f13.net

http://mud.co.uk/richard/IMGDC2009.pdf

An interesting read. If someone finds a recording of the discussion those talkslides were used for, please post a link. I would be highly interested.

And if this is the wrong subforum for this, please feel free so push this thread around.

Edit:  Corrected conference name which I fucked up.

God it's good to hear someone say this out loud:

 :roll:

As much as I hate to use an overused meme...

Obvious statement is obvious. 

Nothing in that presentation that hasn't been stated by any armchair developer with more than 6 months gaming experience under their belt.

Those are some really unattractive slides.

I hope to hell he was being sarcastic with this one. 

He was obviously paid per font.

Physician, heal thyself.

He failed to address the real reason MMOs suck, and that's ego, their relation to intellectual property, and greed.   Designers and investors tried to take something inherently social, personally creative, and gamey and turn it into a patented product.  Now, they're backpeddling to reform the initial "openness" the genre needs to survive.

It's like rather then being given a nice high-quality hammer, we've been given a bunch of half-pounded nails in a board...  soon after which one becomes bored splitting skulls with or pounding our fists into a bloody pulp on.  For no ultimate reason at that.

So his proposal is to begin with a hand-crafted, polished, broad, directed experience (WoW) and then segue into an open-ended deep sandbox with nebulous emergent content (EVE). This is justified by his belief that content creation is, well, hard, and he dismisses user-created content as a potential solution pretty much out of hand. Well, I disagree. I don't believe that "emergent" gameplay compares favorably to hand-crafted polished content.

You hear about these really cool world-changing political shifts in EVE online, and they sound really awesome, but the vast overwhelming majority aren't playing at that level-- they're mining, or killing pirates, or PvPing, or trading resources. And that level isn't really about the game anyway, it was "played" on bulletin boards and IRC chat channels. The game was incidental, a justification.

I don't play games to chat with old friends, or collect cute pets, or decorate my in-game house with crazy furniture or play wacky dress-up. I don't want to be a miner, or a crafter, or a cog in a wheel of a giant corporation. I don't want to have to "find the fun". I pay the devs for that, it should be handed to me on a silver platter. I want to be the hero that saves the day, exploring dangerous new continents, every day overcoming new challenges, progressing through a well-written story. That's what I pay for.

Now, that's just me. Some people dig all that crap, and I have no religious objection to that. But it's not my bag. I want to be the hero.

I think he was grossly mistaken in his dismissal of user-created content, especially when he himself noted that the best moments in gaming are usually created by the gamer.  The game (especially the RPG and even moreso the MMORPG) is there as a Tool for the player to glean his own fun from.  Since MMORPGS are content-rich, they're only economically viable if only 1 juggernaut exists (WoW); one that is big enough to provide content in a timely and quality manner.
In order to combat this simple fact, you have to GO BACK to the beginning and make the game what it was meant to be... and that's a highly refined set of tools combined in a polished theme with just enough quality linear content to ease the player's injection into the gameworld until they can fend for themselves.

Once this is done, we'll be paying monthly for raw server usage instead of writers and artists... and development will be cheaper and quicker.
Until that time, the best we have to look forward to is this new fangled isometric MMO trend and/or pbbg on the web.  3d 1st/3rd person MMOs are dying quickly imo... and they'll continue to unless they embrace more refined development pre and post-release.  Just take too damned long and are too damned expensive for the eventual "2 weeks of pleasure" most people get from them.

Here's where I think the industry is mislead.  Sam and I want very different things from our game.  Instead of making a game for each of us, they attempt to make a watered-down version of a game that contains aspects that we both want while leaving neither of us truely satisfied. 

More specialized games please!  Less of this "appeal to the masses" crap. 

Those aren't the same things.

I'm waiting for someone to admit that mmo's aren't content rich and have very little in common with real games.

Well, I hope you weren't waiting for Bartle to say it, considering he's never made one.

Agreed.  The most content rich MMOs I've played pale in comparison to a game like Oblivion (+mods/addons), or better yet, Morrowind.  Let alone many other games.   MMOs are mediocre for their content, and fun for their social aspect.  I'm back on WoW at the moment because I wanted to hang out with some old friends that live far away from me and play a game with them, not because the content is oh-so-compelling.

Player created content = CoX custom missions.
Player created content != EvE PVP sandbox corp wars etc.

Actual user created content is likely to be gimmicky and kind of suck, but you will get some excellent things sometimes as well. I can see dismissing it just from the idea that it would be nigh-impossible to give it the sort of QC that it really should receive.

Thank God someone will say it: the dude made MUDs in the 70s. MUDs are cool and all but they're as far removed from modern MMO market and design realities as can be at this point. He's a sharp guy, I appreciate the psychology of games stuff that he's done but he's never done it.

So what if he hasn't made a MMO? Neither have most of us, and we certainly feel qualified to judge them. His ideas aren't naive or laughably clueless, they're just wrong. First, user created content is the future of online gaming. I've been saying that for a decade now, since before the lumboards, back on alt.games.everquest. It's manifest destiny. And secondly, while there may be some overlap, "game" players don't necessarily enjoy sandboxes. Try to put us in the same game, and what do you get? That's right, SWG. Yeah, I went there. It ends in Twitch!

Yea, and guess what? We're not giving keynotes at GDC.

That's why Eve rocks, and Bartle completely missed the point with his blatherings. Eve is focused on it's gameplay. Maybe that gameplay isn't for everyone, but the subscriber base they do have is (relativley) happy.

I like sandboxes, I like sims, and I like player initiated content. I hate storytelling in MMOGs because they're so terrible at it compared to single player games. That's my preference.

Eve isn't a better game that WoW. It's focused on what makes it different from WoW. That's the only lesson to take from Eve.

EvE is one of those great games that will never be made again because people don't work for free.

Ultimately MMOs need to be cheaper and be developed faster if we are to have more specialised niche titles. They will also look like crap because fast + cheap pretty much means graphics won't have the money spent on them. Try some things out, keep what works and if the game is unprofitable, shut it down and try again based on what you learned.

Yes, this is the Asian 2D MMO industry personified. Graphics are passable, development time is short(er), more MMO titles are produced, each with a slightly different theme / audience in mind.

I'll wait here for someone to chime in on how Asian MMOs suck, thus missing my point.

Koreans have been making 3D mmos for cheap years before 2D exploded onto the seen over there.

Er, have any of you who say he's never worked on a game actually read his CV?

http://www.mud.co.uk/richard/cv.htm

Fair enough cop that he's never had programming duties on a AAA, but he's done a hell of a lot more than 95 percent of the virtual world academic crowd.

Spunky Princess was a real tour de force. MUD & MUD2 was about it, plus some sms java stuff. None of these things are graphical mmos.

Most of the people here, particularly the ones that have been around a while, know exactly what he's done.

Which is be a neckbeard for 26 years. Prior to that, yea, he was an important figure. He didn't know why yet, but he's sure gonna let you know why now!

I think i've suddenly realized the attraction of being an academic. You can write "from on high" about the problems inherent in a topic without feeling obligated to present detailed solutions. Still, another analysis of the problems that a fairly obvious. Unlikely to be resolved though given current MMO's seem to spend 90% of their time on graphics, 9% sucking up to a licensed IP and about 1% actually thinking about the game mechanics and how fun / involving they are.

Yes, MANY of us want Bruce Sterling's job.

futurist?

FUTURIST?

Shit. Brilliant. I wish I'd been smart enough to market myself as that.

Edit: Yes, I just clumped Bartle in with a guy that makes shit up, for a living.

Well, I can't lie that Beyond the Beyond is a steaming pile of shit. There's reasons he doesn't allow comments on it.

Still, Bartle's done consultancy to Interplay, and he's also worked behind-the-scenes on a lot of MMOs, just not in a production role. I'm not one of his biggest fans - the Bartle Square is far too simplistic for my taste - but he does have some chops.

I mean, there's only so long someone can go to school and create an academic career. Bear in mind that PhD-land takes 3-4 years, then you've got 5-6 years of scrambling for tenure after that. If your argument, thus, is that academics have nothing valid to say about MMOs (since the career track to become one pretty much precludes much professional work) I really, really can't get on board with that.

I'm just saying that anyone who knows SO much should be making them instead of pulling this shit.

Today class, we're going to go to my ivory tower, built from MUD, and I'm going to show you my gold throne where I sit when I want to watch the peasants try to make something that I so obviously perfected 30 years ago. After that I'm going to snort blow off a co-eds thigh, give a speech somewhere I really shouldn't be since my last real game came out before the NES was even an IDEA let alone a console that was ready for worldwide release that would change the world. Afterwhich I'm going to say a bunch of really profound, obvious shit and show you a square I came up with back when such a thing may have been relevant. After that? Yea, you guessed it. I'm going to ride naked on the back of my golden eagle that I have named Fame.

This seemed like a thinly veiled attempt to make EVE/Shadowbane (that's right, I said it) look good. Oh, and an excuse to use a lot of abstract terms in different combinations. Far too many adjectives to cloud what he's trying to say with bias, "operate within artificial boundaries for obscure historical reasons", or otherwise to half-make a point "Eventually you segue into a freeform game".

Well shit, if that's all there is to it, we just need to work out how to keep them playing during that time of "eventually" and work out how this serves everyone, not just the submarket a freeform game appeals to.

The other side of the coin says, you make diku content in phases, you expand upon the story from expansion to expansion till you've retroactively portrayed (allowed players to consume) all the lore, you start over. That's what everyone does and that's what works.

All I took from those slides is that if an MMOG doesn't have history written about it it's going to fail?

Without being present to hear his talk, it is not really possible to understand the slides as he intended. He shouldn't release them, because they are really just a visual companion to his talks. Too easy to take what they say out of context.

Oh man, I hope not.

Seriously though, those look like an outline. Though I'm sure SOME dev here heard the speech. I have not, however, heard of a single dev that agreed with the majority of stuff he had to say.

At this point I'm ready to just say "It's put up or shutup time, Mr. Bartle."

There is value for someone whom does does know much.  Teaching others reguardless of the style of presentation.  Much of the education industry (academic) seems not be about teaching at times but it is still something that does get accomplished.

Knowing what to do, knowing how to do it, and leading a team to do it are uncommon accomplishments individually.  To all be done by the same person?  I have no expectations that anyone can do it all even if it sometimes happens.

That's a bunch of boring platitudes to say, "Academe is pretty hot! Bartle rulez!"

He's spent thirty plus years saying the same crap and never putting his hat in the ring even though he could go to any publisher with a proposal, assemble a team and get funding. That's the difference between us schlubs here and him: he could actually make the game he thinks is going to change the world and get all those subs but he refuses to do so.

Even some one who knows what they should be doing can be too poor at execution to get the job done.

This is partly why some companies have an evangalist who preaches and a manager who leads and both teach  everyone what needs to be done in different ways.

Man, I hope more people come in and say things I already know.

Seriously though, everything he said could've been said by anyone at f13. Or many other websites. Or 15 year olds who have no clue what Mud1 was, and they'd all still have missed the point. Just like Bartle did with his presentation.

The whole ivory tower song and dance a bunch of these people do, it has to stop, they aren't helping.

Edit: Clarity.

So.

No one should study novels or fiction. They should just write novels or fiction.
No one should study movies or photography. They should just make movies and take pictures.
No one should study art. They should just make it.

This is an old position. Doesn't just apply to cultural criticism: it's the thing people throw at economists a lot, too ("if you're so smart, why aren't you rich"?)

There is something totally legit to saying that a cultural critic needs to understand what goes into creating culture, and to be humble about the difficulties (practical and imaginative) that are involved. Sure, I'd rather hear Richard (or anyone else) talk about that in detail--about why good ideas or designs in MMOs actually falter when there is an attempt to put them into practice, really get into the design process. (Don't forget though that this is the hardest aspect of current MMOs to study because most producers are insanely close-mouthed about these kinds of specific questions, even compared to the rest of the games industry.)

On the other hand, putting this argument about doing over studying too crudely drops a lot of excluded middles out:

1) That people who make culture sometimes do not themselves understand how best to do it. Come on, on virtual worlds, people here know very well that experience in the field of virtual world design is NOT an instant ticket to "doing virtual world design right". You can have the programming chops and a lot of experience actually implementing virtual worlds and still fuckup royally even with a very unambitious product, both at the level of basic design and at the level of technical management. Right now we have a market of virtual worlds where arguably all of them are fucked up in some important ways, but where most of them are fucked up in almost every way they could be. So obviously you need something more than technical skill and experience: it could be that some of what you need is a critical understanding of virtual worlds as a cultural form. Maybe sometimes you have to get that from someone who focuses on that issue but who can't do some of the other technical work.

2) That there's value in studying a cultural form that doesn't have to translate into making it, as long as the person studying it is humble about the limitations of such study. In the case of virtual worlds, for example, there's a whole bunch of useful shit to know that isn't easily generated within design itself: who plays, who might play, what they do when they play, why they play, what they'd rather play, whether play is actually why people are drawn to virtual worlds. Or my favorite, the relationship between design/code/rules and practices/forms of play--a relationship that designers very self-evidently do not understand well or they wouldn't constantly be fucking up along those lines. Sometimes the study of a cultural form brings in useful bodies of knowledge or methodologies that designers generally know little or nothing about: sociology of networks, ethnography, microeconomics, social psychology and so on.
 
3) That someone needs to teach other people about a cultural form, and to help people refine or deepen their own critical knowledge of that form, rather than make it. E.g., that academics who study virtual worlds have as their first goal communicating to wider audiences and teaching students, not making products.

4) That if you're going to bitch that Richard Bartle needs to be making games rather than analyzing them, why doesn't this apply to literally everyone? Nuke the entire MMOG forum here from orbit, tell everyone to shut their piehole, because the only people entitled to an analytic opinion are game-makers. Game-players and academics and anybody else are disqualified.

5) That if the problem is Richard Bartle gets to talk to GDC, let's see what your keynote would look like. I mean, you gotta have a keynote at a meeting like that, so show me something startlingly better. If it's annoying that someone talks about designing games without designing games (recently), it's equally annoying that someone talks about how easy it is to make a compelling keynote without making a compelling keynote.  Or maybe it's ok to criticize without doing?

Someone just got butthurt.

I'll make a deal with you, in 23 years, if we're still here bitching about the same stuff, I'll nuke the mmog forum from orbit. That's how long Bartle has been in his ivory tower.

Simply put, there's a statute of limitations on wankery.

You've built up an excellent straw man there though.

Look, if you want to argue that Richard in specific flogs some of the same stuff repetitively, cool. But it's just as much a straw man to trot out the "don't study, make" thing so sweepingly.

I don't point it out so sweepingly. I really reserve it just for Bartle.

Look, he's never made a modern MMOG. Shit, he's never really made a modern game. People laugh when George Broussard talks. Well, at least he made Duke Nukem 3D. Yes, Duke Nukem Forever elicits laughter from every corner of the industry when uttered aloud. Yet the guy who made a MUD back when Reagan was president still gets to talk with authority.

Don't try to build up an argument that makes Bartle look anything more than insipid. It'll only be met with groans when the information is coming from one of the few guys in the industry that could get any budget he wants (god knows why) and yet doesn't.

I don't much care about the ad hominem schtick, as far as I'm concerned he's perfectly credible, he's just wrong.

Not only that, he could waltz in to any number of projects in development right now by dev houses doing sandbox style games and have free run of the place. He wouldn't even need to secure his own money or deal with suits. There's a huge list of jobs for CCP doing WoD design. Go for it, dude. Schild's right on when he says this is about Bartle, and Bartle alone,  who's never done *anything* concrete in the industry. He's just one of  us with a resume that stopped thirty years ago.

I think he's wrong about some important things, also. And I'd rather he spend more time thinking about why some of these ideas might prove difficult to implement, or about how good plans turn into difficult implementations. I'd say that about any academic critics of design. But...I mean, if you're comfortable in an academic position, you've got teaching commitments, you're trying to keep a program going, why should you have to drop all that and get involved in a long, painful effort to bring a product to a marketplace in order to have the right to keep on teaching and talking about a legitimately interesting subject?

Gee, I don't know.

CREDIBILITY?

Another way to come at it:

Why *can't* the people with a lot of experience and technical skills in this field make better MMOs? Why do most of them make MMOs which are horribly fucked-up like Warhammer and AoC?

It is an interesting subject. But he's treated as more than just a guy who talks about an interesting subject. There's this starry eyed "if only BARTLE were making games" thing from his fans and a kind of wink wink "if only *I* were making games" thing from him. He's also not talking about just what's fun or the study of subjective stuff like that; he's very much saying that the way to save these games is to do it like THIS where THIS is not only wrong but something he could actually do in a heartbeat.

