance to bring up a silly UI only to find out that nobody else was using it.  So they finally enabled the UI for use anywhere in the world and made the stones summon people in your group right to the front of the instance, and even then people only sort of use it.  They mostly just use it for the summoning.  It also made starting raids on time WAY less retarded.

Invalid, no. Increasingly niche and unlikely to give a ROI on the massive amount of cash it would take to really do it right on a large scale? That is getting more plausible.

Raph, I think you're arguing past people. As I see it, you're talking about games you like to play, other people are trying to engage you as a designer on what games you think others would like to play. As you already stated you don't design games for yourself, your personal preference isn't really relevant beyond some autobiographical context.

Nobody wants to be told they need to stop doing whatever it is they're doing because it's time to socialize. That's it. Add all the social tools you want, but as soon as the game says "Even though you would rather keep fighting, you have mind wounds and must go to the cantina!" you're fucked and doomed to watch people bot your social punishment bits so they can get back to what they were doing faster.

That's it, and it's the one thing you sometimes don't seem to see, Raph. Just let them do what they want. Don't make them play the PK evasion game when they would rather mine, don't make them sit in a cantina and watch dancers when they would rather shoot ewoks, just put a bunch of activities in and let them do whatever one they want.

If you want more people in the tavern, don't fag up combat to get them in there. Just pile more minigames and fluff into the tavern. People like minigames and fluff.

I just want to nitpick. That is simply false. Any level 1 character can easily make it to their respective capital, right out of the box. The only prerequisite would be the ability to walk down a road and read the signs.

The other nitpick, would be it takes roughly 15 minutes as a total newbie to level to a point where the wolves and kobolds are irrelevant. Not days.


/nitpick

Yeah, god knows there are enough level 1 bank alts in every capital. And it might take an hour or so to do the newbie area if you're not some veteran zipping through on autopilot, but then what's the difference? The game is about PVE, and that's the starting point of the content ladder.

Keep in mind my first session was during beta. I spent a good couple of hours in the newbie zone. Not 15 minutes. Started as a human. I haven't gone through that since, no idea what it is like now. The base quest chain was kill 5, kill 10, kill 15, kill 5, kill 10, kill 15, then go to the vineyard or whatever, kill 5, kill 10, kill 15. It took a lot longer than 15 minutes, especially if you're like me and walked up to every NPC, explored every nook and cranny, trying to find anything to do that wasn't kill 5, kill 10, kill 15. :)

The NPC at the edge of the newbie zone told me not to leave until I had done the full quest chain. I left anyway. I found a house which said it could teach crafting. It wouldn't because I wasn't of high enough level. Then i went down the road and found a small town. Nobody would stop to talk. So i kept going down the road, stepped off the road and was instakilled by something in the bushes. Twice.

That was my first WoW session. It wasn't a bad game. It just wasn't for my playstyle.

Since this is so damn far off topic, let me try to just reiterate my point once.

If you design the game so that people are encouraged to stay on quest chains, quickly move from place to place, and have no breather time in the game proper, then people will simply move the breather time outside of the game. That's what you guys are doing with Vent, with forums, etc. That was really my sole point there.

This can be seen as giving people choice, certainly. It can also be seen as removing choice. YMMV. If you're someone who doesn't know the forums, the Vent, whatever, then you just can't see it. You can't find it easily. You have to be more plugged in in the first place.

Me personally, it doesn't suit my playstyle. That has little to do with the broader design discussion.

I also believe it does not suit the playstyle of more casual people who don't have friends in place in advance, or who have lack of interest in digging in to find out more about how to get to talk to people. But i think that those people are increasingly just doing other stuff altogether on the web that is getting more gamelike, rather than coming into the gamey games.

This has nothing to do with how aggressively a designer forces downtime, or whatever. Even the most go-go-go of these games has way way more downtime during play than say, Quake. I am not posting here advocating forcing everyone to stop and rest for half an hour every hour. :P So bringing up cantinas is kind of beside the point, in terms of what I am talking about.

So those people idling and chatting in the Dalaran right now are a figment of my imagination?


I honestly and sincerely do not understand the point you are trying to make.

I think it is that people there are socialising in spite of the game mechanics, not because the game assists them to do so (outside of providing basic communication tools). Raph can correct me if I'm wrong.

History never repeats! I tell myself, before I go to sleep! (http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=tzuJXqgsiSM)

Here's the issue: which MUD specifically solved which problem? If you want to make MUD history usable, it needs to show the progression of how certain problems / issues were overcome, or what crippled which title. Or the various tactics MUDS used to overcome the same problem. However, that takes a lot of care and given how fragmented MUDS can be / were, there probably isn't an easy answer.

Things like the Mr Bungle rape or the Karyn affair / Story About A Tree are important to MMOs because they offer lessons about how players can behave. The actual MUDS they occurred in are a bit less relevant other than the various capacities those environments let players do what they did.

If there is anything to be learned from this thread, its that people generally get exactly what they are expecting.  Raph mentioned earlier that he logged into WoW the first time and spent his time killing kobolds and wolves with no clear idea how to socialize, or to do anything other than kill kobolds or wolves.  I can understand this, and yet I'm wondering how MuD's were any different?  How many MuD's start with you logging into a room devoid of any life save for a sign that says "read this" and being expected to figure things out from there?  The answer to "what next," was always "ask someone," and that was as good advice in a MuD as it is in WoW.  

I no longer play WoW, it has been a long time, but I still laugh in other games when asshats scorn the "community" of WoW and say how filled with 12 year olds it is.  This is both a myth and a lie.  Throughout my time in WoW I met plenty of people like myself, and plenty of people like Raph, and ya,  even a couple 12 year olds.  If anything, there were far more women as well, which I think adds a hell of alot more to the community than any other game can boast.  But then, maybe its just me.  I have what I would consider to be life long friends from Everquest as well, and Ultima Online before that.  Being socially adept is as much a skill in online gaming as it is in normal life, and people who can barely be expected to hold a conversation with coworkers around the watercooler should hardly expect to be able to do it over general chat.

So as for my answer to the many questions posed in this thread.  There is a lot to learn from MuD's, and if nothing else, history for history's sake is treasure in and of itself.  Enforced downtime is a no, but I find it equally annoying finding myself in the middle of a game that has no pause points where I can take a breather and piss.  The minute you realize something is "downtime," you are already bored, and that is the key.  

I feel like you're trying to help someone build a better Facebook by cataloging everyone's fond memories of .plan files.

MUDs, as a platform, provided cheap and simple ways to design and create content. All but a very few were free to play. All but a very few had an active userbase in the low dozens. They explored and exploited a myriad of uniqqe niches and satisfied a myriad of unique players because any slob with a server and a little background in coding could throw one together in a month of weekends. Experimentation was cheap and easy. Nothing to lose but pride.

Barrier to entry for players was also very low. If you build it, and you don't charge them to play it, they will come. There were all sorts of big lists available, and it was easy to place ads and recommendations on Usenet to refine their search. Pop in, see if the quality of writing or the feature list excited you... drop by again later and see what's changed. No pressure. Nothing to lose but time.

It might be possible to sift through and find a few valuable nuggets, but I have a feeling they've been analyzed to death already. The moment is gone... people want realtime 3D worlds, they expect the game to provide them with fun for their money, and those expectations require Massively Multiplayer subscriptions to fund their years of development time. Much of what MUDs could teach us no longer applies.

No, that's correct. The game mechanics really do encourage you to hop on quest chains quickly, jump into activities quickly, etc. Not waiting in line is awesome, and always having somewhere to go and somewhere to do makes the game feel way less aimless. But it also means you kind of have to force yourself to stop.

A good example of how this cuts both ways would be stuff like the way they have organized levels across zones. A lot of them are on gradients -- one end of the zone will be at the low end, the far end will be at the high end, and it naturally leads you to the next zone. More, they carefully have a quest at the low end that leads you gradually up the chain, and a quest at the high end that sends you to the next zone. It's a brilliant and subtle way to manage your progress and railroad you on your way. But it also means that people always move through, and that has tradeoffs. If you are on a quest chain that is leading you in a particular direction, going backwards to a social hub is time-consuming and annoying, and you don't want to even if you want a break. So you hang out wherever you are, or on your chat channel/vent.

