f13.net

...6 years later.

Full article here (http://www.f13.net/index2.php?subaction=showfull&id=1087930615&archive=&start_from=&ucat=2&).

Edit: Warning, it's long.

Lots wrong in both articles, and a lot right.

All players are whiners, given enough circumstances. All players who take the trouble to try to contact a developer, including and especially those who bother posting on a message board, are consumate whiners and probably closet pedophiles as well. Fuck them in their stupid asses.

Let's repeat this mantra over and over until we get it right.

PVP = GRIEFING is NOT a true statement. PVP is not always inflicting grief, especially in situations where both participants have willingly placed themselves in the line of fire. PVP games who have allowed consensual PVP have succeeded; see Dark Age of Camelot, which still holds a high subscriber number.

I'd try to remember more, but my mind got side-tracked by business on the way to post.

For what it's worth, and though I know it involves some serious contortionism in terms of what the term means, I tend to think of DAoC as more PvE than PvP. I think blocking interrealm communication goes a long way towards de-humanizing the opponent. At the very least, it's quite different from PKing, which is, I suppose, actually what I mean.

PKing is a subset playstyle of PVP. Hell, Everquest at the high end was one of the most cutthroat, nasty, badly-designed PVP games I've ever seen, even if unintentionally so. Even PKing isn't necessarily griefing, especially in a game that only allows consensual PVP.

Some comments about Schild's article-



I am with Raph on this one. A small group of players can be the focus of the adventure (ala NWN), and thus have a greater chance of staying in character and roleplaying. As you add players, the chances that someone is left out of the ongoing events for a moment or 2 (and thus get bored and break character to entertain themselves) go up. Add that to the 'monkeysphere' idea that those outside of the players immediate group/area etc aren't conceptualized as actual people, and thus open to grief by purposely breaking character, and you have a mess.



I love having different languages- it really adds immersion for me. As long as there is a 'Common' language for people, with the race/alignment/guild languages as a separate option, then I am all for it. I actually enjoyed 'learning' other languages in EQ.



I don't like this. The only way to combat this is to bite the bullet and remove the troublesome players quickly and permanently. Ban accounts, ban credit cards, ban billing addresses, ban IP addresses. Griefplay costs SO MUCH money in terms of CS costs and lost subscriptions from people who quit because of it that the loss of a griefer's account should never come into the equation.


I'm spent. I may get to Snow's article later.

What I would really want to know from Raph and Co's is something rather basic.

When it comes to game design, why design online worlds at all?

Seriously, why do one as opposed to a single player game or even a multiplayer title?  At what point to it become commonly accepted that making an online "world" instead of just an online "game" is more desirable?

Is it just the supposition that having a single "long lived, goal oriented online game of wide appeal" will make more money than say 3 single player games released over the same time span?  It is a desire to take on a comlicated and every changing challenge?  Is it about artistic expression?  Observation of online group psychology?  Is it about making some sandbox in the air that the designer have always wanted to play in?  A space where like minded geeks can hang out and have fun?  A visualization of some of our favorite storys we can be in?  An extenstion of the desire to be the DM of a good pnp session?

Seriously what the driving motivation to make these things?

I used to think with the same sort of "wouldn't it be cool if" there was an online D&D world where I could play a character through mind blowing adventures with other cool people any time at all.  I used to think "I can't wait for my own holodeck" or "jack implant" or other nonesense read about in inumerable sci-fi/fantasy books.  Having experienced the reality of a bunch of mmorpg's over a number of years, my wants have changed significantly.  I no longer believe I want a massive game b/c most players i would just as soon not share my game with.  I don't want a massive world that has enough content to take me 2 years to see half of, b/c that generally means I wont be able to DO anything worthwhile in my limited play times.  Well, you get the idea.  

To sum up; I read those laws and there counterpoints and on the whole, find myself saying "hey, your high minded world is getting in the way of my low minded gaming fun".  Maybe I'll be ready for a "virtual world" again, when I have the time for it, like when I retire....

Until then, someone give me a lower cost MtG online already would ya?  Real price for virtual cards; a pox on both their houses!

Xilren

I could reply to a LOT of the points raised in the articles, but I think I'll hold off until there are five pages on the thread. So you better all get posting.

Haemish is right that PvP != grief.

Roleplaying and number of players--this is simple, guys, it's Tragedy of the Commons.

WayAbvPar, disinhibition happens to ALL players. You don't want to ban all of them. You ban the clear problem cases. Everyone else, you try to make into a decent citizen of your game.

Xilren's Twin, because http://www.legendmud.org/raph/gaming/whyimakemuds.html, in my case.

A few opinions (and I'm by no means an expert in anything discussed here).

1.  Possibly they're trying to design worlds because it's easier to keep everyone on the same page about the game.  It only takes a few rules to create a "world" (Fantasy?  Scifi?  Basic gameplay features, etc), then you can derive the rest from them.  And if you're just creating a game, you still need these rules, you still need to decide what environments the players see, what they can do, etc.  

It may be easier for the devs to organize the info/rules as a world.

2.  About PvP.  Most people mean "unrestricted" a la EVE, L2, etc., not "option to duel if you want to" when they use the term "PvP".   And I'm personally starting to think that (unrestricted) PvP, while supposedly great on paper, becomes the biggest pile of crap if implemented.  Because it attracts the griefers.

A lot of the replies in my article are merely to be contrarian. I'm not necessarily in agreement with some of the answers I posted. The real problem as I see it is people stopped thinking outside the box because it's safer inside the box.

At the moment I desire a virtual world. I need a break from the other types of gaming. Unfortunately the only adequate one is Star Wars Galaxies and I swore I'd never play that abomination again. It burned me too much in the year or so I had subscribed.

I refuse to play Second Life because it's trying too hard to be the real world with user created content. 99% of the time, in any game, user created content is crap. Putting it all in one place on one server is just too fricking scary for me to wrap my mind around. Good luck to the people over at Linden Labs, but the idea is just insane.

World of Warcraft is coming up. And I'll put aside my problems with the fanbase and say - what? No player cities? Bugger off. I like being social sometimes. The foozles can wait. I'll probably play the open beta, may even buy the box...probably not though.

Then we have EQII and Tabula Rasa. I fear for EQII being just more of EQ. Unless they are radically changing core systems, I won't touch it with your 10ft. pole. And as for Tabula Rasa, that's probably over a year away.

So at the moment, I'm screwed. Until the next big batch of releases, the MMO scene is looking pretty drab at the moment.

I would go as far as to say that the only thing I really look for in an MMOG is unique experiences. It really doesn't matter what form "unique experience" takes, be it getting griefed, seeing something cool, experiencing a bug, etc. I don't really give a crap about the "game" itself for the most part. When I want a "game" there are plenty of single or multiplayer "games" out there with repetative gameplay.

The governing question should be, "How does X create or help create unique experiences?".


I also think it is rather strange that most MMOG players I've seen don't care for Second Life at all (or downright hate it). I don't play it either but as a concept I think it is pretty cool as it offers the most bang for your buck unique experience wise. I would rather be creating or experiencing unique things vs. playing wack-a-foozle mob #989.

Maybe someone can answer, "What is it about Second Life that turns you off so much?". My theory is the programming aspect of it intimidates people but so far that hasn't been confirmed by anyone.

Nyuk nyuk.



That is the point.  Good job.

I'm with Xilren's Twin with this one. I just want a "game". Just one that carries a little more depth, detail, and is more social than the others (that and I'm probably a little imcompetent (http://forums.f13.net/viewtopic.php?t=724) to participate any further with these type of discussions).



That's a wide variety of interests, and I can admire that. One thing though: I noticed that you didn't mention "gaming". Are MUDs even "games"? If they're not, I'll stop bitching from here on out. Could be that I was never ripped off -- I just happened to buy the wrong product.

Wow, that rule explains a lot.  It's like when you wonder why people used to beat their kids, then you find the childrearing manual from 1800 that says, "Rule 10: Beateth yor childe liberally."

The game is only thing the developer flat out must deliver.  Community can build itself if the will is there, and without the game, there is no will.  

As evidence I offer City of Heroes' Supergroups.  They're totally half-baked;  they do absolutely nothing; they are a costume and a crappy chat channel.   But players will keep limping along with them as long as the game holds their interest.   Could combat have been half-baked, but the Supergrouping a polished gem?

A lot of those other rules are pretty interesting, though.

Costikyan (sp?) has a good article (http://www.costik.com/weblog/2004_06_01_blogchive.html#108794168350520794) along similar lines.

The quote that I think applies to that is his summation:


He also words his statements a little bit better. Let me quote and add a third word to our conundrum as well:


Service, product, game. MMOGs are games. They are also services. They are not a product, or rather, you do not want yours to be, as Greg states better than I. You want to make a subscription game service. So MMOGs are a service, but part of that service is offering your players a game. Other parts include community and a virtual world.

For me, the biggest problem was that it looked like ass and performed extremely poor. I don't want to watch a 3D slideshow. I know that loading all of the unique assets is what impacted framerate, but it was bad and it never got better. Has it gotten any better? Choppy framerate gives me a headache after about 5 minutes. Other than that, I thought it was quite interesting and would have liked to have spent more time with it.

One thing I noticed about the rules is that a few of them mentioned things like "length of the game", implying that the games would be of a finite length and then end.  A little out of place in the current 'expansions forever' business model.

And on the game/world thing, having a world means I can do something permanant to it, and it can do something permanant to me.

Thank you Raph for having written that; that was the kind of honesty I was looking for.  Like Stray said, I think it also illustrates the absolute breakdown of communication between dev's and players quite well.

While I was like to make a sweeping general statement on behalf of players, I can really only give my personal take on this.  What I am looking for is NOT a powerful tool for good or evil, or a even an experience I'll remember 5 years from now.  I'm looking for a game+.

What's a game+ to me; it's an entertaining game at its core, but it has more depth, detail and social aspects to it as Stray said.  The why's are simple.  Increased depth and detail to make the game longer lasting and thus more enjoyable (however, this presupposes the base game is fun in and of itself thus more of it is a "good thing").  The increased social aspect b/c it's more fun to play games with other people (however, there is a huge difference between wanting to play with a few like minded friends and wanting to play with several thousand strangers).

But it IS most definately still a game.  It has to be that first or the rest can't happen b/c I wont be around to look for depth or engage in the social aspects.  This stuff isn't unique to computer games either; think about your beer league softball team, or even your local mtg crew.  Groups of like minded inviduals playing a game with added social aspects.  Yes, you can make friends (and enemies) with your teamates and keep them once the season is over, or once you give up MtG, but you would have never even met those people had it not been for the fun game you enjoyed playing in the first place.  As such isn't it the game which has to be of primary importance as the gateway to all the + stuff?

In short, the game's the thing.



What do you think the average players expectation of signing up for a mmorpg is?  Game, or world?  I think a large part of the eternal dev vs player relationship is nothing more than the two sides having wildly different expectations.  If all I'm expecting is a game and thus don't really give two figs about the "world", odds are I'm not going to behave the way the world proponents would want.

Back to Pascal's wager;  I understant what you are saying about wanting to err on the side of caution, but I disagree with the way it's stated.  See, it's not a simple "either it's a game or it's not".  It's a game plus more.  And because of that, IMHO the best way you can't be qualified to make these things is by making good games first and then working on the additional aspects of them.

Hey, we're right back to designing inside out vs outside in again aren't we?

Xilren
PS Quick, someone throw in 4 more pages so Raph will respond :)

Griefers and people who enjoy PvP may overlap, but they are far from contiguous.

Griefers will find some way to wreck other players' enjoyment in any game. I do not doubt that there are griefers in online chess games. I spent years playing a MMORPG with a "justice" system which, for reasons nobody is entirely clear on, condones stealing but savagely punishes even the mildest profanity. Nearly every "justice" report is in fact a griefing attempt. It's a system that can be used to grief, so it is. If there is anything in a game that a player can do that negatively impacts the fun of another player, whether it's killing their avatar and stealing its stuff, or corking up doorways, or /sending them random insults, griefers will do it.

PvP is simply another tool for the griefers. It makes no more sense to not include PvP because griefers will PK lowbies than it does to not include /say because griefers will swear at people. There are many valid reasons for not having PvP in a game, but griefing is not one of them.

The solution to grief players is threefold:

1. Make it as difficult as possible for them to get what they want.
We all know that players keep playing a game when they get what they want, and quit the game when it's too difficult to get what they want. This applies to griefers as much as the next person. For example, a robust /ignore feature makes insulting random people an mostly worthless mode of griefing. Identify the tools available to griefers in your particular game and make those tools as hard to use and as ineffective as possible.

2. Identify the griefers and ban their asses.
While you're at it, ban their credit card numbers, their IP addresses, their physical addresses, etc., along with their asses. However, this must be done as an admin decision, on a case-by-case basis. Why? Because if you have a "zero tolerance" (= "zero thought", like expelling an honor student for having a nail clipper) policy, that too will become a tool for griefers. They will learn what triggers the "griefer" red flags, avoid them themselves, and manipulate other players into triggering them. Remember: Anything a player can do that negatively impacts another player -- and setting them up to get banned is a huge win -- will become a tool of griefers.

3. Make the game so enjoyable to non-griefers that they will tolerate the (hopefully minimal) level of griefing which exists despite 1 and 2.
Griefers are a negative part of the game, just like bugs, lag, crashes, and all the other things we wish games wouldn't have but, realistically, know that they do and will have. It's an equation: Is the fun of playing the game greater than the non-fun of bugs, lag, crashes (and griefers) or not? If a game is really fun, players will tolerate a lot. If a game is boring, tedious, or just plain not fun, it takes very little to push that balance to the negative side and cause players to go somewhere more fun.

Getting back to PvP: I happen to love it myself. For me, it has nothing at all to do with feeling like I spoiled another player's fun and everything to do with the challenge. Fighting an AI mob, you learn the pattern to kill that mob, or that camp, and do it. Again. And again. And again. Pull. Peel. Kill. Pull. Peel. Kill. Rinse. Repeat. No matter how many times you clear the bridge room in Spindelhalla, the mobs never think "hey, maybe we should do something about that mass murderer out on the bridge." Players, on the other hand, learn. They change. They react to your tactics. If you've ambushed two groups of Hibs at one spot, the third group is probably going to be bigger, buffer, and coming at you from behind.

I tolerated Shadowbane for three months after launch, with its griefers, bugs, broken gameplay, lame content, and all, because of that rare type of fun. It's the reason that people still play StarCraft on battle.net when they long ago tired of it in single-player mode. Competing with other players -- and the easiest competition to implement is PvP -- is a challenge, and it's one that stays fresh a lot longer than any number of fedex quests or kill-foozle missions ever will.

I think Snow is dead wrong on many issues in his counterpoint – most noticeably Identity and PvP. You don’t have to be in character to have an identity, simple fact that you entertain an idea of a game environment and adapt to its rules that are very different from real world demonstrates this fact. With regards to PvP – you are dead wrong. All PvE games strive to challenge players with intricate and complex AIs that fail miserably short of even mediocre player. What gives PvP a bad name is ability to be cheap and sore winners or losers, you eliminate these and you can have rewarding PvP game.

You wouldn't say that if you'd grouped with some of the people I have :) Snarky-ness aside, there are cases of game AIs being toned down because they were too good; players weren't enjoying fighting them.

My point here is that games aren't failing to come up with decent AIs, it seems to be a deliberate choice to keep the players winning most of the time.

If this is the right call or wrong is another matter. I tend to favour the position that things that make the game less fun for more people are bad, there is however an argument to be made for challenge. Something to remember though is that the higher the challenge, the more people you cut out of the game. Equally, if you leave the bar too low, you run the risk of alienating the higher-skilled players.

Here's a very important point, and one I've tried to make for years.

Games build communities, whether or not the game is multiplayer or single-player, whether or not there are specific tools for community-building or even communication or not. Quake clans is one example, but there are thousands of others. Witness the hordes of fanbois of Final Fantasy games, that until recently didn't even have an online multiplayer component; once these fanbois were able to use the Internet, they formed communities of their own. Canasta groups, bridge clubs, miniature gaming tournaments, whatever the case may be, games build community, whether by common interest in the same game, or by direct competition, or by cooperative play.

As a developer, you don't have to do one goddamn thing for your game to form a community. It will happen organically, IF THE GAME IS COMPELLING ENOUGH TO PLAY. Every community-building tool you add to the game is gravy, or as Xilren puts it, it's the + in the game + formula. But the heart of the game, the way it plays, the very stuff that makes it compelling is the absolute building block essential first piece of the puzzle. If that first building block isn't compelling, all the great chat channels and forced grouping and guild tools won't matter.

People have to want to play the game and play it together before they will ever be interested in forming a community. I don't count pre-game release guilds in this because these people are sad and need help. The game they are playing is in their head.



This is true. Developers can either accept that players having a negative impact on other players is a necessity of compelling gameplay or they don't. If they don't, roleplaying is restricted, and you've removed one of the paths people can take to create an interesting experience. Not to mention the fact that removing the negative impact players can have on others removes a tool of retribution against griefers.

Developers have to accept that their will be negative actions on other players. Then they have to find those players whose sole purpose in the game is to cause negative actions that are external to the game world, and ban the fuck out of them.

Preferably with pliers.

Unless your gameplay is based on the existance of communities.  SB's lack of advanced guild tools as the example.

I read the article, but I really must say, I don't agree with a majorty of the revised points.  A lot of it seems to be a bitter stream of attacks on developers for not being perfect.  

  A lot of what is gaming I find is really an art.  It's difficult to master, easy to screw up and impossable to predict.  I think a lot of what Raph said originaly involves that amount of imperfection and unpredictability.  I think basicly it just needs to be taken to as fact that developers can't accurately predict how every change they make is going to work and that no amount of internal testing is going to prepare them to go live.  When money is an issue, not even a focus of a game, some things happen that might otherwise not make logical development sence.  You have deadlines, you have subscription rates, you have a Burn rate to stay alive.  So money changes things in a very drastic way.  Thus, while you can try to predict what should happen in a perfect world, and may even want to excuse the faults of the imperfect world, it should be almost expected that it needs to happen.  For good or ill.

   I think a lot of what the original laws stated, where lost to the author of the revised notes.  I almost feel like it was more a bitter player, who got burnt by a previous game and had to debunk a lot of the realities of gaming was writing this article, then someone who may feel a bit more sympathy to a developers and have more realistic expectations of them instead.  

  I understand that developers CAN do a lot more to make a product, 'perfect', but in the end, I feel it's never, ever honestly going to be the case.  We're at the baby stages of MMOG's right now, nobody really knows how they work or why in absolutes.  We can only hope for the best, but honestly expect the worst.

  Oh, and one last thing, I indeed do blame the Players for a lot of the problems.  Players destroy game more, then developers, They don't have to, it's sometimes not even in their best interest to do so, but oh do they love to do it.  The annonymous nature of the internet breeds Poor behavor.  Plain and simple.

  Sentack

I will attempt to keep my anger over SWG in check long enough to make this a civil post.

I think the problem here is that Raph at some basic level doesn't understand what players are. He expects to build this world of his and see the players merrily running around making it live and breath.

Let's use SWG for an example. He gave us alot of tools for world building. Player cities, very deep crafting system, etc...

That part of the game works fantastic. Problem is, he sorta missed what most players want.

Fun.

It has broken combat, borderline forced PvP, and doesn't at all feel like the source material.

I came to realize this while posting on the boards for my Star Wars guild. The game does a good job of modelling a virtual world. It doesn't do a good job of being a fun Star Wars game. Hell, it doesn't even feel like Star Wars.

I think that I have to totally disagree. It IS a game, first and foremost. If you think it's not you're missing the point, and the players won't be around for long. I think I've moved past anger over SWG to sadness for what could have been. I like many others might not even be lured back by Jump to Lightspeed.

I guess I can play WoW and City of Heroes and just pretend I'm fighting Stormtroopers. <sigh>

I still remember beta. We tried so desperately to tell you that things like HAM weren't what we wanted, but we were told it was already done and couldn't be changed.

Obviously you don't ban everyone the first time they spam the broadcast channel with vulgarities, or even the first time they name their character something offensive that slips by the filters (2 examples of fairly benign griefplay). However, the 2nd offense should be punished severely (like a month's suspension). Anyone found to be using cheats or exploits should be banned (and castrated, if you can find the time).

I almost think a 'Rogue's Gallery' would be helpful- post the name and pic of the character banned (whose account, credit card, IP address, etc have also been banned, of course), along with a brief explanation for their offense. You will get the misanthropist asshats who strive to get on the list, but you will also get some positive effects- your law abiding players will see that the powers that be are taking action to keep the game 'clean', while those who may be 'at risk' to grief occasionally will hopefully be deterred (obviously not a guarantee).



It was an art when Richard Garriott was writing Akalabeth, just to see if he could do it. As soon as he started slapping copies into Ziplock bags and charging people for them, it became a business. No matter how arcane the process of creation, customers are entitled to good service and good products. If they don't get them, they have every right to complain and to stop being customers. If the artists don't want to be bothered, they should give their work away or keep it to themselves. The instant money changes hands, expectations begin.

Actually, I disagree with this.  Players have long adapted to creating their own work arounds for things like community building and maintenance external to the game itself.  While having more advanced guild features in SB would have helped, that wasn't the deal breaker by any means.  Technical issues, boring pve that never ended, and losing a city being a very unfun position to be in/try to recover from was what drove most away, not guild tools.

As Haem said, these communities will form anyway, whether they use in game voice chat or out of game teamspeak is largely immaterial.

Xilren

The fundamental problem that this revisiting of 'the rules' highlights is the the disparity between where MMOGs have come from, and what they have become. The majority of developers have their roots in MUDs. The majority of the players however have never played, nor do they have any desire to ever play a MUD. This can seem like a gulf between player expectations and developer intentions, but it is really the gulf between MUD players and MMOG players.

For example, when asked why he designs MMOGs, Raph points to his reasons for designing MUDs. For the average MMOG player, you may as well point to a recipe for pecan pie.

The MMOG genre is a young one and these are common growing pains. It's like how the first TV shows were televised radio shows. It takes time for a new medium to come into its own. MMOGs will never come into their own as long as developers are stuck in the MUD.

Just because they can, doesn't mean they should have to.  I know that guild tools weren't what killed the game, my point was that if the game is designed so that a community is required in order to be sucessful at the game, than the game better have tools to facilitate the existance of the community.

Shadowbane had a truly staggering number of problems, from bug-ridden software to the admins' naive belief that after 30 days of being ganked the instant they set foot out of a safehold in a futile attempt to level, newbies would actually pay for a continuing subscription. It's sad that the game they promised us for all those years never made it into production. But out of all its flaws, one was the most critical: PvE.

Shadowbane was marketed to people who wanted PvP, more PvP, and as much PvP as any human being could handle. We were then forced to "pay" via time doing something we hated -- PvE -- in order to participate in the PvP that we bought the game for: First incessant PvE to reach high R5, then the constant farming to pay for repairs to your stuff, replacement stuff, etc., not to mention if you had a city to help support. I calculated once that for every hour in PvP I was spending three hours in PvE to pay for it. People should not be forced to do something they hate, to no benefit to themselves or any other player, in order to "earn" a tiny bit of something that they're already paying real money for.

Games are an entertainment medium. When you are playing a game, you should be having fun. Imagine going to a concert by your favorite band and being told that in order to hear them, you were first required to sit through two hours of off-key polka music, and then for every song by the band, there would three more by someone so bad they couldn't open for William Hung. That's what Shadowbane was to a PvP player. I dread to think what it must have been like for someone who hated PvP (there were some there, believe it or not) ... seeing that it had possibly the world's most boring PvE, there was absolutely nothing in it for them except grief.

Now, of course, Shadowbane is being trotted out as "proof" that PvP games won't work, that nobody really wants PvP, etc. But it wasn't PvP that killed SB ... it was the inescapable, unavoidable, and mind-numbing hour after hour after hour of PvE.

= Mordechai =

Good articles but to be honest, trying to teach Raph how to design online games is a lost art.

Raph, don't tell me where to put my commas, and we'll get along just fine.

Both games.slashdot and you all seem to think that I'm trying to teach Raph something. I'm not, I was trying to get you all, and whoever else was interested to think outside the box. Some of you are, some of you aren't (talking about fucking Shadowbane - an abomination on mmogaming is NOT thinking outside of the goddamn box). Many would say there hasn't been an original thought about mmorpgs in 3-5 years. Yet, many of us still stick around getting donkey punched every time a new game is released. Why? You probably won't admit it, but it's because you have hope for the future of online worlds. Well, I wrote that article because I'm starting to completely lose hope - when you don't see an original idea for the better part of a decade, you start getting angry. I don't know where I'm going with this but uhm....carry on.

Still not answering the articles. :)

Soukyan, Stray, and others: online worlds are a medium, a platform. Games are one of the things that can be put in them. They are the commonest thing, of course, but they are not the only thing. By and large, MMOs are currently not doing games as well as single player games are, in large part because MMOs have a wide array of other things that go in them as well, and divided attention means less effort towards any given element.

I am a big fan of games. I've been playing video games since the mid-70s, and I've been making videogames since the early 80s. I love games. I have a great deal of respect for games as an important part of human culture, and think they can stand honorably on the shelf with Shakespeare and Mozart and Picasso. I am not, however, going to fall into the trap of thinking that online worlds ARE games in themselves. They are not, as can be shown by countless basic experiments, the two of the most obvious being:

- logging into Second Life or There or Cybertown or Alphaworld, or any other online world whose basic premise is not "game"
- imagining the addition of a working chessboard into any existing online game, which demonstrates a nesting principle

Xilren's Twin, I appreciate that you are not looking for a powerful tool for good or evil. I'm saying that whether you (or we) like it or not, this happens to be one. It happens to be used for games too, which I am perfectly happy about. "Just a game" is used as a way to avoiding considering a lot of issues, as a way to avoid responsibility, and that is why I dislike the phrase. But by no means do I think that lessens the importance of games in and of themselves, cf http://www.legendmud.org/raph/gaming/theoryoffun.pdf.

You state that the best way to approach this is to make a good game first. I'll assert that from a strictly technical and design point of view, you literally can't. You have to start with the premise of the online space itself, and then add the game to it. And there's a TON of implications of the online space that you have to deal with that form what sorts of games you can make. "Online world" is more fundamental than "game" in a lot of very literal ways.

Haemish, I've stated before that "community is the one thing you get for free." Any time you have shared interests and a medium of communication, you will get community. That said, it's sort of like saying "it's gonna rain." The shape of the ponds, rivers, lakes, fountains, pools, and so on are very very much dependent on the landscape you create for it to rain on. The longevity of the community, its ability to grow, to police itself, its stickiness to a given location, all those things are very much driven by the design you do up front. Community just happens in the real world too, and yet we spend a lot of effort on urban planning, city government, and so on. There's a reason.

Notice I didn't say that the shared interest had to be a game.

Xil, apropos the above, this starts to matter a lot when community sticking in one place = revenue.

That said: Riggswolfe, saying what I just did does NOT mean that the game is not important. It is, especially because it's being marketed as a game and it's what you guys are all there to find. By saying these things, I am trying to fight the urge many many people have to reduce the issues, because being reductionist about it leads to wrong answers.

Wukong, there's very few significant differences between MUD design and MMO design. Almost none, actually, given that  there have been graphical muds. The fact that modern MMO players get hung up on text versus graphics is (sorry) an indication that they are being superficial about things and not looking at the issues. Think of the differences as being like the differences between making a black and white movie and a color movie. Or a musical versus a play. Both are still theater, and the majority of the same issues of staging, lighting, acting, seating patrons, curtain calls, props, a script, and so on are the same.

Arc, "a lost art"? Doesn't that mean that someone somewhere had it before, and we forgot how to do it? I'm trying to figure out your phrasing here. (I realize that's not a comma nitpick but a word choice. Nyah nyah.)

Schild, to be honest, you don't know what shape box I am thinking of these days anyway. Tim Burke in his essay about SWG said something like "I'm getting pretty annoyed at the difference between what Raph says and what the games are like." There's a largish gap between what a given person wants to make and what  they say, just as there's a gap between what they want to make and what they actually get to make. I realize you're frustrated. I happen to believe that the pace of change, albeit slow, is not as bad as it seems.

You are correct in this. All I'm saying is you don't HAVE to add community tools for a community to form. Which means that when you base most of your design on forcing people to form the type of communities you want them to, you have already fucked the pooch. You cannot adequately direct the formation of a community in the design stage. You are better off providing a modular system that allows the designer to add important features to the community system once you actually have gameplay that doesn't suck monkey balls.

If the gameplay is golden, community will form regardless of your attempts to steer it one way or the other.

Shadowbane's guild tools sucked monkey balls, so people used Teamspeak. But even with monkey-ball level guild tools, there were still huge guilds created, because the gameplay required it. EQ's guild tools were even worse, yet there's been a cottage industry of web tools that helped, such as Guildmagic, Guildportal, EZBoard, etc. none of which could have been forseen by the designers beforehand.

For an MMOG to release today, it has to have guild tools at least as good as EQ's; that's because the market has already developed a standard set of 'must-have' features. But even if it didn't, an MMOG will create a community all on its own. Better gameplay will create stickier communities, and better community tools will enhance that as well.

But it has to start with better gameplay, not better community tools.

It's not frustration so much as just plain lost hope. Eventually I'll write an essay I've been planning to write, and that's that MMORPGs can save or break PC Gaming. To put it very shortly, with the inevitable addition of a keyboard and mouse to the console and HDTV's looming as a living room necessity, there are only 2 types of games that will save PC Gaming. RTS' and MMORPGs. Why? Well, after the Xbox debacle of putting a hard drive in at launch, they ended up with modded systems that went against their wildest imagination.

Large MMOGs and RTS' REQUIRE hard drives. Loading times from a cd/DVD on a console would be unacceptable. That said, the pace of change isn't just slow, it's unbearable. Every game that comes out makes 1, maybe 2 changes on a previous concept. That wouldn't be a problem if it were a game every 6 months or so. But BIG MMOGs come out about once every five years. I can list the number of big MMOGs that are worth their salt on my 10 fingers. Smaller companies don't have the money to back them up if an experimental idea comes across as trash. Big companies do. SOE, NCSoft, and Microsoft (who as of yet has produced nothing - THOUGH, they do have the money to make collosal mistakes) are the only companies that can really innovate. Blizzard may have the backing to innovate, but they never do, they only refine concepts and ideas.

What I'm seeing with Everquest 2 is promising - there are some really neat concepts including the way guilds are structured and the way housing/community buildings is handled. But I still worry that the combat will be the same crap we've seen over and over again. City of Heroes was a step in the right direction, but after a player got their favorite skills set up in an orderly fashion, the grind really started to show. What killed longevity in CoH was it's complete lack of or care for building a community with tangibles (i.e. guild halls, housing, etc).

Star Wars on the other hand got community building and crafting right (after a long while) but the core combat system was so horrible, it literally drove people away. Coupled with the complete lack of interesting content, it was just a disaster (maybe not financially). I'm a big fan of good content. If you're only going to have a little, make it the best damn content you can produce. If you're going to have a lot, make sure it's all at least interesting, if not compelling.

What we don't need is a trickle of improvements. What we need is a flood of changes that completely tear down the past monuments of core gameplay and replace them. A new way of counting advancement is a good start, but combat is really the key. Compelling combat in a game will put the game a cut above everything else out there.

Simply put - core systems need to be changed, not the frilly lace around the edge.

Edit: sigh, Haemish said exactly what I wanted to say right above me. Verbosity is hard.

Yup.

IMO at this point in MMOG's the industry isn't in need of original ideas, so much as it's in need of well executed ideas.  It just seems that for every game that has problems due to the design, there's two or three more that have problems due to piss poor coding.

Raph, we agree that there are "very few significant differences between MUD design and MMO design". We disagree on whether this is a good thing. According to your analogy, the music in a musical is best treated as an afterthought. Perhaps like the G in your MMOs.

A concrete example is better than dueling analogies. The MMOG I am most looking forward to currently is Guild Wars, which is coming from a different tradition than MUDs. While it is justly criticized for being a glorified matchmaking service, and in that sense also suffers from radio-with-pictures syndrome, it does show that there is more than one way to skin a catass.

It's not a value judgement; I'm speaking in terms of the shape of the field, and you're speaking in terms of the choices made within that field. My assertion is that "there are very few significant differences between the choices you can make in MUD design and the choices you can make in MMO design." In fact, I would go so far as to say there are zero, since to me MUD does not imply text.



I would not at all say that the music is an afterthought in a musical! Nor are the graphics or the scale afterthoughts in MMOGs.



I only played the instanced parts of Guild Wars, so I don't know enough about it.

- If Guild Wars has no gameplay in its central lobby, then it's barely an MMOG at all, and is instead more like Diablo, which is usually used as the dividing line for the medium. That's not skinning a cat, it's skinning a different animal. cf http://www.legendmud.org/raph/gaming/book/4c.html (haven't you people memorized my entire website yet? Sheesh).

- If it has gameplay in its lobby, then it's like Tabula Rasa or the cancelled Might & Magic Online, or the cancelled version of D&D Online, an MMO where most all the gameplay is in instanced areas. That's off at the extreme end of the "world versus instancing" debate going on these days, but it is indeed still skinning a cat.

This is why I like to call the cat "online worlds" these days rather than MMO or MUD.

Raph:

If "fun" can only last until a pattern is recognized in the gameplay, then how is Tetris explained? People just go on playing it. Also, if this rule applies to MMO gaming as well, then why is it that this genre in particular is the most notorious in encouraging repetition? If what you say is true, then repetition is easiest way to kill the fun.

If ideas for an MMO equivalent of "Tetris" isn't on the horizon yet, then the least that could be done is incorporate a larger variety of game modes/patterns (instead of just one), and keep repetition to a minimum. At least that way you keep the "gamers" around longer, rather than never.

I don't want to discount the importance of "worlds". Perhaps they are more important than the "game". And in the case of SWG, one can not argue the amount of variety to keep "world" type players around. It's definitely entertaining in that respect. The thing is (and this might not always be the case in the future), the "gamers" probably outnumber the "inhabitants" 5:1 (just pulling the number out of my ass, sorry)...Yet, the amount of depth and variety in the "game" is the same thing over and over again (and that "same thing" is pretty unimaginative to begin with). Nothing wrong with sticking with your ideals, but there's a large playerbase now that wants something else.



Aw hell..That sucks. Is this "insider news"? I didn't know it was canceled.

I guess I still don't grasp the why of that.  Since you have full control over the online space itself and what is even possible for people to do within it, why can't you start from a game focus and build an online space that is appropriate to the game around it?  

It can't be just persistance of the gamespace.  After all, what's the main difference between an online "world" and a multiplayer game with a shared lobby where players can meet, greet, chat and head off into their own private games ala playing Diablo or Neverwinter Nights online (both have persistance of character)?  [I'm very interested in the way Xbox live seems to be headed where you can message people playing a variety of games to come play with you in a totally different game.  There will be a case where the community is totally independent of a given game, but still depends on games to exist.]  Is Planetside or WWIIO an online "world" or just a multi-player game you can do online with lots of people? Where is the crossover point where something stops being a large scale online game and instead become an online world? And more importantly, why should the players care if it's either?  

I'm starting to believe the real issue is truly these things are being marketed and sold to the wrong people.  Lord knows when I first heard about EQ it was always from the premise of "it's like a GAME of D&D online!" or "it's an online Ultima game!"  not "its a virtual community that has some lite D&D elements in it!".  Should we have a new section in Babbages between the "Computer Games" and "Business Applications" sections called "Online Communities"?

Or are we just overcomplicating the whole genre because we want to?

Xilren

I too don't agree with Ralph, but not because of your reasons, which I disagree.

You state that you have the full control over the online space itself, but in reallity you don't (1) need to have that control, and (2) should have that control, because having it is taking control out of the users.

But I disagree with Ralph because he says that you have to start with the premise of the online space itself, but I think you don't have nor should start with that premise: the online space can be mutated on-the-fly.

There's no difference. There are two kinds of multiplayer games: those in a virtual world (like Diablo) and those with no world involved (like Tetrinet). While the latter can be quite addictive, virtual worlds are the future of games.

When you install WWIIO you're installing the virtual world and the game that occurs there. Virtually you can discuss more on this, but what matters in the end is the fact that WWIIO is one of those online games which occur in a virtual world.

And the problem is that it's not even a marketing issue here, it's the lack of undertanding of what really happening there, many times by the game developers themselves. There's quite a lot of theroy behind virtual worlds that should be carefully studied before starting making one. That rarelly happens.

No, but Virtual Worlds (where you can have "Online Communities" can be used to do both Games or Business.

It's not a question of "genre", Virtual Worlds are quite bigger then the world of games, and quite ancient too (they are dated from well before there are computers...

Read, for instance, the book Out of Control (http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/0201483408/ref=sib_dp_pt/104-9338675-8467906#reader-page) (specially the 13th Chapter) by Keven Kelly to have a sight of what I mean.

Virtual worlds are the future of gaming about as much as Flight Simulators are the future of gaming (which is what...down to like one consumer title?). They very well might be the future of "something", but if the current trends keep up, it isn't going to be in "gaming".

Well it feels like what you say and the end product of your actions is different. SWG feels to me like a virtual simulation with some game-like elements tacked on as an afterthought, with paying attention to the Star Wars license running a distant third (Large areas of wilderness on all worlds, missions that for the most part are "run out in the wilderness, kill X critters, destroy their lair, run back", Stormtroopers that really are elite (Luke Skywalker was a farmboy and he mowed them down like they were department store dummies.).

My suspicion is that somewhere along the way SWG turned into sort of a grand experiment and somehow lost the two things it needed most:
1) Game fun factor
2) Star Warsiness.

I don't necessarily think you're a bad developer. You have some great ideas, particularly in the community building tools you provided. I just think that perhaps your vision is a bit too narrow. At least from my experience. If I remember right you were also involved in UO and that suffered from similiar problems. Especially the concept of players policing themselves. The problem with that concept is that to be honest, most players are immature assholes these days who care only about the next uber thing and little about how they treat other people.

