f13.net

We are the world (http://www.f13.net/index2.php?subaction=showfull&id=1086806829&archive=&start_from=&ucat=2&).

Good writeup. I think CoH is a great start for an MMOG. It will need to evolve into something more than it is in order to keep my interest long term, but I am having fun with it so far. I like the lesson that it teaches- do one thing very well, make it fun, and then build from there. beats the hell out of releasing buggy, half-finished crap with the fun to be patched in later.


I will hate you forever for sticking Rod Stewart's goddamn voice in my head, however.

Sometimes I think that as I grow older, my sense of fun is subtly changing.  When I was younger, I would install a game and immediately start playing, learning the game as I fought the good fight.  Now I find that I take in my surroundings and try things out in a more thoughtful manner.  I look for the storyline instead of stepping in it by accident.  I'm not implying that all those things that have always been an attraction for me such as PvP, skills, loot, etc., are not still as important, but the atmosphere has become a factor lately, too.  

CoH is a lot of fun and I enjoy it when I play.  I don't, however, find it immersive.  Maybe I just can't relate to the whole comic book thing, as I was never an enthusiast.  At times, I can get into the 'feel' of it... like during a particularly creepy CoT mission or the first time I ran through Perez Park.  On the whole, though... it's simply a fun game for me.  It's easy and quick and takes very little sussing out.  It takes my mind off of my real life worries without ever really engaging my mind.  I like it's simplicity, but I would pay more for an MMOG or MMOW with atmosphere, interesting puzzles and a compelling story to follow.  I am a completely different sort of gamer than I was just a few years ago.

I think I would like to have both sides of what you have presented, but I've found that they don't necessarily have to be in the same MMOG.  I wouldn't mind a game where I could build a pyramid AND blast an evil mage to smithereens, but I'm not too fussed about it.  I'm playing 2, at the moment, both completely different, neither demanding a huge amount of my time, and it seems to suit me.

Anyway... enough of my confused wibble.  That was a great piece, Haemish!  I thouroughly enjoyed it.

I think it was Raph who was telling me that he doesn't really buy into the world/game distinction.  Not denying that it exists, but simply noting that if you create a "world", you can always put fit the "game" into it -- but you can't do the reverse.  I'm not sure that's true, either, but I think it's a terminology problem... obviously you can make a game into a world by adding world elements to it, which is the same way you add game elements to a world.  So I don't really think there's an issue here.

But taking it down a notch, it is worth considering whether or not it is easier from a design point of view to create a whole world, and then fit a game into those constraints, or create a fun game and then try to design a whole virtual world around it.  I am tempted to agree that the former is probably easier, but only if you are willing to modify the game world in order to accomodate game play, because I think when push comes to shove, the game is more important than the world.  A fascinating, complex, and immersive world that isn't entertaining to the consumer won't be able to match an entertaining one that is superficial... you can see as much in TV, movies, books, music, etc.

I would hesitate to say that CoH is lacking in "world" though, because I think there's a lot of virtual world elements there.  What it's lacking is depth in both gameplay and virtual world elements.

Bruce

Bruce, the elements may be there, but truly, unless you create your own content (like those phone calls to an agent, which are a one time gag for each one, or some kind of makeshift cantina), all there is to do is fight.

Just to note: that's not why I quit, life is why I quit. But CoH had nothing but the combat part (and travel with superjump, if you consider that content. I consider it a good gameplay mechanic).

If I do not interact with other players where they can affect me then I’m not playing a multiplayer game. If I only limited number of player can interact with me then it is not massive game. If I do not use Internet to play this game it is not online. If I don’t assume control of my avatar then it is not role-playing. CoH is not a mmorpg since massive is severely limited by instancing. If anything CoH is a matchmaker service for a game of instanced dungeon crawls with graphical “city” lobby. Why would you pay monthly fee for that when Diablo2 did it years ago and free of monthly fees?

Good question.  Perhaps this indicates your previous statements are wrong?

Bruce

Oh, I agree there... I stated as much here (or was it corpnews?) during beta.  All there is at the moment is combat, and that's pretty poor for a MMOG.

However, it's not like there's no world.  There is a world, and several ways you COULD interface with and effect it, if the game elements were added to connect up that way.  An example of a game with no world would be a pure dungeon crawl with generic monsters and no backstory at all or any logical connection between them or with the characters.

Bruce

That reminds me of playing pen and paper games when I was younger.  Some of the guys I played with had these super detailed campaign worlds and I thought I needed to have the same for my own.  So I'd get some idea and start working on the world.  I was making all sorts of maps, trying to come up with detailed histories and all that.  Eventually I'd get frustrated at all the work I still had to do before I got it to a point I considered playable and then would give up.

Later on I came up with the idea to run a game that would be mundane fantasy campaign set completely within a huge city, using the Fantasy Hero system (with low points for character building).  I went into it with huge assumptions and generalities, fleshing out nearly nothing but what pertained to the immediate adventure.

I was playing this game with just one player mainly, though sometimes another sat in.  The other guy and I would alternate GMing and whenever one of us made something, the other incorporated it into the world and future adventures.  Sometimes one GM would have an NPC vaugely mention something, and the other GM would pick up on that lore and write something around it later on.  

Pretty soon the generic (hell, the city didn't even have a name at first) setting started becoming very detailed and populated with colorful, recurring characters.  Of course the whole city wasn't like that, but just the parts of it frequented by the characters, and those parts grew as sort of an ever increasing circle as their exploits took them to new places.  I have a feeling that the features we created through play were far more detailed than they would have been if I had sat down and attempted to detail everything beforehand.

I don't know if your comment is saying that having only combat is bad, or if the combat itself is bad.  If it's the latter, I'll have to disagree with you.  COH combat is rather fun.

Because CoH is fun, and Diablo2 is not?

EDIT: And going past snarky, I think the CoH is quite immersive, in that it gives you as much detail as the setting requires. For the most part, it holds that immersion; one minor quibble of immersion-breaking for me is part of the level process. All superheroes in the comics would do everything they could to stop muggings and citizens being accosted and crime on the street. Whereas in CoH, I often will not stop a mugging if I'm either going to a mission, or the criminals are too high for me to defeat, or too low for me to gain experience and influence from. That's a symptom of an MMOG, in that you have to have more content than one person can do so there's enough for everyone, and a symptom of the level game, where you have to segregate content based on levels. Neither one kills the game for me, or really destroys the world, but it does put the game out there in front of the world aspect.

As for CoH being all about combat, after years of design failures that are released as games, I think one of the reasons I'm still so happy with CoH is that it chose to do one thing and did it very well, as opposed to trying to do 6 things and being mediocre at 4 of them and 2 of them sucking ass.

Another reason : secure servers.

For me, CoH is fun. It's the first MMOg in a very long time I can say that about. So, for me, I really don't give a fuck about people parsing definitions of the meaning of *is*.

IS the game fun for you - yes/no?

If yes, then why do you care if it is a world or a game or trumped up instanced Diablo2 with subscriptions?

If no, then why the hell are you wasting oxygen by yammering about it?

Feh.

Because you get what you pay for. Having problems with a level 99 duping sploiter harassing you? Tough luck, Blizzard don't care.

And to add my vote to the others here: Because CoH is a fun multiplayer game, and D2 isn't.

Multiplayer D2 was fun to a point, but then it got old in the upper tier and dealing with the raving morons. Plus, people that jumped games and PKed and blah blah blah. You got what you paid for there, they promised entertainment for free, and I got a good value.

I like the concept.

Your writeup parallels the comic book/promo - the heroes rescue an NPC who they discover later on in a Vahz body shop, rescue her, and then leave us in a cliffhanger as they try to escape.

All they had to do was click out.  Duh!  :)



The role-player in me hates running by a Level 1 mugging.  The good MOG citizen in me does nothing so as not to deprive lowbies.  I admit things like that finally pushed me into the "CoH is for thirty minutes of bunny bashing" camp.  Fortunately bunny bashing in CoH is a lot of fun given the powers and the special effects.

I meant the former.

Bruce

Once I win the lottery I'll have the Cryptic people get together with Teppy and his crew.  And while I'm at it, I'll have Lord British run the whole show.

I've given up finding fun in online "worlds".  I want gaming goodness when I sit down to waste several hours of my time, not a lesson interplantary commodities mining and trading.

Say you were a lazy Cryptic dev who just wants players to stay interested.  You want easily playtestable additions to CoH that build on the city's strengths without endangering the core fun.  Given this constraint, what are the best ways to make Paragon City more a world?

Off the top of my head, I'd say make a police force that actually does something. Let them compete with heroes to get criminals off the streets, and depending on player activity/acceptance, let the Mayor of Paragon City initiate action for or against heroes depending on how much crime THEY stop, rather than the police. Then you'd be able to have corrupt cops, too, which would open up the world/game (I hate this distinction with a passion) to another, slightly more realistic mission/story arc.

Additionally, NPCs in general would be a lot more fun if they did things other than get mugged and tell you what time it is. Letting them fight back against the muggers, or commit vandilism, or even team up with the bad guys for whatever reason could make things seem a bit more "real" (that's what "world" means, right?).

Letting players damage the buildings at the cost of influence would be fun, too. It adds some accountability to the player's actions, and makes misses/area effects a lot more interesting. Repair crew NPCs could come out after the fight (make it once nightly or something - I don't know), and assess damage in terms of influence.

This is just armchair shit, and I'm not sure what the engine can do in these regards.

Excellent writeup HaemishM.  I'd have replied sooner but prior to now I had not managed to acquire the focus to read entirely through the article.

To throw in a comment of my own in regards to what your talking about (which, to summarize, is the viability and potential niftiness that well simulated true Virtual Worlds have to offer) one little point I want to make:

Even if we had a very, very, very realistic Virtual World, it would still be virtual.   And players would still be playing it to have fun.

