f13.net

When did MUDs pilfer the acronym MMO and become text MMOs? I liked MUDs as much as the next guy back in the day. Hell some of the best memories I have in gaming are from them. But can you even see the coattails from there?

Yah, it's unfortunante, but I know why Matt calls it an MMO. None of the "new crowd" know what a MUD is and probably don't equate it to one of those online dealies like EQ and WoW and all those.

Since MMO is the universal "market speak" for such games, I don't see why he can't use it. It fits. His games aren't any less massive than, say, EVE Online (player-wise).

Plus he has a really kick ass profit model!

I looked at their Website and they are claiming over 250 simultaneous users. That does not to me qualify them as an MMO -- they are just a very large MUD.

YOU ARE STANDING IN A STONE HALLWAY.

EXITS ARE: N, S, E, W, NE, DOWN, INSIDE-OUT

>

Player 1: Dude, which way to you want to go?

Player 2: Down?

Player 1: Whatever.

-

See, Text MMO.

What is an MMO?

Massively Multiplayer Online? Online WHAT? Breadbox? Concentration Camp? Platypus? It seems to be missing a noun. I could go for a Massively Multiplayer Online Ham Sandwich about now.

Anyway, if someone doesn't know what a MUD is, I find it highly unlikely they would ever play one. I wonder how long the average MUD player has been playing MUDs. I would guess a really long time.

MMOCC - Massively multiplayer online concentration camp. Pay to be PKed by Nazis! Grind the Sonderkommando and Dig Tunnel skill trees! Eng-game raid content includes surviving random Allied air-raids and the mustard dungeon!

sadf

The FDA would not approve it, something about the proximity of parts of the sandwich to large quantities of cat poop, which can cause some rather nasty diseases.

Alkiera

There were over 7500 players on Eve last night. I don't think he's quite at that level. I would say his subscribers and simultaneous players are closer to AC2. But I pick nits. ;)

That aside, he does have a very good profit model going for himself.

A very large MUD where you can get that l33t sword of uberness direct from the developers for the low low price of $600.  $1200 if you're a dual-wielder.

Fuck Achaea and all its incarnations.

As far as I know, you can get that same sword if you want to catass. Personally, I'd rather spend a few bucks than feel like I "have to" grind in order to keep up.

The beauty of it is that you don't have to pay if you don't want to! Much like MtG, you can play with the starter deck or you can shell out some dough for those extra cards or win them in games against other people.

IIRC, the term "MUD" is still trademarked by whatever company sold the commercial code way back when. "You haven't lived until you have died in MUD" and all that. Century Communications? Whatever.

MMOs often rely so much on their chat system and combat message spams that they are intrinsically about the text anyway, the graphics are there to give a visual representation of that the text is saying.

Isn't the true definition for "massive" 64 people? It's antiquated now, but some FPS's can now be termed that without breaking cannon. I think we might need to up the number to set a standard for what exactly qualifies, but I say it has more to do with population density than one raw number.

Ah, hehe, for some reason I found this very amusing.

I'm far more concerned with inside-out. Perhaps our adventurers are mad bombers?

My arbitrary cutoff for "massively" multiplayer is somewhere between 1,000 and 10,000.

Bruce

But where? On a server? In a zone? In one region of a zone? You only "coexist" with the players relatively near you, the rest (in effect) don't matter.

(Aside: This is what the "instancing removes multiplayer" complainers forget: MMOGs already separate players "artificially" using zones. For games with large landmasses (AC1, AC2, AO) you can take 1,000 players and spread them out so that noone can see any other player.)

Also, putting 10,000 players on a text game server having chat channels (other than vicinity) would be murder without a more fancy client, because important messages would disappear in the flood of trivia. So they cannot be truly massive without either strict limits, or a more advanced interface. And in the latter case you're just a 3D model away from a MMORPG.