If I may say so, maybe what is needed is someone like you developing the player community building tools, and someone like the COH devs building the combat side.

If SWG had had COH combat in it, and the current community tools, along with say the WoW loot system, and the current SWG crafting tools, with lots of attention paid to making it feel like Star Wars (At least HALF the wilderness areas gone, most misisons involving humans or aliens, not wildlife, more technology everywhere, creature handlers pared way back) then I suspect it would be a game that people would play for years.

Take a step back and think about it. Seriously. Wade through the message boards and try to figure out what people are saying. I suspect if you really put your mind to it you'd see that what they're saying boils down to "Great world, terrible game".

I'd like to have both thank you very much.

So, you must start with a world and then you can build games within that? Am I understanding it correctly?

I'm thinking of the phenomenon of some LP MUDs... bear with me. You start with a game framework. Is this a world? Not per se. Or do you consider the framework, the codebase an online space in and of itself?

I'm just wondering because here is a framework that you can take and allow players to build a world from it, and this has been done. Some LP MUDs have taken the codebase (or the game) and allowed player builders to literally build the world from scratch.

How does this apply to MMOGs? Is this more of a comparison to Second Life and therefore not a game? Even though the code for combat model and advancement scheme typical of RPGs was there, does allowing the players to build the world make it not a game?

I'm not saying MMOG devs should make the framework and let the players build a world. Hell, just look at Second Life. That's certainly not what I want. I'm just floating some ideas out there to find out if it's possible to build a world around a game. I should think so even in an online environment.

Here's an even simpler point. The D20 system. It's a game system - a framework - around which worlds are built. Is this not possible in MMOGs? If not, why?

I'm not trying to say you are wrong here. I am trying to better understand your approach and to gain a bit of insight from your experience in the development of these things. Thanks in advance.

Tetris keeps upping the challenge level, and you discover you didn't know the pattern as well as you thought. It keeps you in a state of "flow." That isn't very different from an RPG throwing more creatures, spells, weapons, and so on at you (thought more elegant, since it accomplishes it purely via speed).

That said, plenty of people moved on to other types of puzzle games once they thought they "got" Tetris. I remember on the Mac one of the most popular Tetris variant was one that included invisible blocks, rows that scrolled sideways, pre-placed blocks, blocks that exploded, and so on. That's exactly like throwing more monsters in. Not to mention all the zillions of OTHER puzzle games thatcame out inspired by Tetris. I used to keep a collection--hexagonal ones, stripper ones (blocks formed a picture), true 3d ones, 2d on multiple axes (Welltris), etc etc etc.



The content is supposed to be what breaks up the repetition. There's supposed to be a difference between killing the level 1 rat and the level 1 cat. Beyond that, there's supposed to be a difference between the level 1 rat and the level 2 dog. Same broad pattern, but the details are different. If you are at the point where you an see that it's the same, then you've grokked the entire mechanic, and now we need to give you a whole fresh mechanic. But mechanics are MUCH harder to come up with than ringing changes on a single mechanic.



The risk then is not doing any given mechanic as well as you ought. I name no names and point no fingers, since I am sure you will all point them for me. :)



That is a version of D&D Online that was cancelled uh, five years ago? Not the current one.



You can. But you're still starting from the premise that it's an online space in the first place. Diablo, for example, does NOT start from that premise. Its initial premise is a text chat lobby. The games hang off the lobby.



The persistence of everything else BEYOND the character. Most fundamentally, the persistence of the world in which you interact, whilst you are not present. It can be summed up in "stuff can happen while you're not there."



Both of them are online worlds, and meet all the criteria in the expanded definition on my website at http://www.legendmud.org/raph/gaming/book/3c.html.



For me, when any one of those three criteria is not met. Notice that the criteria take a chapter EACH to explain, so don't expect me to be able to give a one-line answer.



So they know what they are playing? :) So they can know what sorts of experiences can be offered, really.



Not really. Every new medium has always gotten its kickstart via entertainment, despite all the potentially lofty uses to which it can be put.



You are misunderstanding my term there, I apologize. The online space can be mutated, but the premise that it is an online space in the first place cannot be mutated.



You missed my distinction entirely. Diablo isn't really a virtual world.



Quite humbly, I will assert that I know that more intimately than most people on the planet. *shrug*



Tell me that in five years, when you're paying cash for uniforms in your console football game. ;)



I think I started a paragraph with almost this exact phrasing a ways back, didn't I?



I suspect a more accurate conclusion is that it's too wide.



For one, it was intended to. It is, sadly, a bit harder to do than to say.

For another, I wrote a very similar sentence not half an hour ago in an internal email here at work. I used slightly different examples, but the gist was the same.

How did this thread turn into being about me, rather than about the Laws? Schild, is this all because you feel personally betrayed by me, the great white hope? ;)



There are technical assumptions in the LP codebase that DO imply a world. It uses a room-based database. It provides the concept of location out of the box, below the mudlib level even, if I recall correctly. It provides the concept of people and objects within these spaces. It provides the concept of connecting spaces via logical links. At the very least, it is a hypertextual system with a presumption of spatiality embedded in the code.



That is why I call these technical platforms "online worlds" and not games. That is an important point--I call the TECHNICAL PLATFORM that, I call the MEDIUM that.



OK, start with a game, maybe our example from earlier, Tetris. Now, try to build Tetrisworld around it. Is Tetris something you walk up to within the world? That instantly implies a whole host of things about the space within which you walk. In fact, significantly more code and work than Tetris itself. Which is within which? For my money, Tetris is within the virtual world, and you could follow up by plopping Bejeweled right next to it, and nobody would bat an eye. Keep going, and you'll end up with Puzzle Pirates. :)



Worlds aren't built around the D20 system. The D20 system is applied to worlds. This is evident in the vast number of existing settings which have had the D20 rules imported into them.

Speaking topologically, the way to think of it is "which element changes"? And the answer is, the enveloping element changes. The setting is tweaked to absorb the D20 ruleset. The D20 ruleset remains intact (you can change it, but it's by choice, not by force). The world changes to absorb the foreign element. This is why I often use the example that given the right virtual world, you could literally implement every other game ever made within it, because it has a metaphor that trumps everything else. You can embed the Web within a virtual world pretty easily. You can embed another virtual world within one. In theory, the only thing you cannot embed within one is the real world.

The same is not true of the formal boundaries of an individual game. You cannot embed the Web within the rules of Tetris, much less embed Call of Duty. They will rightfully be perceived as two things sitting side by side.

That's the power of the virtual space metaphor.

Raph, you are in the position to control the future of online worlds at SOE, if we don't look to you who will we look to? Garriot? You may be in an ivory tower, but at least yours isn't on planet Krypton. None of us know where the hell Garriot is and he sure as shit doesn't frequent here.

It's not really about you so much as you wrote many of the laws, so who else will we turn to in this particular conversation? Also, when I said think outside the box, I meant all the people here, not just you. Conjecture on your part may be fun though.

Bwa ha ha! *wipes tear from eye*

Thanks for the egoboo, though. :)



Well, I shoulda called out Snowspinner, not you:

"Counterpoint: Koster is an idiot"
"Koster's got his head up his fucking ass"
"I have a lot of respect for Raph Koster" (really?)
"Where Koster Fucked Up"
"I will err on the side of insulting Raph Koster."
"Koster, as we’ll see, does a lot of dreaming" (OK, that's true)
"he should stop pretending, and start making some fucking games."
"He’s too smart to waste on this shit." Arguably.

To which I must only point out that when I've insulted any of you, I have done so in higher-flown language, subtler terms, and usually speaking in generalities. I'm good that way. :)

Probably. I just reread and you said something somewhat similiar yes.




Perhaps. I suspect we're looking at things from different perspectives. You from a dev standpoint, myself from a player standpoint. I'd like to think I'm a fairly average player, I like to explore, I like to socialize, I like to build up my character, show off my avatar. ( I don't like PvP and most of that can be tied back to UO and my general distrust of other gamers being in positions of power over me, which is really what PvP boils down to but that's another thread in itself).

I guess what I'm getting at is that with SWG at least it feels like the game part of things was pushed to the wayside for the virtual world part of things. I don't know a better way to say it. I held alot of venom for the SWG devs, you in particular, over the course of this thread I've decided that maybe you aren't Satan incarnate. Maybe you tried and other things got in the way. (Though if you could explain why HAM was implemented it'd go along way. )



Man, I'd pay good money to see that email. Well, actually, i will once I get a good IT job. Heh. In any case, I suppose it's about you because they're your rules, and it's about SWG because that is the latest product with your name attached. (To my knowledge at least.)

Raph, I wouldn't tear into you if you weren't damn good at what you do, and if I didn't respect you.

But give me a break. This is still, in many ways, a rantsite. Rantsites are tetchy/bitter/profane affairs. If this were being discussed on MUD-DEV, that would be one thing. If it were being discussed in an academic journal, or at GDC, that would be one thing. But it's not. I've made the same points in a variety of ways. This was a rant. It said "fuck" at a lot of things. If you want a similar argument, only with less "fuck" and more Lacanian psychoanalysis, i've got an article coming out soon. Or if you want me to make the point in another forum, that's fine too. I don't care. I'll even make my basic point again, here, without any use of the word fuck.

Games are things we play with. The most fundamental aspect of any online game - more fundamental than its world-like nature, than its community, than anything else - is exactly what sort of play it's offering. Communities form around play. Worlds form around play*.

It's the difference between inventing Pong and inventing the arcade. The arcade is a social experience. Pong is a game. Atari did not create the arcade. It created Pong. And the social experience of the arcade machine followed organically from Pong, from games like Pong, and from the sorts of people who enjoyed playing them.

You can influence all of those things. But you can't design them. You can only design the objects they form around.

*Consider the latest Zelda game as an example of this. Hyrule does not have a particularly rich history or culture. In fact, the world of Hyrule doesn't make a lot of sense in and of itself. What it basically consists of is a few broad strokes of epic fantasy (genre), some references to past Zelda games (Also genre, though a more specific sort of genre), and a bunch of stuff that stems directly from design decisions - a lot of oceans, because the game was built around wind. Dungeons, because it's an epic fantasy game. A town, because it allows for a bunch of puzzles to find pieces of heart. Etc, etc, etc. The world of Hyrule exists only because of these gameplay decisions. I think this is also why so many licensed games are of poor quality - their gameplay is stemming from their world, instead of their world stemming from gameplay choices.

I'll try to move off the "game" vs "world" thing for a minute:



I'll agree with schild that it's more fun to break it down to individual skills, not just classes. Of course, this has been done to some extent before. But the way I see it, that's just multiple modes of expression for character builds, not gameplay really. "Rogues", "Warriors", "Mages" are still doing the same thing -- Just one route gives you daggers, another a sword, another a spellbook -- It's just damage, with a few minor differences.

Maybe an example would better illustrate: Take a Smuggler (or Rogue)

He gets a mission that says the Sand People have acquired a valuable piece of droid technology from a crash site. He gets a fat sum if he acquires it...So, he gets to the camp, there's a small tent, with 5 Sand People standing outside. He should have multiple ways of taking these guys out:

1. Come in like Rambo and start blasting with his pistol, using his unique attacks
2. Get a friend for some help and proceed with step 1
3. Create a diversion and distract them (throw a rock, set up a hologram, etc.)
4. Find a path to stealth his way through and try to steal the object
5. Disguise himself as one of them, say a few words in their own language to calm their suspicions, and steal the object when it's safe

1 and 2 are current options, but what about 3, 4, or 5? Better yet, any combo of those things, where success depended upon a specific sequence.

The game a Rogue plays and the game a Mage plays should be the difference between light and day (or at least the options open to each should be that much different). It could still be a matter of attributes, attacks, or equipment, but the nature of these things as they are now don't set classes or skills too far apart from another. That helps neither the gameplay nor the world aspect.

The same goes for crafters. A player deciding to move from Bio Engineer to Architect should be confronted with an entirely new interface, and a whole new slew of puzzles. Not the same ole, same ole point-and-click fest with a different set of recipes/items he can use.

I want to play in a virtual world - not just play any kind of game. I want to be part of a story that plays in a virtual world.

The problem with virtual worlds, as I see it, is the static way they are build today. Nothing ever changes, and nothing the player does has an influence on the world.  
How can you tell a story in which the evil overlord gets killed each day at the same time, shared by guilds in a rotation ?
How fun - and rewarding - can quests be if they are the same for everybody, and the solution is available on the web anyway ?
How fun can combat be, if you have to kill the same enemy a thousand times to advance ?
How fun would tetris be, if the stones fell in exactly the same order each game ?

There are ways to make the world less static, and so far mostly pvp has been the way to do it. In DAOC fighting other players was random, it was fun - until everybody fell into repetitive patterns of emain ganking and portal camping.
Shadowbane had the pvp right, but a pve zones were to obviously copy-and-pasted onto the map that it never really felt like a world to me.
SWG had a world with random content - but it was to much instanced to be immersive, which totally reversed the motivation. I went to a mission terminal to make me a stormtrooper camp to clear - not to find out which rebel npc needed aid. I could select and refuse missions to get just the right npc's I wanted to fight. In fact, the world for me was not random anymore - I could select which content I wanted to have.
Player-created content and pvp though was great, allthough I'm a bit cynical about it. The TEF system allowed me to kill people who didn't really want to fight at all. The player cities with their imp/rebel bases were great opportunities to just travel around and fight random people.
Still, SWG is the best virtual world for me, and I would have stayed longer if the Jedis didnt have perma death at the start, or if the Krayt-soloing and AT-ST smacking with my swordsman had not been nerfed so badly.

My perfect virtual world would be like a big, 10-sided RTS game, mostly controlled by the server, where players are the heroes.

SWG was too instanced? I suspect you don't understand the meaning of the term. It didn't have instancing until very recently with the Rebel Blockade Runner.

As for the rest of your pro-PvP arguments. Bleh. I disagree. While MMORPGs are more about time invested and less about skill I'll avoid PvP like the plague. Give me a call when it becomes more skill-based and maybe I'll consider it then. As it is, I just don't have the patience to deal with the little sociopaths who tend to participate in PvP.

Alright, let me try this.  If we took Diablo's persistant text lobby and simply replaced it with a persistant shared town of Tristan so you can walk around and see other avatars without adding any other abillities for the players, would that now make it a world like your HoloMud example?  Or would you have to add other abilities for it to make the jump,  i.e. they can chat, create and enter instance map sessions same as always, but now they can trade items and use the Horadic cube (but no combat and npc's).  

That's not only a pretty fine and arbitrary distinction, but it really doesn't seem to change anything about A) how the game is played or more importantly B) how it would have had to be designed.

Planetside and WWIIO appear to me like they were designed as "game first, build world around them" b/c the world parts are pretty minor and the focus is clearly on the game.  Yet, they are "online worlds".  Which why I'm having a hard time grasping why designing in that manner wouldn't be better to acheive better games within online worlds.  Yes, they would not neccesarily be better worlds overall but right now it's the games part I'm primarily interested in.

SWG is clearly a world with game elements.  But I have to wonder, if the world depth was scaled way back and there were several great game within it, would it be more popular?  Say you move your avatar through the world to visit various planets and play incorporated versions of SWG themed games: i.e. a rebel vs imp shootout game (i.e. fps), a jedi flavored combat game (i.e. JK2), landspeeder racing game, and space combat game (xwing vs tie fighter).  You could still socialize in a cantina or go hunting in the wilds, I suppose, but when I think of Star Wars, those are the activities that come to mind I would want to do within the SW world.  But obviously, that's a totally different animal design from the ground up.  I do wonder which version of SWG the market would prefer.  Yes, I know adding JTLS is moving it in this direction, but again, it's a difference in approach, world first game second

My point being, IMHO it's not a right or wrong answer as to how you design it, but it definately needs to be a concious decision since everything stems from that first choice.
 
Sidebar, as large companies like NCSoft and SOE offer more and more games under a single umbrella, i dont think it will be long before we start seeing the worlds within worlds concept appear.  I.e. You log on Sony's station and can walk around a sapce station setting worldspace with an avatar chatting and interacting with others before deciding to enter EQ2 or SWG or whatever.

Xilren
PS Thanks for posting raph despite the barbs and arrows slung your way; I dont think any of us would be here if we weren't all interested in these animals no matter what nomenclature we use

Now that your all ready to bumpfuzzle Raph again and the topic has seemed to drift into game/world discussion, I would like to point out that Mulligan tried pretty hard a few years back to make these very points.

And the result we got from an apparently unswayed Raph was SWG. Yes, I know there were lots of reasons beyond design that SWG ended up the way it is. But it is what it is and actual work results are really all that customers can judge by.

What we need here is hope. Hope that the next generation of these games will actually offer something approaching the combinations of world and games mentioned in this thread. We all seem to recognize this is the direction needed, even to the point of  internal corporate memos apparently.

So is there any hope? And if so what?

This thread became about Raph the minute Raph spoke up. :) Everyone with an axe to grind about SWG turns the thread into "What SWG did wrong." Same as it ever was.

I'm firmly of the mind that you design game first, then modify the world to fit around that. Your world and its community, as Snowspinner said, will develop organically, with or without developer help. Your game won't. While there will be people who will play the game differently than you envision (see EQ and the rise of camping), you will have much more control over the way they play the game than the way they use the world space.

If you build the game first, you can concentrate solely and wholeheartedly on the game aspects, and those are the aspects that take up the most time and effort from a player. When you build the world and try to populate it with multiple game objects, the objects take less precedence than the whole. Since "the play is the thing," to quote the bard badly, you want to be concentrating on making the play the absolute best it can be, EVEN IF IT MEANS SKIMPING ON THE WORLD AND SETTING.

Shadowbane had great lore, but the gameplay didn't match it.

I still play SB and manage to enjoy it. While I agree that forcing boring PvE on a player base was an issue I disagree that it was important factor. It was a factor, and developers finally realized and addressed this issue by increasing all exp X1.5 and decreasing repair cost by /10 and reducing city upkeep by /10. Devs are also in process of adding resource system that will allow earning gold via PvP-centered system. So if PvE was the only thing that drove you out it is safe to come back now, after leveling your character you can now completely avoid killing another mob.

Other more important issues are not as easy to address or remedy as fixing excessive PvE. In my book buggy start and ‘play to crush’ beta players were #1 reason why SB did not retain that many players. Most crashes are fixed, with lag addressed to the point that large scale fights are playable and do not cause chain of sb.exes. I haven’t seen a single crash on my system for over a month but some system configurations, especially Macs, seem to have more problems than others. Almost all beta players are gone by now and current players are less inclined to strive to dominate knowing that it leads to boredom and loss of players. Still damage is done – buggy release and beta players hell bent crushing newbies trying to learn the game made sure that a lot of people won’t ever try SB again.


If we should learn anything from SB is that for a world or a game to be there it should be stable. Buggy releases will cost you more subscribers than implementing few features into post-release. I think stability > content, especially in PvP game.

Another lesson should be that in PvP game loosing should not be excessively punishing on the looser and rebuilding should be easy. I think SB lost more people to beta guild juggernauts burning down cities and chain banning all attempts to rebuild than anything else. Rebuilding was really hard in SB at the start, it is now made easier by merchant cities and shorter ranking times but devs acted too slow.

What should be learned by Shadowbane is what was learned by the early days of UO. Unrestrained PvP is not the way to make a good game. Human nature being what it is you end up with a sort of Lord of the Flies syndrome going on. Add to that, that it is much harder for new players to come into PvP-centric games and you have a losing proposition. It astounds me that anyone is surprised by Shadowbane's total failure.

I've mostly gotten past that mindset, partly because of this thread, partly from remaining in contact with my SWG guild. I am curious about the combat design of SWG, and the mission design, as in, who did it and why was it ever approved, but I'm past the anger phase and am now in more of a saddened phase, with a tiny bit of hope that maybe they'll come out with SWG: The Special Edition! which will have no HAM bar to start with.

Not to derail further, but Shadowbane's failures are not a direct result of unrestrained PVP.   Too much PvE, buggy client, lackluster performance in raids, impossible to build up once you've been "crushed", etc etc.  There was no pig head on a pole, but there was a shit ton wrong with it.

Your second point, however, is correct.  PVP centric games have a higher barrier to entry.   If you do not come into the game with some sort of exterior/interior support structure (ie a guild), you're going to have a rough time of things (unless you're just a griefer, then HAVE A BLAST).  This was magnified in Shadowbane due to the neccessity of cities.

Don't get me wrong. I want that too.

I just don't think that electronic gaming is a medium that's capable of providing that. Especially not on the massively multiplayer scale.

Not yet anyway.  Unfortunately, a good virtual world implies some things that mean it should take a lot of time, meaning neglect of the real world.  It's very difficult to have a virtual world without people, or with people that are only there for an extremely limited portion of the 'day'.  If your town's blacksmith only plays an hour a day, there's a lot of times when someone needs something fixed, but cannot have it done in your town, due to his 'mysterious' absence.  Three AM raid syndrome is another situation where the fact that players are not always there breaks the 'virtual world'.

Some of this can be offset by clever ideas, like SB's and SWG's shopkeepers, etc, but most of it is simply Not Easy to get around.  Until we live in a utopia where we can play games 24x7, it's not gonna be perfect.

--
Alkiera

For me, the game vs. world is defined by one simple thing: how well does the virtual space react to the inputs to the individual and mass of players? A ‘game’ will out of necessity, be static, allowing ‘content’ to be explored and consumed by the players. A ‘world’ will have no ‘content’, but rather emergent behavior that is derived from player interaction with the system.

Therefore, MMOG’s to date have been poor games due to their limitations on players to consume their content, and all have essentially failed as worlds because of poor mechanics surrounding emergent behavior. UO and Shadowbane had the kernel of emergent gameplay (the players created the content), but in many ways did not give the players the tools necessary to enjoy them (or mechanics actively inhibited core concepts - alla Shadowbane). Conversely, CoH may be the best ‘game’ MMOG on the market.

My thought here is that quality has been lacking on both sides of the equation in this genre.

On the game side for example, good games really require strategy and tactics. It is often just as important in good games to not take any action as to take one. This is what attracts players to PvP. You can’t just auto execute movesequence01 for the win. If it works today it probably won’t work tomorrow.

MMOG PvE is very much not only static puzzles but puzzles that are way too simplistic. The last good example of a complex puzzle in a MMOG that I can think of was charcoal making in ATITD. It had three variables inputs (air, fuel, and water) which had to be timed with variable results based upon random throws. I think some of the fighting type box games have this sort of thing. Why has this never been applied to MMOG combat models?

On the world side, the current trend to go unified interfaces for all sorts of world interactions is just terrible. Using an axe on a tree to get wood or a pick on a mountain to get ore is intuitive and therefore immersive. Double clicking tool_x and then see the same box as ever other tool just reminds me that I am working at a computer, not actually in a world.

These two sides of the game should be linked by the lore. Even if SWG had a pod racing game, there should be a quest reason inside the game that compels you to take a try at it.

Quality and detail are very important to the game experience and I have come to believe that we may never see these things all combined in a single game due to the reality of the economics of the genre.

Oh well. Time to go outside now.

When I reached that point where you are now, I skipped the article and bought Battlefield1942.


now i think i know
what you tried to say to me
how you suffered for you sanity
and how you tried to set them free

they would not listen - they're not listening still
i guess they never will

- Don McLean

lost arts

I was finding a non-confrontational vehicle to express my "oh okay, the Raph Thread again" without coming across as self-indulgent. You seem to still crave the fire like a moth after all these years and keep flittering around the topic and offering responses to anybody with input.

You are the face of tenacity.

But I learned years ago that what may appear to be just another gypsy yellow flittering around the fire, is probably closer to the lunar variety that carried Doctor Doolittle home from his little island escapade. In other words, and without the literary indulgence, your kung-fu > my kung-fu.

But strictly as a non-designing retail-purchasing game fan, you and I, at least for a temporal comparison, can be considered peers. Our history and growth as gamers follow the same paths right up until you took the "Learning how to Program" exit ramp to the Mega-Fame Expressway.

So we can both agree that its not about 'making a game' or 'creating a world' but just simply put, its about fun. Virtual Worlds, while not games - are still fun - but not the same kind of fun. Its like comparing a game of chess to playing with army men. The former is thick with rules and regulations and timeclocks and established opening moves and templates. The latter is without rules or regulations or boundaries, and whatever entertainment element is generated, is initiated and managed by the person playing with the plastic green men.

The problem is that Virtual Worlds are trying to be games, when they should just be virtual worlds. Your games, and those of your peers are so far just attempts to create a chess-like set of rules and regulations for playing with green army men. "Gamers" look at them as a bag of green army men and then wonder, "where's the board? How many minesweepers do I start off with? Whose turn is it?" Meanwhile, the other kid takes a plastic tank and bulldozes them all into the sand and declares himself the winner.

no fair - I wasn't set up yet.

The problem here: there is no rulebook to playing with army men. There is no appeals process to undo having your soldiers run over by some other kid's plastic tank. There is only setting them back up again and telling the other kid to knock it off. It works because the other kid will either knock it off, or find himself going home crying.

Now that the prologue is done, I've got a point:

Ultima Online (which is the one MMOG I can claim direct intimacy with so its my scapegoat), and others akin to it, is a game of chess with rules and regulations and timeclocks and established scenarios, etc etc -  only in this game of chess, that kid with the plastic tank can still roll over your queen's row and giggle with glee over his victory. You can cite all the rules and regulations for chess that you want, but your opponent thinks he's playing with army men - there's no rules to army men. So you set up the game and tell him to stop. He rolls your pieces over again and does a happy dance of supremacy.

Repeat thousands of times.

Then you think to yourself: wow this is messed up chess. We're not doing that anymore. So you go to the toy store and come home with Monopoly, Pay Day (old school!), backgammon (ancient school!), and checkers.

You open the boxes, and they all contain chess pieces, and you realize: wow. all the games are the same game of chess that was messed up before. Screw that, I'm watching cartoons.

bottom line for people who paged-down: let me know when you want to play Stratego. I'm tired of playing Kamikazie Chess against the kid with the plastic tank.

I agree on wanting things to be intuitive (i.e. axe chop tree for wood, etc.). As to the intelligence level, this has been scaled for the great unwashed masses, methinks. I would like to see what you suggested in more systems as well, but Joe Schmoe will complain if it is too difficult and requires too much skill. After all, these are distant relatives of the die roll systems where YOUR skill was not figured into the equation, only a random roll so anybody had an equal chance.

Why computer based systems continue to push this equality model, I don't know. There was a discussion as while ago and I believe the general conclusion was that time based was better than skill based because it was more "equal opportunity". That's too bad because sometimes it would be nice if skill would win out over the need to appease those who aren't as adept. Perhaps based on the current player populations, it is determined that the majority do not want skill based systems. It might niche the games... or it might open up the genre to a whole other set of players. I don't know, but I would like to see more systems like the charcoal making on in MMOGs.

Give us a game within the overall game. I'll use Puzzle Pirates as an example since it fits. The overall game is that of pirating to plunder and pillage and steal gold and rum and to trade rum and other goods. Sticking to the liquor (because it's good), you need to make the rum. To make the rum, you play a puzzle game. This game is a sub-game of the main game. Granted, the whole game itself is broken down into smaller pieces like this, but each is a different game that relies on player skill to accomplish an activity in the larger scope. Carpentry must be done well or the boat starts to take on water faster and then bilging must be done that much faster. Sailing must be done well or the boat will move slowly thus slowing your ability to trade as much in a day and netting you less money, or not allowing you to escape a would-be attacker. It goes on and on, but you get the point. I'm not saying Puzzle Pirates has the problem solved or that it appeals to everyone, but the concept of those games within the game within the world is a good one and it appears to work very well.

Puzzle Pirates is a good example of a company achieving, perfectly, what they were trying to achieve. That's to say - it had very low goals and nailed them. While I enjoy puzzles - immensely, I'm more likely to play them at Neopets than in Puzzle Pirates. Every single one of those games can be found in a free variant at either Andkon's Arcade or Microsoft's Online Gaming Zone. ATiTD would be a good example of mini puzzle games (you start getting them later on), unfortunately Teppy has no knack for making puzzle games and they all pretty much suck wind. But I digress, if we want games within a game, I think they have to be more fun than the current offerings, or else I'm going to pop a game in my ps2 and turn off the computer.

Edit: Read 'better' as 'more engrossing with bigger consequences to the world around us.' I don't actually mean there's a game, anywhere, better than Tetris...or Super Breakout.

Well, I think what is happening here is the word 'puzzle' taken too literally.

Combat in the the typical MMORPG PvE is a 'mini-game'. There is a larger meta game of character advancement or quest completion or whatever.

The mini game is a round of combat with a mob or group of mobs. Generally you receive a small reward and additionally character or quest advancement if you win the mini game (you rise on a ranking ladder).

This is really little different from puzzle pirates or ATITD except for the visuallization and the type of the puzzle. The other difference is the control of the timing of the presentation of the puzzle. In discrete games you are in absolute control of when the round starts, where combat in  MMOGs you have less control.

Sit back some time and watch someone playing tetris and then watch them fight something in a MMORPG. Unless you can see or hear whats on the screen or they make some comment, it might be hard to tell which they are playing.

The one eating the sandwich is playing the mmorpg.

This is one of my biggest problems with the current trend in mmog's.  The games lack challenge, contain too many mundane/repetitive elements, and have almost no consequence for failure.

My mom plays freecell for hours... the game takes a modicum of skill and most players will lose more often than they win.  i.e. winning the game becomes its own reward.  If you lose, you start over.  Pretty simple concept but it has kept her interest for years (go figure).

Tetris is a different variant.  Tetris ends when the game becomes too difficult for the player.  The challenge (or fun) is derived from obtaining the highest possible score before the game beats you.  

Hell, even the New York Times crossword puzzle is a game that is lost more than it is won... I and MANY others look forward to it.  

Board games, chess, sports, and others all have winners and losers.  These games have flourished for years.  MMOG's seem so bent on making everyone feeling fuzzy that they lose sight of the reason why many people play games... the thrill and challenge of winning.

As a corollary to that, Nebu, not only do they seem bent on making sure everyone wins, they only add challenge by testing the player's persistence. Challenge is not made by making the pain of losing harder; challenge is made by making the PROCESS of losing harder. The losing is to me punishment enough. CoH's exp. debt is a step in the right direction, IMO, but is still a bit too much in that at post-15 levels, it can really add to the grind.

Most MMOG developers seem overly concerned with the sadistic practice of punishing the player for a loss with the necessity to spend more time making up for that loss by doing the same thing again. As I said, that's not challenge. The only people that's a challenge to are the time-blessed catasses who take some weird form of pleasure out of blazing through repetitive actions to the end game.

I'd like to propose a new standard for acceptable combat mechanics in a MMORPG.

Lets call it (in ATITD style) "The Test of Engagement".

If you can leave the screen/keyboard of your computer for more then 30 seconds during combat and still win (receive game rewards)  more then 10% of the time, then the combat system fails.

This of coarse requires that combat systems be designed with random factors such that the player must watch what happens and respond to it.

Lots of games accomplish this and I see no reason MMORPGs should be accepted.

Wow, what a lofty goal to shoot for.

You know, I hadn't really considered it in this form but you hit on a very good point.  Let me create an artificial parameter called the "thrill factor" or TF for short.  It seems that thus far the TF level in mmog's is generated mostly by fear created by avoidance of some penalty (exp debt, vitae penalty, travel distance, gold expense, etc.).  Combat has been made exciting not by the act of combat itself, but by the fear createded by having to trudge through the same treadmill again if you should be defeated in combat. Am I making sense here?  So, the common motif in mmog's is that we see tension and excitement building from fear of a death penalty, rather than from being entertained by the combat system.  

I think that CoH has raised the bar to some degree by at least making combat that was engaging (albeit still not much more of a challenge once tendencies were learned).  I can only imagine that by improving AI and creating a greater challenge will combat in mmog's ever be more than resource farming.

I have been lurking around for a long time.  Never felt the need to join the banter before.  I have played SWG since beta with a close knit group of friends that truly enjoys the world.  From what I have read of the upcoming changes and the JTLS, SWG will be a force to contend with in this genre for a long time.  Its a world designed to have fun games tagged onto it.  It would not suprise me at all to see the next expansion be Hoth with the planetside engine.  You can build a world that is a vehicle for amazing content to be added (SWG), or you can build amazing content that is a vehicle for world to be added (CoH).  There simply is not enough development time and resources to do both with the current ecomnomic model these type of games are under.  My opinion is that SOE is determined to make the unfun parts of SWG fun, but we shall see.

The biggest complaint about SWG is their combat system.  It goes out the window into the shit can where it belongs in the next publish.

Oh,  the reason I came out of lurk mode was to let you know that Thunderheart (SWG's Community Mananager) was kind enough to link to f13/waterthread in a post on the developer tracker...

Please give a kind welcome to the forum whores of SWG that could not make it on the vualt network and blizzards forums.

Whew boy, that article was a pretty long read. I have a lot of points that I want to touch on, so this will be pretty long as well...



Ok, fine, but how do you make those skills worth a damn if a player can get them at any point in their advancement ladder? What sort of interesting content scenarios do you create? In specific terms, lets say you get a Daze skill that can stun creatures, but the content scenarios created for the given advancement point are all Undead creatures, which can not be dazed.

A player would feel cheated to have put resources into a skill that was not designed for that point in the total content experience. In many cases, the optimal content for a chosen skill would be below the player's current rung on the ladder. Why give the player a useless skill? Players of course complain about this often, it's called being gimped. The advancement path the player chose led to an avatar that was not able to play content that other players could, or compete with other players.

Other options include randomized/instanced areas for players that give them content that will take advantage of their skillsets, making encounters more generic so that any skill could be used effectively, or removing advancement all together so that a player need only find the content suitable for them. You could also accept the mechanic as a way to reward group play. Any of these "solutions" have significant drawbacks, but I'll move on; you can ask me to go into more detail if you wish.



Treadmills are good. Really. Something has to change as one continues to play, whether the game gets harder, new areas are found and explored, or more foozles are collected. In MMPs, the advancement ladder is infinite, because devs need cash, these things aren't cheap to make, etc. There are some treadmills that would be really cool...a content treadmill, for instance. Having a daily (hahaha) "episode" of your favorite game with new, original story, locales and challenges is just a big old treadmill. Of course, this treadmill isn't feasible for a litany of reasons. Do away with numbers? Well, you can hide them, but they're always there. Games, at their core, are about numbers, period. I challenge any response to that.
Gameplay should be fun though, I agree with that. :P

As far as "bots" go, there are ways you can help alleviate this, and the more that a game relies on quick reaction to stimuli, the more difficult writing a bot becomes (it's easy to write a bot for most MMP's today). However, look at the bots on a high difficulty setting in UT for instance to see AIs that are more effective at playing the game than most players are. Once a game's data format and network code have been reverse engineered, it's pretty much free reign for a bot author. I think long term, games will have to accept and embrance them, because detecting and stopping them is a losing battle. I don't see that happening for a while though.



I think the author's original point is that of consistency. You don't put water everywhere in the game that players can't swim in, then place one spot somewhere in the game where they are expected to. This is an extreme example, but serves the point.
Of course, a player wants to find lots of "little clever things" in a game as they play. But you want to make sure those things work well, and as you add more things, the less time you have to spend on each one, and the less work/iteration it receives. I think the better option is to pick just a few cool mechanics and do them really well, and provide lots of deep and interesting advancement ladders to play with those mechanics. One also hopes as a designer that fun gameplay elements will fall out of the interaction with atomic systems (the emergent gameplay). This is historically a hit or miss affair, but some games have had very rich and deep emergent scenarios (SimCity, for instance).



PvP vs. PvE players are a perfect example of the original quote's point. No matter what, a lot of people prefer playing against computer opponents rather than real opponents. Can a game please everybody? Well, really, can anything please everybody? I think it's pretty obvious that a game of any type must exclude or limit certain playstyles to make sure the "core" game playstyles are fun. Would Splinter Cell be more fun if you could choose at the beginning to be Mario rather than Sam Fischer? Of course not, the content scenarios are designed for stealth, they are not designed for platform hopping or jumping on enemies' heads. Furthermore, trying to make a game that attempted to please people who wanted to play like Mario and those who wanted to play like Sam Fischer would end up dissatisfying both camps, because the respective game mechanics are not very compatible.
As far as cooperation, try getting PvP players and PvE players to cooperate. Their goals are completely different. Making a game with both PvP and PvE is at some consequence for them both.


In context to original passage regarding the inability to create stories fast enough to please players:

Well, yeah, okay...but games are made by people, and people need to get paid. I don't think an MMP that has an effective playtime of 6 months or less is a commercial possibility. These things just cost too much to make. 6 months of good writing and immersive gameplay isn't as easy to produce as you make it sound, especially given that many if not most MMP players are known to play 20+ hrs/wk. :) A single player RPG is considered very long if it has 80hrs of gameplay. Such a game takes years to make. Expectations are very high for MMPs in terms of amount of new content experiences, and rightfully so. MMPs generally have to spread their best content out as much as possible, and provide not-as-good content to fill the gaps. I don't think there's anything inherently wrong about this, you just need to make sure the filler is fun to play, and try to make the gaps as small as possible.



While I agree that a game shouldn't require a person to quit their job to have enough time to play, MMP players generally play a LOT. If you are able to give players enough to do so that they can play the game as long as they want, that seems like a good thing. Take Counter-Strike or Quake 3 for instance, the highest end players treat the game as a job. They will spend 40+ hours a week training and competing. But as a casual player, you can still play every once in a while and (often) have fun. I ultimately think it is possible and worthwhile to please both audiences.

I could go into a lot of other things I disagreed with, and a few things I agreed with, but it's a long damn article, maybe later. It's good to have these sorts of discussions though - it speaks to the power and potential of the MMP platform that people dissatisfied with the current state of affairs write and discuss tome-like rants rather than just going and playing something else. :)

This should help us reach the five page mark, hehe. I await your response anxiously, Raph. :)

Dan

Thanks for the feedback Dan. As to address your last point about tome-like rants...

