Minions of Mirth goes into free alpha amongst cries of, "WTF?"

[Nija]

Because, well... How do I put this lightly?

It sucks. You have played Mount & Blade right?

I fire up MoM (this acronym should only ever be applied towards Master of Magic, btw) and I create a single player world. Then I have to create a party, but I don't really want to, so I create one guy.

Then I'm in this weak-looking typical 3rd person mmorpg world. I hit F1, the universal help key, and nothing. I hit I for inventory, it opens up. I've got meat and water. That is innovation right there folks, I don't see why people aren't flocking to this game.

I then notice the ? button and my worst fears are confirmed.

"Double click on a monster to begin combat."

No thanks dude, I hated that shit in 1997 and it's no better now.

Bonus, in my wild keypressing a SKELETON was selected! I found him and ran up to him and proceeded to autoattack his ASS. Man, it was awesome.

Then I saw two more skeletons, and tried to kill them. They were whipping my ass so I ran back to town, only to notice them STILL HITTING ME FROM 20 FT BEHIND ME DESPITE BEING A SINGLE PLAYER ONLINE WORLD WHATEVER THEY CALL IT.

So to summarize

1) it's got a very silly name. If people overlook that and try it they are greeted with 2)
2) an awful what-looks-to-be an EQ clone. If the game is different in some magical way, you best go out of your way to show me what's different within 5 seconds.

Now, to visualize

Movies using Koepi's Xvid.

Click on the images to see the videos.





I don't like M&B because IT'S INDY DUDE, PS CHECK OUT MY AWESOME VINYL COLLECTION. I like it because it's fun.

Indy doesn't have anything to do with it. I'd probably like MoM if it was a non-EQ clone that uhh you know what I mean, just look at it.

[Roac]

Ulterior motive: find out if/how/why this particular Indie game doesn't seem to attract much interest from the f13 community.

Because it has nothing that stands out to attract my interest.  While not a penalty, being indie is not a selling point.  What any product needs is something to set it apart.  The name doesn't exactly do that - Minions of Mirth?  That doesn't sound like something I'd like to play.  Massively Single Player?  Oh come on.  I'm sure they were trying to do something clever, and I'm sure it makes sense to them - but I'm not them, and I don't read their minds.  It's not funny to me, it's just goofy.  So's the name.

But OK, enough about branding.  Quick scan of their website also shows nothing to grab my attention.  The screenshots are ugly, and there's nothing catchy to set the product apart.  I don't mind ugly screenies, mind you - hell, I warmed up my NES the other night to play Dr. Mario.  But if pretty pictures isn't the selling point, something had better be.  Looking at their feature list (burried below screenshots, so you might not even see it), are very ho-hum features.  The first one on their list?  "Windows and OSX support!".  This is what they want to highlight about their game most?  Second is the singleplayer thing, which makes NO sense.  Not trying to insult the devs, and maybe if I would grab the demo, I would really like the game.  Unfortunately, I work 50 hours a week plus, have a wife/daughter, and see offers like this all the time.  I'm not going to do much more than glance at something, and my mind is going to get made up very quickly. 

If you're going to go cheap, that's fine - but you still have to have SOMETHING to get noticed.  Hell, if they would just throw the phrase "functional fetuspult!" and put up a screenshot of it, I'd probably run the demo just for laughs.  And maybe find out I like it.  Or maybe not, but at least then they've gotten me to get my eyeballs on the game itself, and not their website.  Do something odd, like allowing players to add multiplayer content to a live game (ala MUDs), throw in a lot of easy mini games (Puzzle Pirates).  Something. 

[Pococurante]

Heh. Yes and yes, I do the same thing :P

Same actually - I really don't think I understand the game and looking at the website I cannot say I'm any wiser.

I should be the ideal market since I'm at least as much interested in building worlds as I am playing games.  In fact for all my years with games it seems I spend more time tinkering with their innards than playing them.  Currently I'm poring through both of Ken Finney's books and playing around with building my own NPC AI.  I'll follow the forums for awhile to see if it is something I'm willing to buy.