Consider the consiquences of that:

Many players out there are going to say, "What, you want me to to follow the virtual rules and work towards building a virtual society?  Hell no, I'm here to unwind.   Burn it all down - that's my idea of fun!"   We call these players griefers, but in the grand scheme of things they're legitimate players that simply choose to unwind by venting their pent up emotions in what they find a safe, virtual environment.

I can guarentee there's going to be a very high ratio of players simply won't take a virtual world seriously, no matter how well simulated it is.   That's because these players will remember, first and foremost, that virtual worlds are just that: Virtual.    That's their appeal - you can screw around in a virtual world and suffer very little real life consiquence for it.   That's a large part of what makes pretend fun.   If we wanted the Real World, we just have to turn off our computer.

So when I see games like City of Heroes or Guild Wars use instancing, or other "true" virtual world conflciting features, in order to make the game itself better, I say:   "Good! You developers are not deluding yourselves.  You know why people are here - to have fun and unwind."    In other words, I applaud anyone who realizes that realism needs to take a back seat to quality gameplay.

But that's just me.  Maybe you'd rather play house online.   Fine, be a stickler for playing a realistic simulation over a well balanced game.   However, I'll point out, most people will find my way more fun.    Why do you think most of us are steering clear of SWG right now?

I like the idea of building a MMORPG up around the activity of Swashbuckling Adventure.    This allows us to vent those pent up emotions of chaos in an appropriate scheme.    Heroes, not just heroes in City of Heroes but heroes like Indianna Jones or Luke Skywalker, well those Heros break a lot of things.   Smash!   Good, lets put that in a MMORPG in such a way you have the freedom to do that all you like without burning the whole shinoly down.    

Star Wars Galaxies wants players to instead vent their productive side online.    Listen mac, after 8 hours at the office, I'm productivitied out.    Give me something I can do to unwind!    Let me saw the legs off some banthas or blow up a Star Destroyer or something.    City of Heroes, now we're talking, lets knock some villian's heads together.

To comment a bit on a few of the replies on this thread...


Sure, you know Raph.   I've a lot of respect for him, but judging by his handiwork, his school of philosophy is the "virtual world" approach all the way.    Just as I differ in my opinion that I do not enjoy SWG, I differ on my opinion as to how to put together a game.

"World" or "Game"?  It's really a matter of prioritizing.   I can see Raph's point that add an activity (game) in an environment (world) is logically more possible than creating an environment and putting into into an activity.    An environment is a container, an activity is not.    See how that logic works?

However, if you shift your perspective a bit, you can look at it more in the light of how you're going to assemble the program.    You can choose to prioritizing first designing a game and then keep in mind that you have this world as the backdrop.   Conversely, you can prioritize creating a virtual world that has some game-like elements added here and there.    It's clear to me that SWG took the later road, and I don't like the result.  

It's the difference between deciding to look at the design from the outside in or looking at it from the inside out.  

The problem is: the players play it from the inside out, not the outside in.

I'm strong on pointing out there's a great importance in player interaction that many MMORPGs miss.   They seem to think it's okay to assemble a treadmill and make all matters of success or failure in the game depend entirely on your characters stats that, in turn, are based entirely on how much time you invested in the game.   Whammo: We've got a catass-tastic abortion of a game that nobody in their right mind would enjoy.    The games (http://ac2.turbinegames.com/) flop (http://www.istaria.com/), and the developers knock their heads against walls yelling, "WHHYYYY?!"

That'd not have happened if they listened to me first.   People play games to play games.    If your game plays them, instead of allowing them to play the game, you're in trouble.   But inventing an new activity on the spot that's genuinely fun for most people to do for a prolonged period of time is HARD.



The thing that annoys me about this is you might as well point out a man on the street and say, "That's a man".   Then, reacting to my unsurprised expression, point out a lamp post and say, "Also, that is a lamp post."

My point?  MMORPG, ORPG, CRPG.  What differences does it make?    They're all games that you play on your computer.    They all waste time in exchange for entertaining you.   Do you really think it is all that important to distinguish the difference between them that you will bring it up whenever?


Actually, to retract a bit, let me talk about your point of initial classification importance strictly on the level of justification of financial expendicture on behalf of the player.

CoH actually does have several zones in which 150+ players are running around in it fighting bad guys.  So the Diablo 2 comparison simply does not pan out.    While Everquest may tolerate more players per zone, in general there won't be more than 150 in each zone anyway.    As for instancing, instanced missions have been around since Anarchy Online.   Justification for not having to pay subscription to CoH when you would EQ invalid: Try again.

Now, if you were talking Guild Wars or Phantasy Star Online, I could see you have a point here.    They do have the 3D lobbies in which no action takes place and instanced places were the fights actually happen.    ALL action takes placed in these instanced locations, and behind the scenes I suspect one player is actually hosting the game.   How could they justify having a subscription based system?    Oh wait, Guild Wars and Phantasy Star Online don't have a subscription based system.

Overall, it seems to me that the developers are not taking us for a ride.   They know what does and does not qualify as a subscription-requiring game better than some players, it would seem, and are playing their cards the way they are because it's the right thing to do.   Stop being so paranoid (, or else stop trying to weasal out of subscriptions via half-baked justifications).   (Well okay, you did stop, seeing how this post I'm replying to is 5 days old.)

<skips, among other ones, 6 messages where other people are cleaning Sinij's clock for the same reason>


It'd definately make for a more interesting, living, breathing world.

Like I was saying in my previous message though, most players would rather have fun by any means neccessary.    Take a look at the policing attempts back in Ultima Online.   Griefers outnumbered the more responsible players so much that things dissolved into utter chaos.    

Interestingly enough, this utter chaos was remembered by many as being the most fun Ultima Online ever was.   Perhaps it was at that.   However, the thing is, the actual social-economic structure of the game *could not handle* giving players that much freedom.

My thoughts?  Design it like a game, not a virtual world.   This is because there's going to be many, many players who are playing it like a game, because that's exactly what it's supposed to be.   So what do we do when we want to make a fun game?   Put in a bunch of largely artificial barriers whose purpose is to both enforce fair play between the conflicting players and to stop the entire virtual culture from crumbling down.

Emmersion is the casualty, of course.   However, with a little tricky plot-winding, you can usually minimalize the damage.    Instancing?  No!  Inter-dimensional special effects make it clear that these are seperate planes of existance.    Limiting each side in the PvP conflict to 8 players?   The security systems of this modern space ship only allow for that many to get in - sorry, it's the best hackers can do in this day in each.    You can't gank that miner and steal all his hard work - what's with that?  Virtue Shields, Lord British is using them to protect craftsmen, you attack one within one of his protected areas and they're instantly teleported to a  town of their chosing, and the patrolling guards are given your description.   Ect - these barriers stop the virtual society from crumbling while still allowing some level of emmersive gameplay to take place.   These are just some cruddy ideas I generated on the fly, if you've a good development team with some powerful brains working for you, you can come up with far better ones.

City of Villians should be interesting along the lines.   While players aren't allowed to be cops, it will at least get the basic "good players versus evil players" battle lines drawn.   Because the developers recognize the need to design CoH as a game first and a virtual world as a much lesser priority, there's going to be liberal use of instancing to keep fights nice and even.   Guild Wars E3 has shown this approach can work, and work well.   (Guild Wars E3 also shows there will be much bitching about PvP balance.)

(I hope you guys over at Themis are taking notes.  I'm only handing you all the answers you should be telling MMORPG developers here ;))

http://www.pvponline.com/archive.php3?archive=20040613

Funnily enough, I still stop and kick lowlevel butt, when I hear a cry for help... it just feels wrong to run on.
... on the other hand I shoot off like a frightened kitten when the mugger is purple, so my superhero is somewhat less super.

Yes, the cries of help which I ignore have bothered me enough at times that I wished the game dynamically filtered-out cries of help that were more the, say, 3 levels lower than you are.

Bruce

And I think, putting aside any value judgements on those players, isn't that why we ALL are supposed to be playing games? To get away from it all and enjoy ourselves?

Which seems completely counter to the entire "achiever" mentality, but that's the mentality that rules the MMOG industry.

Consider the concept of a game that allowed you to live in a monogamous relationship, and then sent all these different NPC's to tempt you, and allowed you to have "virtual" sex with an NPC, cheating on your in-game relationship. Is it cheating on your real world relationship? Is it an activity that you'd want to allow in the game "world" considering the consequences such a thing might bring about?

Granted, that's not quite as easy a concept to get across as "you can kill other players, do you?" but it's similar. In a game meant to be stress relief, meant to be fun, how much of the real do you want to be saddled with? The line is different for everyone, just like the line between fun and unfun.

Oh Jesus, I hope there aren't any dev's reading because that's the kind of talk that gets made into a game.  I'm pretty sure it would work and would put a dev team on the 'controversial edge' of video game development.

Maybe you could have situations where you go on business trips with that hottie from marketing, and as you drink more and more on your business outing, she graphically gets enhanced...  Brilliant!

Edit: Because Grammer killed my sister.

Who are the developers? Ultimately it's producers, beancounters, and suits at EA, Microsoft, Sony, and NCSoft that are making these games. The grunt developers aren't given the option of trying to convince us that there is a virtual world there. SWG is the only example I can think of where one person was given a lot of control over the direction of a product, and I stayed the hell away from that pile.

Let me be clear: I think most of the grunt developers have more of a clue about making a good game than the suits do.

Yet as an MMO developer, I see few of my coworkers talented enough to build a good game in a fun world. Most MMO devs are caught up in teh shiny, in one way or another. By way of example, I looked at WC2 and thought that the only way to make that game better was to add more units, more buildings, more upgrades. As Gulstaff (http://www.vgcats.com/vgc_comics/?strip_id=65) would say, "MORE MORE MORE". It's like looking at chess and saying "this game is boring, it needs more pieces, and a bigger board, and four players instead of two." Kohan taught me that wasn't the case. Games are fun because the rules are interesting. I think WC3 threw too many rules in, and the result is a complex, disorganized mess that, as a result, manages to emphasize one particular aspect of gameplay (micromanagement) over all others. Make your game too big, and it will get away from you. The only way to fix this is to trim the game down.

