f13.net

[Topic title from one of Strazos' posts referring to people leaving WoW when they "realize the endgame blows." It got me to thinking about why this is.]

Of course it blows. No game designed like an MMOG to be a constant striving toward the "next thing", can ever have a real end -- if you ever get there, it can only disappoint because it really means the game is over. And MMOGs are not about the game being over. These games only stay interesting as long as the carrot on the stick stays in view but is just out of reach until you jump over a number of hurdles -- and once you do get the carrot, a shiney new carrot appears on the stick to make you forget how meaningless and shallow the carrot you just got really is.

When it comes to MMOG's, I no longer buy this notion of an "endgame" or even believe it exists. I think it's patently false. An endgame in games like GO and Chess refers to, literally, the set of strategic and tactical moves which guide the game to its end. How you play the endgame can determine whether you win or lose. After which the game is, in fact, finished. Over. You stop playing. Of course you can play again, but you know the game will also end again.

MMOG's do not advertise that your goal of the game is to get to the end and stop playing. But as most of us know, that's what happens. And unlike games which really do end, I find few people really sound satisfied when they talk about an MMOG that they used to play but no longer play. How many of us have played and quit a MMOG with a sense that we reached a truly satisfying conclusion of some sort -- say the way we did when we finished a single player game? Don't we tend to quit in disgust, or because something more important demands our time, or our finances, or we simply just drift away when a new game/interest shows up?

The MMOG community seems to have come to use the term "endgame" to describe "what happens when your character hits the level cap and you can no longer play the game the same way, or earn rewards in the same way, you did prior to reaching the cap." And suddenly there is supposed to be -- what? -- a magical new game to play? Is that what we really think is supposed to happen when we subscribe to an MMOG and begin the long journey toward...some Emerald City at the end of the rainbow? PvP? Raids? Some new shiney shinier than the previous shiney?

No MMOG has this mythical thing called an "endgame". The game doesn't end as long as there are yet more rewards to acquire, ways to advance your character, or when starting a new character holds the promise of as much enjoyment as playing the first character.

I think the strength of most MMOGs is the variety of characters to play; the key, of course, is having enough content to play without feeling you have "been there and done that" to the point of nausea. Though I never played it, I understand Vampire: Bloodlines, while not an MMOG, had a lot of replay value since the story and gameplay varied depending on which clan you played. Why can't the same be true of MMOG's? I had hoped it would be the case in DAOC -- where playing in Hibernia would be so different from playing in Midgard or Albion that I would have years of enjoyment ahead. (And until the Gaheris server opened, you actually had to devote yourself to one realm at a time.) New races and classes combined with new content should have been a formula for a long subscription.

But what happened instead? After getting a Cabalist to 24, then making it to 50 with my Armsman, my choices were: go back to the Cabalist, try ToA, create a new character in another realm, or go into PvP without ToA. All these paths looked uninviting.  And so I quit -- feeling the game had run its course for me. I felt some sadness leaving. Mythic and its developers had done a good job and I loved a lot of things about the game. Wish I could say saying goodbye was satisfying. It wasn't.

I would gladly have played DAOC from each realm's perspective IF character advancement had been as rapid as that of WoW. Same with CoH, which is a heartbreaker for me, since I was once addicted to the character creator in CoH. I might have made a great stable of heroes to play had the rate of advancement not slowed to a grinding crawl around the mid 20s.

The point at which an MMOG no longer becomes fun is what I would call its endgame, and of course it always "blows". It stops being fun, for me, when the thought of cleaning my kitchen floor is more exciting than that of trying out a new character race/class/powerset, etc. After all, what the hell do I expect is going to happen when my character reaches the level cap? Is the game really going to transform into something somehow so much more interesting that I'll want to keep playing it even if my character doesn't change or advance? And if my character does change or advance, then it's not really an ending.

World of Warcraft's rate of character advancement -- and Guild Wars somewhat even more so -- holds a lot of appeal. I'd prefer the rate to be even faster. It would allow for replaying content while focusing on the enjoyment of character advancement once the newness and surprise of the content has worn off.

In CoH I played through the content and missions in Galaxy City, Atlas Park, Perez Park and Kings Row -- even the damn tutorial -- dozens and dozens of times because creating and advancing characters at the lower levels in CoH was fast and fun. If only it had continued as rapidly at higher levels. Not even the promise of playing an uber alien race, as great as it sounds, could entice me to grin and bear it to higher levels than the mid 20s.

WoW, on the other hand, stands as the first game in which I may actually enjoy running multiple characters up to higher levels. Without sacrificing my enjoyable real world existence to do it. So here's to the end of that fantasy called an "endgame", which will always blow, and cheers to MMOGs that make it easier to play multiple characters.

I agree with you, but I don't think it's just in the player's perspective: EQ set the tone with turning the treadmill from exp to items to flags, making it the "end game", or more accurately, the "raid game", and it become obvious that in a MMOG, the time all the way up to the raiding was simply something that you had to do, but wasn't supposed to be enjoyable.

The problem I think from a design perspective is that ALL of the game needs to be "fun". You can't design a game around the idea of "well, we'll make them do this, that, and play this way for a few months, just so that they can reach the level where we want them doing a totally different type of thing"--that design concept has to go away.

Guiild Wars is kind of an example here--while they have an "instant level 20 char for PvP only" aspect, and it is pretty fun, they still make you play PvE on your "real" character(s), even so much to the point of only letting you unlock skills for your insta-PvP chars if your "real" ones have those skills as well. That's just wrong--if you are going to provide "insta-endgame", then make it that way--don't force people to STILL grind through your treadmill to have the "best" endgame.

I'm tired after catassing in GW all weekend, so this probably isn't really very lucid, but the point is: there should be no transition period from a "fun" perspective, and most certainly not one from a playstyle perspective. Otherwise, your players will perceive the "end game", regardless of the fact that the game goes on and on.

Really well-written post, there.  I'll toss out something that might seem off-topic, but bear with me:  virtual worlds.

The problem with the G in MMOG is that that type of game really isn't a game in the traditional sense of that word.  By that I mean that classic game theory doesn't apply to them, at least in all the normal ways game theory is applied.  Game theory is (a very enjoyable) branch of mathematics, but MMOG's tend to be much more about the subjective experience that a developer wants a player to have.  Most of an MMOG's mechanics revolve around player choice in his interaction with the game system or other players, instead of a set of rules operating on a finite space.  Everquest and chess just don't have that much in common, yet for some baffling reason we persist in calling them both games.

An MMOG really bears a lot more similarity to a virtual world.  A virtual world has no "endgame".  It really isn't even a game.  It's focus is on enabling player interaction with a system that attempts to model a subset of a fantastical reality.  Most MMOG's try to cram together the ideas of a virtual world with the application of a flawed set of game mechanics.  I just don't think that works.  They became balance nightmares, trying to account for every possible player choice in making the experience what the developers intended.  Because you can't really apply game theory to much of an MMOG, you have to rely on the vision of a developer.  When one thinks of the wild diversity of MMOG players out there, there's just no way even the majority of them can be happy with a single MMOG title.

But virtual worlds inspire TEH HATE in a lot of players.  Usually, UO gets trotted out as the negative example.  Myself, I didn't like the way UO turned out.  However, not enough people have been working on the problem of virtual worlds to really solve them.  Instead, game funding is diverted to the cookie-cutter MMOG model because that's what's understood by players, suits, and game developers.  Even though in 6-12 months after launch those same players will bitch about the game, those same suits will introduce addiction-mechanic gameplay, and those same developers will become apathetic or even hostile to the playerbase.  I can't think of a more compelling argument than that sordid history to prove that thinking of MMOG purely as games just doesn't really work.

So, I think MMOG's need to be more virtual world-ish and stop trying to be games.  There is no endgame.  It's not just a myth, it simply doesn't apply.  Now the problem is how does one make an enjoyable virtual world that isn't akin to the aborted fetus that UO became.  I have some ideas, but to be honest I don't really know.  But I do believe that if developers quit trying to think of their MMOG as a game, thinking of it more as a virtual world, that we'll get some interesting and fun software.  De-emphasis on combat, crafting systems that don't induce carpal tunnel, meaningful player interactions beyond the extremes of "You're my ally" and "You're my enemy", and even better AI might all actually see the light of day if we can get past this fear of thinking of MMOG's as virtual worlds.

Let me see if I understand what you are saying.

Basically you think the players should be given a world with some rules, and that interaction with those rules will create depth and complexity and an enjoyable experience?

I run in a lot of fighting game circles and there is always this battle of complexity and depth. Complexity being broad instead of deep. For example, in Tekken at any given time there are about 40 different things you can do. But the depth of Tekken is not any greater than a lot of other simpler games.

IMO MMORPGs have a great deal of complexity, which can be dangerous. Complex rules are hard to design, hard to test, and it's usually easy to find a maxima or minima to fall into. (For example Tekken 4, there are 50 things you can do with Jin while standing, but people only use 1 of them)

I definitely think there is room for someone to create a world with some basic, understandable rules and then have people go at it. The goal being that the depth of the emergent stuff can get people involved. MMORPGs really have almost no emergent gameplay, and the things that do emerge are nearly all exploits.

That's what I think, yes.  Complexity is the biggest issue, but there's an underlying mathematical problem.

The fighting games you mention are not as deep as you think they are.  It's an illusion, much the same way any classic game's complexity is an illusion.  There are a set of mechanics within a closed, finite space, and the player can choose among the mechanics that are legal at any point in time.  Fighting games?  Each player has the same basic palette of actions, just with different windowdressing (aka graphics and sound).  It's really just rock, paper, scissors with dozens more choices.  That isn't a negative thing.  Rather, it's a testament to just how much art goes into a modern videogame.

With modern MMOG's things are subtly different.  I do have a finite (though, large) set of choices, but I can also combine those choices in ways that were unanticipated.  This is one of the traditional arguments for a class system, as you can artificially limit the choices a player has in a way that is easier to balance and apply game dynamics to.  It's an economy of scale issue, in which game theory quickly breaks down because you no longer have a truly closed space, i.e. not all players have the exact same palette of actions to choose from.  The set of player-vs-player and player-vs-mob interactions quickly approaches infinity.

I guess I'm saying let it approach infinity.  Quit artificially constraining things.  To do that, you have to accept that what you are building is not a game.  It's something else.  I like the idea of a virtual world, but it doesn't have to be that.  Just ... not a game.

The main reason that I haven't been able to really delve into any MMOG is the absence of an endgame. I, like a toddler, require structure. I need the validation of knowing how close I am to completion. The complexity of any game need not be found in the ability to play forever, continuously leveling up until you're invincible. I mean, I milked FFX for a full 90+ hours of gameplay. I am a sidequest whore, and that's how I get my money's worth. But I always know that if I want, I can just go ahead and finish the damn thing. If the sidequests were the game, with no main objective underlying the purpose of playing in the first place, I don't know what the point is. Every story needs an ending.

Edit: I think I'm still a little confused about what the "endgame" really is. I meant the "end of the game" in my post.

Edit II: I mean, is the game over because it is actually over, or because you are over it?

I can think of one MMO that approaches virtual world status, that being EvE online.  There is a large amount of freedom, a huge amount of space, and no true grinding because everything is just time based.  Now I agree completely that virtual worlds should be what we are aiming for with the genre, but after playing EvE for 2 months after launch and no recently returning to it I'm not so sure.

I can literally get lost in EvE, I can get confused and forget what I was doing, I can log in and have no real compulsion to do anything.  Because unlike EQ clones there isn't really a progression path for me to travel down that dictates my gameplay.  My skills are always training nothing I do in-game (outside of implants) can effect how quickly I advance.  That should be perfect in theory but the problem is EvE is a virtual world set in outer space.  Which is, well big very very big.  Also its harder to relate to a spaceship when compared to a humanoid character.  I've pondered why I can't really get into or enjoy a game that seems to do what I want and I'm not really sure.  I hate "grinding" but without a real grind I dont really have a reason to play it seems.  Currently I've decided I want to try doing some solo bounty hunting (players can place a bounty on somebody with a low security rating) so I'm training up a ton of combat skills and not really playing while I wait, sometimes I log in and chat in the random newb corporation I'm in.  Sometimes I go and blow up some pirate npc's, and other times I practice following and tracking players around but mostly I just dont play...

I dont really have a point, I just find the whole situation disconcerting honestly.

I would agree with the EVE Online assesment. There's so much you *can* do, it's hard to know *what* to do.

That said, if you are involved with a big time corporation, they always have stuff for you to do if you are bored... but that gets old too.

Hoax: How do you like the new interface? I didn't get a chance to play with it much before my subscription ran out.

Given a sandbox I can make my own fun. Will that fun last forever? Probably not. Does it need to? No.

The more freedom you have the more virtual worldy it is. I'm still waiting for someone to impliment climbing trees ingame. You would think that a game like Planetside would have tree climbing but it doesn't. About the best you can do is jump out of a plane and land in a tree.

The end game for me is when I'm over the game I stop.

Edit: Punctuation.

Sadly I think that I have left most of the MMOGs I've played because the game was unrecognizable from what I started to play:
Trammel in UO
Uber macros/templates in AC1
Expansions in DAOC
My own fault in SWG (I got too concerned with min/maxing and it killed the game for me)

I have never or rarely had a maxed out character in any of those games, even in my catass days.  I claim to want one but always get bored and restart/reroll/quit before that happens.  I MIGHT just reach it in WoW, and to me that's a big plus for that design.

I think that the endgame isn't necessarily a fallacy, but it's an ideal no one's reached yet.  The whole idea is a little weird:  you play one game to advance, and once you've maxed out your advancement, you play an entirely different game. If the advancement isn't fun, why not let the players play the "endgame" from the start?  The sad answer is that it's easier to design a grind than to design something that's fun for long periods. 

I think PvP is a valid answer: look at games like CS.  That game is equivalent in many ways to a MMOG endgame minus the grind, and people play it over and over for years and years.  In AC1 I hear many people have migrated to PvP servers as the game matured and advancement became more trivial.

Raiding is obviously a valid answer: EQ/EQ2/WoW (to some extent) have based their games on it.  The problem is that it isn't as open-ended as PvP - you can only get so many shineys, and someone has to design and balance the shineys, and left unchecked, it leads to mudflation and trivialization of early-designed content.  In short: it's a lot more design-heavy and ultimately self-defeating.