And therein lies the crux of this: Text Based online RPGs are MUDs. A MUD where your avatar is fully realized in a graphical world is a MMORPG. Sort of. There's a deeper debate there that I'd rather not get into because it would be boring. But the important thing to realize is Iron Realms makes MUDs. Not Text MMOGs and calling them the latter is lying to your average gamer. It's bad juju.

If rebranding thier software from MUD to MMOG gets them subscribers then good for them.

I'm all for the proper use of semantics and mean what you say/say what you mean - the words have a meaning for a reason - type thinking BUT sometimes you need to expand a definition or two over time.  I see no reason not to call a large MUD an MMOG.

Total, across all shards/instances.  While it's true that this could create, for example, 20 shards each with only 250 characters each on it, making each one effectively a small MUD, the game is still massive, because of the shared massive experience.  FurryMUCK regular gets over 250 players every night, but there aren't 19 copies of it running at the same time providing the same game to others.  (Which many of you are no doubt thankful for.)

Bruce

Counter strike is a MMOG then?

Of course not.  But it's not a MMOG for other reasons, not for popularity ones.  You do hit on an important question -- what's the "minimum" shard size -- but whatever that number is, it must be substantially larger than your number of concurrent users per shard.

Bruce

For me, a MMOG is mae a MMOG by the number of players/characters that share the same game universe. And I reckon the barrier is about 500-1000.

Lobby areas and multiple instances count together only in cases where the wider game continues across multiple instances (by character or loot carryover for instance).

So, CS is not a MMOG. Because you don't have 1000 people in a rubber, and nothing carries over once a rubber is complete.

Diablo2 is a MMOG.  Because characters are carried over, making all instances (and the lobby) part of the same game.

Counting people across entirely separated instances (such as the traditional MMORPG shard) seems daft. This simply tells you the size of your community.



Concurrent vs total per shard doesn't seem relevant to whether something is massively multiplayer either. A large number of total players/characters compared with concurrent users in one game instance is evidence of a persistent game world, not a massively multiplayer one.

I agree that something like Diablo 2 qualifies as "Massively Multiplayer", as well as an "Online Game" but it's not a MMOG because of the unacronymed connotation of world persistence.  Characters are persistant but the game world is not.  Whether or not it's right to attach that to the idea of a MMOG is debateable, but it nevertheless is the current usage.

By this definition, M:tGO would also not qualify, since there's no "world" there.  It's just a graphical matchmaking front-end.

It does make one question how to classify games like Guild Wars and Tabula Rasa, which while they appear as though they are going to have a  persistant world on the front end, any adventure is going to be instantiated.    At what point does a 3D chat lobby become a "world"?  I don't know, but I think there needs to be some ability by the player to interact with objects or mobs in that world in a persistant manner.  For instance, if you can drop an item on the ground, or add a new structure or building, then it's a world.  Now, in a game like City of Heroes, you can't do this... but, you can at least kill mobs that roam around in those areas.  I just think you need to be able to do "something" that is shared by "others" that goes beyond changing your avatar appearance, chatting, etc.

Bruce

Is this not why the term is slowly being phased out, letter by letter? It is losing its definition now that technology is allowing more people to connect in a massive sense to other games. I think PIG was used by Hedron, and I have seen MMOPU being used more and more.

It is a shame MMOPU sounds so funny when you say it out loud.

Schild wrote:


*shrug* Mud, MMO, whatever. People use different terms. Everquest is a graphical MUD, it's an MMO, it's an MMORPG, etc. We're currently struggling to come up with an acceptable umbrella term on mud-dev that apply to everything from LambdaMoo to Achaea to Second Life to WoW. Raph, myself and a lot of the oldbies simply prefer 'MUD' to refer to all of these, but too many people seem to associate 'MUD' with a particular type of interface or even a particular style of game design. (For instance, I've heard some people in the text MUD community say that our games are not MUDs because the focus isn't on bashing monsters.)