"I have made this letter longer than usual, because I lack the time to make it shorter." - Blaise Pascal. Maybe designers lack the talent, or the desire, or the backing of management.

Players come in many colors. Some like to explore new rules; once they learn a set, they want to move on. Others like to explore the intricacy of a ruleset and gain mastery of it. Possibly the first group sucks at rules, and so avoids mastery because they have learned (through constant failure) to stop trying, or they have a short attention span. Maybe the latter group is suffering from OCD. With regard to WC2, WC3, and Kohan, I appear to fall into the latter, obsessive group. Oh well. I think I'm right, and those other people are just wrong. That's where I started when I wrote the foregoing, but now I think it's just a case of different segments of the audience. Some people like to explore new rules, some people like to master existing rules. (I think this is the new-map vs old-map-again debate in FPS communities.) So let me leave this point and move on.

From a game-theoretical point of view, MMO combat is a simple model. Move points in one bar to another bar. Move mana into health, reduce my bar and his at the same time, spend time to decrease his bar, spend time to increase my bar, pause his actions, etc. It's just time and bars. Get rid of the animations and graphics and you have a text MUD. Get rid of the creature names and you have a puzzle game. The world is important because it enhances immersion. I feel more the hero when I've got an avatar in front of me, doing his goofy idle animation. Worlds provide flavor.

I think immersion should be the primary goal of the world part of the world/game dichotomy. To the extent that immersion is a goal, "world" is its implementation. NOTHING MORE.

Humans have a desire to make order out of the chaos around them. Some people do this obsessively; sometimes that obsession becomes a clinical disease. Personally, I just like arranging my desk just so. Sometimes--and here's the interesting bit--designers like to build things that are nice and symmetrical and balanced and round and even. "Look, isn't it perfect?" I've seen this among many MMO designers; they want to put balance into the system, to build a sense of aesthetic beauty into their systems.

But I don't think that's what most players want. I'm not talking about making art pretty; I'm talking about whether the game systems (from a game-theoretic point of view) have an internal sense of balance. If a player can easily make a mental model out of a system, it becomes boring. If you don't have to think about what you are doing, you have time to think about how you're not thinking. That's what boring is. Lineage 2 had a trivial combat model, and as a result playing through the first 20 levels was mind-fuckingly boring. I think EQ and SWG get grindy when the complexity falls away and you are left staring at what's left of the game. The game feels boring because you don't have to think about it. Spend too much time running (http://www.atitd.net/forum_archive/viewtopic.php?t=16258) from town to town, grinding the same mob, using the same skills, whatever--and the lustre will fall away.

Put things just out of kilter (http://www.worldofwar.net/screenshots/ingame/ingame-170.jpg) and it becomes intriguing. Create an interesting, complex system and keep your players amused for endless hours as they try to learn it. CoH combat is like that; combat is fun. Pleasure exists in the many interconnected ways of ordering combat actions.

I think many of the "world" trappings creeping into games are some designer's overblown sense of beauty creeping into the game. Dark and Light (http://www.darkandlight.com/) and the original (http://www.pharaoh-productions.com/eulogy.html) Horizons struck me as masturbatory designer fantasies. Do these designers understand the effect that 'world' has on players, or are they missing the boat?

Almost no-one I've ever talked to in the game industry has a sense of player motivations. Just talking about killers and socializers doesn't mean that you understand psychology. And I mean understanding here, not knowledge. Why does a killer do what he does? Why does an achiever feel loss if someone is a higher level than him? What drives these players? If you want to appeal to an achiever, you don't just stick levels in your game. Life is more complex than that. Lineage 2 might amuse an achiever for a while, but there is a lot of missing potential there.

To chase that potential, a game designer needs a practical, working understanding of player psychology. In the original article, Haemish mentions that he (as a young lad) didn't think about the effect an assassin's guild and PvP would have on its victims. That's the designer's entire job. Not only should the designer look at that, but he needs to know (or think) to look there in the first place.

And so I end where I began: 99% of the people with control over game design lack that understanding; 99% of the people with that understanding lack that control.

-

My apologies for the length of this post. I lack the desire to make it shorter.

So, is it possible to get the kind of 'world' that you and your buddies first dreamed about? A world full of non-griefing role-players, content (instanced and not), and fun, fun, fun?

Could a game costing $30/month that promised enough content to keep you happy for a long time, enforced rp, and had enough overseers to squash griefers like the vermin they are make it? Would enough people be willing to pay that amount of money for a clean, fun, rp game? Would that be enough money to actually create that much fun and original content? Would it be expensive enough to scare off enough lowlifes so that those that sneak through could be easily squashed? Could the massive amount of content be as bug-free as one would expect from a premium, high-end product?

And I love instanced content. I loved it in AO, I love it in CoH.

Scorus

Only in a niche title not run by pigfuckers. MMOG's are going to eventually go more "boutique" as bandwidth goes down and broadband penetration goes up. They are going to have to figure out how to make good, high quality games that are profitable with less than 50k subscribers.

So, no, not for quite a while.

A couple of things--

1) Nobody ever gets the level of control that Heresiarch seems to think I had. There's no "director's cut" in the game industry. Don't forget that making these is absolutely a team activity, and the fact that you happen to know some of the team's names and not others doesn't necessarily mean that the contributions of those people is necessarily all-controlling. Having my name more visible means mostly that I get to take the blame for what goes wrong--credit for what goes well, you try to share.

2) I'm not anti-game at all. Games are good, games are cool.  As a player, what I want is a game that has all the depth of a world. Haemish says that it's a different of what point you design from, the inside out or the outside in, and I think that's a very good analogy. What I was saying to SirBruce is that once you make some decisions from the inside out, you preclude huge swaths of possible design choices. CoH is a very good game that will have a devil of a time implementing a player economy, should they ever want to. They may not ever want to, but they made some choices that make it very hard to do so. Not technically impossible, but very hard to the point where it may be pragmatically infeasible.

I always resist calling MMOs "games" because it's better to regard them as environments within which games can exist (such as a combat-and-phat-lawt game, but also other parallel or intertwined games, or even something as simple as an embedded checkers or puzzle game). That does not take anything at all away from the required quality or fun factor of the games you embed.

The problem, though, is that the more you widen the scope of what you want to create, the more you dilute the quality of the "games", because your available resources will always be finite.  This just comes down to whether you want a more comprehensive universe to run your toon around in, or if you'd rather developers focus like a laser on one area and do it as slickly as possible.

After years of developers thinking of themselves as "world makers" I'm flat out sick of it.  Give me the studio that focuses on making a game, please, because frankly a true virtual world is just never going to happen.  The entire notion of duplicating the complexities of the real world (at least in my lifetime) is Quixotic, so please, just entertain me.

It's like being forced to watch some avant garde, black & white, French movie when all you really want to do is go down to the carnival and watch the dancing bear.  We need more dancing bears, not artistes.

Yes, that is very true. I think it is a highly valid question for the entire industry (makers and consumers alike) as to whether the scope of what we can create at a high quality bar and the scope of what the market wants match up.



I don't know of anyone who is trying to duplicate all the complexities of the real world. Not even close, actually. You're either overestimating the complexity of the game systems, or underestimating that of the world, I'm unsure which. ;)

Are there really that many developers thinking of themselves as "world makers" as you put it? By my lights, it sure seems to be a minority--a pretty significant minority, at that.



Hmm, I'd argue that the games that most fit that description are maybe ATITD or Eve or Puzzle Pirates even. Aren't most of the games dancing bears, by your definition? Which ones are artistic statements, and which are mass entertainments? I'd love to see your breakdown.

In looking at the market, I'd assert that most of the MMOs are intended as mass entertainments first, and artistic statements as a distant second.

Not completely, not by any means.  However, most MMOGs have dabbled into stuff that I would consider "world building"; housing, crafting, etc.  You've definitely raised the bar in that regard...  C'mon, man, at some point there was someone on your team responsible for ensuring that if the recipe called for it, you could milk some giant Star Wars lizard monster.  

That said, though, most every time some little "side game" like crafting, whatever, is introduced into these games they're almost always implemented poorly.  I'll definitely fess up to my CoH fanboiness, because it seems to me that whenever they tried to implement an idea that either wasn't that well thought out or couldn't be implemented well, they scrapped it.  I believe that that's probably the right way to go about it.  It seems to me that too many developers will throw their little "sub-game" in, even if it isn't very good, just because it adds to the overall content.  I just can't believe that that's the right way to go about it.

Some of that sort of thing is done in the name of appealing to a larger audience. Most ordinary people are not turned on by the idea of fighting baddies while in tights. This is not to say that it isn't cool or fun, because we all know it is. But it doesn't play in Peoria.

For a contrasting view on whether or not appealing to a larger audience even makes sense, you can check out Dave Rickey's latest column:

http://www.skotos.net/articles/engines21.phtml

Some of it is done in order to round out a larger system (e.g., I don't think anyone was actually aiming to have a milking simulation--rather, they were aiming to have a crafting track for cooking, and milking ended up being not only a logical necessity, but worse, one that got forgotten and that players rightfully bitched needed to be added).

Now, both those cases taken as given, yes, often innovations are done poorly the first time. Sometimes they turn out to be things that will become part of the accepted minimum feature set for games (crafting, housing) and sometimes, they don't go anywhere. Most often, they fall in between, as is the case with say, dancing or musicianship, which aren't anywhere near realizing their potential, but which are also one of the thigns that most make genre newcomers (and women, especially) get excited about the game. Neither AO nor SWG has fully managed to deliver on dancing, but I still think that eventually, it's going to become something very cool.

Now, yes, you could leave it out, but then no progress will be made on it. Or we could try the dancing-only game--but if it's a feature like dancing that is unlikely to sustain a game all by itself, that's not likely to happen either.

So what way IS there to try out something new like that?

Milk2Crush

Sorry. I had to say it before someone beat me to it. ;)

Back on topic...