I think the period for ranting is dead. It's gotten to the point where it's just pointless. This article was purely written to spur thought, not diss Raph or anyone else. If Raph's original laws weren't so long, I'd probably write another one agreeing with every point and opposing them purely on implementation, citing examples from the games arleady on the market. But there's some other stuff he's written that'd I would rather address before I spent another day of my life on the 'laws.'

I don't see it as ranting. Ideas for MMO design are far from complete, and I'm just doing my small part in making them better by not playing them. :) Kind of hard to just "move on to another game" when you have a problem with the entire genre.

I would hope nobody has any intentions of dissing Raph either. Not just because he's pretty brilliant and doesn't deserve it, but at least he's willing to put this law into effect:

If it's any comfort, I've been moaning that way for, uh, a long time.



Me too. Sometime when you people are willing to give up teh sh1ny, you should log onto LegendMUD and try out the quests there.



This runs contrary to good business sense, generally speaking. And the larger the company, the less likely they are to try it.

But it's what the indies are trying to do. It's Second Life and There and Puzzle Pirates and Tale in the Desert. It's even Project Entropia, if truth be told.



Even doing a single game that has absorbed all the lessons thus far proved to be really damn hard. That was a goal for SWG--to make "a summary game" that gathered up all the lessons from the games up until then.



Oh yikes. That's a long answer to give. Let me give the highly abbreviated form, and if there's something you don't follow, let me know.

1. Barriers between people playing together are evil.
1a. Therefore, levels that increase stats are evil, because statistical power differentials are evil.
1b. Therefore, player hit points should not rise.
2. Most D&D stats are stupid in online games.
2a. We should come up with stats that matter.
2a, minor observation. D&D did have a neat thing where if you bashed a door, your shoulder would hurt.
2b. We need stats that allow specialization of characters.
3. Power, agility, and mental willpower make sense as broad areas of specialty.
3a. The traditional mage model of "start wimpy, grow insanely powerful" won't work if the power differentials are flat.
4. If a strong guy exerts massive strength, it tires him.
4a. But depending on whether he's a weightlifter type strong guy, or an athlete type strong guy, or a guy with tons of stamina, we could think of three different sorts of strength.
5. A system where you have a pool of ability, a regen rate, and a spend modifier would make sense. Big pool = tank, takes a ton of damage on this front. High regen rate = fast recovery. Good spend factor = feats of strength come easy.
5a. Don't let someone have high in all three of these.
5b. Don't let someone have high in all three stat types either.
5c. These stats need to bounce FAST. Spend some pool, and it's back within seconds. Unconsciousness is caused by repeated successful hits that are perfectly timed.
6. Effectively create four kinds of each combatant.
6a. Big pool is defensive. Low spend cost is offensive. Fast regen is more like a nuker. Balanced is balanced.
6b. Don't make the mistake of making weapons hit only one stat at a time (oops). Make it so different ATTACKS with the SAME weapon can selectively target stats.
6c. Vulnerabilities of opponent should become visible based on how they fight back. If they spend tons of mind when attacking, they are probably weaker on one of the other stats. (oops)
6d. Don't show the relative ize of the different pools to opponents. Make them learn it based on the fight's progression.
7. Make sure that the different moves cater to the three main different styles.
8. Make sure that the different professions divide up nicely across different concentrations of stats.
9. Allow people to change their stat distribution, since they can change professions.
10. Make sure that the racial stat ranges make sense with this system (oops).



Ah, alas, I am not allowed to rant back. My next-best tactic is to guilt-trip. :)



I agree! The only difference here is the fact that you are using the metaphor of the nucleus, the irritant around which the pearl forms, and I am using the metaphor of a pool into which water is poured. If you like, I'll reverse metaphors, and say that the shape of the irritant you design helps determine the final shape of the pearl. That make you happier?



Actually, that law is getting at the fact that different people like to play different ways, like to present different sorts of identities. When I talk with you here, I tend to put on a very professorial character. When I talk with other devs at the office, I tend to be fairly casual and use the word "fuck" a lot. When I speak with academics I am one person, when I talk to lawyers I am another, when I talk to press I am another. When I am jamming guitar, I am different than when I am writing.

When people pick up a game, they see whether or not their identity maps into the game. In some cases, it's nice and generic like chess or Tetris, and it does. In other cases, it's something like Quake, and it doesn't. Most people choose the same character classes, the same races, the same gameplay styles, the same game styles, the same games, repeatedly, because each time is almost like a personality test. And if there is no room for their personality, then often won't play the game.

Hence the law--make sure you map enough personality types.



Yep, except that HoloMUD was a fullbore PvP mud, so it'd be more like adding a full virtual space lobby onto Quake as opposed to Diablo.



No, just the space, avatars, and persistence would do it.



You say that because you are defining "the game" as what happens in the instanced area, but it's not. It's what happens in the whole. For one thing, the entire nature of what you can do as a developer has changed. You can now add instanced Diablo AND Quake off that lobby, for example. Youcan also add things within the lobby  itself that were formerly completely impossible. For another, how you approach the technical platform has changed quite a lot.



People are applying the "game vs world" false dichotomy to the word "world" and then assuming that the word "world" in the phrase "online world" carries the same semantic freight. That right there is the problem.

Let me back up:

Those are the laws of mud design. Muds can have graphics. Muds need a virtual spatial environment that is persistent, and they need a way for avatars to move in them. Diablo is not a mud because the game proper is not persistent, never mind that it hangs off a persistent chat lobby. Quake is not a mud because the space is not persistent. Second Life is a mud because it is. There are debates over whether muds should be considered games first or spaces first, there are debates over whether you should design the mud around a game mechanic, or design game mechanics into muds. Since the definition just says "a virtual space" the answer is the latter. That said, mud does NOT imply a simulationist, highly interdependent approach to design. There are muds that reset their entire contents every time every item is scavenged. There are muds that are just a lobby with PvP games dangling off. there are muds with and without combat systems, muds where the world is algorithmically generated and muds where it is carefully handcrafted. Muds where users can build and muds where users cannot. The common elements are virtual space, avatars, and persistence of the above. The game vs world debate within muds is stupid, because you can easily nest games within worlds, and with some effort, attach worlds to games (zone to 'em, probably), but both fit INSIDE muds, because muds are places, are spaces. If you had to pick one as your base approach, pick world, because you can always nest games into it, whereas you cannot nest worlds inside games. Not that this a a black and white dichotomy. The end.

There, does clearing up the terms more help?



Don't blink, you missed AOL's Cyberpark, which closed several years ago. :)



I'm here talking to you, aren't I? The day I stop is when all hope is lost. ;)



Ahem, I do believe that I was mentioned in the first sentence of the first areticle.



Actually, movement takes the most time and effort, and it's a mud element as opposed to a game element. (I"m gonna stick to those terms now to make myself clear). What I have been saying is that you HAVE to deal with the mud elements first. After that, sure, whatever, do game or sim or whatever you want, but you have to deal with the mud bits first.



Short form, out of six or seven planned forms of content in SWG, only two made it in.



I agree, we had to madly scramble to retrofit SWG harvesting when we realized this, and we didn't quite manage it. Originally, everything was thru harvesters. Big mistake on my part there.



One of the big reasons to go simulationist (also cf the "do it everywhere law") is because you can get broad swaths of consistency across the game. And you can centralize the quality and detail issues into the sim, rather than on zillions of scattered bits of content. Of course, if your sim sucks, then you get bad stuff everywhere too.

Another reason is that it can hugely aid with the content creation times, which lowers budgets, which affects the economics of the genre.



I want witnesses!

Seriously, though, why am I the moth that craves the flame? Why do you think I keep coming back?



I vehemently agree with these two sentences, but after that, you make some assumptions that I don't think are valid. You place them in an opposition when there is a spectrum. In fact, arguably the real difference is purely one of complexity and interdependence. As a result, many of the assertions you make regarding people running over little green soldiers aren't necessarily valid.



We need more skill in the rpgs. We also need more games n the RPGs so when the skill required chases away 90% of people, they have something else to do. We can't make pure skill persistent games, because yes, they fail to retain audience. That's been discussed here before.



Yes, definitely the correct approach. I'd point out that Puzzle Pirates is actually very "world" oriented in its basic assumptions: crafting, player towns, player-run ships, and all sorts of stuff like that. It's a poster child for bridging the two.



I think it has pretty high goals, actually.



That's a goal I agree with wholeheartedly.



It's very similar to the example JC used originally, actually. :)



Yes indeedy, and that's actually the debate from which it arose.



A game must, yes. But a mud does not have to, since it can encompass many games. See where I am going with this?



Really? I was contemplating submitting a rant as my talk at GDC next year. "Why Online Games Suck" or some such. Should I not?



Bring it on, I need to exercise my moth-fu. Or whatever. ;)



Awww... /blush. I'm feisty too, on occasion. I'm told it's charming.

I know that instancing is usually applied to dungeons, where each player gets his own copy of the area. But the effect the mission system had on SWG is very similar - each player gets the content he wants, respawning for him at a push of the 'accept mission' button.

Oh, I disagree totally. I've been playing my part in those stories for years now, in different games, and there are events I'll remember a long time which made it all worth it.
I

Today's project. Try Discworld MUDs quests sometime. They're a lot of fun as well if somewhat challenging to find at times. ;)

Back to our regularly scheduled topic...


Edit: Fixed quote.

Please forgive the long post everyone, Raph made several points I'd like to respond to.



Here is something I don't understand. Why does someone have to give up the pretty stuff (graphics etc) for content? I am sure the quests in LegendMUD are fine and dandy, now figure out a way to squeeze them into other games. (For the record I hate internet slang like teh sh1ny, so never use it except in mockery and at this point I don't think you deserve mockery.)



At this point I'd settle for simply making refinements on existing systems ala Blizzard. They've never evolved, they just polish, and it seems to work well. On another note, you seem almost...envious of the indies.



I'd dare say this is the design goal with WoW as well. They seem to be doing a somewhat good job of it so far.



Speaking from personal experience I can say that I like the thought with this one here. I have a good friend I play these games with (who posts on these very boards) and he tends to have alot more time than me for them and hence tends to outlevel me significantly.

That said, I like CoH's version of dealing with this, IE, allowing the player to sidekick a lower level player so they can play together.

That said as well, perhaps being a player of DnD and other pen and paper games since I was 10 or so has perverted me, but I like power differential. I like being able to beat the snot out of something that I ran from like a little girl earlier in my career. I also have a bit of the Pavlov's dog in me. I like the little music and flashing lights that tells me I made progress.

Lord those are painful admissions.

What I find evil is grinding and a treadmill. Let me level, but don't make me feel like I'm out fighting mobs or whatever Just to level.



Personally I think this is where you ran into trouble. (By you I mean the dev team in general and not just you personally) You didn't want stats and player differentials, yet, I suspect that you came to realize that that's kind of how the games work. You tried to minimize it and it didn't work out as expected.



Very true, but, what are Jedi if not some kind of paladin/mage hybrid? One thing I noticed in my time of playing is it felt like I didn't grow very powerful very fast, but that mobs in the game world Did. Then again I tend to shy away from Uber templates, so that may have been a problem for me. (I was a hybrid from hell, master artisan, pistoleer, and a few thousand brawling points away from smuggler)



Agreed in principal.



I suspect this is where most people's problem with HAM comes in, that and what follows in your next part. In principal I like the idea behind it, though to be honest, it is a bit...complex. Heh.



Again, complex, and one of the biggest problems. It was impossible to make some kind of specialized character in SWG cause you always had a huge glaring weakness that was easily exploited. (IE, you put alot of stat points in action to be a fast, powerful pistoleer, you left your mind or health pool very vulnerable.) That and the fact that you had three different "hitpoint" bars and that armor made them shorter (thus making you more vulnerable) made combat quite frustrating. Put wounds on top of that (which I suspect were put in to make forced socialization, IE , you have to go back to town and socialize to get healed) and combat was very frustrating. I'll be honest, remove wounds and battle fatique and I'd probably go back to SWG. I just couldn't take all the downtime and grinding. Yeah, I know, those changes would hurt medics and especially entertainers (which at the time I left were mostly macroing anyway) but you know, can't make everyone happy!

I really, really thank you for the explanation. At least now I know the thinking process behind it. It seems that HAM was an experiment in leveling the playing field so to speak. If I might, I suggest finding a copy of a made for Showtime movie called Harrison Bergeron. That movie explains very well why leveling the playing field isn't such a good idea.



I won't tell. ;)



I'd also say something that needs to be added to this is that people don't like to be forced into a different personality mode either. The best example of this is PvP. You take a PvE type player and try to force them into PvP whether outright (full PvP) or subtly (you don't have to PvP we'll just make alot of the interesting content revolve around PvP (*cough* GCW, Jedi *cough*)) and you end up with resentment. I think that's one lesson that the current crop of games is having trouble with. They keep thinking if they can just make PvP balanced enough that the PvE people will "see the light." All they're doing for the most part, is pissing off both camps. PvP is too watered down for PvPers and it's feeling forced to PvEers.

I truly think the only way to make both of those camps happy is with seperate servers that cater to their playstyles outright. Mixing them on the same server will never work IMHO.



I wonder if the true 2nd gen MMOGs will take advantage of this. I suppose that with JTL SWG is in a sense. Though honestly, I consider the current crop of MMOG's to be anywhere from 1.1 to 1.5 rather than second gen.



You coming here and talking has done alot to change my views of you and SWG if that matters. Heh. I  am no longer angry. I'll follow the game now and see how it shapes up in the long run. Maybe someday I'll step back into your world. (Really depends on how things change)



Sounds like it had to be released "as is". Powers that Be strike again! Are there plans to patch in the other 4 or 5 forms of content as time goes on?
Were player cities one of these forms of content?



Because you're a masochist? Because you feel the need to make people understand you? Because maybe you're hoping that these talks will spark something, whether in yourself or in us?



Interesting to hear that from a Dev's mouth.

Well, I've enjoyed this debate so far. I know I wouldn't want to develop a MMOG. The technology is there, but to many factors make them hard to get to work right. I think the biggest issue is that they are trying to please all of the people all of the time and it's just not possible. Maybe somebody will have an epiphany and the Holy Grail of MMOGs will come out of it.

Yes, you can do a lot more, but you don't have to.  By saying "can", that means these are all concious choices made by the devs, thus if they wanted to make the mudspace incredibly shallow and nothing more than a persistant matching lobby who's goal is get people into the instanced areas so be it.  That's more what I mean when I talk about which is given primacy in focus, the "game" elements or the "world" (mudspace in which they reside).

My contention is simply I think it's the game elements of muds that need more work, and given a finite pool of resources to use when making one of these beasts, to me that says scaling back on the length, breath, and depth of the mudspace in order to make the games you nest within that space better.  B/c without a doubt, I am now much more interested in the inidividual gaming elements being fun rather than looking at the game as the whole of the mudspace.   To me the "game" is not the whole, it's only the parts Im actively using.

To wit, there are a plethora of things to do in the SWG mudspace (pve combat, crafting, resource gathering, selling/buying, deliever missions, pet taming, pvp, housing, city building, etc etc not to mention the social aspects) but none of the individual activities (the imbeded games) were much fun to me, so I ended up not staying despite the complexity and depth of the mudspace. Contrast to CoH, whose mudspace is severly limited (there's really only 3 things to do, pve hunt, character advancement and socialize), yet I like the pve hunting game and character advancement method so I'm staying despite the shallowness of the mudspace.

I would rather future titles take the coh approach and look to add a few more fun imbedded systems before seeking to flesh out the mudspace with tons of medicore ones.  In short, do few things but do them well.



Ok, that makes things clearer in terms of language, but it still doesn't seem to alter the approach.  To me it all comes back to what is your intent; to make a few fun things to "do" (i.e. the imbedded games), or make a fun place to "be" (i.e. the worldspace itself which is the sum of all imbedded parts plus).  Ideally, you want both; do lots of things and do them ALL well).  Since I don't think you can get both currently, I tend to believe it's the active doing parts (the imbedded games) which ultimately get players to hang around.  While the total worldspace might encourage people to stay longer (i.e. people who extended their subscriptions logging on to UO once a month to refresh their house or into EQ just to chat with your guildmates or SWG to try a different playstyle type), it's imbedded games which get people to stay at all.

You know, in some ways, I feel like this is a "which came first, the chicken or the egg" discussion.



If it was associated with AOL, I'm glad I did. :-p

Xilren

Yeah, someone theoretically could make a virtual space that is a portal for every game ever made, but of course that's not an economical possibility. If you're actually building a MUD, pleasing everybody is not something one could responsibly shoot for (just because you can doesn't mean you should!).

I think there are two extremes a developer can take when making an online world game: try to provide a good fun core experience that people will want to continue playing for a long time, or make a large number of mini-games that individually people might tire of quickly, but enough to keep them supplied with new things to play for a long time. Which option is better is open for debate I think, and there are examples of both extremes in the market today.

In response to various people's complaints about sandwich combat in MMPs, I think this is partly a technical issue and partly there is no excuse. Unreal Tournament can not just simply become an MMP, the bandwidth costs would be too much to handle - it doesn't scale to large groups of players (even if you segregate those players most of the time). Other MMPs like Lineage2 had to rewrite the networking layer of the Unreal engine. Epic says very specifically that the engine does not work for MMP games without making significant changes.

That said, even combat as slow paced as the current crop of MMPs could theoretically have interesting decisions at every "turn", and would feel like a fast paced game. If combat was chess, and you had to make a move every 5 seconds, the pace would at times feel frantic. The problem is not the pacing, it's the lack of interesting decisions a player can make at every point (which is the "true" pacing of the game). Would current games be better if you had to press the attack button each time, rather than pressing the auto-attack button? It would be worse, because now instead of being able to go make myself a sandwich, I'm stuck at the keyboard pressing the same key over and over. If the true pacing of the game is slow, at least now I can eat while playing. :)

Dan

I have not read the thread beyond this point, because I had to stop and answer this. This is a theoretical explanation, and I'm going to add one bit of down-to-earth reality that Raph should be keenly aware of that alters this statement.

Yes, the way you talk about the game vs. world debate above does say you should start with world first. BUT... big but here. The realities of MMOG design, specifically the economic realities, dictate that while you CAN nest many games within a world space, doing so will usually result in each nested game being mediocre at best ON RELEASE. You will never have enough time, nor will your design properly focus on each nested game before you run out of development money and time. The suits and the fanbois and the retailers will be crawling all over your ass for a box long before you'll be able to nest 2 GREAT games into a world space. And you know this.

Given that situation, I'd rather you create one great game, nest it inside a decent world that has a framework for adding nested games, and go from there. Otherwise, you get SWG, released way too early with an entire year having to be devoted to making the nested games up to snuff with the rest of the genre.

EDIT: Now that I've read the rest...



I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that that particular aspect of CoH's combat is one of the MAIN reasons it has such interesting combat as opposed to other MMOG's. I mean, the combat isn't THAT much different, but it is much more engrossing, for 3 reasons:

1) You cannot sit back and do nothing.
2) You are generally fighting either lots of mobs at once, or one mob who has powers that are the equal of yours
3) The visual display of combat is extremely entertaining and informative to watch... every buff/debuff/hit/special effect is modeled by the game engine, meaning instead of reading that you just stunned, you SEE something that gives you feedback about what you did.

That was made possible because they focused intently on the combat model, and feature locked the rest of the world a good bit of time before beta ended.

Well, sort of correct. If you ctrl-click Bash (or some other power), click a single grey mob and walk away, the mob will be dead when you return. However, your toon will not auto-attack other mobs attacking it, so you will need to click the next "victim".

I tend to regret running around with auto-attack enabled, though, especially when trying to run through mobs and by a mistake selecting one, causing my hero to stop, turn and strike the mob, allowing that one and its friends to attack me.

All the pretty stuff takes a while to develop, especially the graphics. To add a new quest with new cool graphics and events takes coordination of writers, all kinds of artists (2-D, 3-D, sound), scripters/developers, NPC people, Item people, approval type people, and testers (hopefully). Getting all those people together while they are working on bug fixes, other new content, and that upcoming expansion is probably a nightmare. It's a lot quicker and easier to just have cookie cutter missions like kill x foozles, deliver foo to Bar, etc. That way you can have a bunch of quests for all people at all levels. I imagine everyone would rather have nice original quests with all original graphics and sparklies, but there's not enough resources for that.

I bet its also depressing to the clever quest writer who thinks of a really creative quest that will challenge the minds of the players, only to find the step-by-step solution of the quest on NinjaPirateRobotQuest.warcry.com within 2 days of its release.

    Well, hey, MAYBE if the project had been scaled properly at the beginning, there would be time to make something that isn't half-assed and boring?  Just an idea.  
    See, in actual professional situations, you're supposed to take a look at what resources you have, figure out what you want to have when you're done, and plan accordingly.  Just doing whatever you think would be cool, then bitching that your crap is the best you could do, because your resources had to be used to produce tons of OTHER crap, too, is considered unprofessional, whiney, and deserving of ridicule.  Which is why we're discussing Raph Koster.  When it comes to "eyes are bigger than the stomach" attitude, and bullshit excuses, he's the king.

Ah, the thread would not be complete without Zaphkiel. I've missed ya, man!

But basically, he's right. Hence my remark above about "view is too wide" above. Mea culpa. That said, a tremendous amount of work went into scoping SWG down from the very start. We didn't just do whatever we wanted.

Now, to address it in the way Haemish wrote it, which was more polite and somewhat more insightful (forgive me, it's late, my veneer is slipping):



That's true, Haemish, but there's three basic factors that need to be kept in mind, which I'll summarize as

1. you only get one launch
2. some games exclude others
3. the world part has overhead

To elucidate:

1. Given the economic realities of how the biz works, it's extremely difficult to attract people to your game beyond the initial window of attention. This means adding more games after launch will NOT help you build audience. There's no point in adding, say, a rich economic game to, say, EverQuest, not in terms of growing the audience. Well, maybe if you manage to relaunch the title at the same time, but that's hard. You only get one chance at that huge level of attention, and if something is missing for a segment of players, they will literally never give your game a second thought again. This then becomes an audience limiting factor, and may in fact prevent your game from being a competitive player in the market.

2. If you attempt to nest multiple games within a given mud without having planned for them all, then you'll be obliged to make the games completely orthogonal to each other. This will reduce the possible interest levels and complexity levels that they offer, and will also prevent you from doing things that require higher degrees of cooperative play among players. In some cases, it may preclude huge swaths of possible gameplay. For example, adding a player-driven economy within a loot-driven game after the fact without having planned for it is liable to be difficult at best, impossible at worst, and even when you finish, you're not likely to have one that works well. For different games to fit together within the one world, you pretty much have to plan for them all from the get-go. And then, if you fail to launch without one of them, you'll see interdependencies that seemed to be covered suddenly exhibiting stress fractures. In SWG's case, we cut vehicles and cities because they were the LOWEST impact cuts--oddly, something like entertainers was a far higher impact cut, so it stayed in. It's evident that ALL of them needed to be there, but the absence of vehicles was less impactful to the rest of the game as a whole. This makes it difficult to plan a world platform that can grow to include a wide variety of activities.

3. An obvious point, but choosing to create a platform where you can add various types of games requires that you do some things in advance, and some of them may be difficult. As platforms, many of the games out theere right now would not easily adapt to the addition of certain features, simply because they were not envisioned as worlds first, but as games only. Because of this, EverQuest can easily accommodate something like instancing, but has a hard time accomodating a player economy or a full-blown housing model; the assumptions made in building the platform simply didn't include these things because it was designed "game first."

So yes, you're right (you too, Zaphkiel), but it isn't quite as simple as "just do it this way," not if you want to expand the game later, not if you want to reach a diverse or different audience, not if you want the games to be added later to mesh seamlessly with the whole.



It's interesting how often the "you can't please everybody!" mantra comes up. You all do realize that we're not even close to that, right? That in fact, we're failing to please even the expected MMORPG audience, much less the total audience of gamers, much much less the broader audience outside games that would dig virtual worlds, right? For all the philosophical schisms among you guys on things like PvP, treadmills, levels, or game vs world, you guys are all IDENTICAL and all muds are IDENTICAL to a large group of gamers out there. By doing these things we're not trying to appeal to some mythical "everybody." We're trying to appeal to a group larger than "hardcore hobbyist."



Yes, that's definitely true. We're not talking so much about stay here, as we are about "show up in the first place."



Someone has to keep trying, or else we'll just do the other, and the genre will stop growing. We have to actively work on tools to make it feasible even though it may not be practical currently. Otherwise, what you see now is roughly what you'll get. Budgets will not rise because the audience will not justify it, and therefore new games will have fewer features, not more. You'll end up with one game with a highly polished combat model, another with a fantastic tradeskills model, and each game will be one-note.



Cost.



No offense to Bliz folks, but, uh, no, WoW is not a summary game. I leave it as an exercise for you guys to make a list of all the lessons since 1996 and all the important features since 1996 that they are leaving out.



I should have put an "oops" next to that one, because we didn't hit that one either.

That said, it's actually simpler, rules-wise, than a traditional stats system. In those, you have independent regen and spend rates often on a per-ability basis, some of them completely invisible. In some cases, you have them on a per-class basis (WoW again). On top of that, you have levels to account for, and associated power differentials. You usually also have damage types, and so on.

A lot of this extra complexity got layered onto the HAM system as well, once it became apparent that the core of it was not functioning quite correctly. But I would assert that the reason why it didn't is the lines marked with "oops."



You just described classes. :) That's intentional, by and large. Now, there's matters of degree, but those are not systemic, they are a tuning factor.

You need to realize that the way it was supposed to play was that you healed your HAM FAST. Think of the HAM bars as being only like mana. It would come back within a few seconds. You might get knocked out from losing it all, but it wouldn't last because of the rapid regen. Getting in a deathblow would be a lucky thing or something that required a lot of team coordination. You'd die from wounds, not from HAM. That's not how it plays at all, but that was how it was intended.



I would have cited the current Jedi system as the best example myself.

PvP is a far more complex issue.



They were directly inspired by AO's missions, with the thought that "if we've got an interesting world, doing missions will be more interesting if they happen in the world and not in a pocket zone."

-Raph

Raph, you keep citing EQ's inability to accomodate a player economy to prove your contentions, but since the release of Luclin, the player driven portion of the economy has in fact become an important addition. I'm not just referring to the bazaar, but to the addition of crafted equipment that is often the best a non-raiding character can hope to attain, along with the farming of crafting components which is often the best way to raise money for said equipment. It seems to me that EQ is actually a great example of how you can actually add to a world and appeal to different players well after launch.

I personally believe the genre has stopped growing. Or has reached a point in the business cycle where growth is much more moderate and akin to what might be expected in traditional businesses.

I know that back in fall and spring of MMOG love as few years back, and the success of DOAC, the air was all light and sweet and there were visions of coins tink tinkling in the heads of producers and developers alike.

A lot of industry pundits would come to this community and other forums and insist that there was this great untapped market just over the next release.

Now, here we are in the hard winter of reality. Its pretty much the same group of players.

A lot of us play very little anymore but have been replaced by a next generation of players.

Casual gamers? Female gamers? I know a lot of them. They all play pogo or single player games or other less time committed gaming models.

Small niche games that do one or two things well would be fine. And we're not gonna play any one of them for all that long either. Not like we did with UO or EQ.

I think what has happened here is that this community has matured to accept the realities of the genre. Many of us like the old music, but realize we will never hear it again. If one note is all we can have, then that's better then no music at all.

   When I lose at chess, or sports, I feel, with a good deal of certainty, that the other player played better than I did that day.  I might even learn something about the game in the process.  With MMOGs, when I lose, I feel, with a great deal of certainty, that the other person was a better exploiter/cheater/macroer/bigger catass than I am.  The only thing I've learned is that in order to "compete", I need to exploit, cheat, macro and quit my job to get better.  Big difference.

    Sorry I'm late.  Great discussion so far, but I think the conclusion ( that you won't want to accept) that we're going to find is that the technology and business just isn't there yet for virtual worlds.  It's not possible to make a virutal world of the quality that players need, with the present limitations.  Stick to good games, and leave as much room to expand as you can.

Perhaps we should switch tracks a bit, because I think everybody here is mostly in agreement in priniciples, but things fall apart when it comes down to implementation. Let me submit that perhaps the issue is not the 'laws' or the way that Raph and other designers view these games/worlds/whatever, it's the process of building them that is screwed.

Here is my impression of a typical MMP development cycle, feel free to correct me if I'm way off base here.

1) Designers want to make an online world because it's cool/interesting, and execs want to do it to make lots of $$$. At this point, there is a rough scope/budget already in place, based on the strength of the IP or amount of private funding, etc.

2) Designers spec out the gameplay environment, consisting of several large systems (e.g., Combat, Crafting, Player Cities, blah blah) and make their best effort to forsee how each system will play out, and how the systems will interact with each other. This is the planning stage, but typically production starts happening at some point before planning has finished, hopefully starting with systems that are seen as unlikely to get revised later. Near the end of the planning stage, once development time has actually gotten scheduled out for these specs, the designers scramble madly to cut features, trying to fit within time/budget constraints while still providing a fun experience.

3) The systems are built to spec. This usually starts happening midway through the spec-writing process; often the specs will change on a frequent basis, with everyone shifting around to try to adapt to them.

4) Now that you've built all the systems for the game, hopefully you're still on schedule. Problem is, the game turns out to be not very fun. Some individual systems might have some fun bits, but lots of things don't work as intended. I would guess that most of the time, interactions between system doesn't work anything near how the designers envisioned it. At this point, you have two options: go back into planning and trash/revise lots of existing systems, or move forward, hoping that you can take what you have and make something cool by rearranging the minutae.

5) At some point, beta occurs. This is usually at some point during production, likely before all systems have been fully implemented. Everyone knows the game is screwed up; at first, the developers hope that the implementation of missing systems will fix the game, then later it becomes pretty obvious that the design that was specced out didn't forsee or aknowledge a lot of problems. In late beta there is a mad scramble to tweak rules and numbers, but many of the problems are systemic.

6) Ship! with lots of missing, broken, or useless features because the developers were scrambling madly to make what they had at least vaguely fun.

7) Hopefully, continuing development will happen on the game to address these issues, but meanwhile people are playing and getting pissed off when the game world changes underneath them.

What can be done? You could blame the designers, after all they specced out a game that wasn't fun. I don't think that's really productive though - even the most experienced developers in the industry fall into the cycle outlined above. Hiring new designers won't get you anywere - it just means the specs will be that much farther out of alignment, because experience is likely the only semi-reliable thing that you can use to gauge whether a system is going to suck or not before building it. The process is the problem, not the designers.

You could also inflate your production schedule to account for the inevitable collapse of the game's systems. I'm sure most developers do this already to some extent, especially the ones that have been making these games for a while. I don't think this is the correct solution either, ultimately. Trying to fix a broken game is like trying to fix an ugly painting. You see lots of things to change, but changing those things requires changes in other things, eventually you end up with something not-too-ugly that wasn't anywhere near what you originally envisioned.

I submit that it's far easier to build from the ground up, rather than from the top down. First, come up with a small, fun mini-game. Iterate on it until it is a polished gem. Then build new systems and game mechanics on top of that. If you build and polish combat, you know that at least will always be fun. Don't bother thinking too much about crafting or player cities or whatever until combat is fun. Once it's fun, don't mess with it - higher level systems should be designed within the constraints of lower level systems. I'm glossing over a lot here of course, much easier said than done.

The only MMP I know of that was built like this is Puzzle Pirates. They had a solid base to work off of (I believe all of the puzzle games were complete derivatives of existing games). They put those already fun games within incrementally larger contexts - play these puzzles in cooperation with others to pilot ships, coordinate larger groups to fight over land, etc. The core moment-to-moment experience is fun, which I think is a requirement of any larger context being fun.

I think Puzzle Pirates was able to do this because, as Raph mentioned, Indie titles have more flexibility in a lot of ways. The larger the company, the more they seem to follow a top-down process more suitable for manufacturing than game development. There are a lot of reasons for this, accountability being a major one. A bottom-up process is a lot harder to manage than a top down process.

I'm sure all of this is nothing new for Raph or most game developers to hear. It takes a long time for lessons learned to be carried forward, but I don't think that MMP games are anywhere near stagnating in design and follow-through.

dan
PS. I haven't played SWG much, my comments are directed more at the industry as a whole.

Wukong, EQ has done a STELLAR job of extending the game with new modes to play the game. The additions they have made on the economic and trade front are really good.

That said, if you do a graph of the EQ economy today versus that of SWG or even UO, or for example the Tale in the Desert economy, I think you'll find some very significant differences. Huge areas of a full economic model turn out to be missing or abstracted to a very high degree. Is there an economy driven to a degree by players? Absolutely--there can't NOT be once you have item trades. But is it what we call usually a "player-driven economy"? Well, no. But then the problem there lies in the term "player-driven economy" which isn't all that descriptive.

Nyght, what you describe is a recipe for contraction, or for disruptive innovation that comes along and crushes the entire currnet market.

Zaphkiel, the phrase "lose at MMOs" struck me--I assume you're referring to PvP, but it's interesting how many folks consider this to be the case even in PvE.



I agree with your conclusion.

But if nobody tries, then the tech and business models won't ever get there. Someone has to push at it.

Dogles, what you describe is the process for all games development. One big reason is that currently, there is no science or craft of fun, whereas there is for music, for writing, for art. As a result, that middle stage you describe is a lot of fumbling about with intuition, or a lot of copying of known models.

The process you describe is why you see the industry you see today. If there was one lesson I'd want you guys all to take from this thread it's this:

Every time you moan about yet another clone game or another polished slick but not interesting sports title, or whatever,

compare it to what you're saying about playing it safe and refining the core and "just give me a fun game!"--

the one leads to the other. The market forces are ALL on your side there, and you are reaping what you sow.

I'd argue that we're not that far away from music, writing, art, movies, etc in terms of craft and practices. I.e., they don't really know what they're doing either. There are theories, tools, guidelines and tips, but a skilled and highly trained musician can still make a crappy song. You can have a well crafted script for a movie, but if the production doesn't go well, the movie will be crap. Why do so many crap movies get made? Someone must have thought the script was at least decent...

Game design isn't new, there are plenty of recommended theories, tools, and practices for a designer (Raph being among the best when it comes making this publicly available). MMP games don't invalidate these. Fun is something that any entertainment medium strives for, and making a book "fun" to read is just as difficult as making a game "fun" to play. When an book author fails he doesn't say "well, there is no science of fun", he realizes that somewhere along the line he screwed up. He's a generally talented and creative writer, he started with a good idea, maybe a bunch of good ideas, maybe even a well-crafted outline, but there was a problem somewhere in the process that got him from there to here.

We don't know how to make fun games yet, that's true. What the studios need to recognize is that the process (the "how") needs refinement more than the design prinicples. The worst part imo about this is that the larger the number of people involved, the harder it is to iterate on a process. Since MMP games are so notoriously expensive to create, the process tends to get improved at a very slow rate.

On another note. I think a big problem historically with MMPs that Raph alluded to is that the genre has been the same as the platform. I think we're finally seeing movement away from that, with non-fantasy themed games and games with different play mechanics. CoH, Sims, Planetside, SWG, and Puzzle Pirates are all games that have broken the mold in various ways. They were obviously shooting for something different, even if many of them ultimately did not succeed in making something fun. I think WoW will bring in a lot of new people because of brand recognition and hype, but I don't expect the majority of those people to stay - these are the same people that tried EQ/UO/AC/whatever years ago and didn't like it, so there's little chance of them liking WoW. We'll see, I guess. I think the MMP genre is quickly getting burnt out, but the platform has a long future.

dan

As a consumer, I can certainly hope it's the later. But from my observations hovering high above these and other forums, as I think I stated in the previous post, the former seems more likely.

If I was working in the industry, I'd be praying for even or just slightly better.

And:



Well, all I can say is it seems like the chickens have come home to roost. Through the past years we have seen buggy releases and shallow games time after time with only a few bright spots or exceptions to point towards. And so our credit cards have become tired and cracked.

Hell, I'll admit to funding most of those bad launches, including the last one of yours. And I'll admit that I'll probably do it again for the next big shiney (EQ2?).

But if the industry needs the kind stick-to-it accounts of UO or the big numbers of EQ, well, I'd be tuning my guitar or writing my first novel if I were you.

I read the IGN interview with the guy that did CoH. He was beaming at 100k accounts.

That my friend, ( and I do mean that because you have worked so hard to try and please me over the years), is the future.

Dan, as someone who has trained quite a lot in writing and in music (and art, and other areas) I can tell you that there most definitely is far more science and craft to them that is established and accepted, than there is for games. Tons and tons, seriously.

Yeah, and a lot of it is crap, seriously. I know lots of people that went to college and further for music and it did them little good as musicians. They might get the mechanics down, along with a lot of theory about art and writing. But often that doesn't mean they'll be able to write better songs. There are lots of artists that would say formal eductation will ruin an artist, putting arbitrary boundaries on expression and so on. I don't fully subscribe to this, but the supposed rules of music and art and writing sure seem to change every few years, just like the rules of game design. Not to say game design is "there" or even on par, just that it isn't that far off in this respect.

Perhaps you're referring to the actual mechanical aspects and less about the ethereal, which I can start to agree with more.  Designing a game system is tough, and there's little out there in terms of standard notation schemes, common language, structure guides, etc. You're pretty much on your own. This is not true for the other fields you're talking about.

But my point being that we can argue about design theory all day, but I don't think that's the big weakness here. There are plenty of known fun game mechanics out there, such that I'm not even sure it's necessary to come up with new ones to satisfy people right now. Doesn't matter - in an MMP, a designer is trying to mishmash all of these (hopefully) cool little mechanics and hope that something fun will emerge from that. He ends up sacrificing each mechanic for the benefit of the other, until he gets a steaming pile. It doesn't matter what you put into the grinder - you'll just get out mush.

There has been this notion that designers should be able to understand and anticipate all of the interactions within a system or collection of systems before actually building it. They CAN'T. This should be obvious now, look at any postmortem for any game out there. Stop trying, build a process that makes it so you don't have to anticipate everything ahead of time. Then give me something fun to play! :)

dan

Dan,

Yes, I am referring to the mechanics. Without the mechanics, there's fumbling. It's the difference between a folk art and one that has developed further. I am not speaking so much about the ethereal.

