Wish is cancelled

[Matt]

I just wanted to say that what I am still looking for in a game is one that can even begin to translate paper-and-pencil RPing into the online world. And in my style of RPing, it's not being an action game, nor a strategy game (at least primarily). It's being a part of an interactive and dynamic story, with a strong emphasis on "realistic" gameplay (well, in the sense that Sci-Fi and Fantasy can be "realistic").

If you're looking for interactive and dynamic stories, you're probably going to have to look at smaller MMOs. I'm not particularly familiar with the smaller graphical MMOS, but a lot of text MMOs that beat the pants off anything any of the graphical ones (big or small) can provide. The flexibility that text MMOs provide allow developers to do things like alter storylines based completely on what players are doing, and so on. One of our games is running a multiple-month story right now where we only planned the first month, preferring not to lock ourselves into a particular mindset regarding how the NPCs would react to what the players are doing. Issues that are a big deal in graphical games in terms of development resources simply aren't in a text game. Want an entirely new type of monster in our games for instance? Just write up the various descriptions, write a mobprog for it if needed, and define its attacks and attack style and you're done. Half an hour, at most, unless it's part of a quest or otherwise has more complicated mobprog logic.

And while our games are way more roleplaying and story intensive than the big ones, you'd find even more intense storytelling and roleplaying in the roleplaying-enforced games like Armageddon (armageddon.org) or Shadows of Isildur (middle-earth.us) .

By the way, with respect to UMMOGs, Eve Online has had a max of 12k players online in a single universe, though it is statically zoned. They commonly run between 8-10k.

And Kingdom of the Winds did this 5 years ago. Mutable Realms's claims were completely spurious.

--matt

[Soukyan]

By the way, with respect to UMMOGs, Eve Online has had a max of 12k players online in a single universe, though it is statically zoned. They commonly run between 8-10k.

And Kingdom of the Winds did this 5 years ago. Mutable Realms's claims were completely spurious.

--matt

Yes. We all realize the Kingdom of the Winds did it 5 years ago. It can be done. Eve has now done it in a fully 3D game universe and will continue to do it as their subscriber base grows. Has anyone hit 15000 so I can give proper credit once Eve hits that? The fact that Eve has obtained that in a 3D MMOG is quite impressive since others have tried and failed. I think that is the point, not who did it first.

[Stephen Zepp]

Has anyone hit 15000 so Ican give proper credit once Eve hits that? The fact that Eve has obtained that in a 3D MMOG is quite impressive since others have tried and failed.

It's not a matter of "can" anymore, it's a matter of "want to".

Even though on the surface it sounds cool as a marketing ploy, there just isn't that many reasons to want that many players on a single world, and several to not want it:

--content distribution: to have 15,000 players in a single world, you have to have somewhere to put them all, much less keep them busy

--performance: it's simply easier on the hardware (primarily the db server clusters) to parallel your critical performance paths instead of serialize them (and yes, I know that there are several mechanisms and schemas for optimizing that many users--but those are in business related db models that have been optimized over 20+ years in some cases, for very specific task structures. MMO databases don't have classes that teach any Joe Schmoe the umpteenth iteration of db structures and optimization for the tasks required)

--sociological research: there are quite a few sociological and anthropological studies that report the max "efficient" community size is somewhere between 200-350. After that, instead of a single community, it becomes a set of sub-communities. From a gameplay perspective, since most MMOG's that bother doing research are trying to enhance their "communities", they sometimes take things like this to heart.

--based on the relative success of MMOG's that use instancing in some form or another, less appears to be more to the current market, not the reverse. Players want their own little areas and worlds with only their friends, not tens of thousands of others (Personally, I think this is an artifact, not a true demographical observation of the MMOG market, but I seem to be in the minority on that).

[Roac]

--sociological research: there are quite a few sociological and anthropological studies that report the max "efficient" community size is somewhere between 200-350.

You're right, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't drop everyone onto one server.  None of the games out now have player populations of 300 people.  It is, however, cause to design divisions into the game in terms of kingdoms, realms, guilds, cities, etc.

