The Laws of Online Gaming Revisited...

[HaemishM]

As a corollary to that, Nebu, not only do they seem bent on making sure everyone wins, they only add challenge by testing the player's persistence. Challenge is not made by making the pain of losing harder; challenge is made by making the PROCESS of losing harder. The losing is to me punishment enough. CoH's exp. debt is a step in the right direction, IMO, but is still a bit too much in that at post-15 levels, it can really add to the grind.

Most MMOG developers seem overly concerned with the sadistic practice of punishing the player for a loss with the necessity to spend more time making up for that loss by doing the same thing again. As I said, that's not challenge. The only people that's a challenge to are the time-blessed catasses who take some weird form of pleasure out of blazing through repetitive actions to the end game.

[Nyght]

I'd like to propose a new standard for acceptable combat mechanics in a MMORPG.

Lets call it (in ATITD style) "The Test of Engagement".

If you can leave the screen/keyboard of your computer for more then 30 seconds during combat and still win (receive game rewards)  more then 10% of the time, then the combat system fails.

This of coarse requires that combat systems be designed with random factors such that the player must watch what happens and respond to it.

Lots of games accomplish this and I see no reason MMORPGs should be accepted.

Wow, what a lofty goal to shoot for.

[Nebu]

Most MMOG developers seem overly concerned with the sadistic practice of punishing the player for a loss with the necessity to spend more time making up for that loss by doing the same thing again. As I said, that's not challenge. The only people that's a challenge to are the time-blessed catasses who take some weird form of pleasure out of blazing through repetitive actions to the end game.

You know, I hadn't really considered it in this form but you hit on a very good point.  Let me create an artificial parameter called the "thrill factor" or TF for short.  It seems that thus far the TF level in mmog's is generated mostly by fear created by avoidance of some penalty (exp debt, vitae penalty, travel distance, gold expense, etc.).  Combat has been made exciting not by the act of combat itself, but by the fear createded by having to trudge through the same treadmill again if you should be defeated in combat. Am I making sense here?  So, the common motif in mmog's is that we see tension and excitement building from fear of a death penalty, rather than from being entertained by the combat system.  

I think that CoH has raised the bar to some degree by at least making combat that was engaging (albeit still not much more of a challenge once tendencies were learned).  I can only imagine that by improving AI and creating a greater challenge will combat in mmog's ever be more than resource farming.

[Andamay]

I have been lurking around for a long time.  Never felt the need to join the banter before.  I have played SWG since beta with a close knit group of friends that truly enjoys the world.  From what I have read of the upcoming changes and the JTLS, SWG will be a force to contend with in this genre for a long time.  Its a world designed to have fun games tagged onto it.  It would not suprise me at all to see the next expansion be Hoth with the planetside engine.  You can build a world that is a vehicle for amazing content to be added (SWG), or you can build amazing content that is a vehicle for world to be added (CoH).  There simply is not enough development time and resources to do both with the current ecomnomic model these type of games are under.  My opinion is that SOE is determined to make the unfun parts of SWG fun, but we shall see.

The biggest complaint about SWG is their combat system.  It goes out the window into the shit can where it belongs in the next publish.

Oh,  the reason I came out of lurk mode was to let you know that Thunderheart (SWG's Community Mananager) was kind enough to link to f13/waterthread in a post on the developer tracker...

Please give a kind welcome to the forum whores of SWG that could not make it on the vualt network and blizzards forums.

[dogles]

Whew boy, that article was a pretty long read. I have a lot of points that I want to touch on, so this will be pretty long as well...

"...[Players should be able to] pick pools of skills for each of the four base classes and then [let] the player pick which skills from which pools he wants."

Ok, fine, but how do you make those skills worth a damn if a player can get them at any point in their advancement ladder? What sort of interesting content scenarios do you create? In specific terms, lets say you get a Daze skill that can stun creatures, but the content scenarios created for the given advancement point are all Undead creatures, which can not be dazed.

A player would feel cheated to have put resources into a skill that was not designed for that point in the total content experience. In many cases, the optimal content for a chosen skill would be below the player's current rung on the ladder. Why give the player a useless skill? Players of course complain about this often, it's called being gimped. The advancement path the player chose led to an avatar that was not able to play content that other players could, or compete with other players.

Other options include randomized/instanced areas for players that give them content that will take advantage of their skillsets, making encounters more generic so that any skill could be used effectively, or removing advancement all together so that a player need only find the content suitable for them. You could also accept the mechanic as a way to reward group play. Any of these "solutions" have significant drawbacks, but I'll move on; you can ask me to go into more detail if you wish.

"Macroing, botting, and automation
No matter what you do, someone is going to automate the process of playing your world."

"Dump the treadmill, dump the numbers, and make gameplay fun. If the gameplay, story, and content are engaging, players will then stop botting to enjoy the game itself."

Treadmills are good. Really. Something has to change as one continues to play, whether the game gets harder, new areas are found and explored, or more foozles are collected. In MMPs, the advancement ladder is infinite, because devs need cash, these things aren't cheap to make, etc. There are some treadmills that would be really cool...a content treadmill, for instance. Having a daily (hahaha) "episode" of your favorite game with new, original story, locales and challenges is just a big old treadmill. Of course, this treadmill isn't feasible for a litany of reasons. Do away with numbers? Well, you can hide them, but they're always there. Games, at their core, are about numbers, period. I challenge any response to that.
Gameplay should be fun though, I agree with that. :P

As far as "bots" go, there are ways you can help alleviate this, and the more that a game relies on quick reaction to stimuli, the more difficult writing a bot becomes (it's easy to write a bot for most MMP's today). However, look at the bots on a high difficulty setting in UT for instance to see AIs that are more effective at playing the game than most players are. Once a game's data format and network code have been reverse engineered, it's pretty much free reign for a bot author. I think long term, games will have to accept and embrance them, because detecting and stopping them is a losing battle. I don't see that happening for a while though.