It's not that this is bad -- again, it's tradeoffs.

Another way to think of it is that at any given moment in WoW, you have a menu of choices. "Stop and smell the roses" is not on the menu. You can choose to do it, but gosh, there's that convenient menu right there... so you keep going until you are tired. It's great for fixing those who are directionless, certainly, but it also has the side effect that there are fewer folks smelling the roses than there would be otherwise.

Is stop and smell the roses ever on the menu? The very nature of stopping to smell the roses removes it self FROM any kind of menu or directed experience.

How do you direct Rose Smelling, when the very process of Rose Smelling is based around being undirected?


I just don't get what you want?

That's why I say allow players to be active when they want, allow them downtime when they want.

A friendlier waypoint system would help with that specific instance, such as a town portal system similar to Diablo 2.  Let me mark my current spot as well as a social hub or two and port between them as I please.  I understand the desire to make worlds feel large, and I'm okay with some restrictions there, but this habit of games limiting you to one and only one bind point gets old fast.

Isn't crafting and fishing a type of downtime?  The way crafting was implemented in WoW, you just hit a button and wait.  The same can be said of flying on gryphon paths.  The difference with WoW is that your downtime isn't spent regenning mana, yelling "CAMP CHECK" at the zone entrance, or waiting for a mob to spawn. 

Fishing yes, certainly.

Crafting, not really. WoW crafting is not like DaoC where you cranked out 500 shields for the perfect one, and the material gathering is more active.

Want? I didn't ask for anything. :)

But ways you can direct smelling the roses, off the top of my head, which have varying sorts of effects and consequences, some of which you may hate and some which you might not:

- quests to take you to vistas. Badges for exploration.
- design spaces meant for public or private events
- allow users to mark off spaces as theirs
- provide systemic reason to hang out somewhere that is quieter
- un-optimize traffic. In other words, have timed gates or places where you wait
- have traffic patterns with crossroads, rather than one-way flow
- have gameplay patterns with a "loop" quality
- reduce the amount of "global" anything, such as purchases, teleports, etc
- add mechanics where users can do things to each other/with each other, particularly collaborative creativity
- add social minigames; trivia, social word unscramble, etc.
- add "display" events such as talks, lectures, theater events, concerts, etc
- add alternate advancement systems for social elements
- add  "LFC" -- looking for conversation. Allow instant teleport to social groups, allow them to raise the flag for a chat session
- player-voted awards for roleplay, helpfulness, etc
- create a newbie helper, greeter, or mentoring program

I could go on and on. All of these have been done with great success in many many worlds from old muds to modern MMOs.

Edit: it isn't that you cannot go do all these things yourself. You can. It's just that if none of this is incentivized, or is even actively penalized in terms of keeping up with your outlevelling friends, then you will tend not to do them.

I like those a lot, and now that I've time to think about it, I think that was a large part of my problem with WAR.  It was an on-rails game, no different than single-player, where you went from one town to the next on the clearly marked road between them.

Compare almost any low-level zone in WoW, or the Shire in LoTRO.  XRoads and Camp Taurajo had a "city" feel to them (people were constantly coming back), not just the quality of a truck stop that would be quickly abandoned. 

Design zones radially (maybe a central hub that people come back to, various small settlements on edge of zone).  Disperse quests and interesting things in a way where you have to wander over the zone to find them (not just 500m down the damn road).  Stick more single NPCs in random places (like the robot chicken escort quest in Felwood, turtle escort in Tanaris, or a 1000x other examples in WoW) to reward exploration.  Put less interstates in zones and more footpaths.

Lumping Ventrilo in with forums is a mistake. Ventrilo is an inherent part of these games anymore, both socially and in terms of competetive performance. Getting a third-party program and an IM address is a bitch, but that's why games are integrating voice chat these days. Voice is here to stay.

Fishing in WoW, as compared to fishing in other games, is right along with the standard WoW experience of intense directed gameplay. There's no downtime about it. You're forced to stare at the bobber and click it, and if your timing is off, you lose. If you're chatting (like while fishing in UO or EQ or ATITD or SWG) you risk missing the skill hit and the loot.

Yeah, but it's not as intensive as "DON'T STAND IN THE FIRE!"

<harp> Move away from levels as a reward mechanic.  At least as one that gates people from playing with whomever they want. </harp>

It's only now that I haven't played in a while and have racked up some post-leveling time in WoW that I realize what an odd scene UO could be at times. I used to be in a UO vampire RP guild with an old guy who used to write speeches for Cheney back in the 80's. Which is neither here nor there, but still sounds weird to say.

I know what Calandryll's talking about, figuring out what to do once you were in game. I tend to think utterly trivial teleportation might tend to help socialization, or at least it can potentially. In WoW you pretty much never see your guildmates "in person" unless you're doing an instance/raid together, because traveling is too much of a nuisance to do just to /wave and say hello. But in UO people would hop into Ventrilo and go "Where's everyone at?" and a few seconds later they would have recalled over to wherever we were all hanging out at the moment.

One guy's at his house looking for something to give his friend, someone's bored and drops by to hang out, a couple other people stop by because so-and-so's sister with the hot-sounding voice is there, pretty soon there's a whole little crowd, and you all end up crawling a dungeon or something.

It's something you have to design for from the start, though. With trivial teleportation there is no traffic, and people simply are where they want to be, which can leave the in-betweens feeling awfully empty.

Type faster  :oh_i_see:

A few pages ago Raph said that players have inertia and need to be prodded to get off their asses and kill slimes, now he's saying that players need special incentive to stop killing slimes and talk to their pals. Which is it?


These are great examples of what not do do: make the game a pain in the ass for people who want to play it in a way they enjoy.

If you want to chat with your friends fine, but don't punish me because I'm not a chatty Cathy.

It sounds more to me like he wants LARPing Larry.

Indeed, there's definitely a fine line to be drawn.

I want to be played in order to make me socialize more, definitely. I just never want to have the feeling that bullshit block X is here so I must sit on my thumb and wait for someone to talk to. As mentioned earlier, places like the Xroads and Camp T made socialization easy without distracting me from my gameplay, when I didn't want it. Once you start talking about intrusive elements such as the removal of global purchases or teleports (or chat, Hellllooooo Warhammer) in order to push the players to build communities and social spheres at times in which they may not want to- players will push back.

Edit: Please let it be a carp

Raph is chatty and makes games for chatty people. If you're not chatty, his games will stab you in the cock. (At least until he quits and the next batch of developers look at the social engineering nightmare they've been left with, throw up their hands, and shoehorn in Trammel while there are still any subscribers left. Or, to be fair, shoehorn in the NGE and chase all the subscribers away.) It's just who he is, and it's not going to change no matter how much we yell at him on messageboards.

It's okay. We already have Blizzard to make Blizzard games. There's room for a Raph.

Though what I wish is that someone would give Raph a pile of money to make an MMO, with the caveat that there must be a Blizzard guy standing behind him at all times with the authority to go "What the fuck?" and slap him in the back of the head with a fish when he starts getting too beardy and tries to implement a simulated hydrological cycle or something.

What kind of fish?  :headscratch:

Insert Tanks vs Mechs spinoff.

In that case, it would be a mechfish.

(http://robotoys.com/Zoidshark.gif)

I don't know where you got this but it's dead wrong. WoW had a lfg system in beta and early release. It was taken out when they were scrambling around trying to prop up their failing database servers. It was a very simple system where you could flag yourself as lfg and people could search for class and lfg flag.

The WoW you played did not survive the iterations before release. I've played humans both in beta and release and the newbie quests were nothing like that. Sure, you get a 10 rat tail quest and a kill 8 kobold quest, but as I said that chain of 5,10,15 never survived, rightly imo.

Interesting enough though, all 3 of the games I've played with intergrated voice chat the feature is almost completely unused. LoTR, Eve and now WoW. No one uses the built in voice chat.

The Built in version is always shit. Always.


I don't know WHY it is always made of crap and fail, but it always is. Blizzard spent a entire content patch on it's version of Voice chat and it was still total shit.

It's a shame because the integrated voice chat has options to show which characters in your party are speaking. Which is kinda handy to figure out who's getting chewed on by a zombie.