[Nija]

More stuff now that I'm at work with nothing to do.

As you can see in the videos, there are wildly different things to do. In MoM, I hold down W and run up to some monsters, then I double click on one of them. I click the "kick" button a few times, and that's the extent of what I can do in combat. Oh, I hit spacebar a few times to JUMP, because, well, what else was I going to do?

Then the contrast is M&B. HOLY SHIT DID YOU SEE ME LANCE THAT GUY IN THE FACE?! I didn't autoattack, I didn't even target him. I brought my horse up to speed, the lance dipped, and I used small, slow movements to position the LANCE in front of his FACE and then I ran into him.

And he died, now imagine that.

People bitch about how hit calculations and stuff that ADVANCED can't POSSIBLY work in massive games, yet I bet they would work fine if they got rid of all the retarded dice rolls and concentrated on collisions.

Minions of Mirth suffers from the fact that the don't have the money to hide their shitty core gameplay. Something like World of Warcraft has TONS of money, and they used it to hide their crap-tastic core gameplay, like a VC would hide a booby trap with bamboo scraps and leaves. Hell, even I was fooled for a little while with WoW. After a week, I just played to hang out with friends. After a few months that wasn't even cutting it.

When you hit 60 most people will see how shallow it is and (hopefully) give up. Doing 5 man instances with people you know is OK, but you'll probably exclude one of your friends and that isn't OK. 15 man instances, evey with people you have known for years are bothersome. 20 man instances are worse. Now imagine trying to do that shit with people you DON'T know. Sitting around on Ventrilo for 4-5 hours a night listening to the same faggots day in, day out. Surprised it hasn't driven anyone insane.

At the end of the day you're left with hitting a button on the top row of your keyboard and 'HEY DIPSHIT DON'T STAND THERE U'LL GET AGGRO NOOB' 'THAT ROLL DOESNT COUNT YOU DONT HAVE THE DKP TO ROLL' 'SORRY ONLY WANT HOLY SPEC PRIESTS' 'WTF ROGUE JUST SS U WILL DRAW AGGRO'

And you'll be happy with it for the next fucking decade as people scramble to copy it.

Anyways, nobody cares about any of this obviously. See my avatar.

[Merusk]

Psycho.

It's old, but applicible.

[HaemishM]

My biggest stumbling block has been time. I haven't had a lot of time to devote to even looking at the demo I downloaded (and this was on the computer that blew up). I tried it out on the same day that I tried Irth Online. I will say that it certainly was better put together than IO, which was a total POS. But between WoW, MLB 2k5 on the X-Box, TV and DVD's, MoM just kind of fell through the cracks.

Now, I put about half an hour into it. It felt rough and alpha-ish, which fits. It's interface was crude. The "shiney" was decent; it didn't sparkle me, but it didn't turn me off either. I ran around, tried to kill a skeleton, had to run into a guard tower to get the guard to save me.

It had potential that I just haven't had the time to explore.

[AOFanboi]

To be viable, indie games have to offer something unique, not just copy or attempt to clone some other $20 million game - and especially not EverQuest. Add something, dammit, something that will make it worth it.

An interesting allegory to "why don't people play Minions of Mirth" could be "why do people play indie game X instead"? In my case, I play Uplink because it's simple yet addictive with a decent and simple interface. I play HoneyComb because it's a vastly improved Minesweeper. I play Swarm because it's an old-school four-way scrolling shooter with a simply brilliant interface. I play FATE because it's an improved single-player Diablo, with great variety in character design.

Did I mention I happily paid for all of those games? In the case of HoneyComb even twice?

You cannot make an indie MMOG-style game in the World of Warcraft age; Rubies of Eventide is older and more established than MoMirth, and even they cannot hope to attract many players.

[Samwise]

Mini-tangent:

While not a penalty, being indie is not a selling point.