"J.C. Lawrence’s “do it everywhere” law
If you do it in one place, you have to do it everywhere. Players like clever things and will search them out. Once they find a clever thing they will search for other similar or related clever things that seem to be implied by what they found and will get pissed off if they don’t find them."

"Your players are not lab rats, do not treat them thusly. The trick is to have many different ‘clever things’ and have them wildly vary in construction, rather than having 1,000 of the same thing. Of course, 1,000 different things is harder to make than 1,000 of one thing. So this falls under the ‘do you have enough money to make it’ category."

I think the author's original point is that of consistency. You don't put water everywhere in the game that players can't swim in, then place one spot somewhere in the game where they are expected to. This is an extreme example, but serves the point.
Of course, a player wants to find lots of "little clever things" in a game as they play. But you want to make sure those things work well, and as you add more things, the less time you have to spend on each one, and the less work/iteration it receives. I think the better option is to pick just a few cool mechanics and do them really well, and provide lots of deep and interesting advancement ladders to play with those mechanics. One also hopes as a designer that fun gameplay elements will fall out of the interaction with atomic systems (the emergent gameplay). This is historically a hit or miss affair, but some games have had very rich and deep emergent scenarios (SimCity, for instance).

Dr Cat’s Stamp Collecting Dilemma
Lots of people might like stamp collecting in your virtual world. But those who do will never play with those who like other features. Should you have stamp collecting in your world?” We know that there are a wide range of features that people find enjoyable in online worlds. We also know that some of these features conflict with one another. Given the above, we don’t yet know if it is possible to have a successful world that incorporates all the features, or whether the design must choose to exclude some of them in order to keep the players happy."

"As long as you tie each system together and require cooperation between the players that use them, each type of player will be forced to interact with the other types of players.

PvP vs. PvE players are a perfect example of the original quote's point. No matter what, a lot of people prefer playing against computer opponents rather than real opponents. Can a game please everybody? Well, really, can anything please everybody? I think it's pretty obvious that a game of any type must exclude or limit certain playstyles to make sure the "core" game playstyles are fun. Would Splinter Cell be more fun if you could choose at the beginning to be Mario rather than Sam Fischer? Of course not, the content scenarios are designed for stealth, they are not designed for platform hopping or jumping on enemies' heads. Furthermore, trying to make a game that attempted to please people who wanted to play like Mario and those who wanted to play like Sam Fischer would end up dissatisfying both camps, because the respective game mechanics are not very compatible.
As far as cooperation, try getting PvP players and PvE players to cooperate. Their goals are completely different. Making a game with both PvP and PvE is at some consequence for them both.


In context to original passage regarding the inability to create stories fast enough to please players:

On top of that, as long as the static story is filled with enough good writing and immersive gameplay, everyone will still do it.

Well, yeah, okay...but games are made by people, and people need to get paid. I don't think an MMP that has an effective playtime of 6 months or less is a commercial possibility. These things just cost too much to make. 6 months of good writing and immersive gameplay isn't as easy to produce as you make it sound, especially given that many if not most MMP players are known to play 20+ hrs/wk. :) A single player RPG is considered very long if it has 80hrs of gameplay. Such a game takes years to make. Expectations are very high for MMPs in terms of amount of new content experiences, and rightfully so. MMPs generally have to spread their best content out as much as possible, and provide not-as-good content to fill the gaps. I don't think there's anything inherently wrong about this, you just need to make sure the filler is fun to play, and try to make the gaps as small as possible.

Ownership is Key
You have to give players a sense of ownership in the game. This is what will make them stay – it is a ‘barrier to departure.’ Social bonds are not enough, because good social bonds extend outside the game. Instead, it is context. If they can build their own buildings, build a character, own possessions, hold down a job, feel a sense of responsibility to something that cannot be removed from the game – then you have ownership.

Job? NO. That’s a huge problem. Players don’t want to play a job when they get home from work. They want to play a game. Everything else is true in the above, except for the part about the job. Get rid of it. Stop going into game design thinking that I want to work 9-5 at Initech and then come home and work 6-11 farming some rare form of copper.

While I agree that a game shouldn't require a person to quit their job to have enough time to play, MMP players generally play a LOT. If you are able to give players enough to do so that they can play the game as long as they want, that seems like a good thing. Take Counter-Strike or Quake 3 for instance, the highest end players treat the game as a job. They will spend 40+ hours a week training and competing. But as a casual player, you can still play every once in a while and (often) have fun. I ultimately think it is possible and worthwhile to please both audiences.

I could go into a lot of other things I disagreed with, and a few things I agreed with, but it's a long damn article, maybe later. It's good to have these sorts of discussions though - it speaks to the power and potential of the MMP platform that people dissatisfied with the current state of affairs write and discuss tome-like rants rather than just going and playing something else. :)

This should help us reach the five page mark, hehe. I await your response anxiously, Raph. :)

Dan

[schild]

Thanks for the feedback Dan. As to address your last point about tome-like rants...

I think the period for ranting is dead. It's gotten to the point where it's just pointless. This article was purely written to spur thought, not diss Raph or anyone else. If Raph's original laws weren't so long, I'd probably write another one agreeing with every point and opposing them purely on implementation, citing examples from the games arleady on the market. But there's some other stuff he's written that'd I would rather address before I spent another day of my life on the 'laws.'

[stray]

I don't see it as ranting. Ideas for MMO design are far from complete, and I'm just doing my small part in making them better by not playing them. :) Kind of hard to just "move on to another game" when you have a problem with the entire genre.

I would hope nobody has any intentions of dissing Raph either. Not just because he's pretty brilliant and doesn't deserve it, but at least he's willing to put this law into effect:

The opinions of those who leave are the hardest to obtain, but give the best indication of what changes need to be made to reach that ultimate goal.

[Raph]

the pace of change isn't just slow, it's unbearable

If it's any comfort, I've been moaning that way for, uh, a long time.

I'm a big fan of good content.

Me too. Sometime when you people are willing to give up teh sh1ny, you should log onto LegendMUD and try out the quests there.