That's not right.
1) You can teleport to Dalaran for free from most quest hubs once you reach level 74 or so.
2) Dalaran is located in the middle of Northrend, making it a natural hub.
3) Dalaran has portals to every other major city, making it the natural place to bind yourself to.
4) Dalaran has portals to all PVP areas.
5) It is the most graphics-heavy area in the game. The other day I noticed that the toy shop has a small toy train running on top of its doorway.
6) And much much more...

It is definitely intended as the place to be.

I don't play WoW, so I can't say.

Within CoH/V, the email system is only used by gold spammers, but the global chat system is epically good at getting players together, even across servers. The Pocket D (dance club either heroes or villains can enter) is mainly used by RPers or as a convenient meeting spot. Travel powers would appear to give more people time to talk since you can get there quicker or (for flight) autofly in the general direction so you've got your hands free.

Sigh.

An object at rest tends to stay at rest. An object in motion tends to stay in motion. You do remember high school physics, yes?

When the whole game's incentive structure is around "get people to move move move" then yes, if you want them to stop you need to give them counterincentive.

You could also have less incentive to move move move, but then you get something fairly sleepy that the gamers say isn't a game at all.


I was not saying "do all of these" or even "do any of these." I was listing ways that have worked, for better or worse.

Global purchasing has historically reduced social interaction because it means that people don't have to go back to a central location. They can mail order everything to their spot in the distant area where there's only two other people.

Global teleport works to undo the loopback and crossroads styles of mapmaking referenced above. It can, as observed elsewhere, also help socialization in other ways.

Times gates... I knew someone would complain. :) Yes, it can mean things like healing up, rest time, long-term cooldowns, waiting for transport, or timed access to places. Timed gates even in a go go go are not necessarily even going to feel like waiting. Think the tense moment in the locker room before all hell breaks loose in the game. PvP muds used this very effectively -- and people chatted while there, and in fact formed very tight bonds.

I realize you think you're being misunderstood, but the issue is deeper than the recurring programmed-downtime one we've been having since SWG beta :-)

It continues to be a good example of what separates popularity from immersion.

MUDs were built by and for the tech fringe looking to escape into the virtual, to be the vanguard of the metaverse. But that market is shrinking by percentage against the aggregate consumer market.

Nowadays, games are all around all the time in all points of consumer engagement. The mass market comes with a very different expectation. They don't even consider themselves "gamer" because that very label is becoming less relevant. It's taken longer to impact MMOs because of established traditions, but it's affecting us now through WoW.

The new-person-off-the-street, the vast majority of MMO players now that started in WoW look at it very differently. They're not coming immersive/escapist MUDs. They're coming from Bejeweled on mass transit, Solitaire, Fishdom, Pogo, maybe Club Penguin now (it's been out long enough), and so on. NONE of these are designed for multi-hour sessions at the expense of eating and physical interaction. This is the essence of "game snack" and is a major growth component of these industries. They game and socialize together, multitasking without being programmed too because of split-attention.

And while veterans may complain about the pace of WoW, let's be real: we're kids in a candy store. The very rate of our individual achievement has always been set by us. We're the ones that backwards engineer for the optimal path. In WoW, the rails are more apparent, but also much faster. It's an achievers paradise where of course our old methods of interaction don't apply. And the market has changed too. Our dreams of a popular genre have been realized (though to some in a rather Monkeys Paw fashion ;-) ).

Veterans haven't lost their ability to interact. They've just had to adjust how they do so to account for the new market that joined us.

As an aside, I always wish someone would copy the house-building from UO. Not the "fill up the world with urban blight" part, but the "design a custom building tile-by-tile" part they patched in a few expansions after Trammel. (Put it all in instances, whatever.) Then give everyone unlimited teleports back and forth between their home and wherever they were in the world. Like how in KOTOR you could poof back to your ship to swap party members, then back into the field to keep playing without having to do all that walking.

Then everyone can still run around the world being directed between locations, but you can still meet your friends "face to face" at the drop of a hat.

Which is more or less what I suggested with a bit of housing thrown in, so I'll completely agree.  The housing instance can even be its own isolated little social hub to make sure friends can step out their door and socialize but can't sell if the designers don't want you to be able to quickly port to town, sell, then return.

Why is your average MMO player going to meet someone in game to chat when they can just chat in a private/guild channel or on vent?

The person who likes to hang out with people on screen and just talk is shrinking.  Even if you build a game for "social interaction" in game etc, you're still going to have everyone in their own social circles talking out of game in vent.  You're not instantly going to create a virtual society.

Sidetrack of a sidetrack, but don't assume that building voice chat into the game is a good idea.  Having that aspect of community handled by a third party has a bunch of benefits.  Like the fact that you can establish a group of friends that carries across games.  I suspect we'll move to a model where there's a standardized API for voice-chat, a bunch of third parties implement chat servers with various features, and game makers just hook into the API to do things like automatically creating chat groups for raids and so on.

If every game has built in voice who cares then?  You can still use vent if you want.

I just want to say that I am fully 1000% behind simulated hydrological cycles.

Yea, you may have been confused by when I say 'any sort of LFG.'  And that is wrong.  I'm speaking mainly about a comprehensive UI LFG that you could use from anywhere, and you know, people would actually use.  They didn't put one of those in until they started patching in TBC.  But yea you're right.  I think I even remember flagging myself, then doing a /who lfg and seeing my name alone on the list.

Oh believe me, I know. That's why  imade that green comment a ways back.



I have to point out that the average hours of usage for WoW are smack in line with past MMORPGs. WoW has not actually effected change on this front. What games DID have lower snack-sized sessions? uh... SWG. ;)

Not having access to private data, I don't know whether the median point changed with WoW.

It's actually growing, just not in games but on websites that are rich social environments. You are getting more and more places where live chat is popping up (Meebo, Facebook, etc), and even asynch tools like Twitter are being used as synch chat. In a lot of ways Twitter is becoming web-based IRC.

This is a big, giant, crock of shit.

Average player session length (per session and per day) in SWG was dramatically lower than EQ, EQ2, EQOA, UO (I have no access to WoW stats, of course). Average monthly hours, however, was larger. The only conclusion is more sessions, shorter.

It's not even hard to see why. People checking in every day or so for a short time to check harvesters, vendors, and the like. Much more asynch, pop-in-pop-out behavior.

Everything's about SWG again!  :drill: Anyone care to comment on the NGE?

Is that actually a positive? It sounds like what I find annoying about Nile Online. It requires a lot of attention but I have to spread it all out through my day instead of being able to just take an hour and be done with it.

Live chat among people you already know. I know very few people who use Facebook to talk to strangers. The last true bastion of random chatter amongst random people for no reason is the forums. And even then how many people simply get banned for not fitting that particular forums social environment. I mean your having this discussion in F13 forums for gods sake...

Bell curves  :grin: In all seriousness, as there been any surveying done of the non-core userbase as it applies to playstyle? It's easy to get veterans to take MMO surveys, but that's going to skew.

And I should have clairified something I've been harping on for awhile.

WoW was designed as a succession of snacks that players can choose to consume as a meal. This has attracted both snackers and meal-seekers. Other games were meals that only attracted those predisposed to wanting that.

I should also mention that I abhor the term "snack", but it seems to have gained traction in certain corners of the bizdev side of the industry...

This all reminds me of the "satisficing" discussion from a few years back. A lot of us veterans will say we'd like WoW plus a bunch of the stuff we missed from UO. And yet the game is obviously adequate without them. The same can be said about traditional views of interaction. Given that people are collaborating in the real world with tools that once were relegated to the technophile fringe, and virtual worlds. So why would they "need" (and retroactively therefore miss the lack of) socializing as supported by dart and chess boards in a virtual tavern or through laborious regeneration time?

At the same time, the emerging browser worlds actually skew more heavily on a world of activities than on a linear game. WoW is the pinnacle of old-skool games done right, but I won't be surprised when they apex and start changing the game to appeal to the younger crowd coming up differently.

But I'm biased. I've long wondered what it would be like to focus on the game first to become successful enough to latch on the experiential world later. ;-)

I think that was SWG's main problem.  :dead_horse: Not enough fun adventure. Too much tradeskills and social spaces. There was no good balance there.

Both my roleplay and non-roleplay UO guilds tended to hang out 'in person' a lot, despite the existence of guild chat channels and Ventrilo servers. We tended to hang out in person WHILE sitting in Ventrilo. Let me see if I can figure out why in my own mind.