Exactly. Early implementations may not always be the best, but they are at least attempting to break the mold and integrate more of these sorts of activities into the worlds, even if these activities don't appeal to the "standard" MMOG player of old. They are tasked with drawing a more diverse audience into these games. Greater diversity in the playerbase can certainly make for a more robust and interesting world at least as far as the social aspects are concerned. Greater diversity of playerbase also makes it more difficult to please everyone all the time, but that could never be done anyhow, so there's no problem there. From my narrow field of view through my MMOG avatars, it seems that UO, DAoC, SWG and a few others managed to garner a rather diverse population of players. But I've gone on a digression way past my original point. The way to try out those new things is to put them into the current and future games and keep at them until you get them right.

Anyway, I think that what some customers feel are that some game designers have gone so far into trying to make a "world" that the games within the world were not very fun or well thought out.  And I think, Raph, even you would agree that in SWG, a lot of the extra "world" type stuff -- the economy, the entertainers and doctors, players cities, etc. -- came out pretty well, and that the systems that were really flawed were more the "core" "game" systems like combat, skills, Jedi, etc.  Of course, too much of the reverse and the world can feel "empty" and "lifeless", like AC2 or City of Heroes.

Still, I still do not think it is THAT much harder to add "world" elements to a "game" like City of Heroes.  Yes, they have constraints, but there are constraints if you follow the opposite path as well.

Anyway, I think ideally what you need to do is to come up with a way to have the "world" design approach, but to limit the scope sufficiently at first so that you can really concentrate on the core gameplay so the "game" is fun.  Then later you can expand on the existing "world" infrastructure code and design.

Bruce

<stamp little foot> That was my post, dammit.


This is a pretty good point.    Ever try to design a scenario in Neverwinter Nights without first laying down the story?  Unless your name is Douglas Adams, that's sure to create an unsellable mess.    

Another nice thing about designing with the big picture in mind is you can leave pleanty of room to add things later.   An excellent way of conducting a MMORPG, which is expected to grow.   Excellent, or so it would seem...

The main issue I have with this is, as a player, I've often experienced that the result of this "think big" design approach is that you run out of development time before your core game mechanics are very well refined.    This is probably because as you're designing from the outside in, you've deliberately put off a good deal of this inside until later.    You end up with this nice big environment to expand in, but not many worthwhile activities at release.

All dressed up, places to go, but nothing worth doing.   How often have our would-be adventurers found themselves in this situation when embarking in a newly released MMORPG?    How many players do you think are genuinely interested in hanging around immediately after release, waiting for the fun to be added in later?

Maybe this is the standard MMORPG life cycle.   I can name several MMORPGs which have managed to survive a feature incomplete release, such as Anarchy Online and Everquest.   Yet, I can name others that didn't, such as Earth and Beyond and Asheron's Call 2.    

There must be a line of minimum features neccessary to retain sufficient player population interest to keep a game going.    It likely varies from game to game based on several factors.   For example, I could see Star Wars Galaxies getting quite a bit of leeway with the internationally popular Star Wars licence.

It's not all that mysterious, I suppose, it basically comes down to if you can financially survive having a feature incomplete game.

That's your problem as a developer.  As a player, I face a far more serious problem: it isn't really much of a game to the majority of us while we're waiting for you to "patch in the fun".

Hmm, should read Skotos more often - interesting articles indeed.

Different subject though.  Though the goal may be to point out the difficulty in attracting the mainstream, I think he's basically talking about establishing a hook based off if niches.   I say, so far as a MMORPG concerns, the hook is only half the battle.  

Yes, it gets people to buy the boxes because OMG it's <insert popular pop culture reference here>.   However, it has nothing to do in terms of designing the game itself.    

A crappy game will drive people away before you get your first subscription, even you secured licence to make Christianity Online (although the few billion box sales will likely be nice to have).    A good game will actually overcome a bad licence - it may have a little more difficulty getting advertised, but word of mouth will spread like wildfire if it's incredibly good.

So, here's a thought: You want the mainstream to play your game, don't worry about attracting this or that "geek" niche, or any niches at all.   Instead, just make your game so good that a great deal of players would be genuinely interested in it (, I said, as if this were an easy matter, which it's obviously not ;)).    If you're successful in making an orgasmically good game, word of mouth with perhaps an initial minor advertisement booster should cover you.   If you build it, they will come, so to speak.

Switching back to the idea of designing the inside again... I still think the key to creating a truly good game has a lot to do with creating activities a high level of meaningful involvement with the player.   Not just a high level of activity.   Not just a high level of involvement.    However, a high level of meaningful involvement.    Tough call, but I wager you could get it with practice.

I like to think I have a really good answer for this.  That answer is:

"Think it through all the way before implementing a new feature."

BS?  Well, I will agreethat this doesn't guarentee that you'll come up with a bulletproof feature, but it does improve your odds considerably.  

Easier said than done?  Well, it would involve taking things quite a few steps further than you have proof to back up.  That's does risk jumping to false conclusions, which could be catastrophic.    However, I'm wagering that if you had thought it through, bounced it off those people you're supposed to be paying for consultation, and were able to take the time (assuming you have it) to consider the consiquences, your odds improve greatly that a proposed feature could be a success.

Worse case scenario, you may find a reason why this new feature idea is going to be an absolute dud.    This sucks because it means you'll feel you just wasted a lot of time.    

At this point, I say either find a way to work around it, or scrap it.     This is because choosing to go ahead and do something you know isn't thought out all the way is choosing to perform an experment.    Most players won't thank you for the guinea pig treatment.   If you want to experiment that badly, use the test server or your beta test: that's where the sworn guinea pigs live.

The solution is to design from the inside out while considering possible areas of expansion. The world in most MMORPGs is basically the same. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out what doors should be left open.

I would also point out that it is a lot easier to add stuff to a smaller, solid core than to a big mess. Expanding around the edges is usually a lot easier than filling stuff in the cracks.

The problem with a lot of project management, especially programming projects, is they go for the big picture and "down the road" style features and leave themselves places to fill in, but it turns out the places to fill in just don't make sense. (And you find out too late) Nothing quite fits in the way it was planned.

It's good to solve a specific problem in a way that *can* be generalized, rather than try to solve a general problem.

I think a big issue with some of these games is that they aren't fun until the very end, and if in the very end they still aren't fun it's just too late. MOO3 was a lot like that. The game had been worked on for years and had tons of stuff but the fun wasn't in yet...and it never made it.

If you can get the core of the game going and fun, you KNOW you are in good shape. If you keep delaying the fun by design, you have no idea where you stand until it's too late to adjust.

I see a lot of MMORPGs that adopt the "it's not fun now in beta 2, but just wait until beta 3!" attitude. It should be fun in pre-alpha.

I think the biggest failing of the world design philosophy is that it really doesn't concentrate enough on the fact that you are making a game that is meant to be fun. World's require things that may or may not be fun.

I think the ideal approach would be to take your design doc, read it and think about it for a few days before you ever program a damn thing. Sit back and think, then write up a wholly separate document. This document should be a step-by-step description of exactly what a player will do on a typical night after they login. Read it back to yourself and to the design group once you're done.

If it doesn't sound fun, start over.

I'm much more in favor of building from the inside out... sort of. Take the feature/features you KNOW everyone who is interested in your setting (or your target audience) will want to do. In most MMOG's, especially fantasy-based MMOG's, that's combat. You can talk about crafting, housing, flaxing all you want, but if the majority of people want to kill orcs, build that shit first. Make that fun and un-buggy. When that works, then you can think about adding other things.

In City of Heroes, if they were to add some kind of crafting system, I'm wholly convinced they could put it in and make it more interesting than all the crafting that's come before in MMOG-land. It's not faith in the dev team. It's the fact that they can devote more resources to the problem than say SWG because they don't really have to fix anything in the core model. Combat is fun. The activities people do day in and day out are already so well-developed, they don't need constant rethinks. A tweak for balance here and there, but that's it.

It's similar to the SWG model of adding space combat as a separate update/expansion. Space combat SHOULD be a completely separate and different game, with new mechanics. However, had SWG taken the concept of each component being more of a separate game, I think combat would be more fun, crafting would be more fun, etc. etc. etc. The original scope of SWG was too ambitious for the time-frame. I think SWG would have been better served releasing the combat/PVP model game first, with some baseline crafting, then in 6 months, release the full-blown crafting deal. Then release the dancing wookie game. Then the space combat game.

But again, I think a bit of the old corporate hubris came into the design and construction of SWG. I think from the top executive level on down to the littlest programmer on SWG thought that they had enough money to tackle any of the problems that such an ambitious design would face, never admitting that the timetables for such ambition were undoable no matter how much money you threw at the problem. After all, EQ had released with crafting in such a shitty state, and people still paid for that through all the craziness.

What I'm trying to say is, I'd rather you release with 1 feature working and update when other features are working, then release with 6 feature sets all of which are half-assed and broken.

This will get more subscription time and expansion money out of a player like me for sure; I don't have enough time to blaze through the content like many folks do; I have a lot of other irons in the fire that demand my time. When I DO have time to play, I want to be entertained, not frustrated.

Take CoH for example- I still enjoy logging on for my 5-10 hours a week and playing; the character advancement and combat system is still interesting to me. If an expansion (or a free update) adds depth into the game with the same quality as these features, it is a certainty that I will keep my subscription active and buy new SKUs.

I would rather see one or two deep, well-constructed game systems rather than a dozen shallow, buggy or incomplete systems. The former gives me something to do while other systems come online; the latter just exposes me to more good ideas with terrible implementation (a definite turn off).

But CoH does have some "worldsy" elements.  e.g. the thugs aren't usually just standing around waiting to be beaten-up.  They're breaking into cars, vandalizing bus stops, stealing purses, etc.

The reason they do these things (as opposed to, say, just standing there waiting to be beaten up by spandexman, or appearing out of thin air when you click the 'dispense enemies' button), is to provide the illusion that 'it's a world'.