Seems obvious enough, but that really is something to keep in mind.  I've noticed that many fans of indy games will make special allowances for a game because it's "indy", and some indy developers will make something that's basically a mediocre rehash of a successful commercial game and hope to sell it primarily on the basis of its being "indy".  That actually does work to some extent, because the developers will find success among those aforementioned devoted indy fans, and it is all well and good to be passionate about the "cause" of putting game development in the hands of the little guy instead of the EAs of the world, but if that's as far as you get then you're never going to grow past that small fanbase.

I'm primarily speaking from my frustration with Darwinia and the fact that it had horrible crashing bugs on release.  When I went on their site looking for solutions, the only technical support option was the official forums, which was absolutely packed with Introversion fanbois that obviously had a lot of personal investment in Introversion, and said things along the lines of "hey, this game was made by only 5 people working out of a house, that's really something!  And they worked really hard on it!  You shouldn't complain if it's buggy!"  I paid real money for this game, I'll damn well complain if it's buggy and/or sucks.  And these are the same people that beta tested the game - BAD PLAN.

Incestuous circle jerks are all well and good, but it's really important to realize that selling a game as "indy" won't get you any further than that.  Games need to be sold on their merits, not their means of production.  Gish caught a lot of people's eyes because its physics engine did things that nobody else had even attempted yet - not only that, but it was able to turn that gimmick into fun gameplay.  The fact that it came from a small indy developer was purely incidental.

</tangent>

<MoM>
I mentioned this when we were talking the other day, and others have stated it in this thread as well, but MoM just never really "grabbed" me - it did sound at first like maybe it could be a framework to rapidly prototype new MMO gameplay systems, and that could be kinda cool as far as that goes, but after I poked around on the site for a bit all I saw was a graphical Diku-EQ-clone toolkit, so I left.

If MoM does have capabilities beyond rehashing EQ, the developers would do well to advertise that a bit better, and maybe put up an example or two of something bold and innovative (bonus points for fun) done using the MoM framework.  Look at Counter-Strike - love it or hate it, CS was a whole new type of FPS, it was a very powerful demonstration of the flexibility of Half-Life modding, and it drove Half-Life sales through the roof, not on the merits of Half-Life itself (although that was also a damn good game), but on the merits of the Half-Life engine as a framework that other games could be built and played on.

In the case of MoM, the core game isn't anything exciting, so it will need a Counter-Strike if it's going to get anywhere.

[HaemishM]

In other words, innovation and independence mean fuckall if it's broke.

[Pococurante]

I hate to re-rail... now I feel dirty.  But MoM itself - there's some hate here besides Nija's Therapy Thursday.  Is it genuinely bad?

[Stephen Zepp]

Outstanding feedback folks (and much I happen to personally agree with re: MoM), so thanks for spending the time!

[Evangolis]

I hate to re-rail... now I feel dirty.  But MoM itself - there's some hate here besides Nija's Therapy Thursday.  Is it genuinely bad?

I don't know.  And nothng I see or hear of it inspires me to change that.

[Alkiera]

I actually played this quite a bit when this thread started up...

My basic reaction was 'Wow, it's like EQ, only without netlag'.  Almost exactly like EQ.  I ran around, killed snakes and beetles, graduated to killing the skeletons in the tower, and the thugs outside the town...  got to level 15 or so with a Wizard.

The game was obviously in an alpha state, tho... lots of races still had default human models, many of the classes were there in name only, with no special abilities to speak of... Fortunately I picked wizard initially, it seemed to be one of the most fleshed-out.

After that, I lost interest.  I never really figured out anything about altering my own server, and the game didn't seem anywhere near complete, anyhow.

Alkiera

[Evangolis]

Then the contrast is M&B. HOLY SHIT DID YOU SEE ME LANCE THAT GUY IN THE FACE?! I didn't autoattack, I didn't even target him. I brought my horse up to speed, the lance dipped, and I used small, slow movements to position the LANCE in front of his FACE and then I ran into him.

And he died, now imagine that.

People bitch about how hit calculations and stuff that ADVANCED can't POSSIBLY work in massive games, yet I bet they would work fine if they got rid of all the retarded dice rolls and concentrated on collisions.

The argument is generally that latency forces you to use queued combat systems, and auto-attack systems.  It's pretty hard to test this notion, since you'd have to build an MMOG to test it directly, so we end with the argument from authority.