[Stephen Zepp]

You're right, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't drop everyone onto one server.  None of the games out now have player populations of 300 people.  It is, however, cause to design divisions into the game in terms of kingdoms, realms, guilds, cities, etc.

I happen to agree with you actually, but in all appearances, it seems that the current MMOG's don't--and seem to be working out pretty well so far in that decision. I think that if you are providing a "non-conflict" type of community building MMOG, then adherence to this type of population count is probably very important (anything bigger, and the sub-communities begin to form, and your "non-conflict" community quickly becomes a conflict based one, since as soon as you have more than one sub-community, they are by definition opposites in some form).

Now, in a conflict based MMOG, the separate sub-communities are critical to gameplay--at least if you want to actually have conflict. I would suggest that community conflict management is an important part of a successful conflict based MMOG, and that would certainly be easier with a smaller number of sub-communities, as opposed to literally hundreds or thousands of conflicting sub-communities in one geographical space.

In game terms:
well proportioned server:
--we're at war with X, Y, and truced with Z. A and B are allies. Anyone else is neutral.
ultra-massive server:
--we're at war with 713, 611, 123, 122, and 410-496. Our allies are anyone with odd middle digits, names starting with 'A', and anyone that is a truced, allied, or friendly partner with our allies 1023, 1022, and 1154, except when that conflicts with Rules 1, 3, and 7. Of course, that's only on tuesdays...

EDIT: Content added/adjusted. Sorry, I tend to forget to preview when I think I'm done, and re-edit...

[Roac]

I happen to agree with you actually, but in all appearances, it seems that the current MMOG's don't--and seem to be working out pretty well so far in that decision

For one, the problem is a tough one to crack.  Shadowbane made a good attempt at it with cities; when you're in a city, there is a decent amount of socialization tools available to make a city a social unit.  The downside is that there probably aren't enough socialization tools, and that should the population of your social unit drops (your GL quits, a large subguild joins someone else, etc), it causes other issues unrelated to socialization (like survival).

I don't think the two should be connected - it seems to put too much strain on the society, even within a PvP game.  Yet it does create a good barrier for entry, because you're unlikely to let in people from enemy guilds, and without some sort of barrier for entry these subcommunities are pointless.

[Stephen Zepp]

For one, the problem is a tough one to crack.  Shadowbane made a good attempt at it with cities; when you're in a city, there...

It certainly is, and I knew your name sounded familiar, heheh. I ran what was arguably one of the largest/most influential nations on Fear for about 8 months, and the sheer amount of socio-political entities on one shard alone made just diplomacy a rat's nest of interactivity and dependent relationships--and was just about too much to handle for anyone, much less a techo-geek like me who could do it full time.

It was even worse on corruption as you know--even with the mega-alliances and all that shit, you still had endless chatter on /nation "is XXX friendly?", can I kill "YYY"??

[V_M_Smith]

1) And if you and you're friend are tacking around the server, trying to pick up other friends, and have to say (as I myself was never attracted to CoH) "Doh! Queynos 7 not queynos 1!" Does it really matter how this "instancing" garbage is handled as long as it means you can't just walk into "Hero City" and find your friends. Multiple location worlds, shouldn't have multiple instances of those locations. Now from my merchant standpoint, selling things, and letting people know I have them to sell is much easier if I don't have to worry about selling it 20 times, because I have to go through multiple instances. Want any more examples of how this is annoying?

2) Companies already have understaffed CSR's.  Call for a "GM" during prime-time, 90-120 days after launch. They always overstaff for that time period. The understaffing comes from monitoring 22 servers (I believe UO at one point was down to 1 GM per server/shift, with limited "helper" support). In a one world instance, all of your support is dedicated to the one place people play. This means unlike UO or EQ, where 700 people of GL or EQ server have a problem but only 15 on another server do, you don't have one staff begging for help from another team.

Which is more efficient? Well if you're going to throw everyone together like that, that means that you still require x support personell per person. Figure maybe 1 support person per 250 users (not sure what the actual industry standard is), but you lose the rounding because of some fraction of users that play multiple servers. So you actually save support cost!