You're taking the 'world' argument to a ridiculous extreme by suggesting that a 'online world' would implement a 'thug ecology', etc. and that if they don't, then they aren't virtual worlds.

The opposite end of the spectrum would be to argue that they ought to remove those thugs' various activities - just have them stand around waiting to be beaten.  And take the cars off the streets too, because they aren't contributing anything to gameplay, etc.  Why even have zone maps if you aren't trying to make a 'virtual world' to at least some degree?  Just click a button and be thrown into an instanced box with some badguys to fight.

I think what you're arguing here is that MMORPGs ought to be minimalist in terms of world elements (certainly you're not suggesting ALL world elements be removed?) and gameplay options, so that development time is spent to ensure that what little there is to do, is fun.

I'll agree that some MMORPGs ought to be that way, but all of them?  Nagh.

NEG.

All we've ever, EVER asked for is a game that's fun at the core. Once the core game is fun and near flawless and not based on someone's badass spreadsheets, you can experiment all you want. Until the core elements (combat and guilding, or whatever your game may be) are complete, adding things like, hmmm, I don't know, different races for your merchant vendors, shouldn't happen.

Are merchants in SWG still broken? (I mention this because I liked to roleplay my master merchant/master smuggler - but since both classes were horribly crippled, I didn't get to do either).

No. Virtual worlds are a noble pursuit and I like to see attempts at creating them. Saga of Ryzom is doing some interesting things with the animal AI in that certain species exhibit herding tendencies and have migratory patterns that vary based on seasons, food supply, local predators, etc. They have a hell of a well done weather/season (meteorological?) system although it can use even more fleshing out. The problem they have is that despite those neat things, the gameplay itself is not terribly fun. It's standard MMOG fare. Auto-attack with specials mixed in, etc.

CoH makes the thugs do those things to bring the world alive. Ryzom has the animal AI to give the world a living feel. Both succeed at that. CoH has fun combat gameplay. Ryzom does not. The saving grace to SoR is that it is still in beta, but I don't see the combat system changing drastically at this point.

Looking to SWG as an example of a well-made virtual world. The biggest complaint I've seen is that the combat is not fun. I don't think that the game should not be the beautiful virtual world that it is, but rather the combat gameplay should have been made fun first, perhaps before some other game features were even bothered with. I think that's what some folks are trying to suggest. You can make a great virtual world with games in it, but make sure that each of those games is fun and solid before boasting about and putting in more games that are tedious or incomplete or both.

Hey, virtual worlds are a great goal. And in a perfect world, they would be the ultimate in video gaming and social experimentation.

But unfortunately the vast majority of humans on this planet are too far back on the evolutionary scale to maturely interact in such a fashion.

Thus they make shitty games. And shitty vitual worlds, honestly.

While there's a lot of onus on the developers, you have to keep the playerbase in perspective, too. People are just horribly, horribly broken.

I wouldn't take in-game behavior and find it neccessarily a reflection of out-of-game behavior.   Like I said, a lot of people play games to blow off steam.   That's why virtual worlds are challenged, because a good portion of the playerbase is simply there to have fun - not work hard building a virtual society.

The trick is to erect the right barriers that players can goof off without ruining things for everyone.   It's a knack that most MMORPG developers are pretty good at these days.    Shadowbane focused on accountability.   Everquest simply doesn't allow grief behavior.    Star Wars Galaxies is as varied as Ultima Online itself, but restricts putting yourself or buildings at risk to PvP as a strictly voluntary action.    Haven't played ATITD, but sounds like they've got this down a science.

Yeah. They kick out the unsavories. Of course, they also don't allow PvP combat, etc. There are a lot of things you cannot do in ATITD. In a true virtual world where anything is possible and where there is no societal precedent, with the exception of perhaps some fictional lore, it will be a bit more difficult to control people. Of course, we have yet to let players run with a game because there's profit margin involved. Even SB won't let the players go totally grief-tastic, and I'm not saying they should. However, things have to be allowed to get much worse to determine if they will get better or not. I have a hunch that in virtual worlds, no good virtual society can be built in a virtual world with no "hard-coded" preventions because if people get tired of something, they can simply logoff and quit and find something else to do. Logging off in real life is essentially suicide. Sure people do it, but most of us prefer to enact change on our society when we want to change something that affects our world and our lives. Until such a time as a community in a virtual world reaches a level of concern for that world, we won't see a community that is not dysfunctional. And on that point, you are correct that ATITD is damn close, albeit with the necessity of preventing some activities from ever occurring in the first place.

But see, ATITD does allow not only PVP, but also the creation of the society that fosters a "peaceful" community. It allows the community to vote on changes, including getting rid of the unsavory. And by PVP, it allows politicking to the point where votes can be made to remove enemies. No, it isn't the direct PVP of Shadowbane, but it is an interesting experiment.

But why does ATITD succeed, both financially (I'll smack the first motherfucker tries to say ATITD has not been a financial success) and artistically? Because it tries to do what it wants to do well. Sure, they could have added a combat system, so people could have duels, but that would have diluted the design vision as well as programming resources. From the outside, ATITD seems to work better at creating an interesting virtual world that the players enjoy than SWG does. You haven't seen a great big main feature rewrite to rival SWG's combat revamp in the entire time it's been online.

It was aimed at a niche; it had a limited time frame for competitive gameplay; it let the players create the kind of community they wanted to. And it succeeded on both levels far better than anything that has come from the major studios with major money.

They didn't aim too high, and I'm guessing they didn't have some slavering board of directors with giant dollar signs in their eyes to answer to.

All mmogs are niche products, those that capitalize on it succeed, those that don't are forced into a niche or fail.

But I was being a bit vague by just using the example of broken toys (tm). It's also incompatible playstyles thrust into the same arena. Maybe this is a good idea from an ivory tower, but it sucks in execution.

In UO you had people with a diablo mentality that just wanted to run around goofing off, and also folks with an ultima mentality that wanted to enhance the world and goof off in an entirely different way that had nothing to do with some pigsucker in a death robe and purple potions. Too ambitious, even though it was a great game for both playstyles (originally). And the compromise pretty much screwed both playstyles.

Oof, I can't think of any good way to reply to some of these things without sounding like I am picking on individual games.

Growing outwards can be very hard or even impossible. Could SWG have been made without a player-driven economy? Yes, but try adding it later. Could you add a player-driven economy to EQ? No, not really. Some decisions simply preclude others. CoH lacks items altogether. A large part of the roles items traditionally fulfill are instead filled by buffs. Adding items and all the infrastructure for commerce is feasible, but then you have left the question of what the items DO for you, and that's a tough problem. This doesn't mean that CoH made a mistake, just that they made choices. Arguably, going to Felucca and Trammel in UO was a "growing outward." Was it truly growth, or did it basically kill off one playstyle?

ATITD is an interesting case. I've said many times that I admire the game a lot. But it's also trying to do something very very specific. Specific enough that the audience for it is pretty small. It is successful on its terms, but it is not successful in terms of market penetration. Argualy, it's just successful enough to be stuck at the size it is now, rather than growing to the size it deserves. This connects with the point made (incorrectly, imho) by geldonyetich (I think I attributed it correctly this time!):



This is simply untrue. ATITD, Puzzle Pirates, Ico, Beyond Good & Evil, even MULE. Believe me, I WISH it were true, but we have all seen it not be true countless times over. :(



What Haemish proposes as a process is something that we always hammer on. It's also one of the most difficult skills for designers to learn. It can be very very hard to put yourself in the player's position--as evidenced by the difficulty some folks here have in putting themselves in each others' position on debates like the one on PvP, for example. So even though we had exactly what you describe as part of the design process on SWG (it was a required section in the design docs, in fact) it's damnably hard to follow through on. Everybody seems to think we did combat last in SWG--in fact, combat work started darn close to the beginning, and kept being worked on throughout.



Really? Then why are so many doors closed? A lot of the history of online world design is one of retreating away from difficult problems ("let's not allow dropping of items" for example). I agree with the point that Margalis makes here that often in dev we worry too much about possible down the road things and not enough about the here and now, but there's also the opposite, which is not worrying about the future at all, and thereby creating barriers to it ever coming to pass.

I can think of lots of things that got left out of SWG that IMHO should have been there to make what is there more fun. I can also think of something things that are there that because they are not FULLY there, probably could be removed. And I can think of things that are there that should be removed because they plain don't work. It's a ragged line, basically.

One of the big points I'm pushing for on this thread is there will *always* be a higher than real life ratio of the "Diablo Mentality" players in a MMORPG.   Reason being that it is rightfully classified as a leisure activity, and so many people aren't going to take it seriously.  

We've retreaded this point a few times, back when it was in vogue following the fall of early UO.   A couple of proposed solutions I've heard is 1. Go for the soft sell, and make enhancing the world a thoroughly more enjoyable or profitable activity than griefing, or 2. You could simply block off access to harmful activities altogether.  

Unfortunately, it seems #2 is the easier to implement solution.

Curse you, reality!

Though out of the titles you mentioned, only Beyond Good & Evil really stands out for me.   ATITD and Puzzle Pirates were niche products with minimal advertising.   Never liked ICO, the artistic style was good but the puzzles were every bit as frustrating as an early Sierra adventure game.   M.U.L.E. was way back in the day when home gaming was extremely young, in a vastly different atmosphere than a game today - considering how many people know about it today I figure it should have done relatively well regardless of what sales figures may indicate.

If I'm inadvertantly trolling here, feel free to ignore.

How then, did the TEF system ever make it into the player's hands? Or the HAM system for that matter?  There's two basic questions that could have derailed both of those systems right out of the gate.  Can this complicated piece of garbage possibly be fun and not incredibly exploitable (TEF) and will players enjoy killing themselves performing special moves (HAM)?  I just struggle to see how either system made it off the design floor.   They, at their core, make the combat portion of the game needlessly complicated, hard to balance, exploit ridden (well, this is hard to predict at times), and just generally unfun.  