Until now.

Terra Nova has a post on the IBM conference Net Games 05.  It is chock full of ultra geeky papers on damn obscure shit, all of which are downloadable.  Among them was this: The Effect of Latency and Network Limitations on MMORPGs (A Field Study of Everquest2)

What they did, for those who don't want to wade through it, was take two matched PC setups, two similarly experienced players, and two similarly experienced characters, and hook them up to a network switch which had a Linux box attached to it that would allow them to increase the connection latency to any desired value for one or both setups.  Then they had the players perform some standard MMO stuff, like fighting, under variable lag.

They found that combat in EQ2 was robust up to about 1250ms (1.25 seconds) latency.  Over a second of lag.  Here is their exact statement of what they found:

Our hypothesis has proven to be partially correct. The game expectedly turned out to be non-playable at very high latency sequences. The"breakpoint" (point from where the game was no longer fluently playable) however occurred at 1250ms, which was more than two times higher than expected. Two main reasons are responsible for this effect. On the one hand the movement seems to be rendered locally (a detailed analysis of rendering and movement can be found in section 4.3). On the other hand the combat seems to react pretty accurate even at 500-1000ms. The Everquest 2 player combat system is based on a special queuing mechanism that allows the player to queue up to one combat move. This action is already sent towards the server, and as soon as the current combat move is done, the new ability is instantly executed. This makes even players with higher latency feel like they got no delay. Because most abilities take around 1 second to perform, it is easy to understand why the combat turns out to become very problematic at latency times of more than one second.

They did a bunch of other stuff as well.

So now we have a benchmark.  Now, I am neither geeky enough, nor a sufficiently capable programmer, to introduce a similar variable lag mechanism into the UI of a PC Game like M&B, or CS, but for one who was, it should be fairly straightforward to do so, and determine how resistant the combat mechanics are to lag relative to EQ2.

As a side point, their method could also be used as a testbed to determine how well different MMOs responded to latency, which would provide customers with an actual benchmark to consider these games by.

Of course, if you are dealing with a locally hosted game, this is not an issue, and there is no excuse for having a dull combat system.

[Samwise]

I don't need to set up a high latency connection to tell you that something twitchy like CS really really sucks at high latency, even with good netcode (the Half-Life netcode is possibly the best of any FPS).  With "high" being anything over 100ms.   Anything where you have to react to the actions of something that's on the other end of a sluggish connection is going to be extremely frustrating.  The more interactive and/or reflex-based the combat, the snappier the response time from the server needs to be.  Not exactly rocket science.

[Sky]

The argument is generally that latency forces you to use queued combat systems, and auto-attack systems.  It's pretty hard to test this notion, since you'd have to build an MMOG to test it directly, so we end with the argument from authority.

Bwhawhawha?

Planetside? Best usage of the mmo space thus far. Maybe not the best implementation of the idea, a bit generic and lacking in Vision(tm). But proof of concept that you can have player skill interaction on a massive scale.

[HaemishM]

I hate to re-rail... now I feel dirty.  But MoM itself - there's some hate here besides Nija's Therapy Thursday.  Is it genuinely bad?

I don't think it' bad so much as it is not good.

[Evangolis]

The argument is generally that latency forces you to use queued combat systems, and auto-attack systems.  It's pretty hard to test this notion, since you'd have to build an MMOG to test it directly, so we end with the argument from authority.

Bwhawhawha?

Planetside? Best usage of the mmo space thus far. Maybe not the best implementation of the idea, a bit generic and lacking in Vision(tm). But proof of concept that you can have player skill interaction on a massive scale.

These are opinions, and they may indeed be perfectly valid ones.  However, it would be better if we could talk about relative playability at different latencies for all online games using actual numbers.  This is the sort of 'popular science' approach that is largely lacking from game reviewing, and which would help remove us from the editorial fellatio that characterizes too many reviews.  As it is now, we are faced with constant 'yes you can'/'no you can't' discussions, which really don't move anybody toward anything but flame wars.