3) Now WoW and EQ2 are both new and trading brands. If WoW didn't have Warcraft in it's title, well, one of my friends called that beta a "steaming pile of horse puckey." WoW, as he put it, "has very limited value" before it gets old. The problem is while you will say "Wish Fanbois" there are blizzard/WoW fanbois too. Was diablo good? Yes. Was Warcraft good? Yes. Was that latest single player warcraft really that good? No. Now EQ2 is an updated EQ, so it's going to garner the old numbers of evercrackers (I still don't understand the whole static quest thing, anyone? What is the point of such a system, you couldn't inject a little variety in it, could you?) CoH on the other hand, people have told me is pretty fun. I don't play it myself, but my friend says he likes it, but that it was getting a bit boring for him. Wish was his future play (or so he hoped). He didn't care about the instancing, but, he didn't care that Wish didn't (instance) either.

So actually the Risky thing is that Wish unlike: Tabula Rasa, EQ2, Lineage 2, or WoW, SWG, didn't have a fancy dollar name (Richard Garriot, EQ, Richard Garriot, the Warcraft Franchise, Star Wars) to "guarantee" a minimum ROI. That was the risk for Wish, and is for any other MMORPG without a big name stuck to it. That's nothing to do with the project, it's feasibility, or technical acumen. Nope, that's money politics :)

I'm the one that mentioned this above.

1. The EQ2 example is an implementation issue.  CoH does instances very well.  

2. A single server would be a daily battle for the overworked, understaffed CSR team.  Unless your company is willing to shell out the resources for sufficient CSR support, this is a logistics nightmare waiting to happen.  

3. People seem to want instancing.  Look at the subscription numbers for WoW, EQ2, CoH.  Also look at the latest expansion by Mythic.  Instancing seems to be the current business model.  If I were an investor, I'd consider the single server model to be a very risky move.

[Mesozoic]

CoH did this very well and very unobtrusively.  Your chance to really see it in action has lapsed, at least until CoV comes out.  Suffice to say that there exists an implementation of instanced "main areas" which met with wide approval from a large playerbase.  At every zoneline and every train station, players had the opportunity to pick an instance of available zones, where multiple instances existed.  Moving from one to the other never took more than a minute.  

There was no crafting in CoH and very little trading, but a robust crafting/trading system would probably implement an auction house system that could persist across multiple zones, including instances of the same zone.

[Stephen Zepp]

It's been debated back and forth a lot in the forums in other threads, but I have to admit I don't understand the rationale of turning a "Massively Multiplayer" game into a "Minimally Multiplayer" game by creating separate zones/areas/worlds/whatever you want to call them for very small subsets of a world's population to play in.

What the popularity of instancing games tells me is that the draw of a MMOG is not the same for all players in the target market, and in many ways people actually don't want a Massively Multiplayer experience, what they really want is a decent quality game to play with a small selection of friends.

That's not a bad thing at all, but I think the huge subscription numbers WoW sees, and all the other top end MMOG's are seeing is a consolidated result of much more than just the game's quality and it's MMOG nature--in many ways it's because the Minimally Multiplayer genre doesn't have enough members for them to be satisfied.

Which, in turn, implies that there is an "undiscovered market" of Minimally Multiplayer purchasers out there that hasn't been tapped yet, and ultimately will drive the subscription numbers of current MMOGs down by an undetermined amount when that genre is tapped.

[Soukyan]

So actually the Risky thing is that Wish unlike: Tabula Rasa, EQ2, Lineage 2, or WoW, SWG, didn't have a fancy dollar name (Richard Garriot, EQ, Richard Garriot, the Warcraft Franchise, Star Wars) to "guarantee" a minimum ROI. That was the risk for Wish, and is for any other MMORPG without a big name stuck to it. That's nothing to do with the project, it's feasibility, or technical acumen. Nope, that's money politics :)

Ah yes, but neither CoH nor Ryzom had fancy dollar names backing them either. CoH was started by a one man investment and a three man team and they used good business sense to make and sell a product to get more investment capital and obtain a big name publisher. Ryzom may not be long for this world, but they managed to make it to release. Wish could have gone the route of CoH and made some smart business moves, but instead the single monetary investor and lead of the entire project decided to try to go it alone and make due with limited resources. Poor management killed the game. They could have found capital if they needed capital, but that would have meant the sole investor dropping his ego and making some changes to his own plans for the game.