Trippy wrote:

Our largest game, Achaea, has done just under 700 simultaneous, but daily peaks are generally more like 450 simultaneous. I find most of these number-based delineations to be completely arbitrary. There's nothing fundamental about, say, 100 simultaneous users or 1000 simultaneous users. The only mark I tend to buy is 64 simultaneous users, just because this seems to be as high as most games where the # of simultaneous players is explicitly limited by the tech go.

I'd also have to ask what you consider something like Meridian 59 to be? Is it a MUD not an MMO because it doesn't hit X number of simultaneous players? What about, say, Wish? Is that not an MMO because it doesn't have 1000 (or whatever) simultaneous players during development?

Some amusingly disgruntled guy wrote:

Yes, fuck us right to hell! God knows there's such a massive difference between buying a sword from us for $600 or going to one of the third party sites and buying a sword for $600. Oh wait, there is a difference. For the games where you have to go to a third party site you're going to be paying $10-$15/month on top of that there sword.

Viin wrote:

Yes, that's correct. There's nothing you can't obtain by just spending free time/effort in-game. On a personal "I'm a player too" perspective, I don't like games that seem to feel you have to be someone without a job to compete. Free time is a currency too. I would still be playing CoH if it had offered me the opportunity to cut down on my free time expenditure by replacing some of that with dollar expenditure.

Doubleplus wrote:

That's the definition I use, but I wouldn't claim it's any more particularly 'true' than anyone else's definition.

Sir Bruce wrote:

We differ here. I don't consider the simultaneous numbers for sharded worlds to mean much. I'm much more interested in how big each shard gets, since each shard is 'the game' by itself, without other shards. The community around the game may include players from other shards, but the virtual world itself is shard by shard.

--matt

Please, please, please. Don't mince words. WoW and EQ are 160' Yachts. A MUD is a dingy. None of us walk around calling human beings neanderthals. Don't do the same for games. Evolution isn't kind to the weaker species. Even if the weaker species is still profitable.

Basically, I'd rather be at the top of the MUD ladder than at the bottom of the MMORPG ladder. But hey, if you want to be clumped in with Horizons, be my guest.

WoW and EQ are MUDs with a crapload of players, or, if you prefer, our games are MMOs with not a lot of players. A yacht is a big boat whereas a dingy is a small boat.

Where we are on the 'ladder' is basically irrelevant insofar as it doesn't affect my life, or the life of anyone that works for my company. Whether you want to consider us "at the bottom" of one ladder or "at the top" of another ladder is not going to have an effect on our success or failure.

--matt

Careful Matt.  Talk like that will cost you your red name.

Bruce

Careful Bruce, talk like that will get you nowhere.

I like this.  I wish more companies had this attitude.  Maybe then UO would not have felt the overwhelming need to re-invent itself into a steaming pile of follow-the-leader crap.

Text MUD's are not mass-market. Never have been, never will be. Text isn't sexy; until it is. In computer gaming terms, though, text will never be sexy. Yes, please tell me the success stories of Achaea and Gemstone or whatever other text MUD you have out there. Yes, text MUD's can be profitable, and successful, and have lots of concurrent users. Yes, it can do things graphical games never will. Text will not ever supplant graphical interactive games anymore, because no one is slamming millions of dollars into research and development to determine a more realistic method of displaying... text. The most hopeful innovation text can ever wish for is "digital paper" e-books.

And I say this as someone who wishes to make a living on reams of text wrapped up on dead trees.

They are not, however, MMOG's, MMO's or whatever the new term is. Massively-Multiplayer Online Games are Mass Market games. Text MUD's will never be mass market games. They just won't. I think that in order to be considered for the silly term of MMOG, you should be a mass market game, which means graphics. ATITD is an MMOG. Text MUD's are not.

