f13.net forums - Bartle: Online games suck and will only get worse

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June 24, 2025, 04:50:03 AM

we're back, baby

http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20041103/bartle_pfv.htm

New optimism from Bartle, who points [gross oversimplification ahead] out that players transmit "genes" to new games, but games that are shitty spit out many more players than games that are good because of low retention rates. The result is that shitty ideas get spread further than good ones which, combined with the fact that newbies expect new games to be like their first, means that evolution will drive MMOGs to get worse and worse as time goes by.

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[Author's note: What I'm calling virtual worlds, you might call MMORPGs or MMOGs or (if you're a real old-timer) MUDs. Macro replace with your preference accordingly. Got that? Then I'll begin…]

Introduction

Virtual worlds are being designed by know-nothing newbies, and there's not a damned thing anyone can do about it. I don't mean newbie designers, I mean newbie players - first timers. They're dictating design through a twisted "survival of the not-quite-fittest" form of natural selection that will lead to a long-term decay in quality, guaranteed. If you think some of today's offerings are garbage, just you wait…

Yeah, yeah, you want some justification for this assertion. Even though I'm in Soapbox mode, I can see that, so I will explain - only not just yet. First, I'm going to make four general points that I can string together to build my case. Bear with me on this…

The Newbie Stream

Here's a quote from Victorian author Charles Dickens:

Annual income £20/-/-, annual expenditure £19/19/6, result happiness.
Annual income £20/-/-, annual expenditure £20/-/6, result misery.
Annual income £0, annual expenditure £20,000,000, result There.com.

OK, so maybe he didn't actually write that last line.

What Dickens was actually saying is that, so long as you don't lose more than you gain, things are good. In our particular case, we're not talking olde English money, we're talking newbies, although ultimately, the two amount to one and the same thing.

Now I'm sorry to be the bringer of bad news, people, but here goes anyway: even for the most compelling of virtual worlds, players will eventually leave. Don't blame me, I didn't invent reality.

If oldbies leave, newbies are needed to replace them. The newbies must arrive at the same rate (or better) that the oldbies leave; otherwise, the population of the virtual world will decline until eventually no-one will be left to play it.

Point #1: Virtual worlds live or die by their ability to attract newbies

Newbie Preconceptions

Another quote, this time from the 1989 movie Field of Dreams:

If we build it, they will come.

Well, maybe if you're an Iowa corn farmer who hears voices inside your head telling you to construct a baseball stadium, but otherwise…

A virtual world can be fully functioning and free of bugs, but still be pretty well devoid of players. There are plenty of non-gameplay reasons why this could happen, but I'm going to focus on the most basic: lack of appeal. Some virtual worlds just aren't attractive to newbies. There are some wonderfully original, joyous virtual worlds out there. They're exquisitely balanced, rich in depth, abundant in breadth, alive with subtleties, and full of wise, interesting, fun people who engender an atmosphere of mystique and marvel without compare. Newbies would love these virtual worlds, but they're not going to play them.

Why not? Because they're all text. Newbies don't do text.

Newbies come to virtual worlds with a set of preconceptions acquired from other virtual worlds; or, failing that, from other computer games; or, failing that, from gut instinct. They will not consider virtual worlds that confront these expectations if there are others around that don't.

Put another way, if a virtual world has a feature that offends newbies, the developers will have to remove that feature or they won't get any newbies. This is irrespective of what the oldbies think: they may adore a feature, but if newbies don't like it then (under point #1) eventually there won't be anyone left to adore it.

Point #2: Newbies won't play a virtual world that has a major feature they don't like.

Not-So-Newbies

Here's another quote (kind of), from a private study of 1,100 players by the Themis Group. Themis's researchers asked veterans of 3 or more virtual worlds how many months they'd spent in their first one and how many months they'd spent in their second one. Dividing the second figure by the first, we get these averages for time spent in the second virtual world compared to the first:

EverQuest 80%
Ultima Online 70%
Asheron's Call 70%
Dark Age of Camelot 55%
Anarchy Online 55%

Players spend considerably less time in their second virtual world than they do in their first. Why is this?

Well, the first virtual world that someone gets into is very special to them. It's a magical, enchanting, never-to-be-repeated experience. You thought it was only you who looked back wistfully on your early days like that? Nah, it's everyone.

This has consequences. There used to be a virtual world called NeverWinter Nights, unrelated to the BioWare RPG, on AOL. When it was closed down, its refugees descended on Meridian 59. They immediately wanted M59 to incorporate every piece of NWN functionality that they could remember.

In general, players view all their subsequent virtual worlds in the light cast from their first one. They will demand that features from their first world be added to their current world, even if those very features were partly responsible for why they left the first world. They'll say they hate treadmills, but if their first experience was in a virtual world with treadmills, then they'll gravitate towards other virtual worlds with treadmills, all the while still hating them.

There's a long explanation for this, to do with the search for identity, which I won't delve into here because you only need to know that players do behave this way, not why (that's a different rant). Read my book (Designing Virtual Worlds) if you want the full story.

Point #3: Players judge all virtual worlds as a reflection of the one they first got into.

Short-Termism

No quote this time.

When a virtual world changes (as it must), all but its most experienced players will consider the change on its short-term merits only. They look at how the change affects them, personally, right now. They will only make mention of possible long-term effects to help buttress a short-termist argument. They don't care that things will be majorly better for them later if things are minorly worse for them today - it's only the now that matters.

Why is this? I've no idea. Well, I do have an idea, but not one I can back up, so I'll keep quiet about it. The fact is, players do behave like this all the time, and it would only take a cursory scan of any forum after patch day for you to convince yourself, if you don't believe me.

This short-termist attitude has two outcomes. Firstly, something short-term good but long-term bad is hard for developers to remove, because players are mainly in favor of it. Secondly, something short-term bad but long-term good is hard to keep because players are mainly not in favor of it.

Design that is short-term good but long-term bad I call "poor". Virtual worlds are primarily a mixture of good and poor design, because the other two possibilities (outright bad and short-term bad, long-term good) either aren't implemented or are swiftly removed. Good design keeps players; poor design drives them away (when the short term becomes the long term and the game becomes unfun).