OK, now you're just straying off point. This isn't about Funcom shipping way too early or Mythic making core design errors. We all know Funcom shot their wad and it was a blank and we know Mythic has people like Barnett who just can't seem to shut the hell up. At least they tried.

Maybe you're not getting it.

Bartle hasn't tried. All he's done, for nearly 3 decades, is grow a wicked neckbeard.

Oh for fucks sake.

Edit:  Along the same lines, it's far easier to snipe from the sidelines (a la Bartle or anyone else for that matter, including players and other commentators).  The minute someone like Bartle DOES get charged with creating a game and it (likely) fails miserably, their lolcredibility gets tossed out the window (see Raph and ask yourself just how relevent he is these days - though to be fair he was always a designer, but his 'academic' work is what brought him 'fame').

I have yet to meet a starry-eyed fan of Richard's in many years of going to conferences and reading scholarly and non-scholarly literature about virtual worlds. People cite him, he has access to various soap-boxes when he wants them, he's given respect both for creating MUDs and establishing them as a legitimate subject of academic interest well before anyone else did but no one particularly genuflects. You can take or leave whatever he says concretely, in its own terms: the credibility of his points stands or falls independently of his career.

Aha! The core of the matter- facial jealousy. I've figured it out  :why_so_serious:

e: I thought credibility was a thing that only sources of information could possess, not the information itself. Whether he's right or wrong is an issue, but not the one at steak here.

A million Bartle Scale signatures in MMO forums across the world beg to differ with you.

People use the Bartle-scales, sure, but a lot of them don't even know where it comes from or who Richard Bartle is. I've had all sorts of players tell me that they're achiever-killers or whatever but they're not fans of Richard Bartle the neckwattled academic. It's like saying that people who know their Myers-Briggs type are fans of Myers and Briggs.

Dude. He's giving keynotes. People are still starry eyed. There are hundreds, if not thousands of mmog devs worldwide that are far more qualified than he is.

Shit, the lone QA tester on Vanguard has more MMOG experience than Bartle does.

Perhaps you're missing the point. Which would be impressive because it's a giant bricking coming right at your face.

Seriously. You're arguing that people aren't all gaga over a guy who has never developed a video game when they invited him to A GAME DEVELOPERS CONFERENCE, an invitation not to talk about theories of fun but to talk about theories of fun and how everyone should do a job he's never done before.

"It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat."

I get it. I'm just saying it's overblown. A keynote is about what someone has to say, and whether an audience finds interesting or stimulating or fun to hear. It's not a job application or an award for lifelong achievement. When you're putting together a meeting, you try to think of someone your attendees are going to listen to and maybe take issue with in good ways: inviting some guy who has a lot of experience but who is painfully shy or a bad public speaker is an epic fail.  If this particular keynote strikes you as badly done, fine. I think Richard makes some obvious points rather blithely in it, if I'd been in the audience I'd have been grumbling about some better possible choices, too.

Are you all finished? Well, allow me to retort. (http://www.brokentoys.org/2009/05/01/worst-presentation-ever/)

You amazingly missed the point on the very first point of your retort.

Lum, by posting that to your blog, you've made it a pain in the ass to quote.

In short.

1. I would not create UO. Didn't like it then, found it a mess then, don't like it now, is a bigger mess now. And much like I am with Bartle, I'm pretty fed up with the arguments that still come up every now and then about UO.
2. Obviously he can't walk in to a publisher and get $50M. But he sure does talk like he can. As such, he should really, you know, put up or shut up.
3. I think it's about time we quarantined Patient Zero. It has become a disease and the template for 90% of what we hate.

This one I'll quote:

Bartle hasn't just not worked on WoW.

He hasn't worked on ANY MMOGs. According to his CV he may or may not have consulted on some games, but it's under NDA. If he has consulted on some games, I'd like to just go out of my way to blame him for them all being derivative. It'll make things a whole lot easier on everyone. I'm pretty sure he didn't consult on Tabula Rasa or Vanguard though. Those were made by some of those pioneers who had figured it all out.

Look, it's cool that you like the guy and think he's relevant and may have something interesting to say. But as I said before, there's a statute of limitations on wankery. Or, if you'd prefer politeness, can someone please take the needle off the broken record.

 :popcorn:

I bet these key note speaking engagements pay decently.  How can I get one?  I made a few MUDs in my day.

Depends, but sometimes they do.

Start writing about MUD design and how it applies to contemporary MMOGs/virtual worlds. In places other than nerd boards. That could get you onto some conference panels, etc. How are your speaking skills? Think you could keep an audience interested and entertained for 30-45 minutes with a talk and then answer questions and disagreements afterwards?

I've read some of the MUDdev archive and yes -- every argument about MMO design idea (permadeath, economies, themeparks, etc.) is in there.  Point is, no one current in industry I bet cares.  They will continue to reinvent the same problems over and over again.  That's job security for some (e.g. Paul Barnett).  And the players definitely don't care. 

This feels more like a generational problem -- the people starting to create and run MMO's are not from the MUD generation.  Disagree? Let's see where MJ and BigPaul are in a year+ with their MUD cred after launching WAR.

This MUD vs MMORPG (1990's) feels like the kind of culture war that happened with the plummy types of live theatre drama vs TV recorded drama (1940's).  TV won, WoW won. 

Edit: I'd also note that having inventor and academic credibility isn't sufficient in industry.  People will not follow someone's ideas just because they are the most complex, elegant, innovative or even correct.  The history of consumer software in particular has shown repeatedly that it's NOT the best software which wins commercially.  Hell, it's not even the most complex, elegant, let alone innovative software titles that become successful.  So, I don't see how MMO's will ever be any different.  Although I like theory and respect MUD's, but I'm kind of plummy like that.

And I don't really understand what Lum was trying to say.

This is pretty much exactly what Richard says every single time I've been at a conference with him: we encountered all these problems and issues before with MUDs, nothing much has changed, people keep walking into the same buzzsaws, how about trying something we never tried with MUDs? He concedes that there's a few things about the size of playerbases and graphical interfaces that are minor variations, and of course, that the underlying technical management is different in scale and structure. On design issues, I think he has a point, but it gets frustrating to hear after a while because sometimes you're experiencing or seeing those issues for yourself in a new way and it doesn't matter that someone else experienced them before--you want to think your way through it independently. And because I do think in a few cases graphical commercial MMOGs have issues of their own, or innovative variations on MUD designs.

But inasmuch as you concede that some of the issues in the current design arena are well-established, it means that experience designing MUDs is highly relevant to judging design now. And it might be that if you always wanted to try something different back then, you still want someone to try it now. Can't see what's wrong with that, unless the stuff you want to try is flawed. (I think, for example, that he's way too pessimistic about user-created content as an idea, then AND now.)

Easily, but who gives a shit about who I am?

Erm, neither is Bartle. GDC took place last month. He spoke at IMGDC, which has no relationship to the various GDC-trademarked conferences such as the main GDC in San Francisco. It's a MUCH smaller conference (by at least an order of magnitude, probably more), put on by totally different people. That may or may not matter to you, but keynoting IMGDC is not the same thing as keynoting GDC. I would agree that it's be a little odd for Dr. Bartle to be keynoting GDC at this point but given that he birthed both MMOs and indie MMOs I don't see why you're getting your pants in a tizzy about him keynoting a small conference focused on independent MMOs.

--matt

Christ. Not this again.

What's the difference between an MMO and an indie MMO?

Having stockholders.

I think you're missing the point. This was IMGDC. Keynoting a minor conference is not a big deal. It's not GDC. It's not E3. It's not PAX. With all due respect to IMGDC and Dr. Bartle (whom I respect, apparently unlike some of you), it's not as if it's the kind of conference where you expect to see Rob Pardo keynoting. You seem to hear "keynote" and think, "Omygod he's being blessed as the expert of all experts by the entire games industry! We can't have that! Let's slam him for being too uppity!"

Whether the comparison is apt or not is beside the point, but if Thomas Edison were alive I'm sure having him keynote a conference on the energy challenges we face in the 21st century would still be very interesting regardless of whether he's done anything since way back when.


--matt

So if you have an ambition to be given a shit over, get out there and start writing and talking. Unless you think conference organizers troll nerd boards and say, "Hey, that guy there, I like some of his two-sentence posts and his forum name is cool, let's invite him to give a talk even though none of us know who is or whether he's a drooling retard in person". If you don't have any interest in writing or talking about games outside of work you've done and boards you post to, then why bitch about somebody else doing so? Because they said something you'd say and you're irritated that you didn't get to say it instead? Or because you've got something else to say and a burning ambition to do it? If it's the ambition thing, then get out there and get heard--there's places to publish that will get you some reputation capital.

Not a discussion I find very interesting insofar as I don't care whether something is "corporate" or "indie" only whether it's "good". It's why I don't go to IMGDC (and turned down an invitation to speak at it. Well that and I get conference burn-out very easily. They put IMGDC too soon after GDC.)

However, I'm sure MUD 1 would be considered indie by absolutely anyone's standards.

--matt

He was saying "Richard Bartle is rubber, and F13 is glue. You called him a neckbeard, I'm going to do the same to you! Boing fwip!"

Also, "There's no way Richard Bartle will notice this discussion in a forum thread, so please read about it on my blog".

 :oh_i_see:

I know the difference between corporate and indie.  You said he birthed both, I'm not sure what the distinction would be in that regard.  An MMOG is an MMOG regardless of it's funding.

Matt, we know (or at least I know) that you are completely incapable of not defending Bartle. He's your forefather. He created your livelihood. Fact of the matter is that your comparison to Edison is just pure madness. First of all, Edison never stopped progressing. He didn't dick off to an ivory tower where he could repeat the same shit for 30+ years. A more apt comparison would be comparing Bartle to an 80s band. 30 years later, they're still performing the same shit for the same people at the same venues because they have no marketable skill in today's economy. I'm SO SORRY for discounting your predecessor to that.

Not really.

Get over it.

I'm glad you keep making money off MUDs. But please, don't pop up whenever MUDs come up with completely predictable tripe. Though, this time, I didn't expect anything as ridiculous as the Edison comparison.

Also, he didn't birth either. All he did was birth and INFLICT THE DISEASE that is diku. We'd have virtual worlds and such today without him. The internet GUARANTEED IT.

Meh. I've always taken the position that academics are like reporters and editors rolled into one. They aren't interested in making things happen but telling you how and why it unfolds. It ruffles my feathers they don't do as much about something they talk so passionately about but it doesn't hurt that someone is putting the time to research the material and condensing into something proactive people can follow as useful advice.

Even though Bartle repeats himself everytime he does manage to say something new and interesting when I read his work and it helps shapes my ideas on what I probably should be doing.

It'd be cool to see you have a conversation in which you don't resort to just insulting or belittling people.

You also don't have much of an idea of what you're talking about. I disagree with Bartle more than I agree with him. I think the "Bartle Types" are kind of nonsense and he and I somewhat violently disagree about the importance of "the magic circle." What that has to do with recognizing that he's a valid keynote speaker (not that anyone needs my or your blessing to make someone a keynote speaker), I don't know. I'm capable of disagreeing with someone on many issues and still respecting what they've done.


My livelihood is mainly making 3d MMOs these days, btw. I'm still the chairman of Iron Realms but it's been awhile since I was actively running it.

Sure he stopped progressing. He died. What has Edison done lately? Nothing. He's dead. Thus my point: If you brought Edison back today he'd still make for an interesting keynote despite the fact that he hasn't done anything for many decades.

I don't compare Bartle to Edison in the sense of their level of accomplishment. Clearly, Edison did bigger and more impressive things than anyone in the games industry ever has.

I was merely pointing out that not having done something for awhile doesn't disqualify you from being able to entertain an audience at a keynote.


Dr. Bartle didn't make DIKU any more than he made WoW.

And yeah, we'd have virtual worlds and such today without him, but that's the case for most firsts that rely on evolving prior work, which is to say almost all inventions/firsts. We'd have airplanes without the Wright Brothers, but I bet any aviation conference would be thrilled to be able to raise them from the dead and keynote.

--matt

Had a good laugh reading that but instead of trying to roll the rock up I'll let "teh funn E" slide.

Personally I think the most relevent thought of the poster you quoted but editted out was the idea that MMO devs don't specialize and as a result try to go after both the people who want to be served content and those who want emergent behavior content at the same time and failing with both.

This is why I actually disagree with Bartle. Making an MMO like the first MUDs is dumb because it requires a huge investment in resources in both manpower and funding.

I've had an idea of what to do for an MMO of this type and I'm sure many others have thought so as well but I would suggest for practical matters you make two or four MMOs that are smaller, more focused on certain needs of players and then you make your one MMO to rule them all.

Above all else you should acknowledge that MMOs have a lifespan, based on not players getting bored but because it is software based on techniques and technologies that will make them less manageable to code with later on.

I'm not sure what you're trying to say. Yes, the Wright Brothers and Edison would make great keynote speakers at any given conference. I'm also pretty sure they wouldn't parrot back what forums have been saying (both right, and wrong) for nearly a decade. You say you aren't comparing them like that, but you are. Also, Bartle isn't dead like the rest of your examples, he's simply not in the game and yet still feels comfortable telling people how to make the game.

Honestly, go re-read my 80s comparison. It's pretty much note for note what Bartle has been doing since MUD2.


Yea, I know, Earth Eternal, right? Bravo to you for actually throwing your hat in the ring, which is all I'm asking Bartle do. Even if he fails, at least MAYBE he'll grok why he failed, unlike the bulk of the industry these days.

On a totally separate note - and don't take this the wrong way, it's not an insult, I'm just calling it as I see it - whoever is doing the concept art, it needs less Furry. You're approaching 3D Furtopia levels here (admittedly, I know nothing baout the gameplay, but I'm not really referring to that).

Fake: Oh, right, yea, I know Bartle doesn't need our blessing. I'm just incredibly tired of hearing the same bland crap every day and it's even worse when someone makes a presentation out of it, misses the whole point, and then proceeds to come off as authoritative on the subject. Hence my whole "put up or shut up" deal with him. Maybe in person the keynote was so "THIS IS HOW IT'S DONE" but the slides sure are, and the internet functions on a level of around 99% on the perception is reality scale.

Never.


Allow me to cherry pick a point out of your blog entry there.


You could write it in letters of fire on the insides of people's eyelids and WoW clones would still get funding. That too, is an old discussion. It doesn't matter how often or how loudly people bitch about game design. The entire history of video gaming is there for everyone to peruse and see that. People love to set money on fire. Not only in the video game industry, but this is the topic nearest to our hearts.

I prefer the Koster brand of Sacred Cows.

I'm really not comparing them like that! I'd pick more obscure examples of inventors but then nobody would know who they are.

You and most of the posters here seem to feel pretty comfortable telling people how to make a game too. Most of the posters have no experience making any sort of MUD/MMO, etc that I can tell. Does that invalidate all your opinions? I don't think so. It does mean you're writing/offering opinions without the benefit of experience but shit, Blizzard had never made an MMO before either. Experience isn't everything.

It's something though, and even if Bartle's hands-on experience is generally limited to very old games he's got a unique perspective insofar as he's the only guy whose perspective spans the entire history of MUDs/MMOs/virtual worlds. I agree that there's a lot of room for interpretation as to how valuable that is but I don't think it's fair to just dismiss it out of hand. Nobody's saying that because he spoke at a small conference (or even a big conference) he's gospel. But it's a point of view and it's from someone who has been watching the industry develop longer than anyone else. Worth at least not just dismissing, even if you disagree with most of what he says, no?




Thanks, though I threw my hat in the ring 13 years ago and it's not left the ring since.

You know, you say things like the bulk of the industry doesn't understand why it failed, which implies that you know that their understanding of why they've failed is flawed....which implies that you know why they failed.

Why do you think you (who, with all due respect, haven't thrown your hat in the ring) know why games fail but Bartle can't, yet has more experience than you do? I'm not trying to turn that into a pissing match. It's a genuine question.

Beyond whether he does or doesn't, I guess I don't buy that it's not legitimate to offer advice and criticism when you haven't done it. It's the same jab that people lob at film, book, theatre, game, music, etc reviewers, and much like the same (largely illegitimate) jab that professional critics throw at do-it-for-no-pay bloggers. Heck, in Bartle's case at least he has done it albeit on a small scale, a couple of decades ago.


No worries, not insulted by that. We've gotten very good reactions to our concept art among our target market (younger than you) though, which is the important thing.

We're not going after the mainstream retail MMO crowd. We're not hubristic enough to try to compete against the big boys at our size (25 people) on a sub $5m budget.