Someone needs to come up with a third answer.  And in the meantime, the "grind" to the endgame should either be fun, or it's pointless and a copout to include it.  Though it's interesting how masochistic people really are -- their "fun" activity can be painful (think Lineage 2) as long as it's in pursuit of some goal, regardless of how utterly pointless the goal is.

The whole "end game" discussion reminds me of an idea I think I saw in another thread on this forum.

A sort a GW'esque hub, to wich you connect with your character, and you basicly bought every quest or content( Maybe module is a better word)  you played. Now this is a game model in wich all emphasis lies in content and fun, and not so much grinding. You could even let different companies provide different story archs and/or settings.Your login account would have different characters wich ,dependant on how many quests they did, have a certain "lvl" or experience wich would open new Quests for them.. Hell, you could even implement a permanent hub system alla NWN. The only disadvantage I think would be the uselessness of catassery.It would probably be very nice for casual players, catasses would have less fun, dependant on how much content is available.  I'm sure it's much better explained eslewhere on this forum. (And as a non native speaker, and dyslexic ;),  I'm not sure if you understand me well enough).

Basicly, I just wanted to say that this model looks quite "end game/ player burn out" proof, as the emphasis much more on content. It would obviously be less "Massive" but probably more RPG.

Here are the MMO's I have played to one extent or another:

EQ (twice)
Earth and Beyond
DAoC (for about a month)
WoW (for a month)
AC2 (for a few weeks)
Beta SWG
Beta Planetside
EQ2 (for a month)
CoH
Gemstone III  :-D

Of the games I have played (that I can remember ATM), EQ had the best "endgame" for me, but let me explain.

I've had 2 stints in EQ: the first started some time after the release of Velious, up to the release of Luclin. The second started around the time of LDoN, and went to a short while after the release of GoD.

In my first stint, the "endgame" for me was open plane raiding for my little lvl 48 Rogue. It was on weekends, and took about 4-6 hours, time that would have been spent playing Anyway. I thought it was really fun, and it was new. Unfortunately, I quit when Luclin came out, because I was in HS, and had no way of upgrading my system at the time to meet the new standards.

My second forray into EQ was much less satisfying. I practically sprinted to 65 in pre-nerf LDoN, but when I got there, all that I was left with was horrific camping; camping hours upon hours for those final few levels and AA's. The ridiculous cockblocking content of Luclin. The obscene flagging for PoP. NOT FUN. Unfortunately, for the other games I have played, their "endgame" seems to emulate this, if they even have an "endgame" (I was pretty high-level in Earth and Beyond...wtf do you do in that game at high level, kill mobs for hours on end?).

I think Guild Wars may have finally figured out a way to be "fun". The is less of a grind, and in the end, you have glorious, balenced PvP. That works for me.

A variant on that idea that I posted a long while back is to have the "endgame" be content creation - use in-game money you've earned as a player to purchase content creation tools - the content you create in your zone is accessible to other players and has the potential to generate more in-game money for them, you, or both.  Apply the principles of a sim economic game to this so that there's real challenge to building and maintaining a "profitable" zone rather than making it an easy money faucet.

In a mainstream game/world you'd have to find someway to control "STC" (http://mythical.blogspot.com/2005/04/community-players-vs-characters.html).


edit: quoting is hard

I've thought about that, and my conclusion is basically "fuck mainstream".  Not a popular viewpoint if one is looking to make money, I know, but there it is.

I love the idea of content creation, but not as an endgame.  I'd want to see characters (as opposed to players) at all levels create content in some way.  In-game money would be but one way to access content creation.  You also could access it via quests or assisting other players with their content creation.

what kills so many of these games for me is 2 things:

1) that the operator (like the whore-fathering SOE) will dramatically change the ruleset at some point leaving you either suddenly without an end-game or substantially weakened.

If the latter you are only left with grinding and paying for more.  Which brings me to...

2) that the operator imposes dramatic time-sinks for players to even approach or slightly participate in the end-game (whether high-end crafting, PvP, legendary classes like Jedi, etc.)  It remains to be seen if GuildWars will work, but the timesink/levelling system is so uncreative and self-destructive to a game someone has to try something new.

Yeah, it could be like if when you reached the level cap you were given the chance to become a "Wizard" and write content in a C-like language, and we could call it LPMUD and the year would be like ten plus years ago.

The problem with using in-game economy to guide what content you can create is that MMOs are TERRIBLE at balancing the economy, what with items and resources popping up from thin air and whatnot. In AO, for instance, higher level people have oodles of credits, but nothing really to spend it on. One of the biggest reasons to go with Alien Invasions seems to be that player cities are excellent money sinks in case you were afraid the credits would reach an integer overflow and plummet you into the negative.

Great post, BTW.

The MMOG Endgame problem is a problem of time. As a developer, you want your gamer to keep his subscription active for a while. Many, many months. Only, you can't actually create a game that constantly challenges most good players for more than say 90-100 hours of time. Even some of the best RPG's of the past, with 120 hours of gameplay, really only provided a good 60 hours before things got boring and players were just trying to get to the end. Now if the average player only plays 5-10 hours a week for your subscription game, over a 3-month period, he's played a total of 60-120 hours. And you've given him the first month free for buying the box, so you have to give him 60-120 hours of GOOD content for the cost of 2 months of subscriptions.

You can't generate good content that fast, especially when you have to worry about exploits, more than one player and play style, griefing, and the limitations that bandwidth places on game mechanics.

For the player, the natural inclination is to play an MMOG for longer play sessions and for more play sessions in a given week in order to justify the cost of subscriptions. Which is why the average MMOG player tends to play for 15-20 hours a week.

Thus, the grind is introduced to slow progress towards the endgame, thus lengthening subscriptions and making more profit. The endgame is that part of the game that normally throws the player enough of a curveball that it's like starting a new game, almost.

There need to be multiple "endgames" with short curves to progress to them. I don't think a virtual world is the answer to the endgame problem, though, because we are really 5-10 years from virtual worlds even being remotely feasible given the current tech. And they'll still run into the community/griefing problems that UO and SWG ran into if they don't watch out.

Virtual worlds would be fun, but the problem comes in the term world. A world implies it is somewhere you LIVE, and if you live there, you probably spend way too much time there for anyone's good. There's also the thorny issue that MMOG's ARE sold as games, and as such, the buyer has a certain expectation, i.e. he expects there to be a game in there.

Thing is, games in other genres have been able to come up with challenging economic models that involve items and resources popping up from thin air - why can't MMOs apply some of the same lessons?  For example, imagine if player cities had the same amount of effort put into their design as, say, the Sim City games.

If you end up with too much inflation, ratchet up the "difficulty" until things stablize (the Sim games would do stuff like bring in Godzilla or civil unrest at high difficulty levels, IIRC) - the overall economy gets a money sink, and the players at all levels get a new challenge to try to deal with.  Again, these problems have already been solved in other genres.

People (as in catass farming whiners) react negatively when their items (read income stream) suddenly become less valuable, bitch on boards and organize idiotic lag-filled in-game protests.

Endgame is the notion that the game doesn't really get fun until after you have gone through the advancement process.  The reason is that most MMOGs are compeditive between players, and advancement gives a decidedly and usually monsterous lead to those who have reached the end of this process.  Because you can't compete, you can't play.

If you feel that's a figment of people's imagination, you're welcome to try and build a castle at level 2, or go PKing with your newb sword, because it's all the same to you.  And forget finding a group to go explore any zone outside the monbgats (fyi - most to all new content is high level).

I think the "suddenly" is key there - drastic and obviously heavy-handed changes tend to cheese people off.  Gradually ramping up money sinks and/or challenges doesn't generally seem to have the same effect.  Taking Puzzle Pirates as an example, the boards get pissy when major changes are introduced that change the value of rare items (search "kraken blood" and "black paint" on the forums for an example of a sudden drastic change), but the devs also monitor the economy carefully and make subtle price changes all the time to keep things in balance, and nobody seems to care much about the subtle changes, even though they're fairly obvious to anyone playing the economic game, because the subtle changes don't feel quite so much like the fiery wrath of God.

An even better trick is to make the fiery wrath of God feel like content.  Using the Sim City example, if you have Godzilla come in and start levelling buildings every year or so to drive property values back down, and give the player base a chance to try to fight him off (and eventually win) it'll be much more well-received than if you just skimmed an equivalent amount of money off everyone's bank accounts to get the same net effect.  My understanding is that people really dug the alien invasion thing at the end of the CoH beta, which sounds like a similar gimmick.

Virtual worlds shouldn't be pitched to a mass undifferentiated audience but to a very specific demographic.  The flaws of the existing products all stem from the fact it's marketed widely and has to be highly lucrative to support its infrastructure.  The entire argument of can Trammel ever coexist with Felucca is a specific example.  I was reading Tad William's Otherland series and weaning myself off Gemstone III when UO was first released; the Otherland world definitely influenced my perception of what a virtual world can be and the challenges that come from crafting a world that appeals to a certain mindset.


I never liked the random disaster as content feature in the SimXXX games.  I'd rather the external factors been something like a Walmart opens on the outer fringes of the map and sucks at my commercial areas while driving down my taxbase, or an interstate bypasses the town and the council has to negotiate a new major employer.

I agree with what your saying - just working off a deep-seated resentment I have nursed for years and that left me unable to function as a normal human being who likes small furry things and toddlers with sticky ice cream cones.

Btw - doint goggle furry and sticky.

As far as end game. I know I am getting a bit tired of Uber Raids of time sucking. Part of what made Fallout and Planescape, and Star Control 2 just so darn good is their conclusions. You saw your actions effects on the worlds/galaxy. You left the game with a feeling of accomplishment. All I can do from my four years of EQ is look back and say, I made some good friends. But other then that - I just lost 4 years of my life.

I'd say this is absolutly right, with a few qualifying statements. Playing a game in expectation of a specific goal at all times will only lead to the disaster you describe, there will be no endgame.


The endgame is the point where you are freed of game imposed goals. WoW has a clear endgame, it's the point where you hit level 60; the point where you escape the fundamental drive of "the next level" and take your head out of the sand and look at what is around you. It just happens that when you get your head out of the sand there is nothing to do but:

A: Jump aboard the next linear structure provided by the game, equipment chasing/raiding.
B: Quit.

However consider a game that provides you with non-linear alternatives and you would have an endgame; something that you do not have access to when you begin the game, but does not lead to a specific point. I don't know if any of you have played the MUD Medievia, but I'll use an example from there:

When you get to level 124 in Medievia you become a HERO, and your leveling days are over. According to your theory you would assume most people would quit the game at this point however the large majority of Medievia players are HEROs, not those on the treadmill to HEROdom. When you become a HERO you are free to do whatever you want, and when you realise this you don't quit because there are many things to do in the game that are not connected to the leveling treadmill. You can go trade and become rich, you can compete in hero battles, you can join a CPK clan and fight others, etc.

The lack of an endgame only takes place when everything in the game is attached to specific linear paths, WoW (any many other MMOGs) don't have an endgame because they don't really have anything you can:

A: Do apart from the set paths
B: Do properly without first completeing the set paths.

(BGs are something that might change this, but even then they might require that to be compete in the BGs you will also have to compete in the Raiding; linear once again)


I played three MMOGs which I look back on with a sense of a decent conclusion, all MUDs. Medievia, Achaea, and Imperian. Of course I look back on WoW with some annoyance, I thought it was a MMORPG, not a strange co-operative, persistent, RPG.

The crop of MMOGs you are talking about don't advertise the fact that you will get to a point and quit because then they would have a hard time making people part with the subscription fees. Or to offer a nicer view, because they think they are creating games that have fun endgames, but fail.


I come from playing MUDs, and I've found a few that do have endgames I enjoy. It's for this reason that I played WoW in expectation that there would be a decent endgame. I was not however thinking of it as some kind of sequence in the way you describe, I merely expected to be able to get to a point in the game where I would be able to quit leveling and getting equipment and turn myself to doing other fun things.



Some do. Some reach a point where the future rewards are either negligable, or atainable in a non-linear fashion. Imperian, another MUD had an endgame in this way. You had leveling and with leveling came increased power, but the gap was exponential and after you'd reached a decent level you didn't have to worry too much about grinding away at the next level, it wasn't that big a deal. Instead I played the political side of the game, gaining influence in my Guild, City, and Order. To play the political game you didn't need a level, in fact chances are if you spent all your time leveling then you wern't getting much done on the political front. I also played the economic game. Taking advantage of rescources to make a fortune and purchasing a shop to sell wares. Likewise, monitoring my inventory and scouting the world for good prices took up much of my time, and didn't depend on my level.


The strength in a MMOG, if it is any good, lies in the playerbase. Multiplayer Online Game. Persistent worlds are boring after you discover most of it, the way to keep a world interesting is to keep it changing, and the best way to do this is to make player relations meaningful. If I log on once a week to find that the world has changed then it keeps me intersted and engaged. Say I log on to Imperian and go around checking all the rescource prices/avaliability. If they are the same as the last time I checked then I ignore them. I already know what the implications of the prices are at those levels. If things are different then I have something fun to do. Change drives player interest, and after a while the only significant change in an online world is going to come from other players.


The point at which a game is no longer fun for you seems to be the same point it is foreveryone else, where there is less newness than repitition. This happens to be what we've called the "endgame" because the dominant model for change in the current crop of MMOGs is driven through the leveling process. World driven.


Replaying the same content is boring, though. I quit WoW when my second character, a priest, got to level 40. There was nothing ahead of me that was any different to what I'd already done. I knew the game content from my other character, and I knew how to play a priest to my satisfaction. I've been playing Guild Wars since the WPE last year and most of it is boring already. The PvP is what keeps me interested, because it's always changing.


WoW is currently a great co-op RP game. But to call it a good MMORPG is a stretch I won't allow. Nearly everything fun in the game is driven by the world, not other players. Thus you will reach a point where you've done everything you find fun and have nothing to do untill the next expansion.


However I'm with you on the sentiment of wanting the end of the "endgame".

Any game that has a decent endgame would be just as good if they sepperated the linear process and allowed people to access the endgame right from the start. If BGs in WoW turns out to be fair and balanced (and considering the item based nature of the game I doubt it) there is no reason people should be forced to get to level 60 just to compete in it. If I enjoy PvP and want to pvp why do I have to spend so many hours doing comething completely unrelated? Likewise in Guild Wars: Retail sucks in comparison to the beta at this point because I'm being FORCED to play through a rather terrible co-op RPG just to be competitive on the PvP stage. I'd rather sit and write this lengthy response rather than play the game because I don't feel like sitting through more awful PvM missions, grinding for runes, or unlocking skills..