Part of it was the fact that if you give everyone the tools to build super-customized houses, most of them will build something, and a lot of them will like having other people around to see their pad. Any decent-sized guild is likely to have at least one or two people who like building a cool place and having everyone hang out there. Since your house was typically the place you stored the bulk of your gear/materials/consumables, there were plenty of purely workmanlike reasons to be there as well.

Part of it was the fact that teleportation was totally and completely trivial. If you weren't actively doing anything, your guild's hangout (whether it be a public bank, tavern, or a player house) was just sort of where you would end up while you figured out what to do. If other people were there, you would invariably start chatting via overhead "speech" rather than interrupt the flow of guild chat.

If you create a private Ventrilo channel and pull two people down into it to talk to you, you're sort of expected to have something important to say, and anyone who's not in there might wonder what it was. But if you just breeze past their house to shoot the shit while they sort their ore stockpiles or whatever? That's casual.

I dunno. I'm half asleep and need to think on it more, but like I said, even in the age of Ventrilo, even a totally non-roleplay UO guild would have a "guild house" where everyone would go to meet and goof off.

This actually happened to me. I met one of my former DAOC guildies, and RL friends, in WoW about a year ago. We were standing in Stormwind chatting. After about ten seconds, I was honestly confused why he wanted to chat with me in Stormwind, when we could continue chatting while in separate ends of the world at the same time. The reason I felt so antsy, I concluded, is that Blizzard directs the player so well that no matter where you stand in the world, there are subtle clues as to what you should be doing next. If nothing else, there are clues where you can go to find that out.

Since then, I have been trying to find a place in any of the WoW zones where I honestly felt lost. So far, nothing. No matter where I go, no matter what I do, the terrain slopes and the objects point towards areas where quests, raids, trade skills, and PvP start. This makes it really hard to sit in one place when there's practically a dotted line and big flashing glowy arrows telling you to click on this NPC.

(Editted for clarity)

That's level design. What we've gotten in other games is world/sim design. The difference is absolutely palpable. Neither is right or wrong, there's only how it measures against the overall game and how it works for or against the premise.

Of course, feeling lost is connected to feeling a risk. And in WoW, there really isn't any. You'll never lose your corpse in a lava flow, it will never be looted by someone else, and there's local graveyards all over the place (heck, they just added a few dozen to the old world).

And that's game design, not world design :-)

YMMV.

And here we are back into the what-if exercise of a 3D pre-Trammel UO with a $100mil budget  :awesome_for_real:

I'm thinking about my first experience in Everquest, which was wandering around the starter Night Elf city (whatever the fuck it was called) with no one to talk to and nothing to do for what felt like hours. The only reason I stuck with it past that point was that I knew there were people and things to do in the game from message boards and watching my friends play. But if I had gone in cold, I don't think I would have given it much past 5 minutes before logging off in frustration.

Here on f13, less than one in 500 people are banned, and yet I still hold out hope.

Absolutely, and that's entirely my point. If you put all the awesome SWG SL UO Etc fun fun things to do in the taverns, but the entire game is pointing you towards the PvP arenas all the time, it doesn't make a difference how fun your dartboards are. Players are going to flock to the arenas, or they're going to feel like they're doing something wrong if they stick to the taverns. (And if those dartboards are more fun than the PvP, players will complain that too much work went into the dartboards.)

Game players want to be driven to game play. Giving them the tools to make their own fun has never had as much appeal commercially. The perfect hybrid of both could theoretically work, but so far we haven't seen that (it cost that much just to make a game).

This got me thinking. Even all these years later, and never having played a Dark Elf, I immediately remember "Nektulos". 99% of the zone and area names in WoW though I couldn't care less about. It reminded me of a discussion I had with my wife awhile back about contempotary pop culture references for our generation.

• Real life: how many kids nowadays are going to have generation-defining common memories like Star Wars Ep 4, E.T., early Van Halen, etc.
• MMOs: how many players nowadays are going to have memories beyond the actions they made in certain games.

Popularity seems to come with the adverse affect of blunting real standouts. This is probably just the LCD effect. You gotta blunt something to make it more mass marketable. But how much of this is connected with the amount of folks aware of a thing?

There were less movies like E.T. back in the day and therefore more people went to see it. There were less people playing MMOs when we accepted crap we're so glad WoW and Eve don't have.

This is probably just a typical Art vs Market question, but I also like to try and find the middle. There's always the fringes that hate when things become popular or can't figure out why anyone could possibly like a thing. But I prefer the merge.

Instead of things were better back in the day, they were more memorable? 


 :oh_i_see:

Honestly I'd rather have a game that just lets me putter along at whatever pace I like, than one that's stop-and-go. In other words build a game that's at least a little "sleepy" and not the one that shoves you along with directed experiences and then slaps on the breaks with mind wounds or some other mechanic.

UO did a good job of this, by which I particularly mean the post-Trammel game. You could go kill monsters forever with zero downtime if you felt like it, not even time spent running/flying like in WoW, but the game was still pretty mellow and chatty because it was relatively unfocused.

There's room in the marketplace for a game that's basically "updated UO/SWG minus all the bad legacy stuff that was inescapable once decisions were made". You know, dedicated PVE/PVP servers instead of a Tram/Fel split, housing set up so as to avoid urban blight, no HAM, no silly permadeath alpha classes, yadda yadda. It wouldn't need to have cutting edge graphics or lots of labor-intensive directed content. It wouldn't require a WoW budget or deliver WoW numbers, but it could probably grab a couple hundred thousand people and keep them basically forever.

I mean UO is how old and ridiculous-looking now? But there are still enough subscribers left that they're developing an expansion and just now started a whole new "EA employees roleplay and run live events with the players" program. In 2009. Even if EA's woes make them shitcan it tomorrow, it's been 12 years and the point stands. A game that was built along those lines from the start, not so much to grab a bazillion people and take on WoW as to be super sticky, could probably be a steady earner for 10, 15, shit, 20 years.

I mean you think I'm a UO partisan? Shit, I'll fuck off and play WoW for long stretches. But there are people in that game I know who are just straight-up "Fuck you I'll quit when they unplug it and not before!" Those are your fucking DREAM customers.

Nostalgia: helping you remember things the way you want them since...

You mean in MajorMud? Minotaurs are in the wooden passages on the island with the labyrinth and ancient crypt, Cyclops is in the hazy swamp under the black house, and I have no idea where the keys drop. I think they are part of the level 10 quest?

He meant tele arena and you don't need a key in the labyrinth in Major Mud afaik.

Nope, you don't... I'm playing right now, haha. A friend said he had started playing on one of the old boards, and I joined him.

There is never more than a dozen people replying to a topic at any given time. You have gotten your wish.

Heh--late to the party so I missed all the cool stuff, but I'll try to write an article about ACK!Mud and Shades of Evil--we didn't have that huge of an impact in the overall MUD world, but we did do some things that had not been seen many places before to solve some rather unique socialization problems, so maybe it'll be an interesting read.

That's such a terrible way to gauge it though. Considering 90% of leveling any crafting class was pressing the same buttons over and over. I know how much time I spent and how many classes I mastered, but what it provided for wasn't "people playing in short bursts" it was "people stopping before their eyes bled out."

You can categorize it however you like, but it was one of the most frighteningly grindy experiences in modern gaming. Particularly for crafters. I'm sticking to talking about crafters because combat just wasn't worth leveling up :awesome_for_real:

Edit: Oh right, the other 10%? Yea, that was spent trying to find expendable giant piles of resources or checking harvesters.

So, what bastard got the crystal shortsword?

Quite right. Among those who prefer WoW to UO, it would be a waste of time to convince them to play UO instead of WoW. Sandboxes don't have as much commercial appeal as WoW, but they have commercial appeal. (And honestly, I find them more fun.)

To be the CoH/V fanboi, but: CoH/V lets a supergroup build their base tile by tile on a set lot size. Here's an example. (http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=loBzAG6BQks) One of the veteran powers is supergroup base teleport.

It's not a perfect system - only the top rung of the SG get to build it, you can't invite who you want into it at the drop of a hat and the costs of doing anything fun until recently were extortionate. But it contains a lot of flexibility. Not a lot of players use the system as it stands (probably because not everyone is the leader of an SG / VG that can afford to run their own generators and teleport pads) but if player apartments are ever brought in with more flexibility in visitation, CoH/V would fit your requirements near perfectly.