Ah, but love, hate, or indifferent to him, Raph is out there trying his best and refining his ideas.

Being in academia, I'm quite fine with researchers and such.  Experience does matter, however.  The longer one goes without that experience the more theoretical the research becomes.  It might be really good research, really interesting research, but putting it into practice lets one refine it in important ways that merely discussing it ad nauseum does not.  At this point Bartle is more of a theoretician.

I guess what I'm saying is that Schild has a valid point, even if I don't agree as vehemently.  Some people don't like theoreticians telling them how things should be since it often lacks the experience of how things are. <shrug>

John Madden and Madeleine Albright are theoreticians too...
Instead of hypothesizing and passing judgment on the man's character how about you, Schild or anyone else who feels tired of rehashing old news just link back to the days you actually did discuss the merits of his arguments and not the merits of the person speaking them?

I understand guys like yourself have been in the Mud/MMO scene for a long time and aren't as interested in regurgitating old ideas but I think you are over shooting your goal of trying to bring up some practical issues of listening to Bartle (in addition to any other source we use) by unintentionally making every statement he makes sound irrelevant because he's "too theoretical." It doesn't help advance discussion for the younger generation like myself and slows down our ability to get up to speed with where you are.

Go look at the WAR forum. You'll find all you ever need to know about mmos.

I'm not quite sure you're getting it.

We know what fun is, and feel pretty comfortable telling them / you / whomever that what they're making is not fun.

I agree, it's just a modest point. Since people who have an experience of how things are also seem rather short on ideas about how things could be.

Unlike some posters around here, who are very free with ideas about who things are and how tihngs could be without the benefit of experience, knowledge or modesty, but love to bitch about how everyone else gets things wrong. Which is cool as long as it's just forum shit but maybe less cool the more entitled and chest-thumping it gets.

Simply hearing the same old bullshit you hear from  every arm chair game designer who has playing WoW for x amount of years and/or has spent most of their early mmo experience playing some type of sandbox game and can recall every "grand adventure" with dewy eyes.

Fuck you DLRiley, I agree with you.

Um, I've said one thing in this thread, and that it's Schild has a point but it's being missed because he's being overly aggressive about it.  I said nothing about the quality of Bartle's work, his character, nor my feelings on the rehasing of ideas.

For us to discuss about the merits of the talk, we'd have to hear it.  All we have are the slides, which if representative of the talk don't say much of note, and if not representative of the talk aren't worth discussing.  So I didn't bother trying.

A couple things.

1. We're a bunch of folks that like theorizing about games. I don't think ANYONE HERE thinks they have all the answers or even some of the answers - except in very, very specific and obvious cases, like WAR or CoH or AoC. And ironically, All of those games, except WAR have gotten around to making the exact changes we bitched about before anyone else. Our anger at certain design issues is pretty laser-focused. Particularly my own. Mostly because I'm willing to sacrifice and forgive other transgressions for certain key elements of fun to be resolved (for example, yea, WAR had lag, but the EXP curve and grind associated with it were a far greater issue than 'some lag at a keep siege.')
2. Some of us will go on and try our hand and see if we have some of the answers. Some won't.
3. This really isn't a case of chest-thumping, if it came across that way - well, whoops.

Edit: To add an example.

Actually I was just thinking that maybe the central problem is that Bartles talk focuses on wow-likes being a result of a failure of game design. Judging by the beta I'm in its more a game production issue with those financing (or selling the game) pointing at WoW and saying "get me a piece of that". Combine that as a design goal with a very agressive production schedule and there's little time to implement and experiment with alternative gameplay models. If you have the time to only implement one attempt you're forced to play it safe, let alone let it bake and see if you have emergent gameplay.

Pretty much. We can whine and cry about Fun, but if a certain game company has management or investor issues, it's not going to put out anything but a DIKU clone. If we're lucky, maybe with a side order of RVR or some neat feature that survives the process.

I think we all missed the point of Bartle's talk. By comparing it to Lost Girls, he's saying that modern MMOs need more pornography erotica.


This horrible analogy made me laugh a lot. Good work. Zombie Edison would have nothing to say that's relevant because in the near 80 years since his death the world has completely changed. He wouldn't recognise it. "Hey Edison, let's hear your opinions on modern movies, modern electricity and music distribution methods. What's that? You don't like talky movies, you're from a time when electricity wasn't as widely available as it is today and you're only familiar with record players? Plus you are sickened by the moral decay you see in our society? Oh, you wily scamp!"

He'd probably make a grab for all the cash earned on his old patents and dance a jig on Tesla's grave though.

I don't disagree with the ideas Bartle puts forward, but all that stuff is high level. Let's see some actual tactical discussion about how to implement it and then I'll be impressed. He doesn't have to even make the thing, just discuss the systems he'd put in place to do what he says needs to be done. Which is exactly the same point Lum ends up on - how do you do that?

If it were me, the answer is not to aim for millions of players, but try to do things small, cheap and fast. Develop a business plan where 20 000 players would be enough to make money off, create a MMO that allowed for rapid development of system iterations and beta the hell out of it - feature and content ready for launch - for a good 3 months at least prior to launch to iron out the rough edges / polish polish polish. The modern MMO industry seems to be aiming at getting 1m players by developing titles that take years to get out the door, crush beta into a short period of time (or don't pay attention to live beta feedback), try to appeal to everyeon and launch before a full coat of polish has been applied.

The linked presentation amounts to "let's give them cake and also eat it!" An entire WOW plus an entire Eve - brilliant!

It was also full of errors and poorly thought-out ideas. If raids get old after the first time you do them then why do people run them dozens of times? If the elder game in WOW is boring and nobody likes it then why does WOW have a billion subscribers, many of which have been subbed for a half-decade?

Much of what was presented as being a problem was really just "I don't like this stuff" masquerading as analysis. But the goal of game makers is not to appeal to Bartle, it's to appeal to players. In his catty retort Lum makes the same mistake:


Yes, except that WOW has neither of those and is a hundred times more popular. The first three points of Lum's retort are this sort of wishful thinking.


Translation: I don't like WOW.


Translation: I don't like WOW.

So apparently WOW sucks, it's poorly designed, it's not the kind of game people come back to and it needs to take a lesson from Eve and a BBS from 1975 where high school students who couldn't get laid could pretend to be wizards. Because those are widly successful whereas WOW is a failure...

I'm not a fan of WOW but this sort of "analysis" is just daft ego-driven nonsense. If I was going to make an MMO I'd be studying WOW like hell to figure out why people like it so much, not dismissing it for not copying my awesome MUD.

Lum really gives himself away at the end of his post:


If players want to play games where they consume content isn't that what devs should be delivering? The subtext of Lum's post is "how do we force feed players games they don't want?" How can we trick them into playing virtual worlds - games we want to make regardless if anyone wants to play them.

The only people who have done that, are other WoW devs.

I agree, but I don't think years of polish would have saved, for example, WAR. The problems with WAR were the client code itself, everyone bitches about how it feels "sluggish" after playing WoW, and the design decisions around pve versus pvp. You say "Listen to the beta feedback" but that supposes a willingness to sift through all the crap to find the few gems of feedback, and then interpret player desires into real code.

Polish is vastly overrated. I think Sly's got it in his sig "Polish begins on day one." You have to begin a project paying attention to little details that the player is going to have to deal with, like UI and font size and client responsiveness. You can't just tweak that shit later, because people in your beta are going to tell their freinds now and sink you before you get out of dock.

Sorry, I edited out what you responded to.  :awesome_for_real:

What I had written was that I don't see a lot of MMO vets seriously examining WOW to try to figure out why it's so successful beyond ego-preserving fluff like "It's called Warcraft" or "they had tons of money." In particular I don't see anyone honestly stating "here are literally 50 things my game had that WOW vastly improved upon." Even simple stuff like not having to talk to everyone in town over and over again to get quests, the kind of thing that can really annoy players but was accepted as the status quo until WOW looked on the genre with fresh eyes.

Considering my Xfire profile says I've sunk over 800 hours into WoW, you sure nailed my personal likes and dislikes to a T! Hey, next tell me what movie I like. I'm kinda curious. Then again, the parts you quoted as proof that I hated WoW and should pray for death was where I was summarizing Bartle's presentation points, not making my own. Maybe Bartle doesn't like WoW, and you should tell him what movie he likes instead.


Whereas high school students in 2009 who couldn't get laid pretend to be wizards in WoW instead. This is clearly an improvement. By god, we have PARTICLE EFFECTS now.

I didn't say WoW was a failure. I said attempting to clone WoW would likely fail. Given recent history that is not really a daring prediction.


Considering that most of those innovations have essentially become user interface guidelines for MMOs (clear visible distinction for quest givers being the most obvious example) it's pretty obvious that question is being asked and answered repeatedly. Not all the answers are correct; not everything in WoW is holy writ and just aping a user interface won't create a particularly compelling game.

If I had to list the one innovation WoW made over every game that came before, it would be in embracing the solo player. Almost every MMO to that point "incentivized" grouping by punishing the solo player because it was believed that truly compelling MMO gameplay was through grouped experiences. WoW disproved that theory handily.

I do like virtual worlds, and I'm certainly not going to apologize for that, both from a personal standpoint (because last I checked, we were actually allowed to like different things) and from a production standpoint (because virtual worlds tend towards systemic design, which is far less expensive in manpower and time to craft than content design). And there absolutely is a place in the market for a well-executed VW. Whether that VW can also deliver WoW-class content design is an open question (and which sam an eggplant's post referred to). Not really sure where you got "omgth wow sucks because I couldn't get laid in 1975" from. (I was 9 years old, so I don't feel too slighted about it.)

You really want to try to misrepresent a blog post that everyone can read? The points you summarized were bracketed by:


So they are good points, obvious truths, F13 "didn't get it" and...you don't in any way endorse those points. Right.


The fact that your reponse to my request for an evaluation of WOW's success is a non-sequitor about innovation says it all.

Craft matters.

Dueling edits! :


At the end of your blog post you raise the question of how to entice people to VWs who aren't interested in a VW experience. Isn't that the wrong question? Creating a game that can compete with WOW on its terms is already nearly impossible, creating a game that competes with WOW on iits own turf *and* has all these awesome gameplay systems and open-worldy things? Good luck.

There's nothing wrong with creating a VW as long as you realistically budget it and aim it at players who want that sort of game. Trying to cast a wide net and entice WOW players seems doomed to very expensive failure. The biggest problem with Bartle's presentation is that it amounted to "let's smush Eve and WOW together!" Which is a fine design if you have unlimited time and buidget. Otherwise not so much.

Isn't a fair thing to say at this point MMO devs are forgetting they are building large systems and when calculating the debugging process it should take up atleast half of your development time? As a result they should consider beta as part of the debugging process where they are debugging the 'unfun' as well as the critical system errors?


This assumes the two variations of MMO design are mutually exclusive in terms of existence. It's a big investment sink making it an impractical goal not an impossible one.

Every time I hear a dev say their not competing with WoW I roll my eyes. Simply by being an mmo your competing with WoW. There is no real depth in the mmo industry to really say your not competing with a 8 million pound gorilla. Your either WoW side of the spectrum or Eve side, and EvE is pure simulator so its a pretty crowded room already. Lets see your either coexisting with WoW or your a WoW alternative. If your game can't hold up as its own as a WoW alternative, LotR, EQ2, FF11, CoH/V than your budget should allow you to coexist with WoW like the dozens of f2p games supported by RMT. Being a WoW clone isn't a flaw, people are playing the fuck out of games that have very little not in common in WoW by the virtue of being a diku, being unable to either coexist or be an alternative to WoW is. If you want to move closer to the EvE side of the spectrum, you might want to understand that EvE is not a game in the sense that it has very different accessibility issues, YES YOUR NICHE GAME MUST BE ACCESSIBLE, you encounter with your standard diku. Since you ARE playing a simulator and people enjoy it much differently than an actual game. And just a minor hint, just because EvE has world PvP, doesn't mean you have to participate in it at all.

I don't know if they are forgetting per se, but in the race to launch not enough time is being left to deal with it. Open betas have been used as marketing exercises, but the reality is that they should be viewed as large scale tests at how both systems and their underpinning ideas work with a critical mass of players. It's as close to real play as the game gets before launch. But at this point pretty much everything is locked down and the devs are really just stress testing systems to see if the servers can cope. If critical mass dislikes or breaks a system during open beta, there usually isn't time to fix it up prior to launch.

Then again, I'm of the opinion that MMOs shouldn't even announce themselves until closed beta is about to start. Plus no-one has put up a few stacks of a million dollars each to test out my ideas.

No, misreading and misrepresenting blog postings seems to be entirely your area of expertise. Of course I endorse them. What I don't do is make the logical leap you accuse me of and say that since, to quote me,

There’s a vast difference between user-created content (such as City of Heroes’ architect system) and user-generated ‘content’ (such as the Eve Great War) - the latter is compelling and why people come back to MMOs.

Cloning WoW is expensive, you will probably fail, and the result isn’t very good from a design standpoint anyway

that means, to quote you,

Yes, except that WOW has neither of those and is a hundred times more popular. The first three points of Lum's retort are this sort of wishful thinking.

Translation: I don't like WOW.

The first point is at least arguable - although it's not the point I (or Bartle in his original presentation) was making, if you wanted to I suppose you could derive that. I'd disagree since the 'stickiness' for players in WoW raiding is less in the mechanics of how raids are laid out and more in how guilds cooperate to work through them, which is the sort of emergent high-end gameplay being referred to. But that is at least something that be argued over.

The second point is less arguable, and more ridiculous, since you're jumping to making assumptions about my motives that don't actually exist. (Especially since I just made a post nerd raging about how Blizzard is keeping me from playing WoW with their latest holiday patch.) I mean, if you think asserting that cloning WoW is a bad idea from a business case standpoint (or even a creative standpoint) means that I hate WoW.... that's not arguable, it's just silly.


Yes, it said I didn't respond to a tedious request to type a 50 point competitive analysis into an unrelated forum post and instead responded with 1 point.


Actually, it's noting that both Eve and WoW do what they do very, very well, and both games address failings in the other, and learning from both and including elements of both might be worth trying.

I'll abort our slapfight (in part because I can't read large italic blocks) and focus on the meat of the discussion.


Typically games that do two things half-assed turn out a lot worse than games that do one thing well. One of the reasons WOW is successful is because it aggressively cut out a lot of features. It's hard for me to imagine how you could include elemnents of both Eve and WOW without creating Eve plus WOW. If you strip out a lot of features from Eve then it wouldn't have the richness of systems for the emergent gameplay to be interesting, and if you cut out a lot of content from WOW then it wouldn't stack up to WOW and other content-heavy games.

In addition there is such a thing as subtraction by addition. If I'm interested in a simulation game then I have to wade through a bunch of levels of directed mob fights first? If I'm interested in directed content I have to navigate large open spaces with no quests only to support the simulation aspects? My UI has a bunch of stock market trading buttons cluttering it that I have no interest in?

I have to question the premise that Eve addresses many failings in WOW. According to Bartle the Eve endgame is much stronger than the WOW endgame. Yet WOW is orders of magnitude more popular, even among long tenured players. Hmm. Not to mention the fact that expansions and patches make the game essentially episodic in nature. The end-game matters less when the level cap is raised and new quests added on a regular basis. I don't see how Eve addresses the failings of WoW as much as being a different game that appeals to a different crowd. Not trying to appeal to every player on earth is not a failing, it's a strength. What exactly is the failing that Eve addresses?

Your perspective seems rooted in "how do we justify making virtual worlds, given that not many people want to play virtual worlds?" But instead of the obvious "make it on a small budget for a niche crowd" your answer is "sucker WoW players into paying for it."

Edit: In the end saying something vague like "let's try melding these two games" is pointless, especially when "let's" is really "you guys over there try out my ideas!" This sort of academic theorizing has to be turned into budgets, schedules, hiring plans, etc.

"Let's try to combine Eve with WoW" is no different from what you see all over a place like gamedev.net. "I"m making a game that's Starcraft meets Diablo!"

How about WoW but with the combat of Devil May Cry? Or Eve but each planet turns into a game of SimEarth? Or perhaps in the next Star Wars game you could go into the cantina, plug in your Rock Band instruments and jam out in a music game. All of those *could* be good games if done competently.

The ability to produce an idea that sounds ok in a powerpoint slide is not interesting.

CCP seems to be slowly trundling along in that direction. We had a new player on rpg.net who's just starting Eve as his first MMOG. I wonder if he's going to make it past the first few minutes or if Eve is going to stomp all the enthusiasm for MMOGs right out of him.

Oh my, wouldn't that be wonderful!