Point #4: Many players will think some poor design choices are good.

Summary

OK, so we now have the four points I need to launch into my tirade. These are:

Point #1: Virtual worlds live or die by their ability to attract newbies
Point #2: Newbies won't play a virtual world that has a major feature they don't like.
Point #3: Players judge all virtual worlds as a reflection of the one they first got into.
Point #4: Many players will think some poor design choices are good.

I can now construct a line of reasoning that supports my initial assertion.

The Newbie Induction

Under point #4, players will eventually quit a virtual world that has poor features. Under point #3, however, they won't necessarily recognize that a feature which caused them to leave was indeed poor. Under point #2, they won't play those virtual worlds that lack this feature. Under point #1, those virtual worlds that do lack the feature - that is, those with the better design - will die through dearth of newbies. Any absolute newbies, for whom this is their first virtual world, will be educated to believe that this is how things are meant to be, thus starting the whole cycle again. Q.E.D.

The normal rules of evolution by which computer games operate propagate good design genes from one to the next. Each generation of game takes the best mutations from the previous generation and adds to them.

Virtual worlds also propagate good genes, but they propagate poor ones more readily. The best virtual worlds don't pass their design genes around much because of their high retention rate: "Why would I quit when what I want is right here?". Poor design genes cause players to leave sooner, so it's these features that wind up being must-haves for the next generation of products. This leads to a bizarre situation: for a new virtual world to succeed, it has to have the same features that caused its antecedents to fail..!

You're not convinced, huh? OK, here are two of examples of the theory in action, one old and one new.

Example 1 (Old): Permanent Death

If characters that died stayed dead, it would open up all kinds of very convenient doors for virtual world design:

It prevents early-adopter players from gaining an iron grip on positions of power.

It re-uses content effectively, because players view same-level encounters from different angles using different characters.

It's the default fiction for real life.

It promotes role-play, because players aren't stuck with the same, tired old character the whole time.

It validates players' sense of achievement, because a high-level character means a high-level player is behind it.
Many designers and experienced players would love to see a form of PD in their virtual world, but it's not going to happen. Newbies wouldn't play such a game (under points #2, #3 and #4), therefore eventually neither would anyone else (point #1).

PD is short-term bad, long-term good: rejected.

Example 2 (new): Instancing

Instancing looks very appealing on the face of it: groups of friends can play together without interference in relative tranquillity. What's not to love?

The thing is, this is not what virtual worlds are about. How can you have any impact on a world if you're only using it as a portal to a first-person shooter? How do you interact with people if they're battened down in an inaccessible pocket universe? Where's the sense of achievement, of making a difference, of being someone?

Most players don't see it that way, though.

Newbies see it as familiar - "fantasy Counterstrike, cool!" (point #2). They don't know what it means for their long-term enjoyment (point #4). Of course, they eventually will learn what it means - boredom and disenchantment - but even so, they probably won't connect the effect with the cause. They'll just go looking for another virtual world that features instancing (point #3). Older-era players will perhaps initially avoid anything with instancing because their first love didn't have it (point #3), but they'll probably try it eventually because (point #4) hey, maybe it's that missing piece that will give them the sense of closure they crave?

Thus, instancing will get locked into the paradigm. New virtual worlds that don't have it will get fewer players than those that do have it, even though they have the better design.

Instancing is short-term good, long-term bad: accepted.

Analysis

It's not just permanent death, it's not just instancing: it's teleportation, it's banks, it's non-drop objects - it's everything that makes sense in some contexts but not in all (or even most) contexts.

Player: You don't have teleporting! How can I rejoin my group if I miss a session?
Designer: Well gee, maybe by omitting teleportation I'm kinda dropping a hint that you can have a meaningful gaming experience, without always having to group with the same people of the same level and run a treadmill the whole time?
Player: Are you NUTS? I want to play with my friends, and I want to play with them RIGHT NOW!
Designer: But how are you ever going to make new friends? How -
Player: Are you listening? RIGHT NOW!
Designer: (Sigh)

Virtual worlds are becoming diluted by poor design decisions that can't be undone. We're getting de-evolution - our future is in effect being drawn up by newbies who (being newbies) are clueless. Regular computer games don't have this problem.

The market for regular computer games is driven by the hardcore. The hardcore finishes product faster than newbies, and therefore buys new product faster than newbies. The hardcore understands design implications better than newbies. They won't buy a game with features they can see are poor; they select games with good design genes. Because of this, games which are good are rewarded by higher sales than games which are bad.

In virtual worlds, the hardcore either wanders from one to the next, trying to recapture the experience of their first experience or they never left in the first place. Furthermore, in today's flat-fee universe, the hardcore spends the same amount of money as everyone else: developers aren't rewarded for appealing to the cognoscenti, except maybe through word of mouth that always comes with caveats (because of point #3).

Possible solutions

I'm not completely pessimistic here; there are ways the cycle can be broken, mainly by attacking points #2 and #3 (that is, by overcoming prejudices concerning what "should" be in a virtual world). Here are half a dozen hopes for the future:

Innovation. If evolution doesn't work, maybe revolution will? A virtual world different enough that it doesn't map onto players' existing experiences may attract newbies and oldbies alike. Of course, there's no guarantee that the new paradigm won't itself be short-term good, long-term bad…

Marketing. People can sometimes be persuaded to overcome their preconceptions. Even a text-based virtual world could become a monster hit if it had the right licence and was advertised to the right group of people. Unfortunately, marketing costs money.

Cross-fertilization. If no poor features are ever added, point #4 becomes redundant. How do you know that a proposed feature is genuinely good, though? Simple - there are two traditions of virtual worlds (West and East) so you cherry-pick the best ideas from the other one. You speak Korean, right?

Works of art. Virtual world design involves much craft, but at root it's art. A designer makes decisions based on how they feel things ought to be. Players will eventually pick up on the differences and play a new virtual world just because they like the designer's previous work: Raph Koster, Brad McQuaid and Richard Garriott already have more creative freedom than first-time designers. Point #3 evaporates! If only designing a virtual world didn't take so long…

Time may heal. If you wait long enough that people forget why they ever objected to something, that something can come back. Fashions change, and who knows what the newbies of 2024 will think? Good ideas will always get a second chance to enter the paradigm, it's just that "wait a quarter of your life for it to happen" thing that's a little depressing.