[Samwise]

A game that's based on fast reactions does not work well past about 100 ms latency.  Period.  Done.  You don't need to set up an experiment to figure this out.  Ask any online FPS player, because any online FPS player is very familiar with the effects of lag, and will probably tell you that right around the time their ping hits triple digits, the game becomes much less playable.

This is most likely directly related to the reaction speed of the player.  Most humans are perceptive enough to spot tenth-of-a-second lags in fast-paced combat, so 100 ms is where stuff like that starts breaking down, even if the netcode tries to smooth it out - you'll notice the tenth of a second difference if you shoot at someone who was there (on the server) a tenth of a second ago, is still there on your screen, and you miss.  Smaller intervals of lag (I personally can't tell the difference once it gets below about 40 ms) aren't noticeable because you (the player) aren't able to process things that quickly anyway.

For something like a game of chess, you don't need to react in real time, so lag makes almost no difference - even a game of speed chess is going to be perfectly playable with a full 1000ms of lag between the players.  A standard game will probably be fine with up to a few seconds, even for the really basic opening moves that require no thought.

An IRC conversation starts to feel laggy past about two seconds, depending on the speed of the typists - people who type at snails's paces anyway probably have higher tolerance for latency.

Basically, it all comes down to how fast your reactions are expected to be under optimal conditions.  If your latency exceeds that time frame, it's no good.

The real question, to my mind, is not how can we deal with crappy latency, it's how can we design systems that pare latency down to acceptable levels.  This is partially a matter of hardware (fat pipes and fast servers) and partially a matter of software (netcode that minimizes the amount of data sent back and forth without allowing a client to cheat).  Right now there are precious few examples of games that can do twitchy combat on massive scales and keep latency low, but that doesn't mean it's impossible.

[Pococurante]

A game that's based on fast reactions does not work well past about 100 ms latency.  Period.  Done.  You don't need to set up an experiment to figure this out.  Ask any online FPS player, because any online FPS player is very familiar with the effects of lag, and will probably tell you that right around the time their ping hits triple digits, the game becomes much less playable.

This fundamentally is why I tend to dismiss the "Mmogs are not twitchy enough" rant.  There are interesting things done these days with client forecasting and server master reconciliation but that only goes so far until one encounters other remote users.

[Samwise]

I do, however, think it's a fallacy to say that twitch doesn't work in high-latency environments and therefore MMOGs can't have twitch.  This presupposes that all MMOGs are necessarily high-latency, and that's simply not true.  Most of them have been up to this point, but I think that's in part because the way that MMOG gameplay is currently designed, paring down the lag to levels that would be acceptable in a twitch game hasn't been worth the effort.

[Venkman]

As Merusk said. Checking out something that just enables me to make my own content isn't so compelling when there's off-the-shelf stuff that got paid development budgets, and Second Life which is like collaberative Maya. If I'm paying money, it's for content.

Plus the abbreviation is a bit cheeky :) Mom?

[Nija]

Gimme a break guys, have you even played Mount & Blade? You don't need a 100ms ping to play that. 500ms would work, maybe even a 1k ping.

We're not talking retarded hitscan weapons and yeah, look at Planetside.

Argument dismissed, it's possible but nobody cares.



That was during AC2 beta when people actually played it. Not a glitch either, just a typical LPB ping on the MS backbone.

[koboshi]

re-railing because I couldn't give a flying fuck about latency...

  The reason I didn't go for this game had nothing to do with the graphics, the indie-ness, the anomalous single player lag, or the failures of marketing. The truth of the matter is the marketing worked, they had me at ‘you get your own editable server’.  I mean that was it for me, I left for work that day with visions of cyberspaces like Iduru's Hak Nam or Snow Crash's Black Sun. I thought that with the introduction of a MMOG maker, users would be able to create their own worlds, or at least rooms, in which their rules reigned. I imagined people developing their own dungeons and inviting friends to join them, in some sort of personalized questing system. DMing reborn. I had thought the same of NWN, and was just as wrong.