City of Heroes is an excellent example both pro and con. Pro because it concentrated on one thing - a visceral combat system - to the exclusion of much else (economy being a huge example). Con because once you tired of that, well, you were done with the game (City of Heroes to date has almost zero end-game content). Which is fine for players (and healthier, at that) but it definitely hurt the long-term health of the game.


You're assuming what I'm saying is a zero-sum assertion. Just because a virtual world might be enhanced by gameplay elements that game-centric not-world games like WoW have proven to work does not mean it immediately has to "sucker WoW players into paying for it." Take Eve as an example. Slamming an end-game 25-man PvE raid system into Eve would not only be fairly nonsensical, it wouldn't work, because that's not why long-term Eve players are there. However, adding more compelling guided content for newer players would help address the yawning chasm of difficulty/approchability that helps keep Eve a niche hardcore title, without diluting the political endgame that Eve has proven to be successful for their players.

(Not very coincidentally, that's been where a large part of Eve's development has been focused the past two expansions.)


No, actually I've been trying to make exactly that sort of game for a while now. And I am well aware of (and actually, far more comfortable with) budgetary constraints then academic theorycrafting.

The only thing I ever hear from anyone, whenever Bartle says anything, is how irrelevant he is or how important he is, and how we should tell him to shut up or to listen to everything he says. There are, at most, three or four brief mentions on the entire Internet on points and suggestions that have been made. Everything else is people making fun of each other for praising him or condemning him. Holy crap people in the Internet are dumb and I have links to prove it!

The problem with the combat system is that it's still not even close to the quality of real combat-centric games. It may be visceral compared to other MMOs but compared to other games it's still a slow paced dice rolling affair. So I'm not sure that's a great example of anything but poor execution or a design that's stuck halfway between two worlds.



Yes, but that's you and not Bartle. In all seriousness if you can make a kick-ass game that combines virtual worlds and games then good for you, I look forward to it. But there's no indication that Bartle has any interest in doing that vs. asking other people to spend fortunes trying to do it for him.

From his replies on Broken Toys:

Considering how many less-than-desirable folks have had that "rain of money" spell cast on them, I don't know why he thinks that's an excuse.

Well, that's not really fair.  There are a lot of shady motherfuckers born with silver tongues who are perfectly happy to tell the people with money that they'll make a better version of WoW.  Maybe his excuse is having no interest in doing something like that?

When he leads of with that it's incredibly fair. He can say it's because people won't give him money, I'm more interested in whether he's tried and NOT gotten money or if he hasn't tried. Which brings me back to fear. But then, if he has tried and hasn't gotten money, maybe there's a reason.

I had assumed from his comments that he has tried, and I also assume that all anybody with the money wants now is a WoW-like because they are stupid enough to think that particular lightning can be captured twice.

He could do something radical like apply for a job and prove his worth while subtely influencing the design of the project he was assigned to.

Or he could make a low-cost prototype and shop it around.

He could do it the way everyone else has to do it. Guess what, publishers won't give 50 million dollars to every random hobo who asks for it. Imagine! But somehow that hasn't stopped thousands of people from making games.

It's almost like if you want to accomplish something you have to put in a modicum of effort. Sorry but "nobody will gift me millions of dollars" isn't much of an excuse.

He should hook up with Richard Gariott and/or Brad McQuade. They seem to have the bullshit skills to score dev money.

Do you really think that? Have you SEEN all the mmogs in development? Off the top of my head I can only name 5-10 that are aiming to compete with WoW whereas there's 30 to 40 publically announced that aren't. Do you think all of them just magically found money? I don't want to be mean to dev studios to make a point about Bartle, but put simply - there's a lot of people less qualified making devs than Bartle. Well, actually, now that I've typed that, I realize there probably aren't. More like, he's just not qualified for more than he's doing - which is probably the case. But hey, he really, really loves virtual worlds so obviously what he says is worth listening to.  :oh_i_see: The next best thing to having a career making them, I suppose, is talking about them.

Edit to add: Virtual Worlds, I'm pretty sure, have more full-on non-journalistic careers surrounding them than any other gaming genre. Of course, assuming we're not counting people teaching art, sound, etc. That is to say, Virtual worlds have a lot of people TALKING and not DOING and at the same time have a lot of people DOING that probably shouldn't be. It's a mess.

This is pretty much the consensus opinion at this board and most gaming forums. So Bartle sucks for saying it? No, it is not "WoW sucks". It is "Making a WoW clone where you come into market less resourced and polished than WoW at launch, let alone WoW as is, is a fucking clueless move". You might say that's fucking obvious. Well, it's not so fucking obvious that two development houses didn't just urinate millions of investor dollars down the drain doing exactly that. I'm sorry if you get all pissed that somehow the postings of people in a nerd forum didn't carry the day for that opinion, but it didn't. So as far as I can see, it's a very good thing if Richard Bartle or anyone else says it wherever they say it.

There are a million cunts out there doing philanthropy in really shit ways. What have you done to save the earth today? What? You have other things to do? But what about those million cunts handing out money to fight malaria or whatever?

Come on. Complaining about what other people haven't done and demanding that they do something that that no one has yet done well as a condition of their legitimacy to speak is bush-league stuff even when you have a resume as big and long as Vin Diesel's left bicep.

Shorter summary of this thread:

Nerds who talk a lot about virtual worlds complain that people who talk about virtual worlds haven't created Robot Jesus yet. Film at 11.

Get over yourselves.

Says the guy who posted 3 times in a row.  :oh_i_see:

Way to miss the point completely.

People aren't reading this quote all the way until the end:


Make note of the part after the final comma.

Yes, cloning WoW is expensive and yes, will most likely fail. But saying that a clone of WoW will have poor design implies that WoW itself is poorly designed. That's the part I take issue with.

Also most MMOs fail, regardless of whether they attempt to clone WoW or not. That part of the above is meaningless. If you compare games that try to copy WoW to games that don't I'm not sure there is a significant difference in terms of success rate.

People like to use WAR and AoC as examples of games that aped WoW and failed tremendously but what about non WoW-clones like Vanguard, Stargate Worlds, Tabula Rasa, Planetside, Romans in Spaaaace!, the game Lum was working on that was cancelled before it was even announced, etc etc? And what about (relative) success stories like LOTRO that did clone WoW?

Show me the empirical evidence that cloning WoW is a terrible idea vs. doing something very different. It's kind of tiring to here Eve constantly thrown out as the sole example, as if the market can support 50 Eves when in reality it can barely support one.

It's just poor communication. "Not very good" is probably meant to mean something. Why it is phrased in such a way I don't know. Perhaps to hedge his bets. Perhaps because it allows fanboys to read whatever they want into it and thus agree with him. Perhaps bceause he just sucks at communicating. Perhaps because he really doesn't know what he means and hasn't thought his ideas through well enough to properly articulate them.

Why might cloning WoW not be "very good" from a design point?

Your first point is one that would make sense, that the implication is that WoW itself is poorly designed.

It might be that cloning might not be that great from a design standpoint because you wouldn't properly understand and control the design decisions that have gone into WoW, meaning you won't be able to properly run your WoW clone, even if you do clone it properly.

It might just be a really bad way of saying "I don't like WoW style game design".

Maybe it means "I think WoW style design will soon be outdated, and cloning it will just leave us with an out of date product by the time we get around to doing it properly".

I'm sure we can come up with a number of readings, depending on what we want to have a go at...


I agree that it is mostly meaningless. It provides too much area for people to project their own assumptions of what is being said. It's fun to do that, but better to just ignore it and address the more definite questions you mention.

Also I think Guild Wars is probably an example of a MMOG that has done ok while taking its own route.

No, you feel comfortable telling people what you find fun. It's an opinion. That's all.

--matt

Naah, that's not true. You're talking about the retail space, which is a sub-section of the entire space. Most of our pre-release forum users at Earth Eternal, for instance, have never played either WoW or Eve and aren't looking to. They've played Runescape though.

Actually, what I mean was that developers who try to "clone WoW" explicitly more often than not learn the wrong lessons, duplicating things that are pointless (such as having a 3d image of the player's avatar in a circular portrait on the top left) while missing things that are important (having enough quest-driven content to advance a character with a minimum of percieved 'grind'). Thus more often than not "cloning WoW" as a design directive results in bad design because rather than making a good game, the producers are trying to reverse-engineer someone else's. And historically (and in other genres besides MMOs) that has not gone well.

Even then, there was plenty of just such a situation in WoW on release. I remember having to grind mobs in Arathi Highlands and *sigh* Stranglethorn Vale because of gaps in quest content. That stuff didn't hinder WoW's growth in the slightest.

I think that a lot of people think that if they try hard enough, they can catch the perfect storm that propelled WoW into pulling in over $1 billion in revenue a year. They can't because a number of factors that helped WoW succeed weren't even related to design issues.

Considering such portrait is about the only way the players are going to have a good, close look at face of their own character and anyone else's, i'd say it is not pointless as it's simple validation of work some players put into character creator. It's basically a permanent but low-key "yes, you are semi-unique snowflake" ego stroking.

I guess the lesson from this could be, people who try to analize WoW are quick to dismiss stuff as pointless if it doesn't appeal to them directly. Even established developers :why_so_serious:

Wow, that's embarrassing.

Edit: Seriously. I can't get over this. I heard that slap from across the internet come through my monitor.

There's a bit of a difference between "hm, let's display the character's headshot as a reminder of their avatar identity" and "hm, let's display the character's headshot in a circular window on the left hand side, with three bars representing health, mana, and something else extending to the right, as a reminder of some other game".

Here, I have it on good authority this forum likes charts!

(http://sjennings.files.wordpress.com/2007/09/uithroughtheages-1.jpg)

(The Warhammer one is a photo from a trade show because it was during their NDA'd beta.)

Oh, and extra UI bonus chart!

(http://sjennings.files.wordpress.com/2007/09/uithroughtheages-2.jpg)

That's not what you said.

Moreover, so what? It's a minor thing which is both a) good enough to be industry standard and b) is actually expected to be industry standard now. This might sound like moon man talk but out of all the things to complain about with WoW the UI is seriously not one of them.

He didn't say other developers were doing it wrong. He's just saying you're wrong to call how WoW did it as pointless. It's not.

When other companies copy it, they may not being copying it for the right reasons ("because WoW did it" is not the right reason, the psychological effect of seeing the face is), but the end result is the same. Unless they screw it up, which many do.

Shrug. I thought that my meaning was pretty clear, but if you want to encourage a pile-on over having the temerity to critizice cloning another game's UI, feel free!

It's a sore spot with me, because (a) I am a compete user interface/usability fascist already (it comes with learning to code on Macs, they drill it into you by force) and (b) there's nothing quite like the feeling of firing up a game and having the interface tell you in 5 seconds that "we couldn't be bothered to come up with our own".

I mean, if we're going to clone everything about WoW's default interface just because it's WoW, I guess that means we need to ensure that people can't move most interface elements freely (because in WoW's default interface, you can't) despite that being a feature of almost every game prior to WoW. Or make sure you use a serif typeface despite usability studies consisitly showing sans-serif typefaces being more far readable over time, because, hey, WoW.

WoW did do a good deal of commendable work in making their UI accessible. But it's not perfect, and just aping it without thought quickly becomes really obvious.

If you make a list of the big design lessons to learn from WoW ordered by importance then 'Hey, let's copy their UI elements' has to be pretty low on that list. Taking the superficial parts while ignoring the deeper elements isn't likely to end in success.

Do you get worked up that almost all FPS UIs are about the same? If not, why not? Do you think it's possible for a game or game genre to hit just the right sweet spot of UI accessibility and usability that you don't need to tweak a given aspect any further?

Because I think the above example of yours is taking something which is demonstrably done *right* and insisting it's derivative crap. On top of *that*, you're roundabout saying we need to change something that works exceedingly well because WoW does it which is every bit as bad as making a clone because WoW does it. Which puts us right back at square one even if bottom is now top.

But more than anything none of this has fuck all to do with the fact that Bartle hasn't done anything for thirty years, even though he could have, which was the thrust of this entire abortion in the first place and here we are, Bartle-ing everywhere all over the place.

Considering most advanced players mod out that part of the interface and replace it with something else, I'd say "demonstrably done *right*" is at the very least debatable.


No, I'm not. I'm saying that cloning 100% of WoW's interface is a sign that you're not paying attention to the needs of your own game. If you're making a game that has a character with three variable combat pools and nothing else that needs to be communicated, great! Knock yourself out (although, you know, at least make the portrait a square or something just so you have some fig leaf of originality). But an interface's function is to communicate gameplay feedback, and unless your gameplay is 100% identical to WoW, your interface should not be.

I can tell you right now that if you remove that portrait plus bars doodad in your shiny new over the shoulder perspective MMORPG you have immediately limited your audience and you've done so more than you would think at first blush.

And not a single game you showed copied 100% of WoW's UI. Not a one. To various degrees, sure, but not wholly. We're not talking about total lifting of UIs anyway; you very specifically were talking about the healthbar/portrait combo. You're essentially arguing that every fighting game is a Street Fighter clone because all fighting games have two health bars across the top. That's not true, either: the health bars across the top both work and are expected.

Lum you're being a little pig headed with this player portrait UI frame thing.  You're wrong.  It's ok though.

UO has had a little round radar map forever as Lum certainly must know. The only thing changed in the new version is the addition of the ability to zoom, a concrete bit of functionality that I'm pretty sure WoW didn't invent anyway. Portraits next to health bars are one thing, but the little round radar map is literally as old as the genre.

Certainly, but maybe we shouldn't just write it off as the case of "these people just don't know what they're doing, cloning pointless stuff lol", where it might well be the case of more educated "hey, that's a neat enhancement well worth copying". Also, as far as the 'three bars of whatever' go this is definitely not UI element coined by WoW, of course:

It can definitely be said that there's group of MMO players who have no interest in this feature, yes. But this is --to put it slightly closer to original topic-- like declaring that since Achievers have no interest in some particular feature of the game, then apparently this feature isn't "done right". Even though meanwhile the Socializers or whoever may be all squee! about it.

Incidentally, this is WoW UI as preferred by sample of most advanced players (http://www.fohguild.org/forums/screenshots/33834-your-wow-ui.html). Suspect for large group of not as advanced players it could be all replaced with large "Unsubscribe" button.

Unless you're a healer... in which case players are forced to play the interface rather than the game.

If an MMO can make healing more interactive with the game itself, they should have some success.

Of course, saying a GUI is bad or poorly designed in any way because advance players mod it is a pretty piss-poor straw man.

There are always folks like me who 9 times out of 10 will quit a game in which modding is necessary to find the fun. Lucky for Age of Conan, WoW, and WAR, I never really had to fight with the GUI. All that I ask is that I be able to reposition things. Generally speaking, a 24" monitor needs things more compact. But I can't fault the devs for designing something that my brain needs in a tighter space. But I'll stop with that talk since it's straying off point. Much as I don't want programmers in my games, I don't really want systems or content designers designing my GUIs. If you're wondering what I'm talking about, look at Eve. Pretty sure that's what happens when designers make a GUI. There is no way a skilled (art/GUI) designer designed that. If it was a pure GUI designer, he's almost certainly the worst in the industry.

I refuse to derail this from the previous conversation, but I don't mind saying that long before healers become more interactive we'll see them go the way of the dinosaur and everyone else will get better pots, buffs, and self-heals. No one likes a priest. It's a relatively ridiculous archetype anyway in a game structured like an MMO.

/ends priest talk - oh, edit to add: Of course, really, how interactive is a diku anyway? Not very. So the argument is flawed anyway. NOW, /end priest talk.

I didn't mean to start a "priest discussion" rather that the importance and structure of any UI is dependent on the needs of the subclass using it.  My goal would be to minimize the importance of the UI such that players are looking for cues within the game rather than staring at bars on their UI for hours on end. 

My suggestion is one of making the UI less vital (less like a HUD in a flight sim) to gameplay. 

Yea, that'll happen when a player can rely on skill instead of refreshing hotbars and life bars. I guarantee you the moment that day comes, you'll either run screaming or quickly learn to embrace twitch. Until then, people should be happy games have made ANY progress in GUIs considering the complete lack of decent GUI designers out there.

You can have in game cues without going to full blown twitch.  There are many alternatives out there, it's just not the easiest way to go. 

The design of the game could reduce the need for many aspects of the standard MMO UI elements.  It would just require that we shed the constraints of the diku mold... which may take a while.

Mass Effect is interesting in this context since it's almost like a prototype of that. There's the "oh shit" group heal and rezz in hands of the group leader, but aside from that every character is just left to fend for themselves with abilities to soak up some damage, increase mitigations for brief while, fast shield recharge, cover system and having brains bigger than Leeroy Jenkins.