Growing maturity. Perhaps the best hope for the future is the growing maturity of the player base. First-time newbies will always assert the supremacy of their first virtual world, but oldbies who have been through the mill enough will realise that some of the features they've been taking for granted are actually counter-productive. If they're around in sufficient numbers, we may see virtual worlds appearing that do everything right and very little wrong, removing point #4 and leading us into a golden age. I can dream…
Conclusion

Virtual worlds are under evolutionary pressure to promote design features that, while not exactly bad, are nevertheless poor. Each succeeding generation absorbs these into the virtual world paradigm, and introduces new poor features for the next generation to take on board. The result is that virtual world design follows a downward path of not-quite-good-enough, leading ultimately to an erosion of what virtual worlds are.

Fortunately, there are a number of processes at work that have the potential to arrest this descent. Thus, although the future of virtual worlds may look disappointing, it's not completely bleak.

Besides, for the purist there will always be text MUDs.

If you need me, I will be sitting on the toilet with a revolver in my mouth.

Great read... this said it all.

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Virtual worlds are becoming diluted by poor design decisions that can't be undone. We're getting de-evolution - our future is in effect being drawn up by newbies who (being newbies) are clueless.

I agree with his premise, not his conclusions.

Instancing is good, when done right. Perma death and text will NEVER get mass market acceptance, no matter how good the gameplay. It just won't. As I said on Corp about this same article, as long as MMOG's are sold as GAMES, the real virtual world stuff will not be considered good game design, because people don't pay to have negative things happen to them. Real virtual world projects won't ever be mass market.

Perma death will never stay in a production mmog until they can ensure that your character will never die to bugs/ connectivity issues/ or people cheating. As long as any of those three can cause perma death people will simply not stick with the game for any lenght of time. They may try it initially but after a while it would disuade people from staying.

kaid

Quote from: HaemishM

Real virtual world projects won't ever be mass market.

Are there any other markets virtual worlds can survive in, designed as they're meant to be, besides "games"? Should designers seek a sort of compromise or move on and find another use for them?

Overall, the issue with MMORPGs is the same as any game:

I want masterpieces of gaming art.
Creating games is about making money.
Masterpieces of gaming art are harder to create than just a generic game with a shot at making money.
Therefore Masterpieces of gaming art will remain few and far in between.

The real issue is that most gamers are such phillistines they wouldn't know or care what is a masterpieces of gaming art or not. Hopefully, this will change in time.

For what it's worth, a MMORPG cannot survive and expand well if it cannot adequettely entertain enough players to keep the subscription money coming in. Because the focus is on player retention, a MMORPG does have a minimal amount of required fun quality in order to remain operational and successful enough to expand. Either that, or it has a natural advantage such as a mindles fan following or giant financial backing. For the most part, though, successful MMORPGs I don't like are better interpretted as being cases were they are still enjoyed by players with different tastes than my own.

What we really need is for one of us (i.e. people who want a good game and not catassing) to win a powerball lottery jackpot of around $300M, to fund the project. Then we can put together a good team of designing minds (there are some in the industry, the industry just sucks the good from them). Our goal would not be money, or high subscription numbers, but sheerly creating the most perfect online world possible. Without our primary motivation being money, our creativity would know no limits. We would not rape our loyal and devoted customers (who obviously are buying and playing the game for the right reasons, otherwise they'd be playing the other dogshit on the market) -- Disc/box would be $20 and monthly fee of $5. Would we be losing money? Yes. But we have enough to spare.

/end fantasy

Short version: Until money is not the primary motivation for a MMORPG developer, we will never see a game that truly meets our dreams.

Seems overwrought.

It rests on the assumption that newbies are all single-issue voters, as if the existence of even one feature that's short-term bad, long-term good will cause an unsubscription. The way out is to tease people into the game with enough short-term good features (graphics, CRAFTING, good social aspects, positive iterations on old ideas) that your short-term bad, long-term good features are worth it.

Also, I think Bartle's categorization of good- and bad- ideas and how they propagate is fundamentally broken. The King MMORPG is Everquest, and if pressed I bet there's very little in Everquest he'd consider a particularly good idea. And yet the problem is not that Everquest is hoarding its players and their sweet good-idea genes aren't being propagated, the problem is that the commercial success of Everquest is causing its irritating ideas to be propagated way, way too much.

Tackling his points:

1) Virtual worlds live or die by their ability to attract newbies
ANY service requires that the number of clients stays above a certain level, in order to remain profitable. I hope he doesn't consider this news, but only as the first point needed to make his conclusion. However, contrary to this point, any service can indeed experience a downturn in clients up to that point. It may require a restructuring of the company (downsizing) to remain profitable - but the goal of such a restructuring is normally to push the lowest allowable customer level down.

2) Newbies won't play a virtual world that has a major feature they don't like.
Then don't let newbies have access to them. Some things are too complicated to take in on day 1, or which a new player simply doesn't have the skills (either RL or character wise) to deal with. Devs have so far been fairly poor on bringing players up to speed on how to play their game. The best that they have done so far are tutorials and "newbie lands". More is needed, but to say/suggest that it CAN'T be done is fallacious.

Working on a MUD, we needed volunteer devs. A lot of them - in our case we usually had 20-30ish at any given time. Our only source of recruits were our players. Granted, they had to be people who can enjoy text games, but we had plenty of demographics, including senior citizens and stay-at-home moms (though they were, of course, a minority vs 15-25yo males). My point is that we had to train these guys to write code, and Bartle isn't going to convince me that there's any MMOG feature anywhere that's more dificult than that. Most of them weren't doing real complicated stuff, but yes, they did get a handle of if-then, for loops, and putting them together to do interesting things. At any given point in time, very few of our coders were professional or student programmers (2-5ish). If a 45 year old housewife can learn how to build this "wonderfully original, joyous" virtual world, they can learn how a crafting system works.