The whole games doesn't need to be fun, just the various aspects of the game have to relate in ways that don't require the individual player to commit to them all. If you want to PvP would shouldn't be required to kill lots of animals. If you want to craft items you shouldn't be required to be any good at PvP, if you want to go kill animals you shouldnt' be required to be able to craft things, etc. This doesn't mean things shouln't be related, the relationships just shouldn't be forced. For example:

Lets consider a couple of players.

Player A: Likes being important.
Player B: Likes crafting things.
Player C: Likes PvP.
Player D: Likes hunting animals/exploring.
Player E: Likes making money.

Player A is a city leader and is good at politics, but not much else, nor is he interested in much else. However being an important person he's often the target of enemies of his city, besides wanting to make the city safe for its own sake. So he hires player C and some of Cs friend's to look after things. Player C like nothing else but to pvp, however he need to get items made and he doesn't want to make them himself so he pays player B to do that for him. Player B likes making things but hates getting the rescources, so he buys them off player E, a local merchant. Player E likes makeing money but doesn't like running around the land for items, so he runs a shop in the city where he buys resources from player D, and sell them for a profit to player B. Player D likes running around the wilds exploring and finds a lot of rescources in his travels, so he sells them to player E on his way through town. Player E has all this money on hand and needs somewhere to look after it, so besides paying the town (and through it player A) for his shop he also keeps it in the town bank. Player A safeguards the bank by using taxes and shop fees and the like to fund hiring guards and player C. And so on.


This is an ideal situation where everyone is able to do what they want to do and not worry about everything else, while still taking part in a world with meaningul relationships. There is no "endgame" here! :)

Don't try telling me it can't happen either. I know it can. I've seen large aspects of this working in games already, all it requires is more effort! The real problems with these games is they can be life-consumingly fun and traps for addictive personalities.


Unfortunatly I havn't played EvE, so I don't have much of a point of reference.

As for making getting lost. The point I said above is even more important in a true virtual world; people are everything. Without a community the game will die, as there will be little to do as a sigle player. But I personaly don't mind this, it's a multiplayer game after all, if i'm not getting anything out of my interactions with the other players then I mgiht as well be playing a single player game.

In a game with a proper community then your actions as an individual will have meaning, if you're getting lost and wondering what to do in the game it might be because the game does not have enough of a structure between the players to give the individuals actions meaning. In a virtual world you should be movitated to do things for yourself because you feel that doing so will change the world around you and thus be interesting. To go back to my example above: If the guy who likes exploring comes back to town every day and sells his ites to a NPC other than another player then he is all of a suddent cut off from the rest of the world. For al lintent he might be playing by himself and it would make no difference to anyone else playing the game. It might seem a little thing but this can have a large affect on how 'fun' the game is for the individual. Eg:

Scenario 1:

Player D comes back from the wilds with a whole stack of animal furs which he sells to the local NPC.
NPC: Thank you. Here is your payment of 1000gold.
Player D goes off to do exactly the same thing.

Scenario 2:

Player D comes back from the wilds with a whole stack of animal furs which he sells to the local merchant.
E: Hey D, the market for fur has exploded, all of a sudden we have this new crafter in town who can make winter coats and the price is through the roof, there isn't enough fur to meet demand. If you can get me anymore of this stuff I can promise you 5 times the normal price.
D: Who's the crafter?
E: B, he's got a shop over near the centre of town. Tell him I sent you and he should give you a good price on a coat.. hell bring me another 30 pelts and I'll get you one for free.
D: Ah ok.

D walks over to B's shop.
D: Hey man I hear you need pelts, how much are you paying for them?
B: I've got a deal to work throguh E for all my raw materials, if you have any stock you'd best go through him.

D later stops by Es shop before heading out of the city.
E: Listen I heard you went over to B and offered to sell him pelts up front. The guy and me go way back so he let me know right away what was going on. I've given you a good deal here for ages and I'm pretty annoyed you tried to go around me, don't let it happen again or I'll cut you off.

etc etc..

And before you say I'm being a bit fanciful then keep in mind that a scenario very similar to this happened in Imperian in the good ol' days back when I played it. I traded blackmarket Iron with influental crafters for exorbant prices, set up exclusive distribution channels, and wrangled favours with city leaders. All through simple market demand for some iron.


I don't think we're that far away from a playable and rewarding virtual world. As for the problem of addiction. It is a problem, but not that much of one. Most players have goals in one way or another, no matter how good the game is. If I want to be the richest player in the lands I'll probably give up when I've achieved it (or when I have some much it's pointless). If I want to be the best fighter I'll probably get tired of winning the arena challenge after a couple of times, if I want to be a great conquerer I'll probably quit once I've proved that my clan can take out anyone we want to. Even when we don't meet our loftiest goals we tend to decide to move on at some point.

Because people come in to these games with certain goals then there is going to be a game there for them if these goals can be met. My goal for WoW surely wasn't to get a couple of characters to level 60 and then quit, I wanted a decent game to play. Sadly there wasn't a game there for me; there was a decent co-op game and a plesant level grind, but that wasn't what I was there for, it wasn't the game I wanted and so as far as I'm concerned it didn't count. People create their own expectations and find them met or not; this is what makes a game good or not. Provided there is some way of meeting your expectations in the world provided there will be a 'game'.

Two things:



One:
Good thing you're here to tell us what's allowed, Mr One Post.

Two:
Psycho.

Just wanted to point out that Guild Wars has the end-game thing nailed down:

The primary activity *is* the end-game - anything else is just extra (or icing on the cake, as some might see it).

 :-(

Oh and hi. This is umm my second post. Came browsing over after the Darkfall interview at MMORPG.com linked over here, and found this debate interesting so I thought I'd flex my opiniated brow. I think I wrote maybe a bit too much?  :-)

(GW's icing is poisonus, a shame)

What happens when Player C gets bored and quits, and, worse, no one else is interested in PvP/defense?


Try to apply that to a massively-sized market system, and it's not going to work.  Also, not going to work when B, D, and E aren't friends to begin with (an example could be taken from EVE, where the most popular professions are "griefer", "ore thief", "scammer", and "corp assets thief."  The atmosphere in that game isn't all pink and fuzzy like WoW's.)

How is this any different to Wow?
*  Medevia - you're a hero.  Wow, you're a lv60.
*  Medevia - you trade and become rich.  Wow, you trade and become rich.
*  Medevia - you hero battle or CPK PK others.  Wow, you duel or PK others at Tarren Mill

Where is the differents?


How many people played these MUDs?  If its less than 10,000 concurrent users, imho you can't call that Massive.


How is that different to current-day WoW?  Guilds have politics in terms of who helps who out, who KSes who, who tries to race who to what content.  Its not nearly as political as, say, EQ with its non-instanced raiding, but its definately there.  (Thats the one bad thing I'll say about instanced content, it takes a lot of the teamwork/politics/drama out of server politics).


And from the economic POV, WoW is exactly the same.  Except instead of price of tiberium, its the price of mithril ore.  Same thing - you get full-time traders, you get people trying to flood the market/corner the market, all that stuff.

WoW isn't a RP game.  Not by any means of the imagination (Planescape, Fallout, even Baldurs gate are RP games).  But it is definately a Massive Multiplayer Online Game.  Even sony stopped called EQ a MMORPG 2-3 years ago.


I actually have some hope for this.  Simply because the many of the skillsets for being a champion raider (patience, tenacity, ability to follow orders, ability to execute the exact same thing over and over multiple times) are different to being a champion PvPer (ability to follow orders, ability to improvise, quick thinking, ability to devise strategy on the go).  While better gear will definately help, if you've managed to let 3 rogues get in amongst your healers, you're fucked.



How did Player A get a city in the first place?  Was he elected?  If so - how did people know him?  MMORPGs are combat games, first and foremost - if your primary char isnt good at combat, noone knows you (except for ATITD, which not many people would class as Massive.  Successful, but not Massive).
B through E occur in WoW today.  B is the trader (often supplanted by the guild trade mule, who is backed by and supplies everyone in his/her guild), C is about 50% of the server population (ie I like hunting shit and couldn't be bothered baking bread), D is another 24% of the server population (I hunt shit and skin/mine/gather herbs while I do it), and E is either B, or the exceedingly rare class of people who just live by playing the AH/stock market (although half of these are guild bank mules, who are bankrolled by their guilds).

How is this any different to WoW/EQ/DAoC/Any of the other current MMORPGs that I personally haven't played?



Yep, agree with this.  The whole point of these games is other people, otherwise you may as well go play a proper RPG like Planescape.


Most of us on this website (and its relatives) are online gaming veterans.  We would all love this, to have meaningful long-term effects on the gaming world.  Unfortunately, once you make this stuff massive, it tends to go pearshaped.  Either
* Devs dont have the money/time to make dynamic content.  It takes 5 minutes to rewrite a text description of a town.  Takes a hell of a lot longer to change the graphics and download them to all your customers.
* Asshats will be asshats.  If they can permanently affect the world to spell out "C0CKFEATURES" in ogre heads, you can bet they'll do that and post a screenshot on your message board.  If they can buy every damn bearskin in the country and then sell them at one million gold each, they will.
* 95% of your player base will complain loudly and repeatedly if you change anything.  For previous examples, see Trammel in UO, Kithicor redesign in EQ and Honour System changes in WoW.  They want to be doing the same thing over and over again.


I do.  If the technical/financial problems dont stop us, the societal ones will.  We haven't seen a court case against a publisher because little Timmy was traumatised because someone emoted A$$R4p3 over his corpse.  Yet.  Add in true 'virtual world' aspects and the possibilities of this increase a millionfold.  As an example, go google up Dawn and Fetuspult for what some people get in their minds for online games.

You've got a well thought out post, but it sounds to me like you are reasonably new to true massive online games.  They have a million different things they have to worry about that your average MUD with 200 close-knit people don't have to worry about.  Not that this a bad thing, it just makes it a different thing.

Oh yeah, and since youre new here I feel I have to insult you in an imaginative way.  Arsemincer.  There you go.

Then the game has failed. Can't run a MMORPG without people playing it, can you. The Devs might try and step in and save it by making it so that NPCs can carry out the fighting aspect (ie. city armies become made up of NPCs dictated by city funds, rescources, etc) and that those plyers still around who enjoy the other acpects still work towards something.


The trick is population density. What works in a busy city wont in a small town, and vice-versa. It was only an example to illustrate that giving players the tools to the market system creates a dynamic market system.


Represantive populations samples B, D, and E will cover a wide range of player relationships. If it runs into problems like the ones you describe for EVE it'll be because the game lacks a proper comminity (hence accountability, etc).


Because in WoW there is little point trading and becoming rich. There is little point PKing others at Tarren Mill (besides PK in WoW not being that fun). So what if you're rich in WoW, what can you do with it? By the best equipment? Flaunt it through epensive money sinks? There's no town to build, no real dynamic use for that money. Why PK? There's to land to take over, no loot to win, before I quit there wasn't even any ranking to gain (honour system is a start.. but it's still not much), no ladders to compete on, scant bragging rights... If you set up another guild in CPK in Medievia and strip them all all their equipment then it kind of means something: you get heaps of expensive equipment for free, you go up on the CPK ladder, your clan gets a reputation and bragging rights, etc.

There was a place in Medievia where an enerprising player could make a good stash of money every so often, the only problem was that it was in CPK so the plaec was often staked. I loved running the gauntlet, trying to get in and out with the goods before the stakers knew I was even there, I liked the fu nknowing that there was a guy or two sitting a few rooms over who would kill me and strip my of all my equipment if I made a mistake. It was fun. There was nothing like that in WoW last I looked, nothing even close.


You're right, I can't say they were massive. They went between 300-700 people online at any one time. It's just a population density thing though. Compare it to WoW for example, back when I was playing I'd be lucky to see another 50  level 60 players in my primetime. My gameworld in WoW seemed significantly emptier because while there were more people around I wasn't interacting with most of them in any way.


Execpt WoW is not designed to support this in an extensive fanshion, making it simple, more unwieldly, and have less of a dynamic effect on the world; whether or not the price of mithril ore changes in WoW does not fundamentaly change the game in any way for nearly everyone except the die hard traders.


Yeah. But I still don't think it's a good one. :) What I mean is I think that the aspects of WoW that relate most closely to a RPG (quest system, leveling, storyline, etc) that work the best, and the bits that relate to making a good MMOG that don't. For me.


I hope that's the case too, though I probably won't come back and play it.



MMORPGs are not completely about combat. Everyone knows who Conquest are in respect to WoW and it has nothing to do with any PK skills they had, or any combat skills really. Everyone in the beta knew who DIE were, and it had nothing to do with combat either.

In Imperian there were, at the stage I played, 5 main cities. Each city had a leader, a council, ministers, and citizens. Original city leaders were elected by the Gods on the opening of the game but thereafter they were run by the players. Stavenn was originaly run as a dictatorship before the guy was fourced out in a coup and then there was an election struggle between two major guild leaders. There was open fighting on the streets (and even in the planned negoations) between the various guilds before finaly a new leader was chosen. Kinsamarr was run by a council. There were factions vying for control of power at all time and constant elections, wth the leadership changing hands very often. Someone would contest the current leader, nominations would be put forward, citizens would vote, and then a new leader would take office. I don't know much about the politics of the other city because I was banned entry to it as a practitioner of magic, and didn't know many people in power there. The other two cities were nature councils; one was goverened by a guy who later changed guilds to one focused on death magic (he later resigned under intense pressure) and the last was looked after stably for a long period of time by one of the notable explorers of the land. People knew each other through the city chat channels, through guild associations, and through general in game meetings. Most of the famous people in the game at that time were famous due to politics, be it guild or city based. We did have a few who were known for their fighting skills, be it in the arena or in the wider world, but they were not the majority.

As for for the example I gave differs from WoW and the like:

In WoW these relationships are not a key part of the game that rely on each other. Full time traders in WoW are so rare because it's not fun and it's mostly pointless; what's the point of being rich if it can't buy you decent equipment, a house, etc. If I'm rich in a world with cities and politics and houses and armies and such then being rich gives me something to do with my money, if I'm rich in WoW I can ride around on my horse and constatly tell people "no I won't loan you money". This is completely ignoring the fact that the best way to get rich in WoW has nothing to do with the AH or trading and a alot more to do with grinding. Similar reasons can be raised for crafting and everything else.

If we consider a more trading friendly concept though, say a game where rescources are heavy and need to be transported by cart of ship or whatever, we can imagine it being more worthwhile.