I have to admit that your last paragraph sounds exactly like "there's plenty of known plots out there, quit futzing around and give me another mystery novel," or "there's plenty of known chord progressions and melodies out there, don't deviate from I-IV-V, I just want something I can dance to!"

So I'm going to, in the end, put on my artist hat, and tell you "hell no" on that one. :) No offense, but what a horrible world you want. :)

Ultimately people want something to enjoy, and people aren't going to appreciate half-baked attempts at greatness. And if your first priority is an artistic statement, start with an easier platform! Go back to 2D or text, rip out all the miscellaneous crap so that you can more quickly flesh out the game. Throw out the movie licenses! Work in your basement! :P

If you actually want to entertain large numbers of people, start with what works. I'm not saying that there isn't room to play in the future, it just seems to me that someone should try and get the basics right first. Maybe you feel like you've already done this, in which case I could understand wanting to do something else. :)

Anyway, nice talking with you!
dan

   The Wright brothers wanted to fly.  Until they found a way to actually do it, they built bicycles.  Ones that people actually found useful.

I'm kind of an "artist" too, so I know where you're coming from. Music, for the most part, I play for myself. Ever since I first picked up the guitar, I've always tried to explore as many routes as possible to make songs. I probably don't do as much exploring these days, and have mainly settled on playing slide, tuned to Gm. Still, it's not really something that lends itself to a catchy sound either. Not even a traditional "bluesy" slide sound for that matter (almost more arabian or gypsy-like), but I like it that way.

Yet, when I do happen to venture outside my little world, sometimes it can be just as fulfilling to do something simple like I-IV-V. Maybe not as a "musician", but as an "entertainer" or whatever, definitely. Maybe it's just that I'm still a punk at heart, but simpler forms of music are much more fun to play when you have an actual audience around. The same can't be said for "gypsy slide". It's also great to get people moving and dancing (it isn't always about you, you know?). Similar things I could say about acting (where the audience applies even more).

There's a reason why the blues have survived all this time, why the Beatles are far more loved than say, Frank Zappa or King Crimson (Yet, the truth of it is, as dumbed down as he could be, McCartney could take any prog bassist to town). It's easily understood, people can't relate to it easier, etc..

Umm..Where was I? Oh. I guess what I'm trying to say is: If you want to be heard, sometimes you just have to give people what they want. I'm not saying that you have to totally forsake all your principles (there was a St. Pepper after all), but that you can find just as much fulfillment in I-IV-V, as long as you step outside yourself a bit. It's also you're obligation, because first and foremost, you took the job, and people have paid and are here to "dance"...Not just to "appreciate" music (Besides, you can just slip in the more esoteric stuff into your set later on. By that time people will be drunk enough that they'll listen to almost anything).

My point: You're an "entertainer" whether you like it or not, Raph ;)

EDIT: 4 in a row. Bad spelling day.

This is precisely why I don't enjoy PvP. It's not skill. It's all the things you mentioned essentially. Frag me in a FPS, you're better than I am. Beat me in a PvP battle, well, see above.

Y'know, on second thought, there should be somebody to push the envelope, and you have to admit Raph has been pretty consistent in that regard over the years.

Reading from his website:


So um, yeah, that pretty much sums it up, doesn't it? Take it or leave it. There are plenty of other people who making simple fun games, but Raph is about the bleeding edge. Good for him. Bad for Jedi. :P

dan

[edit fixed quote]

Everquest in space?

See? It is about me. :P

Believe me, I know full well you gotta put in the crowd-pleasers. If we're gonna make it about me, I take some comfort in the fact that a fair amount of crowd appears to have been pleased.

Of course this is about being an entertainer. I consider the entertainment part mandatory. The art comes after that basic step. It's not in my nature to consider the art optional, though. There can be art in the three minute pop song, there can be art in the daily comic strip. Not going for it seems... sad, somehow. And I mean sad in the original sense.

I also know what Zaphkiel is saying with his bicycles. That said, the next step isn't going to be made by people working part time out of a spare bedroom, I don't think.

Anyway, can we get back to dissecting the laws? We need one more page before I can tell schild and Snowspinner how they're all wrong.

I'd wager City of Heroes here, too. It has three things: Exploring (not really a "system" but it's something to do), combat and missions. That's it, but it works. The only imbalance I know of they have fixed after release is the auto-hit of Provoke (when all other PBAoE powers roll to hit).

However, I have no idea how they are going to add crafting et al, but noticing how features (like fishing) have been added to its spiritual predecessor - Disney's ToonTown - I am sure they will find a way.

This is because most games 'skill' is a function of time input.  We need player skill, or at the least a less playtime-controlled advancement function, before PvP will really work outside of carefully controlled circumstances.

--
Alkiera

I totally agree. Other than to say I don't think it works period, even in controlled circumstances, until skill becomes a factor.

Heh, well if we have your attention, I'm certainly going to take advantage of it. :)

I'm not going to respond to the schlid's post, because I could fill up several pages disagreeing with him. Snowspinner's post I mostly agree with, but I don't think he's really disagreeing with the laws, just Raph's recent games. Instead, I'll talk about the original laws.

From the laws:


Yes, ideally there should be an advancement ladder in the game that feels infinite, so that a player could continue playing indefinitely and still feel like they're reaching milestones. However, without finite ladders in the mix, milestones become meaningless. If you reach level X+1, you're no closer to "winning" if the number of levels are infinite.



Maybe I'm misunderstanding, why does the reward for killing a player have to be "ny"? Couldn't you slap on some arbitrary reward instead, which may not be as high as killing a monster? I'm not saying you would want to do such a thing necessarily, but I don't see any reason you couldn't.

As far as monsters being less exciting to fight then players, I think that is assuming that the same mechanics are used for fighting players as for fighting monsters. Perhaps that can be safely assumed in this context.



One could argue that the latter isn't really a game at all, or at least it's not a very interesting or fun game. If there is only one optimization path in a game - time - players will see that very easily and optimize that. You lock out anybody who doesn't see the game as a full-time job from the advancement ladder. Saying that anyone can reach the pinnacle by mere persistence means that any game involved doesn't even enter the equation. Play the game well, or play it badly, it doesn't matter - just spend enough time playing it and you'll advance.



I discussed this briefly in one of my previous posts, but it seems to be proven that you must exclude some features for the benefit of others. PvP and PvE are at odds with each other - putting both styles of play in the game is detrimental to both of them.

This law seems out of place - first of all, it's not a law, it's a question. :) Secondly, it's a question that can't be answered, because it asks if "players will be happy". The answer is yes and no (or sometimes just no). :P

Thanks,
dan

Those interested in this debate will probably also like this debate from a collection that MIT Press put out in March. Academic take on many of the same issues. Our good friend Raph had this to say when it was posted on /.

Well I guess I can post my views on some of the laws for Raph and others to tear apart. I won't post on all of them, just the ones that I have strong feelings about pro or con. For the record I'll probably refer to SWG during this, not to pick on Raph or that game, but simply because I view it as a common ground that can be used for example purposes. Here goes:



For the most part I agree with this wholeheartedly. The only one I have any issue with is the one about not making the ladder feel finite. I disagree here. I think people as a group like to have a goal. They like to know that if they climb the mountain they can reach the top. Now, if you want to raise the bar later, and make that summit a false peak that is fine and probably should be encouraged.

To relate it to SWG I feel it did the first two parts of this rule very well. However, it was lacking in the milestone department. That is something I used to remember. You never felt like you were advancing. There were no "dings" so to speak.



Brilliant. I remember harvesting and dancing in SWG were heavily automated. (in the case of harvesting I mean in the early days when an artisan is trying to work his way through those sets of skills.) I wonder if you guys have an excel spreadsheet somewhere keeping track of this stuff. I'd bet so.



I not only disagree with this law, but I find the results of it to be a large cause of problems in today's MMOs. It is a naive law that fails to take two things into account:

1) Player preference, some will prefer to PvP, some will find it boring, distasteful, etc
2) Realities of player maturity. Some players are fine with PvP and just take it as part of the game. Others, both on the winning and losing ends of it react badly. From losers who get pissed and it ruins their entire day to winners who use PvP to get their revenge on the world, frequently taunting the ones they kill like schoolyard bullies.

I make no secret of being a person who doesn't like PvP. However, even if I did I wouldn't like what it does to games to try and mix the two playstyles. Personally I think you should have two MMO breeds. PvP. PvE. Don't mix the two. We've seen the problems again and again. From abilities that are balanced in PvE causing havoc in PvP, to player anger over some compromise that has to be made, to any of a myriad of other problems. (TEF in Star Wars being a favorite topic for both camps).



For the most part I agree with this, but the trick is, in addition to the world being detailed, interesting, the way in which players interact with said world must also be well done. If the world is beautiful and fascinating but I find the "game" part of it to be frustrating, I'm still leaving.



I'm in the exclude camp. I think alot of the current problems come from trying to mix to many playstyles together. ESPECIALLY PvP and PvE. Shadowbane should have been nothing but PvP just like CoH is nothing like PvE. (For the moment at least). Keep in mind the very first sentence of that law. It's about the most true thing I've seen yet in these rules.



No shit. In addition I'd add that it seems that roleplaying is a lost art in these games altogether. These games also don't reward roleplaying. In a tabletop game if I do something that's "in character" even if it is disadvantageous, like giving up the Uber Sword of Bad Guy Whacking to the Holy Church of Good Guys, I may get rewarded in some other manner like extra experience points from the Dungeon Master. If I do the same in an MMO I just lost my sword and that's it.

you know RP in these games is in trouble, when you see forum posts deriding those who even make an attempt.

I'm going to stop for now because this post is getting quite long and to be honest I don't want to take up a whole forum page by myself.

But how is the server going to recognize "in character behavior"?

In-game actions are easily traceable, but the computer cannot classify them as "in-character" because it doesn't really know what the character of the character is like.

Unless, instead of letting the player create a custom background and personality, you force them to pick traits from a list of options, to define their "character".  Or answer 10 hypothetical questions.  Then the AI can judge whether giving away the sword corresponds to the traits chosen.

Or, maybe a better method would be to keep track of in-game actions (requires large database), including "gifts", the quests chosen, the way the quest was completed (killing vs diplomacy), and build a psych profile.  Then reward the player for actions that further conform to the character's psych profile.

Could be an extension of the faction system into new territory.

Of course, building a psych profile database of (ultimately) your customers could lead to all sorts of trouble.  

But, if you quantify the profile (to a number, or the good ol lawful-evil chaotic-good scale), you can delete the history of actions that led to it, saving database space AND avoiding potential legal headache.

But then, you need to code all your in-game actions and quests to support the different choices different personalities might make.  Instead of "just kill everything."  Quests with multiple solutions, oh! the bane of spoiler sites everywhere.

Hmm, single player games (Kotor?) have done this already.

Just a little note: The forum pages will display the default number of posts (or your preference if you changed it) per page no matter how long those posts are. Feel free to write novels if you've got it in your head and you have the time to type it. Some very good stuff so far. Please carry on...

    I'd go farther.  This is not a law.  This is a design descision.  It assumes open PvP and full looting in order to be true.  If you don't allow looting of victims, and apply negative experience for PKing, then it isn't true.

As someone with a BS (full of BS actually) in Fine Art, I can tell you that while there may be a "science" to the craft of artwork and music, the science ISN'T what makes good art/music. Creative ventures truly are all about something my art professor told me about going to art school.

"You spend 4 years learning the rules, and the rest of your life trying to figure out how to break them."

Creation by the "rules," by "Science" is iminently less interesting and most people can spot that, even if they can't dissect it rationally and critically. They just know what they like. David was an incredible realist, matching exacting proportions with photo-realistic colors, but he doesn't hold a candle to Monet, or Cezzane, who break all the rules of the science of art. Picasso and Dali burned the rulebook, and desecrated its body. The science of creative enterprises produces boring creative enterprises. Britney Spears music is all about the science of attracting a certain demographic, as is the BackStreet Boys. And while it makes assloads of money at first, such money and such careers don't last without some serious rule-breaking.

Will comment on other stuff as I get through this thread.

EDIT: Obviously Raph, you are trying to "artify" the MMOG genre. The MMOG genre in my opinion lacks the science you are speaking of, it lacks the codified, standard practices. MMOG development is still trying to find all the standard instruments, whereas a band just needs to pick up some mics, a guitar, bass and drums and go at it. This is one of the reasons I'm actually in favor of using off-the-shelf packages like NetImmerse, Butterfly.net and such for MMOG development because some things need to be standard. There's way too much NIH (Not Invented Here) = Bad thought in MMOG development.

Haemish, I don't think we can break the rules until we know what they are. There's some classic patterns in folk arts which demonstrate that by and large they tend to be very non-innovative and conservative. The radical shifts in art style of the various artists you list all came in reaction to established formal styles. With no "rules" so to speak, you don't have a way to react. Picasso was an incredible draftsman, he knew precisely what he was doing when he decided to do something different.

Your prof said you have to break the rules, but he also taught them all to you, did he not? I agree creating solely by the rules leads to dull and uninteresting work. But in fact, many of the artists you cite were notable for exploring the rules, not ignoring them.

As to your other point, it'd be great to have a standard platform. I don't think we're at the point yet where those platforms are mature enough--they contain a ton of assumptions about what you are making.

I thought we do have rules.

"Thou shalt sucketh all the time a player will give out of him, and require 50% more to boot."

"Thou shalt not mixeth the PVP and the PVE. Two great tastes do not taste great together."

I actually have an article cooking in the old bean that establishes the rules of MMOG development as they've been observed.

So, did we just come full circle here in 3 posts?

Edit: Finally read the entire article.  (What, me respond just on a few posts instead of knowing what I'm talking about...)

Overall, I like what schild is trying to do with the article: challenge some of the assumptions that have been gathered through the years of MUD and MMORPG development.  I disagree with some he's said, mostly due to direct contradictory experiences or just a feeling that he's disagreeing to disagree instead of actually finding some humbrage with what's being said.

The laws themselves are a good starting point to build a online world, whether it be a MUD or MMO (same thing basically).  You can argue the points of each law, but it's hard not to see how they should be present and on the table during any initial development of any MMO.  There's just too many lessons learns coalesced into juicy, digestable tidbits to ignore.  

What will make this genre interesting is where people deviate and where they succeed in their deviation.    I think it will be quite something to behold when a game actually pulls of a tight-knit roleplaying community on a 3000 person server or when a game without character class, prestigious titles for players, and a monotonous level grind ends up having a solid customer retention (didn't UO kind of do this for a while?).

But breaking rules just to break rules accomplishes nothing, there needs to be a reason to make these leaps other than just seeing how far you can jump (*cough* HAM *cough*).  Unless it can introduce a tanglibly improved experience for the player first of all, it has no business being thrust upon them (early rifle firing in WW2OL comes to mind).

Overall, good stuff. Perhaps I should read the front page a bit more.

PS. The irony in Dundee's law makes me chuckle.  I wonder if he wrote it before or after "pokemon".

The "infinite milestones" law reminds me of one of the things that troubles me about the genre. Nobody ever leaves a MMOG happy. Like all games, some people will try an MMOG and hate it right off the bat, or soon find something in it they hate (nerfs in MMOGs or jumping puzzles in FPSs). Those are the lucky ones, because unlike other games, even those that love a MMOG, will eventually learn to despise it. Since a MMOG never ends, when a player stops playing it is because they are sick of it. Despite years of pleasure the game has given them, they leave dissatisfied.

This is the darkside of retention efforts like "infinite milestones". It's not just a bad thing for any individual game, but it is a bad thing for the genre in general. It makes players less likely to want to try a new MMOG, or more likely to leave it sooner, as soon as it reminds them of the old game.

I think MMOGs should end. Or more precisely, they should climax. They should provide points along the character's advancement path that allows the player to walk away satisfied. And then give them a reason a come back.

For example, since most MMOGs now launch with expansions already in mind, the end-game of the launch version should provide a climax, like a boss mob that once defeated a character can never fight again. Then when the expansion is released, give those characters some benefit and a new boss to shoot for.

Generally, I think the focus should be less on retention rates and more on positive churn rates. To paraphase: if you love your walking credit cards, set them free; if they return, cha-ching; if they don't, your game sucked to begin with.

"Baron's Theorem
Hate is good. This is because conflict drives the formation of social bonds and thus of communities. It is an engine that brings players closer together.."


I have been trying to figure out what it was about 'Old School UO' that was so above and beyond all MMOG experiences I have had since. There was something about the chest opening, and the music at the log in screen I can still hear today. When I fired up UO, I was literally engrossed in a new world, an immersion into a game that provided me emotion and enjoyment. Everything since then I can only describe as experiences and only remember them as such:

Anarchy Online: Flying for the first time as my Meta-physicist; getting a good laugh out of killing leets and eleets as they spouted out insults like "i roXXoR j00 newb!". The rest of the game was a pretty grind, fun at times.

Neocron: The coolest game that noone played. Favorite experience, my first outpost battle - my first adrenalinized experience in an MMOG since UO. Fun, 90% open PvP...neat faction system. Buggy. Underpopulated.

Shadowbane: My first siege was awesome, though the game's bugs were above and beyond the worst I have seen in my time. RPed in a Minotaur Horde, was cool but the city was so hard to maintain and farming sucked. Decent PvP, but the bugs drove me away.

Planetside: Action packed fun, my first 100+ person battle dropped my jaw. Cool game, the only MMOG im playing at the moment.

SWG: Ok game, very pretty. Neat crafting system (not that I'm too into that). The Naboo palace as the sun came up was breath-taking, though it is not good when thats the best thing you can say about a Star Wars game.



     So what was it about UO that made it so much more immersive than what I have listed above? Why do I still get a flood of emotion and am able to picture the towns and feeling I had in game when I hear a MIDI song from the game?

I say the difference is fear. Fear of the unknown. Beyond those 10 tiles each way, you never knew what was coming. Or waiting. Knowing you had better bank often or you could actually lose something. Don't take that precious Vanq out unless you're ready to get to business.

The fear of the red. I, to this day, remember the first guy to ever PK me. David Killmore, I vowed to become strong enough to return the favor one day - though I never saw him again. Maybe the fact was I had freedom in this game, where others only have rules and switches. UO had this neat thing where if you saw a red approaching and you didn't want to fight, you could RECALL. I know its crazy, but it worked. I think some people never figured this out (at least from their incessant whining you wouldn't think so).

Anyways, hate is good. It helped form my guild, where we helped train others to fight the reds. Through the conflict gave our guild meaning. Sure the reds had an edge, but when we were hanging out at Serpents Hold and somebody came up saying they were PKed at deceit, we mounted up and gated to try to exact revenge. Without these types on conflicts everyone would just spend their time trying to get teh shinest of teh shiny. Race to level 65. Or whatever else. Oh wait...thats every damn MMOG out today. Grind away boys![/i]

Hell, hiding worked against most of the amateurs that tried to pk in UO :) The worst thing about UO pvp was exploiters, imo (well, and cable vs dialup).

I found that the worst people in UO were those who used loopholes in the system built to stop them from griefing, part of why I feel any anti-griefing measures will only be subverted for griefing purposes. Whether it was the death-robed purple potioner or the Great Lords and Ladies who would noto-kill you in a heartbeat, the folks I had the least problems with in UO for the entire run of the game were red-named.

I still remember the first time I was pk'd. I was killing hinds to make some armor so I could afford reagents, and he got me outside the moonglow zoo with a couple lightning bolts (in beta). Instead of whining about it, I learned the hiding skill and was rarely pk'd afterwards, in several years of playing the game, and then it was almost always a notokiller or an exploiter/lamer (miner killer types).

It also defined my part in our roleplaying community as part of the Yew Militia. As annoying as the incessant griefers could be, it did make for an omnipresent foe for roleplaying pvp companies. And the attack and counterattack between the pks and the original antipks (before antipk became synonymous with notopk) could go on for hours as we waited for news of the newest attacks, tried to follow them back to their headquarters, etc.

I still remember the day AOD was dumb enough to have their blue shill show up at Buc's Den, where I had been fleecing their reds all day with my thief. I snooped her (the blue's) pack and lo, a fat keyring. One snatch, run, and hide later and it was just a matter of hijacking a boat and heading to their little town to mete out a bit of player justice.

It was also a lot more fun when boats were basically community property, mostly used for transportation and then left behind like a bike on the side of the road. If it were there when you returned, cool, if not, find another.

I think the thing about UO was that you had so many tools to allow you to play the game you wanted to. But because of the outlash against pks, not understanding that the problem was not the pks, but the griefing, a lack of accountability, well, here we are in treadmill land, hunting foozles.

The interesting thing about early UO is the completely polarized viewpoints of people looking back at the game.  Either it was the Jesus of player justice, player conflict and pvp or it was a gank ridden nightmare to be fled from with great haste.    

I think this pretty much happened because the game was developed without any sort of niche in mind beyond just taking the graphical MUD farther.  When you have no target audience, and no basic system in place to regulate player behavior beyond a very rudimentary set of restrictions, you have a salad instead of a soup.  You get completely different player bases attempting to coexist within the same world.  Quake-heads, MUD fans, and Ultima fanbois attempting to cohabbitate is something out of a nerd reality tv show, only bad things can happen.



This worked for some people. Hell, it worked for me in that game.  But god knows a great deal of people just wanted to enjoy their leisure activity without that fear.  To this day, I still sweat more than normal, start to quiver a bit, and get a queasy stomach partaking in PVP like I did during early UO.  I just get wrecked with fear and anxiety, but it was really fun to feel like that in a game. I like games that produce strong emotional reations from me and UO produced some of the strongest.  Nothing could beat the sheer tension of facing off against a group of similar skill for control of a dungeon or popular player area.  

But I can assume that just not a lot of players wanted that. I'm sure the miner didn't (beyond a few masochistic ones), I can assume the guy trying to tame deer in the wilderness didn't like worrying about being rolled by some bored FPS exile.  I know I enjoy ATITD in its relaxed setting and wouldn't exactly want to be sevenbladed to death while I'm tending bonfires and making lime.

I think UO showed that fear can be a great boon to any virtual world.  But it's going to be a niche of a niche if PVP is going to be involved.  It has to be marketed and targetted well towards it's audience, otherwise I believe it'd suffer some atrocious retention rates.  There isn't just one show to contend with anymore and people will just likely move on than live through another early UO which rubs them the wrong way.

One of my main complaints about UO's world was the lack of relatively safe places to mine. I know when I started up on Siege for my second round of UO, I spent my youth in Cove, where one could safely do some mining.

If resource gatherers had enough options for safe harvesting, only needing to risk death for mining or lumberjacking when the safe places were all taken, awarding the risk taken. Hell, if that had happened, the only people who would have been bitching would have been griefees (that lovely deathrobed bastard with purple potions added nothing but annoyance to the gaming experience imo) and whiny bitches due for a firm choking by wayne brady.

I, too, used to break out in sweat and get very tense in UO pvp. There was so much more to it than just fighting, lots of subterfuge and ways to act without being a direct combatant.

But the things I loved about early UO are exactly the kind of things the mainstream EQ clone lover hated, mostly because people are broken. Some of my most tense and favorite moments came playing my thief in UO. I had a moral code and basically only stole from pks and griefer types (d00ds, in the parlance of the day), unless there were a driving rp reason. I did break into a few houses by doing a lot of scouting and some really good thieving of keys (not abusing bugs or being lame by bank stealing with a partner). It's all the lame bank thieves and 'flag' thieves (pks who invite attack by flagging themselves) that destroyed the fun of that class, same as the idiots who thought killing miners was fun ruined pvp with the introduction of Trammel.

That's why I'm such a dick about griefers and exploiters, and about needing accountabilty in mmogs. Because the one mmog that was actually good was ruined and nobody is going to revisit that open playstyle again, imo. All because of a lack of accountability and people who can't maturely interact with others.

BUt what does this have to do with Shadowbane?  Oh, wait...

Xilren

Early in on UO, we had a philosophy of trying to fix issues in context. Rogue carpenters laying siege to the city of Trinsic by building up giant walls of furniture at the entrances? Ok, put in axes so that people within can chop their way out. From the dev point of view, it was a game of adding enough "physics" to the game to balance out the exploits.

But you only go that route if you are passionate about fighting that battle. If you are doing it for the art of it. If you are not, you instead take out the ability to drop things from your designs.

If we had made it so that six miners in a group mining were automatically two hundred times stronger, or were automatically a guard zone, or could strip PK ability from people attacking them, or some such, then we would have been encouraging the right sort of behavior, and probably it would have worked better. None of those occured to us back in 1998, though.

There ARE contextual means to resolve these things. The problem is that to find them you'll have to actually run the experiment again and make players miserable while you figure out the solutions.

*takes Raph by the hand*

Come with me, little boy...

So, how did you solve miner ganking?

Edit: Ohh boy, another long article.

Edit Dos:

I think you're on the right track but wildly optimistic.  Certain griefers tend to transcend rules and method for keeping them in check.  Certain playstyles, while not technically grief, tend to drive certain types away from a more aggressive, risk filled game.  Now, this isn't a problem if you're shooting for a niche, but becomes really really problematic if you're trying to shoot for the moon like SWG or UO.

Sometimes you just have to "code it out". I'm curious to see how you're going to "code it out" without "coding it out".   I'd like to think it's in the players hand to make their experience better, certain games have shown you can do that (ATITD) but even successes in player policing have involved intracate involvement from the powers that be.

Anyhow, keep us informed. I'd like to see your stab at this on a design standpoint even though you couldn't get me to play a UO player shard if you jabbed me with a pointed bamboo stick.

Azaroth, if you'd posted that here, we'd be on page 5 already! Darnit.

Why is it so hard for me to write any sort of decent response to Raph? Heh. I vaccillate between fanboi and ranter.

Let me just respond to a question you asked me (and went poorly answered) elsewhere: Why do I play mmogs?

The answer is you (and the folks I don't know who make you look good :)). Because you strive for art, to make a compelling and interesting creation.

I have a hard time evaluating SWG because I just don't find it very fun, I wish I could be more constructive (but that's when I get to ranting). I'm also sad because it seems to me the low road has consistently been taken, and honestly, I can't see how any other road could have been taken when you involve Lucasarts (I was totally shocked by KotOR, I expected Lucas to drag even mighty Bioware into the sewer).

So my question in return is: Is art wasted on a playerbase that doesn't give a damn?

Because I certainly seem to be in the vast minority on most topics (gamerelated) that are discussed in the various communities I participate in. I mean, my favorite mmogs are CoH and Planetside, despite the relative shallowness and 'game'ness of both. Mostly due to the southern turn I feel the genre took after the huge promise of UO, for the reasons you hint at.

Does nobody comprehend that post length has no bearing on the page numbering? If you set your preferences to display one reply per page, we'd be on page 131 right now. ;)

Well, as much as it was meant to be an unfair question, I do have an answer that doesn't involve skirting it :)

We intend to put in a PK system whereby you are penalized a different amount of points for different actions. PKing people with less than x total skill points. PKing people in certain regions like the Britain GY or Despise. And the like.

Depending on your amount of points, you'll suffer a certain subset on a compounding list of penalties designed to be general nuisances and hamperings, but nothing so strong and intrusive as statloss. Something like our current penalties.

In such a system, killing miners for relatively little gain wouldn't be generally be a wise course of action. Thusly we're not coding out the freedom to do whatever you like, we're just providing a set of penalties designed to punish your actions, not just your colour.

As far as "coding out griefing without coding it out", we're not coding anything out. We're coding tools in. In general if you want a very vague idea, we're coding in a system for players to deal with griefers themselves within the game. Might work and it might not, but I'm excited about it, and it's a worthwhile test if nothing else.

While I've never been a big fan of PvP as it is implemented in MMO's to date, I think this is important.  Part of the issue of griefers and pks in 'player freedom' games like UO, is that the hope i for 'player justice' to save the day.  And player justice has a nigh impossible job when it comes down to stopping unwanted activities.  IMHO, there needs to be good support for people who want to play police/guards/investigators, who can track down and punish griefers and those who Pk the 'innocent'.  Make it a class, or a skillset, that helps you figure out who stole the miner's money, where they went afterword, and where they might be now.  Let them capture the theif, bring them before some kind of in-game device that can look at logs and say 'yes, this guy stole that stuff', and let them punish him, throw him in jail for some period, etc.  The 'OMG I'm paying for this game, you can't throw me in jail' crowd may leave your game, but that's where you win, as the developer.

You also need some method of cross-account accountability, so the theif can't just log on a mule(on the same acct) and thus still have access to things denied those who commit crimes.  Multi-account muling is still an issue, but one which I think is unavoidable with current technology.

As a side note, I never played actual UO, and only spent a few hours attempting to play on IPY.  I seriously wanted to know what UO was like...  I was mostly frustrated by the complete and utter lack of anything like useful documentation on how the game interface worked.  The in-game help all described how present-day UO worked, which, aside from movement, and a few UI elements, were completely unlike how IPY works.  I understand it was written for old UO vets, who probably remember alot of how it used to work, but you won't ever get any sheep to play that way.

--
Alkiera

Rewriting basic documentation for UO is a pretty time consuming task. With the new website coming up, we'll look for some alternatives like maybe even adding a section that is completely or partially ripped from old logs of Stratics in 99 or so. With our unique info added in, of course. That's really the easy part, sort of.

We've also been looking to get a newbie-friendly companionish program going with (volunteer) volunteer counselors.

I fully realize the need to be more newbie friendly in the information and startup department, but there are honestly so many things that need doing you can really get sidetracked. Especially coding wise. My one (exceptional, however) coder has literally be up to his neck for months. The little coding I'm capable of (which, come on, we really shouldn't even be calling coding) is just of no help unless I'm off on a minor cooky side project or you want something done in five hours that he could accomplish in five minutes.

Cross-account accountability isn't so much of a problem as accountability skirting via proxies and such. When you have a limit per IP on account creation instead of a limit per $$$$, you'd be surprised at the amount of hell you can raise on proxies. However, we're going to be dropping proxy connects here really soon with the help of Resident Security Dude and one of our biggest scourges will be.. curtailed, if nothing else.

Cross account accountability for general, legal, in game actions may be slightly tricky, but it probably achievable - if it's something you'd want to do. I'd be a bit cautious of even going to an account-wide system, but I guess it depends on the final workings of any system that's put in place. A lot of griefing can be done with a 50/50 newbie, so it's definitely something you have to look at.

And by the way - encouraging people to play "cops" - always something I've been interested in. Might just work right in with our upcoming town system, if I can ever figure out something really decent. In fact, the griefing system, the new PKing system, all that, will likely tie into a town system I've been putting some thought into.

We'll see.

Edit: Stop writing off the top of your head and not going back to check for typos, dipshit.

You might want to look into setting up a Wiki.  They work remarkably well in practice as a player created playguide (ATITD has a pretty decent one).  May help for some of the more intricate systems in early UO. At least it would remove some of the burden from your shoulders and put in a possibly long term beneficial bandaid.

As someone that works in the information development field, having your audience contribute their expertise to your documentation often produces great results.

PS - Where the hell is Joe and why the fuck hasn't he given me a spiffy little title yet?

"Jackass who thinks he's a developer or something and likes spiffy titles because it elevates him above the rest of the dirty cattle, even if unfairly" has a nice ring to it.

Big fan of that, big fan of that. However, I've been surprised by how little it tends to go on with our playerbase. Because it's an old game and people figure everyone already has it figured out, or because we're only one server with 20k accounts instead of 200k, I don't know. Either way, I think if we can highlight the amount of it that HAS gone on with the new website, it could possibly spur some more activity in that particular area. And I agree, it's a very good thing.

Hell, we picked up another server recently for our webhosting needs and our IRC. Maybe we can offer space for people who are particularly ambitious, who knows. A little mini Stratics for IPY would be sensational.

It's great fun for the pks, great fun for the junior Nancy Drews and Hardy Boys, and a big ball of shit in the hand for the miners.  

Just something I've noticed about crafters (having played one and knowing many), they generally don't like being fucked with while resource gathering.  Look, it's boring, so they just want to get the damn thing over with as soon as possible.  Sure they don't want Sir Miner Ganker killing and not being penalized, but they just as soon never even be bothered by the bastard in the first place.

I look forward to seeing how your system works, but player justice is still pretty much a mirage. It doesn't matter how exciting for others you make someone's shitty experience, it's still a shitty experience.

The good goes with the bad to fuel the rollercoaster of emotions a good online world should be.

The key is to balance things as best you can. You don't want to get PKed, but we can't remove the option to PK. We can, however, punish those PKers suitably and based on their actions instead of their killcount.

Should a guy who kills miners and newbies at the Britain GY all day have the same penalties as a guy who kills the odd 7x mage in non guilded combat for whatever reason? I don't think so.

20k accounts? Er, how big IS the UO emu scene these days? How many users total, any estimates? How mahy of those 20k accounts are actual players? What's your active userbase size? How many uniques in a day?

18,708 right now actually.

No estimate on total users, really. We restrict to two accounts per IP, so you can look at that a lot of ways. Everyone has a second account, half of the people have a second account, not too many people have a second account.

Of course, I've heard it's not entirely uncommon for the average account per person on OSI to be estimated at more than two itself. I've seen people with 50 ffs :P

We could pull some metrics I suppose, as we use an email recovery system that forces you to attach an email to your account for things like password recovery/changing and higher end administration crap. It can get tricky though, as many, many people choose not to attach an email to their account for one reason or another, and the way shared accounts are logged makes it impossible to track the number of a users accounts by their IP. Which would be completely unrealistic anyway. I'm sure we could figure it out, but our resident math horndog isn't around anymore.

Uniques is our userbase size. Unlike any other shard we place restrictions on several things, like account creation and logins. We've had a one connection per IP limit in for a very long time now, and our prime time traffic will go over 700 unique connections, and sits at about 600 during the rest of the day, due to the seemingly quite large foreign population. And the macroing.

The UO emu scene has grown since IPY rolled in and started doing 1500 (non unique at the time) connected clients at a time. We might go back to a less restrictive system once we get onto our new dual xeon server on wednesday, as it's mighty impressive to log in and see 1500, but there are a lot of practical reasons why it's just not the best idea - although, the wow factor does, I imagine, retain players a lot better. Plus people on networks get shafted a bit.

There are some other big shards out there that generally came along after IPYs success. Most shards, as always, have like five people. But there's those few bigger ones with 1/200 non-unique connections at a time. I hear the official RunUO UO:R shard is doing well lately due to their implementation of factions. However, the amount of people who tended to put together 20 characters macroing in a small house at the same time when we had no limits like these other servers really makes me suspect of their populations.

Nevertheless, playing on IPY is just like playing on an OSI shard, population wise, and the players love it. I've often heard we're more populated than the OSI shard a player had just come from.

Also our active population has recently dropped a bit due to several factors, mainly including faults in the PvP system that allow for some pretty lame stuff that quite a few people tend to take advantage of. We've hopefully addressed them well in the upcoming patch, and I wouldn't be surprised to see our average unique client count go up to 850 or so. Were we to implement factions immediately it'd be really nice for the count, but I want to add some sieging factionish features to the town system instead, which I hope overall will be more fun and better for the shard.

And so the cycle goes on...

Player justice is a myth. It won't happen. It can't happen on a large enough scale for MMOG's to be worth bothering with.

You see, as we should all know by now, griefers, especially serial griefers are complete cockmunchers. They are the motherfuckers you meet at a party and within 5 minutes of talking to them start to think to yourself "This guy is really and truly full of shit." They are the people you try to avoid; they are the asshole in the bathroom with the cocaine, who knows no one would talk to him if he didn't have the cocaine. When they are online, they are truly the most odious people to have any interaction with. And they like it that way.

In order to police those kinds of people, you have to interact with them. Short of an insta-kill button with electrodes attached to their real life chao sack, player police will have to deal with the scum of the fucking earth. And while that may sound interesting the first 500 or so times, the 501st time you have to shuttle your player cop ass into the mines because b0n3d00d is azzraping a corpse, you will be begging to be at the helm of the Kevorkian Machine this motherfucker is hooked up to. More than guild leadership, or tech support at an ISP, this will be a thankless job with an odious community that does not reward your good job with anything but scorn and derision. Who wants to pay to endure that kind of suffering? Shit, I'm not sure I understand those who pay to endure the abuse that a guild leader takes, and you want to make an entire class of player that does nothing but deal with immature muffinsnatchers on a day to day basis and pays for the privilege?

Player accountability can only work through hard-coded restrictions on anti-community behavior followed up by a PAID support staff that investigates and castigates serial griefers FOR THE CHILDREN.

Multi-account player accountability is possible, and don't try to tell me it isn't. It just isn't CHEAP, and since customer support is job last for MMOG development and game companies in general, it won't be a priority unless the installed player base makes it a priority.

The problem with most proposed PK solutions is that they focus too much on punishing the PK rather than protecting the victim.

Most miners in UO would tell you they got absolutely no satisfaction from knowing that a PK would suffer stat-loss. Part of that was the fact that the victim had no way of knowing when (or if) the PK took stat loss. And even if they could somehow know the exact moment the PK was killed and how much stats they lost, it didn’t change the fact that the PK ruined hours of resource gathering. The harshness of the PK’s penalty isn’t going to make the victim feel any better about being killed and losing hours of play.

If you want an open PvP game, you have to lessen the pain (at least for non-combatants) from being killed. If I’m a miner and I am killed by a PK maybe I only lose 25% of the resources I have mined and nothing else. This way I don’t lose my shovels, my clothing, etc. and I can get right back to mining pretty quickly. Or perhaps give me the option to instantly teleport back to town if I am PKed so I don’t have to run for 10 minutes to get ressed (this has the added bonus of letting me avoid the smack talk too). I’m sure you can pick apart either of those, but you get the idea.

I’ve never liked the idea of punishing players for playing your game. It doesn’t make any sense. I’m not talking about exploiting or griefing, those people aren’t “playing”, they are just being disruptive and they should be removed. But for game systems like PKing, you can implement harsher and harsher punishments for doing it in order to curtail it, but then why bother having it in the game in the first place? Or you can implement penalties that are nothing more than a nuisance, but then all you’re doing is annoying your player-base while not preventing them from continuing to PK anyway. Either way, no level of punishment resolves the real problem.