3)Players judge all virtual worlds as a reflection of the one they first got into.
I agree with that. More correctly, people will judge anything based on experience. With your first anything, you have no experience to go by, hence the newness sticks with you. Hopefully it's a good impression. Studies show that people tend to remember both the first and last in any series of events the best. What Bartle fails to mention, however, is that people will also remember the bad things about the "first time". When people arrive in a second+ game, they may well ask that features they are familiar with be added, but also that bad features or past pitfalls of features be avoided.

4) Many players will think some poor design choices are good.
True. An easy example of this is that players often want things to be easier; however, by making things easier it can also make them more boring, which leads to shorter attention given to the game. The discussion about making a game difficult enough to be interesting, but not so difficult to frustrate, is an old one.

Regarding his argument:

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Under point #4, players will eventually quit a virtual world that has poor features. Under point #3, however, they won't necessarily recognize that a feature which caused them to leave was indeed poor.

Non sequitur. The conclusion may be correct, but the reasoning is not. The assertion that was made was that many players will judge a specific feature based on short-term gains or losses. The argument is that, because of poor features (based on the player's pov), a player will eventually leave. The key point here, is how long is eventual; if a player sticks around long enough, per Bartle's reasoning, they will recognize that the feature they thought was bad was, in fact, good. That is, Bartle must be defining a good feature as one that makes players happier / increases the duration of their stay long term, since he has already defined a bad feature as one that players enjoy short term but dislike long term. If a feature has no benefits either short or long term, then I fail to see how it would be a good feature.

In other words, if the "bad feature" doesn't cause the player to leave very soon, they will recgonize the change was in their best interest, and remain. I don't neccessarily agree with all the premise used in this argument either, but that is what follows from Bartle's claims, not the conclusion he stated.

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Any absolute newbies, for whom this is their first virtual world, will be educated to believe that this is how things are meant to be, thus starting the whole cycle again.

If a newbie felt that this good feature was a bad one, and as a result they left, they would certainly not advocate for that same feature to be implimented in the next game they went to. Players do not go around saying "wow, that feature in game X really blew. Lets do it again!" Also, his point #4 does not logically apply (another non sequitur) to absolute newbies. His point in #4 is that an experienced player would feel that a certain change was bad, based on short-term consequences. For example, a nerf to their class. However, an absolute newbie would walk in after this change, and not have this bitter feeling about it. It would not be a feature that they dislike. for the same reason that the player in #4 disliked it. It may cause both types of players to leave, but it does not logically connect them.

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PD is short-term bad, long-term good: rejected.

I disagree entirely. For example, his claim that it prevents players from gaining an absolute grip is untrue; it can very easily lead to a situation where advanced characters utterly dominate, because they slaughter anyone who attempts to level a character to become a potential threat. If the mechanics are different, such that newbie characters are a threat (even if a minor one) to the health of established players, it means that becoming established lacks much of the achievement. Afterall, there isn't much to achieve if a newbie lacks a significant percent of the power that an advanced one does.

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The thing is, [instancing] is not what virtual worlds are about

It can be. Virtual worlds do rely heavily on being able to bring together tens of thousands of people. However, I refute the claim that throwing 20,000 people into one room suddenly validates or improves upon a virtual world. Do you have 20,000 friends? Could you even possibly have 20,000 friends? Ok, not even friends - can you possibly interract, one on one, with 20,000 people in a single play session? If you gamed for six hours, you'd have to interract with almost a person every second.

If anything, this intruduces insurmountable problems of scale. Raph mentions these in respect to support issues. I feel that as virtual worlds are bringing more and more people together, they need to do much more than they are to break out everyone into functional groups. Don't prevent interractions, but channel them so that at any given moment, I don't have to worry about 20,000 other people. Instancing is one way to help with this. Create dungeons (castles, evil temples, whatever) with a cap on how many people can join - or a cap on how many people from each team (clan/city/region) can join, so you can have several competing teams that don't get zerged. Make sure there are enough such zones to go around.

Instancing, like any other feature, can be implimented in a good way, or a craptastic way. It's such a generic term/feature that it could mean most anything, and can't by itself slot into either the good or bad design categories.

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In virtual worlds, the hardcore either wanders from one to the next, trying to recapture the experience of their first experience or they never left in the first place.

Unsupported argument, and I disagree totally. In the paragraph above, Bartle mentions how the hardcore can pick and choose good standalone games. I see no reason, either logically or from experience, why MMOGs suddenly makes the hardcore customer stupid to design. Instead, I do feel that hardcore gamers are experiencing a lack of choices. No, seriously. Count the number of standalone titles released last year, on all platforms. Now count the number of MMOG titles released. Last year.

When the number in column B is even a quarter of what it is in A, then come back and talk about this point and whether it's true.

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Besides, for the purist there will always be text MUDs.

Except that MUDs are proof-negative of his conclusion. If the de-evolution were in fact occuring the way he described it, successful MUDs could never have come into being. Or rather, MUD1 would've been praised as the Eden of MUD-dom, and nothing would've ever been better. He catches some exceptions in his possible solutions, but his conclusion seems to make the fate of MMOGs absolute.

Personally I think the man just likes to talk.

MMORPGs as a genre are stale, whooptidoo.
Innovation will come its just a matter of time and it will most likely come from an outsider or a small upstart....shall we quote numerous examples in the business history when this has happened?

To concentrate on a sub-point being discussed, permanent death is also not possible in the current MMOG's due to the player-retention method being used: time invested in building up your character. I think we need to get away from that.

I distinctly remember the period in my pen-and-paper DnD gaming history when I went from min-maxing to actually being able to use "throw away" characters... just average characters that I'd play for their RP value instead of combat prowess. So I certainly think that story and content can be sufficient as player-base retention reasons. And once the characters themselves become unimportant to the player, permanent death can be implemented.

The other way to do it is to defuse the effects of death or the character itself. Perhaps the character dies permanently, but the skill points/xp accrued remain on your account, and you can create another character if you so wish. It, again, depends on the purpose for playing: "to advance in the world" is not a good enough reason.

Sorry for derailing this a bit into the permadeath discussion. The rest of the points he makes in that article are meh, I don't really agree with his reasoning. The original 4 axioms he states may be true, but the way he uses them, and his conclusions, I don't agree with.