What we don't need is a trickle of improvements. What we need is a flood of changes that completely tear down the past monuments of core gameplay and replace them.

This runs contrary to good business sense, generally speaking. And the larger the company, the less likely they are to try it.

But it's what the indies are trying to do. It's Second Life and There and Puzzle Pirates and Tale in the Desert. It's even Project Entropia, if truth be told.

IMO at this point in MMOG's the industry isn't in need of original ideas, so much as it's in need of well executed ideas.

Even doing a single game that has absorbed all the lessons thus far proved to be really damn hard. That was a goal for SWG--to make "a summary game" that gathered up all the lessons from the games up until then.

I held alot of venom for the SWG devs, you in particular, over the course of this thread I've decided that maybe you aren't Satan incarnate. Maybe you tried and other things got in the way. (Though if you could explain why HAM was implemented it'd go along way. )

Oh yikes. That's a long answer to give. Let me give the highly abbreviated form, and if there's something you don't follow, let me know.

1. Barriers between people playing together are evil.
1a. Therefore, levels that increase stats are evil, because statistical power differentials are evil.
1b. Therefore, player hit points should not rise.
2. Most D&D stats are stupid in online games.
2a. We should come up with stats that matter.
2a, minor observation. D&D did have a neat thing where if you bashed a door, your shoulder would hurt.
2b. We need stats that allow specialization of characters.
3. Power, agility, and mental willpower make sense as broad areas of specialty.
3a. The traditional mage model of "start wimpy, grow insanely powerful" won't work if the power differentials are flat.
4. If a strong guy exerts massive strength, it tires him.
4a. But depending on whether he's a weightlifter type strong guy, or an athlete type strong guy, or a guy with tons of stamina, we could think of three different sorts of strength.
5. A system where you have a pool of ability, a regen rate, and a spend modifier would make sense. Big pool = tank, takes a ton of damage on this front. High regen rate = fast recovery. Good spend factor = feats of strength come easy.
5a. Don't let someone have high in all three of these.
5b. Don't let someone have high in all three stat types either.
5c. These stats need to bounce FAST. Spend some pool, and it's back within seconds. Unconsciousness is caused by repeated successful hits that are perfectly timed.
6. Effectively create four kinds of each combatant.
6a. Big pool is defensive. Low spend cost is offensive. Fast regen is more like a nuker. Balanced is balanced.
6b. Don't make the mistake of making weapons hit only one stat at a time (oops). Make it so different ATTACKS with the SAME weapon can selectively target stats.
6c. Vulnerabilities of opponent should become visible based on how they fight back. If they spend tons of mind when attacking, they are probably weaker on one of the other stats. (oops)
6d. Don't show the relative ize of the different pools to opponents. Make them learn it based on the fight's progression.
7. Make sure that the different moves cater to the three main different styles.
8. Make sure that the different professions divide up nicely across different concentrations of stats.
9. Allow people to change their stat distribution, since they can change professions.
10. Make sure that the racial stat ranges make sense with this system (oops).

give me a break. This is still, in many ways, a rantsite.

Ah, alas, I am not allowed to rant back. My next-best tactic is to guilt-trip. :)

You can influence all of those things. But you can't design them. You can only design the objects they form around.

I agree! The only difference here is the fact that you are using the metaphor of the nucleus, the irritant around which the pearl forms, and I am using the metaphor of a pool into which water is poured. If you like, I'll reverse metaphors, and say that the shape of the irritant you design helps determine the final shape of the pearl. That make you happier?

But the way I see it, that's just multiple modes of expression for character builds, not gameplay really.

Actually, that law is getting at the fact that different people like to play different ways, like to present different sorts of identities. When I talk with you here, I tend to put on a very professorial character. When I talk with other devs at the office, I tend to be fairly casual and use the word "fuck" a lot. When I speak with academics I am one person, when I talk to lawyers I am another, when I talk to press I am another. When I am jamming guitar, I am different than when I am writing.

When people pick up a game, they see whether or not their identity maps into the game. In some cases, it's nice and generic like chess or Tetris, and it does. In other cases, it's something like Quake, and it doesn't. Most people choose the same character classes, the same races, the same gameplay styles, the same game styles, the same games, repeatedly, because each time is almost like a personality test. And if there is no room for their personality, then often won't play the game.

Hence the law--make sure you map enough personality types.

If we took Diablo's persistant text lobby and simply replaced it with a persistant shared town of Tristan so you can walk around and see other avatars without adding any other abillities for the players, would that now make it a world like your HoloMud example?

Yep, except that HoloMUD was a fullbore PvP mud, so it'd be more like adding a full virtual space lobby onto Quake as opposed to Diablo.

Or would you have to add other abilities for it to make the jump, i.e. they can chat, create and enter instance map sessions same as always, but now they can trade items and use the Horadic cube (but no combat and npc's).

No, just the space, avatars, and persistence would do it.

That's not only a pretty fine and arbitrary distinction, but it really doesn't seem to change anything about A) how the game is played or more importantly B) how it would have had to be designed.

You say that because you are defining "the game" as what happens in the instanced area, but it's not. It's what happens in the whole. For one thing, the entire nature of what you can do as a developer has changed. You can now add instanced Diablo AND Quake off that lobby, for example. Youcan also add things within the lobby  itself that were formerly completely impossible. For another, how you approach the technical platform has changed quite a lot.

Planetside and WWIIO appear to me like they were designed as "game first, build world around them" b/c the world parts are pretty minor and the focus is clearly on the game. Yet, they are "online worlds".

People are applying the "game vs world" false dichotomy to the word "world" and then assuming that the word "world" in the phrase "online world" carries the same semantic freight. That right there is the problem.