I am in no way against the idea of having PKs in a game. But at the end of the day, it’s the victims who are going to quit if being killed is too painful. Spend more time thinking from the victim’s perspective rather than the PK’s.

The type of thing I'm envisioning is a closer mapping between what happens when crimes occur in (an ideal)real-life, and what happens in game.  If you kill someone and steal their stuff, then get caught, you get some penalty from the court, which may well include reparations, IRL to the family of the deceased, in a game you can actually make reparations to the one you killed.  

Frankly, I think as a griefer, it'd be more fun to be the crimnal who does stuff and gets away with it, thus becoming notorious, which would draw larger manhunts, maybe bounty hunters (Which wouldn't be exploited so much if the requirement was 'capture and bring to cops', rather than just 'kill', to get the reward.)  I'm thinking like "Catch Me if You Can" here, or any other similar movie.  However, ideally most criminals would be caught.

As far as the victims go, yes, there needs to be some modification of systems so that those who don't wish to be attacked can go about their business with some modicum of safety, tho I agree with Azeroth, I think, when they stated that rewards for the miners should be comensurate to risks taken.  So mining in the safe dungeon is not as effective/profitable as mining in less protected areas.  Perhaps 'safe' mining locations could be run by companies who provide guards both at the entrance and regularly throughout the inside, but require some percentage off the top to pay for the guards.



The actual process of getting materials is one of those systems that needs to be changed.  Not sure how yet, but something that ends up like SWG, where high-end crafters find it better to just buy materials from those who harvest it, rather than harvest themselves, and new crafters harvest it themselves due to economics, but with more continuity than SWG harvesters...  Some kind of combination of SWG and Horizons.

--
Alkiera

I don't think that any of this really gets to the problems of PK (non-consentual PvP) for me.

Its all about time. My time. Real time.

If I get a few measily hours to log in and play, I want to decide what game to play today. PvM, Craft, Resource Gather, Train, Socialize, or PvP... whatever. My choice. Not yours.

I don't really give a rat's ass what you do to the guy that disrupted my play. That doesn't change my lost time.

I think we have seen the solution actually. Zoned or Area PvP switches seem to work the best. DAOC for example. No obscure rules, TEFs etc.

As long as there is enough non-PvP+ content areas to keep everybody reasonably happy (< notice reasonable). There can be incentives in the PvP+ area as long as they are not really lopsided.

The bottom line that you won't like: I don't want my world effected (too much?) by your play. Effect the shit out of each other... I dont care. Leave me the hell alone.

Thanks for listening. Back to the rules now eh?

This would seem to indicate that you want a persistant single-player game.  If other players can't affect your world, they might as well not be there.  I would be willing to agree that 'persistant single-player world' games is an under-represented genre in computer/console gaming. I think Harvest Moon might be one example.



Frankly, I'm not interested in keeping everybody happy.  I'm interested in keeping a target audience happy, which may or may not include you.  I agree with others here that the giant 400+k account games are not the future of MMOGs.  It's hard to get that many people to agree enough on how things should be done to stick around longer than the free month, especially if your game actually introduces something non-stock-standard.

--
Alkiera

Actually, I think what Nyght is saying is not so much that he wants to never be affected by another person. I think he wants to be able to CHOOSE when he will be and won't be subject to being affected negatively by other people. How that's done is up to debate, but I think for MMOG's to be more "mass-market" (or at least as mass-market as a subscription-based game will be), this has to be a priority. PVP is fine with most people, even those who tip the scale way towards PVE-only, so long as they get the CHOICE to participate or not to participate.

The question is how many miner types are going to be OK with the danger of being jumped?  With games like ATITD being targeted at the crafting/resource gathering player, is the "miner who likes to be hunted" player a large enough demographic to be worth going after?

That's a good question. I think if the rewards for going into a dangerous area are worth it, then yes, there may be miners who are willing to risk it.

But that's exactly why I said we need to look at the issue from the perspective of the victim. If you determine that nothing will make the typical miner OK with being attacked, then you've answered the question about whether to put in the ability to do so. If we continue to only look at ways to punish the PKs (which unfortunately is the most common answer) we'll never come to any meaningful conclusions.

Well ya know, I've found it damn hard to find much of a player economy or PvM group hunts or socializing in those single player games.

But H has is right. Choice is the answer.

As to "I like to be jumped miners", I think you can probably find a handfull on any UO shard in Felucca. But it is really a small percentage of the player base.

Because this is as simple as including resources at a slightly higher production rate in PvP+ areas, I see no reason not to include this playstyle in a game.

As development priorities go, I would sure rather have an interesting and bug free combat mechanics then PvP Miners.

I'll bet even the miners would agree.

Bwhaha, that's a great reference. Having lived in so many band houses and having so many, many parties, I can't count how many times we've kicked 'that guy's' ass. We didn't need him for coke, heh. Once had a guy lock himself in our bathroom after he spent the money we had given him for an 8ball on crack. He had the nuts to give us some crushed up crack rocks, then go lock himself in our bathroom and smoke crack.

That's why bands have security, kids. I'm sure he couldn't walk for months. That's what's lacking in mmogs. Someone to break legs.

Anyway, good post Hammy.

Miners. I played a blacksmith in UO, I mined a LOT. Traditional mining, cave mining, boat mining. I've been pk'd by more morons than I can hope to remember, I even tell them I'll make them armor if they don't kill me, heh. Dumbasses. As far as the ability to be killed while mining, only if there is some really kickass ore! That's why I said there should have been an option for mining in justice zones, so you could do your day-to-day mining without worrying about some dickhead coming along and wanking himself all over you.

I liked the unpredictability and fear in UO, but there are times when it was going too far, like when mining. My point is rather than create a mirror (not a mirror!), a more eloquent solution would have been to create more areas like Cove, where you could gather resources in relative peace (it was the getting to and from that was a bitch on SP, heh). Obviously OSI was painted into a corner with the static 2d map, but hey. If instead of a pvp- mirror we had gotten a new land that was pvp+ but a bit more well laid out...

I always look at both sides of the issue. I've been a 'pk' (though not an asshole about it) and also a crafter (and everything in between except tamer or bard).

Your average PK is quite bluntly a sociopath. My perfect world would let them do what they want, but give the victims their home addresses. Then the victims can show up on their doorstop and show them what it's like to be PKed in real life.

To Azaroth:



I couldn't disagree with this more. People often speak of needing emotions from an online game. I only need one emotion. Fun. Period. That's all I want from an online game. If I want to be angry and frustrated I'll go get a call center job. I do not want to pay my own money to feel these kinds of stressful emotions.

This is why I disagree with Raph's law that says that killing players is always more rewarding than killing AI. For who?

If I have a choice I might participate in PvP. If I don't have a choice I won't pay to play your game. Period. This also goes for things like SWG, which say you have a choice, but you really don't. What I mean is, if you want to miss two of the biggest parts of the game (Galactic Civil War, Jedi) then yes, you can avoid PvP. Of course, that likes telling me that I don't have to jump from the burning building. I can choose to get burned if I want.

PKs are not sociopaths. At least no more so than a baseball player who slides hard into second to break up a double play. They are just playing the game, and in most cases, playing well within the rules.

The sociopaths are the designers that make those rules. People who think murder is neccessary for freedom and fear builds strong communities. That is Stallinism, not good game design.

   I think you're confusing sociopath with psychopath.  Sociopath just means anti-social.

A recurring theme here seems to be that players are motivated by various forms of drama.  I'm not referring to it in the "tell me a story" sense, but rather abstractly as the presence and resolution of a conflict.  This includes everything from PvP to the process of leveling and equipping a character to starting crusades on message boards.  Everywhere players are passionate about something, there's a conflict involved.  Fun game mechanics are fun because they resolve interesting conflicts in a fair and entertaining way.

The fundamental problem, though, is that my actual or threatened suffering is not good entertainment.  Other people's suffering, and the methods they (or I) use to end it, are.  Movies and books solve this issue handily by taking us out of the equation.  Games put us back in, and so emerges the problem of how to motivate players to play without making them uncomfortable enough to quit.  Putting players in the same situations as movie characters (without softening the rules) would result mostly in frustrated players.

Early UO was incredibly dramatic, but it only works when there's a perception that the outcome isn't predetermined.  For a lot of players, the day they realized that they'd never be able to compete with those they'd come to hate was the day they left.  On the other end, a lot of players find more gentle games to be boring for basically the same reason -- choosing fights wisely means you'll never lose.  No uncertainty means no tension means no drama means no fun.  The problem is, though, that introducing this uncertainty means that sometimes things will turn out unfavorably, and the same threat that makes the game interesting is the one that makes it painful.

So far, every multiplayer game I've played has either addressed this problem with the form "everyone wins" or "the top 20% beat the hell out of everyone else, who are promised that if they work hard enough they'll be in the top 20% someday".  Both leave the majority of the playerbase bored or frustrated, and if they stay it's only out of a hope that someday they'll be uniquely positioned to do something noteworthy.  

It's like awards day at a grade school.  Everyone wants to walk away with a certificate that says they're somehow unique in a good way -- that they have a place in the world, and a role to play in the dramatic events that shape it.  Most current games only have a few awards to give out, though.

Just for the record, Merriam-Webster (http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary?book=Dictionary&va=sociopath) shares my confusion. In fact sociopath means a great deal more than just anti-social. Sort of like narcolepsy means more than just tired.

One place an element of player justice does work is ATITD.

Admittedly it relies on two things....

1) Devs being willing to code in laws agreed by the players, and once coded these are system enforced.

2) On the rare occaisions the legal system is used for punishment after the fact rather than prevention ahead of the fact, the devs being willing to do anything up to and including outright ban people if it passes the vote. (lesser sentences have also passed, including one occaision where a player was renamed from 'douchebag' to 'flower')

Also worth noting that this is players acting as judge, jury, and legislature. The sentences and enforcement is actually carried out by devs.

Has anyone figured out if ATITD has a smaller percentage of idiots in the playerbase, or if it's just that the idiots haven't hit that critical number needed to be truely annoying?

Thief:Deadly Shadows.

I was basically Garrett in early UO and loved every minute of it. Exploits aside, pvp wasn't the problem with pks, it was the will to annoy and frustrate others by attacking miners and rp weddings and whatnot. And imo those were relatively small problems that could have been dealt with easily, in the framework of game fiction, even. Instead we got Trammel, something neither side really wanted (anyone who wanted Trammel actually wanted to be playing EQ imo).

And yes, killing a person is so much more rewarding and exciting than killing AI. I never get very excited playing against AI, in any game. Because it sucks ass in general and is quite stupid and rudimentary. I guess if your necessary challenge level is a drooling retard in a safety helmet, than AI fits the bill for you. For me, I'd rather go up against humans who are laying ambushes, can retreat realistically, who can be fooled, etc.

Just to offer an alternative perspective, I don't like going up against human opponents because I actively dislike beating other people and neither do I enjoy being beaten. So direct PvP is basically a no-win for me no matter who 'wins'. I'd always rather go up against an AI, this way I don't feel bad when I win or quite as pissed off when I lose.

Apropos, the difference between pvp and pks is sportsmanship.

   Sociopath replaced psychopath as the general term for the disorder.  Psychopath implies violent.  Sociopath doesn't.   I thought you were saying he was implying they were violent.

If someone goes out to meet people and perhaps have meaningful discussions about baseball, they are not going out to be beaten up by drunk frat jocks. You cannot simply say that "no PvP = no interaction", it's never that simple. There are a myriad of ways "other players can affect your world" that don't involve ganking.


EVE does this. You want to mine 'roids for that rare and expensive ore? It's in that pirate-infested, low-security system over there.

Just to play Devil's advocate....then why are you playing a multiplayer game? Moreover, why play one where direct competition (not necessarily via PVP) is certain to take place?

It always comes back to pride and shame. PvP is pride and shame taken to its greatest degree, and defeat is made even more humbling by the cumulative character nature found in most MMOGs.

But hey, I suppose I experienced your sentiments briefly as a kid....one time when I played little league, I felt bad for the opposing pitcher after I went yard on his ass for a last-inning game winner. But at some point, you either have to accept it, or go back to tee-ball....because if I imagine how the pitcher would have felt if he had struck me out that day, I know that he was taking the same risk I did, seeking the same reward.

The reward is pride, the risk is shame.....always has been, always will be.

Bring the noise.
Cheers.............

I disagree. I'm not a sore loser because I feel no shame in losing. It's a game, someone's going to win, someone's going to lose. As long as the winner beats me fairly using sportsmanship, I don't mind. I can lose and have fun if it was a fair fight.

I also get no pride in winning, just a different kind of fun.

That doesn't prevent someone from coming to the discussion to yell "Baseball suck, your all pricks for likeing such a gay sport, rugby > all!!!!111!" over and over again.  Or any other similar obnoxious behavior that is allowed by the system in PvP- games.  And in real life you can't just /ignore them.  They affect your world.

Agreed, as above.  But Nyght didn't say 'I don't want people to interrupt my mining by killing me', he said, "I don't want my world effected (too much?) by your play."  Then was stated that the reason he doesn't find single-player games fulfilling are the lack of three things, player economy, PvE group hunting, and socializing.  All of these allow for grief play, if there are other players.  I can disrupt a player economy by opening a shop next to yours, selling the same goods for 1/2 or 1/4 the price, or giving them away for free, because I want to, or just to piss you off(SWG).  I can disrupt your social time by standing around saying/broadcasting dumb stuff, using animated emotes with annoying whistle noises you can't /ignore(CoH).  In PvE, KS'ing, camp/mob stealing, and training are great ways to affect your world in ways that cannot be removed without removing me(EQ).

Every 'non-PvP' MMOG to date has had PvP...   just not PvP COMBAT.  If you think the PvP in EQ doesn't generate the same bad feelings and pissed of people that it does in Shadowbane, or UO:Felucca, you are sadly mistaken.  And I'm pretty sure that PvP issues in non-'PvP' worlds have caused more lost time for the players involved than any number of hours lost due to PK's in UO.

In summary, 'MMO' implies some form of PvP.  In many cases, PvP is not about direct combat, but rather competition for respect, customers, resources, targets, attention, etc.  If there are other players(where by 'other', I mean outside you and your desired groupmates/friends), there IS PvP.

--
Alkiera

So what?  You can broaden the definition of "pvp" to include "Logging into any game" or "Getting on the Internet" and then starting from there you can disprove any point.

Reduce it back to "non-consentual PK" which is what most people here are talking about, and statements make sense.  Nyght said that he doesn't want his world affected by a PK's play, which is usually "pkill!", so he did mean he didn't want to be interrupted by someone killing him.

The strange thing about real life is that people don't feel the same need to channel their inner asshole that they feel on the internet.

The anonymity that the internet brings certainly does bring out the worst in some people.  Perhaps it's the lack of accountability that creates an atmosphere where people are rude beyond their normal boundaries.

As asked earlier in this thread, I'm not sure if the improved behavior that I've seen in ATitD was because the intellect of the clientel was better or if it was because the nature of the game made your online personna's reputation more important.  Either way, there is something to be said for games where the average player is more enjoyable to interact with.  Building accountability into an mmog is a difficult thing... I think single-player-per-server accounts are a step in the right direction, but they do come at a cost.

In every conflict there is triumph and defeat. To some degree, people take a measure of pride in winning, and suffer some measure of shame in losing. That's why competitors try to win.

You don't have to do touchdown dances over a win, or smash your monitor when you lose to experience either. In either case, you can still have fun....and most do, which is why folks stick around even after having a negative experience with PvP.

Even if both players are a good sport about it, when 2 people are trying their best to win and they are beaten, it bruises the ego just a tad, if you have any sort of emotional investment in the character or the game. It may even come in the form of being annoyed with yourself over making a mistake....but it's there.

Winning feels better than losing....pride and shame is the catalyst behind that. That doesn't automatically preclude anyone from having fun, nor does it suggest that people cannot display good sportsmanship.

In fact, I would go so far as to suggest that good sportsmanship is CONCEALING pride and shame for the sake of continued good-spirited competition. You keep the trash talk to yourself after you dunk on somebody, just as you play out the game even if your team is down by a wide margin. Doesn't mean winning isn't good or that losing doesn't suck balls.

Bring the noise.
Cheers............

You have to be aware of the risks you are taking within the context of the game....if you are going out to meet people and have meaningful discussions about baseball, you may want to consider that you shouldn't be going to a raging frathouse kegger to do so.

Maybe the fantasy baseball squad is sitting in the basement of the dorm poring over statistics, eating cheetos, and drinking gatorade for no particular reason. At some point you've got to either go hang with the fucking fantasy baseball geeks, or admit that you're having more fun at the kegger, even with those annoying drunken fratboys running around the place.

It's not as if you don't have a metric fuckton of options either way at this point.



Many of which are negative, as well as positive. And the bitch of it is that you cannot block the negative interaction without inhibiting the positive.

Bring the noise.
Cheers.............

Yeah, see, that's why I was just talking about my own feelings on the matter. Winning and losing are not even important to me, it's playing the game and having fun. I realize that I am in the vast majority when I express my opinions, but that doesn't make it any less valid an opinion.

Oddly, beginning with my very first online game, UO, I've always seen the anonymity of the internet as a chance to be a /better/ person than I am in real life, and let that leak over into reality so I know that I'm a good person even when I can get away with not being very nice at all. It's pretty empowering stuff. I also realize that I'm in the vast minority on that one, too ;)

To sum up, I'd rather lose a good fight honestly to a good opponent than win a fight by nefarious or unsportsmanlike tactics or by fighting a weaker opponent. Of course one tries to win, that's the point of the excercise. But the actual outcome has little to no effect on my enjoyment of a game.

I quit playing chess competetively when I realized that the catasses would always outplay me. I didn't want to dedicate 15 hours a week to getting better at chess.

It's only at the amateur level that some degree of 'smart play' makes one better at chess. It's the same with volleyball, basketball, softball, baseball, and the rest. Dedicated hobbyists play five or six nights a week, and sometimes all-day Saturday and/or Sunday. They'll go to the batting cages a couple times a week. They work hard on their game. I can't compete with them; no amount of smart play, fitness, or agility is going to let me beat them.

But it's socially acceptable to play games outside all day; playing games inside all day is catassing.

So the important bit here is: games where playing a bit smarter provides an edge are fun and well-balanced. If an opponent plays a whole bunch, they can gain a ton of skill, to the point where they can easily smash an opponent. Some games, such as golf and go, provide a way for handicapping, which can make an imbalanced contest fun for both sides.

    Are you suggesting there is a MMOG that is NOT amateur level?

Yes (http://search.ebay.com/uo_Ultima-Online_W0QQcatrefZC12QQfromZR8QQsacategoryZ33886).

Edit to clarify: The point is that people are playing MMOGs professionally, not that any particular game is "professional" compared to the rest as "amateur".

Bring the noise.
Cheers..............

PKs, the skill problem, game vs world--ya know, if we can just run thru the instancing debate here, we might be able to wrap up all of online game design and go do something else this weekend.

You can't keep the edge, though, because others will learn and then play as smartly as you.  Especially with fansites on the web.  And the developers can't allow for smarts to infinitely shape gameplay, if I can word it that way.

So basically a "smarts" game doesn't really exist, because the playerbase learns the tricks of "playing smart" during beta, and they'll be optimally smart by the time the release rolls.

Well, first of all I disagree that direct competition is certain to take place. While it can happen, in 4+ years of MMO gaming I have managed to avoid it just fine.

As to why I play multiplayer in the first place, I like co-operative gaming and it's kinda difficult to engage in that otherwise.



Not for me. For me, the reward has nothing to do with pride. It's about an entertaining way to spend time, often but not always with friends.

Are you taking notes? If you write this all down, you've got your next conference presentation eh? ;-)

Not very insightful for you but they are havin fun.

Let me just say instancing can be good and bad, depending upon the context. Now we can all take the weekend off to watch fireworks and eat some high calorie food. Except for you Italian and other foreigers. No rest for joo!

Have a safe 4th folks.

I think you are working off the assumption that talent is better than experience.
See, the situation you are describing is like playing a Paganini etude on the piano at three/quarter time. Yea, it's nice that you can play it, but don't show up at the international piano cometition and expect people to take you seriously unless you have a certain technical skill level that is a given to perform in the higher tiers.

Technical ability, aka catassing, is a prerequisite. This is why sports have fitness tests, etc.. Then, when everyone is on an equal level with the 'basics', is where the "smart play" comes in. There are many people who are as fit, as coordinated and as experienced as Figo. But there is only one Figo.

(not that this is relevant to the +skills catasses that mmogs tend to work for. Which is shitty game design, nothing more. There are plenty of smacktards that play CS - but i have the necassary skill with the AK to make their presence a non-factor, regardless of how much idiocy they can spew forth)

 - Meg

Direct competition != PvP. Direct competition takes place when yu sell wares as a craftsman, because others are doing the same. It takes place when you are hunting mobs, because KSing and such takes place. You are playing in a game where thousands of players share a common world, and they are directly competing for the same resources, whether they can PK each other or not. The only way to avoid direct competition is to never log in.

And if it's only been about 4 years in MMOGs, it's not as if you haven't had the choice to avoid it all along....so wtf are you complaining about?



There are dozens of PC and Console games that allow for co-op play...so why go MMOG?



I explain WHY multiplayer gaming is more satisfying than single player, and you reply by saying "not for me, I just find it more satisfying than single player gaming".....dig a little deeper. Why do your accomplishments in a MMOG mean more to you than accomplishments in an offline game?

People make an emotional investment in their character, that's why they get mad/annoyed when someone PKs them for no particular reason. Some would refer to it as "taking pride in their character"...it doesn't have to be this big machismo chest-thumping pride, as everyone seems to try and interpret the word. Simply put, do you give a shit about your character? If so, that denotes a degree of pride.

Getting your ass handed to you, whether you wanted to fight or not, is humbling. It's humbling in the same way getting pushed around by a schoolyard bully is humbling....because even if they don't make an effort to humiliate you, it takes a bit of your pride. For lack of a better term, the opposite of pride is shame.....it doesn't imply that you logoff and cry for 45 minutes after being PKed, or are ashamed to tell people about it. It's the simple "dying sucks" feeling we all get. I think it's amplified when another person does it on purpose...because AI has no choice but to attack you, it doesn't know any better.

But, hey, way to wave a dismissive hand at the entire point without really considering its validity.

Bring the noise.
Cheers..............

I never said direct competition==PvP. If I'm hunting mobs and people are KSing, I go do something else or go elsewhere. It's easy to avoid, it's easy to choose to not compete.

So, I still disagree. It's more than possible to avoid direct competition.



I don't know what gave you the impression I was complaining about anything. Go back and read my original post, it's about offering my alternative point of view, nothing more.



Because they're not Massive. New content isn't added, the games end and are finite.



No, you explained why multiplayer gaming is more satisfying for you. Your reasons do not apply to me. My 'accomplishments' don't mean anything in either genre. They're just games, entertaining ways to pass the time.



I think you're taking this way too seriously/personally. I have considered the validity of the point and I'm not dismissing it. I'm just saying it does not apply to everyone.

Again, players are competing for the same resources within the game world in many instances. Don't confuse competition with confrontation....a lot of the time, competition is good spirited and not hostile in any way. It's buying the last 50 black pearl before the other guy in the shop does, it's solving the puzzle first, it's getting to the verite vein before the other miners when the ore respawns.

Competition is not completely avoidable. Confrontation is.



That "alternative point of view" matches the predominant paradigm within the MMOG genre. People that don't like PvP or an overtly confrontational game have those options...so I guess I don't grasp the need to express that opinion just because someone suggests the opposite.



So why not a game like NWN where new content is added both by bioware and created by the community?



I'm calling bullshit on that one. You're once again dismissing the point by simply glazing the whole thing over.

There are plenty of entertaining ways to pass the time, there is a reason you choose gaming....and for choosing multiplayer gaming....and for choosing the MMOG genre. There is a reason you invest time and effort into building a character, and why you take care to keep that character alive and growing.

The accomplishments don't mean anything to the world, it's not as if we're curing cancer here....I get that. But I'm calling bullshit that hitting a level, or getting an uber-goodie, or getting killed in-game don't mean anything TO YOU. Otherwise it falls into the category of "take it or leave it at the first sign of aggravation"....which in the realm of MMOGs doesn't keep someone playing and paying for 4+ years.

Fuck, just even based on the notion that you pay additional money to stay subscribed to your chosen MMOG, and maintain your character, you're indicating that it holds more worth than an offline game. My question still stands....WHY does it mean something to you? And WHY does it mean more to you in a multiplayer game than an offline one?

It's not personal, and I'm not taking it seriously at all....I'm just amused that you're regressing to arguments like "it's just a game" in the same thread where you talk about a dislike for PvP. If it's just a game, and you can take it or leave it....getting killed by a PK should be no big deal.

I'm just amazed at watching people try to deny that after all the time and effort they pour into their characters that they don't ever take some measure of pride in that character. My mom cooks a meal and takes a measure of pride in it...that's 20 minutes. My little niece colors a picture and takes pride in it...that can be 5 minutes. You're trying to tell me that after logging 100+ hours of various inane and tedious tasks to build your MMOG character that you take NO pride in it? None at all? Give me a break.

When you have pride in something, an assault on that is an assault on that pride. When you fail to defend it adequately, that pride takes a shot to the nuts. That small annoyance is what I'm referring to when I talk about shame. That shame is why people dislike losing. It's why failure isn't as enjoyable as success.

But please, go ahead and explain to me again how this all doesn't apply to you and your personality.

Bring the noise.
Cheers..............

Levels and foozles mean nothing to me. If anything, I dislike them, because they are barriers to my idea of fun.

But then, I don't play EQ clones, either.

Yeah, it's because I was so invested in my miner that made me upset when someone pk'd him. It was in no way the hassle of watching the pk gripe that I only had ore and a couple shovels on me, losing all the mining time I had just put in, then having to find a healer to raise me, go buy or get some new shovels and then look for a spot that's not mined out or camped by pks, only to have the whole thing repeat itself again in a half hour. No, not that at all.

Talk about missing the point.

I don't know if he's telling you that, but I am.

Please try to understand not everyone thinks or feels the same as you.

YOU may feel shame. That doesn't mean everyone does. Is this so hard to grasp?

I'l get up and stomp around the room cursing when I get rolled. I'll also stand up in my boxers, rubbing my buddha belly, yelling "It's Taco Pizza time!" when I win one. I want the game to pull at my emotions.
What I can't stand is finding out the competition is exploiting the mechanics or outright cheating by using third party software. If I can't be competitive because my opponent has perveted the rules of the game then my desire to play is lost.
Like moving the chess pieces when your opponent is off taking a leak or sneaking around behind the bleachers to slip into the endzone I can't fathom the gratification of winning that way.
Even if your honest and don't use exploits you have to at least research and understand them to remain competitive. When I have to invest that extra effort to for "Wins" in the game the enjoyment get's lost.

I'd love to see a game that "hid the numbers". They'd still be there but the player is a few layers removed from them. No xp #'s scrolling by, level bars showing progress or con colors. The players actions still raise and effect his skills but are only evident by the new feats they perfom in the game. Now walking down a road encountering another player you'll have no idea if he's a grand master or a newb, vice versa for him. It would make random killing a much higher gamble . Of course Running full steam into a tree or the side of a building should knock you silly and leave you dazed for a few moments. Also player's mounts should drop turds so my tracker can pick up their trail.
I know none of the above can be realized but one can dream can't they?

Typical of Raph. Long treadmill, tedious advancement, and when you get to the end there's no reward.

=)

Haha. Zing.

The point is about advancing through your objectives toward your personal goals. Getting past those barriers obviously holds some value to you.



It's a setback....being PKed while mining is a setback to your advancement toward some sort of goal.

Why would that setback matter if there is no personal investment in trying to accomplish something? Maybe it's as simple as developing you character to the point where you consider gameplay "fun", maybe it's earning enough gold to buy a tower, maybe it's getting a special item or title.
 
You're saying the annoyance stems from the PITA of getting back to where you were and all the wasted time you spent trying to reach some objective, only to have it all snatched away from you.

Think a step further....why is that objective important to you? Most likely because it leads to another objective, and another, until it leads to something you want to achieve and/or do.

For example : Mining -> Ore -> Ingots -> Armor -> Equipment for your fighter -> the ability to hunt more efficiently -> making gold -> buying a guildstone -> starting a guild.

Now in this example, are you telling me there is no emotional investment in achieving that goal of starting a guild, and no pride in accomplishing that goal?

You can't tell me that in all the time you've played MMOGs you've never had anything you wanted to accomplish. I don't buy it.



I think you're so caught up on the specific terms "pride" and "shame" that you are ignoring the concept at play here.

Do you derive any sense of satisfaction when you achieve successes in-game? Do you have any sense of dissatisfaction when you experience setbacks?

I find it pretty fucking hard to believe that you are completely apathetic about the successes and/or failures you experience in-game...and that you don't experience even the slightest emotional reaction to either. You're treating emotional reactions as if they are binary....they aren't. People experience them in varying degrees, even you.

Stimulus -> response, and whatnot.

Bring the noise.
Cheers.............

Not everyone has an ACHIEVER mentality, which is exactly what you are describing.

Some people just actually like the act of mining/crafting/killing, etc. Sure, you can try to stretch it to mean they are trying to achieve something, but the manner and attitude with which they approach that ahievement varies greatly. Thus, we have achiever types, explorer types, and all sorts of types Bartle never classified.

Not every achievement in-game is an achievement in the mind of a non-achiever. For some, it's the journey, not the destination.

It's like talking to a doorknob.

See, it's not so hard to understand.

Or maybe it is. I don't care, really. I'm done repeating myself to someone who obviously shows no sign of trying to understand another viewpoint.

Non-achievers don't count. They switch games too much, and don't buy multiple accounts, so why the hell would you want to cater to them?

Hmmm - cause there are a shitload more of them then achievers?

I'd wager a guess the majority of MMOG players are achievers, actually, followed closely by socializer/explorer. I'm one of like 10 killers who aren't achivers, so it's pretty easy to tack killer onto achiever on some level. Now, the reality is a powergamer/multi-account holder is pretty much the king loon in a category of nuts, and sets the bar for all the crazies below him. Since it's a large population, it makes sense to design for the guy who's holding sway over all the "regular" achievers who occasionally lapse into a powergaming mode.

That said, fuck that noise. If the journey's not fun, the reward isn't worth the effort. But good luck keeping both plates spinning.

Killers take pride in their PvP ability.

Socializers take pride in their position within the community, or their chosen subcommunity (e.g. a player-town or guild).

Explorers take pride in displaying their knowledge of the game and making new discoveries.

Achievers take pride in the more tangible accomplishments....stats, skills, levels, wealth, etc.

The concept applies all around....substitute the phrase "derive satisfaction from" for "take pride in" if it doesn't suit you.

You guys are attacking the concept as if I am pulling it out of my ass....refer back to the Laws:



I'll even agree with schild's assessment that glory is the goal....pride (or the ego) is why people pursue it. This isn't necessarily a bad thing....just a simple reality. Just as the point that people have emotional reactions to events in the game because they have an emotional investment IN the game. The reactions are proportionate to the investment.

To make a comparison to golf, the occasional great shot is what makes you love the game...the shots in between are what make you hate the game. The worst tragedy in the game is hitting a hole in one with no witnesses, yet you hope nobody notices when you duff your drive and send the ball a whopping 5 feet.

In other words, the glory comes from having others around to see (or share in) your triumphs, the shame comes from having others around to see your mistakes.

Bring the noise.
Cheers.............

And there's a shitload more people who don't play MMOGs at all. Attempts to recruit them haven't worked either.

To extend your metaphor to golf, some people just play golf to drink beer with their buddies. Scores don't matter, and are often forgotten 10 minutes after the game is over. The hole in one is a memory, a story that gets told for years.

I think people who aren't achiever types play MMOG's (and really any games) as a means of creating a story of their own to tell to someone else. Like most of the things we do in life, we all just want to tell a story that someone else would want to hear.

DV, you're making a lot of broad generalizations lumping everything that wiggles into categories.  

What if I just play to have fun. I play to amuse myself and find Bartle's categorizations a bunch of horse flop.  I've adapted my style of play all over the spectrum of killer, achiever, explorer, etc, just to enjoy a game.  In UO alone at times I was a killer, socializer and at a point achiever.  But at no point did I think to myself, "I'm a killer, I must murder those to increase my pride and decrease my shame in this well done bartle experiment" (Ok, I'm over doing it just a tad here.)



Ahh a golf example, nice that I can relate coming from a golfing family.  

What if you're just playing golf.. I know this will sound odd..... for fun!  Yes, playing a sport because you actually enjoy hitting the ball and getting outdoors away from the squables of real life for a bit (this applies to gaming also, "duh").

I used to get really mad playing golf.  I'll admit to breaking my 3 iron after duffing a shot in a tournament.  Now, that I play more sparingly, don't practice at all, and don't even keep score anymore, I find it difficult to get angry.  Sure I'll let out an occasion "fuck" which I slice the ball off into a ravine (hey, it cost me money).  

When you're not playing for the win, and just enjoying the process of being there and striking the ball, you're pretty much liberated from all of the bullshit categories people try to lump you in.  Pride no longer matters, neither does ego.  I guess it's kind of like being Chevy Chase in Caddyshack (sans the talent).

I think if COH is any indication and some of the general vibe around here, we're starting to care less about Bartle, about goals, and about really dumb laws like Baron's there.

You've just described the way I play golf. I may not give a shit about my score when I duff on the 8th tee, but it doesn't make it any less infuriating at the time...particularly with your buddies there to see it. Even if nobody says a word about it, it is humbling. People don't like to be humbled.

With that in mind, most folks don't want a story that contains the phrase "so after I got rezzed...." too often. Or a story where they were a social outcast (not on purpose), or they couldn't achieve their goals, or they repeatedly made stupid mistakes, or they tried to kill something and failed.

People want to succeed in what they try to do, and they want others to share in that. That's why they play online. People don't like to fail, and they don't like it when people see them fail (or even worse, cause them to fail). That makes them dislike playing online.

And yes, that applies even if you are playing "just for fun".

Bring the noise.
Cheers.............

Edit: added the last line for Rasix's benefit.

Have you been taking lessons from Sloth? Egads man, I'd like to reply but why bother.

That's interesting since I consider UO and SWG to have about the shortest treadmills and least tedious advancement I have come across in an MRPG (least tedious because it is short). I actually associate Raph's games with less treadmill than normal, and an attempt to make less developed characters more competitive with fully developed characters so that you don't need to play for 100 hours a month to keep up with the people who do. I guess I missed the "reward at the end" in the other MRPGs too.

And no endgame. So, whats the f'in point?

Nobody said it was entirely accurate. Just funny :)

If your only point is that people play for reasons other than simple achievement - ok, point taken. Golf isn't a very good metaphor for MMORPGs though for many reasons. For one thing golf is a socially acceptable thing to talk and tell stories about - even with non-players. This is a huge hurdle MMO's have yet to cross. I defy anyone on these boards to sit down at a dinner party and in the midst of mixed company and begin regaling the table with tales of your EQ conquests without being branded a social leper. Moreover golf is about individual's skill with a golf club. MMOs are about developing mostly non-transferable skills within a developer defined ruleset and having copious amounts of time to invest. The closest metaphor is the course - the MMO is the course we decide to play.

Unfortunately this doesn't in the slightest advance the discussion of whether Raph's laws are any good or not. For my part I come down more in the Brad McQuaid camp and agree with him that the primary goal of a MMO developer is not to create some social experiment in a virtual space, but to craft a peice of entertainment. The fact that you have to build a virtual world before you can create the purpose for the virtual world (the game) seems to me self evident. As someone else has already said, the game is the thing.

Besides, online or virtual communties will always fail to emulate real relationships. If this is true, then why spend so many resources in a futile endevor? Perfect the current paradigm, stabalize the market and hope for slow incremental change. In the end, just keep the players happy.

Then why play golf at all? Why not just go outside and hit a ball with a stick? What's the hole for?

The fun comes from playing the game. You may not be playing to win, but you're still playing. If the game is broken, it will be mildly to greatly frustrating, depending on what you're trying to get out of it.



Ok, would you have less fun if everyone else got to take two turns for every one of yours? Or if you had to use a baseball bat when everyone else got a golf club? I'm willing to bet you'd have more fun playing something else at that point, even if it's "just for fun".



You want a game to play without goals? Why not go play There or Second Life or something? Games need goals, it's mandatory.

dan

Major edit: You know what, you completely missed the point and I'll just leave it at that.

I agree that games need goals. I'd argue, though, that socializers, explorers, and killers aren't really playing the game as such. They're playing with the game, certainly, or, perhaps, playing parallel to the game, but I don't think the game is the fundamental thing they'r ereally engaging with.

Let's see if you can figure this post out. I'll try to be more verbose.



You can't make a LOT of blanket observations about why people play games, but you can make some. People play games to have a fun experience - that's a blanket observation. A game is a collection of rules that dictate how player(s) can progress towards goals. The series of actions that a player takes while moving towards those goals is the experience of the game, and the experience is where the fun is derived from. Thus, a "fun" game is something that has goals where the experience towards reaching those goals is fun. Everything I just said should be self-evident.

The reason you'd play golf in the first place, rather than just standing on the lawn and talking, is because you want to have fun playing golf. The game of golf would not be fun if it did not have goals. Thus, if people play games to have fun, people play games because there are goals.

Bartle's types are just a way of classifying goals in games into broad catagories. Players shouldn't necessarily care about them, but developers probably should.



Um.



"We're", as in including yourself, correct?

You may not be playing for the express purpose of reaching the goals put forth by the game, or even reaching any goals at all. But without those goals being there, it's just a fancy chat room. If the means provided to approach those goals suck, it's a bad game, you'll find something else to play. Soo... game developers should strive to make goals that are fun to reach for a variety of people. That's what Bartle's types are about, and partly what Baron's law is about.

dan

Depends on the game, really. Experiences that are considered fun to some people but are largely disruptive to the group can fall out of a game unintentionally. But there are games out there that attempt to cater specifically to the goals of socializers, explorers, and killers.

dan

SEMANTICS FOR THE WIN.