To me, it doesn't seem like you did combat last.  It seems like you did combat as you invisioned it from the very start.  Along the way the design of other portions of the game grew and complexity upon complexity heaped upon the system until quite frankly it broke and only a complete rewrite would fix it.  The game either had the biggest, broadest scope of any game in history or suffered from the worst case of scope creep I've ever witnessed.

Actually, ATITD does have direct PVP but through the school of conflict which allows the players to compete against one another through direct competition in mini-games.  These games are often based on strategic bluffing.  Winning these games often gives the victor a tangible advantage in the world, some even being resource or crafting advantages.  

This to me is one aspect, where in attempting to introduce direct player confict, that the game creates a barrier for those not wishing to participate.  In order to prospect for marble, you need to have a certain rank in a strategic bluffing game called tug.  This is almost as nonsensical as burning mounds of leeks for ash and is somewhat of a turn off for the more casual, non social player.

A lot of what drives people away from ATITD, I believe is being addressed in the second telling of the game.  Will reducing some of the time sinks and barriers that gave the game a high initial churn rate make the game less of a success? Will it bring in more people or drive the diehards away?  I suppose the game gets to continue being one of the more interesting experiments in the industry.

The issue with TEFs is almost all issues with how it interacts with grouping, not with TEFs in general. That said, your alternative is the same PvP flag stuff you've seen before. At some point, you have to try doing something different. TEFs were driven by the desire to have more people try out the GCW. It's pretty well established that if the choice is signing up for PvP 24/7, people won't do it.

HAM is simply badly balanced right now, which is why it is getting fixed. The original conception of it isn't quite what's there right now. "Will players enjoy killing themselves doing special moves?" Sure. It's just spending resources on offense versus defense. That's not exactly a radical idea, and many other games have done it. But it does have to be balanced to work.

Excuse me for momentarily pretending this is the SWG forums - but this is one of the reasons I quit the game, horrible imbalance all around that went completely unattended to by your PR people on the boards.

What was so hard about coming out and saying what you've just said? You could have saved a lot of players by just coming out and saying (and I mean you, not some face) - "Hey, there are many things in SWG right now that are BAD, I'd list them but it's unnecessary, we are working on it." I know I might still be subscribed if this had happened.

You must have quit at a much earlier time.  At my point there had made the admissions and mea culpas but there were still no fixes in sight.  I think a combat revamp was promised over 6 months ago.  

To address Raph, I just nitpicked on one aspect of HAM, but there are several which make it a bad system.  It seems tailor made for 1 on 1 PVP/PVE, but falls apart in group PVP and PVE.   For group PVP you have one pool that's basically unhealable and you have the problem of people hitting different pools while all trying for the same goal, to kill the other person.  This gets even worse in PvE where everyone is just trying to take down the beastie, but due to the HAM system, their overall effectiveness is hampered.

It seems like it was built on a solid idea from your explanation.  But as the complexities of the surrounding systems were brought in, the concept just falls apart and renders itself useless. I just fail to see how this wasn't caught in the design phase.  I do realize you actually had to release this game in a reasonable time frame, so wholesale design changes once you've actually started implementation is costly, but did at any point were you on the verge of just scrapping the system and starting over?

I wish I could assemble a proper reply for Raph.

I can't. I get too apoplectic.

Absolutely. I got the impression (back when the flamewars were raging) that the biggest problem with Serek Dmart's BattleCruiser games was that they tried to encompass too many gameplay elements (read: "big scope"). This in turn led to a bugfest with few actually fun things to do because development effort was too thinly spread to ensure any one element was properly completed.

This was as opposed to successful games that took parts of what BC tried to be, and perfected those parts and ignored others.

This is also why focused MMORPGs like EVE, CoH and ATiTD aquire a following, while more complex games tend to alienate players (with cries of "nerf!") because there are too many things for the devs to balance, e.g. crafting vs. player-driven economy like in FFXI, SWG and Horizons.

Simpler game = more focused gameplay = easier to balance = less development intensive = more resources available to create content. MMOG developers need to realize they are in the entertainment industry, not the mathematical world simulation industry. Make the world look real, but plz. put a game in there too.

IMHO it's not a balance issue at all; it wouldn't be a fun system even if it was perfectly balanced.  I think what Rasix was pointing out is it appears that it was a great idea on paper that when actually implemented has shown itself to be completely unenjoyable.  Having players damage different HAM bar's makes grouping up for combat much less desirable then if you have a single health bar.  Having certain specials do unhealable damage to yourself just doesn't sound fun to even a casual gamer.  If the damage was easily recoverable, that would be a tradeoff people could deal with.

When you say balance, I read that as "adjusting the numbers in the system to make it equitable across all combat types and styles"; I don't think that what most want.  I think people would actually prefer a change to the core combat system itself...

Xilren

On the one hand, you say that the system is impossible to make fun. Then you list two problems that are not inherent to the system as being big barriers to it being fun. There's nothing in the system that says that players have to damage different HAM bars by nature, and there's nothing that says that specials need to do unhealable damage to the player, and there's nothing that says that the damage has to be difficult to recover.

At this point, yes, I think most people want a change in the system, and the changes that the team is working on do in fact change the system. But the biggest problems are not systemic in that sense, IMHO. At this point, however, it is easier to change the system than change all the other things that have built up around the system.

The first time a boss called me out by name in CoH, holy crap that was immersive.  You know that was like three lines of code.  The first time I got ambushed in Atlas Park, I jumped out of my seat.   Several dozen lines, probably.  I wonder if an MMO can increase its world feel by steadily adding small stuff.  First the citizens comment on deeds of heroes in their area, then a little weather maybe, then small events, then bigger ones, then plaques commemorating the events, etc, etc, etc, all the while more and more zones steadily get added.  

Would a steady stream of small, incremental improvements work, or will it require really big changes like a vast thug ecology systems to really get the feels-like-a-world job done?

I have to admit, there are good parts of the HAM system.  Self-inflicted damage from special moves creates a serious tactical consideration: will it hurt you more to attack than it would to damage the target?    

That said, I'd have to say what annoys me the most about the HAM system is the self-inflicted down time.   Wether the mob damages you or you damage yourself, the thing is that the damage is there and you'll have to rest it off post-combat (or else blow a bunch of med kits.)

Also I would like a few more really influential choices in combat.  Right now, it's prone if you're fighting at range, standing if you're close up and personal.   Then just focus on whatever HAM bar your profession is best at taking down.   Apply debuffs to improve your odds at cost to your HAM bars or through use of items on hand.    

This is your entire combat exercise, and although there is something to be said for pre-combat prep work, it's the same thing every fight.    Just about the only thing that changes about the combat I've run into in SWG is the monster AI, which is pretty cool in that it's highly varied and somewhat what you would expect from a wild animal.   (Except they tend to confront you rather than immediately run away.)  

Course', I haven't tried the PvP yet.  I wager players could create a bit of unpredictability to battle.   However, will the abilities I have at my disposal really be used any differently?    Prone at range, standing close up, focus on whatever part of the HAM bar you're best at, debuff.   Nope, pretty much the same.

But I see you're aware of most of this (http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=Developers&message.id=14605#M14605) already.   Self-inflicted HAM damage shortly regenerating?   Stronger combat tactics?   Back and forth attacks and counterattacks?  Profession specific (such as a Pistoleer vrs Rifleman) roles in combat?  That'd would be a whole lot more like it.

Just on the whole "this'll hurt me as much as it'll hurt you" bit, CoH does have special moves that hurt the player, however the moves are usually very high level and involve turning the character into some sort of raving death machine, at the end of which time, the damage is applied.

Geheheh. Oh, the ambushes are great. I mean, there you are, thinking the mission is actually _done_, and then you're like "Huh, something's coming over the wall. ...wait a minute. That's not a normal mob!"

And then the grenade explodes underneath you.

OMG NAZI RUSH heilheilheilheilheilheil ^_____^

--GF

I don't think I went into enough detail.  Yes, the examples I gave I consider balance issues, not systemic.  BUT, even if those resovled, IMHO I don't believe the core combat model would be engaging and enjoyable b/c it seems designed primarily to mesh withing the rest of the "world' of swg and a distant second to be fun.  That whole outside-in design theme (or world first, game second).  It seems to me that it would be much harder to create a wide diversity of fun things to do in a cohesive world setting b/c you have to start with so many prerequistes in palce to make the "combat module" or "crafting module" fit within the framework of the rest of the world that you automatically limit what can be done right off the bat.  i.e. "Here's the parameters the combat module has to fit within, now go design something fun".

At least, that's my take on it.



Which is fine and all, but it begs the question, how did the original system make it out the door is the current concensus is it need to changed?

Xilren

See, here's where the rubber hits the road, and the world divides from the game.

All of that you just mentioned isn't REALLY you affecting the world, because every player will get the same response so long as he follows the same steps. If the boss you speak of is in an instanced mission, anyone can get that instanced mission and see that, and if you group with someone who does that mission after you've already done it, well, you'll see the other person get that response. It's a scripted response.

Now, to the people who who are more world proponents, this irritates them to no end. All you really have is the ILLUSION that your character has affected the world. It's the same complaint some have about not being able to go into buildings where you don't have a mission. There is the illusion of immersiveness, but it isn't truly immersive.

Whereas the game proponents will be too busy enjoying the goddamn game to worry about whether or not someone else has seen or heard that little scripted response before. I think CoH does a very good job of making that illusion work so long as you don't look too closely behind the curtain. People expecting a world CANNOT stop themselves from looking behind the curtain.

Maybe it's the fact that the game is a superhero comic book game that makes me (normally a world-man) ignore the curtain entirely. Maybe it's the fact that I'm just enjoying the interactive gameplay so much I have no time to see the curtain. It could even be that since the setting is so "new" in MMOG terms, I'm ignoring it; whereas in fantasy settings, I've seen them in MMOG's so much, I tend to look beyond the setting simply due to over-familiarity with it.

And Raph, I have to ask. If you actually wrote the "what does a player do" doc, how closely did the beta gameplay follow that doc? And if it didn't, why not? Or more importantly, why did creation of the game continue on the same lines if the reality didn't mesh with the doc?