Let me back up:

Those are the laws of mud design. Muds can have graphics. Muds need a virtual spatial environment that is persistent, and they need a way for avatars to move in them. Diablo is not a mud because the game proper is not persistent, never mind that it hangs off a persistent chat lobby. Quake is not a mud because the space is not persistent. Second Life is a mud because it is. There are debates over whether muds should be considered games first or spaces first, there are debates over whether you should design the mud around a game mechanic, or design game mechanics into muds. Since the definition just says "a virtual space" the answer is the latter. That said, mud does NOT imply a simulationist, highly interdependent approach to design. There are muds that reset their entire contents every time every item is scavenged. There are muds that are just a lobby with PvP games dangling off. there are muds with and without combat systems, muds where the world is algorithmically generated and muds where it is carefully handcrafted. Muds where users can build and muds where users cannot. The common elements are virtual space, avatars, and persistence of the above. The game vs world debate within muds is stupid, because you can easily nest games within worlds, and with some effort, attach worlds to games (zone to 'em, probably), but both fit INSIDE muds, because muds are places, are spaces. If you had to pick one as your base approach, pick world, because you can always nest games into it, whereas you cannot nest worlds inside games. Not that this a a black and white dichotomy. The end.

There, does clearing up the terms more help?

i dont think it will be long before we start seeing the worlds within worlds concept appear. I.e. You log on Sony's station and can walk around a sapce station setting worldspace with an avatar chatting and interacting with others before deciding to enter EQ2 or SWG or whatever.

Don't blink, you missed AOL's Cyberpark, which closed several years ago. :)

So is there any hope? And if so what?

I'm here talking to you, aren't I? The day I stop is when all hope is lost. ;)

This thread became about Raph the minute Raph spoke up. :)

Ahem, I do believe that I was mentioned in the first sentence of the first areticle.

If you build the game first, you can concentrate solely and wholeheartedly on the game aspects, and those are the aspects that take up the most time and effort from a player.

Actually, movement takes the most time and effort, and it's a mud element as opposed to a game element. (I"m gonna stick to those terms now to make myself clear). What I have been saying is that you HAVE to deal with the mud elements first. After that, sure, whatever, do game or sim or whatever you want, but you have to deal with the mud bits first.

and the mission design, as in, who did it and why was it ever approved

Short form, out of six or seven planned forms of content in SWG, only two made it in.

On the world side, the current trend to go unified interfaces for all sorts of world interactions is just terrible. Using an axe on a tree to get wood or a pick on a mountain to get ore is intuitive and therefore immersive.

I agree, we had to madly scramble to retrofit SWG harvesting when we realized this, and we didn't quite manage it. Originally, everything was thru harvesters. Big mistake on my part there.

Quality and detail are very important to the game experience and I have come to believe that we may never see these things all combined in a single game due to the reality of the economics of the genre.

One of the big reasons to go simulationist (also cf the "do it everywhere law") is because you can get broad swaths of consistency across the game. And you can centralize the quality and detail issues into the sim, rather than on zillions of scattered bits of content. Of course, if your sim sucks, then you get bad stuff everywhere too.

Another reason is that it can hugely aid with the content creation times, which lowers budgets, which affects the economics of the genre.

without the literary indulgence, your kung-fu > my kung-fu

I want witnesses!

Seriously, though, why am I the moth that craves the flame? Why do you think I keep coming back?

we can both agree that its not about 'making a game' or 'creating a world' but just simply put, its about fun. Virtual Worlds, while not games - are still fun - but not the same kind of fun.

I vehemently agree with these two sentences, but after that, you make some assumptions that I don't think are valid. You place them in an opposition when there is a spectrum. In fact, arguably the real difference is purely one of complexity and interdependence. As a result, many of the assertions you make regarding people running over little green soldiers aren't necessarily valid.

Perhaps based on the current player populations, it is determined that the majority do not want skill based systems. It might niche the games... or it might open up the genre to a whole other set of players. I don't know, but I would like to see more systems like the charcoal making on in MMOGs.

We need more skill in the rpgs. We also need more games n the RPGs so when the skill required chases away 90% of people, they have something else to do. We can't make pure skill persistent games, because yes, they fail to retain audience. That's been discussed here before.

Give us a game within the overall game. I'll use Puzzle Pirates as an example since it fits. The overall game is that of pirating to plunder and pillage and steal gold and rum and to trade rum and other goods. Sticking to the liquor (because it's good), you need to make the rum. To make the rum, you play a puzzle game. This game is a sub-game of the main game. Granted, the whole game itself is broken down into smaller pieces like this, but each is a different game that relies on player skill to accomplish an activity in the larger scope.

Yes, definitely the correct approach. I'd point out that Puzzle Pirates is actually very "world" oriented in its basic assumptions: crafting, player towns, player-run ships, and all sorts of stuff like that. It's a poster child for bridging the two.

it had very low goals and nailed them.

I think it has pretty high goals, actually.

Wow, what a lofty goal to shoot for.

That's a goal I agree with wholeheartedly.

I think the author's original point is that of consistency. You don't put water everywhere in the game that players can't swim in, then place one spot somewhere in the game where they are expected to. This is an extreme example, but serves the point.

It's very similar to the example JC used originally, actually. :)

PvP vs. PvE players are a perfect example of the original quote's point.

Yes indeedy, and that's actually the debate from which it arose.

I think it's pretty obvious that a game of any type must exclude or limit certain playstyles to make sure the "core" game playstyles are fun.

A game must, yes. But a mud does not have to, since it can encompass many games. See where I am going with this?

I think the period for ranting is dead. It's gotten to the point where it's just pointless.

Really? I was contemplating submitting a rant as my talk at GDC next year. "Why Online Games Suck" or some such. Should I not?

there's some other stuff he's written that'd I would rather address before I spent another day of my life on the 'laws.'

Bring it on, I need to exercise my moth-fu. Or whatever. ;)

I would hope nobody has any intentions of dissing Raph either. Not just because he's pretty brilliant and doesn't deserve it

Awww... /blush. I'm feisty too, on occasion. I'm told it's charming.

[Monika T'Sarn]

SWG had a world with random content - but it was to much instanced to be immersive, which totally reversed the motivation. I went to a mission terminal to make me a stormtrooper camp to clear - not to find out which rebel npc needed aid. I could select and refuse missions to get just the right npc's I wanted to fight. In fact, the world for me was not random anymore - I could select which content I wanted to have.