Player A has 50gold and wants to fight. They buy armor and weapons.
Player B has 50gold and wants to trade. They buy a donkey.

Player A comes across rescource X but has no way of transporting it.
Player B comes across rescource X but finds wild animals in the area.

Player B says to player A, guard me while I load this on my donkey and I'll give you 10 gold when I get back to town.

Player B gets back to town and sells rescource X for 100 gold, giving 10g to player A.

Player A goes and buys themself a new and better weapon.
Player B buys themself a horse and cart.

Player B will eventualy get rich, and player A will get better at combat.

Compare it to trading in WoW. In WoW a trader gains little othan than the amusement they might get from trading itself...

Opportuinty costs are key. People seem to shy away of them because they want to be abole to do everything themselves, but this is a terrible notion that goes right in the face of a Multiplayer game.


Dynamic content is not the answer, the trick is to make player relations meaningful enough that they can be considered content. The players will make it dynamic themselves.

Asshats will be asshats, but if you have a world with meanigful player relationships, and thus accountability, the asshats be restricted in what they can do. Asshats can't ruin the game when the game is fundamentaly connected throguh player-player relationships and not player-world relationships, because the other players wont stand for it. As for cornering the market on bearskins.. I'd do that if possible... if it turns out that cornering the market on bearskins ruinds the fundamental gameplay for everyone else (ie: unless you have a bearskin you cannot travel int he snow areas thay make up 90% of the game) then there's something wrong with the game implementation; anything that fundamental to the game shouldn't be able to be ruined so easily. If however I have cornered the market on bearskins and am using my market dominance to merely jack the prices up and make myself a profit then it's reasonable, eveyone else might decide they don't like it and take counter meanures (killing me on sight, not allowing me to trade in their cities, forming parties to discover how I have managed to corner the market and then trying to counter it and regain a share).


Well I meant a enjoyable playable one for me, not a perfect one. :) Granted we have yet to see the full scope of the can of worms in relation to online communities.


Thanks. I must admit I reasonaly new to MMORPGs as the spawn of Everquest, though I have played MUDs and such since back in 95.

The reason I havn't played many but the more recent ones is because they never attracted me, they were missing the very things I have outlined above that make MOGs fun for me. Now that I have decided to give them a shot I'm finding my fears to be reasonably founded.

I don't meant to disparage the MMOGs that currently exist, I just find it odd that not many of them have pushed at the genre in the diverse ways that MUDs of the past have. The million different things that MMORPGs have to consider that MUDs and smaller MOGs don't does not prohibit them from pushing the envelope, yet many of them don't. Why, for example, are the Guild/Clan facilities in MMORGPs still so terribly limited? Why are the ingame community features near non-existant? Why are so many of them focused on leveling/equipment/PvE grinds? Why are there few attempts at more complicated political systems?

One of the anwsers that would first come to mind would be money, that investors are not willing to throw millions of dollars at something that might not work, but this is a weak argument. MMOGs of the standard variety fail all the time yet people keep funded games with the same basic ideas. Takie a look at the current MUD scense, the games that are doing well there are the ones I describe; the ones that have pushed beyond the typical. Granting that MUDs are a good testing ground for some online concepts, that they are a cheap method of getting some feedback on what gets people playing and keeps people playing, it makes sense to give some of the more sucessful innovations a run on bigger budgets.

/quibble=On

The commercial MMOGs tend to cap around 3-4k per "world".  To put that in perspective the hobbyist emulator RunUO recently successfully hosted slightly over 3k people on a single dual-proc server and by all accounts was quite playable.

/quibble=Off

Ok I think some points were made that I should tie together with why I felt EvE is such an interesting topic in this discussion.

1. Population, buzzword = massive.
Nothing comes near to EvE in terms of concurrent players, the game-universe is fucking massive though, so this does not mean you are ever going to be too crowded, but 24/7 there are 6k+ people online.  On weekends the regularly break 9,000 players.

2. Freedom, buzzword = non-linear, dynamic, endgame.
I dont need to kill foozles to level.  I have many options to make money (trade routes, player generated courier missions, npc killing, buy low - sell high, npc generated missions, mining).

Expanding on this one, I would pose the question if there is no endgame because there is no real linear advancement to begin with.  There are skills, but they are time-dependent, you can't catass to greater glory.  You are what you are, and it is always improving.  There are so many skills and so many paths though that there are 100's of different ways a 2 month old character could play.  You can't have an end-game unless there is a ladder that can be climbed in x time /played.  Instead you just have a world you play a game in.

But my point was, while this SHOULD be the fucking idyllic holy grail all MMOG gamers (that aren't EQ-clone loving fucktards) it doesnt' seem to work.  Am I so shallow that without a path of power advancement to follow I dont really care to play?  I dont want to think that I am, but thats how it seemed, when I would log on, check my skills, and log off.  On the other hand, was that because I had not joined a player community?  I could, but I didn't because I wasn't sure I wanted to commit a bunch of time to corporation activities.  I dont know the answers just throwing thoughts out...

Anyways, there was other stuff but its really hard for me to follow these bruce'd posts, I feel like I need to take notes to keep what has been said organized.  Definitely would have to not post from work to really get fully involved in every aspect of this thread.


*added*  I dont know why whenever people discuss true virtual worlds they say it can't be done due to the people on iweb = shitcock factor.  Afterall, its not like people in reality are nice/friendly/fair, why should we all grow a big set of morals when we jump online?  Again drawing on EvE (its the only game I would give the title of virtual world to at this point) sure there are tons of ore thieves, gate campers, pirates, mercs, scammers whatever.  But there are also massive player alliances that control a vast majority of the outer edges of space that have various honor codes they hold their members too.  Also there are many players who remain in empire space protected (for the most part) by gate turrets and the CONCORD police vessels.

I have more fun when I participate in someone else's story than when I have to create my own and then participate in it, so I really dig quests/missions, and try to be in a corp because then I can participate in the corp's goals.  But EVE doesn't have as extensive a quest system as other games, and corps are very jaded about recruiting.  The advancement is too long, too; a year to get a decent set of skills.   And despite their best efforts over the last year+, the PvP (which is supposed to be the core of the game, but personally I just want to avoid) has no shades of gray whatsoever, fights last seconds and you always lose.

To quote Yogi Berra (?), "More ballgames are lost than won"

1.  It doesn't take a year to skill up, I would gauge at 4mo's to get Hvy Assault Cruiser + comprable skills (nothing that isn't pre-req to 5 obviously, and prob allot of lvl3's) you can probably fly Interceptors + good skills in 2-3mo's.  The problem arises from the fact you spend most of month one, training only learning skills which leaves you with little to do. 

2.  Combat itself in this game is fucking genius, not perfect but its the only auto attack system that even resembles involving a good deal of player skill.  There are so many stats to factor in, relative velocities, missile travel times, short range-long range, drones, smart bombs, ect.  Your only goign to die in 1min if you are targeted by multiple gank (pure damage setup) ships, and that just can't be avoided.  The one major failing in my mind of the combat system is there are not enough deterrents to zerg tactics.

Anyways, I'm not even a huge fan of this game like I said, but I just find it unfortunate that so few people seem to have ever played (due mostly to the slow/boring/S L O W newbie experience).

It's a shame I never tried EvE...

But I'm not about to start now...no time.

No one has enough time for Eve. Seriously.

Bah, Eve takes its own time. Just play some other games while the game trains your character for you. :)

It could be because the game is fucking boring as shit to play. I made it through about three hours before just giving up. I've had more interaction with an Excel spreadsheet. Doing things was entirely too "easy."

My point boils down to this Haem:

Can I wail and gnash my teeth that MMOG's are linear piles of EQ-clone shit, when I get confused and bored if I'm given the freedom to do whatever I want?

or

Player content:  Can it possibly work?

To the first question, yes you can. And I didn't get confused by what I was supposed to do, the act of doing what I was supposed to do was fucking boring. The execution of activities, in this case, mining, was mind-numbingly simple and thus boring.

To the second question, yes, player content can work... but not in the server sizes that MMOG's are trying to foist on us. Massive = suck. Lag issues are the least of the problems. Smaller communities are tighter communities, and are generally more open to things like roleplaying. Larger communities mean more shitcocks. One shitcock can fuck up an entire game experience for an exponentially large number of people.

Seconded.  Smaller focus, greater freedom including content creation.

I really wish the turbinites had attempted to go this route with the upcoming DDO game rather than shoehorning D&D into a typical mmorpg fest.  Not to say that it won't be fun, but it wont be the same style of game most think of when you say D&D.

Someone bring on NWN3, or Bioware next game/creation engine.  I'd be interested to see what sort of response an online game would get if for your initial purchse,  you get a set of common areas and creation tools, and then for your continuing monthly fee, the devs were primarily responsible for adding new building block for use in the toolsets, with content "modules" or "areas" created by players and managed/DM'ed by those same players.  Highly rated content could be incorparated into the official shared gameworld or something.  NWN was a step in that direction, but was never really designed to allow people true freedom of creation, nor persistance world states (plus the whole combat pacing = the sux).

Xilren

We shall see (http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=Wil+Wright+Spore&btnG=Google-search&meta=).

I decided to try out the EVE 14 day trial to get an idea of what some of you have mentioned.

After 3 hours of it (and I'm going to try and stuggle through more to get a better idea) I agree with HaemishM; I just went and had a shower while my ship auto-piloted between planets. A long shower.

The political scene of the game might be great fun at the top end, but when the world is so numblingly boring (and the communication tools so terrible) then there's not much there to make the place live. Uninteractive content is not fun at all. It was bad enough in WoW where I had to sit on the back of a flying animal for 45mins just to get to the other side of the world, let alone the same thing in a game where the world is just empty space. As for the scope of the game, while it must work on the macro level (because people play it, right?) the micro level was all mind-numing PvE easiness.

On the second point: I also agree that player content can work, as I've said a few time already in this thread, and while I think that smaller communities are going to have an easier time of it that large ones I don't think it's beyond them either; they just require that the population densities and player interactions in the larger MMOG fosters a whole selection of communities (that are the size of the smaller MMOGs) rather than a single large one.

If you're aiming at making a game for a smaller community chances are you'll get the details correct because if you don't you wont have a game, while if you're aiming at a big one you might tend to focus on the overall picture, but there's nothing to say a large game shouldn't be able to get the details right as well.

Someday I will write a font page article on this, but player-made stories are not for free the way devs think they are.

Here is the classic example: I'm a frail wizard, and I need a basilisk tail to complete my super-spell, so I hire a bunch of adventurers to go to the far ends of the earth to get one for me. Sounds reasonable at first glance. But then you start thinking:

1: Why can't I go get the tail myself? If I'm high level I should be able to, if I'm not I don't have the gold to pay most likely.
2: Why would the adventurers take me up on my offer when XP is more valuable than gold?
3: How did I get so much gold in the first place?

etc etc etc.

Players can only give each other quests and participate in meaningful player-made quests if you make the game with that in mind.

Not to mention
4: What happends if all the basiliks have all been killed before the adventurers get there? (i.e. failure conditions)
5: How would the adventurers even know you were hiring?
6: If they bring you a tail and you don't pay them, what can happen?
7: How often would you even need this item (one time thing, regular occurance) and does this tail have relative value, or absolute value in the game?
Etc etc

Absolutely have to be made with these sort of questions in mind.  The why's of the game need to make some sense.  But that doesn't mean it has to be needlessly complex.  Getting lower level toons to go farm your spell components for you so you can focus your high level guy on instance runs and such is a perfectly reasonable "why" to 1, and 3.  And 2 is really just a matter of opporunity; if people know you want X and you are in the area, might as well get X to resell for some extra cash.  Such already happens today in games like WoW but it's not presented as a direct quest.  It's abstracted through the auction house.  And because of that abstraction, I doubt many people consider that "player created content" at all.

You could go the other route and actually try for more depth from pcc; and of course, the more "worldy" the game, the deeper this stuff gets quickly.  Hell you could add several layers of depth to an existing game from nothing more than a crafting economy based on geographiclly specialized resources and overland travel not being trivial.  Of course, the deeper and more complex the interactions, the easier it is to cock it all up.  Still, I think a niche market exists for some of these suckers beyond text muds. 

One nice thing about the various NWN attempts at persistant worlds; the authors had full control over things like coin and loot drops, so you could have a world thats very tight on magic gear so economic scarcity can drive all sorts of actions (instead of typical heavy loot worlds where everyone is clothed from head to toe in magic gear in a min maxing stat comparing extravaganza of a fashion show).  Course, the tight worlds seem to have less appeal overall compared to the phat lewt worlds, which brings us right back to smaller focus games, which seem better suited for content creation anyway...

Xilren

Lets set some very basic game mechanics:

Players and NPCs have an alignment. Good, Neutral, and Evil.
Opposed alignments cannot communicate.
Every person in the world can have two, and only two, skills.

Now lets change the example a touch:

I'm a good frail wizard, and I need a herb to complete my super-spell. I have two skills, Magic Flames, and Healing.

Herbs grow in the game world. Picking herbs requires the herbology skill.

I cannot pick these herbs myself. (answer to question 1)

Thus I can get the herb off other players or NPCs that have the skill.

The type of NPCs that harvest the herbs are evil and resistant to magic. So I can't kill them to get herbs. (answer to question 1)

I'm good, killing other players just to get herbs would ruin my alignment. (answer to question 1)

So I have to get them from another player.

I might hire a good warrior to kill the NPCs and get me some. Why would he do it? Because he has skills for killing and needs gold to buy a new weapon.
I might hire a herbologist to try and harvest me some. Why would he do it? Because he's has skills to do it and needs money to afford supplies to last him while exploring the land.
I might try to find a shopkeeper who sells them. (the shopkeep is neutral and gets them form an evil supplier who trades for them with the NPCs.) Why does he do it? Because he's a greedy bastard who wants to build the bigest house and show off.

So I have my herbs now. I use these herbs to cast my super-spell, FIREBALL, when hunting outlaws. I loot the outlaws I kill and/or get a reward from those who hire me to kill them. (answer to question 3)

Who hires me to kill them? Perhaps a blacksmith who got robbed by them (the same smith who makes the warrior's weapons).

As for quesiton 2. A level based system is just asking for trouble if you want player interation to make sense, simple because of the way level based systems scale up. You can't have a level system in that vein if you want it to work easily.