I am really hoping the combat revamp and ham revamp helps swg out. My biggest gripe about combat in swg though has always been lack of tactical diversity. In most games things break down where everybody has their unique skills they add to make a group more powerful than solo and more diverse.

In swg in general you could group with 10 people and for all intents and purposes they all do the exact same thing and fill the exact same role in a group. It tends to make most groups I have been in feel like a zerg rush. This I think is an artifact of a skill based and not a class based system and there is probably not anything that can be really done about it.

Its one reason I like COH so much each person has their job and in a big group there is trust and diversity in everybody performing their skills to allow the group to win. Swg groups are kinda like full groups of wizards or blasters lots of offense not a whole lot else going on.


kaid

To expand on the immersiveness, it's the illusion that the game is making you the focus.  Having citizen npc's spout lines about you when you click on them, overhearding enemies discussing you or calling you out in battle, having ambush parties track you down, having mission areas for you only, collecting souveniers which tell your story.  All that puts the individual player back in the primary seat which makes the illusion much easier to buy into.  Yes, I know objectively that there is nothing I am doing in game that hasn't been done my hundreds of other players before and will be done by hundreds after, but viscerally, I don't care because it's fun so I'll suspend my disbelief and enjoy it, much like getting in a good rpg session and "into" your character so that the die rolls and such don't matter, the story does.  Doesn't matter if EQ has 100x times the content in terms of quests, I never felt that way about any of it b/c I was never the focus.

Xilren

I'm not knocking on this because I agree with your post, but if we assume that only guns are available in SWG and neglect melee weapons, then yes, of course everyone can essentially do the same thing. If you went to New York and gave everyone a gun, they would all be capable of killing a deer (or each other) and would not need a group of ten people to do so. So yes, it is really a problem that arises because it is a skill based system and tries to mimic reality such that anyone can do anything, but their level of expertise will vary depending on how often they do it and how much experience they devote to honing a particular skill. It helps to make SWG more of a world, but as you pointed out, it diminishes multiplayer gameplay mechanics to a point of unneccessary or unfun.

Let me take a step backwards from this, maybe, and see if I can shift the way we're looking at this a bit.

Another way to look at what we're discussing is depth versus breadth, or "how many ways are there to play the game?"

Most games have a given mechanic, and then ring changes on it as you advance. Particularly classic arcade games work this way. Some of the changes may be a matter of memorization (as in topdown shooters, for example) and some may be a matter of mastering tactical variation (as in single player FPS gaming). They're basically about improving skill at one particular challenge.

The best of these often have the challenge evolve over time--early on you get some tools and challenges, and think you are doing everything the game offers. It's not until well further into the game that you realize that the stuff you learned in level 1 was merely the tiop of the iceberg, and success now calls for you using dozens of tools out of a toolbox to solve the larger problem. Civ was like this.

Then there's games where there is more than one challenge to them. A lot of puzzle games and platformers work this way--you have alternate challenge modes, like time trials, or secret-hunting, or puzzle mode versus time attack.

An important thing to realize here is that immersion is completely orthogonal to this. This is all about the challenge. A game can be highly immersive, and fail to meet the necessary challenge levels.

Here's the rub though--some people, of which I am one, don't need to ring the changes on a mechanic to feel like they "get it" and don't need to play any further. To a degree this a philosophical thing--some folks will say you're not a gamer if you don't beat games--but it's there nonetheless.

There are people who powergame Minesweeper. They are not much different, in that sense, than the people who powergame EQ. Then there's people who look at it and say "I get the basics, and I'm not interested in ringing the changes."

The question then becomes, who's a given game for? For "butterflies" who drift from mechanic to mechanic, for people who powergame one aspect? And how deep can you make any given mechanic? If you make it too shallow, the powergamers will finish quickly, but the butterflies may have other things to move on to instead. If it's all one thing, and deep, the powergamers will be happy, but those looking for more exit quickly...

This all ties into "designeritis." There's really only one sort of designeritis, I think, and it's the act of continually overcomplicating the designs. Why does it happen? Well, because designers are trying to create systems that continue to challenge them. They're powergaming design, basically. A designer who is happy ringing changes on a known system is probably not going to be bringing much new to the table. This often leads designers to be butterflies ("kitchen sink design") or to try tackling intractable design problems (like PvP, or virtual worlds)...  designers are looking for something new, that's why they are designers.

And this can mean they close out all but the connoisseurs, of course.

Mechanics are (for better or worse) a much narrower palette right now than say, writing, or music, or other creative activities are. So I would expect content designers to take much longer to reach this point.

Anyway, long ramble. If you're interested in ringing changes (and there's nothing wrong with that, it's completely natural and normal), then you will be very happy with a slick, well-done game that does established things really well. It may even trim out a lot of things that other games do, and there will be no detriment to its fun factor. If you're not interested in that, you'll probably grow more tired of it over time.

Eventually, I think people get tired of ringing changes. But that may be my bias. I think people migrate from powergamer to butterfly over time (actually, over experience.) This is speaking broadly, mind you--an individual game may offer the right mix that pulls them back--but over time, they become jaded to the ringing of changes, and that's when they start calling it a treadmill.

Speaking as a hardcore gamer, I have to say that personally I enjoy a ringing of changes.    It helps keep gameplay fresh when there's a new element introduced from time to time.    This is one of the main things MMORPGs have going for them.  

I just wish the frequency of the changes would occur more often.   It might be because I'm already bored of the gameplay that takes place at the lower rings.   A part of designing of a MMORPG seems to be to try to string out the transition between the different rings as much as possible.   Probably in order to keep those subscriptions coming in.   However, if you're a hardcore gamer, you're already *PAST* the level of gameplay that you're stick at with your current ring.  

This probably is why you're seeing people with experience migrate from powergamer to butterfly.   Experienced players have likely played this type of game before, and grown bored of it.    The only way you allow them to get to the higher rings is by accumulating things which are gained only through time investment.   As a result, these experienced players are trapped at lower rings, unable to get where gameplay is enjoyable for them at the higher rings except out of raw time investment.    The bloody treadmill wall is now rearing it's ugly head.    The player is only allowed to progress by performing activities against their will, and so they move on.    Thus, you have what appears to be a butterfly but is actually just an experienced player being forced to endure inflexible advancement mechanics.

A similar flaw could be found in a top down arcade shooter such as 1942 (http://www.klov.com/game_detail.php?letter=0&game_id=6766).  If you've played scads of top-down shooters before, and can already beat levels 1-19 with your eyes closed, maybe you'd rather start the game out at level 20 than slog your way through the first 19 levels of gameplay which is not at all remotely challenging to you?

What you really ought to do is provide a competency test that allows an experienced gamer to forward directly to what they are capable of.    Let them choose their difficulty.    Maybe leave the traditional mechanics in tact as well for the inexperienced players who won't be advancing through anything but persistance alone.

As it happens, in the late lamented Privateer Online we had a design which went like this:

- you buy skills with money, not XP (they were actually couched as licenses or guild membership fees, etc)
- skills each added more complexity to what you could do in the game
- you pay maintenance fees on skills, a regular fee
- if you can't pay, you slip back down the ladder
- you can twink someone to any skill--if they can make the money to pay for it on an ongoing basis, great!

That comes pretty close to what you're suggesting, I think.

Flipside, of course, is that it ties you to the game even more. Take time off without a built-up bank account, and you lose standing...

FWIW, I've observed the powergamer->butterfly pattern pretty much in my entire gaming career across all genres, so I don't think it is just from the pace of advancement in the games.

There's a another very common designer's disease, which is the "play any game for no more than a half hour" disease. It isn't because the designer is now a bad player, or because they lack time--even those afflicted with severe forms of this disease still get hooked on games occasionally. But the threshold of novelty required to make the designer want to play for longer is so high that the designer doesn't stick. And it mostly comes about because the designer has trained (usually self-training) to dissect mechanics, so they grok all they need to know about the game in the first half hour or less. (To be honest, I frequently buy $50 games that get ten minutes from me).

Privateer Online's system would have been interesting.  Except perhaps I'd want to count maintenance time into actually online time as opposed to both online and offline time.  This would be neccessary for the hardcore vrs casual time investment differences alone.

Better still, ditch the money requirement and rig advancement to a mission system with progressively harder missions.   This drops a lot of the time investment requirements.     You'd still be able to accumulate cash which would allow you to upgrade your ship and increase the odds you can complete the mission, but if you're a really good player you'd advance sooner with inferior equipment.

Yeah, I agree that the powergamer->butterfly effect probably isn't entirely originating from being stuck in the wrong ring.    Although I wager a goodly portion of that is from simply being experienced enough to generate a bit of "been there, done that" sentiment which is very similar.

I can see how, from a developer's perspective, you'd just grok it and leave it.    No real harm done - although you might miss some interesting nuances of the later game unfolds, that's more of a story teller thing than a game designer thing.   I have seen a few interesting games that implement mini-games in unusual yet fitting places down the line, such as Anachronox, but they're a rarity.

I rarely finish games.  It's got to be damned good for me to put in the effort to want to see how a game finishes up.  In the past few years I can think of only a few games I've actually finished; GTA3, Vice City, and KOTOR.  I've been sitting on Thief 3 for weeks now, in only the 3rd mission because I've been completely consumed by CoH.

Deep down, yeah I understand that it's a shallow treadmill.  What it's got going for it, though, that no other MMOG currently has is charm.  It's the gee-whiz factor of jumping from rooftop to rooftop dispensing justice.  It's got electrical blasts, bodies flying from super punches, and grown men in tights.  I'm pretty much your stereotypical butterfly, but I've been attached to this sucker like a lamprey, and I really don't see myself losing the love any time soon.  I don't exactly know what to attribute this to, but I think it's the fact that the game has heart.  No other MMOGs do (except, perhaps WoW, but that's just off of second hand reports) and that's why this is the first one I've played in over a year.