SWG was too instanced? I suspect you don't understand the meaning of the term. It didn't have instancing until very recently with the Rebel Blockade Runner.

I know that instancing is usually applied to dungeons, where each player gets his own copy of the area. But the effect the mission system had on SWG is very similar - each player gets the content he wants, respawning for him at a push of the 'accept mission' button.

[Monika T'Sarn]

I want to play in a virtual world - not just play any kind of game. I want to be part of a story that plays in a virtual world.

Don't get me wrong. I want that too.

I just don't think that electronic gaming is a medium that's capable of providing that. Especially not on the massively multiplayer scale.

Oh, I disagree totally. I've been playing my part in those stories for years now, in different games, and there are events I'll remember a long time which made it all worth it.
I

[Soukyan]

Me too. Sometime when you people are willing to give up teh sh1ny, you should log onto LegendMUD and try out the quests there.

Today's project. Try Discworld MUDs quests sometime. They're a lot of fun as well if somewhat challenging to find at times. ;)

Back to our regularly scheduled topic...


Edit: Fixed quote.

[Riggswolfe]

Please forgive the long post everyone, Raph made several points I'd like to respond to.

I'm a big fan of good content.

Me too. Sometime when you people are willing to give up teh sh1ny, you should log onto LegendMUD and try out the quests there.

Here is something I don't understand. Why does someone have to give up the pretty stuff (graphics etc) for content? I am sure the quests in LegendMUD are fine and dandy, now figure out a way to squeeze them into other games. (For the record I hate internet slang like teh sh1ny, so never use it except in mockery and at this point I don't think you deserve mockery.)

What we don't need is a trickle of improvements. What we need is a flood of changes that completely tear down the past monuments of core gameplay and replace them.

This runs contrary to good business sense, generally speaking. And the larger the company, the less likely they are to try it.

But it's what the indies are trying to do. It's Second Life and There and Puzzle Pirates and Tale in the Desert. It's even Project Entropia, if truth be told.

At this point I'd settle for simply making refinements on existing systems ala Blizzard. They've never evolved, they just polish, and it seems to work well. On another note, you seem almost...envious of the indies.

IMO at this point in MMOG's the industry isn't in need of original ideas, so much as it's in need of well executed ideas.

Even doing a single game that has absorbed all the lessons thus far proved to be really damn hard. That was a goal for SWG--to make "a summary game" that gathered up all the lessons from the games up until then.

I'd dare say this is the design goal with WoW as well. They seem to be doing a somewhat good job of it so far.

I held alot of venom for the SWG devs, you in particular, over the course of this thread I've decided that maybe you aren't Satan incarnate. Maybe you tried and other things got in the way. (Though if you could explain why HAM was implemented it'd go along way. )

Oh yikes. That's a long answer to give. Let me give the highly abbreviated form, and if there's something you don't follow, let me know.

1. Barriers between people playing together are evil.
1a. Therefore, levels that increase stats are evil, because statistical power differentials are evil.
1b. Therefore, player hit points should not rise.

Speaking from personal experience I can say that I like the thought with this one here. I have a good friend I play these games with (who posts on these very boards) and he tends to have alot more time than me for them and hence tends to outlevel me significantly.

That said, I like CoH's version of dealing with this, IE, allowing the player to sidekick a lower level player so they can play together.

That said as well, perhaps being a player of DnD and other pen and paper games since I was 10 or so has perverted me, but I like power differential. I like being able to beat the snot out of something that I ran from like a little girl earlier in my career. I also have a bit of the Pavlov's dog in me. I like the little music and flashing lights that tells me I made progress.

Lord those are painful admissions.

What I find evil is grinding and a treadmill. Let me level, but don't make me feel like I'm out fighting mobs or whatever Just to level.

2. Most D&D stats are stupid in online games.
2a. We should come up with stats that matter.
2a, minor observation. D&D did have a neat thing where if you bashed a door, your shoulder would hurt.
2b. We need stats that allow specialization of characters.

Personally I think this is where you ran into trouble. (By you I mean the dev team in general and not just you personally) You didn't want stats and player differentials, yet, I suspect that you came to realize that that's kind of how the games work. You tried to minimize it and it didn't work out as expected.

3. Power, agility, and mental willpower make sense as broad areas of specialty.
3a. The traditional mage model of "start wimpy, grow insanely powerful" won't work if the power differentials are flat.

Very true, but, what are Jedi if not some kind of paladin/mage hybrid? One thing I noticed in my time of playing is it felt like I didn't grow very powerful very fast, but that mobs in the game world Did. Then again I tend to shy away from Uber templates, so that may have been a problem for me. (I was a hybrid from hell, master artisan, pistoleer, and a few thousand brawling points away from smuggler)

4. If a strong guy exerts massive strength, it tires him.
4a. But depending on whether he's a weightlifter type strong guy, or an athlete type strong guy, or a guy with tons of stamina, we could think of three different sorts of strength.

Agreed in principal.

5. A system where you have a pool of ability, a regen rate, and a spend modifier would make sense. Big pool = tank, takes a ton of damage on this front. High regen rate = fast recovery. Good spend factor = feats of strength come easy.
5a. Don't let someone have high in all three of these.
5b. Don't let someone have high in all three stat types either.
5c. These stats need to bounce FAST. Spend some pool, and it's back within seconds. Unconsciousness is caused by repeated successful hits that are perfectly timed.

I suspect this is where most people's problem with HAM comes in, that and what follows in your next part. In principal I like the idea behind it, though to be honest, it is a bit...complex. Heh.

6. Effectively create four kinds of each combatant.
6a. Big pool is defensive. Low spend cost is offensive. Fast regen is more like a nuker. Balanced is balanced.
6b. Don't make the mistake of making weapons hit only one stat at a time (oops). Make it so different ATTACKS with the SAME weapon can selectively target stats.
6c. Vulnerabilities of opponent should become visible based on how they fight back. If they spend tons of mind when attacking, they are probably weaker on one of the other stats. (oops)
6d. Don't show the relative ize of the different pools to opponents. Make them learn it based on the fight's progression.