Fucking christ on a stick.  Weren't your first posts actually insightful?

What is the endgame in CoH? "Endgame" is such a strange concept anyway in an MRPG -- I think of them more as a continiuum where you can do whatever interests you at the time (some have more options than others obviously).

Whatever. Feel free to add to the conversation, instead of flaming everyone who responds to your posts. I'm here to have a conversation, and you seem too pissed off to talk.

Agree.



Please explain. I agree communication in online communities will never (at least any time soon) be as good as face-to-face contact. But just as strong relationships can form - lots of people have gotten married to people they met in games, for instance.



I think a lot of people are unhappy with, or just tired of the paradigm. Personally, I don't think the laws are the big problem, I think the problem is that you're not going to automatically have a fun game just by following them. One could argue that means we need more/better laws. :)

I agree there is room for slow incremental change to the existing paradigm. I think it will become more and more of a niche audience though. The standard MMP combat mechanics pretty much suck (or at least they're getting old), designers haven't figured out how to make new/better types of group play, and the costs of building the content for these worlds is so massive that you typically end up with lots of story-light, uninspired, and shallow scenarios that you have to repeat over and over again to advance.

That's a bad recipe for an RPG, which is what most people come into the genre expecting (for obvious reasons :).

Personally I'd like to see developers take/steal aspects of other genres and put them in an online world setting - RTS, shooter, adventure/puzzle, 'pet' games (sim city, etc), turn-based strategy, and so on. There are a ridiculous number of straight-up MMORPG's in development, and little else.  Nearly everyone is catering to this small niche, when there is a whole platform to explore.

dan

I am an explorer that fucking doesn't care if anybody knows what he discovered. New discoveries have nothing to do with pride, but with my curiousity. Discover what a new skill can do, discover how a new area is, discover what a new item looks like. They are all satisfactions in themself. But I admit I am not at typical mmorpg-player. I discovered I get better mileage out of my gaming experience by playing Single Player games while chatting with my old EQ-buddies via eqim or skype. I would be quite satisfied with small scale group crawls through new areas without a thousand social retards waiting at the fringes of my vision to disrupt my gaming experience.

I'm not sure if you were flaming me there or not, but I think the point is important. Socializing, exploring, and killing are all things that are, to varying degrees, out of game play. You can't design a game to cater just to one of them. (There's an arguable exception here about killers that I'm going to avoid unless someone presses me on it.) That doesn't make them invalid playstyles. But it does make them something that can't be planned for.

It is, to go back to the larger debate, a part of world design, instead of game design. So the question, for all of those playstyles, becomes whether or not online worlds are possible, or whether those playstyles are, at least for the time being, permanatly relegated to second class citizenship

My bet is on B.

Next motherfucker brings up a golf analogy will be stabbed in the eye with my rigid cock. Most analogies suck for MMOG's.

Games of all stripes can be played multiple ways according to the needs of an individual player, whether he's in a group or social, etc. The rules can often be peripheral to the entire game experience, depending on how many want to be followed by the players. Games build social connections of their own accord, and the strength of those social connections is a function of the depth of the game. While you don't see many communities form around Solitaire, MMOG's spawn guilds, golf spawns a group of friends, tournaments, pro tours, amateur tours, etc.

I'll just go ahead and make up a law of my own, which unless someone else has said it, will heretofore be known as Haemish's Law of Frank. Why Frank? Frank's a great name... Robin Day has a hedgehog named Frank.



Maybe that's just human nature, but the more a community has to struggle against something, such as another community, the stronger the bonds between individual members of that community have to be. PVP+ games need guilds who have trust between their members, who organize and work well together. As a result, the better (as in more effective) PVP guilds can move between games as a unit instead of as stragglers.

I'm rambling, because it's that type of morning, but I think you get my drift.

All games have goals, but not all gamers are as emotionally invested in these goals as others. Thus, DV feels shame when he gets PKed and joy when he wins, while Sky shrugs his shoulders when he gets PKed and smiles when he turns the tables on the cockgobbler who PKed him.

Not you, if it makes you feel any better.  I just get rather annoyed when people miss or ignore the entire point of my post and start arguing over definitions.

I think there's only so much planning your can do with catering to the different play styles.  But a mass market game needs to enable these as much as possible.  However, certain developers are going to have differing views on to do this.  Take for example global chat channels.  One dev might consider this a neccessary to allow people to form social groups.  Another dev might consider it a hindrance from forming tight knit social communties.  

It largely seems to be a system of trial and error with the successes being emulated across the board.

Representative but not wholly comprising the reason for this rhetorical torrent.

Nice theory of human action there, chief. But you're missing about three-fourths of the picture. Goal-oriented actions (what the German theorist Max Weber would toss into his mental bucket labeled "instrumental-rational" or whatever the heck the thirty-letter German analogue is) aren't the only type, the major type, or even the final type of human action.

Value-rational is another type. Doing something because it's the right thing to do. (Thank you, Spiderman 2.) Before you say, "well, isn't the goal to do the right thing?", no, it isn't. Because it's not a goal in any but the most ephemeral sense. I can't say "okay, I helped that old lady unload her packages, I am now officially a good person! Time to eat this kitten!" The people who play City of Heroes and oneshot villains they gain _nothing_ from, just to save the NPCs, can loosely be said to engage in this type of activity.

Traditional is a third type. Doing something because "it's done". When the anime club you just joined hauls you into the college arcade, cues up DDR MAX, and shoves you onto the pad, it's a sort of trial-by-blinkies, and the point is not to win, but to _experience_, and to share the experience with others - including, six months later, the poleaxed newb who _you_ push onto the pad.

The final type is affective - doing something just because it feels good. Believe me, when Arsenal wins and a screaming crowd of hooligans hits the streets and shoves a bus over, they're not following some cosmic timetable. If games "have" to have anything, it's this. They have to be fun.

(It occurs to me that you or I are confusing goals with ends. Putting a ball in a hole (I'm so sorry, Haemish) isn't necessarily the goal of golf, but it is an end. )

Anyway, back to the types of action - and why the last is the most important. The sort of leader who appeals to that last type of action - who organizes people with charisma and makes them feel good about what they're doing - history will bear out that he, not the guy with the 800-page rulebook, is the first to bring order out of chaos, even if it's only momentary, even if it's only coalesced around him. Without that charismatic seed, you can't bring people together.

--GF

How about I shorten that:

No way man, that's Just Wrong.

As for the topic at hand, I think Bartle missed a few types, or perhaps, rather, his types are limited by the playerbase he studied.  As 'world-game combination' subscription base has grown, the genre has appealed to people who do not neccesarily fit into his cute lttle scheme at all, not even poorly.  I don't know that I'm familiar enough with the groups in question to add titles for them.

As far as different groups and how they interact with the 'game' portion of an MMOG, I think it's pretty obvious that the acheivers are going to be the most besot with the 'game'.  Killers will be too, if that's the only/best way to be good at defeating other players.  The group that Sky is in probably gets alot of milage from the 'game' portion too, but without the addictive attachment that acheivers get.  Other groups find the game to be a useful plave to hang out due more to the 'world' aspects, in that explorers generally want to see new stuff, the whole world if possible, and socializers need the world to hold all the people they want to interact with.

I'm not sure what all that has to do with the laws of world design, tho.  I'm still of the opinion that as a developer, you need to pick a battle, or maybe two, and fight those to completion.  There is too much competition in the field, some of whom have HUGE bank accounts to spend, to try to become the next EQ or early UO.

--
Alkiera

Bartle's model now has way more types in it, actually. I'm disappointed that everyone on this forum hasn't gone and read his book yet. Shame on you, I thought you were MMO freaks. ;)

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0131018167/qid=1088790773/sr=8-1/ref=sr_8_xs_ap_i1_xgl14/104-1231349-8872743?v=glance&s=books&n=507846

I tend to fall asleep when the real heavy academic-type discussions come around. That's a book I would like to read, just not sure I could actually wrap my mind around it.

I remember seeing a post here when the book came out.  Some people discussed it.  I haven't gotten around to picking it up, tho I should prolly check local bookstores.  I'd order online, but shipping companies don't like my neighborhood, for some reason.  FedEx is just shy of hurling your packages out the window as they drive by, they're here and gone so quickly.  And everyplace demands signing for packages now, and I'm not home when they deliver ever.

But yeah, it's on my list of things to do.

--
Alkiera

Sorry. I bought http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0262232324/qid=1088792021/sr=8-1/ref=pd_ka_1/002-3329278-8116855?v=glance&s=books&n=507846 instead.

Why read a book when we can experience the shit that is produced by people who read his book? I mean seriously, 99% of the virtual worlds out there are absolute crap. And aside from backseat driving, I don't see Bartle contributing much. His 'test' is about as accurate as a dart from 7 miles now.

So erhmmmm, what were you saying?

Edit: To add to this though, all of the big MMO devs can talk the talk. They can talk up a great virtual world where magical things happen and players swoon over the endless possibilites. Then when it comes to hiring people for implementation, it seems you shut off your brain, cover a wall with resumes, and throw darts at it. It's not the concepts that suck, though some do (i.e. Monsters that spawn in the same place every time but only have a 1% chance of dropping necessary loot) - but rather, the implementation that never ceases to make my anger reach new heights. I mean who the hell is working at some of these offices? I mean with every game that's released, the majority of the amazing ideas we heard have been implemented in such a way that even the most drug addled brain would find them annoying.

For one thing, Bartle never designed a test. Some other guys designed a test based on Bartle's conception of player types. So you can't really blame him for that one.

For another, to accuse Bartle of backseat driving is kind of spurious, what with him inventing the fucking genre. I mean, criticize him as much as you want, but he did invent the MUD. That pretty much makes him get a place on any list of ten most important online world designers.

And for a third, Sturgeon's Law applies to online worlds too.

I'm talking about Bartle's contributions to the innovation of today's MMOGs. I give him credit for what he did. But I'm talking about where the genre needs to go, not the shoddy state it's in.

And ok, I won't blame Bartle for the test, but if it was made using his ideas, I do blame him for trying to pigeonhole the player types. When really a pvp type (me) can go to being a crafter in SWG and enjoying it 10x more than the combat - and both were pretty much equally crap (though the resource system was absolutely fantastic).

If Stugeon's Law applies to online worlds, which one is the 10%? Seriously, I'd like to know. Right now I'd give Magic: The Gathering Online that prize.

I never really read Bartle as pigeonholing player types. Or, at least, I never read him as closed off to the idea that a given player will move among player types.

To simplify the point here, my position was that we both feel the same thing, we just feel it to varying degrees. And as you point out, we feel it to different degrees proportional to our emotional investment in the game, character, and present objectives.

For some, that does indeed mean shrugging their shoulders, for others it means an "ah fuck" response, for others it may mean throwing a temper tantrum of some variety. My personal reaction to being PKed was in the "ah fuck" range, because I played as an anti, and enjoyed PvP. Even still, nobody likes to lose/get killed/screw up unintentionally.

The term shame is used to represent that negative emotion or feeling of dissatisfaction, just as pride represents the positive emotion or feeling of satisfaction when they are playing well. The mini-battle that ensued over nomenclature is pretty much irrelevant.

Too many folks got hung up on the terminology, and took them to extremes....then pointed out that upon being PKed they don't say "dear god I was PKed, I AM SO ASHAMED, LET ME LIVE THE REST OF MY LIFE IN MOURNFUL SECLUSION", just as their every activity was not a conscious effort to serve their ego. Well no kidding....those are ridiculously extreme positions, just as someone implying they literally never experience ANY change in emotion when they accomplish a goal, or experience a setback.

If you really think about it, Baron's law is basically saying that the presence of other players is a double-edged sword. It plays a dual role....it regularly makes multiplayer gaming more enjoyable, and more aggravating than single-player gaming.

Bring the noise.
Cheers............

I agree. As much as it may be true that there are pitfalls both in restricting and allowing duplicate names, I have a hard time staying awake through an entire chapter about it.

The academic-type writings on MMOGs are good, sound theory and all....but like most academic-type writings, they are fairly obtuse to the layperson.

I think that's why the Laws have gotten so much attention over the years...they're written in simple English, and are explained in a way that most people can at least grasp the basic concepts behind them. Write a book in that style, and I think it'd do quite well among MMOG fans....likely better than the more academic MMOG books on the market.

Bring the noise.
Cheers..............

People did not take your definitions of Pride and Shame to extremes, it was you who used extreme terms and failed to properly define how you were using them.

Pride: A sense of worth, dignity, self-satisfaction.
Shame: A sense of humiliation, degradation.

Your switching of Pride to mean Satisfaction and Shame to mean Dissatisfaction this late into the argument leaves you as the person at fault for the misunderstanding. People correctly defined Pride and Shame when responding to you because you neglected to define your terms before, or shortly after, their use in your argument. If a term is not defined then people (be they readers or listeners) must accept the terms on their common definition, even if that is not what  the arguer intends them to be. Had you instead used the much clearer terms of Satisfaction and Dissatisfaction, or properly conveyed the meaning you intended Pride and Shame to have, there would not have been so many posts claiming your stance about Pride and Shame to be invalid.

Note: Pride does not mean just Satisfaction. A person takes pride in how they accomplish something, or they can take pride that they accomplished something. A person does not have to take pride in the end result of something.  A person can have plenty of satisfaction and have no pride in what they have done to attain it; an example being if one continually fumbles over a task but manages to still accomplish it correctly they could be quite irate at themselves for how they performed but still be satisified the job was done correctly. Shame clearly goes beyond a sense of dissatisfaction down to a sense of worthlessness.

Whether you like it or not terminology is vitally important in a debate of any kind. People get hung up on it because if one person takes a word to mean one thing and another person intends the word to mean something else entirely then there can be no consensus on which to base an argument. In the end an argument can be rendered invalid by one mis-defined term.

If you wish to argue from the stance that Satisfaction is what keeps players playing a game, and that Dissatisfaction is what makes players become annoyed or even leave a game, well, that is a strong case to argue; just use the proper, or properly defined terms to do it.

That's true! But I argue that you aren't going to have a game if you don't provide goal-oriented actions for a player to do. That is the only point I was trying to make (i.e., goals are mandatory for games). If the goal-oriented actions aren't a requirement, then you could say doing drugs is a game, or masturbating (both affective actions, generally speaking). In which case you have a broader definition of "game" than I do. :)



Perhaps so. To be specific, I'm talking about what the game rules provide you in terms of milestones or win/lose scenarios. I think you're saying that a player's goals while playing might not align with the game's provided goals, which I agree with, but I think it is mostly beside the point of "what makes a good game".

Perhaps I'm being pedantic, but as a game designer, one has to assume that the player at least has some willingness to reach the goals provided by the game. Otherwise, they're just there to hang out with friends, or look at the pretty colors or whatever, in which case the game itself doesn't enter the equation.



If I understand you correctly, you're saying affective actions are the most important things for a game to provide, because they're "teh fun". I think there is an important distinction here - playing a game should be an affective action (you're generally not going to play because it's the right thing to do, or that it is the tradition of your peoples ;), but the actual actions that a game provides for you are goal-oriented. I don't think you'll find games that provide actions that are inherently affective, or at least they won't stay as such for long.

You could say that while playing KotOR, that a player makes value-rational actions while role-playing as a lightside/darkside Jedi, but I would guess that for most players this breaks down pretty quickly once they realize that the outputs are generally pretty-clear cut - you either add Light Side Points, or Dark Side Points to your character's alignment. There are very little shades of grey in the Star Wars universe, by design. Furthermore, I think players will generally realize how this ties into the rules of the game and optimize to one of the extremes, because that is the optimal path. I.e., the designers made them goal-oriented actions, so player choice of action eventually devolves into goal-oriented, even if it wasn't in the first place.
(Raph talks about pattern recognition and how players naturally optimize within a rule-space in his "Theory of Fun" doc he linked earlier, which is a great read imo).

Online worlds make things interesting, in that you can participate in them theoretically without ever playing the game(s) provided, or without there even being a game provided. I think it's important to distinguish between the two, given that one encompasses the other. I am speaking about games, in the broad sense.

Thanks for the response,
dan

Most analogies suck for most things. That doesn't mean they're not a useful tool. Analogies are just like golf. :P



I'm not sure this is correct. Tetris, for example, is a pretty deep game, if I understand your meaning of "depth" correctly. It has considerably more depth than most MMP games. There isn't this huge social community of Tetris players, afaik.

When you say "depth", I'm interpreting it as "how difficult it is to play within the game's rules to come up with the optimal path". For example (hehe), the depth of golf is the difficulty of getting a hole-in-one on all 18 holes. For most MMP games out now, the depth, in this sense, is really shallow.

dan

[edit fixed quote]

I agree, the test doesn't make any sense. People aren't going to go and play your game with a singular goal in mind for all of eternity, and I don't think that was what Bartle was implying. The reason a person plays changes over time, and naturally changes based on the game s/he is playing. He's just trying to categorize the reasons why people play online games, not the people themselves. At least, that's my interpretation.

dan

Actually, in the book, Richard advances some notions about what the natural arc of change is for a player. The core of his book is that argument that the "point" of MMOs is for players to undergo an arc of learning about themselves, and that they should nturally exit when they finish.

Raph, thanks for making it so I don't have to read that book. Screw learning about myself in a game. That's just a stupid idea. I wish I could be more reasonable about it, but I play games for fun, if I want to learn about myself I'll do something extreme. Including, but not limited to, trying to kill someone with no motive or going to bed with a disease ridden prosti....oh wait - lately, that's what MMO's have been like.

It's almost depressing.

Edit: Raph, that wasn't a stab at you. That idea though, I just don't think that's possible to achieve with an MMO. I mean, people play MMOs to escape the real world - that's why a virtual world is fun. I really just can't see anyone, anywhere at ANY TIME ever saying "wow, this MMO has unvealed new truths about my being." Or anything like that. Could you elaborate more on the idea Bartle was trying to convey? Sure, I could just go buy the book, but - well, it's easier this way. I have a pile of books I still need to read.

You'll get a lot further in life when you stop making sweeping and critical judgments based on two sentence summaries.

What have you done for me lately, Bartle?

Really, I hate to sound all mean and such but...who here can name a great Bartle-made game? The idea that MMOPRGs are just MUDs is a dumb one, and leads to things like the SWG HAM. What is so hard to get about the fact that having graphics vs. no graphics really DOES make things different?
----
The whole "world first" vs "game first" argument is an amazing waste of time anyway. The goal is a fun game. The end. If you don't make it it doesn't matter why. If you are willing to ship things you KNOW are broken and KNOW aren't fun, it really doesn't matter what your approach was. In that case the approach was not the flaw. If you don't really even *intend* to make something fun, no theories can save you.

Which works better, game first or world first, maybe is an interesting question but it isn't the right one, or at least the most relevant one. SWG HAM sucks because SWG HAM sucks, they knew it sucked, and they didn't care to change it. The problem there was not game first vs. world first.

If you can spot fundamental flaws in your game that make it much less fun than it should be, but not be bothered to fix them, what books you read before you started don't matter.
---

Today my friend and I were talking about how games made by Nintendo are always polished and fun to some degree. They may not be your cup of tea, but generally you can see where the enjoyment would come from, even if that genre doesn't really appeal to you. You can go a long way by doing all the little things right. In the end, their games reach a certain standard for quality because that's what they aspire to.

It's one thing for your game to be poor because it is a genre nobody cares about or is too bland or too similar to other games. It's quite another thing for your game to be poor because you didn't care to fix up the details you *knew* were wrong. In my mind, #2 is much worse because it's preventable. It's one thing to say "hey, this game where you beat congo drums to move is really fun, but nobody seems to be getting excited about a congo-drum based game." It's another to say "yeah, we shipped this game with 10 broken professions and sucky combat - we'll patch in a year."

Actually, you do indeed learn a lot about yourself by playing mmogs if you pay attention. You are thrust into a social situation where there is almost no accountability for your actions, you can pretty much act however you feel.

Some people take that to mean they can act out their every twisted fantasy and treat others however they want, because others are faceless.

Some find that it strengthens their own moral code, and act like a mature and ethical person even when you don't have to at all.

When you find that you can be a good human being, even when nobody would know who you are and you don't know anyone else, that's something imo.

Mmogs made me realize I'm a much better person than I thought I was, and also that a lot of people, given the opportunity, are real shits.

These profound sentiments attributed to Bartle by Raph (I haven't read the book either) about what we take away from a MMO and how it should relate to our lives smack of mental masturbation. We can learn about ourselves through any mundane task if we apply enough thought and perception to the matter. In this case, why did anyone bother playing anything past UO if the primary goal of an MMO was to see how you act when most rules and consequences vanish? Every title since has offered the same self assessment. The great experiment is over. Now can we get on to making some more quality entertainment?



Tell me that isn't just the slightest bit self serving. :) I think I'm a great person online too, but my perspective is a bit skewed.



Not only will online relationships not be as good as face-to-face relationships, they will never approach the level of intimacy required for full and healthy connections to develop. The strong relationships you cite weren't strong until the online relationships became offline ones.

I wonder when Raph is going to end the suspense.

Take a look at an article on mmorpgdot regarding CoH.

I'm interested to hear comments on the design principals noted in the article.  (for some reason I had to highlight the text for it to appear).

Also, waiting for Raph's response.

Way to entirely miss the point of mmogs serving as a large social setting in which you have total and complete anonymity. That's why they are an interesting social experiment. Mundane tasks generally don't have that essential factor.

No. I'm a respectful and fair person online. Some people are opportunistic and selfish, looking to have their fun at the expense of others. I don't /think/ I'm a good person online, I am. You won't find me in a death robe disrupting player events just to piss people off, nor ganking miners or crafters. I like my pvp against people who can fight back, and touching on the topic of sportsmanship, I don't mind losing to a skilled opponent if I'm capable of defending myself.

I also never claimed to be a 'great' person. I said I'm a good person. Very different things. Great implies I have a large ego. Good implies I'm not a dickhead.

What an abysmally stupid statement. Just because these things could be derived from the game doesn't preclude it from being a game, one with some of the most compelling player-created content I've seen thus far in the post-MUD genre.

Baron's law uses the term s "glory" and "shame"....so it's not as if I'm the one that came up with the concept. Yet after several pages worth of text explaining my position (i.e. agreeing with Baron's law), people still revert to the extreme interpretation.

As someone said earlier, semantics for the win. Plus that whole thing about the forest, the trees, and whatnot.

Bring the noise.
Cheers............

I agree with the mental masturbation comment. It's justification for an empty but fun activity. The idea that playing a MMORPG makes you better as a person or something...

There is nothing wrong with empty fun activities. But it's silly to pretend it's some sort of grand experiment or learning excersize, anymore than a three-legged race or 2 person potato-sack race would be.

It's hard to do anything competitive or cooperative with others and NOT have the chance to learn something about yourself. Play monopoly.

Actually, though Tetris is difficult, it is in essence a shallow game. There really is only one type of gameplay, and since the game is single-player, it doesn't build many social connections. While winning the game is certainly a subtle exercise, the only real social connection that is built is from the entire experience, the cultural zeitgeist that comes from having played Tetris. Or Solitaire for that matter.

How many people who've ever used a Windows PC will laugh at a joke that peripherally mentions the addictiveness of Solitaire? Those games build some social connections, but it's about as deep as making Super Friends jokes.



I'm not relating depth to difficulty. I'm saying the strength of social connections in games are related to the depth of the game, where depth also means breadth of experience. Even MMOG's, which have horribly shallow gameplay experiences, have multiple types of experiences, from the crafting, combat and exploring aspects, to the competitive aspects all the way to the social aspects. MMOG's, while suffering from mindlessly repetitive gameplay, STILL manage to have "depth" but mostly through breadth of experiences.

There are many things to do, so many that one person cannot usually do them all. There's an idea, just on the edge of my brain that I could probably articulate had I not sat in the sun so long today.

EDIT:

Actually, I can say EXACTLY that about my time as a guild leader in EQ. It hasn't happened in every MMOG I've ever played, but the ones I've put time into have taught me things about people and myself that I probably wouldn't have learned anywhere else.

But that's just me. One of these days I intend to write down a history of my time as a guild leader as kind of a contemplative personal journal.

Most physical sports games don't have the breadth of experience you speak of. The rules are generally very simple, and there are at most a few roles within the game, but they generally have the strongest communities.

Breadth of experience can backfire, in that you, as a developer, must sacrifice the quality of each individual experience to support the full range of experiences. Thus, the depth of each experience suffers, in every sense. I think a lot of what people liked about SWG (and other MMPs), for instance, was the breadth of experiences, they just didn't appreciate the depth of each individual experience.

Here's a question. CoH has far less breadth of experiences than many other MMP games on the market today. The depth of the combat system is pretty standard for an MMP (though perhaps a little better than usual). Do you think the community has suffered as a result of this? I am not an active player, so I can't speak one way or the other.

On another note, I've thought about it a bit, and I think that your suggested law is a tad too general.



Community strength become much harder to predict when you're talking about games that don't require any form of group tactics (e.g., single-player games). I.e., this applies specifically to games in virtual worlds.

I was actually just looking through the laws and noticed this:



I think this is basically what you're saying, I'm suprised Raph didn't point it out earlier ;). I think Baron's is too vague in wording about what types of conflict form social bonds in game, and who/what players should hate. I can't agree that all hate/conflict applies. E.g., it won't help build a community if everybody "hates" everybody else - look at Quake. There is little to no community to speak of in a regular deathmatch. Only when you split people into groups do communities blossom.

The way I'd say it is: Games that reward and facilitate group tactics build communities, the strength of those communities is proportional to the level of coordination required between members. Again, just my interpretation.

dan

Block bomb for t3h win! (http://www.tetrinet.org/)

We usually speak of horizontal and vertical interdependence. To wit:

- do tasks require multiple people to complete optimally?
- do advanced players need the presence of low level players?

Both of these give you teh w1n in terms of community building. A game which lacks them will likely not build communities as well.

This relates back to the multiple ladders of advancement issue mentioned earlier. A large reason why EQ is successful at building communities is precisely because of this. They DO have multiple ladders of advancement with different gameplay--the different classes. And the strong interdependence between the classes is what drives the community in EQ.

This of course runs headlong into the desires for shorter play sessions and  soloing. But that's the rub.

Newbies needed by advanced players is a trickier nut to crack. EQ's economy emergently displayed it with newbies gathering low level items for high level players who needed them. AC's allegiance system was a direct attempt. So was schematic revocation in SWG.

I believe in #2 but not in #1.

#1 eventually leads to forced grouping no matter how you slice it.  And I do not believe that the power of community outweighs the benefit of allowing strong solo play.  For certain game designs, of course, forced grouping makes sense, but even those need to allow for less-than-optimal solo play.  But I think as a general design rule, you want to avoid requiring multiple people to complete a task optimally, not encourage it.

#2 I'm totally for, if by "presence" we mean things like the economy and services and infrastructure and so on, rather than grouping.

Bruce

From all the people I know that still play Everquest because the guild friends they made there still play it, people they grouped with for many months to years, I would gather that yes, #1 IS a good design choice to hold players in the game.

But I know plenty of people that still play with their guilds in games that are far less "forced" grouping than EQ.

Sorry, but too many MMOGs have copied what EQ did thinking what they did must be right, since it is so popular.  This is another one of those elements.

This doesn't mean community isn't a valuable and powerful force to use in your MMOG.  I just don't think forced grouping is the correct approach to nourishing community.

Bruce

Just that you don't musunderstand me, I am against forced grouping as well. Just saying that if you can bring people to group with each other the bonds they share are usually stronger. And I personally experienced people remaining in Everquest despite being burned out of the game, on behalf of others.

If the others don't need you, its easier to turn your back on the game and just keep in contact via guild boards for example.

Well, looks like I'll just log off, I can't find *player type x*.


Let's make up for stratifying our playerbase with levels.

How did you get so much right with UO, then totally forget how to do it? I'm confused. Well, the fact that you are referring to EQ clones might be a clue. Working with SOE might be another.

Try looking at CoH. Almost any 'class' can solo, but it's a lot more fun to play as a group. Level stratification almost eliminated by sidekicking.

Multiple people doesn't necessarily mean that each one has to have an individual specialty. It also is not necessary to require grouping (or other elements of interdependency) for all aspects of the game. You're dismissing the idea, because you've seen it implemented poorly in the past.

If you don't have a magical weapon, and cannot cast spells, you don't go hunting werewolves....it doesn't mean you can't play at all. However, having the option to bring along a spellcaster buddy and let him fry the werewolves while you keep them at a safe distance....that can work nicely.



Levels aren't the only means of separating advanced players from newbies/lowbies, as evidenced by UO. If you don't give newbies/lowbies meaningful things to do, it becomes a treadmill grind up to advanced status. Moreover, if you give them meaningful things to do, they can still contribute to the community....in a way that is even relevant to your most advanced players.



It's been said that CoH is like a good popcorn flick....easy to get into, but also easy to walk away from.

Interdependency is a long way from forced grouping. One of the big issues faced in MMOGs is that solo play is encouraged somewhat by gameplay mechanics. If a player can kill X creatures per hour (Z for # of hours), each yielding Y rewards, the end result is that they walk away with X*Y*Z in overall rewards. If 2 players team up, it has to produce a result greater than 2*X*Y*Z over the same length of time to produce any tangible benefit.

The classic example in UO is hunting liches. You can solo them, and it may be more fun to fight them with other players. However, doing so means you have to share the spawn, which reduces the number of creatures you can kill and loot per hour. Additionally, working with another player doesn't serve to make the team appreciably better than the sum of its parts. Plus, gang-banging a creature is less effective at building skills than solo combat...so players develop by keeping creatures to themselves, and are incented to keep playing that way.

So what do you do? Well, you can give the players encounters that are practically impossible to solo, and offer unique rewards for completing them. This, naturally, can lead to a feeling of forced grouping...particularly if it requires various specialized character types. An alternative would be to make the group substantially more effective when combining their efforts. Of course, this is also sure to get the soloist crying foul...if grouping is perceived as more effective, they will treat it as a rejection of solo play as a viable playstyle.

It's a fine line to tread....MMOGs are filled with paradoxes like these. The notion that solo play must be viable in a massively multiplayer game is just one of them.

Bring the noise.
Cheers............

I keep forgetting that the goal is to create addicts, not fun games. Sorry.

And here I thought the goal was to create immersive, engaging, compelling and FUN gameplay that players can enjoy on a continuous basis. Indeed, that means retaining playes as a core piece of the business model.

Just because some catasses declare themselves addicts to excuse their marathon playing sessions and lack of appropriate personal priorities does not change the objective of MMOG design, IMO. YMMV.

Bring the noise.
Cheers.............

I said "optimally." I didn't say "at all." I think that it should be evident from the games I've worked on that I don't personally agree with forced grouping--but I'd be nuts to deny how powerful an effect grouping has on community, and to fail to encourage it.

I agree that levels are a problem--I believe I even once said "levels suck." That doesn't mean that you won't always have advanced and newbie players, or expert and inexpert players. The rule of thumb still applies.

Aren't you supposed to be telling us how we're wrong or somesuch?  Or do we need another couple pages?

I think Sky's talking about meta-developing (term derived from "meta-gaming"):  instead of developing the game itself, and letting players decide whether to stay or go, you build in game mechanics for the specific purpose of retaining people and making them play longer.  I.E. you're pretending to be a nice game developer, but really you are an evil businessperson whose real purpose is to addict people and take their money.  Like secretly adding an addictive drug to a soft drink and then advertising that it's "just a soft drink."

Perhaps a second point is "if Fun Game -> Profit, why do you need to specifically code other, artificial things for the Profit?"

Because player aquisition and player retention trump all for a subscription based system?  These games don't have the box sale numbers like a Diablo, Warcraft, Sims, or any other popular non MMO title.  

They also in most cases appear to take longer to develop, take more capital, and require not only and extensive live team, but a large support staff.   So, it's not really that far of a stretch to say that a business model tends to get incorperated with the design of an MMO.  

Ideally, you want the game so fun people can't bear to be away from it. But since that seems kind of hard to keep up for a year or more, you need to incorperate systems that either make the completion of your game a prolonged experience or make the emotional, time investment of the game significant enough that's it's hard to walk away from.  

Making grouping mandatory for some experiences does suck for Mr. Casual, but it creates some strong social bonds that those less hinged to reality find it hard to walk away from.  Having a long drawn out ride to the top may not stop mr. catass from hitting level X in a month, but Mr. Casual probably won't even reach it in a year.  Having expensive virtual real estate that can go away if you quit makes people log in from time to time to avoid losing it.

In an ideal setting, the road to success would be:

1. Design game for lots of people.
2. People keep playing fun game because it's fun.
3. Profit.

Instead you mostly get the underpants gnome scenario where #2 is a complete mystery until some windbag named McQuaid happens to stumble upon it.

I'm not in the biz so, any of the above can be assume to be 100% pure horseflop.

I think CoH has a fine model for player retention. It will retain me as a subscriber and I play anywhere from 3 days for a couple hours each to no days per week. Yes, it's easy to walk away from, but that's why I will stay a subscriber. Because I can get a group within 5 minutes and I won't totally ruin everyone's night if I must log on short notice. It gives me what I want, when I want it. Players should not have to feel an inherent need to play a game in order to continue playing it. If it's fun, they'll play it... at their leisure.

Yeah, that's the gist of where I was going. If the gameplay is not fun enough to keep people playing, and more importantly, develop 'elder games' of their own, then imo just close down the genre.

I've yet to see an analog to the sheer amount of advanced player driven content UO offered. I don't know if that was due to the (now) unrivalled amount of player interaction. But I know that 90% of my UO playing after the first six months or so had nothing to do with coded content.

My character was 'finished', and I then moved on to playing a great game. In the new world of mmogs, characters aren't really ever done. Less so with SWG, I'll give you that. So why didn't I get into elder games in SWG? I don't know.

Time's certainly a factor, but the game just never did much for me (and I was a huge SW nerd when I was a kid, saw it 20 times in the theater on the original release and all).

It's one thing that puzzles me about the genre, and I'm loathe to put it up to being a jaded old mmoger.

Seems to me the discussion keeps doing it for me. :)

How's the view from your ivory tower?

I know.  

I was trying to re-word Sky's post.

But you're basically arguing that the purpose of "the game" is not to provide entertainment to us, but rather to make money for the devs.  Or at least that that's the most important thing.

Similar thinking applies to the earlier boy- and girl-band craze, and also whenever any product is copied because it's popular (Diablo clones), generally in real estate, and with stock trading.  The music, the gameplay, the house, and the actual corporation don't really matter, only their ability to make you some cash.

The fear, of course, is that whenever something is less important, it usually ends up being crap, because not enough time is spent developing it.  We'd all like the devs to spend time lovingly creating masterpieces, not simply a viable business model.

No, that's not what I'm saying.  What I'm saying is that your game needs a hook for mass market appeal.  It needs something to keep them paying 15 a month.  I was speaking more in hypotheticals and examples from current games and why they did what they did not how I think things should be.

If a dev can have this hook emerge from their game instead of being designed into it, bravo.  This is ideal and games like CoH and at least early UO had this happen.  Just right now with failure of E&B and others and cancellations of games before they hit the gates, it's a big risk.  

I'm not saying you should design around a business model.  I'm just saying it happens and it's not hard to see why.  Of course, as you pointed it out, it's not hard to see why this way of thinking breeds crap like AC2 and Horizons.

Heh. I like Ajax. Not only can he understand my posting (sometimes even I don't), but he likened mmogs to boy bands. That's rich!

So I guess that makes Horizons Joey Fatone (sic) and SWG is Justin Timberlake.

It can include grouping, but doesn't always require it. Crafting-based economies like UO, SWG, ATITD and Eve are good examples. The benefits of multiplayer gaming without the requirement of being with those other players on their schedule.

He said "tasks", which doesn't just include Killing Mob X for the umpteenth time.


Ding Ding Ding.

A "game" will draw the players in. What keeps them there depends on the player's personality. There is no universal constant though:

• A great many EQ-like progression of new foozles. Applies to EQ clones. But it's not indefinite. Games that advertise "unlimited levels" miss the point entirely. It doesn't take a mensa candidate to recognize that getting Sword A to defeat Mob AA is exactly the same as getting Sword Z to defeat Mob ZZ. The key is options. Scoff as some might, EQ does offer many entirely-different ways to play. Talk to anyone who's played an Enchanter, Cleric, Warrior, Wizard, Magician and Bard and they'll list more differences than similarities.
  
• The community they fall in with. Applies to all games. Some folks like to argue the value of community, but I haven't heard a valid objective point yet that says it's irrelevant, so continue to believe it's an intrinsic part of the lifespan of an account. As a counterpoint, it should also be noted that there's a relationship between the retention of an account and the solvency of the player's community, including the age of that community. If 75% of a random pickup guild ("Be an officer, join us at Orc Lift!1") quits the guild or game two weeks later, that's going to have a minimal to no impact versus 75% of an established multi-year guild.
• The ability to chart their own path, using their prior game achievements as a baseline. Applies to some games. One minor example: 6 months of my SWG experience involved nothing skills any newbie can get in two hours (Merchant Business III and Artisan Survey IV). Yea, running an energy business is "work", but it was fun because I'd never done it before (and now that I know, will never do it again :) ). Regardless, that not only kept me in the game for half the game's age, it also kept me from experience so much of the rest of the game there's actually things I'm finding on account reaction #1.[/list:u]
  EQ works, but it's still a niche product. It's the Alpha game though, which fools others into thinking "this is the way to make money." But that's just Darwin applied to the genre. Even those companies who advertise achievement within X hours entire miss the point:
  
  Players don't want to sit at their computer and worry about how many hours they need to spend playing a game.
  
  If the hours happen, great! It's rewarding. But having to decide whether one has enough time to play beforehand makes and keeps the product niche. Most people, and most being most, simply do not want to care that much.

UO is Leif Garrett?

As he said, that's not what he meant :)

The truth is that it's both. It's fine for game designers to discuss their theories, but the reality is that these sorts of games happen within businesses, and as such involve a fuckton of people who are not game designers. Just the way it is. The game must be good for the players and sell well internally so that it can sell well externally. Otherwise, it's just another pipedream. Labors of love will be fine when NWN 5.0 can support hundreds of simultanous connections, bringing MMOG middleware development to the masses.