----

4. If there is a reasonable market in place then question 4 won't happen exactly in that way... say for example that there is no shopkeeper, and no one kills the NPCs often. My wizard needs herbs so he hires a herbologist. The herbologist comes back with hardly anything, but says he noticed the NPCs were harvesting them. My wizard then decides to hire a warrior. The warrior comes back with a whole heap. Who gets paid what depends on what the service agreement was at the begining, was it a flat rate, pay by the herb, etc?

5. Logically, if there is a shopkeeper I would go up to him and say "I need to buy some herbs, got any?". If he says no there I'll do futher inquires. Possibly putting up an ad on an in-game message board. Perhaps the shopkeeper, registering my demand, with follow up enquiries himself. Chances are if we've played the game for a little while we'll have some understanding of how to obtain herbs. Then it becomes a matter of finding those who are able to do it. Chances are the shopkeeper will be better at it, as he does that sort of thing more often. Chances are that herbologists/etc would know where they are generaly needed and would be avaliable.

6. If you can't pay them then perhaps they won't give you the items. Perhaps if they give them to you and then you say you can't pay they'll ask for them back. Perhaps if you don't they will then hire someone to kill you, or get you banned from that city, or try to kill you themselves. We've coloured our world with PK and shops so far, so revenge and economic sanctions aren't out of place.

7. How often would I need it? Depends how often I'm casting FIREBALL, doesn't it? As for the price:

What happens if the herbs are consumed faster than they are replaced? The price goes up. What happens if they are consumed slower than they are replaced? The price goes down (though ones assumes that the herbs would go off after a time (decay), so they would reach a stable price, unless the replacement rate increases.).

Herbs grow. They are picked by the NPCs and by players. If the NPCs are killed often they wont have time to gather herbs. If they are never killed they will gather all the herbs. So:

If the NPCs are killed often then:
Hiring a warrior would net you only a few herbs for your outlay. Herbs would cost a bit.
Hiring a herbologist would net you a lot of herbs for your outlay. Herbs would be cheap.
The shopkeeper would have fewer herbs avaliable. Herbs would cost a bit. (though a decent shopkeeper would probaly hire a herbologist to take advantage and stock up their store)

If the NPCs are hardly ever killed then:
Hiring a warrior would yeird a lot of herbs. Herbs woudl be cheap.
Hiring a herbologist would yeild few herbs. Herbs would be expensive.
The shopkeeper would have many herbs avaliable. Herbs would be cheap. (though a good shop keeper would bump the price up as long as there were no warriors competing)

But maybe the shopkeeper is evil and will only sell to evil people, so their price is cheaper than the good price, etc.

The price would certainly be relative and dynamic.

Now this all seems pretty complex, but when you break it down it's still just the basics outlined above that make it work. A lot of fiddling and tweaking and balancing would be required to make it a sucess, but it's the basic concepts that drive it.

Look at WoW:

Lets say we apply the following to WoW and think how much the game would change (possible for the worse, given the rest of WoW, but it's jsut an example):

Put in player owned shops/more localised AHs.
Allow more of the faction mobs to be gatherers.
Structure rescource placement more.
Implement weight on gathered materials. (mined materials cannot be taken on flight paths, they slow the player carrying them down, and they require a shipping few depending on volume if they are to be moved from one continent to the other)

----

There's another question that will be probably be asked of the characters in my example world above:

Why do they do what they do? Why would some wizard want to run around killing other players all day? Why would some guy want to run a shop all day? Why would some warrior want to kill evil NPCs all day? People don't want to play the game as a job!

The answer is because these jobs are FUN, of course. The goal is to make the various "jobs" each character fulfil like the tasks that players enjoy doing anyway, and to give them flexibility to do a variety of them (but not all at the same time).

People like PvPing. Some might like to be more freelance PKers who go around killing people and robbing them (the bandits), some miight prefer to do it with some nobility (my wizard). Some people might like PvE content, being the masters of the Mobs, and spend time doing that (the warrior), while some might perfer wheeling and dealing and making money and trying to get rich (the shopkeepers). Others might enjoy exploring the world (the herbologist), running a city (the politician/clan leader), or large scale wars (clan members). It's not really an attempt to make a virtual world, it's still a game. It's just a game where there are a whole series of different fun things to do that have a complex series of relationships tying them together. The 'world' comes from the diversity of the population, not the game mechanics.

Looking at WoWs endgame honestly, the only people I think it truly satisfies are people who like the PvE grind and Raiding. Why? The game is level and item centric.
Looking at Guild Wars' endgame honestly, the only people I think it truly satisfies are those that like team PvP. Why? The game is built around the skill mechanic and balanced around 8v8 combat and.

Neither of those games started with an idea of what various people liked doing and tried to design to fit them all together, but that's what a virtual world is, a place where options come first.

(note: http://www.nickyee.com/daedalus/archives/001298.php is interesting reading. makes one consider what kind of options have to be avaliable to cater for a large number of gamers, and re-enforces that options have to be nonexclusive and flexible)

lamaros, I like what you did there, with your example game.

Complexity in character interaction not by required grouping, but required interaction, because one player can't do everything.  By limiting what a character can do(yes, limiting!), you require them to interact with others.

Secondarily, I like that combat skills and non-combat skills are part of the same choices.  It should indicate that devs have put as much work into making herbology and blacksmithing as fun to do as fire magic or swordfighting. I'd argue that 'shopkeeper' should also be a skill choice.  It'd let you hire NPCs to manage your shop, etc.  Can put items in storage and set prices for them, heck, set buy prices for some items too, so herbologists and basilisk slayers have someplace to sell their loot.

We're starting to get more games to use this approach.  In fact, both heavy 'world' games did the the latter, in that crafting skills used points from same pool as combat skills(UO/SWG).  However, SWG never really bothered to make any of the game fun, much less crafting or harvesting.  And UO is, well, UO.  Being 2d, and having an interface with the same complexity as the average space shuttle console, along with its dubious history...

If we could get ATiTD to merge with some combat mechanics, and change character definition to something more like CoH, with relatively low numbers per server for an MMO, we might see something interesting.

Or not.

Alkiera

What I would like to see is more segretation of the massive worlds, where lateral movement between groups is difficult.  Guilds is one way to do that, but it's fairly limited because it's normally so flexible.  The only real way to build up communities is to have semi-static membership.  If everything is fly by night, you just have NYC Online.

What you'd need is a player-contributable mission system.  It handles the logistics of success/failure, dealing out rewards/penalties, and so forth.  Really, it's just a fancy Bazaar, except insted of bidding on available resources, you post demand for resources, and the motivation in both cases is pretty similar; you want the result, but it's more ecnomical to just pay the gold instead of doing it yourself. 

If you had such a system, it's also entirely possible to design some requirements such that they *must* go through this system.  For example, assume I want to build a house; I need 500 timber.  The only (or only practical) way is to get it through the mission system, so I put up my requirements, my payment, and it generates 50 missions that each net 10 timber.  The rationale could be anything; the only way to get the 500 timber is to go through the Timber Guild (historical use of the term Guild), who doesn't only want gold - they want lots of other things done too.  Maybe the local orcs are causing trouble in the timber trade business, or whatever.  Make the requirements such that it requires numerous points of activity; I couldn't and wouldn't want to do it all myself.  So instead of paying 1,000,000 for a house deed, I work through various PCs/NPCs, setup missions to meet goals, and put up reward money.  This in turn can create dozens of missions for players to do.  So, to address the questions:

1) You can, but sometimes it won't be practical (number of iterations required) or you'd rather not (the tail is on the other side of the world, and you have other things to do).
2) They would get XP and gold for doing it.  Getting XP for completing a mission could be built in.
3) Same way anyone in a MMOG gets gold.
4) Success/failure would have to be monitored by the mission system.  That's handled now through existing systems in MMOGs, as well as with MUD systems (I worked on one), so I know it's doable.
5) Through a common mission interface.  There might be multiple interfaces as with SWG, or just one as with Mx0, but just so that there is a system players can understand and interface with.
6) Handled by the mission system. 
7) You'd need to build it into the game to depend on the player missions.

I like when all this is going.

One issue is scale. With the housing example, everyone going to want one. So now, in game of 2000 people, you have 100000 timbers quests.  Now all your players are complaining because only rich people who can offer ridulous amounts of gold gets their quest done.

Er, well that's a bit vague of a complaint.  It's equivalent to saying that a Bazaar can't work because people will complain that only the lowest priced items get sold.  It's true in both cases of course, but all you're doing is identifying how capitalism works.  If there is a consistant demand for something (say, this simplified timber example), the price point is going to stableize - the market will expect 10k per timber mission, or whatever.  If you try to lowball it at 9k, you won't get takers.  Same thing with sales; if you try to sell your SuperMagicSword at 20% over market value, you're not likely to sell it.

...

So what?

So instead of giving them a new carrot, MMO's go nerf fucking crazy and tear everything apart.  Yeah that makes sense.

No, MMOG's never make sense. Any attempt to make them sensical dissolves into nonesense.

Personally, I'm in favor of all great, epic style items just randomly blowing up in their wielder's faces, deleting their items, and perma-killing that character as a Jagger lesson.

Def: Jagger Lesson - You can't always get what you want

Why is it that no one ever thinks of putting a sign in MMOs?  Whether a really big billboard or just a plank on a stick in the ground.  Would seem to solve a number of these issues in "fantasy" settings.  I'm sure there's some BS answer about storage, but seriously, I don't see it.

I think the issue with something like a sign is that it would become unmanageable. If every player had the ability to plant even a single sign you'd probably end up with an entire section of a city just all signs that nobody ever looked at. The same is true of things like in-game bulletin boards, I think it would just me unmanageable.

As far as player-made quests go, what would probably make sense would to have a standard way of creating them, similar to an auction house, but instead of buying items people are picking up quests. You create a quest using some standard form, maybe add some flavor text, pony up the payment and then someone takes on the quest, completes it, comes back, it's verified and they receive payment.

I'm thinking something like:

This quest is to collect (#) of item (ITEM_TYPE) and pays $. Recommended for players level #-#.

Then it's searchable, there are no payment problems, etc. It then becomes a bitch to make cool custom quests, but honestly I think those would be a rarity. There are some holes in what I propose, for example can two people work on the same quest at the same time?

But when you get down to it, all I've proposed is an auction house that is buyer centric rather than seller. That's the problem with player-made quests currently, there isn't really any point or anything to quest for. It all boils down to being the same as "looking to buy 5 tiger hides" which is essentially the same as people just selling tiger hides and you buying. I mean, I could commision someone to go get those hides, or people could just get those hides and sell them on the open market.

---

I think if people are really serious about player-made quests, they have to think through a number of examples of a quest OUTSIDE of a MMORPG and figure out how any of those could translate into a MMORPG setting. My guess is the vast majority of them won't.

Take for example the old "go defeat the super evil boss creature and win my daughter's hand in marriage" quest. In a MMORPG that would best be doled out by an NPC. And players will want to defeat the super evil boss whether or not another player gives them a quest."

Everything in a MMORPG is ordinary and repeated a hundred fold. Any time you are doing anything, 100 other people are doing the exact same thing. I don't really see player made quests working in that environment.

I would love to see someone write up 10 different types of quests from fantasy literature or games that would translate into a MMORPG. My guess is nobody (here or in the professional world) can do that.

I have the opinion that there are too many people in most of these games.  With something less than 2500 people doing shit, the shit could become manageable.  We need to back off the tech-demo Wish sizes and get more in tune with the Monkeysphere.  Call them Largely-Multiplayer Online Games or whatever.  Pulling a number from my ass, I'd like to see a 500-toon limit on any given MOG server.  You'll never read signs in a advertising forest of five hundred signs, but if there are more like 75 it becomes easier.

I guess I really started feeling this way after my low-pop WoW server was the victim of a merge.  We had enough people to drive the faction AH, but not enough to warrant a trip to Gadgetzan.  It was pretty damn nice.

1000 is managable. Even up to 1500 I'd say.

And bulletin boards are much better than signs.

EVE does player "quests", but they are simply 'fill orders'. Ie: Bob is offering 2000 credits for 100 iron.

Depending on the area you are in, they could be offering more or less credits per iron (depending on how scarce it is).

These show up in the market place and is the only way to sell things instantly - otherwise you have to put them up for auction. (There are no NPC vendors to buy crap from you at a set price).


However, real actual quests could be an interesting 'end-game' for a lot of players. Heck, most MUDs turn their players into Immortals/Wizards after reaching max level, allowing them to create zones and quests. There's a game called Grendal's Revenge which focuses on lair building - add in the ability for other players to enter your lair - coupled that with Second Life's model of paying fees to enter another players establishment, and you could have player generated content.

Or instead of money, make the player have to earn some praise points for basic quests - generated by players who complete the quest and give it a positive rating - be able to turn in those praise points for more things to create more quests with. Eventually they'd be able to buy some space and start developing a full fledged dungeon.

There are creative people (given the right tools) who will spend months creating good content for free.

I do think the key here is to make sure the population size is not out of hand. 2000 characters per server is more than enough (not online, but created).

2000 created is WAY to low. Any half large world will feel emptyish with less than 300, and less than 300 online at once is not going to happen with 2000 capped.

And I don't get this whole player quest thing. Horse before cart.

I suppose if you *only* had players and no NPCs, yah it'd be a little empty. But the idea is that there is a finite number of "heroes" in the game, and not every single thing you bump into is another hero. Flesh out the place with NPCs. See: Daggerfall series with chances to run into other players and assist/destroy each other.

Not sure I understand your 'horse before cart' comment.. are you saying you need players before player generated content? Well yah...

The problem with player-created quest isn't in the numbers, though certainly the way-too-high server populations of our current MMOG's would make player-created quests a nightmare system to police and manage. The problem is that players cannot be invested in the game.

What do I mean? Well, quests in general aren't just "I need 5 tiger hides." Sure, that's the mechanics but the story has to be something different. What can a player DO with those tiger hides? In MMOG's today, not much of shit. They can make some cool armor for themselves or their business. Whoopy.

But they aren't invested in the world, they are insulated from it. They aren't invested because nothing they do in the world is unique. EVERYBODY has the same options in regards to those items. Why? Because no player can be given special stuff that other players can't have access to. Everyone has to have the equal opportunities, and everyone has to have the same relative power.

Player-generated missions are only going to work if the player generating the mission has something unique to gain AND unique to lose with the success or failure of the mission. Take a cyberpunk style game where you create a mission to extract a scientist from a rival cybernetics company to get him to work for you. In MMOG's today, everyone must have access to the same scientist, and whatever benefit that scientist gives you has to be equal for whoever extracts that scientist. So what's the point of competition over the mission, other than being FRIST!1!@ But if your company, owned by the player, actually lost something (say your stock price went down) if the mission failed, and actually gained something unique (a new crafting recipe that no one else had) for success, well that would be different wouldn't it? You would be invested in that mission, that quest.