The MUDders I remember from my uni days were the guys who would sit in front of a dumb terminal for hours on end to MUD with some of the other guys sitting next to them. Should they somehow manage to land a geek girl, they'd train her to play the MUD so they could do it together.

Socialisation in MUDS appeared to come about because these people weren't that good in communication in RL, so they did it by proxy in the game. They'd probably be offended at being called "gamers" too.

I like how "come help save MUD history" turned into "what have MUDs ever done for us?" followed by "MUDs suck! When are we going to get UO redone?". Yeah, I know - Welcome to F13.  :grin:

That's pretty cool, didn't know COH/V did that. I wish WoW would rip some of this shit off. It's not the sort of thing Blizzard usually goes for, but the fact is the game needs gold sinks and they can't keep selling increasingly jacked-up mounts forever. Houses and furniture and fluff are a great way to make people spend money without actually touching game balance at all.

I kinda want to play some more UO now. It's been increasingly strongly implied that Luna, the city that superceded Britain as the primary social hub on a lot of shards, is about to get the shit more or less blown out of it. I love that kind of stuff, and since they figured out how to do destructible buildings a couple years ago, blowing the shit out of stuff is a much more intriguing prospect.

Then again, eh. Depends on whether any of my friends give a shit. They're kinda enjoying WoW at the moment. So am I, really.

/ramble

Blizzard isn't going to put housing in until they can figure something out that will make housing useful without killing capital populations. So like, never. They refuse to make it for the sake of making it currently, which is a bummer.

Unless they've got banks and auction houses in them, and are linked to the trade channel, why would houses kill capital populations? God knows UO houses didn't stop banksitting from practically becoming an Olympic sport. It would kill the "night elves cyberfucking in the Deeprun Tram tunnel" population though, which is a blessing unto itself.

But where will we get cyber screenshots to post on the realm forums if that happens?

That's exactly it. If they don't have those things, then it's just 'The Sims' in warcraft. Which would be enough for most of us, but Blizzard wants housing to be something more.

What this magical more is supposed to be? /shrug.

I kinda figure there's a WoW housing system sketched out on a whiteboard somewhere in Blizzard HQ, and we don't know about it because they're Blizzard and don't really tell us shit until they have something to show for it. When the game gets a little older, subs finally peak, players are getting a little too rich, then it'll be time. Hell, friggin' Kalgan used to be Evocare, lead designer on the UO expansion that added that tile-by-tile house building I love.

There were prototypes for guild housing in a alpha or early beta or something. Some idea's of even letting rival guilds attack them while you defend or something. Nothing really tangible though.

No clue, I'm dualing druid and warrior.

Players will migrate to the easiest most central spot if designed one, or create their own when the level doesn't compel them too (ie, EQ1: docks in Oasis, EC Tunnel pre-Bazaar, etc).

Banksitting didn't stop in UO, but the real/veteran commerce was done in houses and malls. The main cities were for newbs only from what I recall, and for the occasional bank visit. But for every award-winning fish tank in UO, there seemed to be a dozen empty oversized bankslots. With all the effort put into these tools, how many pre-3D people actually bothered? The memories of these places are great, but it's because we don't remember the blight of vacant slums.

WoW created these social hubs through /trade, banks, AH, and general crafting stations all in the same locations. And the player population didn't splinter when they added AHs to the other cities. What's the point of housing? Cool place to sink gold into occasionally and eventually forget? I agree they'll probably come at WoW's apex, but what I'd rather see if just guild halls, modelled around the SWG ones (except with doors ;-) ) where players could own rooms therein. Create a single city just for the guildhalls of the faction, make it part of the next expansion. With this one, they picked up a whole city and floated it over the new lands. Next one they should pick up a land mass and use phase 1 pre-expansion-launch to allow players to populate it through achievement (ala the unlocking of Sunwell).

Man I'm tired. Need stronger coffee.

Another option would be to put player housing in capital cities (instanced, duh), and players use their homes as free teleports to the capitol of their choice. Weird that nobody's tried this before.

That sounds like the most "Blizzard-ish" way to go with player housing. I can imagine a guild headquarters with trophies and furniture based on guild achievements in addition to the usual knick knacks and whatnots.

It occurs to me that this is almost exactly the same game as tending Pokey on Facebook, or whatever.

Anyway -- the point wasn't the grindiness, it was the session lengths. You said "crock of shit," I offered vague yet authoritative-sounding references to stats, you changed the subject. :)

It's worth wondering whether it was the advancement ladder that made it grindy. Hmm. I mean, isn't crafting in WoW also pressing the same buttons over and over?

You can automatically craft multiples in WoW. You can craft X of a thing as long as you have the resources just by pressing one button to start the automation. But then, WoW doesn't really have crafting game. It has a resource gathering one. Which honestly I've always wondered about: why bother having a skill progression when you're not really doing a skill? Of course, that's the model for many of these games, so I'm like 10 years late to asking this question ;-)

I think the grindiness is as we recently discussed (this thread or another, can't remember). It's not time from start to some ethereal "finish", since that doesn't exist. It's time between milestones, where those are most often some critical new ability or stat adjustment that matters.

For crafting, usefulness (or lack there of) of gathered resources and crafted items is everything.

As an example of this, a very top end tool (player skill) was auctioned in ATITD yesterday for a quantity of a resource that newbs are instructed to gather as the first or second gathered item when they learn the game.

Yes, its grindy as hell to gather the stuff, but that alone gives it value and a 1 hour trial character could have reasonably won the bid and acquired this tool. His time would be valuable and the tool would be valuable to him.

You know the issue: in game time, subscription age, or player skill. Making equivalencies and allowing player choice of approach is the answer.

I didn't change the subject. I gave you the exact reason you saw a metric that translated to "bite-size" which leads me to believe you didn't go in there and watch people play the game in real time. Why do you think there were macros for almost everything? Don't get me wrong, I liked the game, but I'm just saying exactly how it was. Smugglers had to grind the hell out of the tiers to get to the good drugs. Dancers afk'd to get to their more ridiculous dancers. Architects, god, don't even get me started on architects. Armorsmiths, weaponsmiths - the reason things like Krayt Tissue FWG-5s took so long to discover is because people not only had to find efficient ways to get Krayt tissues (which was eventually completely soloable by my smuggler, stack DoTs and play dead), but weaponsmiths were too busy grinding to really experiment. Same with armorsmiths, it took months to find out how to make good composite armor.

It was a big, huge grindy mess and the ladder of advancement quickly approached nightmarish. Game had more "levels" than any other MMOG that comes to mind.

The reason I mastered as much as I did? College.

Edit: In other words, "bite size" gameplay sessions for SWG was a matter of improper reading of metrics.

Wait, what? I'm not fondly remembering 1998 here, I was just playing a couple months ago. Vendor-malls are good to buy from if you just need to find X now and buy it at a premium, or if you're a seller who deals in bulk. Barking at the bank is good if you're looking to go the extra step to buy something for less, or if you're someone who's not really a big trader but happens to have something valuable to sell. And while you see the occasional house that's just a blank plot with some containers on it to throw loot into, virtually everyone builds something way more complex than what they have any concrete "need" for. I suspect most of the blank-with-loot plots are storage for multi-account packrats who already have a "real" house anyway.

As for urban blight, yeah, whenever you pack houses together out in the world it's going to look lonely since the odds of people being both online and at their house at any particular hour aren't high.


Nothing. It's a gold sink, a toy, an e-peen showcase where you can hang your "obsolete now but uber to own back in the day" sword on the wall. When you start talking about guild-halls with trophies and sieges or whatever, my eyes just glaze over. I don't really care if my guild leader can own a house, or if it has Onyxia's head (or whatever) on the wall.

Yea, but you're rare. The people who remember housing remember the urban blight of UO which we saw again in even greater force in SWG.
But even that's a side issue, since it supports my point from earlier: Blizzard wants people to be together in social hubs. They designed the game around that. I didn't play UO before housing, so I don't know how if the playerbase spread to the four winds once all the major plots were taken. But I suspect Blizzard is concerned by this very thing and how that'd impact a) the social hubs; and, b) the newbs.