It's pretty fun. Could see it work decent in a modern MMO too, admittedly more complicated in these medieval sword-swinging things.

We already saw what happens when we don't go "full-blown" twitch.


Perhaps, but Mass Effect was an unbalanced mess. And I'd say it's not going to get even a tiny bit more balanced in Mass Effect 2. The class structure and skillsets are just too flawed and the growth rates were funky. I liked Mass Effect, but fixing that system for an MMOG would take years of testing and a legion of REAL testers.

Twitch suggest reaction based on short timers.  Increase the timer length and you open up the ability to mix reaction with strategy (skill choice).  I think this is a middle ground that games like DAoC and BF1942 hit the sweet spot in.  You just need to be quick in your decision making, not necessarily in your reactions.  They are different types of twitch... maybe I'm just splitting hairs.

Twitch and strategic response are two completely different sides of thinking design methodologies. Strategic response requires a much deeper level of balance than twitch, where the end result is "make sure your items, weapons, and leveling scale have some modicum of balance and the players will make up for the rest" versus "a pile of skills that the player may or may not use once he figures out how to maximize output damage and minimize damage taken that will be impossible to balance in the long term."

At one time, hotbars weren't across the bottom and tied to the number keys.
At one time, the / key was not the default for entering line commands.
At one time, there was no global chat channel, nor trade channel.
At one time, the entire UI was unconfigurable and immovable (ironic considering that in almost every other genre, that's still the case)

The list goes on. History is precedent set by the victor, but it's not about copying. It's about lowering the barrier of entry for folks you hope to leach away from the prior king of the genre. Which is easy when 90% of the games launched all share the same basic experience, separate more by foozles and side activities than anything at the core.

When a game is different than the establishment, then you have the latitude to create a new UI. But even there, "different" in this medium is more "how do we modify another genre but get people to pay for it". For example, I'd be shocked if the incockpit view in JG:E doesn't resemble Freelancer in some form.

But that's not because it's hoping to get decade-old Freelancer users. It's more because that's what's already been proven to work, so why not use a pre-solved problem?

But the stuff that seems superficial had some thought and purpose put into it. It's the thought process that people should be paying attention to, not the end results.

The UI is one of the most prominent things about the game. Every player is going to encounter it (at least in the beginning, in the case of UI modders who use addons and such) and it's going to be in a lot of publicity shots. It's the first handshake when a player logs into WoW. You don't want a sweaty, trembling handshake.

That was my point too.

Yes. On the whole, Blizz tends to take every part of a game equally seriously. UI, gameplay, sound, graphics, etc... Maybe everything doesn't always work out for them, but their average performance usually beats the shit out of other development companies.

Most games that ape WoW are also basing themselves off of D&D style DIKU gameplay anyway. It's small wonder that they can steal WoW's UI and have it work for thier game.

Mobs, hit points, mana, xp, etc...

There really isn't a need for a different UI for WAR or LOTRO, for example.

It's strange to have lamaros agree with me.  :awesome_for_real:

I guess peoples' ideas of the word "clone" is different, to me it means "clone", not "poorly replicate." But even if you take it to mean poorly replicate I still don't see meaning in the argument. If a team tries to copy WoW and does it poorly because they don't understand the game very well would that team alternately have produced an awesome game by doing their own thing? I would guess not.

Saying that most clones will be poor is another variation on most clones will fail - statements that apply equally well to original games.

Isn't LOTRO the most successful recent major MMO to be released in NA? (Excluding kids stuff) And that game seems to be the most WoW-like. It also seems to be doing better than DDO, if expansion activity is any indication - a game made by the same company that didn't copy WoW.

Perhaps the root problem is less that too many people want to copy WoW and more that too many people simply aren't as talented as the WoW devs. Which isn't a problem that can be fixed by reading powerpoint slides or adopting different game designs. I would go as far as to claim that *that's* an obvious truth. Instead of asking "how do we come up with better designs" perhaps the better question is "how do we find better personnel?" One of the key things that sticks out about WoW is that it didn't recycle all the usual suspects or employ people like Barnett.

Edit: Having portraits next to energy bars was in SSF2:Turbo (or maybe even in Super) in 95 and was also pretty standard in Capcom beat-em-ups like AvP. It's not like it's a new thing or solely an MMO thing. In X-Men: Children of the Atom it even served a gameplay purpose since the background color would indicate how close you were to being dizzy.

Chilton (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Chilton_(game_developer))
Pardo (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rob_Pardo)
Kaplan (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Kaplan)

2/3 are from a catass EQ guild, two are Blizzard higher-ups and one is their world designer.  Previous experience is a false cause, what they might have learned there may be closer to the mark.  I'd even go so far as to say that Barnett is a symptom of the problem rather than the problem, because really all most people have against him that they can substantiate is that he's a blowhard that talks too much, which means he might fit in right here if he'd burn his own heresy. :why_so_serious:

Google does the same.

Exhuming Old Corpses:

Kant is fucking grindy.

...Or were you going for the irony?

Most Certainly. For one, that I am familiar with, LoTR, dispite it's superficial resemblence to WoW's ui, it was a total mess to use, for a tank at least. You can even see it in this posted picture. Notice the row of tiny icons under your portrait. See how tiny they are? They are your buff and debuff icons. They are actively sorted and more around on your bar as buffs fade or are refreshed. Now, quick. Pick up the poison debuff that will kill you in 5 tics.

I think there was a reason WoW put the buffs and debuffs for your character on the right side and made then 4x bigger than all the rest of your group. And WoW isnt perfect by any means. Ask any player  who can cast a cure spell how they identify and cure spells on their group members.

So wait, I'm confused here. Copying a functional UI is a bad thing?

I'm assuming the next comment is how people picked up WASD improperly as movement keys and all those copying fuckers didn't just see a functional keyboard layout and go "hey, this is a good idea"? As far as I can tell, MMO UIs are moving heavily into the "this is your basic UI. Now mod the fuck out of it however you like", just like keyboard controls became X is standard, and you can bind whatever if you don't like that.

But to misphrase an old catchphrase: what does this have to do with shadowbane?

This UI discussion is a good example of where there are some tools in various academic toolboxes that get the conversation into a bigger context.

1. Path-dependency, especially the way that economics uses the concept. E.g., why do we mostly use QWERTY keyboards when there are layouts with higher utility (theoretical speed and ease of use, better ergonomics). We do because the original  QWERTY layout won out in a different technological environment, partly because it had specific utility in that context (it reduced tendency of typewriter keys to clash during typing) but also because its original producer was skillful about establishing it as a market-dominant product in the face of other arguably superior designs. See also VHS and Windows. Path-dependency says, "Look, at a certain point, even a product with less absolute utility than an alternative has more utility because it would cost so much to undo production processes that are highly adapted to the dominant product and in the labor time of workers or end consumers who would have to learn to use the alternative". So new products end up stuck on that path, and only occasionally does an opportunity come along which opens up the space for an alternative. (Say, for example, a text-entering technology which is no longer based on a keyboard at all.)

So you could look at something like a virtual world UI that has a portrait of a character plus name plus health and mana bars as an example of path-dependency. This gets us off of the assertion that designers are simply lazy or derivative to something messier--that they're going with a convention whose origins are semi-arbitrary because any alternative takes real time to design and real time for players to learn, and the utility you deliver with any such rethinking had better well be worth it. If it's just a tweaking of UI while the mechanics of the design remain the same, it's hard to say that such a tweak would be warranted.

2. A lot of academic work on virtual worlds focuses on the underlying grammar of play and practice in them, and the extent to which it has become second nature for consumers of the form. If I'm teaching a class on film theory, I can get you to really "see" things you've always seen while you're watching films: scene transitions, montages, close-ups, tracking shots, and I can get you to think about why they work but also show you concretely where they came from, how they developed in the history of film. I think that's an important precondition of innovation in film: to know something about the total toolkit of devices, techniques and so on that filmmakers use AND to know how they're inherited from past films. That last is especially important because a contemporary filmmaker may not always know where a technique came from, and may take it for granted or see it as necessary. Once you know that it came *from* somewhere, and that films didn't always have it, you're in a much better position to use that technique in new ways--or to stop using it. In some ways a film historian or film theorist is better positioned to understand some of those things than a filmmaker, unless that filmmaker is also thoughtful and knowledgeable about the medium (as many are). So surely we can do the same things with virtual worlds or MMOGs. A lot of posters here have long experience with games, so thinking about the history of digital games comes easily to you through your own experience. It doesn't necessarily come easily to younger players or for that matter to younger designers. I think there's plenty to do along these lines--and you no more need to have made games yourself than have made films yourself to know something important worth sharing in this sense. Take the issue of healers: the holy trinity (or classes period) is as much a MMOG convention as a dissolve or a montage. Imagining a new grammar or arrangement first takes understanding how we inherited this one, and the patterns and practices of play that it has generated.

You get equipped with a wall of text this morning, chief?

Let's not.  I've mostly been staying out of this thread and few things in design get me riled up like the Holy Trinity.

Yes copying functioning UI is bad, if you don't have the same functions behind it.  Look at Mythic and the creation of their Mythic second, this was done because the UI was telling players that their abilities were ready to use again when they weren't.  You can say that it's due to Mythic's design and implementation errors, but you could also say it's because Mythic tried to shoehorn WAR functionality into WoW's GUI.  They may have been better off to look at the way their systems actually worked and then developed the GUI in a way that got the important information for their systems to the player.

As someone said earlier, they weren't competent enough to pull off copying someone.  What makes you think their own designs would have yielded better results?  Actually we know what happens when they try to think creatively, so that's a completely rhetorical question.

I spoke at the conference the day before, but I had a plane to catch and missed Dr. Bartle's speech.  So there's that!

I'm really getting an old-timey sensation from this thread, and I like it.

Bartle's excuse for not making a game is a cop-out.  Translation: I don't want to ask for money because it's hard.  I'd add that if he did shit or get off the pot, he'd risk that he'd be off his throne or we'd all smell shit.

Copying it is bad period if the UI is obsolete or becoming one. Taking WoW health bars as an example and breaking it down by style of play:

• Questing 1-80: Health will be 70%-100% if not taking unnecessary risks. Mana may drop to below 50% in which case a simple "Drink soon!" reminder after combat will suffice.
• Raiding: Your own health is out of your hands. Managing mana/rage/power/points is of utmost importance to how well you do so they should be displayed prominently.
• Socializing: Neither bar will drop below 90%.
• PVP: Both bars are of utmost importance and should be displayed prominently.

In none of the cases do health bars tucked away in the top left corner provide useful information in an easy to use manner.

I might even go as far as say top left corner health bars are obsoleted as soon as you get a big widescreen monitor.

Which is probably why the most popular total UI revamp mods deal with wide screen and insane resolution scaling.


Me? My monitor sucks and I play in a 1024 window, the default works just great for me.

You guys don't reposition the health/energy bars near the center of the screen as soon as you start playing? Wut?

It's indicative of games being designed to please everyone except the fucking player.

With all due respect to those in the industry, but when I sit down at night after a long day at work to fire up an MMO I could not give a shit less how much your Publisher, the programmers, the IMGDC, your spouse, or your dog loved your "sleek and original" UI. The only thing I care about is does it enhance my fun, or at the very least does it not get in the way of my fun?

The poster boy of this type of designer thinking is Mythic. Let's teleport dead and almost-dead players out of Open RVR combat because our servers are shitting the bed. At Blizzard, that concept wouldn't have made it out of the "LOL, wouldn't that be great! But no seriously, what do we do?" stage but Mythic actually rolled it out live on one server. The only way that something like that makes sense is if you totally discount the player's perspective and are just looking for a quick and dirty solution to the problem.

I'd say copying a functional UI badly is a bad thing.

Thinking the UI from a popular game is functioning adequately and then copying it badly is a very bad thing.

But aside from LOTRO's tiny icons (which WoW used to have, anyways), what part of that UI is copied badly? They seem.. nearly identical. One could say they missed the point of some of the features, but they didn't miss the direct rip of said features.

I submit the feature of WoW's UI that Turbine missed was "is moddable"... however that is probably not in line with the discussion.  Personally I found the WoW interface to be a great impetus to obtain a mod, and in fact it caused me to download and examine Lua.

I think they fell down pretty hard when it came to icon design. If I remember the basic introduction to mac programming I read, the original intention of icons was simple, easily distinguished, distinctive identifiers for spells. The abundance of crosshatch shading in LoTR's icons made seeing cooldowns difficult and telling which icons were in a usable state pretty difficult too. It's easy to find icons that violate the principle in both games but WoW's stand out more because they are so rare, while large numbers of LoTR's icons were a mess.

When I brought the issue up in beta I was told the icons were from sketches JRR had put in the original manuscripts, which due to his credentials as an icon designer, supposedly made this a good thing.  :ye_gods:

Would say that's an exaggeration and going too far -- that's considering number of modern games which run in widescreen configuration and still utilize that very placement to good effect. And given much more hectic nature of these games (say in Devil May Cry, Demon's Souls, plenty FPS titles although these sometimes pick bottom screen corner) their 'health bars' are just as important for the player to keep eye on.

Now granted, with console games people usually sit far enough from the TV they can comfortably see the whole thing; but if you don't apply the same approach to the monitors then you're doing it wrong.

No disrespect guys, but I think the GUI you're looking for or expect MMOs to have can brew its own coffee and regularly flies to the moon on its free Sunday afternoons.

Frankly, WoW's boxed GUI has to be considered close to perfect or at the very least the best in its class. It does everything it needs to do in order to let you play the game, right as it comes on the discs. That you can really kick the shit out of it with add-ons is just a cherry on top of it all, it's not the assumption under which the basic UI was built. That most people can play most (probably all, if people weren't so convinced it was unpossible) of the game and yet be confused by a minority of the features is the mark of an excellent UI.

There can always be more options. But configurability is not usability, as the saying goes.

One of my big bitches nowadays is font size. Tabula Rasa, for example, had a really shitty font in a very small size. I'm sure it was pretty low on the totem pole of things to fix, but it bugged me every time I played.
Eve is guilty of this too.

Yeah, most games let you change the default font, but hey. I can also just quit and go back to WoW...

EvE font was one of few things that made me eventually quit the game. At some point they've replaced their original font with something that tended to be nearly unreadable on some screens and just very confusing on everything else with little visual difference between some letters... and then basically ignored forum shitstorm that followed. As far as i can tell they're still using that font; dunno, maybe it's some developer's girlfriend that had made it.

Funniest part is, some Korean MMOs go as far as to allow players to pick their own font for the game. Hopefully rest of the world one day manages to catch up with that.

Ironically, the UI was probably the least important thing that Bartle covered. If he covered it at all.

UI isn't sexy. It's more flashy to talk about virtual worlds and theme parks and quest chains. People take a good UI for granted until it's missing.

Yeah, I wasn't necessarily defending universally bad GUI decisions, just generally good UIs. Because generally good is about as close as you can ever get. Eventually UIs get crushed under their own weight.

Gonna disagree here. Un-modded, WoW's UI is obnoxious. Having action bars that you can't move scattered across the screen makes more complex classes REALLY difficult to play. Hell, the inability to move windows (or even have up certain windows at the same time) still gets under my skin. And remember when talking about WoW's UI, you have to consider the launch vs now arguement. Many of WoW's UI features were originally addons that were eventually implmented into the core UI (SCT comes to mind).

I'd argue that both CoH and EQ2 have far better default UIs than WoW.

And I'd argue that Dead Space has the best UI ever made, and developers should try their hand at organic UI's.

I would not be so quick to laud WoW's default UI simply because it lets you press all of the buttons you need to in order to play.  The original EQ interface did the same thing.  Hell, I liked the Horizons UI more than the WoW one, which seemed a big step back to me and I could not wait to mod it.  I currently have a similar but less intense problem with the LotRO UI, but I am doing my best to ignore it and hope for a rumored UI revamp.

The only thing about WOW's UI that I like is that I can do whatever they want with it with addons.  I completely change everything about it.

Unit Frames, MiniMap, Scale, Color, Combat Text, Hotbars, buff/debuff location-size-output display, etc.

There isn't anything about the original UI I use.  But I would be an "advanced player".  However!  I have to admit that it does a good job giving the casual player enough information to do their daily quests and pay their 15$ a month with.

I believe the UI is the most important part of your game before it's launched.  The first 30 minutes or so of a new player's experience are the most important.  If you're UI in klunky, broken, too big, too small or if I can't change it to my liking is going to scare off a potential user.