But then, in MMOG's now, if it's something you can hire someone to do, it's generally easier and more efficient to just do it yourself. Since parties/individuals/guilds have to be jack of all trades in current MMOG's, there isn't any good game reason not to just do the mission yourself with your guild, as opposed to hiring someone else to do it.

Another problem with player-generated missions is that they really work best when the generation of a mission FOR something generates another player mission to oppose that mission. Which is PVP, and we can't have that, even if it's consensual.

Note that a lot of what I said above talks about things I bitch about in current MMOG's. Such as the unique content. Unique content in current MMOG's is fucking stupid because the game's are predicated on time invested > everything else. Which means the catasses WILL ALWAYS GET STUFF FIRST OR MOST. In order to really make player-generated questing work, you have to throw that shit out completely. You have to start from the ground up with that stuff in mind.

this might seem a stupid point BUT do players ever know what the end-game is?  I mean, do the operators ever tell them?  It sort of would presume the designers knew what the end-game was themselves, as they built the thing, even if the design is open ended (whatever that means). 

If you had a definitive set of goals (micro or macro), why couldn't you tell players that? Why couldn't you tell players "this game is about X, and here are some Y ways to participate in X, and P, Q and R are some sample achievements you can have on your way to X."  

I presume they don't because of scaring off potential customers?  I kind of would like to know what the "ultimate" is in every game -- ultimate class, abilities, place, loot, whatever.  Is this too limiting?

I actually do think there is an "endgame" built into every game, MMORPG or not.  Why?  Because it's how the designers structure their design limits.  Until there's a mechanic to give players advancement without the artificial capping by levels this will continue.  I genuinely don't understand how hard it is to design quests, content, whatever that scales to skills or acheivements so far of the players -- whether it's badges, money, friends, PvP kills, etc.  I don't have the solution, but between everything out there for the last 5 year there must be some combination that works.

Edit: sorry, just feels like to me I only learn what the "real" end-game is by paying $500 for a year+ for 2 accounts and by then -- when I figure it out -- I'm inevitably disappointed.  I'm not sure if I'm more disappointed by the discovery of the end-game itself or the weariness over 1+ year to get there.  Either way, I kind of would like to know up front, and maybe that's naive.  It seems it's not making lvl50, for example, that's the problem, it's the fault of the developers not to have the ability to scale any of the in-game content around the players of that level.  Sure, lvl10's shouldn't be able to solo high level mobs, but a lvl50 should still be able to benefit somehow from a lvl10 quest, or be killed by a gross herd of lvl10 mobs.  Maybe a better way to think about it, is "to have an effect on the world, wherein they are a participant" (so rank/fame/faction?).  No idea.

^ That is pretty much exactly what I meant by "horse before cart". To make player quests work you need to have a game where those quests occur because they have a purpose. You need to have players who have limited skills who need to rely on each other.

The things is, when you get a system like that in place you don't really need player created quests, the player interaction will often provide questlike aspects without a formal system. (And once again I'm going off MUD experience here)

Oh I certainly agree - MMOs are currently a few generations behind the more advanced MUDs available. While not everything can transfer directly over, I think the 'fun' aspects can. The main issue, in my mind, has already been stated: developers/publishers are more interested in seeing how 'massive' they can make a game rather than focusing on small interactive communities. Once they realize that small communities will foster even better retention than large 'lost in the crowd' populations we might see some changes.

(There are some games going in the right direction: Puzzle Pirates, Second Life, Tale in the Desert, etc - Even games like EVE and Neocron are at least exploring other gaming styles and incoming streams).

From what I've read of Spore (http://pc.ign.com/articles/617/617441p1.html) it may well provide the jumpoff point for that sort of cross-pollination to MOGs.  The author only partly tongue-in-cheek bills it as a massive single-player game.

But there's a huge problem in convincing decisionmakers along these lines.  Raph Koster has more than a few times here on these boards and their predecessers quoted studies that inflict the status quo of retention through mindless addiction.  I suggest that the concepts discussed here (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1573223077/qid=1117050953/sr=8-1/ref=pd_csp_1/103-7231584-3085455?v=glance&s=books&n=507846) suggest these decisionmakers are shooting at an obsolete target.

I spent more time skimming this thread.  There's a lot here.  I'll throw out some half-baked opinions and ill-considered ideas.  My general bias is toward skill-based characters, against heavy reliance on combat, and toward large and interesting environments.


Number one isn't too difficult.  You, as a robe-wearing, tower-dwelling wizard can't get the tail yourself because the basilisk might eat you, it's a long way for an octogenarian to travel, or maybe you are just lazy/arrogant.  You aren't high-level because levels suck dog balls and are not present in this imaginary game.  You are good at magic/alchemy/whatever but when it comes to combat, if you don't toast your opponent(s) before they close on you, you die.  Dying is bad.  Better to give some pocket change or trinkets to young cockstrong adventurers and let them risk being turned to stone for eternity.

Number two could be true or false, since we are in a skill-based game.  I think they would be motivated by what is to them a large amount of money, or perhaps it is their business to yank tails from basilisks and deliver them to merchants or wizards directly.  It might also be that the basilisk is good for something else such as eggs, meat, scales, etc.  Hardened adventureres would be required to gather the difficult-to-obtain items.

#3. Since you are assumed to be a RWTD wizard, it should also be assumed that you didn't get the tower at character creation.  Let's just say that you have been stingy over the game-years.

#4. If the basilisks are all gone, the laws of economics means that the price of basilisk parts will skyrocket.  People who used to make fancy basilisk-scale armor or used the eggs to make omeletes would have to find alternate ingredients, or fund an expedition of crazy adventurers to search for more basilisks if they have a very long respawn timer.  The world would have to be flexible enough to handle something like this... do we want the possibility to run out of basilisks, even for the short term?  I think a short-term lack of resources could be interesting if done correctly, but this penalizes the non-catass.

An interesting implementation would be changing resources.  The basilisks might all die out, but a week or two later someone finds a creature whose name is easier to type that provides similar resources.  This could get complicated and would probably required a Live Team that wasn't a bunch of lowpaid dick-licks, or smart (not Smart) programmers that could automate this.  It might even slow down Allakhazam's inevitable publication of the loot tables.  I don't see what the big hold-up is when it comes to a dynamic game world, other than stingy or misguided companies.

#5.  Adventurers could find out you were hiring easily, I think, if there was some well-designed commercial area where advertising space was available, or perhaps there is a central point for this sort of thing, like an adventurer guild.  Sounds cheesy at first, maybe, but seems logical to have a central place to hire lackeys and find employers.  Otherwise the out-of-work warrior would end up knocking on the doors of wizard towers or merchant homes.

#6.  If a person or group that had traveled far to slay a monster that a RWTD wizard could not kill decided to double-cross that wizard... well, let's rule out uncontrolled PVP because that blows.  If it was enabled, the angry adventurers could threaten or kill the wizard, but then you would have the opposite problem of preventing the adventurers from slaying the wizard once he presented himself.  This could be enforced with a contract, which I don't think should be required.  If someone wants to just make a verbal agreement, fine and caveat emptor, but signing a contract would penalize the contract-breaker somehow.  This could get messy.  A simple mechanism would be to use the aforementioned guild as a third-party contract handler, requiring both the tail and money be submitted before completing the transaction.  They could perhaps also provide an item-identification or appraisal service that helps the unwitting decide if the trinket is valuable to them... for a fee.

#7, hmmm... seems like the question is "Will an NPC buy this thing, and if so, for how much?"  My personal taste is to have NPCs buy common things.  This way someone could conceivably eke out a living as a farmer by selling <farm product> to someone in-town.  Nothing should stop them from selling to players, though.  In fact, I like the idea of pharmers actually being farmers in a game, but perhaps I'm alone in that.  This is a way for money to be created, though, so we have to be careful.  Personally, I am in favor of item decay where it makes sense.  Farm implements wear out and become money sinks.  Armor is damaged as it is used.

Rare items, I think, should not be sellable to an NPC (or buyable from one).  I can't give the checkout girl at the grocery store a lump of gold in exchange for two pounds of bacon, you see.  A metalsmith would be more than happy to make an offer on it, though, or use it to create a trinket for me.  I am not sure that I like unique or limited-availability items, since this is a road well-traveled by abusive GMs with in-game buddies.

To answer Soln's question: There is no real end game in the current MOG.  If there is an end-game, it consists of the same infinite power curve wherein people play something resembling the prototypical Vox raid for continually-diminishing gain... all the while paying the monthly fee.  If the actual game itself was fun just to play, there would be no need for this.  Expansions that add extra continents or moon-cats just adds length to this curve to make sure you don't reach the end before the devs add frogmen and a dozen more raid dungeons.  I'm not telling you anything you don't already know.  If someone makes a game that isn't just a linear combat-power-ladder, one where a player could never become more powerful than the environment, there would be no need for top-loading expansions.  You could add expansions to the "middle" of the game, like adding mounts, stocking lakes with trout, providing new crafting recipes, adding player skills, etc.  If the game itself is actually fun to play, you don't need the all-encompassing power-curve.  Perhaps a dozen little ones: politics, various types of combat, trading, various crafting lines.  I'm really reaching here, huh?


Well-said.  Imbuing a MOG with the ghost of Karl Marx is no way to motivate players, other than the petty ones who always post about class balance on VN.  Haemish is correct here, and I think his idea would have a far better chance of implementation with smaller populations of players/pigfuckers.  It would also be important to avoid mudflation in this situation since unique rewards (not necessarily items) could easily turn this into another EQ clone.  The rewards should add distinction instead of power, or perhaps provide access to new things.  It is also important that there be some class-separation, since that is what really motivates people to play the game.

About size, this is going to rely on personal preference to a degree.  My experience with a ridiculously low population in WoW showed me that it could be made to work if the world was interesting enough.  At the low levels on Crushridge, PvE was viable even though it was a PvP server.  Not only that, my undead toon could hit the wilderness and not see anyone else for a while, which was usually a good thing in Hillsbrad.  I still had that heightened sense of danger, but it was more of a Resident Evil 4 sense of danger instead of the certain knowledge that I was about to be ganked.  I had the option of skirting the populated areas, taking the long way around things, hiding in bushes and so on.  With enough players to ensure that you will never lose sight of one, this is lost.

Another thing was the relative abundance of natural resources.  I never had too much trouble finding metal pre-merge, but of course I am now competing with people who do nothing but run laps around Charred Vale or even Shimmering Flats.  Enchanters were relatively rare; now I have to turn off General and Trade when spending any significant amount of time in Org.  It's not that I'm anti-social as much as the fact that anyone I am not somehwat familiar with is very close to being an asshat.  It only takes him repeating a message in Trade too quickly in order for me to actually despise him.  The thing is, he wouldn't have to spam Trade if there weren't two dozen other people selling the exact same piece of useless junk.  I think if you are used to the buzz of a city, like someone living in a real-life big city, you could be bored out of your mind when visiting the country, so this isn't necessarily for everyone.  But compare the number of assholes in LA to the number of assholes in Anchorage.  Someone just has to design an interesting environment, and it has to be persistently interesting.  This is where people miss the real idea of a "persistent world"; they create a "static world" instead.

Asheron's Call had some quests where certain components of the item came from dungeons with level limits.  High level characters were forced to buy these from low level characters, or build their own lower level characters to farm the stuff.  The devs did this on purpose because there were complaints that new quests were only for high level characters.

It's been done, in the oldest MMOG to boot.  Don't you remember wandering about the east Brit Bank and seeing people spam "INGOTS XXX!!!"  "BOARDS XXX!", etc?

It was done much earlier than that, and much better.

Walk in to most MUD cities and you'll find a room that has a bulletin board. Filled with posts titles such as:

"Looking for a Dagger OF Fire"
"Selling Ring Of Wizardry"
Etc.

I'll harp on this point for ever. Bulletin Boards sould be far more common in MMOGs! Community building, item/clan advertising, spam uncluttering, and many more reasons beside!

Bulletin boards existed in UO from day one.  Just no one used them.

Makes sense - open-air markets IRL are noisy places too.

I agree, if you walk into a marketplace, you can expect people to be selling you on crap in the usual manner.  Using /yell or whatever game-appropriate tool.  It would spare my sanity a bit to keep the market off to the side, but then how do you keep the used-camel salesman from spamming some other, more well-traveled area?  Because he will, since most people aren't looking to buy something.  I can only think that it would have to be handled as in real life: city ordinances.  I'd love to see a NPC guard take a swipe at some dick for shouting trades in the wrong area.

Now, how does the game figure out what's an "inappropriate" yell and what isn't?  At the risk of starting a player justice derail, here's an idea: let players in the area do a "/stfu" on people who are yelling.  If a certain number/percentage of players all /stfu, the city guard takes notice and chases the offender off.  That way people who have genuinely interesting announcements (slim chance, but it COULD happen... "I'm quitting the game and giving my priceless stuff away" is one example) wouldn't get arrested for spamming, but people spamming "OMG FAGOT LOL" would get hauled off immediately.

Hell, they existed in EQ as well, and no one used them or knew they were there. I only found one by accident in Qeynos. The existence of bulletin boards is meaningless if they aren't easy to use or documented.

As with everything, they have to be implemented well to work.

I know that I personaly would have used a BB in WoW, especialy if it was linked to the battle.net realm forums.

So would delinquents.

Yeah. That's why you need a GM who would moderates properly and often, and link forums/bb violations to the account.

That's just crazy talk.

At the risk of stating something obvious or perhaps stupid since I'm not a programmer, it is entirely possible for the program to monitor chat or chew logs and issue warnings.  It is also entirely possible for this to be driven by a statistical analysis such as with a Bayesian spam filter; you can either issue warnings on things that look like spam, or be aggressive and issue warnings on things that don't look like "normal" talk.  The database, like the spam filter, should be trained by a real person (not players), but this real person should only have to spend some time each week browsing chat logs for things the filter didn't catch.  Might be better to have a /spam_report command so players could send in stuff, depending on chat volume.  Properly written robots could simply generate a list of asshats rather than issue warnings directly, or there could simply be a grace period during which the warned could appeal.
Some ass-numbers:
Three(?) consecutive un-responded-to warnings gets you guard aggro; obviously you are an antisocial miscreant.
Using the exact same text three(?) times within twenty seconds gets you guard aggro; don't spam, fucker.
Unless you are in the marketplace.