[HaemishM]

but a lot of text MMOs that beat the pants off anything any of the graphical ones (big or small) can provide.

No, they really don't.

[Lum]

Define "beat the pants off". By his definition (interesting game systems), yes, they do, since text MUDs are far easier to get experimental with. Try any of the TrekMUSEs for example.

[HaemishM]

I'm being experiential. As in, in my experience, if I'm going to play a text-only game, I'll read a novel instead. Text doesn't do it for me, nor does it do it for the vast majority of game players. Which is why graphical MUD's have higher subscription numbers than text MUD's, despite the fact that text MUD's have much lower technical requirements on server and client side.

Text MUD's are certainly easier to edit, on the fly, but that doesn't mean they "beat the pants off" graphical MUD's, because most people, including me, won't be able to "get into" the game play long enough to care. I'm glad he likes playing with the artifacts of the past, and that enough other people do to make it profitable, but I'd prefer to play games made this century.

[Mesozoic]

It's been debated back and forth a lot in the forums in other threads, but I have to admit I don't understand the rationale of turning a "Massively Multiplayer" game into a "Minimally Multiplayer" game by creating separate zones/areas/worlds/whatever you want to call them for very small subsets of a world's population to play in.

You kinda answered your own question in paragraph 2 there, but I would have to add that there are cases where instancing leads to far more immersion.  Mainly, these have to do with quest/mission-specific area populations (1) and with respawning (2).

(1) In CoH, it would be silly for a contact to ask me to go to an abandoned lab and clear out a nest of bad guys if that same contact had just sent some other guy to clear out the same area.  I might wander in only to find that Captain Super had already won the day.  Also, a non-instanced mission zone could not adjust its mob population to challenge the inbound group.

(2) Respawning is absolute immersion-breaking crap.  Its crap that has been required in non-instance games for so long now that we accept it without thinking, but its crap.  Instancing allows you to fix this with non-respawning mobs in a quest/mission-specific area.  

CoH did this right, WoW fucked up.  The beginning of the end for me in WoW was when I realized that mobs in our specific instance were respawning.  Why?  The place is ours,  - and we killed them.  So who are the mobs respawning for?

[Xilren's Twin]

What the popularity of instancing games tells me is that the draw of a MMOG is not the same for all players in the target market, and in many ways people actually don't want a Massively Multiplayer experience, what they really want is a decent quality game to play with a small selection of friends.

Ding ding ding; we have a winner!

Instancing to me has always been an attempt to provide focused fun to the individual/small group that is much closer to the pnp game systems this genre allegedly is supposed to resemble.  You can have much more flexibility and dynamism in an instance b/c it doesn't matter what others are doing in their own version of it.  Interesting game experiences, that;s what "quality" means to me (beyond the technical aspects of course)

The focus is now back to you and what you do, which is really just another way of saying, you get to be the hero.  Isn't that what storytelling has always been about, the protagonist(s)?  Instancing, for all it's faults, is a tool that can help make things interesting.  Standing in line to whack eternally respawning Vox? Not so much.

Xilren

[Stephen Zepp]

It's been debated back and forth a lot in the forums in other threads, but I have to admit I don't understand the rationale of turning a "Massively Multiplayer" game into a "Minimally Multiplayer" game by creating separate zones/areas/worlds/whatever you want to call them for very small subsets of a world's population to play in.

You kinda answered your own question in paragraph 2 there, but I would have to add that there are cases where instancing leads to far more immersion.  Mainly, these have to do with quest/mission-specific area populations (1) and with respawning (2).

(1) In CoH, it would be silly for a contact to ask me to go to an abandoned lab and clear out a nest of bad guys if that same contact had just sent some other guy to clear out the same area.  I might wander in only to find that Captain Super had already won the day.  Also, a non-instanced mission zone could not adjust its mob population to challenge the inbound group.

(2) Respawning is absolute immersion-breaking crap.  Its crap that has been required in non-instance games for so long now that we accept it without thinking, but its crap.  Instancing allows you to fix this with non-respawning mobs in a quest/mission-specific area.  