Again, complex, and one of the biggest problems. It was impossible to make some kind of specialized character in SWG cause you always had a huge glaring weakness that was easily exploited. (IE, you put alot of stat points in action to be a fast, powerful pistoleer, you left your mind or health pool very vulnerable.) That and the fact that you had three different "hitpoint" bars and that armor made them shorter (thus making you more vulnerable) made combat quite frustrating. Put wounds on top of that (which I suspect were put in to make forced socialization, IE , you have to go back to town and socialize to get healed) and combat was very frustrating. I'll be honest, remove wounds and battle fatique and I'd probably go back to SWG. I just couldn't take all the downtime and grinding. Yeah, I know, those changes would hurt medics and especially entertainers (which at the time I left were mostly macroing anyway) but you know, can't make everyone happy!

I really, really thank you for the explanation. At least now I know the thinking process behind it. It seems that HAM was an experiment in leveling the playing field so to speak. If I might, I suggest finding a copy of a made for Showtime movie called Harrison Bergeron. That movie explains very well why leveling the playing field isn't such a good idea.

give me a break. This is still, in many ways, a rantsite.

Ah, alas, I am not allowed to rant back. My next-best tactic is to guilt-trip. :)

I won't tell. ;)

But the way I see it, that's just multiple modes of expression for character builds, not gameplay really.

Actually, that law is getting at the fact that different people like to play different ways, like to present different sorts of identities.

[snip]
Hence the law--make sure you map enough personality types.

I'd also say something that needs to be added to this is that people don't like to be forced into a different personality mode either. The best example of this is PvP. You take a PvE type player and try to force them into PvP whether outright (full PvP) or subtly (you don't have to PvP we'll just make alot of the interesting content revolve around PvP (*cough* GCW, Jedi *cough*)) and you end up with resentment. I think that's one lesson that the current crop of games is having trouble with. They keep thinking if they can just make PvP balanced enough that the PvE people will "see the light." All they're doing for the most part, is pissing off both camps. PvP is too watered down for PvPers and it's feeling forced to PvEers.

I truly think the only way to make both of those camps happy is with seperate servers that cater to their playstyles outright. Mixing them on the same server will never work IMHO.

That's not only a pretty fine and arbitrary distinction, but it really doesn't seem to change anything about A) how the game is played or more importantly B) how it would have had to be designed.

You say that because you are defining "the game" as what happens in the instanced area, but it's not. It's what happens in the whole. For one thing, the entire nature of what you can do as a developer has changed. You can now add instanced Diablo AND Quake off that lobby, for example. Youcan also add things within the lobby  itself that were formerly completely impossible. For another, how you approach the technical platform has changed quite a lot.

I wonder if the true 2nd gen MMOGs will take advantage of this. I suppose that with JTL SWG is in a sense. Though honestly, I consider the current crop of MMOG's to be anywhere from 1.1 to 1.5 rather than second gen.

So is there any hope? And if so what?

I'm here talking to you, aren't I? The day I stop is when all hope is lost. ;)

You coming here and talking has done alot to change my views of you and SWG if that matters. Heh. I  am no longer angry. I'll follow the game now and see how it shapes up in the long run. Maybe someday I'll step back into your world. (Really depends on how things change)

and the mission design, as in, who did it and why was it ever approved

Short form, out of six or seven planned forms of content in SWG, only two made it in.

Sounds like it had to be released "as is". Powers that Be strike again! Are there plans to patch in the other 4 or 5 forms of content as time goes on?
Were player cities one of these forms of content?

without the literary indulgence, your kung-fu > my kung-fu

I want witnesses!

Seriously, though, why am I the moth that craves the flame? Why do you think I keep coming back?

Because you're a masochist? Because you feel the need to make people understand you? Because maybe you're hoping that these talks will spark something, whether in yourself or in us?

I think the period for ranting is dead. It's gotten to the point where it's just pointless.

Really? I was contemplating submitting a rant as my talk at GDC next year. "Why Online Games Suck" or some such. Should I not?

Interesting to hear that from a Dev's mouth.

Well, I've enjoyed this debate so far. I know I wouldn't want to develop a MMOG. The technology is there, but to many factors make them hard to get to work right. I think the biggest issue is that they are trying to please all of the people all of the time and it's just not possible. Maybe somebody will have an epiphany and the Holy Grail of MMOGs will come out of it.

[Xilren's Twin]

That's not only a pretty fine and arbitrary distinction, but it really doesn't seem to change anything about A) how the game is played or more importantly B) how it would have had to be designed.

You say that because you are defining "the game" as what happens in the instanced area, but it's not. It's what happens in the whole. For one thing, the entire nature of what you can do as a developer has changed. You can now add instanced Diablo AND Quake off that lobby, for example. Youcan also add things within the lobby  itself that were formerly completely impossible. For another, how you approach the technical platform has changed quite a lot.

Yes, you can do a lot more, but you don't have to.  By saying "can", that means these are all concious choices made by the devs, thus if they wanted to make the mudspace incredibly shallow and nothing more than a persistant matching lobby who's goal is get people into the instanced areas so be it.  That's more what I mean when I talk about which is given primacy in focus, the "game" elements or the "world" (mudspace in which they reside).

My contention is simply I think it's the game elements of muds that need more work, and given a finite pool of resources to use when making one of these beasts, to me that says scaling back on the length, breath, and depth of the mudspace in order to make the games you nest within that space better.  B/c without a doubt, I am now much more interested in the inidividual gaming elements being fun rather than looking at the game as the whole of the mudspace.   To me the "game" is not the whole, it's only the parts Im actively using.