This would be a low-hanging-fruit solution, obviously, and as such should be fairly benign with the warnings it issues, since mistakes will happen.  Augmentation with warnings based on specific words would be great.  Two months of Korean open beta should be enough to get the word database in decent shape.

Employing the example of ATiTD, I have no problem with ordinances that affect particular users.  If player Cocktard de'Azz is bothersome enough for other players to run a bill through the in-game legal system, he needs to be dealt with.  This could be making him KOS to the guards in some areas, or everywhere in a certain town.

However, the inapropriate use of areas is due to bad design.  Apparently no one on the design team knew that the EC tunnel was the perfect place to sell shit.  Of course it was, because it was a fucking bottleneck in travel.

And because there were no guards there that KOSed evil races. It was truly the most convenient, non-KOS area in the game, with easy access to portals and a bank (well, easy for EQ at that time). It was the hub of the game that they claimed Freeport was in the lore.

Why would we be taking exception to the EQ tunnel though?  I dont mind at all that the player base tends to adapt their own areas of intrest.  I find it much more damning of the world design that at least 1/3rd of the zones in EQ are NEVER visited because the xp/time ratio sucks balls and the grind is so bad that doing anything that isn't optimal is considered insanity.

Last time I played you did not deviate from:

local newb leveling > oasis (the beach w/ the specters) > lake of ill omen. 

Period that was where you went and if you ventured to other zones with mobs of those level ranges you would find them devoid of life.

I think emergent behavior like this is one of the most interesting aspects of games - online or not. The EQ tunnel, Quake rocket jumping and (plz no) UO pre-casting are all unintended but interesting game mechanics.

Regarding using spam filters in chat, while I am pretty impressed with the Bayesian filters you can find for email these days, I'm pretty dubious that any AI-like monitoring of chat would be successful.  The miscreants would find ways around it, and you'd get false positives on too many innocents.  Same as it ever was...

/grumble

Unintended sure, but interesting in the same way as sneaking an ace out of one's sleeve.

The only real problem I had with the tunnel was the damn yelling, whether I was in the tunnel or not.  Just making it a separate zone would have been perfect.  Otherwise it was great.  People should learn from this example, really, and make a super-duper marketplace in X.

I have always enjoyed the strange things player-communities come up with when they make gameplay better.  Marketplace areas are often the most obvious examples, but I agree that the actual marketplace mechanics should be a bigger priority with devs then they seem to be.  I enjoyed Ragnarok's (yes I played it) market system as there was very little spam and it was fun checking out tons of shops hoping to find some kind of great deal.

A really good example of something that basically reinvented the game would be skiing in Tribes1.  It was always stated by the devs that it was an unintended feature but basically it was the reason Tribes was and is the best CTF ever invented by human hands.

My mantra these days:

NO
•   Fee
•   Shards
•   HUD
•   Levels
•   Skills
•   Inventory management
•   Tutorial
•   Dragons or elves
•   Grind
•   Boobies
•   Travel
•   Static zones
•   Tedium or makework
•   Hotkey fests
•   Spreadsheets
•   Oppressive maintenance
•   4 hour sessions
•   4 gig installs

 
YES
•   …to swords
•   Explosions
•   Fun in 10 minute blocks
•   Building
•   Groups levelling up together
•   Player skill required
•   User content
•   Consequence to actions
•   Competition
•   60+ player games
•   Interdependence
•   Embedded experiences
•   Self-directed pursuits
•   Humor and wit
•   Intelligence
•   Obvious play mechanics
•   Quality story and worldbuilding

Other than Yes to Swords - unless it's  Rune style twitch system - I'd like to see you make a game like that. But I can't imagine Smed and Co.'s leash is long enough to support your mantra. Please, Raph, for the love of god, walk the walk.

And make a good virtual world. No one else is.

With or without swords, this sounds like a good direction.

I, for one would love to see swords and explosions in the same game. Two great tastes that taste great together!

Sounds more like vaporous buzzwords to me.  Not that I am trying to discourage Raph.  Too many Dilbertian meetings.

Just remake UO with more shiny and less r0xx0r already.

Swords is a stand-in for "swashbuckling derring-do." Just like explosions is a stand-in for "dramatic exciting feedback."

Yeah, it is vaporous buzzwords. But sets of buzzwords are the building blocks of philosophies and game visions and so on.

I'm not giving up on virtual worlds. And yes, my leash is long enough in the R&D group.

That's good to hear. Hopefully something will come out of the R&D group that has absolutely nothing to do with anything that's on the market though.

I like the Yes list, it looks good. I'm willing to bet that Marketing manages to slip Boobies back in to the Yes list when you're not looking though.

That Yes List is a good start.  :mrgreen:

My mantra these days:

NO
•   HUD
•   Levels
•   Skills
•   Tutorial
•   Dragons or elves
•   Grind
•   Static zones
•   Tedium or makework
•   Hotkey fests
•   Spreadsheets
•   Oppressive maintenance
•   4 hour sessions

Amended the No list to remove things I can easily tolerate if a game isn't a goddamn EQ clone.  Hell if you can get 100% of the yes list I would put up with almost everything on the No list except hotkey fests, elves and tedium.  The Yes list is a sexy beast.  Whats with all the promises of nice things on the distant horizons recently?  A glut of fps-mmog hybrids, tbs mmog announcements and the promise of a SoE product more along the path of Pside then EQ?  Somebody freeze me and wake me up when any of these lovely dream-products actually releases in a non-buggy state that still resembles the flowery words we always hear before the crushing reality of easy $$$ clone games > innovation sets in.

Boobies are on your no list. This is a crime against nature, and the pr0ncow is not happy.

I want all of these in a game.  Sadly, it appears the American mass market does not.  The popularity of WoW signifies the fact that people want none of these things in their MMO experience.  My retention in the current iteration of mmog's has been very short due mostly to the lack of these four ideas.  I don't want to be lead by the nose, I don't want to be able to do everything well, I don't want to win every encounter easily, and I certainly don't want to be insulted by an overtly simplistic game format.

I like solving puzzles.  I like my games to be difficult to a point that I feel I've done something when I've overcome a challenge.  I like having a role in a gaming world that cannot be duplicated by everyone else... being a specialist as it were.  If you can incorporate these 4 concepts into an mmog without it feeling like a job, I'll become your biggest fan.

Yeah, don't mind me, I have been ruined by too much Massive Corporation Bullshit.  You have to create the bulleted PowerPoint prsentations to get the management on your side.  Facts are not necessarily your friends when playing corp politics.

I do think that the virtual world goal is the best one; somehow I am always disappointed when I sign up for something new and it's just another Diku.  This is why I like Grand Theft Auto so much, particularly the sprawling San Andreas.  It's not just some open field of smashy-smashy, but there are short-term consequences for bad behavior.  Implementing some sort of repercussion for people being shitfuckers is vital.  But what the hell am I saying?  You know all this.  I'll just give you my nodding, slackjawed support.

You know.  We hear "virtual world" as a buzzword all the time.  I'm not convinced that a virtual world is even what people really want.  People want a virtual world where they are the ones that make the world change.  Given the scale of MMOG's, we'd be seeing virtual worlds controlled by catassing asshats with nothing better to do in their life than ruin it for the rest of us with significantly less play time.  I don't want to live in their world thank you very much.   

On a similar note, I do enjoy a game with a social hook.  Give me a reason to interact with other players beyond killing ubermob_8479 with 6 gajillion hit points.  A Tale in the Desert was a step in the right direction in building a virtual community.  Teppy just killed it with chores and mind-numbing click fests. 

I am assuming that most of the people playing WoW have never played a MOG before.  If I were to apply my own sick-of-this timeline to them, I figure that many of them will sign up for this forum in five years, unified by a common experience in MMO shitcockery.  We will then fight for nine months before each choosing a micro-niche MOG in which to create a Bat Country guild.  So let it be written.

Seriously, though, you can't assume that a random sampling of WoW players knows anything at all about other MOGs.  Who knows what they want?  I bet they have no idea what they want.

About the (any) virtual world, I agree with your points.  Some catass repellent needs to be sprayed all up in that bitch.  Someone just needs to invent catass repellent first.  I think it should come in the form of gameplay that does not equate "time played" with "I win", for one thing.

I don't know. I want a virtual world where I can sell stuff and come up with the packaging and shit. Sim Mall, online, where I can own an In-And-Out burger and fag up the entire place. It'd be great. I mean, that's just an example. What would be even cooler is if that mall was a lobby to hop into other game worlds or mini game worlds in an arcade or something. Wait, I'm sorry, that's too good of an idea for the industry right now.

Just give me something without levels, we'll move on from there.

I'm inclined to agree with you there, unfortunately the only good example of what I would even consider a virtual world is EVE.  Unfortunately, due to the serious lack of fun in many areas of the game it is hard to have a good discussion about virtual worlds based upon it.  Any attempt will be quickly sidetracked by a ton of people pointing out how mining in EVE is about as boring as gaming gets.

I do think creating a world that reacts to player input in a meaningful way should be a definate goal of the "medium" but for now lets focus on those other minor details.

/played > player skill
levels
raid content and the uber guild cock-in-ass politics that it spawns (I'm fine with epic, boss style npc encounters but there has to be a better way right?)

Based on the one major foray into a "real" persistent world, the Sleeper's Tomb back in old EQ Scars of Velious days, the mass market community absolutely does not want a persistent virtual world. My personal belief is that this is because they make the most powerful zone in the game, with the most powerful items in the game the only one to be persistent, and added to this the only people that were able to positively interact with this zone, and decide to make the world changing event take place were the top of the line catasses who could get there in the first place. To the rest of the populace of the game, the only possible viewpoint of this persistent world aspect was a negative one--they could never influence it, only be screwed by it.

Now, if the concept of a persistent world (or virtual world if that's what you mean: player's actions influence the world itself over an extended time) extends to each and every player, then I think the market would adapt and eventually enjoy persistent worlds.

As I keep saying, this shit would be easier to implement if you design your game for fewer than 500 people.  When I am online, say in WoW, 98% of the other players might as well be orange DOT barrels since I don't interact with them, I just drive right by hoping I don't get any shit on my ride.  They essentially become really stupid NPCs that refuse to give me quests or lore, substituting grief and dancing emotes.  I derive absolutely zero benefit from almost every player not in my guild.  Even the Alliance dicklicks provide some "content" since I know right away they are the enemy.  The other Horde players just steal my iron nodes.

You can own an In-N-Out (or whatever you lefties eat from) in a world capped at 150 people.  You can fit 150 fuckers into a persistent San Andreas, for Marduk's sake.  Player justice comes about because it won't take long for the other 149 people to figure out that you are a turd-lipped monkeyfucker and you become the pariah that everyone loves to hate.  "Oh, look, there's that asshole Futt Bucker... watch me run him down."  SPLAT.

I'm also strongly inclined to say that the gameplay itself would be only interaction with the world.  When people start acquiring things, you get back into the loot problem.  The thing is, I'm not really sure if anyone else would like to play something where there was no material advancement that affected gameplay.  To extend the persistent San Andreas idea, I could probably buy a building and it be mine, but I should not be the only one able to buy a bazooka.  Acquiring control of a unique game area or mechanic and keeping it from other players is the kind of thing that will get FOH involved.

OK, enough ass-talking from me for now.

Nah, it's actually worse then that.  People want "virtual worlds" where they are the ones who decide how the world changes, strictly based on whether or not these change affect them positively (or at worst, are neutral).

Take in game economies; people are generally fine with other players selling stuff so long as a) when they want to buy, they can find the stuff others are selling, b) others aren't trying to sell the same stuff for less then they are, and/or c) the auction spam can be turned off [/i]when they dont want that part of the world to exist for them.   Same thing for PvP; they want it to exist ONLY when they actually want to utilitize it.

Everyone wants to be their own lord and master of a virtual world, they just dont think about it that way.

Xilren   

I've said it before and I'll say it again. The mass market DOES NOT WANT A VIRTUAL WORLD. They just don't, no matter how much they might say they do. Which they aren't, BTW, as evidenced by the success of WoW.

They don't want a virtual world, for many of the reasons Xil just outlined. They aren't in control of it. A virtual world will have the same rules as the real world: the strong get stronger, the rest get shit. The very idea of a virtual world is antithetical to the mass market, because it implies another life, whereas the mass market just wants to be entertained for a few hours without hassle, and if they are looking at the MMO area for that entertainment, they want their friends and likeminded people to be involved.

People who want virtual worlds are not the mainstream and never will be. They are a niche. You will not design a successful virtual world that is meant to house 100,000 people. Server populations have to be under 1200 people concurrently online. The bitch of the whole thing is that to do a decent virtual world, you need mass market type money, but without hopes of mass market appeal.

I think that your points are pretty damned spot on...and one of the things that I love about being an indy developer (and yes, GG, falls under that definition!) is that we can still give it a whirl!

Yes, the REAL UO, not that abomination that EA has on life support.

Or you guys could just kick some cash down to the Mount & Blade folks, withth stipulation that they make it a multiplayer game!

Ooof, did you really just say that?

I didn't say it was wrong in and of itself--just that it wasn't the best choice for introducing the concept. Myself, I think that -every- event should be "world changing", in that content like that should be both unique and dynamic. It just turned out that with the quality of the items (best in the game, especially the monk's robe, but others as well), and the difficulty getting there, it became a "race to grief", where guilds would farm the area until another guild could finally make it in...and then they would shut it off, so that other guilds couldn't ever catch up.

The quality of items didn't get matched until the upper reaches of Vex Thal, and even then were too damned hard to get into for anyone to really recover. Monks without regen robes couldn't pull most of Vex Thal for a long, long time...

No, I was just boggled and baffled that you cited that as the first "real" serious effort towards a persistent world. Leaving all of muds aside, what about UO, AlphaWorld, OnLive? What about Meridian 59's guildhall ownership system?

Why are all of these persistant worlds more boring and less visceral than Trade Wars?

Maybe, MAYBE someone can answer that for me. Far as I can remember, the commcercially licensed muds and text games of the early 90s (MajorMud, TeleArena, and TradeWars) were consistant throughout. There wasn't something you could call an "EndGame." And there were true achiever type things to do. I remember camping the labyrinth entrance the night they were putting the first expansion for MajorMud in on my local BBS and was the only rogue to get the crystal Shortsword. When I left, I handed it off and as far as I know, it's not been through 6 generations of players.