Until then, there must be a balance between:

• Who the game is for.
• What they accept as fun.
• How many will pay to play it monthly.
• How much money must be spent to deliver a compelling experiencing[/list:u]
  And then the company must scale their expectations. Not everyone needs to hit >500k subscribers.

having just returned from vacation and having not the time or energy to read 8 pages of the rantsite version of historical re-enactment, can someone answer one question for me:

Did you guys "fix" Koster yet?

/sarc

To the best of my knowledge (which is limited to the fact that I haven't heard anything specific  EVAR, for which I am eternally grateful) he is intact and able to pass along his demon seed =)

He is still loose and making games too, for good or for evil. Or, most likely, a bit of both!

I'd say Ozzy.

I was thinking UO is like the Who, with a lot more John Entwhistle and Keith Moon than Pete Townsend and Roger Daltry these days.

   UO is Menudo.  All the parts have been replaced, but it's still the same game.  It was also the first of it's kind.

Now that was a fun little read.  Here's the main design points noted therein:



Which to be honest don't sound terribly deep, complicated or off the wall.  But, I think the key was them identifying their key goals and then making those 3 works well.  Or to, repeat outselves from prior in this thread...

"Do few things but do them well."  They also seem very comitted to building on their initial success and thereby fleshing out the world aspects.  :)

I also liked these two:  On almost having 200,000 players...


My god, a team with reasonable goals aiming for small but high quality and succeeding beyond their expectations.  See, it can be done.

Maybe we should redub the "laws of online gaming" to the "laws of online world design" and post up a single new law of gaming: Keep it simple stupid.  That way dev teams can make a choice of what the hell their intentions are before the build us a 30 function swiss army knife when all I wanted was a good, sharp knife.

Xilren
PS Vehicles and Animal Companions as future power pools - woot
PPS Voice chat will be available natively in-game someday
PPPS In case anyone cares, i haven;t been in CoH much as i got sucked back into MTGO but I am still playing

Not quite as easy as that.

"Do a few things but do them well." won't work if the "few things" aren't what the majority of MMOG players want, exactly.  Because of that, there's not a lot to choose from.

CoH did PvE combat well.  The only other thing left to do is PvP, really.  I don't foresee a MMOG succeeding by doing only tradeskills, or only exploration, or any other single subset of gameplay, even if they do it "well".

So, really, "do a few things and do them well" means either focus on PvE combat (and thus be a clone of CoH, because you have to include sidekicking, eliminate autoattacking, and balance for 1 player vs. many mobs) or try to do PvP and hope that you get it right (actually find the definition of "well") and that the griefers don't ruin you.

I hear ATITD is a mmog purely about crafting and lets face it, EQ is all about PVE...

My point being, stop trying to be all things to all people all the time or else you'll end up with lots to do but no fun doing any of it.

Seriously, PVE sound like a small thing, but it's not.  If you want to restrict your goals to pvp and social? That's fine; do them and do them well, but don't throw in a crappy pve part and crappy economy part just to say you have them (that's pretty much what SB tried to do).

Even something as "limited" as pure PVE has multiple aspects that have to all fit well together (i.e. class or skill based; balance and synergy; power curves and advancement mechanisms; single player encounters vs groups vs raid level stuff; random spawn vs static; loot vs non) and still be executed in a fun way.  It's not simple. but what IS simple is narrowing of focus.  Don't give me 20 half baked and broken player classes/types, give me 5 that work top to bottom, inside and out.

Xilren

Xilren,

Thank you for commenting on CoH's design perspective.

They appear to have done well with the perspectives of:

1. gameplay first, online world second
2. simplicity and accessibility now, complexity and depth later

I think it is OK for CoH to be described by seasoned players, like Ajax, as a game lacking depth.  Unseasoned players can enjoy the game for now.  When depth is patched in, they should be seasoned enough to compete with existing seasoned players.

Thus, I see CoH as a game that self-selects its community, starting with players who want simple gameplay (this may be the aveage new online game player).  After one or two years of successfully patching new gameplay, they can "patch" in the seasoned players looking for depth and breadth.  By this time CoH will be a well-tuned F1 Racer worthy of Michael Schumacher.

If EQ is known for depth or breadth, EQ didn't get both overnight :)

They were already called that. :)

Um, they did and it's called Planetside.

Because it's late and I feel snarky. Goodnight. ;)

Well yes, but I think most of this thread has revealed that people naturally assume when you say online game and online world you actually mean the same thing.  Just look at the thread title.  As you said, while online worlds CAN have games within them, they dont have to do and even if they do they might not be very good ones as they must fit within the framework of the rest of the world.  And yet all along these world are being marketed to people looking for the game parts first.

This disconnect of expectations is the source of much frustration.

Games aren't worlds and worlds aren't games.  Semantics for the win, but it's damned important or we'll never get anywhere, from either side.

Xilren

You know what the sad thing is?  CoH's world seems more alive than most MMOGs around.  It's all those NPCs running around and getting mugged.  More games need active NPCs like that.

Debate seems to have stalled on this thread so here’s my contribution, for what its worth. Again referring back to the original laws:

Storytelling versus simulation
If you write a static story (or indeed include any static element) in your game, everyone in the world will know how it ends in a matter of days. Mathematically, it is not possible for a design team to create stories fast enough to supply everyone playing. This is the traditional approach to this sort of game nonetheless. You can try a sim-style game which doesn't supply stories but instead supplies freedom to make them. This is a lot harder and arguably has never been done successfully.

Lets imagine I'm the guy making a MMOG and I'm still dry-humping the dream that one day I'll be able to create an online world that, as outlined above, qualifies as a simulation or at least addresses the problems with a purely storytelling driven game. The first thing I do is throw out the idea that a game must be one or the other, either a sim or a story-based game, and label it "False Dichotomy #4353" and try to build a game with both elements. Next I spend time designing the skeleton of a system where players can be empowered to create actual content, mods, events, etc that can be incorporated into the game at some point. I get help from the community if I need it. Importantly, this part of the project must not take up more than a fraction of available resources, knowing that if this happens then my game will become a fun vortex, a singularity from which no fun can escape.

Then I proceed, under pain of torutre and death by my corporate sponsors, to create a refined clone in the tradition of EQ-WoW-CoH and craft enough content in to satisfy the catasses for a while. Say two to three months for the uber ones, and closer to a year for the less hardcore and casual players. And I mean quality content - no corners cut grade-A PvE content (I'll set aside PvP for now). I test, test test and test some more. Then I test again for good measure. Then I release.

Finally comes the great experiment: after the game's been out for a while and I've had 5 or 6 months solid to code the tools needed, I unleash the modding/content creation tools to the community. Whether it is an in game system (not likely) or a stand alone download doesn't matter. What matters is that I am putting some of the "God power" that I as a developer have into the hands of the community. The test server would become a playground for fertile minds, and might just become the popular server to hang on. If I was feeling truly ballsy I would allow crippled versions of the server code to be downloaded and then run as testing grounds for new player created content. The best of it would be incorporated into the game, with the caveat that itemization occurs in-house only for balance reasons. If corporate gets upset, I'll pitch it as an expansion, albeit a free one. Or if I must, I would consider charging for the tools.

Sure some of the free servers would sap away some of my paying playerbase (and that depends more on how I decide to cripple the server code than anything else), but the rewards would be reaped in game longevity and reduced content creation costs. Plus this is assuming that creating a game where strorytelling problems are mitigated was my dream and that the core game is appealing in its own right, as this must come first. People had to buy Half Life and like it for Counter Strike to become such a hit. Same thing applies here.

Some will argue that this isn't quite the same as a true simulation. It does however solve the same "mathmatical" problems that a pure sim does and solves one other large problem that MMOG's have been grappling with for quite a while: it allows players to truly affect their virtual world and play God. It in fact addresses the "Ownership is Key," "If your game is narrow" and "Rickys" laws quite nicely.

Ownership is key
You have to give players a sense of ownership in the game. This is what will make them stay--it is a "barrier to departure." Social bonds are not enough, because good social bonds extend outside the game. Instead, it is context. If they can build their own buildings, build a character, own possessions, hold down a job, feel a sense of responsibility to something that cannot be removed from the game--then you have ownership.

If your game is narrow, it will fail
Your game design must be expansive. Even the coolest game mechanic becomes tiresome after a time. You have to supply alternate ways of playing, or alternate ways of experiencing the world. Otherwise, the players will go to another world where they can have new experiences. This means new additions, or better yet, completely different subgames embedded in the actual game.

Rickey's Law
People don't want "A story". They want *their* story.

Though I doubt anyone will ever try the mod approach to MMOGs, especially in the way I've outlined, I do think that the above would be a game I would play - and play for quite a while.

I disagree with this, because it depends on the story.  Sure, the answer to a quest will be up on a website in hours, but if your entire game is a story, it'll take much longer (as long as the catasses take to "finish", I suppose).  Problem is that in a lot of games the point is to "build an online persona", not to participate in a story.

As a side note, despite its other (current) faults, Ryzom is trying the story approach.  EVE has some plot elements that haven't been released yet that no one knows.  And the reason why established universes such as Star Wars are attractive is because there's a background epic story, and everyone wants to participate, or at least witness it.

Problem with stories is that they have to have an ending, and no one wants that.

Personally, I disagree with Rickey's Law, too.  I may be in the minority, but I want A story, not MY story.  It's why I watch movies and read books: I want a story, any story.    Even when I roleplay within a game, it's not MY story, it's the character's story; it's still someone else's story.

I tend to read Rickey's Law as "a story that players are not involved in is not a story that will involve players." If that makes sense. It has to be THEIR story in that they have to be invested in it.

I don't know how to put it but the law implies that the story has to be a subset of the game, that the game's (existing) players need a good story to keep them busy or something.

If the devs start with the design decision that "the story = the game", then it is implied that the story is good (it better be!), and that players are involved in it (players wouldn't be "players" if they weren't in the game, and thus in the story).

It's like they want the game to have a good story in it, but not badly enough to stake the (fate of the) game on it.

The principal of charitable interpretation needs to be used extensively when reading the laws. They are not robust. Consider them insights or pseudo-laws if it helps (does for me).

I mention this because this made no sense to me: "I don't know how to put it but the law implies that the story has to be a subset of the game, that the game's (existing) players need a good story to keep them busy or something"

Storytelling is a way to describe the art of content building. What is important is that the act of telling the story takes resources and these resources are expensive and could arguably be better spent creating the tools for the players themselves to create their own content.

As for Raph's comment that "a story that players are not involved in is not a story that will involve players," thats just 6 one way and half a dozen another? The point is well taken though. I do like to feel invested in a game, and would feel that way even more so if I could create and see pushed live my own hand-crafted encounters, missions, dungeons or what have you.

Only if it's the single story in the whole game. CoH has several "small" stories you get a glimpse into if you read what the mission contacts and bosses say, and read all the clues gathered during the missions. The same could be said for other games with prolonged series of interconnected missions; especially FFXI with its cut-scenes related to the main plot missions.

When my Ice/Ice Tanker ran through "The Vazhilok Pollutant Plot", that was a small story that was summarized in the description of the souvernir I got. It was not "the" story, but "a" story.

Then I think we differ in the definition of the word "game."  For you, it seems that the game is the software, the package that has to be filled with content, whereas for me the game is the content.  Same for "book:"  the book is the paper and ink that hold the story, vs. the book is the story itself.

And my point was that when you look at it from the perspective that the content is the game, then you implicitly stake the game's success on the quality of the content (which generally results in better content), and if you don't have content you don't have a game (giving the players tools to make their own content results in a simulation, not a game, in my opinion).



If you reword it to "a story that players aren't involved in is not a story that attracts players," and then refine it to "a story that doesn't involve players isn't fun," you get what I think he was trying to say.



CoH doesn't have a main plot.  Come to think of it, none of the MMOG's seem to have a main plot.  Why is it that CRPG's all have a main plot, in addition to all the little stories you find in the game, but MMORPG's only have the little stories?

The reasons why have been stated already, I know.  I was asking the question rhetorically as a way to whine that devs should put a main plot in a MMO game in the future.

Devs have TRIED over and over to put a "main plot" in an MMOG. One reason and one reason only that this doesn't succed.

THERE ARE TOO MANY FUCKING PLAYERS.

No storyteller can handle as many characters as an MMOG, even a segregated server MMOG, can throw at a story. The human mind cannot process that many actors. Take the War of the Ring in the real Holy Triloyg, the Lord of the Rings. Sure, there were armies of actors, thousands, hundreds of thousands of participants.

There were maybe, MAYBE 40 characters all told. I'd have to go back and count.

No one wants the little shitty plaque that says "Participant." No one wants to be the cog. They may not all want to be Aragorn, but they sure as hell want to have at least as much importance as Pippin or Merry. They want to act upon the story, have the story act upon them, and for something SOMETHING to come out of it other than a "Participant" badge that everyone gets.

That's why main storylines don't work in MMOG's.

Semantics for the win, yet again.

If the story doesn't affect or include the players in any way, expecting anything more than a tiny fraction of the playerbase to give a shit about it is asinine. That's what the law, and Raph are trying to say....and it's true.

Players care about what happens to their character more than any other character in the gameworld. They want to make an impact on the world around them. If you introduce a narrative story to an MMOG that doesn't include the player, and doesn't allow them to affect the outcome, what's the point?

It's like the tree falling in the forest....if something happens in your gameworld, and it neither affects or involves any of your players, does it really need to be there at all? Rickey's law says no, and I tend to agree with that.

Bring the noise.
Cheers.............

No argument that content is king, I think I said that a few times in my post.



I think you're wrong here. What I'm arguing for is for devs to share the power of creation of content. Where the content comes from is irrelevant in terms of the Storytelling vs. Sim law. Again, the gist of the law is that it is expensive and probably impossible to supply new content to a large number of gamers (or world participants if you prefer) indefinetly. One soultution is a sim style game, another is what I described above: give the players the ability to create their own game assets, instance them, and watch the content roll on in.

I still think you can have both Sim and Storytelling aspects in one game though. Its not a zero sum choice.

Well, we do it anyway, but it's sort of like bumblebees flying. :)

For a fun math workout on it, try this link and get ready to feel depressed:

http://www.legendmud.org/raph/gaming/contentcreation.html

The content creation game is a losing battle. It's blatantly obvious if you think about it for four or five seconds.

This is why I always tend to think back to UO, where there were several player-run quest groups. UO gave the players limited means to create their own content. Now instead of a few beleaguered devs trying to hammer out content, you have potentially thousands of content creators.

Gotta smack down the griefers, though, or it'll get messy fast. That's why my watchword since the very beginning has been "accountability". Achieve that, and a lot of things will fall into line a lot more smoothly, and the genre can truly move forward.

For an example, I'd offer the time we were sitting around the Serpent's Cross Tavern, sipping ale and playing chess with the other guys in the Yew Militia. Suddenly a teacher from the Acadamy bursts in and informs us of attacks on their school. We move out and engage the "evildoers" and then stick around for a while to be certain they have moved on to easier pickings. The headmistress buys the ales later that night.

As a counter-example, my dark elf necromancer heard the rumor of his lord's daughter, Lanys, appearing in the Rathe Mountains. He moves out to meet this divine beauty, and finds her surrounded by throngs of not only devout tierdal, but hordes of unbelievers and light folk. Lanys tells us of her father's wishes, but she is drown out by the light folk who are trying to attack her, and several of them are bringing the local giant population to aid their cause. After teleporting away several times, she finally is able to say she is looking for a champion....and all the devout tierdal are ecstatic! She turns to a human monk of Quellious and chooses him as the champion, then teleports away.

The first example was a common night in UO. The second was the only gm-run quest I saw in my 3 years of playing EQ on and off, which was poorly acted, scripted, and gave a dark elf quest to a goddamned human monk. More specific to the topic, the first was run entirely by players, including four player run institutions, the second cost manhours of staff time, generated a one-off quest that left a bad taste in all but one player's mouth (for teh phat lewtz!).

EQ's popularity set the genre back several years, imo. That and no accountability, it's easier to create a pvp- mirror.

It seems to me that part of the hope with Raph's Laws isn't to serve as a box for MMOG development but as a source of accumulated wisdom.  I think maybe the title 'laws' is what has rubbed some the wrong way.  Maybe they could be more accurately described as 'theorems' or 'pearls of wisdom.'

Something, I have always found funny is that if people (myself included) who spent copious amounts of time thinking, discussing, writing, and bitching about online games spent that time actually working on making a game they could put all these excellent ideas to good use.  I know everyone talks about barriers to entry and development costs.  In reality, it is just a lack of motivation and organization. Most of the cost of software development is the programmers and artists time.  There are plenty of open source projects which rival the commercial projects in scale and complexity.  A great example is traditional text based MUDs.  They don't have the fancy graphics or scale that MMOG's do but they have served and could serve as excellent proofs of concept for everyones views and ideas on game design.  

Raph is fortunate enough to get paid to do that.  Although, after reading a thread like this I don't envy him ;)  It is much easier to be an armchair designer then actually do anything myself.

Since we are well down the road of semantics anyway, they aren't "Raph's Laws"....they are a collection of 'laws' compiled from the MUD-Dev mailing list, with contributions from well over a dozen different devs. I'm going to bet that on that mailing list, the laws weren't just made up out of the blue and left unchallenged. Raph, Dundee, feel free to confirm or deny on that one.

I think its more likely that bashing Raph has become fashionable since SWG's launch, and the laws have generally been viewed as the paradigm for conventional wisdom by the community. When the laws are compiled by a guy who puts out two high profile, commercially successful MMOGs, it's natural backlash for the folks who didn't care for his work to attack those laws.

What's more interesting to me is watching some compelling design concepts get shitcanned in favor of making a safe, commercially friendly MMOG in the same vein as UO, EQ, or DAoC. I don't think you can lay that one at Raph's doorstep, or blame the laws, either. That's a matter of the suits doing the funding wanting maximum ROI with minimal risk.

Bring the noise.
Cheers..............

Hell, that's UO's whole story, right there. Which is why I uttered that quote so many years ago when Raph first told us he was going to work on SWG. I held out hope that once that debacle was over, he would make the game he really wanted to make, without "the suits" throwing monkey wrenches into the workings. I still hold that hope, that I'll see something as vibrant and mature as UO could have been, almost was.

He replied at the time that he hoped that's what he was doing (with swg), but I have a hard time buying that. SWG feels like a bad compromise that lost its way somewhere in development.

Anyway, it's that hope and respect that have made me refrain from many, many brutal attacks over the years ;)

Interesting read. I think the content creation battle can be won, and I thought about it for slightly more than 5 seconds. Schlid's original article was ostensibly written to provoke "new" ideas and discussion not just defeatism, so here’s one possible solution.

In Raph’s article it states that the player time:dev time ratio is 1:460 based on the assumption that one year of dev time is needed to craft 40 hours of game content (or story). This does indeed look like a daunting ratio, but it's quite a ways from Dembski's universal probability bound of 10^-150, so it is possible :)

What I've been beating like a dead horse these past few posts is to flip the ratio, and make creating content part of the "player time" side. Supply tools ala Neverwinter Nights to the community and set up a test server to try out the player produced content. Send the best of it live and instance it.

With an already solid game seeded with good content, this could work, and increase the longevity of the game/world for those that need new content to continue playing.

All that said...



Amen.

While not the first, UO sort of got the snowball rolling into full effect. Because it was dubbed as an 'online world' by a boasting mantra of 'we create them thar worlds' - this has become the identification for online games with persistent content.

Other than UO, of the 'big league' MMOs, I dont think any of them have attempted to create a world. They seem to betroth the motto: "We Create Stuff For You To Do."

And maybe there is an important distinction.

     UO was never even close to being "mature".  Vibrant, I'll give you.

Actually, it was very mature until some pancaker showed up in his death robe tossing purple potions and uttering his mantra "OMGLOL!!1"

That's why I'm a stickler on accountability. OSI had a playerbase that actively made the game a better game, added content continually, but they treated us the same as any douchebag who's fun was derived by disrupting other paying customer's gameplay. It's too bad the constructor's $10 was equivalent (or even lesser in some ways) than the destructor's $10.

   I'm not saying there weren't some mature players in UO. I'm saying the game wasn't mature.  It wasn't designed to be mature.  It catered to immature players.  The staff was immature, from the lead dev right down to the last GM in Ironwill's GM PK guild.  The programmers were immature, and lazy.  For every step forward, they introduced three new bugs to be exploited.  
   Maybe we're just arguing semantics.  If so, I don't want to win that way.  I agree that constructive players were treated like shit, and griefers were rewarded and patted on the head.

Mature as in 'players given freedom to interact with each other and the world' vs. Mature as in 'polished code, professional staff'?

Had some trouble with logging into F13, so I'm a bit late to the party.  Anyway, "Rickey's Law" was the punchline to about 3 paragraphs of explanation of why developer imposed stories that try to create an overall "plot" for the players to experience are in general doomed to suck.  Players want to experience a story, but they don't want to be bit players in it, and they don't want it to roll on without regard for what they do (cf. the Siege of Trinsic).  The stories they are most invested in are the ones that are about them, for example for those that were there the "Siege of Trinsic" that occurred during UO Beta where a couple of PK guilds made peace with each other and made it nearly impossible to enter or leave Trinsic by land, and the players who banded together to try and drive them out and break the siege (this was before Magic was in common use in UO) will always be more memorable and compelling than the officially sanctioned one that marked the introduction of UO:R, which dictated that even on the server where the players *won*, UO:R rolled on regardless.

So it's essentially intended as a statement that we need find ways to empower the players to create stories they care about, and make the results relevant.  Our stories are *always* backstory (even when they are "backstory that hasn't happened yet"), and we need to accept that and move on.

--Dave

Exactly. I was speaking of the former, and apparently the latter was the death of the former.

Dave brings up an excellent point. The Seer program was hurting, not just because of the slow pace of enacting things, but also because it wasn't as loose and from the hip as player quests were, it was inflexible. Most Seer's RPCs were better than any "official" plot they were involved in. The other bad thing about the Seer program is that it harvested a lot of the designers of the player quests, leaving those like me, willing to participate but not that good at designing and implementing, to fend for ourselves.

I wish the Seer program had worked, imo we'd be playing a far different kind of mmorpg today. Instead I'm barely even interested in the genre at all.

This might already have been said, I haven't read every post in this thread.  I agree 100% with what MahrinSkel said, especially the contrast between the UO:R story versus the adventures surrounding those PK guilds.

At least for me I think part of the distinction between a virtual world and a 'game' is the virtual world is an environment where one can experience, and play, and interact with others.  There may be stimuli and certain rulesets, and subsets of the virtual world but within the context of the system you have the ability to create your own story.  Because, even at the most basic level whatever you do IS the story.

In a 'game' there is a specific purpose or set of goals (although they may be open ended, simulation games for instance).  There is a finite set of rules which defines the experience and there is a progression through the game.  Doesn't matter if you are talking about an MMOG or checkers.  The entire purpose is to entertain, compete, learn, or whatever other purpose the game provides.

I guess I see that as part of the distinction between a virtual world and a game.  Even though a game might dynamically respond to your actions it contains a predefined purpose.  In a virtual world you are defining your own purpose.

There is of course a lot more to it then just that, but I think it is a good point to make.  An english professor once quoted, "There are three types of stories, the story the author wants to write, the story which wants to be written, and the compromise."  That is applicable here, they should ideally be a medium where that compromise can happen.[/quote]

    Freedom to interact isn't mature.  In UO, you were free to interact negatively.  You could kill, steal, loot bodies and houses.  If you wanted to build something positive, like a community, you were limited to using the same tools.   Killing, stealing, looting.  Anything that couldn't be done with those tools just couldn't be done.  When the ability to interact positively, on a community level, is just as effective as the negative tools, then it would be on the road to being a mature game.

Examples of positive tools?

Edit: Because, to be honest, the only real tool I can think of off the top of my head is communication.  That allows you to use any other tools in the game for both good and ill.

Don't confuse the Seer/Interest program with the official OSI events. There is a big difference. Interest program events were pretty much independently created plots provided to various RP communities.

Seers were basically players who ran their own events....they were just players that were provided additional tools and support from OSI to do so.



Some of this was due to the fact that Seers, Elders, Troubadors, and RPCs often needed to have an IGM to make any significant alterations to their character. Want to become a dragon as a final boss? Need an IGM. Need to have armor or other items created? Need an IGM.

That's why the RPC often came off more natural....by playing the character as essentially a roleplaying PC, it lended itself to the same style of play and improvisation as most roleplayers.



Well, you had to either seek out the rp communities that were getting Seer events, come up with your own, or find a group that was doing player events.

Unfortunately, there weren't enough Interest members to support their shard. This is why we tended to find a player city, or established RP community to work with. It just wasn't feasible to run 10 events with 10 different groups each week....a fair amount of "sup thou, can you wipe my murder counts" or "gimme a quest with a kewl reward" and whatnot.



I agree, but blame the vol lawsuit, dishonest interest members, and bitchy participants....because that's really what killed the program.

The vol lawsuit brough the liability issue, which eventually got it shut down.

Dishonest interest members screwed the entire program, because they destroyed any sort of trust OSI had for us to use our powers responsibly.

Bitchy participants neutered the program, by taking personal recognition out of the picture. People crying "favoritism" every time eventually reduced us to the point of issuing "participant" type rewards and generic "thanks for your help" messages. These same people would try going toe-to-toe with a Seer-controlled dragon using a viking sword, wearing no armor, and then BITCH when they died. Sometimes they'd die to AI and complain that "this bastard GM just killed me".

OSI didn't trust us with the limited powers and small teams we had, let alone with teams of the proper size, and appropriate powers.

Bring the noise.
Cheers............

    The ability to make your house a guard zone.   This was actually promised by Raph, but he couldn't find a way to do it that wasn't *unfair* to murderers.  
    Kick/Ban options for organizations running events.  
   
    Stealing was included in the game.  It was possible to steal, in five seconds, with a 5 minute old character, literally a million gold worth of
house deeds.  In order to level the playing field, there should have been an ability to have an equally significant impact on the thieves.   Any house owned by a character on the same account as a thief that had been caught or detected should have been subject to attack.  Once enough damage was done to the door, it should have opened, and the house lootable.  That would have been a positive tool.  

    The ability for miners to rig explosive potions to go off when they die and their corpse is opened that destroys everything in a three tile area.  Kills characters, destroys weapons, armor, magic items.  Everything.  Using bags of purples to disrupt player gatherings, no problem.  Working as intended.  Expanding the idea to defend miners, too much trouble.  Can't be done.  It would be unfair to PKs.  

    However, as I said, Raph cared a lot about being fair to assholes, and didn't give a flying fuck about being fair to the victims.

Yeah, I know. I was very active in the rp community, and this was the main complaint I heard from Seers. The main few who worked with us one our stuff were members of our player quest group beforehand. I glossed over a lot of the particulars, mostly because time has misted that portion of my brain, as it is wont to do. Don't do drugs, kids. ;)

But I didn't even touch on the official OSI events, that was a mess.

If each shard could have grown it's own communities, if resources had been spent to allow such a thing, in a way that didn't break the code (so each shard could be unique but still patched as one codebase), that would have been incredible. Each shard being a different and unique world, instead of cookie cutter copies with maybe some different housing here and there.

I guess SWG has some of this thanks to more options for towns and whatnot. Now if it could only drop the crappy HAM combat idea entirely and put in something fun ;)

Urgh. My problem with the guard zones was that reds walking NEAR a house might get instakilled without warning, and there was no way to tell given UO's interface, screen display, etc. In 3d, for example, there would have been no issue.

You may say "who cares? Instakill 'em" but frankly, you could have just as well have occasional lightning bolts from the blue that zapped reds and had the same gameplay experience--we would have gotten the same complaints. Perception of how it feels as a player matters a lot.

Not having played UO past 5 minutes in beta, was a "Red" player considered a Murderer? A social outcast and someone who goes distinctly against the very virtues that are the basis for morality in Brittania?

Lightning bolts from the sky at random, or instant death when coming near a house?

I'm not sure I see the problem. You had to CHOOSE to be Red, right?

Actions = consequences.

And this is coming from someone who LOVES PVP. Consensual PVP that is.

Anything that involves an instakill will be grabbed by the griefing community as a tool.  I'm not sure how'd they do it, but they would turn it around on people, probably within an hour of going live.

You could go red without even killing a single player early on.  Early UO's rep system wasn't very effective for pinpointing the bad guys.  I went red serveral times as an anti.

Plus at the time there were no provisions for guild warfare.  So, fighting your enemies often meant getting tagged as a evil doer.

It just wasn't a very robust system and treating all reds as scum would have been a mistake at that time.

    The same gameplay experience  FOR THEM.  The gameplay experience for everyone else would have been vastly improved.  Perception of how it feels for the PKs, very important.  Perception of how everyone else would like it, don't give a shit.  Thanks for proving my point.

I played UO for quite some time, and never really enjoyed the PK aspect of the game.  Despite the fustration of being murdered while trying to mine, hunt monsters, or just minding my own business it did add a certain edge to the game which is missing from other games.  

Lets assume for the sake of argument that PKing has a valid place in a game (which it obviously did for a long time in UO).

Zaphkiel I think the point your missing is that if there is going to be a system which allows players to murder others, there also needs to be a system where players can enact justice.  Having arbitrary lightning bolts fall from the sky isn't a very good solution (unless your intent is to stop people from killing other players).  If that is the case then why allow it at all?

What the developers needed to do was give players real tools to police themselves with.  The biggest problem with PK's was that they would kill you, then recall back to their house drop their loot and log off.  So even if then you got some friends together to go hunt them down and bring them to justice they weren't even online anymore.

I had high hopes for the bounty system, but it did nothing to help.  All it did was identify names of murdering characters.  One possible way it could have been implimented was if your name made the bounty list players could get an item which would allow them to locate them.  PK's always knew where miners were because there were only so many good places to mine.  If there had been some way to track down murderers and thieves it would have gone a long way to making the system more fair.

The bottom line is yes the developers failed to give the players the tools they needed to police themselves, as well as creating constructively.  UO gave players a lot more tools then most of the MMOG's out there but it still wasn't enough.  That doesn't mean that the developers were biased, from everything I've ever read Raph say he doesn't strike me as the type to glorify any one playstyle.

Actually, I lobbied to remove part of the karma/rep changeover. I played a thief pretty much from the release (after playing a paladin type in the beta) onward. In the first live version, you could sink to the first layer of red (Dark Lord/Lady) from stealing, so you had to be very careful who you stole from. This actually led to my love of stealing from pk guilds.

With the rampant griefing, and general assholish behaviour from many 'blue' avatars, I'm saddened that folks think red=bad or pk or whatever. It simply wasn't the case. My guy in the Militia (Sky, oddly enough) was always working down murder counts from griefers.

That was the biggest flaw of the system, and a flaw of most coded systems, griefers will always find a way to mess with people. Hell, most "antis" were knowingly or unknowingly "notopks", they see red and attack without thinking about who they are attacking or why.

      " My experience is exactly the opposite. They will band together, be
 better at the game than anyone else, and rack up WAY more kills
  than deaths. WAY WAY more. They will, after all, be the best players
  in the game (playerkillers tend to be). "    --Raph Koster,
      From the developers digest, on a discussion on perm death.

    I don't know, sounds to me like he likes them.

Who are typically the most effective PvPers in a given game? That's right...the PKs are.

If you put permadeath in place, you don't even slow PKs down. Even for mere statloss, the travelled in packs, and used more efficient and effective group tactics to minimize any potential risk to themselves. Imagine how much worse they'd be if they were in danger of losing the character completely.

You also have the "zerg" factor....PKs in groups don't have to be maxxed to ruin your day. They could trot around with newbie characters or partially developed and still be quite effective.....then simply re-roll upon death. Much like your issue with thieves, PKs don't have to be fully developed to be effective....so the disposable PK becomes a very viable option.

Plus, consider that whatever punishment you intend for the griefers will eventually be manipulated to affect a good-natured player. Goading someone into attacking your blue character, spying, looting, noto-killing, KSing, and general asshattery often push a good natured player over the line. If you're going to make it so doing so means risking permadeath, you may as well pull PvP completely....otherwise, you're just severely restricting the blues from enacting player justice, while the reds would continue running wild.

I agree with Raph regarding just randomly killing reds with unavoidable lightning bolts from the sky. Pks aren't some automatic unavoidable, infallible means of randomly killing players.....you have a chance to survive, and you are aware when there is potential for danger. You can prepare, and even fight back. OTOH, people can't do anything about the random lighting bolt....and there would be no way to tell which houses you can walk near, and which ones you cannot.

Plus, if you allowed the house as a guard zone as a toggle on every house, everyone who wasn't red would turn it on. At which point, you've basically put guard zones in place for 80% of the map. At which point, you may as well go Trammel in the overworld, because the Pks are going to be virtually unable to hang out on any subserver other than the dungeons. *Step, step, random instakill lightningbolt, reroll*

Sounds to me like someone just needs to STFU and stick with non-PvP games, and leave online worlds to those of us that can accept some level of risk.

Bring the noise.
Cheers...............

It was sounding good until you put in that 'people who are into PvP are manlier than those who aren't' shit.

I mean, what the hell is that?

The point being that there are plenty of options for the folks who want no part of PvP.

It's not a personal jab, or dick-waving measure. Just a bit of irritation that people want to insist on every world being non-PvP, instead of just going to a game that has the ruleset they want.

Bring the noise.
Cheers.............

I accept the level of risk of PVP. I enjoy it.

But, and it's been said over and over again, that PK bring griefers. Of course, so does any other sort of gameplay involving interaction with other players.

My point was that the UO system always tried and tried to enforce or at least enact some form of punishment on those who it deemed to be anti-social to the world of Brittania, but never went far enough to make sure those social mores were followed. Maybe it was too easy to become red, and I'm not going to argue that because I'd be arguing from ignorance of the system. My point was that if there was a crime or series of crimes that people could perpetrate in UO that was bad enough to get them labelled as a red, as someone who is an undesirable to that society, why bother pussyfooting around?

Haemish's Immutable Law of Justice Part 1

If there is a rule you do not want someone to follow in an online game, the only way to ensure that said rule will not be broken is to enact swift and divine justice upon the rule breaker in as harsh a manner as possible. Since hammer blows to the testicles are right out, random lightning bolts from on high are just as good. Banning works too.

Haemish Immutable Law of Justice Part 2

No matter how effective the tools for policiing your community are, policing the community of an MMOG is not a task for the players to control. Justice becomes tyranny in the hands of online players, in the same manner that power corrupts. The only truly effective method of policing an online community is by an arbitrary body that is selected, administered and paid by the company who developed the game world in the first place.

Haemish's Immutable Law of Surprises

Players prefer to act on the world as opposed to reacting to another's actions upon them. Policing the community, defending their town or keep, or having their actions disturbed by another player, NPC, or the world will only be (barely) acceptable if the player is informed ahead of time that such an action could happen. Even when he is informed of the risks, players will still whine.

Which finally leads to,

Haemish's Immutable Law of the Whine

Players are whiny bitches who will spout the most inane babble imaginable since the Tower of Babel no matter how much you try to accomodate them, warn them of the risks, or target their desires. Accomodating the whine is less important than appearing to listen.

    Sounds to me that someone still feels the shame of having his playstyle defeated by carebears.  We won, you lost, deal with it.  PKs could have just stayed out of civilized areas.  How many times did they say "If you don't want to die, stay in town"?  Well, if they don't want to die, stay away from houses.  The lightning bolts would only drop if you come near a civilized area.  That's NOT random.  However, trying to claim it is, in order to defeat the idea is just the kind of lying bullshit I expect.

    Ubiquitous?  Sometimes one keeps a belief only because it's opponents never cease to be assinine.

If you're going to ban or otherwise severely punish players for PKing, why not just hard code it out of the game? Why allow it at all? Seriously, why include PvP if taking part in it means you get instakilled, permakilled, and/or banned?



If we had ever been given the proper tools for policing the community in UO, I think this law may have been disproven. A big part of the issue is that players viewed antis with as much disdain as PKs. They didn't respect or appreciate the measures others took to try and protect them....they simply bitched that the danger shouldn't exist.

Far too many loopholes existed in UO's player justice system to consider it anywhere near effective. SB strikes me as a poor example due to it's design flaws, and marketing as the "r0x0r1nG" MMOG.



Players want full control over what happens to them. If they die to a mob because they didn't heal, so be it.....but if they happen to get ganked because they decide to stop and discuss a casserole recipe at the Xroads, they get pissed. It's all about control....many players want a predictable experience, so they can be prepared at all times. When you catch them with their pants down, they cry foul.

So, in short, I suppose I agree.



I dunno on this one. I think the whine is simply a manifestation of players being driven by self-interest. A substantial portion aren't satisfied just to know that you're listening....they have an agenda, and they want results. Acknowledging the concern is just a signal for them to turn up the volume on the whining if they want something done about it.

Bring the noise.
Cheers..............

That's amazing...because I spent the pre-UO:R era playing as an ANTI. I busted my ass for years trying to keep non-PvPers safe. I'm just annoyed that despite the emergence of alternative non-PvP games, UO whiners insisted on turning UO into a watered down version of Diablo. And they did it because they couldn't be bothered to support or help the ANTIs.

Players housing != civilized areas. Yknow why? BECAUSE YOU CAN PUT THEM DAMN NEAR EVERYWHERE. You can sail close to houses, you can easily come upon them while walking through the wilderness. It's not as if UO had zoned housing developments or anything....you could put them anywhere they'd fit.

Bring the noise.
Cheers..............

I disagree. They are the least ethical PvPers. Not the best.

My personal experience as both a PK and later an Anti (until most antis became mindless noto-killers) shows me that 'most' pks were not all that good at pvp, since they went after easy targets or exploits/3rd party hacks. Basically the grief form of pvp is pk.

If there weren't so many noto-killers parading around as antis, it may have been different.

That law is for the people who insist on mixing PVE and PVP in their games, and yet do not make the simple step of watching how other games fucked it up completely (hello WOW and COH... possibly).