CoH did this right, WoW fucked up.  The beginning of the end for me in WoW was when I realized that mobs in our specific instance were respawning.  Why?  The place is ours,  - and we killed them.  So who are the mobs respawning for?

Sorry for such a big quote, but I wanted to respond to all your statements:

--I should been more clear in my question: If what you want to provide to your customer base is a Minimally Multiplayer experience, why in the hell are you building a Massively Multiplayer (and all the infrastructure upkeep that entails) in the first place? Build a Minimially Multiplayer game from the get-go.

1) Ahh, but that right there describes why it's not "immersive" to me at all. How in the hell can you be immersed in a persistent world when the same arch villians have to be killed over and over and over and over again (or even can be killed in that manner). If Captain Super did win the day, then dammit, the world should know about it...not let me go ahead and win the day against the same opponents as well, just cause.

2) Bingo. Respawn is such a huge kludge, and completely destroys immersion of any sort whatsoever. Even with your difference of "CoH, they never respawned for me, while WoW they even respawned for me", you still are respawning..and therefore the player's actions are not interactively persistent. No matter what anyone does, Mob X is still gonna be hanging out next week waiting for someone to come kill him again. Instancing compounds this lack of interactive persistence in it's attempt to fix other issues.

Instancing IMHO is putting a bandaid on the symptom, instead of diagnosing the disease and curing it.

[Stephen Zepp]

Note to mods: Sorry about the thread hijack, the convo has turned into something completely different...would it be possible to get a split off?

[Nebu]

1) And if you and you're friend are tacking around the server, trying to pick up other friends, and have to say (as I myself was never attracted to CoH) "Doh! Queynos 7 not queynos 1!" Does it really matter how this "instancing" garbage is handled as long as it means you can't just walk into "Hero City" and find your friends. Multiple location worlds, shouldn't have multiple instances of those locations. Now from my merchant standpoint, selling things, and letting people know I have them to sell is much easier if I don't have to worry about selling it 20 times, because I have to go through multiple instances. Want any more examples of how this is annoying?

Those are fine examples and you'll not that in my post I was neither in support of nor against instancing personally.  I was merely stating that the trends among newer mmogs seemed to gravitate in that direction.  

Playing the devil's advocate there is another side to the coin:
A single gaming world requires considerably more content.  Instancing allows more people to use and enjoy the same areas.  A couple of examples a) If questmaster Bob tells me that I have to get 6 foozle pelts and there are only a few foozle spawns nearby, there will be an artificial cue created to obtain foozles from the closest spawn.  I say artificial because often there are other foozle spawns, human nature draws the most people to the closest location. b) Lets say that moles spawn quite fast and give both good exp and loot.  Well, there will be a higher demand for moles than there will be for other mobs of the same level.  This isn't a new idea, it has happened in every mmog released to date.  Instancing allows for more people to combat these creatures without the need for player created waiting lists.  Less wait, happier customers. c) Each group of players get their own special dungeon to explore.  The combination of instancing and random area generation makes for extra content with fewer expended resourses.  AO did a decent job with this, then CoH, then everyone else followed (LDoN, Catacombs, etc.).  People paid to have this feature... it sells.

As for multiple servers, it's an opportunity to play the game in a new environment. I'll call it a sort of replay value. If you've played any mmog, you'll recognize that each server has its own social structure (heirarchy if you will) with a unique economy, feel, and personality.  A single server has these traits also, but there are no other options.  What Wish attempted to do was to attempt to create microcosms by having folks congregate in towns.  It's difficult to assess whether this would have been successful over time given that we knew little about the entire economy or the transportation system.  If you'd like to see an example of a single server game in action, play a Tale in the Desert.  It's a wonderful game concept with lousy implementation.  The single server feels very much like you're trapped back in high school. I'll leave it at that.