A good UI will enable a player to stick around just a little longer.  However that "longer" may be just enough time to find out your RvR is a piece of shit.

WAR's UI did a lot of things right. Wish more mmo's allowed you to move, resize and hide everything in the screen.

So obnoxious that if it wasn't possible to mod the crap out it, I likely wouldn't be playing it anymore.  The fact that after all these years you still can't move or scale the different parts of the base UI shows what a relic it is.  It's been fairly obvioius Blizz has just been mailing it in with the UI since release and letting the huge mod community handle things for them.  Plenty of people still even use the mods that they tried to shoehorn into their UI because Blizzard's version/implementation just ends up being an inferior bastard child of the mod that inspired the change. 

There's nothing that says your game can't have a simple/basic default UI for a new or casual player and have tons of customization options and additional features for more advanced players.  It would be nice to have a fully functional and asthetically pleasing UI without having to download/update over a dozen addons every time the game is patched.


About the only area it was lacking was displaying buffs and debuffs in an easy to identify manner, which you figure would have been a priority with all the powerful debuffs like Gork Sez Stop, etc.

Unless I'm raiding, I find UI addons to be more trouble than they're worth.

I haven't played WoW so seriously the past couple of years that I've felt the need to use many addons. I run it vanilla with a couple of RP mods that don't really affect the basic UI at all.

And sure, I love tinkering with addons too. It's satisfying and whatnot. However, being able to configure everything isn't synonymous with a good UI. If that were the case, they could just give us a Lua script prompt. I praised WoW's UI because it's relatively free from ornate doodads (unlike WAR), it's fast&snappy and very consistent. Just compare WAR and WoW when something like moving items around in the inventory. LotRO doesn't do this nicely either. EQ2, can't remember.

Many of you may feel it's underdeveloped, although I think it's closer to simple than underdeveloped. It gets the job done efficiently without having to place a mass order for trinkets from the bells & whistles factory. The whole deal that panes and significant parts of the UI are fixed is as much an advantage as a drawback. Much of the bitching when it comes to WoW's UI is probably thanks to it being fully adjustable through addons. So many things you "have to have" when you can have almost anything. To implement it all is simply just not realistic for a developer.

Sure it could be better, it always can. I don't think that was the point, however, because what the UI does, it mostly does well.

Oddly enough, I think we have reached the point in the discussion on UI where we are seeing a separation of the "casual" and "hardcore" in a similar way to the Bartle presentation's separation of world and game.  The LotRO UI (since that's what I'm more familiar with today) is mostly just fine and is more than adequate for my wife to play, but I think she might still use the arrow keys to move around.  Even so, she complains about the shop interface which is indeed overly simple and apparently targets a simpleton of very low ability.  Beyond that you have resolution-scaling problems, including text-size problems which make it hard to read things, which add to the feeling of "underdeveloped" rather than something intentionally designed for newbies.  There is likely a bit of both in there, with devs not spending much on UI development due to there being a perfectly-usable stock type that most people will at least grudgingly use, so putting a team on UI development seems a waste.

However, I don't see any reason other than economics for there to be more than one UI design in a pulldown, even if it's something incredibly simple like "Default | Large Icon | Minimalist".  You can have tons of options while also having a select few presets.  Really.

Edit for making sense.

We've certainly hit that divide.  For The Masses, and that's who you're appealing to if not making a niche game, Tarami is right that WoW has a good, simple UI.  It does what is needed, and for the time was a stellar improvement in layout.  (Let's remember our games history!)

Many of us want more, and while it not being built in can be frustrating, we do have the option to make mods.  Yes Blizzard adds more on occasion, but they're going to be conservative because The Masses don't need those features.  They don't make the default UI for us.

Sure as fuck helps, though.

I just want the ability to make the UI the way I want it.  Clean and simple.  But some people like dood-dads and art etc.

Everyone has their own tastes, so I think the ability to do what you want is best.

I fail to see how the ability to move and resize windows is an "advanced" user feature. What exactly is WoW's UI a stellar improvement over? It is inferior to CoH and EQ2, both of which launched (at least a week  :awesome_for_real: ) before WoW. Having played both of those, WoW's UI felt like playing in the stone age. Don't the masses like resizing windows?

It's better than the EQ UI.

Ahh, fair enough. My EQ1 experience was not long enough for the UI to be memorable; the time was 2 hour laggy slideshow of death by ants, after which I swore off MMOs for a time and returned to MUDs.

Which had significantly longer beta periods. :-)

Seems i missed a lot of this thread. I have played both Wow, and LOTRO. If i am not mistaken, wasn't it turbine that basically refined the modern MMO UI with AC2? That, Wow is basically based on?

To me, World of Warcraft's UI is, to put simply, broken. Not in terms of fluff, or usability, but that fact that so many of you NEED to mod it to find it useful. Its also for that reason i love the LOTRO UI, its consistent, non mod able (To the point of advantage, or game play changing such as maps, and mini maps), it has a great variety of options in the realm of icon size, text size and positioning of elements (CTRL + \)  in the options panel). The "shop window" is way more streamlined (sorting/locking of items) than the bag hunt system for Wow. I absolutely love the fact that in LOTRO they do not overwhelm your screen with hundreds of ability's that are simply not useful...... What i am trying to say is, there are simply LESS icons on you screen,. by design! How is that not better?

Some things to consider, some the the game play elements of LOTRO would be negated by UI mods, there are skills that would no longer become class features if you could mode to the extent of warcraft.

For the functions it needs to perform i would say that the LOTRO UI system is eloquently designed refinement with a lean to usability, and simplicity. The quest log is simply brilliant.

I think, however some here wouldn't not recognize a good UI design, to many of you are to accustomed to modding the UI, and for all intents are now conditioned to play, or use it "One way". Any game that is not laid out to that layout (that you modded) is now somehow inferior. Ignoring that un-modded, it does what it needs to, and does it well. Sometimes exceptionally for what its required.

There is good and bad, but being somewhat of a UI designer myself, i recognize when comparing Wow's to LOTRO, LOTRO is simply more refined. Maybe this means "For dumb shitts" to some. But there is something to be said for simplicity, and restriction of customization.

The only other UI's that i give big props to, is that of AOC. Of course, it was required to facilitate different functionality than the other two, but its layout, presentation, and usability was fantastic. I even stole some elements of it fro a project i was working on.


Only if the UI was inadequate to begin with. Now i know someone will come in saying "i like clicking this or that, and i can play with out it", that's conditioning, conditioning you imposed on yourself, by modding over something that was inadequate, if, it ever truly was in the first place..

You can't really carry the argument that less options = good.

I most certainly can.

Your whole design philosophy about UI's is what drives me insane when I try to play a new game.  You're too rigid in your thinking.  Every person likes a different type of UI you need to allow people to create their own, or give them the in game tools to do so.  You're never going to win.

The less option available for customization the worse your UI is.   

I always felt that for PvP games there is something to be said for keeping a consistent, relatively uniform UI for everyone.  It's your platform for competing and taken in that context a lot of user created UI mods are flat out cheating.  I expect I'm in the minority here though.

All the options in the world can't save a poorly designed UI for the new player or a poorly designed on for the game, period.

The entire old guard, all the moldy MUD relic guys and the people at places Mythic, and SOE, and so forth, should fuck off and go get nice productive jobs writing thermostat control software. I keep seeing them on forums like this, telling us they still matter, and then just pitching one shitbag flop after another.

Go away. Sooner or later Nintendo or someone like that will decide to make an MMO, and Blizzard will have a real competitor. But not you guys. You guys just don't even have the technical chops for it. Mythic seconds, anyone? What the fuck.

(http://pitumbo.com/pikachu2.gif)

You rang?

Everyone is getting the same information from the server, how someone prefers this information be displayed doesn't seem like a competitive issue at all (I'm talking health bars, action bars, buffs/debuffs, not seeing through walls/terrain/stealth).  If someone likes different style or different size font, wants their health displayed in position Y instead of X, etc. etc. I don't see the big deal.

It only becomes an issue when the default UI is so bad at presenting this information that people who go out of their way to make it easy to see and interpret have an advantage over those who don't.

Presentation of info is one part of a UI. Your second sentence i agree with. Thankfully, positioning, font size and font type, are all options in almost all but the most old GUI options. This isn't what i am referring to, those options, have already been accounted for by the UI designer. Its already provided to the user in most cases.

Emphasis mine. Did you really not play WoW? I challenge you to log in and change the positioning of ANYTHING without mods. Seriously. That is precisely what I'm railing at. Being able to play the game how I like it is a big deal for me: I like my chatbox in one place, my hotbars in another, etc. You cannot do this in WoW without mods. Am I cheater?

I thought I said Wows basic UI was broken?

Also, where did i say modders were cheaters? I have also been speaking in somewhat broad terms, not trying except for a few places to talk about any one game.

Why Hasn't this happened yet? Seems so damn obvious.

Where else but in this genre does fully customizable UI matter, much less a gamer expectation? I find full customization a bad excuse, something used as a crutch, and only allowable here because it's pretty much part of the culture of MMOs. Which can be said for so many conventions in the genre. Heck, you can even look at the real growth opportunities in this genre (kids-target browser/full screen) and compare your need for XML/LUA bot-able UIs to that. That doesn't even get into just about every other genre.

UI is a red herring. It only matters to core gamers, and mostly in this genre. If a game here lost players, a poor UI is not the top reason.

Cultural issues? Does WoW even have a toehold in Japan yet?

Technical issues? I bet if Nintendo ever did make this kind of move, they'd want World of Pokemon to be playable on the DS, the Wii, whatever their next generation console will be, and also port it to the PC. Each platform is going to require some extra design and dev time. Also, they'd have to find some developers who know how to write software for Windows.

After FFXI, I'm not looking forward to any PC port of a game that has to be playable on the Wii. Just saying.

No, it's not. It's important to everyone, even if they don't know it.

See your regular soccer mom's confusion if she's been a longtime mac user and tries using a windows box. Particularly notable "back in the day."

Games may not lose players over a poor UI, or at least an amount that isn't notable, but it definitely matters a huge, huge deal. The trick is to make a UI that is passable enough that it's something regular people won't complain about. But really, every company should have people only doing GUI work. Of course, there aren't enough GUI designers in the industry for that to ever, ever happen.

I have found, for the most part, programmers have very little understanding of usability. Maybe its just in my field, but... I'm thinking no. You can always tell when it was left to a programmer to make (or design the methodology of use) the UI, and not a GA or other person with usability in mind.

Typically, they are also the ones to "Let the user fix it". AKA: Modable.

Darniaq is right, this is really one of the few places (MMO's) that lets you mod a UI like this. Everyone else seems to think like i do. wonder why.   :oh_i_see:

Bolded the most important part there.  Granted there is a pretty large gray area but a lot of the so-called convenience mods provide a quantifiable advantage beyond just aesthetics.

Take something like vanilla EQ or Guild Wars.  You were limited to 8 skill slots and this forced a tactical decision.  Totally invalidated by changing the interface to support more.  Modded raid frames in WoW, especially early on before they streamlined the default one, could provide a ton more tactical information in a much more condensed, easy to digest form.  Color coding for debuffs, ordering players in real time based on health remaining, even changing a healer’s workflow with click to heal.   You drastically lower the amount of situational awareness and reaction speed needed compared to someone using the provided tools.

There are also going to be things under the hood that the client needs but the player shouldn’t really have access to.  Radar and stealth hacks come to mind as extreme examples but the advantages are all there for someone willing to tinker.  You can argue that the out of box UIs are not fun or needlessly difficult and I’m totally on board but that’s not my point.  Bitch that the options you want aren’t provided in game, not that tools to modify the game are weak or not present.

I know we are in an MMO thread but take something like a Starcraft or a TF2.  It’s not an issue because the interfaces provided are pretty damn good at what they need to do.  User modified interfaces are band-aids and I’d rather see developers, you know, develop something that’s gonna work well.

[Edit: I take too long to reply.]

No, I meant it's a red herring in this sub-topic. It wasn't Bartle's major point, and it isn't the thing most holding back the genre. Not with WoW having gotten it right both in terms of default UI as well as allowing for the most complete customization of it (though requiring most of that happening out of game, rather than within ala SB).

As an aside, I totally agree good UI is critical. But only this genre sub-contracts the achievement of "good UI" to the very players who need a good UI most. Where else is that nonsense allowed? There's plenty of games in other genres that have bad UI, but there's a lot more examples where the studio spent enough time tuning it the right way. Here, instead we get games that are largely derivative of prior games that still don't know how to get those things right.

And just to be clear, when I say "UI" I meant the specific interface windows that provide input points and statistical insights into the game mechanic (e.g. hot bars, health bars and portrait, map, inventory, etc.). The world environment itself is something I categorize separately.

Well, yea, Lum didn't want to talk about the fact he missed the point.

 :awesome_for_real:

In other game genres there should be no need to mod the UI because the user requirements are controlled by the game itself. Depending on where you are in the game, the UI can change as needed to provide the necessary feedback for the situation at hand. In an MMO, even a fairly heavily content-managed one such as WoW, the UI needs to be able to handle multiple play options. As has been pointed out earlier in this thread, a healer's UI requirements are different from those of a DPS character, which are different from a support caster and so forth, but sometimes your healer needs access to the elements that the DPS guy relies on just to confuse the issue.

I think this is only partially true. It comes back to the game designers. Since it's late and I'm tired, I'll use my favourite way of making a point.

This is a design meeting at Valve:
- So I have this idea of having different types of body carapace. Like, certain types protect better against bullets and some better against energy weapons.
- How are you going to visualize that?
- I was thinking you could have this symbol in the user int--
- No, no! That's too much to keep track of. It isn't fun.
- Yeah, well, I guess it was a bit fudged. I'll develop the idea some.

This is a design meeting at Mythic:
- So I have these ideas what we could do with armour.
- Like what?
- So you have two types of light armour, I call them spell cloth and martial cloth, each type can only two different classes have. Then of course you have all the medium armour, for six different classes. And the heavy. That's four more. That's like twelve types of armour.
- That sounds awesome. Yo- err, I'm a genious. Then we attach some different defense values to those. All presented as numbers on the character sheet. That's fantastic. You and you, go make up some formulas for it. Use the dart board if you have to.

I dunno man. A negotiator in Fallout 3 is a fundamentally different experience than a sniper, but I didn't need to reconfigure my entire UI for that. Going older, Zergs, Protoss and Humans play very different, but all work within the same core UI. Closer to home, the only real difference between a WoW healer and a WoW DPSer is what your icons look like and which bars are the most important to you. That's for the majority of the game anyway. For the Raiding subset, yea, things get different real quick.

But even all that aside, it's not the job of the player to figure out the best UI. That's what developers get paid for  :oh_i_see: Contextual UIs based on class? Why hasn't that been done yet (aside from it's hard)?

Because blizzard has to implement a system for the lowest common denominator so keeping the UI simple / pretty is high priority. And they don't have to worry about holding back the hardcore and perfectionist types because they know the UI is fully modifiable. That's why Blizzard consistently introduces simplified versions of some of the more popular mods.

However this discussion was more interesting when it was talking about gameplay than minutia.

The NGE thread is still open.  :awesome_for_real:

I used UI as one example. What's the fundamental difference between WAR and WoW? Nothing. You kill monsters for experience and loot, and fight other players. Bang. Done.
The details, the minutia, seems to be the difference between 300k and 12m.

Even the WoW devs were surprised that players were so gung-ho over haircuts. Haircuts!

Haircuts are fucking important in a game where you are otherwise Class/Race Combo Clone Number 567,825-B.

Haircuts and hats. Being able to keep your hair while wearing one is like sitting in chairs, apparently a must-have.

This meme is funny. WoW is not simple. It just lowers the barrier of entry by making a game that a) works; and, b) properly explains itself. Anyone that survives the trek to 79 is well prepared for the jump to 80. Anyone hitting 80 is only unprepared for the lifestyle changes required because Raiding is a lifestyle change that transcends all MMOs.

WoW is not easymode EQ. It's EQ that f'ning worked. I was there. WoW is better at doing what EQ1 set out to define. No harm, no foul, one was first, the other polish.

But the idea that WoW was some lowest common denominator experience scaled to dumbify a game enough to attract soccer Moms and 8 years olds doesn't survive first contact with the very same people that play the crap out of Ulduar for 20 hours a day while refreshing the PTR patch notes page.

WoW was not EQ1 dumbed down. It was effing EQ1 done right.

But I agree with you that Blizzard knows what mods to make default in their UI, and isn't afraid to do so. Which is fine. Apple's been doing that since After Dark.