EDIT: Oh yeah, and the other thing is, I think the makers of MMOG's need to move away from the "Make a game to last forever" design philosophy. Aim for 5 years from the start, and you can design a dynamic game with a changing story line and effects on the game world, and it would be a better game than something static and fixed in stone.

Hm,... The more mainstream you aim the dumber the product has to be. The designers role is to draw the line between comfort and challenge. Incidentally the extent to which the "short term bad, long term good" fits into the world, and is explained as an intentional part of the design, the more likely it will be accepted.

His example of perma-death is ludicrous. That's a fairly precise example of a designer being too focused on designer concerns. There are perfectly good reasons why players are not going to be interested, the main one being it's not fun and makes challenging yourself punitively punishing.

This article was on slashdot yesterday incidentally, so it's had very wide distribution. Probably more than it's degree of insight deserves.

I think his initial blurring of the virtual world/mmorpg/mud term is a bit telling. Some view these games as worlds, some view them as games, and some view them as sandboxes. I think each would use a different term to describe their ideal game. Each has a somewhat different connotation.

If you view mmorpgs as virtual world simulators, i think you can easily believe what he is saying. But if you view these games, as 'games', not virtual worlds, then the genre is doing fine. I don't think any of the mmorpgs could be described as a sandbox, so i think that sort of view died at birth.

I feel a little weird responding to this because I have a great deal of respect for Richard and let's face it, his credentials are a bit better than mine. :) But, while I think the first part of the article is spot-on, I think the assertions are a bit off. First, I agree that a design that is short-term good and long-term bad is a poor design. However, a design that is short-term bad, but long-term good is equally poor. In fact, I'd argue that this is one of the biggest problems with the genre. How often have we heard someone say "The game begins to get fun at level 20." or "Once you get past this part, the game is great!" Wait. Why can't it be fun right away? Design shouldn't force players to suffer through the short-term to get to the long-term fun. And those that do will often churn out players before they get to the "good" part. This is especially true now that players have so many options…they won't stick around if the game upsets them early on. Designs must take into account the short-term effects just as much as they take into the long-term.

Mostly though, I wanted to comment on the permadeath example. I believe permadeath is short-term bad and long-term bad (whether you are making a MMOG or a virtual world – and yes, there is a difference) and that the arguments for it are flawed.

It prevents early-adopter players from gaining an iron grip on positions of power.
-True. But there are many ways to keep veteran players from holding positions of power without deleting their characters. The bigger issue to solve though is making new players valuable to the veteran characters. We need to solve that problem first.

It re-uses content effectively, because players view same-level encounters from different angles using different characters.
-Not really. For the most part, players generally want to skip the early levels once they've re-rolled a few times. This is partly because the early levels are often boring, but mostly because once you've experienced a "decked-out" character, being forced to become a relative "weakling" again gets old fast. If you want players to reuse your early content, it's simple. Make that content fun. People play multiple characters in CoH (my gut says more so than most other MMOs) because the early experience is fun, not because the game forces them to. I do this in D&D all the time too. I enjoy rolling up new characters and starting new campaigns because playing the early levels in D&D is fun. I also like going back to play my old characters once in a while too and I like knowing they are still around. If my DM ripped up my character sheet every time a character died, I'd probably find a new DM.

It's the default fiction for real life.
-Honestly, this is mostly irrelevant, especially in a non-realistic setting. Realism isn't a bad thing by any means, but it's trumped by things like "fun" and "game balance".

It promotes role-play, because players aren't stuck with the same, tired old character the whole time.
-No, it destroys role-play. People spend a LOT of time developing their character's persona. More importantly, they spend a lot of time developing their character's relationship with other characters. In fact, that forms the cornerstone of most role-play groups. To take that away from them is a mistake. The longer they have a character, the more developed they become and the more attached the player becomes to that character. I've never heard a role-player refer to their three year old character as "tired". In fact, quite the opposite...most are VERY proud of these characters. Also, keep in mind that most players do not roleplay. This is very important. As these games move into the mainstream, even less of a percentage of the players will be role-players. They don't want to roleplay, they don't even see it as part of the game. Also, both those that roleplay and those that don't roleplay cite "my character" as one of the top reasons they stay in the game. This isn't just newbies, its veteran MMOG players too. Every time you delete someone's character, you create a decision point for them whether to stay in the game or not. This is both short-term and long-term bad.

It validates players' sense of achievement, because a high-level character means a high-level player is behind it.
-Somewhat. Although one could argue it destroys the long-term sense of achievement the moment it is taken away because now I am a high-level player forced to play a low level character. One can make achieving a high level in the game more challenging/difficult/meaningful without deleting characters.

Now I'm not saying permadeath is ALWAYS bad or that someone is stupid for putting it in their game. But, if you think about it, Permadeath is basically the equivalent of 100% xp loss at death. I'd imagine that a death system that had 100% xp loss wouldn't go over too well. It’s a hardcore system that will churn out all but the most hardcore players. So, I am saying that it will limit subscribers (both short-term and long-term) and that one should only do it with that understanding. If one is creating a niche, hardcore game that isn't meant to have hundreds of thousands of subscribers (and there is nothing wrong with that) then go for it. Otherwise, proceed with extreme caution.

I think the jury is still out on instancing. I don't like the idea of fully instanced MMOGs, but I do like their use to facilitate certain gameplay, especially questing. I hate bringing up UXO since it got canned, but I really wish some of you could have seen the quests we were building in those instanced areas...stuff we could never do in a public quest. After having both played games that have instancing and worked on a game that had instancing my gut says it’s a good thing when used in moderation.

All of this said, while I totally agree that we aren't innovating enough; let's not ignore the fact that there have been some attempts, even by the bigger companies. Majestic, Motor City, Planetside, and even TSO tried to break out of the standard PvE level-treadmill. Just because those games aren't wildly successful doesn't mean we should ignore the effort. There are also a lot of other games (Puzzle Pirates, ATiTD) that are very creative and some of the bigger games (like SWG's player controlled economy) have some pretty innovative features as well. I don't think its all gloom and doom.