  I also thought of the possibility to use the system as a proof of concept generator for MMOGs but the truth is that any true improvement to an MMOG, especially in the eyes of those most jaded of gamers you find here, would be too great a change for this particular system to handle. Furthermore, to truly experiment with the possibilities that would be up for review would require the massively multiplayer part more so than the online game part.

  In conclusion I wanted something from the game which was perhaps too much to expect, and when it couldn’t deliver on its promise of greatness, fell into worthlessness, perhaps through no fault of its own.

[Pococurante]

I suspect to really take a proof of concept as far as it would need to go you'd windup having to go to the underyling engine anyway.  Mom seems mainly an easy way for moderately techy people to setup virtual chatrooms for their friends.

[schild]

Or a kickass place to run a PnP campaign...instead of IRC.

[Samwise]

Only if you're not the one who'd be putting in a month of coding/modeling/mapping before each two hour adventure.   

[schild]

I was being sarcastic. MoM will be proof of concept that player generated content bites ass. Though NWN did a good job of that. I like acronyms. The entire playerbase of video games is FUBAR when it comes to doing work themself.

[Samwise]

Actually, after I posted that I did start to envision a toolkit that could be used to set up PnP style sessions with a minimum of pain.  It wouldn't look like NWN, and my guess is that it'd look even less like MoM.  It would have turn-based combat.  The DM would have every character's stats at his fingertips - at a whim he could right-click a character's name, say "Make Spot Check", and the system would tell him the results with the player being none the wiser unless the roll was high enough.  Also, the toolkit would ship with thousands of pre-generated locations and models, and an NPC generation system that would put SWG's character creator to shame.

Anyone who wants to buy my idea for a million dollars please PM me.

[stray]

The entire playerbase of video games is FUBAR when it comes to doing work themself.

Entire?

I only see vast amounts of crap from people who gravitate towards rpg's and fantasy games. Call me condescending, I don't care (I doubt that you do either), but most of this crowd has zero taste and doesn't know a damn thing about fun other than abstract number crunching bullshit.

And the more creative rpg'ers that do exist are, for the most part, in PnP land.

Basically though, dorks, as a general rule, are boring people. Not very well rounded either.

As for other genres, there's a higher percentage of decent stuff from the fps/rts playerbase, or even sim/simcity players.

[Sky]

MoM will be proof of concept that player generated content bites ass. Though NWN did a good job of that.

Yesverymuchso. When I see devs crow about player-made content...I just

[Pococurante]

So there are no player scenarios out there for NWN you all liked?

[Sky]

I wouldn't know. By the time player content (or even official content) actually started showing up, I was long gone, it was off the hd.

My biggest problem with NWN was that to make the module you wanted to make, and not just cobble something together, you needed to be a 3d artist with MAX (or whatever 3d app applies, I'm not a 3d artist). It was like a lego set with just the custom legos. All helmets and ray guns, no bricks. Exceedingly limited for the end user.

[Nija]

What NWN really lacks is a good interface to go about finding new player-made content. Something that looks like a gamespy browser, but instead of sorting by deathmatch, team deathmatch, CTF, you'd sort by single player mods, multiplayer mods, fantasy, ROMANCE, whatever.

Then you'd SELECT a server, but it would be a mod, and the little MOTD screen would have some information about it or something. All from within the game.

You're supposed to rely on your own hosting and your own advertisement, or use one of those godawful places like nwnvault to host your stuff. It just sucks. Pony up the bandwidth/server stuff like Blizzard did for Battle.net. Where would Diablo be without Battle.net?

Oh yeah, same place NWN is now. Forgotten.

[schild]

NWN wasn't fun. It doesn't matter if the playermade shit was good. The game itself was boring boring boring.

As for player made content:

Counterstrike, a few ut2k4 mods (if you like war sims, bleh), a Deus Ex mod I forgot the name of and wait for it - translations of japanese games.

Yesh, I'd say nearly all playermade content sucks. Sorry I used the word "entire" earlier. It was so far off the mark.

Now one thing you can count on - playermade content is often funny when made to be humorous. As players we're much better at bringing the funny than we are at creating more fun.