Take away the quest trackers that hold your hand to the conclusion of the quest, spell timer mods, pot timer mods, hate meter mods, and whatever else, and WoW ain't so easy.  It, honestly, can be pretty freakin' brutal when it wants to be.  I swear, look at some of the mod'd UI templates and screenshots of what people do their UI and it's not even a game.  You might see a 2"x2" square of the action, and that's IT. 

Then it just turns into Dance Dance Revolution with a keyboard.

That's generally because MMOs just pile on the powers as the carrot for character advancement, so that you get single target heal, heal self, group heal, group heal plus buff etc. By max level a character gets a huge number of powers to play around with, some which are particularly specialised or situational.

Other genres have allowed the UI to be stripped back by limiting the number of things a player can do with a character (or: have stripped back what a character can do, so the player doesn't need a complex UI to deal with it). MMOs could simplify what they offer in terms of gameplay thus not needing a screen full of power trays, but I think the MMO players would revolt at not getting a new power variant every other level.

Not by much though.

Yeah, that would be fucking huge. Partly because of the IP, but also partly because Nintendo has a level of general craftsmanship that Mythic/Funcom/whatever just plain do not (and will never) have.

True,  I forgot about the chatbox.

UnSub: Lots of hardcore MMO gamers are arguing against simplifying gameplay, not for it. Making things more driven by player skill, i.e. ability to micromanage 400 different buttons.

I know what the hardcore say they want, but the future isn't the hardcore. Who then use macros to keep things simple anyway.

UI's are my other big gripe about modern MMORPGs besides static content.

Not the specifics, just that fact the player interface it totally unrealistic for a medeval setting.

Again, I don't want *ALL* MMOs to have dynamic content, or *ALL* games to get rid of seeing health bars on all players and mobs in the raid at the same time - but HOW ABOUT A SINGLE GAME?

They have amazing understanding for their own usability.  If they want a UI beyond a text string they make them fast, powerful, and easy to change.

(http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/images/wgetgui-screenshot.png)

They also know the usability issues with all the tools they work with.  Religious discussions on editors is a common example.

Games are all about obscuring the numbers that actually make it up which is something programmers are not good at since they work on those exact numbers on a daily basis.

If someone introduced a new MMO GUI (with out that MMO having DRASTICALLY different game play or mechanics). No one would play it.

They would be bitching they can't mod it, and "Why cant you just copy wow".

Tell me I'm wrong.

Probably very true.  People want what's instantly familiar, regardless if it will work for <whatever MMO>.  For many, the WoW way is the only way.  And UI mod'ing has become such an ingrained thing, if they can't do it, they'll yell about it. 

The thing is, most people who mod their UI, do so because the default UI is getting in their way and making the game less enjoyable.  Worst possible offense is the UI is making it difficult for someone to function/play the way they want, whatever control style they may prefer.  A lesser offense is the UI not being aesthetically pleasing to the player.  If a game has a UI with a very robust set of customization options right out of the box, significantly more robust than anything out right now, then there won't really be a need for any UI mods other than a few select players who want more exotic/extreme aesthetic options.

How can having a UI that can be as functional and aesthetically pleasing as possible for as many players as possible not be a big deal?  Especially in the MMO space where players will be spending a significant amount of time with the game and even minor annoyances can build to the point where they will hurt retention or scare new players away.

Trying to build the robot-Jesus of UI's and shoehorn your players into it is doomed to failure these days.  There are so many control styles people use, from click to move -> clickers -> WASD+keybinds+mouse -> keyboard turners, that trying to build a single UI that works efficiently for all of them seems like it's more trouble than it's worth.  Especially since you'll already want to have a variety of aesthetic options because I think it goes without saying that opinions vary greatly on what is aesthetically pleasing.

Gee, go figure, one of the only things I can customize on my character to be the way I want it and it doesn't affect my character's effectiveness.  That WoW hasn't implemented the "Costume armor" features from EQ2 and LOTRO baffles me.  For SO many people these games are basically dress-up games, and forcing me to use a weapon/armor model I HATE to have my character be competent in your game makes my attachment to it so much less.

As an example, I want my Paladin to be in White Plate armor.  If I could have the Alabaster Plate set I had in my 50's, with a sword and shield that didn't look like a drunk barbarian threw them away, I'd be happy as could be.  But I can't.  At least, not if I want to be able to actually fight anything at level 80.

It's stupid, and Blizzard seems blind to it.

I don't think they can add a costume system to Wow, color, style, and profile are part of the itemization.

I won't heal in a group or raid without Grid anymore. I used to use the default raid UI, but have blocked the memory out with copious amounts of pills and alcohol.

You're saying they couldn't display the graphic from an item while applying the stats of a second one?  Why the hell not?  LOTRO and EQ2 manage it just fine.

These people should try some hardcore 'casual' games. Micromanaging two dozen chickens and cows to harvest eggs and milk!  :drill:

Back to UI. I have run with WoW's default UI for years. When I started raiding, I looked into stuff like Grid and Pallypower, to make tasks easier. But I still have the default hotbar, windows, etc... never had a problem with them. Never understood the rage against it, since every "better" modded WoW UI I've seen didn't actually look any better to me.

I'm saying that part of the carrot and consideration for the "value" of an item when graded as a reward, is the color, style, and changes to your players profile (out line shape).

Blizzard has said it's a principal decision not to add costume functionality in WoW. No, I can't quote that. Probably due to what Bloodworth mentioned.

Now, which derail were we discussing?

Let me ask this.

If, for example, some of these observations about UI are so obvious and the preferable alternatives so desirable, why do we have what we have instead?

Your menu of options, broadly speaking:

a) Developers are incompetent asshats and you are not. Pleasing as this doubtless sounds to folks round here, it actually opens up more questions than it resolves. Such as: why are they developers and you not? How does a viable industry stay alive with nothing but asshats? (I'm not saying that's impossible, mind you: there are a number of real-world industries that are viable largely because they have a structural chokehold on some part of the business, and can afford to be chockablock with asshattery as a result.) What makes the developers incompetent asshats: personality, bad training, poor incentives, etc.?

or

2) Because of some aspect of the history of MMOGs as a form. In which case it's maybe not so easy to just walk into the room with Wile E. Coyote Super-Genius improvements, whether you're Richard Bartle or the folks hanging around here, and get things changed. Even if someone hands you $50 million. Anybody who has been in charge of a complex project knows that precedent, inertia, and practicality can override the best wishes and ideas even when there's general consensus on those ideas.

or

3) Because the customers are sheep and want bad UI or other bad things, no matter how much developers would like it to be different. Also opens up a lot of questions.

EASILY rectified by only allowing players to use models they have acquired on items that they get.  My concern isn't that I want to be able to use the awesome graphics on some piece of uber loot, it's more "why would I want to upgrade to that when it looks like ass?  Oh yeah, because if I don't my ability to play the game suffers".

Screw that, I just went back to City of Heroes, where the customization is the only thing they DID get right.

That part of the carrot only works for the player if they happen to share aesthetic preference with the designer. When they don't, the carrot becomes a stick and actually reduces perceived value of the item.

Given this, there's very little point in imposing it on the player against their preference. Technical difficulty of implementation and/or maybe PvP concerns are more reasonable arguments but the "it's part of reward"? Not so much, imo.

You're correct.  It's the same reason they won't give a method to turn shoulders off, it's seen by Blizzard as an essential part of the meta game.

How many MMO's have fully moddable, scriptable UI's?

Which part of the meta game, exactly?  Bragging rights?  That would be unaffected.  What else would there be?

There are several reasons.

Keeping you default UI simple, archaic even, and passing the baton over to mods/addons for customization is an efficient and cheap cop-out that even the industry behemoth famed for it's ability to "polish" is willing to undertake.

While the UI is an important aspect of a game, it's nowhere near as important as things like actual gameplay, content, and systems.  Since it's lower on the totem pole and MMO's are never really finished....  the previous reason tends to be an easy route to take.

If you don't have any serious competition, or your competition isn't setting new standards in the UI department, there's no incentive to spend resources on improving your UI.  Spending resources on it or having your paying customers do it for free in their spare time isn't really a tough decision.

The complaint from me is more that many developers are willing to just throw a UI together with limited customization (often just a rehash of previous MMO's with a few slight changes/additions), then leave the rest to the mods/addons instead of actually providing significant customization options.

It may be efficient, cheap, and practically the industry standard (not saying much), but that doesn't mean we have to like it.

UI directly affects gameplay; gameplay dictates your UI.  Crap UI (or even the GUI) drags down what *could* be stellar gameplay if the controls and feedback mechanisms aren't intuative and don't match what/how the designers want the game to be played.

WoW arena PvP requires the ability to quickly target enemy characters, and switch from one to another (for example to counterspell a heal while you are burning your target).  The WoW UI supports this by either using a console command /target [playername], by clicking on the enemy player, by tab-targetting (in which case you might target a pet or a totem or something), or by setting the other character as your focus.

Most remotely decent players get some kind of targeting mod that throws the names of the players in a box on your UI that you can click to target them.  These mods make it much easier to execute target switches and to use crowd control on one target while burning another.

I don't think these mods are permitted on the tournament server, but they're not considered cheating by the community.  So UI mods do more than change the way information is presented. 

The day Blizzard makes a costume tab in WoW, is the day you see 500, 40 man paladin raids for BWL and MC.

Being able to turn off shoulderpad art in WoW would be a fine start. 

EQ2 had a brilliant idea with the appearance tab.  I'm surprised that it isn't an integral part of every MMO released after. 

Isn't it? Pretty much every non-WoW MMO that isn't going to fade away in 3-6 months has some variation of the appearance or costume tab at this point.

I haven't seen it in another MMO beyond LotRO and CoX.  Did I miss a few?

It's possible to do all of that with just setting a focus target and macro's without any sort of addon, could even have it all in one button with a shift/crtl/alt modifier for using the selected spell against your focus instead of your current target.  Mods like proximo and gladius just let people click a portrait/bar instead of searching through forums to find an advanced macro or creating an advanced macro themselves.  Hardcore PvPers have used these kinds of macros since Season 1, these addons just more or less even the playing field a small bit between them and the average joe who just wants to click a bar to swap targets in my eyes.

Supposedly Aion provides variation of that, where you can combine stats of one item with appearance of another. The "appearance" item is destroyed in the process though, so it's bit more limited by the sound of it.

Runes of Magic and Spellborn allow you to convert your awesome stat items into the better looking models.

Anarchy Online.

If you have a game with high-end raiders developing it, being able to show off that you are a high-end player is part of the thinking. They might understand the request to be able to divorce stats from appearance, but it doesn't make sense to them - it is a completely different mindset. It also throws off PvP, where the ability to recognise equipment at a glance gives advanced players an edge - if appearance doesn't link to ability, it makes PvP more random.

Though this can be actually a good thing depending how one looks at it -- the ability to deceive the opponent increases amount of options.

I don't agree with the reasons against costume customisation, but it is the arguments I believe people would use against WoW providing such a system, especially internally.

The PvP is already doomed to failure if you're concerned with the gear.  You should be fighting the player behind the character, not the gear. 

It doesn't do this very well, though.  Looking at a Paladin's gear, for example, you can get a rough idea of his gear's power level, but not what he can actually do.  Holy gear for a certain tier is visually identical to protection gear and retribution gear, save for the weapon type the paladin is likely to be carrying(which I suspect is outside the scope of the argument here).  In terms of gameplay, THAT is the information you'd want to know, not "is his crit chance 23 or 28 percent."

WoW is not and should not be used as an example of a PvP MMO.  It's a PvE MMO with PvP as a feature. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kI0QMtl1X_8

You can simply disable the costumes if you enter PvP combat, like LotRO does. I get Blizzard's point, but at the same time I don't.

No, they don't. They mod their UI to make it easier to play. See: Carbonite, Omen, totem managers et.c. et.c.

People want the game to be easier (giving the impression they've improved) first and foremost. That's what gets their jollies off. Secondly they want it to be comfortable to play. But comfortable to play without changing the gameplay really just leaves changing font sizes and moving the UI elements to compensate for all the screen sizes and sight impairments people might have. I agree all games should have this, even WoW which I've defended earlier - but it's more a question of accessibility than customizability. It's a way to work around some kind of discrepancy on your end, whether that be playing in 800x600 (too low) or 1920x1080 (too high) or wanting to play without having to wear your glasses. This is something I, too, fully appriciate and support.

The thing is, if we absurdly assume WoW had no mods, we'd see that raids we have today would be easier. Not necessarily simpler, just less fickle. Mods have made raids, and certain gameplay elements, hard, because historically mods made those specific elements easy or easier. For example, Decursive made Lucifron easy because the difficulty of him was precisely that, decursing. Mods have spawned a need for mods, it a catch 22 by now. Some auction mods completely remove the need of any critical thinking or scrutinizing when playing the commerce metagame.

It's a situation that doesn't humour me (especially as an old and then enthusiastic Quake-player) and back when I stopped raiding, it was during a paradigm shift in my raid group; healers were now supposed to have addons that displayed any outgoing heals from other healers, tanks and DPS were to have threat meters and so on. It was sold under the assumption that it would make us perform better in raids.

I guess my point is this - UI, bad or good or self-playing, is part of the game experience. A bad UI may mean a bad game, so be it. But when people clamour about games having bad UIs, it's many times self-inflicted difficulty. Maybe it's supposed to be a little harder than you think, maybe the game content was designed with the UI you're using today in mind and you're just not good enough. The UI may objectively suck, then truly bitch about it. Most UIs do not objectively suck, however. Most do something rather well.

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PS.
As a sidenote, LotRO has a UI that can be rearranged but not scripted. I've many times thought, "this would make a great feature," but since I can't fix it, I don't really mind. All the content I'm playing was QA'ed with the stuff I'm using, thus it is solveable with the stuff I'm using. Much like Bloodworth said, the option of not having an option can be blissful.

(http://www.blogcdn.com/www.wowinsider.com/media/2008/04/425_wowscrnshot_042208_000526doctored.jpg)

(http://dmz-gaming.com/images/junk/armorsets/lock_raid_4-6.png)

I am also going to point out that most mods are used to circumvent game play.

Tom tom/ Quest helper (To the point they now account for its use in quest creation), Gatherer, auctioneer, Atlasloot Enhanced, HealBot Continued, Decursive.....

SOME mods are there to customize, but a great number of them are to negate, or circumvent game play or even automate it.

None of those mods automate anything though, they just track data, display information differently, or make different control inputs simple to set up.  They are negating, circumventing, and automating the mindless and sucky tasks in the game and as a result improving the user experience.

Quest mods - they are just displaying quest objectives on the map.  Is rereading the crappy quest description 4 times to figure out where objective X is or looking it up on a web database like WoWhead a critical gameplay element?  Blizzard has not changed their quest design or descriptions at all to reflect the use of these addons, which is why they are still popular and why newer games like WAR decided to just cut out the middle man and include the feature as part of the base UI.

Gatherer and Auctioneer - they are just keeping track of resource locations and item prices.  Is remembering where every node of iron ore you've seen is located or how much runecloth has been selling for lately a critical gameplay element?

Atlasloot - is just an in game item database and display tool.  Is remembering every item every dungeon boss in the game drops or looking this information up on a web database like WoWhead a critical gameplay element?

Healbot Continued - just gives the player customizable raid frames that are already set up to use click to cast commands.  It is possible in the default UI to set up macros for every healing and cleansing spell so they will cast on whatever your mouse is hovering over, including the default raid frames.  Is creating a macro for every spell and using Blizzards crappy default raid frames a critical gameplay element?

Decursive - in classic pre-TBC WoW is was possible to have addons automate things, so decursive automated debuff removal.  That got axed long long ago and ever since, decursive is basically just a simplified Healbot Continued that only works with debuffs instead of all healing spells.

None of these mods automate anything, they just simplify or remove crappy mindless tasks and let you play the game instead of alt-tabbing to look up information on some web database every 5 minutes.

I think his point was, these "crappy mindless tasks" were designed as part of the standard gameplay, so if a mod simplifies or removes these bits then it does in fact circumvent some of the gameplay as it was intended. Same for the alt-tabbing and web databases.

You could argue that these tasks being crappy and mindless shouldn't be made part of the gameplay to begin with, but that's another argument altogether.

Data (http://thepiratebay.org) aggregation (http://www.tradedoubler.com) is (http://www.facebook.com) worthless? (http://www.google.com)

No, which is why the makers of some of these mods and database websites like WoWhead can pull in enough money through donations or advertising to actually allow people to make a living doing those things.  My point is why leave this to external mod developers and websites, hire some extra UI and Web developers so the game has more UI features and the game's official website has it's own official database with related search tools.  More moneyhats for the game maker and a better user experience right out of the box, win win?