And back to the other question: what's the point? Almost everything in WoW has some point to it, with just-toys relegated to things like companion pets. This is a game that doesn't even have EQ2's aesthetics-only wardrobe function (and yet people tailor outfits anyway, for occasion). Don't get me wrong, I'd love to have a Gnome-inspired fully-customizable house in which everything I've got sitting in my bank slots is actually represented by a 3D model that can be moved into some three dimensional location within. But that's of the if-wishes-were-horses variety because of how Blizzard thinks.

They made a game, not a world. They don't care about "immersion" in the way other older games prioritized it.

UO started with housing, and all the major plots were taken in less than a year. It changed nothing about player traffic and the major hubs. In fact, just six months ago, the Britain bank was packed with the most uber of the uber, just as it was ten years ago.

SWG also shipped with housing, and again all the major plots were taken quickly. That changed nothing about player traffic, though I haven't played it in a couple years, I wonder if even now the spaceports are still gathering places.

AC added housing a few years after launch, and those had the functions of secure storage and a teleport location. They also were built around little villages, and cool ones at that. Again, I haven't played it in years, so that might have changed, but for the next year players still gathered at the major transport areas of Fort Tethana and Subway.

So far, no matter how useful housing is, it's proven impossible to divert player traffic with it. I suspect Blizzard could even encourage player traffic if they wanted to.

DaoC added housing and it killed the capital cities within a week.

QFT.

Put a vault and craft npc in your house and the only reason to go to TNN was to talk to the epic quest giver once every 10 levels or so.

Sigh.

The topic was length of session. That's what Darniaq was describing. That's what we were talking about. Short sessions. That's what the stats were. Short sessions. Whether the sessions all consisted of repeated grindy clicking is beside the point. SWG may have been grindy, but it was not a "you have to sit online for 6 hours to the next milestone." You could log off (and people DID) at any stage along the way.

This is different from what drove long sessions in the other games, which is that the process of play was not interruptible. Once you were on the raid, or deep in whatever dungeon, that was it, you had to go all the way to the end. You had to have the group, which took a long time to assemble. And so on.

Don't get me wrong, SWG had plenty of repetitive dull stuff in it, and it also had plenty of timesinks that were in the way. But you could do a game session that moved the needle in less time than in other games, hence the lower sessions. For some profs, you didn't need to log on to move the needle. That was my sole point. Many of the random asynch amusements like Pokey on Facebook are equally mindless clicks, but you get done in 30 seconds, which was the only point I was making there.

My problem is that your takeaway from SWG is completely wrong. Calling it bite-sized sessions is incorrect because it somehow implies a positive. Which it wasn't, I don't log out of facebook in disgust because I didn't get much done in my "mindless clicking."

In fact, it's a pretty terrible thing to take away from SWG. I would ask myself "Why are people logging out" rather than "Hey, look at us! People log in more over a month but play less! The sum is greater than its parts!"

Also, I can log into any MMOG and get something done in a "bite sized" session - it's all a matter of defining based on the games parameters. I can do a quest in WoW in 30 minutes. I can get a level (if you're under 40) in AoC in 30 minutes. I can even log into Eve and get some ratting done in 30 minutes. Nothing was "new" or invented here that hadn't existed on the PC in single player games for years prior. Hell, not even in console games post the Nintendo era. And we're not even getting into gaming with the ability to save states.

In short, you can leave ANY game at ANY stage - AND people do. In SW:G, you have to look at what drove them to log out at "any stage." And it assuredly wasn't them logging in and saying "man, I'm just gonna grind 30 more Thrusterheads and I'll be that much closer to Neutron Pixie," it was "Ah fuck, might as well get these 230 Thrusterheads out of the way. Wat? I don't have enough resources? Tomorrow then. /quit"

Look, I loved SW:G, but I think your metric and memories of it are entirely flawed.

Not to mention, features like "alt-tab" "windowed" etc were unreliable. Session lengths these days, particularly in Eve and WoW (Hell, even EQ2), sitting around AFK, are completely unreliable.

Basically, I disagree with what you said.

Only in the most pedantic sense. For one, like Darniaq mentioned, you can craft multiple items in one go. More fundamentally, crafting recipes are color-coded by your skill. Crafting an orange recipe is guaranteed to give a skill-up. Once you buy a new recipe you are guaranteed 5-30 skill-ups before the recipe turns yellow. And once that happens, there are several new recipes available.

Is "average" the mean, median or mode?

If people are firing up SWG once a day to spend 2 minutes checking their store in addition to playing 'normally' at other times that lowers the mean time per login but doesn't really say anything meaningful about the game.

I could lower the average play session length of FFXI by making it delete your character if you didn't log in once every 24 hours. And?

That reminds me of my old MUD's rent system before they were finally convinced to ditch it.

UO and SWG had hubs and housing at launch. To your point, AC1 later had housing and that didn't spread everyone out, because of existing hubs. I didn't play DAoC when that housing went in but reports were that it did nuke social centers.

But I'm not saying it's a foregone conclusion that Ironforge would die, just that Blizzard probably has figured out to their satisfaction what "encourage player traffic" actually means. I do think AC1's neighborhoods worked pretty well against the world itself and to motivate players in certain ways. I just wonder if anyone at Blizzard ever played it  :awesome_for_real:

This exposes a difference in "doing something" and "advancing in the game system" though. That I think is what schild is referring to. I wasn't originally, but now I will too  :grin:

• I often logged into SWG to check harvesters, email, my vendor, and do some quick selling at Coronet. None of these rewarded any skill advancements though. For awhile, I was a crappy BH with Survey III because to play the game I played (energy business), that's all I needed. That granted me money, but all I did was feed that back into better fusion generators. I sort of existed outside the game system, more in the world proper. Same thing when I started a home decorating business. SWG was many systems in which game play featured in only some.
  
• With DAoEQ1WoW though, you're only path of substantive advancement is how the game defines it. Your session is measured by XP or gold put against item/improvements that also adjusted states. These are really just character optimization games, so the only thing to actually do was optimize, as defined by the foils and gates of the game. WoW is only one game.
  
  

That's the difference. SWG felt very grindy to people trying to play it as the type of game many of the other MMOs are.

You're also not mentioning the driven NEED to login in SWG.  Yeah, my play sessions were much lower on average, but I was logging-in 2-3 more times than I have in any other MMO.   I *needed* to swap out materials in a factory. I *needed* to check resources to see if they'd shifted in the overnight or while I was at work.  I *needed* to make sure my vendors were still stocked or the price of the area hadn't shifted putting me way over priced.

I never felt a need-to-login grind in a DIKU like I felt it in SWG.  As I've said before it felt more like a job than a game, and when I realized that SOE stopped getting my $15.

Megaquotefestresponse...


To bring it back to the original topic: you clearly never played a Diku with "rent," where your saved equipment was eating away at your in-game bank account every single day, and you had to come back to refill the gold balance or your stuff would start vanishing, most expensive first.

Interestingly, the "need to login and grind" factor is exactly what turns me off of Dikus. If I don't, then I can't hang out with anyone I know because they have outlevelled me. YMMV, based on playstyle.

But I think Darniaq has the right of it. It depended heavily on what you trying to do in the game. You could run a large business pretty well with the sort of hit-and-run restock, brief sessions every couple of days thing. And if running the business felt like work (which I can totally see), then it feels unfun and grindy. Or it could feel like a fun subgame that didn't take huge amounts of attention -- we shouldn't let revisionism make us forget that plenty of folks held that opinion. I dodisagree that this was "outside of the game system." That IS the game system we designed for that subgame.

Margalis, I had histograms.


Your paragraph gave me cognitive dissonance, tkinnon0. "Only in the most pedantic sense. You can make more than one item in one go, and more fundamentally, the multiplicity of items is only there as a mark on a ruler, since any given recipe you buy is guaranteed to be 5-30 of exactly the same action with exactly the same result, then you have another ruler with hash marks on it." I mean, for me, you described the essence of repetitive clicking. Again, your mileage may vary. :)

Schild:


Remember when SWG was made. There was no Eve, there was no AoC, there was no WoW. Do you really not remember taking 30 mins just to find the group you required to be able to kill anything of your level? It really wasn't a landscape of 30 minute sessions back then, regardless of what single-player games were doing. That was one of the big bugaboos that everyone, you guys included, bitched about.