To wit, there are a plethora of things to do in the SWG mudspace (pve combat, crafting, resource gathering, selling/buying, deliever missions, pet taming, pvp, housing, city building, etc etc not to mention the social aspects) but none of the individual activities (the imbeded games) were much fun to me, so I ended up not staying despite the complexity and depth of the mudspace. Contrast to CoH, whose mudspace is severly limited (there's really only 3 things to do, pve hunt, character advancement and socialize), yet I like the pve hunting game and character advancement method so I'm staying despite the shallowness of the mudspace.

I would rather future titles take the coh approach and look to add a few more fun imbedded systems before seeking to flesh out the mudspace with tons of medicore ones.  In short, do few things but do them well.

Those are the laws of mud design. Muds can have graphics. Muds need a virtual spatial environment that is persistent, and they need a way for avatars to move in them. ... There are debates over whether muds should be considered games first or spaces first, there are debates over whether you should design the mud around a game mechanic, or design game mechanics into muds. Since the definition just says "a virtual space" the answer is the latter. That said, mud does NOT imply a simulationist, highly interdependent approach to design. ...The common elements are virtual space, avatars, and persistence of the above. The game vs world debate within muds is stupid, because you can easily nest games within worlds, and with some effort, attach worlds to games (zone to 'em, probably), but both fit INSIDE muds, because muds are places, are spaces. If you had to pick one as your base approach, pick world, because you can always nest games into it, whereas you cannot nest worlds inside games. Not that this a a black and white dichotomy. The end.

There, does clearing up the terms more help?

Ok, that makes things clearer in terms of language, but it still doesn't seem to alter the approach.  To me it all comes back to what is your intent; to make a few fun things to "do" (i.e. the imbedded games), or make a fun place to "be" (i.e. the worldspace itself which is the sum of all imbedded parts plus).  Ideally, you want both; do lots of things and do them ALL well).  Since I don't think you can get both currently, I tend to believe it's the active doing parts (the imbedded games) which ultimately get players to hang around.  While the total worldspace might encourage people to stay longer (i.e. people who extended their subscriptions logging on to UO once a month to refresh their house or into EQ just to chat with your guildmates or SWG to try a different playstyle type), it's imbedded games which get people to stay at all.

You know, in some ways, I feel like this is a "which came first, the chicken or the egg" discussion.

Don't blink, you missed AOL's Cyberpark, which closed several years ago. :)

If it was associated with AOL, I'm glad I did. :-p

Xilren

[dogles]

I think it's pretty obvious that a game of any type must exclude or limit certain playstyles to make sure the "core" game playstyles are fun.

A game must, yes. But a mud does not have to, since it can encompass many games. See where I am going with this?

Yeah, someone theoretically could make a virtual space that is a portal for every game ever made, but of course that's not an economical possibility. If you're actually building a MUD, pleasing everybody is not something one could responsibly shoot for (just because you can doesn't mean you should!).

I think there are two extremes a developer can take when making an online world game: try to provide a good fun core experience that people will want to continue playing for a long time, or make a large number of mini-games that individually people might tire of quickly, but enough to keep them supplied with new things to play for a long time. Which option is better is open for debate I think, and there are examples of both extremes in the market today.

In response to various people's complaints about sandwich combat in MMPs, I think this is partly a technical issue and partly there is no excuse. Unreal Tournament can not just simply become an MMP, the bandwidth costs would be too much to handle - it doesn't scale to large groups of players (even if you segregate those players most of the time). Other MMPs like Lineage2 had to rewrite the networking layer of the Unreal engine. Epic says very specifically that the engine does not work for MMP games without making significant changes.

That said, even combat as slow paced as the current crop of MMPs could theoretically have interesting decisions at every "turn", and would feel like a fast paced game. If combat was chess, and you had to make a move every 5 seconds, the pace would at times feel frantic. The problem is not the pacing, it's the lack of interesting decisions a player can make at every point (which is the "true" pacing of the game). Would current games be better if you had to press the attack button each time, rather than pressing the auto-attack button? It would be worse, because now instead of being able to go make myself a sandwich, I'm stuck at the keyboard pressing the same key over and over. If the true pacing of the game is slow, at least now I can eat while playing. :)

Dan

[HaemishM]

Those are the laws of mud design. Muds can have graphics. Muds need a virtual spatial environment that is persistent, and they need a way for avatars to move in them. Diablo is not a mud because the game proper is not persistent, never mind that it hangs off a persistent chat lobby. Quake is not a mud because the space is not persistent. Second Life is a mud because it is. There are debates over whether muds should be considered games first or spaces first, there are debates over whether you should design the mud around a game mechanic, or design game mechanics into muds. Since the definition just says "a virtual space" the answer is the latter. That said, mud does NOT imply a simulationist, highly interdependent approach to design. There are muds that reset their entire contents every time every item is scavenged. There are muds that are just a lobby with PvP games dangling off. there are muds with and without combat systems, muds where the world is algorithmically generated and muds where it is carefully handcrafted. Muds where users can build and muds where users cannot. The common elements are virtual space, avatars, and persistence of the above. The game vs world debate within muds is stupid, because you can easily nest games within worlds, and with some effort, attach worlds to games (zone to 'em, probably), but both fit INSIDE muds, because muds are places, are spaces. If you had to pick one as your base approach, pick world, because you can always nest games into it, whereas you cannot nest worlds inside games. Not that this a a black and white dichotomy. The end.

I have not read the thread beyond this point, because I had to stop and answer this. This is a theoretical explanation, and I'm going to add one bit of down-to-earth reality that Raph should be keenly aware of that alters this statement.

Yes, the way you talk about the game vs. world debate above does say you should start with world first. BUT... big but here. The realities of MMOG design, specifically the economic realities, dictate that while you CAN nest many games within a world space, doing so will usually result in each nested game being mediocre at best ON RELEASE. You will never have enough time, nor will your design properly focus on each nested game before you run out of development money and time. The suits and the fanbois and the retailers will be crawling all over your ass for a box long before you'll be able to nest 2 GREAT games into a world space. And you know this.

Given that situation, I'd rather you create one great game, nest it inside a decent world that has a framework for adding nested games, and go from there. Otherwise, you get SWG, released way too early with an entire year having to be devoted to making the nested games up to snuff with the rest of the genre.