Summary: I'm more in support of multiple servers than I am of instancing.  I think that instancing makes things much easier on the game developer as you can create more content with fewer resources.  As you stated above, instancing wouldn't be needed if the game had enough options for gameplay.  I do admit that I enjoy instanced dungeons... this may be an artifact of my EQ days when you zoned into a dungeon and immediately shouted "CAMP CHECK!".  There is no doubt that EQ had a large enough world to satisfy their player base, it's just that people tend to flock to the locations with the most favorable risk/reward.  In this case, I happen to enjoy instanced dungeons.  

2) Companies already have understaffed CSR's.  Call for a "GM" during prime-time, 90-120 days after launch. They always overstaff for that time period. The understaffing comes from monitoring 22 servers (I believe UO at one point was down to 1 GM per server/shift, with limited "helper" support). In a one world instance, all of your support is dedicated to the one place people play. This means unlike UO or EQ, where 700 people of GL or EQ server have a problem but only 15 on another server do, you don't have one staff begging for help from another team.

Which is more efficient? Well if you're going to throw everyone together like that, that means that you still require x support personell per person. Figure maybe 1 support person per 250 users (not sure what the actual industry standard is), but you lose the rounding because of some fraction of users that play multiple servers. So you actually save support cost!

Again, a very good point.  When I was thinking about it, I guess I was looking more at a grief/conflict standpoint.  With one single world, there is literally no escape from people harassing you using viable in-game mechanisms without having to quit the game (lost revenue).  With a multi-server game, you can either be moved to a new server or simply create a new character on another server.  This often is accompanied by a new set of people to meet and socialize with.  Multiple servers again offer a chance to increase replay value.  Anecdotally, every mmog that I've played, I've moved to multiple servers to see which fit my personality the best.  It may sound funny, but it's true.  

So actually the Risky thing is that Wish unlike: Tabula Rasa, EQ2, Lineage 2, or WoW, SWG, didn't have a fancy dollar name (Richard Garriot, EQ, Richard Garriot, the Warcraft Franchise, Star Wars) to "guarantee" a minimum ROI. That was the risk for Wish, and is for any other MMORPG without a big name stuck to it. That's nothing to do with the project, it's feasibility, or technical acumen. Nope, that's money politics :)

The problem that I saw with Wish was that a) it was an engine demo (proof of concept as it were) affixed to a boring game with a terrible interface and b) the novel concepts for gameplay left with Dave Rickey.  The graphics were dated, the combat was boring, and most people disliked P&C movement (I never had a problem with it personally).  Having tested it since alpha the game never really progressed into anything more than a new version of UO with less personality and a flashy P&C engine.  After 2 years they were still trying to deal with very fundamental gameplay issues... didn't you notice that things kept changing a lot?  They didn't really have a solid foundation for core game mechanics.

In my estimation, the number of people that really liked the game were a small minority as compared to the number that actually tested.  I would say that this was more the problem with Wish than the lack of a big name or an established brand.  The game was a long way from complete and still lacked credible support from the gaming community.  I think that Mark saw that Wish would be little more than a niche title and that would never produce the revenue that he would need to maintain and grow within the industry.  Knowing this, he pulled the plug.  

I beta tested both WoW and EQ2 and didn't care for either title.  To be honest, I'm still astounded by their popularity.  Both titles are little more than shiny improvements on older models.  Having seen someone post that WoW was the best mmog to date, I had to pause... I don't like the game but have to admit that WoW may actually deserve this title.  It's funny because Blizzard didn't really do anything all that much better than what we have seen from mmog's in the past.  They've just managed to suck less at the bad parts.  

In the case of WoW and CoH, they do add something to the mmog genre that has been lacking in the past: console-like fun.  The games are fun right out of the box in the same mindless way that space invaders was so many years ago.  They aren't deep experiences.  They're just light hearted fun.  Colorful graphics on a smooth engine with lots of buttons to mash.  I played CoH and had fun with it.  It wasn't a game I'd play longer than a month or two, but it was fun every time that I played.  It's just a different type of fun than the Pavlovian "ding" response we've been trained to enjoy since the Diku mud days.

EDIT: Some of these points were addressed above... I got distracted while writing and it took me a while to post.  Since starting like 8 more posts arrived.  I figured what the hell and tossed it out here.

[AcidCat]

As in, in my experience, if I'm going to play a text-only game, I'll read a novel instead. Text doesn't do it for me, nor does it do it for the vast majority of game players.