Either I've gotten older, or shit like that just doesn't happen. Worlds may exist, but there's just something lacking in modern games. I'll say this though, SW:G, with it's early early early game economy was one of the best meta-products in a game. Period. Ever. I loved it, and wish that it hadn't transformed...into..well, bad.

What the hell was I saying? Oh right, Endgames, either too inconsistant or too boring. Or take too long to get there. I told a lot of people that when they got to the endgame in WoW it would break that last straw for them. For the most part I was right, a number of people did stick around longer than I thought they would, but even they're beginning to feel the complete and utter boredom of scheduled raids.

Very interesting thread, guys. 

Virtual worlds might not be the final answer to the MMO question, but I don't think that average players would necessarily shrink away from such a game.  Yes, if you allow players and player organizations to own, control, and manage cities, then it will be the most catasstastic players who end up in these roles.  For the rest of us, we're the equivalent of the low-to-middle class.  The thing is, this is only a bad thing if it's not an enjoyable experience and if the game allows the people with power (catasses) to crap on the masses with any sense of impunity.  I don't think all players need to be in control of the entire damn world, they just need to be in control of their little sphere of enjoyment, be it exploration, conflict, or socializing.  So long as they can keep doing what they enjoy doing, I don't think most players will give a damn what the most powerful players are doing.

The idea is that, when the world at large does act upon the average player, it means a new and exciting experience (new content) that jives with how she wants to play the game.  I think players could actually enjoy having a wrench thrown into their playing, so long as its something they have a good chance at conquering/surviving and not just an unfair reaming.  There's a fine line between the two, of course, and that's where the game designers come in.


It's certainly an appealing idea.  It's probably unlikely that we'll see a traditional commercial MMO pursue anything like this, but, as Xilren has already mentioned earlier in this thread, games like NWN offer some very promising possibilities.  NWN was of course not built with PWs in mind, but the users have taken it pretty far.  I wonder how far they might take it if a game were to genuinely provide them with tools to easily set up and operate a PW and then provide players with an easy way to find and join them.  I doubt it would ever reach a massive audience, but it might grow large enough to put a dent in the big commercial MMOs as bored players migrate to these amateur PW servers that they don't have to pay a monthly fee for.  The commercial MMOs would have to at least take notice.  I could see it functioning as a sort of indie MMO scene, outside of text-based MUDs and such.

Because they design and build the world first, and the game/games part of it gets put in as the afterthought.

Virtual worlds are supposed to be open-ended.  The problem is not that "game" gets patched in later, it's that whatever is patched in later does not please all kinds of people all the time.  GW should never be compared to any sort of virtual world and those that do are demanding a different product or at least a mini game inside an overarching product.

My problems with early UO weren't problems inherent to a virtual world.  They were the series of incremental decisions each step of the way all attempting to please very disparate audiences.  The original vision of UO was not misguided - the fact that it is still used as a yardstick suggests it simply needs to be implemented purely to the demographic that wants virtual worlds instead of console games with transparent save features.  I marvel at how often people ask for a pure UO done in current technology and we instead keep getting EQ derivatives.

I'm immediately dubious when I hear a console fanatic (e.g. people who own multiple brands and eras of consoles) critiquing virtual worlds.  Theirs is a  highly-focused playstyle that demands instant feedback of railed gameplay with clear definitions of winning and losing players.  There is no reason why a persistent world cannot have that sort of mini-game instance going on.  I think WoW BG is a step in that direction.  A different combat engine using twitch might be more satisfactory.

But all these considerations are business and engineering oriented.  They have nothing to do with the fundamental nature of virtual worlds.

Fixed it for you.


My definition of what a virtual world SHOULD be (and what UO was close to being), is an open-ended world with assloads of interesting mini-games, each of which could stand on its own for people who like that sort of thing. THAT'S what a virtual world SHOULD be. If you can't pull that off, don't even fucking try. A virtual world could please most of the people most of the time, but only if its component mini-games are all good.


None of which went far enough to please the audiences for "that sort of thing." The PVP didn't think the benefits/disadvantages of PVP were hard enough. The PVE people didn't think the PVE got enough work. All because each of the mini-games wasn't dealt with as a game in its own right.


Grand Theft Auto defies your definition of a console fanatic. It not only defies it, it shoots your concept directly in the face, humps the corpse, beats up a hooker and drives off after doing wheelies on the corpse. Katamari Damacyl does similar things, only it rolls over them and sticks them to its snowballing body. There is nothing inherently console-y about highly-focused playstyles or railed gameplay, and nothing inherently open-ended about PC games. Stop it. Really. There is fundamentally nothing the PC can do that the X-Box cannot do when it comes to the design of a game, or an MMOG. I still believe consoles are where your first real breakthrough mass market MMOG are going to come from. No, I still don't consider WoW a mass market MMOG. Think bigger.


Which is what I just said above. The true nature of virtual worlds is in their open-endedness. But just having a world is a MUSH. A world with interesting and full-featured mini-games is the kind of MMOG that is needed.

Except that I didn't say PC games versus Consoles games.  I wasn't talking about hardware either.  I talked about players and preferred playstyles, like the contrast between Gabe and Tycho of PA.  And the traditional console player since Pong has been someone whose preferred playstyle is exactly as I described because for eons those kind of games sold to the widest common denominator and were doable on the hardware of each time period.

This isn't a conversation about "The Next Promised Death of PCs because soon all consoles will come standard with a keyboard and a hard drive."  If you want to opine about the future of consoles blurring the lines between playstyles start a new thread.  :-P

While I think virtual worlds should have mini-games, that does not define them.  Not unless Xbox Live is a virtual world anyway.  People that like god games and virtual worlds are people who like the freedom to take a broad collection of simple mechanics and arrange them in complex ways unanticipated by developers and yet still get real world-like results.  UO actually did pretty good with that - had they simply had consensual PvP and decent mob spawns from day one we wouldn't still be dicking around arguing that EQ derivatives can be boring to some.

Don't ever Bruce me again or by-gawd I'll photoshop your picture off Oxenfree's old site into some truly Woodcockian Winger art and email it to your ex-girlfriend!  :evil:

Other than a few random muds that allowed for every player to build everywhere they want, I don't see any of the above qualifying for "persistent world" status, in the definition I use: where player's actions could fundamentally change the world view of everyone in the game (that observed the change).

The Sleeper's Tomb script when all four were killed caused permanent and irrevocable changes to the server it happened on...and that's what I mean by persistent world. Saving your characters doesn't count, and basically if a game has respawns that no matter what any player does, always happen, and/or it doesn't allow players to permanently modify common portions of the game world (at a minimum) it doesn't meet my personal bar.

According to Jessica Mulligan, the Defense of Trinsic could have been the first event to match your definition, but failed to do so because of a failure to communicate between coder and designer.  In fact, I'd dispute that Sleeper's Tomb really fits your definition, since the outcome was inevitable.  All servers would eventually reach the same state, it was just a matter of when.

Mind, I think you are using an incorrect definition of persistant world.  I think mutable would be a better term.

I'll go further and say that a UO house meets the definition better than the Sleeper's Tomb does. UO, ATiTD, and a few other games are actually true "persistent worlds" in the technical sense in that they save game state as a whole, and not merely character state.

I might also point out that it wasn't "a few" text muds that had that capability, it was more than half the major codebases, accounting for around 1/2 the muds and 1/3 of the total mud population.

So I must not be understanding your definition either. It's certainly not the commonly used one.

And again, the success of GTA defies your description of the typical console player who doesn't like non-directed gameplay. There is nothing inherent in console games that makes them averse to non-directed gameplay.


That would be a silly conversation indeed. A keyboard and a hard drive is hardly the biggest differentiation between consoles and PC's.


And yet, if you gave yourself an avatar in X-Box Live that walked around a world space spouting "thee's" and "thou's" suddenly it's an MMOG. The only difference is that X-Box Live would have an actual world of different mini-games, while MMOG Virtual Worlds usually have 2-3 mini-games, kill the foozle, craft the shiney, and screw your fellow man in various ways.


I do believe I've never been crazy or brave enough to put my pic on Oxenfree's old site. Consider yourself Bruced.

/* Derail */
I'd pay good money for a giant poster sized wingered Haem.I bet I could get it in the Biennial at the Hirshorn in DC. God knows the art there is tasteless.
/* Rerail */

If I were serious I'd pull the pics SPT posted of him and the snowbeast.  But really I found it much more entertaining to see Haem doing a credible Bruce imitation.  He probably even had something cool to say but the pass was so good I couldn't be bothered to parse for it... :roll:

Heh, I think I invented the term SirBrucing, just not the technique. But years of dicking about with him taught me how to properly use it.

Uhh... that is both hilarious and disturbing.

I implied but did not state that I feel the persistent world we are trying to find here would have no endgame.  Simply defining an end to your game sets you up for eventual failure.  Seems obvious to me.  Instead of putting one big game into the world, which would obviously interest only some people, put in many smaller games which as a group appeal to a larger number of people.  If someone wins one of the games, don't give a reward that allows them to break their foot off in everyone else's asshole... otherwise they "win".

Well in the RL, you don't need an end game because there a new things to invent and viseral experiances to have.  A MMOG by its natures have very little of these.  The whole thing is limited by the designers talent and budget.  So, an end game is a codename for Designer's plan to handle the player's infinite desire for interesting stuff to do with the Designer's finite talent and resources.  No end game means you have no plan (like CoH).  Your end game is "a bunch of small sub-games that interest a wide variety of players."

Stated better than I managed to.

The funny thing is that I agree with your overall point, but from the opposite perspective.

I enjoyed levelling in WoW, but once I got (almost to) the level cap, I realised there was no point continuing past 57 to 60, since all that they have left to do is raid. And if I'd wanted to raid, I'd never have stopped playing EQ1 where I was max level in a raid guild.

If WoW had some forms of non-raid character progression akin to EQ1's AA that you could use experience for (Talents), and items you could gain "points" for and save up, akin to EQ1's LDoN expansion (I believe the DoN expansion has the same kind of thing) then my friends and I would have stayed on, as a casual soloer/D&D style group.

Since all that was left was the raid game, I lost interest.

And virtual world are the last bloody thing I want. I want to play a game, not timesink in a virtual world. I've got the real one for that.

The only key to end game as I see it is player generated. As for example Shadowbane, the end game as I saw it was to build the greatest empire with your guild. Sure, they failed, but you got a little glimpse of how cool it could've been.

Big guilds controlls a lot of land, gets a bit cocky and just happend to piss of just about more smaller guilds than they can handle. Smaller guilds create an alliance and crush uber big guild. Smaller guilds gets pissed at each other because one got 1 m^2 more land, and so right there starts another war. Okay so you might not like this political game which is created, then just don't be a guild leader and just tag along for the ride. Smaller "peaceful" guilds could control and hang out in the areas which are slightly less wanted, and hopefuly be left alone because of the lack of intrest in that area by larger guilds. It will probably be hard to pull of perfectly but there's loads of potential here for an awesome end game which doesn't bore you to death.

Shadowbane + actual crazy good player economy + a little bit smaller dose of crush, and much less ninja 3am crushing + MUCH LESS GOLD FARMING + using the lore server rules of the bat and balancing the game accordingly?  = the win.

Only way to create end game is by virtual, player run world. Players are ony ones capable of creating content at same pace as the need it.

Alternative is WoW grindfest.

And for all the bad things* you can say about EVE, it does have an endgame. I got my battleship** in 40 days of playing, but I stayed for over 2 years. I found a nice guild in nice alliance and we created the history. Amount of player content in EVE is incredible. You can spend your live climbing alliance leadership ladder, you can become fromidable pirate, or zealous bountyhunter. You can crush alliances. You can create trade empires.


The idea I had for EVE was player started war campaigns. Players create incident (say blowing up npc station), NPC will create misson (and transport players, ofc) for other players to investigate and counter the attack. If it would come to a fight, other NPC faction would try to 'use incident for it's own gain' and create mission to reinforce orginal attackers. and so on and so on, with final result being system (not)changing sovereignty. Players start and participate in the damn thing, but it's the system that tosses the cards and have control over the strategy. EVE universe is perfectly suited for it: there are titans can provide means of teleportations and open space is big enought to provide uninterrupted combat for infinite number of players. Unfortunately, writing good scenarios is way over CCP capabilities.



*it's a niche game for hardcore ELITE fans. there are people who enjoy being miner in god's forgotten space colony. For everyone else, there is trade, freight, PvE, missions...
**at that time, battleship equaled WoW's lv60.

Yeah I would like to see something like DAOC's GVG zone, except you build your own fortresses instead of taking over pre-existing ones. Sort of a combination of SWG's player cities and DAOC's fortress GVG.

In SWG you would see players building a bunch of forts around their cities in an attempt at creating their own content for other players to play. Some would disagree that this was their intent, but bragging rights are an awfully powerful motivation to create content that is playable to other players. Unfortunately there weren't many options in SWG for creating such content aside from the  player fortress which spawned a few allies for them. Had their been a lot more PVP related structures that served a variety of purposes, and REASONS to construct these objects in certain valuable areas, you would have seen a greater flexibility in player-created game content.

One such way to add motivation to create such player created content in SWG could have been by simply changing the way resource spawns worked. In the case of mineral spawns. areas could have been designated as particularly mineral rich, where only the best resources would spawn, giving the players a definate reason to capture this area, protect it, and create playable content for their enemies.

You would also see players creating player cities near popular creature spawns (such as Krayt dragons). Had players been able to "captuire" this area and protect it for the Empire or Rebels, the Empire/Rebel faction part of the game would have more importance, and therefore feel more Starwarsy, while at the same time giving end-game players (those ith maxed characters and more money than god) something more to do.


To sum it all up, "end game" (in my opinion), is what you do when you have done everything you can do in a game, and you have everything you can get. It is where you finally get to use all these things you have accumulated throughout the course of playing the game, whether this be experience, skills, money or items. It is a time when you can do frivolous things that you could not afford to do before, such as throwing money away to make uber items, or collecting rares, or collecting bugged items, or creating your own player city, or getting every buff possible on your character to go solo the toughest area in the game. It is the time where the entire game is open to you to do whatever the hell you want because you earned it.

Anyway I wholeheartedly agree, player created content is the gaming of the future, such as the internet could be considered "player created content". If we left it up to the originators of the internet to do all the creating we wouldn't have much of an internet would we? The internet itself is completely "player created", and this is how I see games becoming in the years ahead.

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