Too . . .many . . .words . . .arrrgghh

Honestly, though, I do not believe that this genre is dying, nor will it die anytime soon. Even if there are shit games released, people WILL play them. The active account numbers for all MMO's on the market right now will attest to that.

Just because I think a game sucks, it doesn't mean that 10,000 other people won't love it. One mans trash is another mans treasure.

I think there is any area where Permadeath CAN be used in a major market MMOG, but it's even more limited than instancing or any other feature. If a "high-level" or end-game or whatever label you want to put on a character maxxed-out on the achievement portions of the game could put themselves in a situation that risked permadeath.

It would have to be an instanced dealie. Perhaps the player could involve a group, but only the maxxed character would be vulnerable to permadeath. The character would be warned specifically that such an occurrence could happen, as well as being able to opt out of any encounter which might cause permadeath at any time before the encounter is engaged. It would be the most difficult quest in the game; not EQ-raid difficult, requiring assloads of people, but actually challenging to the players involved. Failure results in permadeath, with no reward. Opting out results in no reward, no loot from the quest at all, and the character keeps his levels. Success results in permadeath, but with a monument built in the game world specific to that character, as well as the ability to start a new character with the same "last name" as the now-retired character, as well as leaving the new character an inheritance of either a set amount or a set item or two. Perhaps the item woulld be the reward from the last encounter. The achiever gets noteriety and a twink item, and a high-level character is retired from the world.

It would be the ultimate uber achiever's wet dream, but without unbalancing the world afterwards. But that's about the only instance of permadeath I can see being palatable, and even then, most will never see the quest.

Yea, I think Permadeath as a sort of "hardcore mode" that players can opt into if they choose to is fine. Since most players won't, it's not really a true perma-death system though. Even then, you still run the risk of a player doing the quest, not really understanding the impact it will have on them, and then once that main character is gone their desire play goes with it.

Calandryll, I agree with most of what you've written. However:

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It promotes role-play, because players aren't stuck with the same, tired old character the whole time.

Actually, perma death can most certainly promote role play. It isn't either a must or must not, but the focus of real RP is RP for the sake of RP. It's not a case where the players care so much about power, such as gaining levels. Instead, RPers want characters that are interesting to play. It's entirely possible to think of a character that sounds cool, but once you get him into the game, you find out you hate him. It's not unusual in my experience for people to kill off their own characters - to reroll. It's also noteworthy that combat oriented characters tend to do poorly at RP. There's not much depth to a killing machine.

In this case, perma death gives a lot of weight to the story. Death matters. Don't screw up, or I will kill you, and that has a massive effect on the story. Serious RPers take a hard look at whether the fiction is consistant and makes sense; being unable to ever die is a serious break to fiction. However, it's often an important element in MMOGs, because the focus of MMOGs is not roleplay; instead it is much more on achievement, with RP being secondary. In that type of game, perma death can be dreadfully painful, because you wind up being reset to the newbie ("my character is worthless") levels because someone else had a bad day. I'm sure there are D&Dish troupes who don't put much emphasis on death - I'd also argue that they're not that interested in RP. Hardcore RPers are interested in a story, and death is a powerful literary component in stories. I know quite a few RPers that are thrilled when their character dies such that it makes for a good story, because again, the story is the entire point of their playing.

Really though, when you're talking about serious RP, you need to talk about White Wolf's system, or similar games. D&D is still highly achievement oriented. It's the EQ of pen and paper. Normal D&D uses RP only to the extent of "you're playing a elf wizard", and leaves it at that. The focus is more on the adventure, getting the phat l3wt at the end of the dungeon, after killing the uber mob, and counting your xp at the end. The pride gained by the players of this game is in the items they've collected, and the xp they've accumulated, not in the stories they've helped tell. Hardcore RPers don't care so much if their characters died, because what they take with them isn't a character sheet, it's the stories, and some of the best stories occur BECAUSE of death.

But anyway like I said I mostly agree with your points, and I'm more than a little dissapointed that this is what Bartle came up with. I really hope that the technical article has more insight than this, or that he revises this before he presents it :/

Death matters in D&D and other PNP RPG's because to the characters, it is INFREQUENT. In MMOG's, player character death is a common, sometimes daily occurrence. In order for permadeath to even approach marketable, death has to be infrequent enough to actually be an aberration.

Most RPG players I know would not accept a DM who got the group killed as often as MMOG's do. They'd go find another DM or another game system.

Quote from: HaemishM

Actually I'll make the arguement that the less frequent death is, the worse effect a permadeath system can have. The longer my character is alive, the more I become attached to it. If I lose a character after 2 weeks, it's no big deal. If I lose him after 9 months, I'm going to be pissed. And that creates the biggest problem with permadeath...

This is why I think permadeath as a game's death system is a lose-lose situation. If you make permanent death frequent, your players never advance. They'll get frustrated and quit. If you make it infrequent, you allow them to become attached to the character. They'll get upset and quit. Either way, it spells cancelled accounts.

Also, keep in mind when I talk about players being upset when a character is deleted, I'm not just talking about the loss of levels, equipment, etc. I'm mostly talking about the emotional attachment players create with their characters and the attachment that players form with each others' characters. More than anything, that attachment is what keeps people interested in these games.

I do like the idea of being allowed to choose[/i] to retire a character and gaining benefits for your next character or some other cool thing...but that's not really permadeath in the sense of a death system.

I think permadeath that is just "Bang, you're dead, start over" without any other kind of changes to a system is just retarded. Sure, it's "realistic" whatever the hell that means in a world with mythological creatures and magic. But without some serious juggling of the game system, you are correct in that it is without a doubt the worst possible feature one could add to an RPG/MMOG other than mandatory physical beatings upon logging in.

Permadeath will only work if it's voluntary. The same guideline worked fine on MU* for years. Obviously, for you to choose to voluntarily die, there has to be some substantial reward. Haemish's idea of a big, imposing shrine or statue is mighty fine.

Also, people are way too assumptive that combat 'death' must somehow model death as we think of it. There's no reason not to simply think of it as a combat loss or an unconsciousness and get out of the whole death&consequences mindset.

I think the best model is superhero comic books. Here you have a bunch of freaks who get in fights constantly, and someone always loses, but death is incredibly rare and very significant. Most often people are just 'out of the picture' or jailed or whatever for a while. Which is exactly what MMORPG do.