Somebody had to say it. Not knocking people that enjoy text games, but this is one of those things where I just don't understand the appeal and never will.

[Nebu]

Instancing IMHO is putting a bandaid on the symptom, instead of diagnosing the disease and curing it.

I agree for the most part, but some good counter examples (the CoH example) were given in defense of instancing above.  The crux is that the "band-aid" (referring to flaws in the current implementation of mmogs) is making money.  A LOT of money.  Until the current models stop being profitable, the industry will be hard pressed to move the genre in a new direction.

[Mesozoic]

Zepp, I want a good multiplayer game.  You've suggested that MMORPGs are not the place for that, and that I should play a regular multiplayer game.

But you want a game where each player's actions are persistent and affect the game world and - by extension  - all other players.  Am I allowed to suggest that you should play a regular multiplayer game for that?

Because frankly, the possibility of the gameworld being permanently affected by the average player horrifies me.  Players can't even be given persistent loot bags without arranging them on the ground to spell out scatological references.

Also note that your example assumes that there are a million devs writing and installing content all the time.  Content is the huge limitation here.

And having decided that true persistence is not desirable, any objection to instancing that I might have had falls away.

[Stephen Zepp]

Zepp, I want a good multiplayer game.  You've suggested that MMORPGs are not the place for that, and that I should play a regular multiplayer game.

I'm not being clear then. My point is that if a game developer plans to give his players a "Minimally Multiplayer" game by using instances, then they should design the game as a Minimally Multipayer game from the beginning, instead of wrapping their real game presentation (1-20 players in an instanced zone) with a massively multiplayer design (and all it's inherent limitations), infrastructure, and marketing scheme. What is happening right now commercially IMHO is companies building a mercedes benz using a touring bus as the blueprint, and marketing it as an 18 wheeler.

But you want a game where each player's actions are persistent and affect the game world and - by extension  - all other players.  Am I allowed to suggest that you should play a regular multiplayer game for that?

If the companies would actually design a Minimally Multiplayer game instead of doing what I describe above, you would get more features, functionality, and awesome game play than you do now, not less.

Frankly, the possibility of the gameworld being permanently affected by the average player horrifies me.  Players can't even be given persistent loot bags without arranging them on the ground to spell out scatological references.

Absolutely valid worry--but I suggest that isn't an issue regarding the persistent world itself (you see things like this all the time in semi-persistent worlds), but sociological concerns and other design areas.

Also note that your example assumes that there are a million devs writing and installing content all the time.  Content is the huge limitation here.

No, not at all. In fact, the entire purpose of this model is that the world itself becomes the content, not static "expansion zones" that have to be released month after month to keep things new and fresh. By nature of the combined models (interactive persistence and hybrid genres) it's the players and the world itself that are generating the new and fresh environment.

[Mesozoic]

...

You see the players as a source of content and interactivity.  I see them as a source of retardation and grief.   Lets move on.

[Soukyan]

No, not at all. In fact, the entire purpose of this model is that the world itself becomes the content, not static "expansion zones" that have to be released month after month to keep things new and fresh. By nature of the combined models (interactive persistence and hybrid genres) it's the players and the world itself that are generating the new and fresh environment.

Players creating content? And this game is free? Or is the hybrid model still pay to play? A community that builds over time will inevitably create some sort of "content", but not necessarily tangible content that other players would want to pay to experience. If I pay for a magazine subscription, I expect fresh, good content every month. I don't provide any content to them as a subscriber except perhaps for a letter to the editor.

I see Meso beat me to it so as he said... moving right along.

[Stephen Zepp]

No, not at all. In fact, the entire purpose of this model is that the world itself becomes the content, not static "expansion zones" that have to be released month after month to keep things new and fresh. By nature of the combined models (interactive persistence and hybrid genres) it's the players and the world itself that are generating the new and fresh environment.

Players creating content? And this game is free? Or is the hybrid model still pay to play? A community that builds over time will inevitably create some sort of "content", but not necessarily tangible content that other players would want to pay to experience. If I pay for a magazine subscription, I expect fresh, good content every month. I don't provide any content to them as a subscriber except perhaps for a letter to the editor.