It's interesting how different people want to define the terms based on different criteria. Haemish, you're saying you want to define it in terms of market. I think most designers would prefer to define it in terms of functionality. A VCR and a DVD burner and a DVR are all "mass market ways to record video" but the terms arise from the design of the technology, not the market.

I'd be ecstatic to call everything "MUDs" because, well, they are all MUDs from a design perspective. There were muds with graphics and there are MMORPGs played mostly in the text box. The interface you interact with is both critically important to the experience, and not really relevant to what the functionality of the technology is...

The REAL gap has always been between the limited multiplayer or session-based games, and the persistent worlds. Alas, persistent world has not caught on as a term either (I don't favor the variant "persistent state world" that much, because many of the worlds do not have persistent states). An umbrella term that made clear that divide would be far more helpful to the field than yet more terms to chop the field up with.

One of the problems I have is the schism between what developers call things and what the players call things. From a developer standpoint you can call things whatever you want. Once they hit store shelves the players will walk into EB or wherever and ask a guy what the best game from a Genre is. I would wager to bet 99.999999% (give or take a .000000001 margin of error) of the time that the employee of said store will never consider a MUD an MMORPG.

The people who spend the money come up with the games. Developers are, after all, servants to their fans.

Sure, but then you run smack into the schism between what player/critics call things and what the rest of the players call things.  You get the same sort of thing you do in other artistic fields, where a critic may refuse to recognize X as legitimate even though a good portoin of the public does.  "That's not art."  "He's not an important director."  "This album is unimaginative and contrived."  "Reality TV isn't real TV."  Etc.

At least by letting the people actually involved on the creative side of the field define terms and priorities, you get a more consistent and informed context.  You may disagree with the quality of one point or another, but then your opinion is reduced to simply that - an opinion of quality - and looks silly if delivered as an ultimatum of truth written on a stone tablet by the finger of God.

Bruce

Bruce, you missed my point. Developers shouldn't care what games are called. The people who buy the games - the ones that PAY the developers should make those decisions. Hence the reason almost all genres of cinema were created by critics. Calling a MUD a text MMOG is near an insult to the MMOG genre. As a gamer, consumer, and critic the term they've created is merely a way to ride the coattails of something bigger. That kind of shit just doesn't fly.

But most of the people who make MMOGs aren't insulted.  Who is insulted?  The buyer, who wants to think they bought something "else"?  It may be useful from a marketing standpoint to tell the customer, "It's not a car.  It's a driving experience."  But it's still an automobile.

Now, personally I do think there are useful reasons to draw a distinction between MUDs and MMOGs in the general sense, but there's enough overlap for a MUD to fairly be called a MMOG (or at least, a small MMOG) without causing an uproar.

Bruce

They might if Muds were actually sold in boxes at stores.  That doesn't remove it from the genre though.

Look there's nothing massive about any mud anywhere. Even the biggest mud probably doesn't pull the same numbers as...let's say ATITD. So, if you want to call it a MOG and be in violation of a Squeenix property, that's fine. But Text MMOG is just, well, a lie.

Not sure about ATITD, but I'm pretty sure some MUDs out there pull more than, say, Neocron.

Bruce

PS - Was Ultima Online not really a MMOG until it passed, say, 1,000 subscribers?  So was it a MUD before then?  Or was it retroactively "always" a MMOG?

Which proves my point. You arent sure of that. It would take an incredibly successful MUD in terms of population to have the playerbase of the crappiest MMOG on the market. I know this is an entire argument based on semantics - but nothing pisses me off more than false advertising.

I never thought of UO as a MUD. Afaik, the term MMOG didn't exist in my world until shortly after I started playing. But it was an apt term. I'd also consider The Realm - which I played for a long time - more of a MMOG than any MUD. However, games like Furtopia, Sociolotron and some others are completely different. I wouldn't call them MUDs or MMOGs.

The sky is ROYAL BLUE!

No, it's blue.  The whole sky isn't the same shade of blue.  And what if you're wearing sunglasses?  Are we going by your perception of the particular shade?