Your links kinda completely proved his point.

Why do it when you've got players doing it for free?

Besides, didn't WoW do this to some extent - release stripped back versions of stuff that player mods originally came up with?

But also:


You've got automate on both sides. You can only choose one for your argument to stand.

The mods definitely automate things - they might not play the game for you, but they make the tracking of information about how / when to play much much easier. You seem to think that this is something MMO devs should pick up and do themselves, but which particular mods do they spend time developing for a playerbase with multitude of play styles?

Not really. I'm not saying it's not useful. Quite the contrary, it's very, very useful. In fact, so useful and powerful that multi-billion companies have been built around it. But just because it doesn't "play the game for you", it doesn't mean it's a ridiculously powerful tool that maybe shouldn't be trusted to the players.

Also, on Blizzard doing it instead; why wouldn't they simply just redesign it to remove those things from the fundamental game design instead of band-aid it with a UI? Because a band-aid is all it is. An addon like Auctioneer only works if not everyone is using it - if they do, it loses its purpose and could just be replaced with an automated auctioning mechanism. When you pick an item up, it compares its mean auction value to the vendor value, then magically posts it at the right price! The travel to and from the auction house is just tedium anyhow.

Thanks.

You say that gatherer does not circumvent game play. I could have sworn that there was an ability made in the game that was designed to track nodes, this replaces it compleatly, and any intent implied by the skill in its utility. Compounded with i am quite sure that frequency of a player finding one (before it was known they had fixed positions) was part of the design (as well as placement, and density of nodes), and consideration for resources and economic impact of the supply.

All That, goes right out the window.

Auctioneer, negates the AH meta-game, in fact automates it with bottom scanner. Any other design considerations such as AH placement
(access to data, travel), and economic impact (supply, inflation, undercutting, working the system, capitalizing on the uninformed), again..gone.


EDIT: SORRY! I wanted to bring up another, not sure what quest tracker i used, but i gave me info that WAS NEVER exposed to me as a player on the default UI, i am referring to mob positions, even as they moved on my mini map and overhead map. This is not circumventing game play? Maybe this is a bit cynical, but why not just have the mobs line up right next to the quest giver?

In stark contrast, LOTRO (a closed UI system) added the quest helper, in function, it only servers as your players since of direction as explained by the quest giver, as the quests are incredibly detailed as it was, it just required you to know where you got the quest (Point of reference). The need was realized, and the gap in "shitty game play" filled, but NOT to the extremes of XYZ of targets, or objectives, with one exception, where to turn the quest in at.  :grin:

So gamers have no memory and can't take notes?  All both of those addons amount to is automated note taking, so you know, you can play the game instead of waste time taking notes on where X is located and how much Y sold for yesterday.

Auctioneer is a tool that enhances the AH meta-game actually.  It gives people who enjoy that sort of thing the data they need to make decisions like, taking over X market could be feasable and profitable, flipping Y item will yield a nice return.  You can do that without any addons at all by just camping out at the AH and regularly checking the prices of items or just using intuition and experience.

Is the real life stock trading game hurt by the fact that now anyone with internet access can track prices in real time and research just about anything they want to know about a stock's history with just a few clicks?

As one who used to be one of the richest fucks in his server, I'll readily say that you'd have to be fucking retarded to let WowEcon or Auctioneer do everything by themselves. Way more cash if you actually sit down and observe the data it gathers, and then determine the prices by hand.

Also more trouble. I topped 80k gold during TBC with auctioneer/bottomscanner. I did have to weed out the obvious bad data, but it wasn't a real problem. I tend to believe that people having difficulty making money this way are playing on servers without sufficiently active economies. I couldn't do it on horde side, with 1/3 the population, for example.

The WoW economy is not rational like the real world. It has much greater up and downswings that are easily, trivially exploited with minimal effort.

My comments were not about an individual users effectiveness in using it. Optimal effectiveness at that.

Yes, I got that. The point was that, even if everyone's using it, there will always be the no-life OCD's that'll take it one step further and plunder the riches.

For the QH thing, Alt+Tabbing isn't a whole lot different.

Auctioneer effectively forces the economy to function rationally by eliminating non rational actors as factors. In other words, if you list your item too low, auctioneer users will buy it out and relist at correct market prices. That's just taking advantage of market ineffeciencies, there's not any real gameplay there. That's (largely) how I built my fortune, because it only takes 10 minutes per day.

The AH minigame is played at a somewhat higher level. For example, timing consumables to coincide with raid lockout resets, reading patchnotes and stockpiling items for a later increase in value, raising prices by buying out everything and relisting at a higher price, etc.

Actually my point is more that "automated" was being thrown around in a way that didn't really make sense.

Addons are not killing stuff for you, they're telling you where to find it, how fast your killing it, and possibly how rewarding it is to kill or what quest/rep it relates to.

Addons are not gathering resources for you, they're helping you remember where they are and plan more efficient routes for gathering them.

Addons are not making money for you, they're showing you how much something is selling for currently and how much it sold for in the past.

Addons are not playing the game for you, they are letting you get the most out of your time by providing useful information in a user friendly manner without requiring you to go through the tedious process of gathering and analyzing said data manually.

Are you saying that without Auctioneer nobody would bother to flip items that were listed well below what they would normally sell for?  I can say without hesitation that flipping occurred before auctioneer was even created as well as before it became as popular as it is now.

It is just making it easier to search through the thousands of items listed on the AH at any given time and find items that have a good potential for being flipped.  Since it is rather popular now there are tons of people on every server who can easily identify low priced items.  This means there is high competition between people flipping items and items will tend to get flipped fairly fast.  Thus, how much money you can make off flipping is still fairly luck based as you'll have to scan the AH and find these items before anyone else does.

The "real" AH meta-game is in controlling the price of items by completely buying out certain items, creating a monopoly for yourself, and marking up the price.  If someone tries to undercut your price you just buy all their stock and re-list it at your marked up price, thus turning a profit.  I've known people who spend all their time in game doing this sort of thing and had 1000's of gold on sub max level characters even pre-TBC.

Yes, exactly. By making it easy to exploit such inefficiencies, auctioneer makes the auction house a more rational market. You could do it before, but it was a pain in the ass.

And what if these so-called tedious processes are intended by the designers as gameplay mechanics?  Might be rotten design but you are still modding out parts of the game.  I'd call that having them play the game for you.  You just seem to be defining the game proper as only those parts you enjoy. 

Under your definition playing chess with a chess program beside you on a laptop is no problem.  It's not moving the pieces, just running a crapton of potential move scenarios and giving you the strongest ones as options.  Hey it's fair because it's just an information tool!

Your example is retarded.

I second this notion.

I think my eyes just fell out of my head.

Just to make a point.

If for whatever reason you were determined to consider every possible move before deciding which one you would make (every turn), which would be more enjoyable for your oppenent, waiting a few seconds for your computer program to churn through that, or waiting minutes/hours/days/weeks for you to do that in your head?

Tedious is pretty much the polar oposite of fun so desinging something to be tedious is bad design.  This doesn't stop MMO developers from using it as a pacing crutch to keep players from chewing through content faster than they can create it though.

Anyone have that arguing on the internet is like winning the special olympics jpeg? It seems appropriate.

(http://images.encyclopediadramatica.com/images/e/e5/Asianfacepalm.jpg)

Meh.  Just trying, and apparently failing, to refute the point that modding a UI doesn’t introduce a lot of automation. In a single player game go nuts.  When it’s multiplayer it provides a competitive advantage.  This is bad.

I never made a judgment on what's fun or not.  Trying to argue about what’s fun and what’s tedious doesn’t go very far after opinions have been stated.

Anyone can download any of the mods we've talked about (Carbonite excluded but that's been fixed now, amirite?), so it's not a matter of competitive advantage. It's into issue of keyboard turning vs mouse turning; one is widely regarded as superior but no one forces anyone to keyboard turn. Blizzard designed the game with some tedious things, but has not objected to mods which remove such tedium. Therefore, Blizzard does not see this as bad.

It's not bad for business.  That right there is the bottom line.  UI mods do give a competitive advantage.  That's precisely why many people use them.  Their existence helps the bottom line, so Blizzard supports them.  It's about providing entertainment for a price. 

Everyone has equal access to f13.net, but you don't see everyone here.  Mods aren't that different.  The only way everyone would have equal access would be if they were a standard part of the interface, which they are not.  I can say this, people that use many of the mods would have fewer sheep (be it financial or combat) were these mods a standard part of the UI, assuming that a part of introductory gameplay involved a tutorial on their features. 

Yah, i just wish we could get all on one page and acknowledge the changes to the UI do remove this tedium. If it's for better or worse i really don't care at this point since it's debatable, but it seems there's also parallel argument running here that modding out parts of game through automation etc does not change the experience at all, and that part is bogus.

That's exactly the stance I argue from.  Yes they are available, they are great, and I use them, but your players shouldn't have to climb out of a UI induced handicap.

It definately removes tedium. But nothing that the player could not have done outside the game already, as has been said above: QH instead of alt tabbing to WoWhead, etc.

The problem with saying 'just integrate them into the game' is that there are people that LIKE this tedium. Hell, I read the quests my first playthrough too; WAR has something like this, where your map is marked with a general area where you can find your quest mobs. As a result, I never read a single quest because I didn't have to. I didn't download QH on WoW until working on my 2nd 80; at that point I just wanted him max level and didn't care about the "fun" of leveling.

And good point Nebu. The complaints about competative advantage risk taking this into 'lolesport' territory. Bottom line is, those who would CARE about competative advantage are all using the mods; for the average WoW player, WoW is not a competative game.

People download mods for variety of reasons - tracking, assistance and competitive advantage among them.

The most highly competitive players will be using mods and macros (and maybe dual boxing, and other things) to maximise their returns and are definitely playing a different game to those who aren't using the same things.

Mods change the game because it changes the type of game you are playing. It's not just customising the UI, it is changing the nature of the game experience by offering shortcuts. Vash's statement that "players can take notes" is ridiculous because this isn't one player taking notes based on their in-game experiences, it is players leveraging the experience / knowledge / notes of every player who has come before them.

I'm not against mods at all, but please let's recognise it for what it is - a shortcut through the system that changes the nature of the game.

Let's keep in mind that not everyone processes information the same.  One UI element may not be as effective for all people.  A mod might not be an improvement for someone else.

Also "competative advantage" in a PvE game?  Please.  When you can mod a real PvP game we can talk.

To be fair, many people play an MMO instead of a single player title because they want to see how they are progressing relative to others in their game world.  In essence, this is competitive albeit a different and less direct type than PvP.  The economic minigame is very much a pvp game if you care to think of it that way. The primary difference being that the "winner" doesn't really gain anything in terms of the game world beyond stuff like an epic mount. 

Three key words: ultra rare loot.

I think all these mods would be fair - if they charged by the data packet and not by the month.

Someone using auctioneer is burning up way more server time / bandwidth then someone not, as with most of these add-ons.

They are all 'cheating' in some form or the other.

Why do they draw the line at combat macros?   Just go all the way and fully automate the client.  Turn all games into programmers contests - but only if YOU write the code - no useing someone elses macros!

And schild thought that arguing about that swtor hermaphrodite's clothes was rock-bottom. Oh, to be young and candid again.

WoW's mods go too far, in my opinion, and they add to the can't-keep-up-without-rushing feeling I get when playing it.  LotRO's UI needs some tedium-relief.

I would not mind the WoW mods so much if they were a Blizzard product, because open source projects are a pain in the ass to aggregate, patch and use.  Refer to Firefox addons.  Even so, as they stand, they automate away a lot of my incentive to play.  This is, however, under Bliz control since they decide which parts of the UI to expose to modders and so I blame them.

On the other hand, only being able to buy one or fifty of something in LotRO is too simplistic.  Maybe I only want twenty-two glass vials and don't want to click BUY twenty-two times, you fuckers.  Mostly it's OK, though, and it doesn't go overboard like WoW.  When I ask for a more customisable UI, I'm not talking about a version of Gatherer for LotRO (not just because there's already something like it).  I like the way targeting works, and how I find resource nodes, and the quest tracker helps alleviate confusion (although I'd prefer better quest design and description instead of a map highlight). A better and more-intuitive button-creation system would be nice, and some sorting options besides "A-Z | Z-A | Price" would be fantastic.

Bloodworth mentioned the apparently-space-age Hide Locked Items toggle, but that is a great example of simplicity-looks-like-stupidity.  I cannot lock or unlock items unless I am in the shop interface, I can't filter by anything else while selling, and I can't sell part of a stack in the shop interface.  I can't do a text search in the shop interface although I can in the AH interface...?  I believe these issues can be remedied without open-sourcing the UI and letting gold farmers access the getRich() function.

Ctrl+T

You can map the 'toggle lock' to a key in game settings; then you can select item in your inventory with Alt+left click if i remember right and use that mapped lock key to toggle the lock.

But yup, it's convoluted and i don't think many people discover this.

The fact that I'm told how to do this in a forum only blunts my point by a small amount.  How many people know how to do this?  I've looked through the keybinds before now.  I'm no stranger to Options; they know the rules, but not do I.. I-I-I-I....

I think its on that little piece of cardboard you get with the game. Could be wrong though.

I agree with this though "I can't do a text search in the shop interface although I can in the AH interface...?". the shop could use a tad bit of consistency with the AH.

Can't download cardboard, hoss.  I read the PDF, though.  Was it in there?  Maybe.  Could they put in a button to do it?  Yes.  It's not about whether the functionality exists but rather how much of a pain in the fucking ass it is.  Saying "you can buy 22 glass vials using this UI so stop QQ" or "there's a keyboard shortcut to perform this step in the GUI so stop QQ" is lame.  I like keybinds as much as anyone, but usability is usability, especially when I'm playing a game instead of learning emacs.

Don't forget how it would be nice to filter out things your character cannot use.  The code is there to display a red border, so put it to work to filter out things in both shop and AH interfaces.

Let me resize any of the windows.  I have eight-hundred titles and the alert icon does not take me to the one I just got, so either fix it to take me there or let me make the window bigger so I can see more than three at a time.  It would be nice to make the quest dialog window taller.  Blah, blah, etc.  I'm not asking for additional functionality, just ease of use.  Dammit.

That's not what i was saying. On another note, there is a drop down in sort for buying, and in the AH for "Usable", but i do not think it extends to your bag under the sell tab.

Yeah, I'm not specifically complaining at you but I want to make the distinction about what I am complaining about.  Also the Usable sort doesn't seem to work the way I expect it to, anyway how hard would it be to implement a filter?

Keeping up with the Joneses is not PvP.  Going over to their house and looting it is.

There's pretty much nothing to learn from old shitty MUDs.  They're dead, and they're gonna stay that way.  Those of you still trying to make some kind of link between the successes are just trying to justify your beliefs and/or relive your childhoods.  Aaaaand, you're fucking crazy. 

The reason that there's nothing to learn from them, is that they're just another game system.  And any game system could have been applied to the team that made WoW and it would have had a similar result.  Why?  They remembered to listen to their players because they knew what it was like to be ignored.  The players told them the brutal truth, as they always do.  And they didn't let their stupid 'vision' get in the way of making a utilitarian money fest.  And that's a way more important lesson than anything you can learn from dissecting MUDs (again).

PvP - player vs player - doesn't begin and end with the use of pointy objects. Most commonly we think about it in terms of combat, but it should certainly be seen in a wider context. For instance: the race to be first on a server to defeat the latest big bad. That's a pvp contest between guilds, even though they won't deal one point of damage to each other.

That's "indirect PvP" and has been around since before there was a term for it  :oh_i_see:


All better now.

Not necessarily; sturgeon's law applies to player-made stuff, too. Plus, with players being anything but homogenous what works for one doesn't have to work for another, their goals and preferred ways to interact with system can be very different.

Players will optimize, whether the tools are provided or not. The difference really is whether the publisher is paying attention to WHAT is being optimized. If the optimizers design around it and the masses find ways to avoid it, chances are it sucks. It takes a special type of office culture to be willing to accept that their baby is ugly though, which is why some companies go for the arms race approach while others actually improve the system.

Have you played WoW? The addon ecology is diverse, mature, and while it's true that most of them are crap, the cream is easily skimmed from the top from multiple competing commercial sites offering addons for download complete with ratings, comments, and automatic updaters.

Yes, i'm just not convinced that optimization always equals 'the light'. It certainly can equal "the easiest/fastest way to the pellet" but these two aren't automatically always one and the same.

That's the other part of evaluating what's being evaluated though. There's a difference between bots specifically intended to leave up characters flipped on eBay and getting around encounters or features not well thought through.