So if you die you get tossed in jail? Like you unable to log in the character for a period of time or something?

Quote from: HaemishM

I think permadeath that is just "Bang, you're dead, start over" without any other kind of changes to a system is just retarded.

I agree, but only because of current design. The reason permadeath works in D&D and especially WW games is because the focus of the game is different from MMOGs. For WW, the focus is on storytelling. You advance your character as a result of good stories, so permadeath for one char isn't a big deal. You lose your character, but you're gaining social respect/admiration, as well as an easy time ranking your next char. Some GMs also take the stance that a well played first character grants special rights (access to restricted powers/classes/whatever) the next go round. So there you have a change to the system.

For MMOGs, having anything approaching that would be drastically difficult. Can you even conceive of how to code something even close to that? Storytelling only works when there are people around to hear your story; in a world with hundreds or thousands of players online at any given point, let alone in the entire system (10k-100k++). This type of scale destroys storytelling for an individual. That's why so much about MMOGs are reduced to numbers/achievement - because it's really easy for computers to do.

Flip side, SWG implimented permadeath to a point. Jedi who die under certain circumstances get slammed with a reset button. They don't lose the name, so I guess it isn't really "death", but for all technical purposes it is. Atriarch is planning something like that too, but again it's not a total reset; you get to pass your skills on to offspring (!).

I find it very odd how many criticisms of Bartle's article have focused on nitpicking the examples he uses to illustrate design decisions. It's like dismissing one of Koster's presentations because of the roughly drawn cartoons. Bartle's thesis that the neccessity of attracting newbies can drastically, and in his opinion negatively, shape design decissions is, in my opinion, an important point.

It is particualarly interesting in contrast to a recent interview with both McQuaid and Garriott. Many of the questions and answers focus upon player retention. While player retention is surely important, it is only one side of the coin. Player attraction is just as important, and is something that has not been subject of much discussion.

Unfortunately that discussion is suffering from partial-birth derailments on every thread I've read about this article. In the vain hope of getting the discussion back on track...

I think Bartle's thesis can best be seen in the decissions live teams make for already established games/worlds/whatever.

An interesting example of this is DAoC's Trials of Atlantis expansion. It always puzzled me why a game previously focused on realm based PvP would so drastically shift that focus to raid based PvE. It makes little sense if all you care about is player retention, but seems more reasonable if you take player attraction into account. When ToA was released, it was probably assumed that anyone who wanted PvP had already tried DOaC. Potential new players would likely be more interested PvE. So even though ToA was geared toward high level characters, it can be seen as a sort of rebranding designed to attract newbies.

That seems to be a micro example of the macro effect Bartle discribes. Just as a game/world/whatever ages and needs to worry more about newbie attraction, often to the detriment of it's orginal focus, so too is the genre in danger of blurred Visions as it ages.

Quote from: Paelos

So if you die you get tossed in jail? Like you unable to log in the character for a period of time or something?

Legends of Kesmai had a "death quest". On each death and resurrection, your character degraded in some way (lost constitution, I think). You could choose to undertake the death quest, where your body was destroyed and you were transported to an Egyptian underworld. You had to complete a series of quests to escape and be reborn.

People didn't do this every death though. I think I would wait until about 4 deaths before I did it. The timing to complete it varied based on what quests you got, how many people were down there doing them, and what state the quests were in when you came along. I think about 20 minutes was the fastest I heard someone doing it in, when everything was setup perfect. Sometimes it could take an hour if conditions were poor.

Bartle is concerning himself with the development of a virtual world at a time when players are more interested in the game. With that viewpoint, any attempt to garner new players (who want games) is going to look like a catastrophe.

Quote from: Wukong

It isn't a minor point though. It shows Bartle either misunderstands his points, or misunderstands the example he's trying to use to illustrate his conclusion. It's more than a matter of analogies breaking down after a point, because the flaws are fairly fundamental. If Bartle's supporting arguments are faulty, then his conclusion is invalid. The conclusion may still be true, but not because of his argument. Many of the people who are disagreeing with him are using his own illustraitons to note the differences.

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Bartle's thesis that the neccessity of attracting newbies can drastically, and in his opinion negatively, shape design decissions is, in my opinion, an important point.

That statement, on its own, isn't enlightening. It's true, but Bartle is attempting to dismantle why this occurs, which would suggest what can be done to tip things into the developers' favor.

Bartle is arguing that Perma Death is good long term, which would suggest that he feels changing a game to add it would be unacceptable, but that including it from the start would be well received for anyone who hadn't played any other MMOG. The baseline conclusion he comes to however, is that since a significant majority of players have played a MMOG before, and they judge any new game based on that experience alone, and because they did not have perma death, it's impossible for any new MMOG to include this otherwise good feature and have customers.

I find several faults with that. One, I dispute that perma death is a good feature for all MMOGs - there are many different ways you could impliment it, and it's the matchup of implimentation with overall game philosophy that determines whether it's good or bad.

Two, his rationale would preclude ANY advances in design in ANY field. Nowhere does his argument require that this same logic only be applied to MMOGs. By this reasoning, DVDs should never have been able to replace VCRs; replacing your VCR with a DVD was a poor short-term answer, customers won't buy a video playback device (or whatever you want to call them collectively), customers will judge new VPDs based on the first one they got, customers won't buy a VPD with design features they don't like, and VPD companies die based on customers. By the exact same rationale, DVDs should not exist. That they do is proof-negative of his assertion. I'd rather use his own example against him (perma death), but that will do too. Or any of a million other items.

People like the perma death one, because they can understand his example and show why it refutes his argument. But that's not the only way to do it. You could show why his points are invalid propositions, mostly on the grounds that they are far too broad to be applicable in the way that he is trying to use them in.

For example, point 1: it makes no claims about how many newbies are neccessary to function, makes no reference to the fact that newbie *loss* is also relevant, or the fact that short term net loss is still acceptable. No game can function if it experiences unending, unchanging negative churn. However, his arguments lie on the fact that there is long term advantage for players, but short term loss, for certain design decisions. Well, that may mean that there is a short term loss of subscriptions, but a long term gain. This is a result of x percent of people thinking "This feature sucks!" and quitting, only to return later once they hear that it turned out really well. The time component is important for his argument, but he omitts it entirely.