You're not understanding. Today, it's royal blue. Tomorrow, it might be more of a cerulean. We need to make sure each shade of blue is categorized into its own indvidual subset, otherwise, color bleed could occur, and have you seen what that does to polyester shirts?

Fuck you guys.

No, don't bring in your polyester rantings on this topic.  It really has nothing to do with the important issue at hand.  Is "blue" not an applicable term for the sky in general?

Well, you're drifting. "Blue" isn't really a term I'd use for sky. "Atmosphere" maybe, but "blue" is definitely more of a descriptive word rather than a method of categorizing our gate to the cosmos.

Atmosphere is really more of what the sky resides in, or is a layer of.  And for the same reason, "royal" blue doesn't come anywhere close to capturing the true tonality of the sky.  It just doesn't cover enough area compared to say, "cerulean" blue.

And as we all know, "sky" blue in general has a much wider acceptance.

(http://www.vampy.tv/stargate/sg-1.jpg)

My "gate to the cosmos." I plan on having it moved in from the backyard any day now.

I simply give royal blue as an adjective in its current state. It may become curulean at a later date, but it's currently royal, and we should categorize it as such. I mean, how simplistic can you get to try to lump everything into the oh-so-generic "blue." There are millions of shades of color; why not use them all?

(http://www.poolwaybilliardservice.com/Images/Cloth_Color_Shades.jpg)

This is every color the human eye can see. Can you guys help me pick one? I need new carpeting for the floor of my VW Lovewagon.

Why not use them all?!  Are you BLIND?  Using them all would fracture the terminology to the point of making this a TRIVIAL DEBATE.  Nobody would have any concept of what sky they were referring to, and just any shade would have the same recognition, diluting the relevace of the colors in general.

I would think that peolpe who enjoy Royal Blue on it's own as a superior blue among other shades would be more happy then having it jumbled amidsts the mediocre washed out blues of the sky.  All of which as you may notice have a much larger coverage then the "royal" shades of blue.

See? Navy looks more purple than purple in that image! WE NEED STANDARDS HERE, PEOPLE!

(http://home.cfl.rr.com/bbg2/baby%20blue.jpg)

I like baby blue.

And buttons, your attempts to derail this thread are blatantly obvious and juvenile.

No, yours are.

WHAT WOULD THAT POOR CERULEAN EYED BABY SAY ABOUT YOUR GROSS GENERALIZATIONS?

That's all I want to know. You're hurting the child's identity as much as you're damaging the sky. Without categorization, we'll never be able to both ensure the sky is perfectly described, in addition to that poor child's eyes forever being termed as your general "blue." Good job, baby killer.

Never EVER do a GIS for 'abortion.' Goddamnit, I can't see.

I'm hurting the child's identity?  You're the one who wanted to blend it in with all the other colors.  Cerulean blue does fine on a child.  But Royal blue just does not belong in the sky.  It's too dark.

At night the sky is black. Are you saying black is too dark for the sky? ARE YOU TOO GOOD FOR BLACKS? Why don't you tell us what you really think, jackoff.

Bleed them together? Of course not! I was merely saying your goals to categorize everything as one color would cause the bleed, and make that poor child's eyes melt into his baby blue garments. Is that what you would have, sir?

No, you're talking about a different type of sky entirely.  None of the blues even exist in this situation.  Are you even someone who looks at skies?

(http://www.fantafilm.it/Schede/1971/77-13a.jpg)

This is what the baby looks like now. You two are cruel.









Where am I?



Edit:

What are those?

 Fine, have it your way.  But don't be surprised when no one knows what you're talking about when you talk about your "Royal Blue" sky.

Well, apparently we weren't talking about the type of sky that anyone was familiar with, so it deserved a new name.  I can't help it if I'm not original, but felt it properly represented the plurality of his utopia of shades co-existing in the same atmosphere.