I'm a terrible butterfly that occasionally gets suckered into powergamer trends. I'm like BigGulp; I don't finish many games. Over the last few months, I've finished the first Splinter Cell, but I've very rarely finished any games, even shorter ones like Freedom Force or the original Thief. I tend to grab a demo of a game, and will usually play it to the point where I feel like I know the gameplay. With Far Cry, I played the demo and decided I'd pretty much seen everything I needed to. The game had nothing to offer me.

With MMOG's, I've become very much a butterfly. Before CoH, Shadowbane was the only thing that even warranted a second glance since I quit DAoC. I've just felt like I've seen everything within the first ten levels of all the other MMOG's, and it wasn't a promising picture. With CoH, I can play it like a multiplayer game, or a single-player game, all depending on my mood. Most MMOG's can ONLY be played as a multiplayer game, ever, and while that has its charm, it also is a terrible weight for someone in a butterfly state of mind.

I find minor changes in mechanics to be quite boring. I often don't finish games once I realize I know basically all I need to know and they aren't that interesting.

If a core mechanic isn't that interesting, it can't last, no matter how many things you add to it.

If you look at say Chess, the rules are fairly simple. Nothing ever changes, other than the players. Buth te core mechanic is interesting. Chess never introduces anything new - it's just players introducing new things to Chess and getting better.

My problem with HAM is...what's the point? Seriously. Why? You have some bars, and those bars have bars...and...so? "Now with 3 times as many bars!" It's a great example of making something more complex without making it any deeper.
---

I also play a lot of fighting games. There are many fighting games that are REALLY complex, but have a couple broken features and degenerate into something very simple. (Tekken 4 anyone?) The same can be said of something like Magic: The Gathering. Although the possibilities are huge, sometimes a certain combination basically takes over and the game becomes incredibly dumbed down.

In most games, complexity and depth, as I am describing them, are INVERSLY related. The more crap you have, the more that can go wrong and lead to stupid problems and degenerate cases. The more stuff you have, the more you can get wrong.

---

What annoys me is people making the same mistake over and over. Before any feature is ever added, ask the following:

1: What does this add?
2: How will people try to abuse this?

There are so many MMORPG features that would obviously be cut if someone thought about #2. That should be one of the first things asked of any feature.

On the other hand, with a perspective that deliberately endeavors to disqualify each and every feature before you add it, you'll not end up with a very interesting game at all.

The nice thing about the outside-in approach to design is that you can catch relationships between features and integrate them in such a way that they may solve eachother's problems.   For example, player enforced policing and unrestricted PvP solve eachother's problems.  In this way, the design process becomes a bit of a puzzle, but has the potential to assemble an infinitely more enjoyable game.

The tough thing is the kind of puzzle you are working with has some very strange twists to it.    Player behavior is often unexpected, and so it is difficult to imagine every way they may interact with a feature.    You do not want to complete your puzzle, because while that would certainly be optimal for a whole game, it leaves you absolutely grounded when it comes to trying to expand upon the game.

Then, when you're done, you've caught yourself in another logical problem - you've designed the game from the outside in when the players play it from the inside out!   It's difficult to appreciate the architectural wonder of the house you have created when all you have to look at is the gutted walls and incomplete wiring job from the inside.

It has been suggested that you design from both the outside and the inside.   The difficult thing about this is you end up stepping on your own toes a lot.   The features you may come up from the inside may not fit important concepts you realize you need on the outside, and you end up going back to the drawing board after wasting much time.

Personally, I'm thinking perhaps finish the outside as a basic concept, then focus most of your efforts on the inside?   Or perhaps get two seperate designers and have them collaborate a lot.    In a way, core single perspective gameplay and the way a MMORPG flows together are really two seperate activities that are connected no more than the different modules in an object oriented program.

I don't see why that is the case. You just end up lacking broken/useless features. Or, you end up with better versions on the features that aren't as abusable.

For example take the SWG naming of items in the Bazaar. The way it was initially (and has since changed, no?) it's easy to abuse. Name things alphabetically to get them to appear at the top, name things in deceiving manner, etc. (You could name the weakest gun in the game the most powerful one)

That didn't pass the "how can they abuse this" test.

Sure, it sounds good on paper, but try it.

I can find something that's either (sometimes both) 1) Not adding anything really neccessary or 2) potentially exploitable in about 99.5% of any feature you could recommend.

You really can't argue that things wouldn't be more interesting if we could still rename our items with the same degree of freedom as originally was in SWG.     I think that the SWG team was fully aware that some people would try to abuse it, but they went ahead with it for the good of the game.    They only revoked the ability to rename items when people complained and/or they were unable to adequettely enforce naming conventions.

It wasn't really for the good of the game if people didn't like it and it had to be changed.

Allowing people to customize items was a good idea. Giving them colors, flavor text, special insignias, whatever...that was the good part of the idea. The basic thrust was ok.



Look at the number of games that have stupid exploits due to things like sleep/freeze spells. That is the sort of thing I am talking about. At this point no game should ever come out with that garbage. For any special that freezes people, stuns them, knocks them over, etc, the VERY FIRST question should be "how will people abuse this?" Because history has proven those are abusable.

Yet, SWG suffered from a bunch of stupid infinite knockdown attacks. How does that sort of stuff make it?

Thanks for summing up why hero vs. hero PvP cannot be added to City of Heroes.

CoH actually has a wide variety of crowd control resistance powers (mostly for Scrappers/Tanks and Defender/Controller granted buffs) and even inspirations (for everyone).    Instead of an example of why PvP couldn't be added to CoH, this is instead an excellent example of why you can't just disqualify every feature right off the bat because it could be potentially exploitable.

In other words, you shouldn't just say "OMG, people will exploit stun/freezing so we dare not implement it!"     Instead, you should say "Oh, okay, so stun/freezing is pretty dang powerful and in order for the game to be fun we need to include also effective defences against it."

Intead of criticizing Shadowbane or SWG for allowing what you consider 'abusable' abilities from entering the game in the forms of stuns or knockdown, you might want to criticize them instead on not providing enough defences against them to stop them from getting out of hand.  

I can also criticize games like Everquest for refusing to allow crowd control powers to work on players at all because they didn't want to go through the trouble of implementing defences against these powers.    This was a stop gap measure that stops their game from reaching it's full potential.

The reason that CoH shouldn't have PvP is because it's entire combat system seems to have been designed around PvE combat.  Specificly PvE combat against Boss type characters who can shrug off some of the powers and have a fuckton (Imperial fuckton that is) of hit points.  Equal level players would have neither, therefore combat would probably be a stinking mess.

If you were talking EQ, I'd agree entirely.   City of Heroe's PvE balance is considerably closer to PvP, with a very similar power base between hero and villian.    Bosses (not Supervillians or Monsters) are about 150% potency to a hero by design, but that's a damn sight better than the 2000% potency vrs the hero a higher level mob would have in EQ.

Anywho, they're going to instanced PvP off into specialized contest areas with equal sized teams in City of Villians, and that's a much better approach than the free for all crap you'll see in many other MMORPGs.

A proposed feature is correctly regarded as a gin-soaked bum with a suitcase asking to crash on your couch "for a few days."  

Joyfully axing features that don't pull their weight is a hallmark of good game development.

Maybe I didn't make myself clear enough last time.  

It's not that I have anything wrong with getting rid of truly awful feature ideas.    However, if you take a really, really close look at any feature in any game, it's not perfect under all possible criticism.    

Why?  Because the features are human inventions, and people aren't perfect.   Even if you did manage to come up with a feature that exhibits true mathematical perfection, I wager nobody but calculators would enjoy having it added to the game.

Since just about everything you can come up with has a flaw, you're going to end up regarding each and every feature as a potential gin-soaked bum in need of a quick eviction.     The result?  A game completely devoid of any and all features.    Or, at the very least, extremely shallow unsatisfying gameplay.

On other hand, if you're considering nearly every (obviously not all) features as something that has a possibility to work if you utilize proper implementation... then you could end up with a nice deep game.

Ultimately, it's EASIER to get rid of features.   However, it's BETTER for deep gameplay to find a way to make those features work.   Many ideas working in sync is what makes a really good game design.

Well, geldon you are reading more into what I am saying than I intend. I do not mean that knockdown/freeze effects should not be in games. I mean they should not be BROKEN in games.

CoH does not have PvP, so I wouldn't say those abilities are broken. Maybe when they implement PvP they will make it so that all heroes have some natural resistance to those things...who knows.

Knockdown/freeze effects are not inherently broken, I am NOT saying they have no place in games. What I am saying is when people consider adding them they need to very carefully consider the ramifications. Providing enough defense, as you say, is one approach. Or, you can make sure they don't have an additive effect with other abilities and can't be cast fast enough to permanantly screw people.

It's a danger to watch out for, not a feature to leave out entirely.

It's like fighting games that have infinite combos. There are certain things you should be VERY wary of when creating fighting games. Moves that stun people is a big one, for obvious reasons. Moves that move you forward as part of the move is another. Moves that give you any sort of free hits is another. (Cause what if you do the free hit causing move again?)

I am just saying there are certain things that historically have been very abusable and problematic, those are *obvious* things to look out for at this point.

Now we're in agreement.

All this talk about game design's got me all antsy.   I'm dabbling again with Neverwinter Nights.   The Community Expansion pack is HUMONGOUS.    However, this deserves a thread of it's own (http://forums.f13.net/viewtopic.php?t=650&highlight=neverwinter+nights).

"Massive" is just a label.  Something that (AFAIK) Garriott et. al. came up with to try to make people understand that UO wasn't just multiplayer, it was mega-multiplayer, something very different, and worth paying a regular fee for.  People were skeptical back then.  

I'm not sure what you're doing when you pull that word out and try to see if it fits CoH or not.  I'm not sure what you mean by "limited."  Can a player in a mission affect someone hovering above City Hall?  No, but neither can a player in Qeynos affect someone on a Plane Raid.  All they could do is chat, in either case.