Agh, I am soooo sick of arguing about SWG. Time has moved past it. But look, none of these drivers of shorter sessions were in the other games with the exception of UO in some cases:

- short missions available on demand in any town
- crafting-related stuff that netted advancement/money/goods for your character while you were offline
- subgames that could be done with very shallow dips in and out
- easy to shift between tracks so you could pick an activity that fit your schedule

SWG was designed on purpose to have a big asynch element, and more of a short session element. A lot of it didn't work. It sure wasn't finished, and a bunch of those individual subgames were not fun enough. Nonetheless, all this was there, and it had a measurable impact. Many of these things ARE in WoW and EVE now, often in barely recognizable forms (And I am not saying they got those things from SWG by any means).

What is also still there is that high-end WoW demands raiding, and raiding demands long sessions and complex prep similar to what doing *anything* involved in EQ. Why this is controversial, I don't know.  It's a simple observation, not a criticism. It is also, in fact, one of many ppl's chief gripe with WoW, that the game changes. And in this very thread, both that and "the game doesn't start until you get to [insert raiding lvl]" have been said. Which could have been cut and pasted from an EQ forum in 1999.

Hence (you knew I would drag it back here) the desire to get this shit written down in that Wiki, so that we at least know that we're repeating history.

Please stop defending grindy simulators. :uhrr:

We just rebooted every 25 hours and everyone lost their gear.  :awesome_for_real:

Regarding WoW housing:

Even the relatively unsociable new-to-genre console kiddies without a hint of roleplay in them would cotton to the system if it were pitched correctly. These are people who whip themselves into a frenzy killing 8000 bandicoots just to see "Achievement: Bandicoot Buttfucker" pop up on their screen and check itself off a list for absolutely no visible benefit. Throw in a ten-foot tall gold statue of their character ripping the head off a bandicoot to put in the foyer of their castle, and they'll go apeshit. You have a bunch of trophy room PVE/PVP acheivement shit, some gold-sink shit, and some craftable shit for people to put in there.

"But WUA, what's the point? I mean do we want people to stay in their houses and depopulate the cities, or hang in the cities all the time, in which case why even have houses?"

We want people to visit their houses, but not spend all their time there. What's more, we want people to visit other people's houses so as to facilitate the real driver of most MMO interaction: good old-fashioned e-peen envy. So we add... say... some sort of house-based item that makes all raid buffs last 50% longer for the night once you click on it. (Or whatever, really.) Then when the whole raid visits to get the buff (travel time should be nil) they're thinking "Man Bob is really fucking pleased with that gold statue of himself. I need to grind me some bandicoots and show him what's up!"

Then, as a developer, the system gives you ways to mess with player behavior without touching game balance. People aren't running Dungeon X enough because they don't think it drops enough good loot? Let people steal paintings off the walls of the boss room and put them in their house. Have lots of random ones that don't show up every time. Have rare ones. People can't bitch because, after all, they don't really NEED paintings. But we all know that a certain demographic will go poopsock-berzerk for months or years trying to collect every last one.

I mean nobody runs the high-end old world dungeons for loot, but there are people who make a fucking lifestyle out of running Stratholme solo over and over again hoping to get that mount the Baron drops 1% of the time. Now you can get people doing that to every dungeon looking for rare deco widgets, and if they really get to hate it they can just stop, since it's not something that provides a gameplay benefit. It's optional grind.

Economy is getting too inflated but you've already added nuclear-powered flying mammoths that can hold 12 people and cost a fortune? Gold-plated floor tiles in your mansion for only 300k! People would love wasting money on conspicuous-consumption bullshit just to make their guildmates go "Jesus Christ Bob, how much money do you HAVE?!" as they step into the house to get their buff.

Does a certain crafting profession need some love? It's trivial to give them some new house widgets to make. I mean if you gave them something useful to make you'd have to worry about how it balanced out against similar items, how it affected PVP, yadda yadda. But this is easy. And the crafters won't care, because the stuff they're making WILL sell.

To be completely cynical: There are ways to tickle people's reward-response (good) that don't involve speeding up mudflation (bad).

No, I played games with rent.. and then never logged in to those muds again.

Again, bullshit "you must login" req's make me not play your game.

I just nosed past Stratics, and UO is having their new "event moderators" set up "offices" in the old Counselor's Halls where you can leave a note in a "wedding book" to contact them and set up an in-game wedding. I have no desire to get e-married, but the whole thing is so deliciously old-school RPful that it makes me want to go back. *sniffle*

But it hasn't moved past muds?


 :oh_i_see:

Inevitable. If you think it's new, it probably isn't. But like I said before, it's a nearly impossible feat (a history of MUDs, that is). Of course, there's always this thread (http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=15082.0). Or the entire forum. ^_^

Edit: clarity.

Sigh. Least mudlike of any of the bigger MMORPGs, certainly. But whatever. :)

Yeah, there's good reasons why most everyone has moved away from harder manifestations of this. That said -- I reference Pokey (one of the more popular Facebook apps) for a reason. They make you login every few days to feed the damn dog. Or else, a friend can feed it for you, thus making you come back out of guilt.

The mechanic is manipulative and uncomfortable. It's also not going away. If forcing you doesn't work, the game will use subtler psychological tricks on you instead. WoW's doing the same things, only in a less obvious format. Rest XP helped you keep up with the Joneses... it also serves as an incentive to come back to claim a "bonus." Etc.

Were capital cities really that popular to begin with? Honest question, because I rarely went there. It was only (as Twat pointed out) to grind trade skills, and I quit DAOC shortly after housing was introduced. I don't remember capitals being bustling centers of social activity, like they are in most other games. And they weren't centers of travel, because they were off the horse routes...at least when I played. You had to hop off the horse in Mag Mell, then autorun for about 2 minutes.

So...yeah, completely ignorant of them one way or another, but definitely worth bringing up.

Or level three alts at once for maximum efficiency.  :drill:


Note to future MMO devs: your capital city should be a travel hub.  Also, travel should be really fucking fast so that people can actually play your goddamn game.

They were never as concentrated as they are in most other games, it's true. Partly because they were sort of out of the way, partly because so much of the games focus was on RvR, so the Portal Keep became the other competing hub. There was definitely a consistent and non-trivial population of players in them pre-housing though.

Post housing, ghost town.

The only exception was the Dred capitals, being the only truly safe zones on those servers.

I recently ground my jewelcrafting to 440/450, so let's take this slightly outdated guide for 1-350 (http://www.wow-pro.com/tradeskill_guides/myahraven%2526%2523039%3Bs_jewelcrafting_guide_1-350) as an example. If you have already gathered the raw materials, you need to craft items from 22 recipes. That's 22 clicks to select a recipe, 22 times to type in the number of items to craft and 22 clicks to 'create'.

In contrast, your trainer (http://www.wowhead.com/?npc=28701#teaches-recipe:0+7+1+2) has 70 recipes for levels 1-350. So if you buy all of the recipes (and why wouldn't you), you'll actually click more times buying them than crafting! And the crafting would probably take less than 10 minutes! And once you're done you'll never ever have to craft those items again!

Which brings me to my bigger point, in that saying crafting in WoW is "pressing the same buttons over and over" misses the forest from the trees. Sure, WoW is a button-controlled game, so to start an action you need to push a button, but it is the planning and execution leading up to the pushing of the button that is the true crafting in WoW. Do you play the gathering game yourself? Do you search for good deals on the Auction House? Or do you get in a guild that let's you take them from their bank for free? The actual act of crafting, the resulting item and the level-up to the skill are just the exclamation point, a confirmation of a job well done.

Saying crafting in WoW is "pressing the same buttons over and over" is about as silly as saying raiding in WoW is pressing the same button over and over because there's a confirmation box that you have to click before you can loot a boss.

While you're channeling Dogbert, I think it's worth noting that the ideal subscription game would dissuade people from logging in while simultaneously inspiring them to continue to pay the monthly fee. Players buy the game (and every expansion), sets up accounts and pay every month, but neither plays nor requires customer service for the actual game. The more they can experience offline and alone, while still justifying a monthly fee, the better the business model.

Design that and you'll make a mint.