All that law is saying is that if murdering someone when they aren't ready or expecting an attack is wrong in the context of the game world, don't expect the players to punish the wrongdoers, because they can't, or won't. You make the point yourself... if only the PVE'ers had supported the Anti's, UO could have still have PVP and not turned into whack-a-mole.

But they didn't, and they WON'T. EVER. Because that involves REACTING and players hate reacting. They want to be proactive. They don't want to deal with the whining victims (as your post castigating the PVEer's proves), and they'd rather just be hunting the PVP'ers instead of waiting for the PVPers to act.

Here's where I agree with you. If you are going to outright punish PVP in a game, either take it completely the fuck out and tell the PVPers to go fuck themselves (or fuck the PVPers up with insta-kill lightning), OR make it so that in order to PVP, you have to agree to it, either by going to an area flagged for PVP or entering a mission or quest that is PVP, a la DAoC or City of Villains. The days of unrestricted PVP anywhere in the world are OVER for anything above a population of 200.

Heh, from personal experience, most anti's were nearly as bad as pks.  We just did everything under the guise of helping out the community.  We still pretty much killed anyone we want, all that was needed was some sort of flimsy reason.  Anti's still carried out extensive guild wars that often meant killing your enemy and anyone with them at the moment, it's not like there were actual guild tags early on.  Basically the only thing anti's didn't do was kill miners and noobs.  My guild wanted nothing more than to just kill everyone, but we had already cornered ourselves into the role of protectors, so we moved servers and let loose some slaughter.

The thing is, everyone we were protecting would have liked it better if there was no need to be protected at all.  I don't remember many thanks from clearing out a group of PKs at the Britain mines. Mainly because the victims were either getting ressed in town, still ghosting about or logged out in disgust.  Given the choice between player justice and not getting ganked by bored ex Quake players, a majority would likely choose #2.

In this day and age, with so many non-PvP games around, is there REALLY such a thing as non-consentual PvP?? If I login to Shadowbane, I am accepting the risks associated with playing in that game world, and under that ruleset.

Unless they just join up, completely oblivious to any information surrounding the game, they know going in that PvP is allowed. If they go into tha game completely oblivious to that fact, who is at fault there? I'd say the numbnuts who joined the game without learning anything about it in advance. I mean, shit....do we need warning labels for PvP+ games now?

I know, I know....even in PvP+ games, people don't necessarily want to PvP all the time. It's not a quake server. But I think it's silly to suggest that every game has to fit into the pigeonholes of SB, EQ, DAOC, and UO. Players join IPY, or Siege Perilous, and they know what they are getting....it's certainly much more niche, but I believe online worlds are much more niche than most care to admit.

When you join a "game", you accept the rules and expect things to be fair....when you join a "world", you accept the conditions of that world. If one of those conditions is "things aren't always going to be fair", those that accept that premise are going to have a much easier time adjusting to Pks, thieves, and other negative elements of your world. It's all about managing expectations.

As to the re-active/pro-active thing, I think you're getting back into Baron's law. Other players are what makes multiplayer gaming a good thing, they are also what makes multiplayer gaming suck. People want to act on the gameworld, act upon others in a positive/negative way, or have others act upon them in a positive way. Not surprisingly, players bitch when others act upon them in a negative way.

Bring the noise.
Cheers.............

And there it is, from the horse's mouth, so to speak. Bored ex-quake players victimizing others because they are bored, not because they liked the game or virtual world that was being nourished by folks like Raph.

Bored ex-quakers who destroyed what could have been a fruitful and rich genre, and instead is crappy EQ clones and halfassed solutions to problems nobody has the balls to fix.

You are, because you are an informed user. But other players who are not as informed may not know. And yes, I do think PVP games SHOULD have a warning label on them that says something to the effect that:

"You may be attacked, denigrated and irritated by any random jackass that you see. Enjoy!"



I'm not trying to pigeonhole the games. I'm trying to make developers commit to the style of gameplay and type of community they want to see in their game. If you don't want it (PKing), don't fucking allow it, or make it so hard it isn't worth it. If you do, inform the customers what could happen.



Actually, the majority of players, i.e. the NON-informed, non-hardcore who are not those of us on this board, they are buying a GAME, whether it's a world or not. Their expectations are of a game, something fun.

Hell, that's MY expectation of a game I buy. You live in a world, you play in a game. This whole business of calling MMOG's virtual worlds I think clouds the issue that they are being sold, marketed and PLAYED as games first, worlds a distant 365th.

   If they were dead, you didn't protect them.  You avenged them.  Vengeance is just as fun for you, not the same thing at all to a miner.  Most anti's were far more interested in the action, than the protecting part.  Protecting is boring.  That's why they weren't respected.  You were just using the miners as an excuse to go PK someone, and not feel guilty about it.  PKs wanted to gank miners.  You needed miners getting ganked so you could gank, too.   It's the same playstyle.

As an aside, it was funny watching some kid review Lineage 2 on the Screen Savers last night. He was trying to show off the game and some guy attacked him ;)

Well, that was just an example.  Sometimes we'd get news of PKs in the area and go sniff it out.  Or wait around for the action. But yes, we weren't interested in protecting, we were interested in killing the pkers.  

But see, being an anti was mostly a reactionary duty.  Once you got wind of pkers in an area it was often too late.  They were either in mop up mode, long gone, or waiting for a retalitory strike.  If we had some sort of extra sensory way of knowing where they would attack, sure, we'd be there ready to protect.  But in a world as big as Britannia and with the relative easy of transport, it was simply too hard to cover all the people that needed it.

Mostly the PK v. anti thing was just a moral dividing line between two sets of pvpers at the time.  One group advocating killing everyone; one opposed this philosophy and used this as an opportunity have a justfied war against the eeeevil pkers.

If we had been a little more like security guards and a little less like the police, then perhaps it could have worked for the innocent miners, crafters and pve players.  But I doubt they would have still liked their position as disposable innocents in a conflict they wanted no part in.

Wait a second....you're saying that being aware of whether or not a MMOG is PvP+ or not makes me an informed user. Then you ask for the devs to inform the players about what could happen in the PvP+ games.

If a random player isn't even bothered to find out if it is PvP+ or not, how are the devs supposed to make them aware (before they buy the game) of various other issues they may encounter?

I think the consumer has to bear some responsibility there.



I suppose the "world vs game" classification needs refinement. Of course, they're all games.....MMOGs to be specific. But there is a huge difference in the two TYPES of MMOG, just as there is a difference between the Sports and Puzzle genres.

But the totally non-informed player is NEVER going to make any attempt to know or understand that. Pretty hard to manage expectations of a group that does everything possible to form their own expectations, and avoid any warnings you give them to the contrary.

To a certain extent, you almost have to let them come into the game and be disappointed. When they object to elements they don't like, you have to stick to your guns, and say "sorry, this isn't for everyone".

Which of course, is a bad move....because many of those players don't leave. They become jaded and disruptive and bitter, and then proceed to try and break your game. I guess it ultimately means you cannot idiot-proof your game.



There is a distinction to be made, though. Folks buying MMOGs expecting every one to be Monopoly or a multiplayer FF7 are going to be disappointed most of the time.

If we assume the players to be totally uninformed, it isn't possible to manage expectations.

Bring the noise.
Cheers.............

Big bold fucking letters saying "YOU WILL FIGHT OTHER PLAYERS AND SOMETIMES YOU WILL WIN, SOMETIMES YOU WILL LOSE."

On the box, on the opening screens, in the manual and anywhere else you can think to put it to warn the wise. It'll be a foolish waste of time, but in the same manner of CYA as "Don't drink the gasoline that you put in your car." You can't completely stupid proof your MMOG, but you can do more than has been done.



People aren't buying MMOG's expecting Monopoly or a board game. They are buying them with the expectation of a fun game as opposed to a time sink. They are buying them with the expectation that the games will be as fun as the single-player games they HAVE played, just with, you know, other people.

It is somewhat ironic that we are making up 'laws' about MMOGs in a comment thread for an article 'debunking' a set of the very same.  I don't totaly disagree with HaemishM, but I don't agree with all his points either.  I just think it is funny.

The problem is that even purely consentual PVP where both parties are ready, informed, and willing is never going to be fair.  In an evenly matched fight the winner will be the person who is willing to exploit any advantage to its maximum potential.  Many fights are evenly matched so that the more powerful character, or more skilled player wins.  In UO PK's biggest advantage was suprise.  You would be focused on doing something, mining, hunting, talking, afk.  They appear out of no where and strike as quickly and lethally as possible.  If they couldn't kill you immediately they would recall/run away/dissapear.  Once they looted a corpse on they went and chances are you would never see them again (or at least for a long time).  Guildwars and Factions in UO (both consensual PVP in a mixed system) were a lot of fun but always resorted to gankfests.  It is really the same in most other games.  

Maybe someone can eventually come up with a better system, there is always low hanging fruit which developers can take advantage of to improve but radical improvement is always going to be exceedingly difficult.  

Siege Perilous was a PVP+ server which although it was always a niche was arguably the best experience UO ever offered.  

Just an aside, any game which allows players to pk other characters should NEVER allow multiple characters per account.  That was a huge problem with what little justice system UO had.

Well, that's because the most ruthless players always win. That's why in real sports they have rules of conduct that are followed, you can't kick the QB in the nuts and eye gouge him, for example, though you'd probably hurt the opponent's scoring percentages.

Too many players treat pvp as a 'war', but it's a 'sport'. Nobody is going to invade your homeland and rape your children, nobody is going to physically harm you, so the rules of war are not applicable.

It's a game, with lots of people being real dickheads about how they play, and not much respect for other folks being shown. That's a pretty major reason I don't like mmogs, the almost complete lack of respect many players exhibit, pvp or not. If you try to 'teach' them respect via pvp, well, then you'r playing their game and they win. Instead, I just shake my head slowly and move on to something else, where people can act like mature adults.

There are no -legal- eye gouges in football.  There are rules.  The PvP in these games needs to have rules in place that either prohibit the eye gouging or penalize you for doing the eye gouging.

I don't think that there shouldn't be *some areas of these games where there is a no-holds-barred ruleset where anything goes, but there should be areas with more structured rules for PvP.  Dungeons, or instanced areas...things like that.

No, that's not why it didn't work.  It didn't work because devs don't know how to handle that many players, and haven't changed the model of storytelling to accomidate a change in the number of actors. You don't write a monologue for 50 people.

So what SHOULD they do?  Not expect players to... I hate to say it... have an impact.  People don't want to be a cog, but they are a cog in a MMOG, and that's not ever going to change.  If you want to be the ultrasuperhero, play a single player.  If you log into a server that has a pop count of over a thousand, meaning probably 20 thousand accounts (not to mention x5 for the number of characters), you aren't all that important.  That doesn't mean that players can't change the world, but it does mean that the player most likely cannot.  MMOGs have populations of small cities; how well known are you in your home town?  

To account for this, devs need to sit down and meditate on what a metaplot is, and how to use it.  They haven't yet, and as a result they're pretty fucking sorry storytellers.  That means recognizing that people will be far less in status than Pippen.  There are only a few Pippens - they will be the GLs of larger guilds.  Their most senior officer might count for one of the half head shots you see in the background on about ten or twenty frames of film.  And that's it; if you're telling stories, that's how it goes.  

At the same time, you don't tell them that they're not big boys.  People want status, and they can still have it, just not on a global scale.  They can find their status within their guild, and within the smaller group of allies/enemies they form, and in terms of personal goals they set for themselves.  From a dev pov, they need to think about what the metaplot is (which is largely out of player control), and the things that players might do within that plot - and design quests, areas, etc accordingly.  

Pick something simple, say some sort of Elf vs Orc dispute.  You have a mountain range with your standard Orc groups, and a nearby forest with some Elves, who are pissed off at each other.  You can look at the situation in two ways, both of which valid; there can be a singular triggering event, such as a megaquest that is omgwtfimpossible to do, and wait for it to finally get finished.  Or (and possibly and) you can have the conflict weighted by how each side is doing.  Each side will be "spawning" a certain number over time of forces.  They don't have to have a game artifact (mob) - it can be just a number in memory.  Each time an orc is killed, their value slides back a notch; each time an elf is killed, their number slides back as well.  If the number increases faster than people are killing them (say, they're off in other zones), then that side will "press forward".  Say the elves are being farmed by a nearby player city, and the orcs are largely ignored; the orcs will appear to push into elven territory.  Next server up, what were a couple of elven houses on the edge of the forest will be burned and overrun by orcs.  In the case of a triggering event, this back-and-forth will not begin until something occurs, such as a quest.

This is fairly simple, and could be expanded a great deal.  How quickly each side increases in number could be a result of other factors; there could be supply lines from other zones.  Players may not initially even realize what they are, other than a group of orcs, unless they paid attention to where they were going, or what they were carrying.  The more these groups are killed off, the less the orc outpost is reinforced.  Whatever quest system that exists could tie into this as well; missions to protect elf convoys, or assault orc convoys could show up on mission terminals/NPCs/whatever when the value on either side gets too high or too low.  

The final link in storytelling within the metaplot would be to have a way to record past events in a general sense - reputation, for both yourself and your guild/city.  Kill orcs, and elf rep goes up while orc rep goes down.  Have that affect mission types, but also your city's standing; if I run out and constantly kill elves, the elves should take a negative look on our city.  They are, afterall harboring a mass murderer.  If the game includes a resource system, the elves should be a resource - one that can be farmed (killed for loot), or protected.  Obviously, the two are in conflict, and farming them will spoil them as a potential trade partner.  

What you have is a game which includes storytelling as a programmable dynamic.  True, the storytelling is not nearly so personalized or impressive as being a member of the Fellowship, but at the same time, it isn't possible for you to be a member.  They included nine people out of a population of millions, and that's precisely why it was such a fantastic story.  By its nature, it is out of reach of MMOG players, and as a result the type of storytelling that occurs needs to change.

Actually, this is exactly the kind of story telling we did with the scenarios in UO a few years back. In the Savage Empire scenario, the orcs and savages were fighting for control of certain areas of Britannia. The number of orcs or savages in the area depended on how many of these creatures the players killed. We even provided tools for players to take a side (orc masks and war paint). In the end, the side that was killed more often lost control of the area and the winning side became permanent residents. The main problem we had with this was while the scenario lasted nine weeks, the finale was over far too quickly. Something we solved in the next scenario.

The second scenario was even more complex, involving players looking for and disabling a series of magical constructs (which had a puzzle-like minigame) and finding the necessary components to build a magical structure that would help free an enslaved city. This scenario lasted six weeks with the finale lasting almost a week – giving just about everyone a chance to participate in some aspect of the “final battle”. Once the players’ succeeded, a quest opened up, allowing them to destroy the oppressor and the Gargoyle city changed from a monster infested dungeon to a real city with shops, banks, NPCs, etc.

The scenarios were designed with exactly what you are talking about…allow hundreds of players to participate in a meaningful way and clearly show the result of their actions.

The scenarios weren't perfect (they initially took too long to make) but they were a step in the direction you are talking about. They were also a great way to add new content to the game. It’s too bad the scenarios were stopped just as they started gaining popularity.

The main complaint we got from players about the scenarios though (aside from the delay in getting new ones out) was that they didn't feel "involved" enough. Fact is, players WANT to be the main hero. We can tell them that MMOGs don't support that, but it won't change the fact that they want it.

An assessment of ability is not an endorsement. :P If anything, this speaks to how corrupting power can be (expert players deciding they can lord it over everyone), how humiliating loss can be (inexpert players getting out of the competition), and how a marginal advantage can result in very long winning streaks. It has nothing at all to do with whether I like the PKers or not.

For the record (again), I don't.

EA seemed to be rather fond of killing things related to UO that players seemed to think were a good idea, for unknown reasons.

As far as players wanting to be the 'main hero'...  That's what single player RPGs are about.  You can dangle a carrot for some of these people by giving out some kind of title or item or something to indicate participation in a given event to the person/group that kills the big boss, solves the final puzzle, kills the most of the opposing force, etc...  but then you get claims of favoritism on the part of the game staff who make those awards.  

People want to be the main hero, be something everyone can't be...  AND they don't want to be locked out of something, don't want there to be something that someone else has done, and therefore they can't do.  They can't have it both ways in a single player game.  Either there is 'single use' content, like EQ events, or 'The Sleeper' in EQ; or there isn't, and everyone is just a cog.  You can't have it both ways.

--
Alkiera

Probably started up right after I quit UO :/  Sorry I missed it.



Maybe after a couple rounds you guys could've figured out some things to tweak that a bit, but bottom line is what they want isn't doable.  Someone's a hero only if a LOT of people aren't, because it requires a lot of non-heros to view them as a hero.  Only real escape from that trap is if you have NPCs viewing you as a hero.  Say for example, you somehow track a player's history in a quest system, in mobs they kill or NPCs they assist - whatever, and through that build up a history for the player that has game applications.  

UO's virtue system gets at this somewhat.  You could add some things like having NPCs recognize you and such, or having NPC guilds/cities/outlaw bands/whatever show public favor toward their hero.  Wouldn't it be cool to be the patron Hero of Occlo?  You're still running ingo the same wall though, in that there is only so much public display of heroism that you can do before the title has no value.

Best thread in forever.


I have always thought that this law:


was disproven, surprisingly enough, by everyone's favorite number-driven stat builder, Everquest.  Despite literally years of hardcore parsing and analysis, there are a number of rather basic combat formulas that are unknown to the playerbase.  Just a couple months ago, some developer let it slip that sheilds increase your AC softcap.  Who knew?  Nobody.



"Treadmills are teh stupid and they need to be replaced with some magical cool thing that neither I nor anyone else can articulate" posts were old five years ago.



Not a solution.  There is nothing magical about currency.  This will just lead to a barter-driven economy (see: Asherons Call) which will have the same problems as a cash-driven one, except that trading will be annoying as hell to boot.



I have never been sure how expansive this law is supposed to be.  If it means your game should be a solo action/group combat/PvP/PvP/crafting/RPing etc etc game, I disagree.  KISS.  Do one thing well before you start branching off.  This genre is yet to create a truly great PvE game OR a truly great PvP game.  Trying to do both at the same time is a recipe for disaster.  In other words...


At this point, EITHER of those games would be an enormous improvement over what we have now.  You cannot go from EQ and UO and SB to "EQ+UO+SB Done Right."  Hell, the last 5 years of the industry have been people trying to make:

a-EQ done right
b-some combo of EQ and UO done right

and they have all failed.  We get game after game after game of "EQ done worse."  WoW, which looks like it just might pull off "EQ done much better" will be the first real bit of progress this genre as had.  And here is the most influential person in online gaming poo-pooing it because it hasn't incorporated every lesson since 1996 and is not trying to be EQ+SWG+UO+Civ2+SB+Counterstrike.  That's what Blizzard has done RIGHT.

In short, evolution > mutation.  As I said somewhere else, evolution is mostly responsible for bringing us the glory of the natural world.  Mutations almost always end in spontaneous abortion.  GIVE UP the "we must reform the world from its very foundations" attitude.  Raph, here's your assignment: give me trammel done right in the next 20 years.  I'll have Blizzard working on EQ done right and maybe someone else working on SB done right.  THEN when we are old men we can start theorizing about how they go together.

You cannot go from The Great Train Robbery to the IMAX version of Attack of the Clones (just speaking on its technical merits here) in one step, and if directors in 1904 had sat around doing nothing but attempt after attempt at making AotC on IMAX we never would have gotten to The Jazz Singer.

Raph, please, get your people to chip away at things and maybe we will see the MMOG version of The Jazz Singer in our lifetime.  
 


Winning and Losing: You can't have this in persistant worlds.  It is no accident that in every competitive game or sport, you reset the board and start the next game at 0-0.  Persistence plus meaningful (i.e. winners and losers) PvP is simply not possible.  You either have to give up persistence by wiping the board, or you can give up on meaningfulness by not having real winners and losers.   Compare US Government vs Native Americans, meaningfulness + persistence, and you will never have a competitive battle between those two again  with Pittsburgh Steelers vs Cleveland Browns, meaningfulness but no persistence where the Steelers get no advantage for having won 4 Super Bowls in the past to the Browns' zero, allowing a theoretically even matchup later with a MOG where PvP gives you ladder points but no in-game benefit, persistence but no meaningfulness, and also allows future competition.

Show me a MMOG that doesn't devolve into perma-winners, that has meaningful PvP, and does not wipe the board, and I'll show you a dev team that is hiding the ball.

CoH does this to a certain extent...  if you click on the random NPCs in the city, they'll say different things, sometimes referencing your exploits as a hero.  Those things are only displayed client-side, I think, at least as much as I don't think others can see them, the things they say aren't actually in a chat channel, just a chat balloon.  It seems to help a bit with immersion, in that people around town seem to realize you're doing stuff to help them,  but only so much so, as no one else hears it, so the other players don't hear how great a hero you are.



This is a good idea, I think, but still runs into the problem of everyone wanting to be the Hero of Occlo...  If the way to get that title is a normal quest, no matter how hard, eventually there will be dozens, hundreds of Heroes of Occlo...  Which makes the value of being one notably reduced.  Witness the number of people wearing shawls personally blessed by the Avatar of Brell Sirelis in EQ.

If it's not a normal quest, then others see the Hero of Occlo as someone who is not special in any way other than just being in the right place at the right time, or lucky to be chosen by the event staff.  This also reduces the value of being the Hero of Occlo.  The only other way to assign the hero title that I can come up with off the cuff is by kills of enemies of Occlo, or something, so that whoever tops the chart is currently the Hero of Occlo...  Which seems kinda silly, but might work, except that if it's a strict funtion of kills, catasses will be the only ones with titles.  I'm a firm believer that nothing in game should be merely a funtion of time played, so that method isn't really attractive to me.

--
Alkiera

So again, we're supposed to feel sorry for PKs because they might experience what to them feels like a seemingly random death that strips all their fun and is out of their control? Sounds familiar to me. They'd just have to avoid houses. Sorry. No sympathy from me.

The difference, of course, is that when a PK attacks another player, the victim has a fighting chance at survival and (albeit slim) victory. Please explain to me where a PK has a fighting chance against random insta-kill lightning bolts from the sky.

See, that's my beef with the whole argument...folks with the "no sympathy" response don't want a fair fight, they don't want justice, they just want a non-PvP game.

IMO, if you want a non-PVP game, take your pick....you have plenty of options on the market. Leave the PvP-enabled games for those who WANT the fair fight, and WANT their opponents to have a fighting chance.

And for the record, "avoid housing" in a game like UO means avoid 80% of the overworld map. At which point, you may as well just outlaw PKing, or insist that reds cannot leave the dungeon server.

Bring the noise.
Cheers.............

The problem is the number of players who want PvP, but don't want the fair fight, or their opponents to have a chance.

There's probably a large audience out there for a game that has PvP as a potential danger that can be avoided, or if encountered, escaped from.  I just think they are turned off by the people who are playing 'Quake with swords'.

You only really need to make new content for the endgame "on the fly" since (lol) you should ship with more than enough content for people to make it to the endgame (/lol).  That's still a Herculean task, and the best example of this is Everquest, which is starting to fall apart at the top end because they cannot spit out expansions fast enough to keep up with the players, which forces them to spit out buggy, poorly-thought out expansions (hello, Gates of Discord) as fast as possible.  The expansions aren't even finished when released anymore (see the "oopsies" that kept players out of the end zones in PoP, Luclin, and Gates until they were actually implemented), and they increasingly rely on extreme timesinks (Luclin keys, PoP flags) just to slow down the consumption rate.  This (along with the fact that the core systems in EQ weren't designed for nearly this many expansions and are also breaking down) is why so many endgamers have left for WoW or are waiting for Vanguard.  The writing is on the wall that this will be a problem for WoW too, but that's another thread.

Perhaps it is vulgar or naive of me to suggest, but the answer may be just to throw more money at the problem.  These games are priced absurdly low as far as monthly fees are concerned (though you cannot get away with charging much more than your competitors and still attract new customers), and once you have people hooked, you could charge a ton of money for expansions and they would buy them.

The easy way out is randomly generated or modular content.  I *hate* that stuff with a passion.  You cannot randomly generate something worth doing.  Maybe in the future, but not now.  Just say no to SWG and Lost Dungeons of Norrath :)  Say yes to good, handcrafted content with more always awaiting me, and I'll pay for it.  Maybe there aren't enough people like me though.

No, just different classes in EQ suffices to satisfy the law.



I'd argue that you already have several of the former, and a couple of the latter...?



Heh, evolution is driven by mutations. No mutations, no evolution. :)



Hmm, I'd say it's been done several times over by now. Hasn't it? What do you define as "done right"?



I agree that overambition is a major problem (mostly, my problem. ;) ).

Heh, I was just coming back to edit that out of my post.  You are of course correct there (though there is some Mendellian recombination variation that drives selection too, and I do think that we can get more progress by rearranging [and perfecting, the analogy is flawed] "genes" that are already out there than we could by saying "hey, lets add wings and gills to this cat so we get a cat that can fly and breathe underwater").  Was just making the gradual > revolutionary point, and you know how I love to reiterate.  And repeat myself.

Maybe I am too pessimistic, but I have not seen a game that out-EQ's EQ or out-UO's UO.  The many EQ clones have pretty much been worse than EQ.  On the "Trammel done right" no I haven't seen that either.  The only game close was SWG.  For me "done right" means "noticeably better on most counts, and worse on none."  What is the game that you think is noticeably better than EQ on most counts, and worse than EQ on none of them?  I haven't played FFO, but I have at least dabbled with the other main players.

I mean, I would love UO's free form game (but better!) and EQ's hand crafted content (but better!) and group combat (but better!) combined into the same game.  I would also love to win the Powerball lotto, which I view as equally likely.  Hrmm, maybe the two are related.  If I could put you, McQuaid and a hundred million dollars in a building, maybe El Gallo Online could really happen...

A PK doesn't have a fighting chance. Neither does a player who has a life outside the game and isn't standing there with 20 of his closest friends waiting to gank anybody they can catch. You also seem to assume I give a flying fuck whether or not the poor witty bitty PK has a good time or not. PvPers are fine. PKs are not. See you're basically trying to get me to feel sympathy for what is essentially a boil on the asshole of MMO's. Hell most PvPers don't even like PKs. (If only because of the negative affect it has had on perceptions of PvP)



I don't particularly enjoy PvP because so far it always ends up boiling down to the lowest common denominator. However PvP != PK.



And??? For the Non-PK when UO was at its worst it felt like you almost couldn't leave the city. I disagree with you. Instakill housing guards against PKs is justice and long overdue justice at that.

It's a shame that we still need to make posts like Riggs just made. I agree with you, Riggs, but it's just sad that 7 years later people still need to be told these things.

PVP != PK. PK's getting reamed in the ass by harsh justice measures is A fucking O K.

Unless someone is going to promote grief play as a valid and welcome playstyle? Yes?

This law is true, one of the most important laws, and probably WoW's biggest problem right now.  You literally cannot talk in a group doing an instance, because you are constantly clicking.  Cantinas are not the answer (at least not alone), you need the downtime built into the rewarded activity, like EQ does.  Now, you don't need EQ caliber downtime, but there is a happy medium between EQ on the one hand and WoW/CoH/Diablo on the other.


By the way R.K. (does anyone else feel odd calling someone they have never met by their first name), I don't know if you can answer this but how much influence do you have over EQ2.  The game is looking promising, if they actually do what they say (can't have any real opinion until there is a beta with no NDA of course *cough let me in the beta and I will compare it to WoW myself cough*).  They seem to be devoting a ton of effort on creating atmosphere, which (along with its 'ease up on the overruse of instancing' stance) was the main thing that had me interested in Vanguard aside from its designer.  EQ2 is even getting some good press on the FoH boards, and most of those people hate SoE with the burning power of a thousand suns after GoD.

Bullshit. Anyone who has ever managed to recall out when attacked, or to effectively fight back can tell you different.



I'm trying to get you to stay the fuck out of non-consentual PvP enabled games, and to stop insisting that EVERY FUCKING GAME CATER TO YOUR PERSONAL TASTES.

If you're going to implement a system that randomly, severely, and permanently punishes PKing, you may as well disallow non-consentual PvP completely in favor of a consentual PvP system. At that point, you've got UO's Trammel.....which is the polar opposite of what many people enjoyed about early UO.

I don't care what you think or feel about PKs, but the systems you're proposing aren't deterrents, they aren't systems for justice, they are simply a way to code in a big "fuck you" to PKs. If that's all you're shooting for, perhaps you should avoid games that even offer non-consentual PvP.



So play one of the metric fuckton of games that offer consentual PvP, or don't allow PvP in any form. You currently have plenty of options in that regard. People who don't feel as you do have far more limited options.



How the fuck is that JUSTICE??

Justice would be someone PKing you, then you or another friend killing the PK and getting your stuff back, plus the PKs items as compensation for your time. Justice would be some loudmouth talking smack, and getting his ass handed to him as a result. Justice would be slaying a thief and getting your items returned to you.

Justice is NOT making everyone that happens to turn red into a KOS immediate instakill by invincible NPC guards, to which there is absolutely no defense. There is no satisfaction about seeing someone get guardwhacked, only a frenzy to loot the corpse, if possible. There is no equitable payback for what you have lost.....just a pissy little way for victims to say "oooh, you're gonna get it eventually" as a PK loots them.

"Just wait until the AI guards show up, then you'll taste justice" not only doesn't really provide justice to the gameworld, it actually undermines PLAYER JUSTICE. You've got a hard coded system that doesn't give a shit if your account was hacked and then used for a killing spree, or doesn't care that you whacked one too many smack talkers, or that someone used an exploit to give you MCs during consentual PvP. Any "punishment" you set up for the PKs will eventually be twisted and used as a device for grief play.

Meanwhile, you've also got a hard-coded set of conditions that real PKs will simply avoid...they'll just set up shop on the dungeon server, and only recall into red-friendly homes....anything that needs to be done in a "civilized" area will simply be done using alts.

But that stuff all requires objective rational thought.....it requires something beyond frothing at the mouth at the very notion of PKs. Once you get past that, let me know, and perhaps we can have a rational discussion on the subject.

Bring the noise.
Cheers...............

Since we are reviewing old truths like PvP != PK, maybe it's time to point out that PKing, in and of itself, does not automatically constitute grief play. Nor does a griefer need to PK to grief.

Non-consentual PvP *is* a valid and acceptable playstyle, even welcome by some players.

It's just sad that 7 years later, people STILL can't get past the notion that a particular MMOG might not be intended for them, and perhaps they should stick to the ones that suit their playstyle.

My point is that we **HAVE** games that disallow PKing, or have lumped significant penalties on PKs already. That is the SAFE play....that's the sound business decision to rake in some money on the status quo.

Here I thought we were looking to innovate and improve the genre. If not, they may as well just start selling boxes containing elf pr0n and a moist towel.

Bring the noise.
Cheers............

Trying to put PvPers and PvErs into the same game, much less the same server, was a huge but understandable mistake when UO came out.  Now, it is a stupid and unforgivable mistake.  "Oh no, Civ3 players and Counterstrike players are not playing the same game!  Hurry and make some shitty Civ3/Counterstrike hybrid to solve this horrible problem!"  Here are your options: (a) PvE game with or without an optional PvP sideshow; (b) PvP game with or without an optional PvE sideshow.  There is no c.

Gawd this gets old. But  OK, one more time.

What you describe is certainly not justice to me. It is playing the back and forth fighting game. Which is the game you wanted to play in the first place.

Justice to me would be giving me back my play time and unbroken attention to what I was trying to do at the time I was attacked. But I know of no games that have RL time warps available.

What they do to you I could careless. But if it happens too often, I will find some other game to play. Hence, not a lot of developers will allow that kind of play.

Your right, they do make lots of games for me now. I hope you enjoy your wait for a game that caters to your playstyle. I recommend not holding your breath.

One could easily argue that UO was either a or b at various points in its history......c would be a game that is a balance between both styles, including interaction and a symbiotic relationship between them.

Interesting that what you classify as a huge and unforgivable mistake is what a fairly sizable group considers the closest to what they actually wanted out of an MMOG. I'd say there are enough that such a game done well could at least make for a profitable and sustainable niche title.

Bring the noise.
Cheers.............

DV, not to derail but my point is this.  Currently we have exactly 0 PvE games done right.  Currently we have exactly 0 PvP games done right.  The chance of someone making a PvP/PvE hybrid done right is roughly 0%.  Trying to do so is just like trying to more from The Great Train Robbery to Attack of the Clones.  Ain't gonna happen.  It's overreaching, and ranting against overreaching is about 90% of what I have been doing in this thread :)

I think that "c" is a great goal.  For 2040.  Maybe.

No, it's understanding that players have to make their own justice within the community, not ask for a hard coded version of divine intervention to give them some measure of revenge.



So why is the answer allowing, yet severely punishing PKs?? Wouldn't it be smarter to remove PKing completely?

You're making my point for me....such a system isn't justice, it's just automated revenge.



OMG, if my point were a landmine, you'd be dead by now. If such a game doesn't appeal to you....wait for it....PLEASE DON'T PLAY IT. That's okay by me....I actually believe that niche titles are the eventual way to go anyway. What I DO NOT want is for players to stubbornly stick in such a game and instead insist that the devs change the rules to suit their playstyle....or worse, use their bitterness as an excuse to grief others.

History shows that the wholesale threats to leave DON'T result in mass exodus, so much as they result in some players lobbying for the devs to alter the game to match their preferred playstyle. The ones that leave are often ebaying their accounts, which means limited churn.



It's inevitable that devs continue to explore it as a possibility, particularly as the genre moves away from the "EQ-killer million subscriber model", and goes for the niches of untapped segments of the market.

I just don't grasp why folks that claim to be satisfied with the current offerings are debating in a thread which is all about trying to debunk the conventional wisdom that brought us to this point.

I also don't seem to understand why those same folks are arguing against a MMOG being developed that admittedly wouldn't appeal to their playstyle. I mean hell, I didn't care for EQ, even on a conceptual basis.....I didn't rail against it, I just didn't play it.

Bring the noise.
Cheers...............

Can't happen, the relationship between PvE and PvP play styles is parasitic, not symbiotic.

     So there is no justice in the USA, because we never get to do it ourselves?   Bullshit.  
     The house guards system was first proposed to PROTECT the OWNERS of the HOUSE.   So they could recall home without worrying if a bunch of PKs were there to kill them on the doorstep.

Not in all instances.....just the most obvious one.

For example, think about a PK infested dungeon, a PvE group could bring along some PvPers to watch out for them. In exchange, the PvE group could provide their guardians with excess magic weapons, or other items that can be obtained through PvE.

The guilds I took part in prior to UO:R all had this as part of their strategy. At first, we simply took turns acting as a scout or lookout while others hunted. Later, the more accomplished PvPers in the group took over those roles, while the non-PvPers and PvE oriented templates could hunt in relative safety. It worked pretty well....the guild made a concerted effort to keep us adequately equipped, we preserved their ability to do so.

But it involved sacrifice on both sides....they had to give up some treasure, while we had to give up time, spend a lot of time standing around watching people hunt/mine, and we had to bear the brunt of most PK attacks.

Your point of course is that without PKs, there is no need for protection....and given our character skills and knowledge of combat, we probably could have just gone and hunted on our own (we did make a concerted effort to train guildmates in PvP and/or methods of escaping alive). Both of which are true.....but IMO, that dynamic added to the experience of everyone involved. Obviously, YMMV.

But the threat of PKs did that a lot....it created tight-knit communities between players that had to depend on each other out of true need, which is in direct contrast to the forced grouping of some other MMOGs.

Some embraced it, some rejected it. But once the need was gone, it all fell apart, and in most cases the tight knit communities gave way to solo players (with several mules) and uber-guilds (where players often didn't even know all of the members).

Bring the noise.
Cheers..............

    Just so we're clear.  There are no rules when it comes to PKs.  They insisted on a no-holds barred, anything goes, we'll do what we want and fuck you if you don't agree relationship.  So that's the relationship we have.  
    So if it seems to you that the ones that don't want PKs in a game they are playing are breaking a rule, you're wrong.  There are no rules.  At all.  Anything we want to do to PKs, including insisting that they be coded out of existence, is well withing the rules, because there are no rules.

The PEOPLE do it themselves....the law, government, enforcement are all things done BY THE PEOPLE. We don't simply rely on God to handle it for us, at least not in this life.
 


Yeah, but that's kind of moot point given that players can now recall directly into their homes, and kick/ban others from the house, isn't it? Also a bit redundant given the existence of Trammel-rulesets as well.

Bring the noise.
Cheers.............

    Game Devs are not gods.  Not by a LONG way.  They respond to the will of the players at just about the same rate that elected officials do.  They pander to the majority at about the same rate, too.

Dark,

Most of what you describe exists in UO today. Zoned areas with open pvp, PvE benefits for entering those areas, Guilds that provide protection for their members while some portion of them hunt for the goodies.

And the result is... Felucca is still basically empty and the overwhelming majority of the playbase is in Trammel.

Open PvP is just not a popular playstyle in these games and since there are plenty of counterstrike/FPS, I don't think you will see a ton of interest in trying to build that into MMORPGs because the cost development is so much higher for these MMOs then the other types of games.

Especially now that the market seems to be in some kind of re-evaluation period after so many flops and disapointments.

I'd like you to get the game you want. Hell, I'd like to have gotten the game I want. I think we are all just saying that it seems very unlikely for anybody to take those kinds of risks to add 10% of the potential playerbase onto their game.

The worst of them anyway, yes. Which was why I dedicated my main character in UO to fighting them WITHIN GAME CONTEXTS.



So when to the DoS attacks on all PvP+ games start??

This is a completely asisine premise....you're suggesting that the non-PvPer method of "fighting back" against PKs is now to go into every PvP+ game community and demand that PKing be removed?

Since when did PKs at large take their fight outside of the context of the game?? Keep in mind that exploits, duping, cheating, 3rd party programs, and ebay are NOT exclusive to PvP+ games, or even games that allow PKing.

That'd be like the NFL Quarterback Club asking the NFL to remove DBs from the game because they don't like throwing all of those INTs.

Bring the noise.
Cheers..............