I see Meso beat me to it so as he said... moving right along.

Poor choice of terminology on my part trying to abstract a large concept:

--(RTS) Players will utilize various architectural building set "prefabs" to create dynmically growing cities.
--(RTS/RPG) players will have functionality inherent to assign "quests" (either directly or via NPC proxy) to other RPG players.
--FPS players just by the nature of their play mode (inhabiting monsters as their play session) create dynamic "events" (and yes, this is not your standard 'scripted event' that some games have attempted in the past (SB), and not the same quality most likely as Wish describes with their "live content")
--failed diplomatic situations cause large wars over extended periods of time to occur, providing "content" for all styles of play.
--interactive persistence with the world environment causes extensive changes over time that continually and dynamically redefine the world itself
--rise and fall of NPC populations cause changing content as well based on geographical, economic, diplomatic, and military interactions with the environment and players.

I'm not talking about players creating new 3-D models and scripting new mobs. I'm talking about a pardigm shift away from "content" towards "systems" (see reference links below), where player actions are "content".

Some interesting links:
Zen of Design blog by Damion Schubert ("Ubiq" from Wolfpack/Ubisoft)
--The Overly Polite Content War Continues (specifically his discussion, not the links, but the links provide good background)
--Experience Driven Design (or, Ubiq's 10 commandments about content vs systems)

Other external blogs:
Jeff Freeman--Content driven development

That's just a start!

[Soukyan]

Ah, good good. Thanks for the clarification and the linkage, Zepp.

[AlteredOne]

12805 views for this thread?  Me thinks F13 got some serious external linkage for this one, from some Wish-related site or other.

[Nebu]

12805 views for this thread?  Me thinks F13 got some serious external linkage for this one, from some Wish-related site or other.

You are correct sir!

You may need to scroll down a tad

[Shavnir]

You know Zepp, on a diffrent (less competitive scale) I remember hearing an interview on my SimCity 2000 CD that had that rough idea.  Your SimTower could go in a SimCity and someone could play SimCopter in that SimCity...yadda yadda yadda.  It is an intriguing concept to say the least.

[Stephen Zepp]

Btw, I know it's rare to be using real names on a forum like this, but it's "Stephen", or "dickwad"--Zepp is what I got called in the military, and I try to avoid it whenever possible!

Actually, the idea has been around for a VERY long time. Back in the late 80's-early 90's there was a set of games (Breach/Breach 2 was the rts/squad action portion I cannot remember the space empire portion but it began with an 'E' I think) where you would fight space battles with the first "half" of the game, and either land on a planet to do a squad turn based RTS type game, and/or actually board an enemy ship during the space combat portion, and it would literally hand you off to the "other" game (all on your own comp of course, using text data files---ahh, those were the days!).

Microsoft also played with the concept at about that time as well with their MS Flight Simulator/MS Air Traffic Control Simulators. You could actually network those two (back in the IPX days) and have the ATC player see the flight sim guy on his radar scope, and give him vectors for arrival and departures.

[AlteredOne]

Btw, I know it's rare to be using real names on a forum like this, but it's "Stephen", or "dickwad"--Zepp is what I got called in the military, and I try to avoid it whenever possible!

Welcome to F13 Zepp!  Err, dickwad.

[Signe]

Yes, nice to have you here, Dick.  Hope your stay is warm and fuzzy.

[MahrinSkel]

Actually, the idea has been around for a VERY long time. Back in the late 80's-early 90's there was a set of games (Breach/Breach 2 was the rts/squad action portion I cannot remember the space empire portion but it began with an 'E' I think) where you would fight space battles with the first "half" of the game, and either land on a planet to do a squad turn based RTS type game, and/or actually board an enemy ship during the space combat portion, and it would literally hand you off to the "other" game (all on your own comp of course, using text data files---ahh, those were the days!).

Rules of Engagement (and ROE2) was the name of the space portion.  The whole thing was called "Interlocking Game System", and I think they had a patent on it (probably expired by now).

--Dave

[Stephen Zepp]

That's what it was, thanks!