Like I said earlier (and I'm sure I wasn't the first in five years to say it): WoW doesn't have a crafting game. It has a resource-gathering one. And that is merely an extension of the entire game, which is about gathering the resources to further optimize your character at specific points on your path of... optimizing your character.

Not that I care at the moment. 18 months later (on and off) and I still love flying my epic engineering copter  :oh_i_see:


Client-less MMOs, one of the reasons general browser-based ones have taken off. Anytime really, and soon anywhere on your smart phone (current in some cases). Further, Facebook is an asynch MMO after a fashion, so you've got the built-in compulsory keep-up-with-the-Joneses factor already (good for YoVille too). Finally, Facebook is a neophytes haven of experiences veterans have gotten bored of years ago, a place where a lot of the same crap that tried and died from the core genres can be tried again because it's new to them.

Ya know, kinda like WoW  :grin:

Preserving history lets us point and mock at all the newbie mistakes being made. But the value of this isn't helped by these mistakes being made with tens of millions of dollars behind them. What really needs to happen is for there to be a presicience model of sorts, some toolbox by which developers with humility look at what they're planning against what was tried against the team they have and/or can get and gives themselves a scorecard featuring probabilities.

Right now the industry still feels very much like a bunch of developers who think they are building a game they themselves want to play without having the capability to recognize the holes in their talent or resources to actually pull it off. I used to think this was bad project management, but it seems deeper than that.

I think it's telling that some of the most successful MMOs come from companies without previous MMO experience, even though the industry as a whole seems to think that veteran status is important above all else. It's like how NFL coaches don't play to win but rather play to not get criticized. You won't get attacked for kicking a field goal on 4th and inches, even if it's not the right move. Similarly the MMO industry puts tremendous value on "proven" talent, even if that talent is a proven failure. (I'm not calling anyone here a proven failure, I'm just referring to the musical-chairs quality of MMO development teams)


I really don't get why people keep pointing to things like Facebook, Habbo Hotel and other such schlock. It strikes me as the typical scenario where everyone behind the curve attemtps to catch up by weakly replicating an existing success. This week everyone wants to jump on the social networking bandwagon, but what reason is there to believe that something that works for Facebook would work for an MMO?

Why not point to Hopscotch, or Boggle, or eating food - all fairly popular activities?

Over the past couple years every VC firm on earth has been inundated with me-too social networking concepts and this strikes me as the video-game manifestation of that. Concept X is popular so let's copy concept X.

I am not sure the stats actually match up to that, with the obvious exception of WoW. Do they? (Makes me want to run some numbers).


Because those cheesy Facebook things are the things both stealing MMO mechanics and reaching massive audiences with them... it's not bc it's faddish, but bc it's working.

And facebook makes how much in monthly subscriptions again?  Sub model v. FTP (or an ad model, which is not possible in an MMO except to an extremely limited extent in most settings) model is the fabulous, fluorescent-pink god of Comparing Apples to Oranges. 

EDIT: Is this why microtrans is the newest MMO fad?  Does the MMO cognoscenti really think the industry can sustain itself by me paying a dollar for a hot purse on the arm my gigantically round-eyed anime girl avatar, and two dollars to have a border of pokemon dancing around my screen?  Wouldn't the industry collapse when the dreamy boy in homeroom finally was impressed enough to text your customer? 

Deep down, I loved the daily reboot. Something about going out with no gear and punching animals to death so I could skin them and make shitty armor amused the shit out of me.

And why exactly are we making an exception there?

Does anyone honestly believe that WOW would be the same huge success had it been helmed by a dream team of MMO industry vets?


Food reaches an even more massive audience. And people actually pay for food.

Anyway logging in once a day to feed your pet is the Tamogotchi, not the MMO.

We've all certainly managed to pee in Raph's cheerios and haven't been on-topic since page one.

 :oh_i_see:

Raph's real design challenge is to make a game that everyone won't want to rant about and derail his every conversation for years down the road.  :awesome_for_real:

Pretty much. They were ugly, buggy, unnavigable messes. There were still places in TNN where you could fall through the world even after Atlantis was released. Camelot was slightly better and the other realms capital city was even worse.

Logging in once a day to empty your harvester is different how?

The food analogy is just being pedantic. Might as well talk about air too while you're at it (I'd say water, but people were able to monetize that  :awesome_for_real:)

Facebook is about similar usage patterns. No, there's not a lot of money being there, at all. Too much time just getting free stuff out that people are used to not paying for it. As a result, I suspect social networking sites are the current bubble. HOWEVER, and it's a big ass freakin' "however", the cost to try something is a hell of a lot cheaper. If the game fails, well, it doesn't take a triple-mortgaged house and entire family savings with it. That inspires more to try, more to iterate, and more evolution in general. Ya know, kinda like MUDs.

And this goes back to the other recurring theme you also mentioned: that it takes an outsider to really shake things up. Well, to be an outsider is to also accept that some of the "rules" don't apply to you.

Blizzard was technically an outsider, but only in the sense that this was their first MMO. Given the incestuous nature of this industry, and that Blizzard was already in an adjacent space, I don't think that necessarily applies. Better examples would include Sulake, New Horizons Interactive, and Ganz  :grin:

Yeah but if we stayed on topic, this wouldn't have gone anywhere.

Raph: Let's make a wiki
Others: ok

Thread ends.

Back on the topic of MUDs, and non-DIKUs at that, I have to throw in a favorable mention to two of my favorites.

Genocide - http://geno.org - Pure PVP, everyone picks race/class combo at beginning of each match and is thrown into the world naked.  Run around and grab armor/weapons/items laying on the ground in the different (randomly spawned each time) zones to wear or sell for heals.  Advancement was a points system that was nothing more than e-peen, and at 5,000 points you became a regulator and were immediately given a dev char so that you could design your own area and submit it for consideration to be made active.  Played this for years, loved it, you could log in and play for a match or two or all night.  If you logged in mid-match or died early, there were a host of ascii games to play to pass the time-- connect 4, poker, blackjack, etc.

Ground Zero - Another pure PVP, round-based game with e-peen being the only advancement.  When you logged in you were automatically placed on either the red team or the blue team, and ran around the randomly generated map looking for weapons to take out the opposing team with.  Tanks, Napalm air-strikes, and some other goodies were also lying around.  The end goal was to push THE BIG RED BUTTON that was somewhere between the 2nd and 4th basement floors, guarded by a nasty fucker with an RPG.  Whichever team pushed the big red button set off the nuke, winning the game.  Server reboots and it all starts over again.  Just mindless fun, like Unreal Tourney in text with a much larger, randomly generated map and persistent e-peen points.

Fuck, thats a great idea.

Yeah, but bitching about Raph's ideas is the same old thing.

You'd think with how well that history is documented (read: burned into our brains), we'd not keep repeating it...  :grin:

It's not just Raph's ideas we're bitching about.  :grin:

/necro
I don't know how I missed this thread when it was first out (probably because I was playing WoW too much), but given the heavy discussion earlier about forced downtime and all that, I figure it fits.



Nobody has mentioned ZenMOO?

From http://www.subgenius.com/subg-digest/v4/0027.html:


I never was able to advance in this - either getting kicked off for fidgeting, idling or answering the koans incorrectly.  Was it real or just a perverse joke?

It still bothers me.

Cant be bothered wading through 9 pages of rotting thread...
Anyone mention the MUX's and MUSE's and MUSH's and stuff?
The Battletech and Star Trek ones were excellent for different reasons (the Star Wars ones for some reason always sucked) with gameplay that STILL hasn't been replicated today in the MMOLG industry.

Remember when Facebook games were the future. Lol.

Heh.

They still are.  We didn't mention it was a dystopian future.

So nobody remembers this?


http://www.luckymojo.com/avidyana/gnostik/mud/zenmoo-questionnaire.txt (http://www.luckymojo.com/avidyana/gnostik/mud/zenmoo-questionnaire.txt)

I'm leaning toward perverse joke, but I want to know.

Sounds insane.

When were MUds ever released as feature complete games? And when were they ever finished? Perhaps there were a few, but the MUDs that I remember and played were always works-in-progress. Hell, that was a large part of the fun for some of them.

[edit]Holy fucking fail on my part. I just replied to a post from 2009. *sigh* I'll leave it up for the free mocking fodder. Have at me, jackals.[/edit]

I figure it's fine since we're discussing MUDs.