He is also comitting the logical error of bifurcation (trifurcation?). He only discusses three types of design decisions; short good and long bad (G/B), short bad and long good (B/G), and short bad long bad (B/B). He omitts discussion of short and long term good (G/G), as well as any business advantage of a B/G decision. Per above, it may be a good move to impliment something that hits your player base now, with a future payoff. The decision is how much of a payoff you get vs how much cost. However, Bartle doesn't bring this up at all; the hidden assumtion is that the cost is bound to be too high, or that devs/pubs are unwilling to accept ANY cost.

Several other angles you could hit it from. Just that the perma death one is the easiest for most people.

Quote from: Mesozoic

I think that is a lot of it. Most of my post was about the perma-death example, but I also tried to discuss the other points as well. The perma-death example is an indicator though, so that's why I spent so much time on it.

The bottom line for me though is that MUD != MMOG != Virtual World != Sandbox. I don't think we should be using the terms interchangeably, and that doing so has created a LOT of problems and confusion.

Quote from: Kenrick

Until money is not the primary motivation for a MMORPG developer, we will never see a game that truly meets our dreams.

You hit the nail right on the head with that one.

Game design is a form of art. Art isn't a commercial endeavor, it's usually a product from creative passion.

Businesses try to make art conform to the same rules as standard manufacturing: keep the stuff rolling out on assembly-lines and fulfill the profit/production quotas.

As with most artistic endeavors, "business" destroys them. Take the music industry for example: When young, struggling musicians who have the passion to create music start off...their material is usually pretty good. After a few gold records and the inevitable "selling out" occurs, the passion dies and their "art" starts to dwindle into the packaged-for-production crap we're seeing today.

The game industry functions the same way: someone makes a great game, big business sees a means for profit and thus the deluge of sequels and knock-offs enter the picture.

MMOGs are the next DOT-BOMBs. That market was a virtual frontier and a decent avenue for profit....now it's a barren wasteland choked into submission by an oversaturated market of shitty games ("Ou! But now they're using Pixel Shader 3.0 and Voice Actors!!!").

Until someone wins that fantasy Powerball ticket or some disgustingly rich mad-man with no aim for profit takes the reins, this chariot of boring game design and lack of innovation is heading straight off a cliff....how long did the DOT-BOMBs take? Any bets?

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some disgustingly rich mad-man with no aim for profit takes the reins

Yeah, Tabula Rasa could be interesting.

There's always going to be a pressure between creativity and whoever is picking up the bills. That's nothing new. It would be safe to say that virtually all great artists have had to balance their dreams against what is needed to get paid. But that doesn't disallow the creation of art, it's just another challenge. Indeed if you gave a true artist 300 million and a blank slate you'd probably find nothing would ever get truly finished.

It does mean that a project without a strong creative vision is likely to be warped by these pressures. Design by commitee, or focus group, or users feedback are likely to make lots of little changes in the direction of ease and convenience with the soul of the game being lost somewhere along the way. There needs to be someone who can point out to both sides how that little change does affect the goal (and determine if it really does, or perhaps the design did have a real flaw). Indeed I would put this as 90% of the explanation for why EQ2 is the way it is, lack of a strong creative voice.

Quote from: Calandryll

Quote from: Mesozoic

I am very much in agreement with this. One of problems as I see it, is a lot of "old school" mud types like Bartle, Raph, and even McQuaid, were introduced to the concept of these online games as sprawling virtual worlds with heavy RP and sandbox elements as a mainly socially interactive form of entertainment, with a small, self selecting player base. The game portions of those text mud were very very limited.

So, when they try to develop a new "graphical mud" they still start from the premise that what they are creating is a virtual world with game elements. And as Ive said before, I don't believe that is what most current mmorpg players are looking for; they want a good game with world elements b/c that is where their backgrounds are coming from. SP games, i.e. take a good SP game experience and combine it with the benefits of shared online space with lots of other people.

Thus, I think the title of this thread is mis-stated. It's not that Bartle thinks Online GAMES suck and will only get worse, it's online WORLDs that suck, and the reason being, most of the people in them don't want them to be worlds at all.

My 2 cents.

Xilren

Quote from: Resvrgam

Quote from: Kenrick

Until money is not the primary motivation for a MMORPG developer, we will never see a game that truly meets our dreams.

Who’s dream though? I can guarantee you that your idea of a dream game is different from my idea of a dream game, which is different from Kenrick’s idea of a dream game, and so on.

I’ll probably get some flak for saying this, but I don’t think a lack of creative freedom or lack of creative people is the only problem or even the main problem. The problem is we don’t do enough research to find out what players really want, instead we build games that “we” want. Too often these games are largely designed in a vacuum, based on assumptions and personal tastes.

If one wants to make a game that appeals to them and their friends, that’s fine. But it will usually only appeal to them and their friends. The truly tough part about making a game is putting in a feature that you-yourself do not like, but that you know your players do.

At the end of the day, as designers we shouldn’t be making these games for ourselves. We should be making these games for our players … and the only way to know what they want is do to research.

I’m not saying you do exactly whatever the focus groups, message boards, or excel charts tell you to do. And yes, we do sometimes fall into that trap. But you do use the research as a tool that can be used to give you some direction, parameters, starting points, and a frame of reference. Without it, you are flying blind.

Quote from: Calandryll

We should be making these games for our players … and the only way to know what they want is do to research.

.

What about the fact that different players often enjoy totally different things in games. What do you do when one group of players wants A and another wants B in your game? What about the fact that players don't know if they like something that they have yet to experience - how do you create something new if you're only going off what your research tells you the players want?

If games are truly an art form, they must come from individual vision, not trying to please an audience. Any great movie is not made aiming to please an audience - that motivation just leads to more formulaic recycling of the same old stuff in new packages. A great novel is written from a personal idea, not going off a focus group. Make something great and the audience will come. Aim to give an audience what you think they want, and you may produce something decent, but probably nothing truly exceptional.