EDIT: Now that I've read the rest...

Would current games be better if you had to press the attack button each time, rather than pressing the auto-attack button?

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that that particular aspect of CoH's combat is one of the MAIN reasons it has such interesting combat as opposed to other MMOG's. I mean, the combat isn't THAT much different, but it is much more engrossing, for 3 reasons:

1) You cannot sit back and do nothing.
2) You are generally fighting either lots of mobs at once, or one mob who has powers that are the equal of yours
3) The visual display of combat is extremely entertaining and informative to watch... every buff/debuff/hit/special effect is modeled by the game engine, meaning instead of reading that you just stunned, you SEE something that gives you feedback about what you did.

That was made possible because they focused intently on the combat model, and feature locked the rest of the world a good bit of time before beta ended.

[AOFanboi]

1) You cannot sit back and do nothing.

Well, sort of correct. If you ctrl-click Bash (or some other power), click a single grey mob and walk away, the mob will be dead when you return. However, your toon will not auto-attack other mobs attacking it, so you will need to click the next "victim".

I tend to regret running around with auto-attack enabled, though, especially when trying to run through mobs and by a mistake selecting one, causing my hero to stop, turn and strike the mob, allowing that one and its friends to attack me.

[ClydeJr]

Here is something I don't understand. Why does someone have to give up the pretty stuff (graphics etc) for content? I am sure the quests in LegendMUD are fine and dandy, now figure out a way to squeeze them into other games.

All the pretty stuff takes a while to develop, especially the graphics. To add a new quest with new cool graphics and events takes coordination of writers, all kinds of artists (2-D, 3-D, sound), scripters/developers, NPC people, Item people, approval type people, and testers (hopefully). Getting all those people together while they are working on bug fixes, other new content, and that upcoming expansion is probably a nightmare. It's a lot quicker and easier to just have cookie cutter missions like kill x foozles, deliver foo to Bar, etc. That way you can have a bunch of quests for all people at all levels. I imagine everyone would rather have nice original quests with all original graphics and sparklies, but there's not enough resources for that.

I bet its also depressing to the clever quest writer who thinks of a really creative quest that will challenge the minds of the players, only to find the step-by-step solution of the quest on NinjaPirateRobotQuest.warcry.com within 2 days of its release.

[Zaphkiel]

Here is something I don't understand. Why does someone have to give up the pretty stuff (graphics etc) for content? I am sure the quests in LegendMUD are fine and dandy, now figure out a way to squeeze them into other games.

All the pretty stuff takes a while to develop, especially the graphics. To add a new quest with new cool graphics and events takes coordination of writers, all kinds of artists (2-D, 3-D, sound), scripters/developers, NPC people, Item people, approval type people, and testers (hopefully). Getting all those people together while they are working on bug fixes, other new content, and that upcoming expansion is probably a nightmare. It's a lot quicker and easier to just have cookie cutter missions like kill x foozles, deliver foo to Bar, etc. That way you can have a bunch of quests for all people at all levels. I imagine everyone would rather have nice original quests with all original graphics and sparklies, but there's not enough resources for that.

    Well, hey, MAYBE if the project had been scaled properly at the beginning, there would be time to make something that isn't half-assed and boring?  Just an idea.  
    See, in actual professional situations, you're supposed to take a look at what resources you have, figure out what you want to have when you're done, and plan accordingly.  Just doing whatever you think would be cool, then bitching that your crap is the best you could do, because your resources had to be used to produce tons of OTHER crap, too, is considered unprofessional, whiney, and deserving of ridicule.  Which is why we're discussing Raph Koster.  When it comes to "eyes are bigger than the stomach" attitude, and bullshit excuses, he's the king.

[Raph]

Ah, the thread would not be complete without Zaphkiel. I've missed ya, man!

But basically, he's right. Hence my remark above about "view is too wide" above. Mea culpa. That said, a tremendous amount of work went into scoping SWG down from the very start. We didn't just do whatever we wanted.

Now, to address it in the way Haemish wrote it, which was more polite and somewhat more insightful (forgive me, it's late, my veneer is slipping):

The realities of MMOG design, specifically the economic realities, dictate that while you CAN nest many games within a world space, doing so will usually result in each nested game being mediocre at best ON RELEASE. You will never have enough time, nor will your design properly focus on each nested game before you run out of development money and time. The suits and the fanbois and the retailers will be crawling all over your ass for a box long before you'll be able to nest 2 GREAT games into a world space. And you know this.

Given that situation, I'd rather you create one great game, nest it inside a decent world that has a framework for adding nested games, and go from there.

That's true, Haemish, but there's three basic factors that need to be kept in mind, which I'll summarize as

1. you only get one launch
2. some games exclude others
3. the world part has overhead

To elucidate:

1. Given the economic realities of how the biz works, it's extremely difficult to attract people to your game beyond the initial window of attention. This means adding more games after launch will NOT help you build audience. There's no point in adding, say, a rich economic game to, say, EverQuest, not in terms of growing the audience. Well, maybe if you manage to relaunch the title at the same time, but that's hard. You only get one chance at that huge level of attention, and if something is missing for a segment of players, they will literally never give your game a second thought again. This then becomes an audience limiting factor, and may in fact prevent your game from being a competitive player in the market.

2. If you attempt to nest multiple games within a given mud without having planned for them all, then you'll be obliged to make the games completely orthogonal to each other. This will reduce the possible interest levels and complexity levels that they offer, and will also prevent you from doing things that require higher degrees of cooperative play among players. In some cases, it may preclude huge swaths of possible gameplay. For example, adding a player-driven economy within a loot-driven game after the fact without having planned for it is liable to be difficult at best, impossible at worst, and even when you finish, you're not likely to have one that works well. For different games to fit together within the one world, you pretty much have to plan for them all from the get-go. And then, if you fail to launch without one of them, you'll see interdependencies that seemed to be covered suddenly exhibiting stress fractures. In SWG's case, we cut vehicles and cities because they were the LOWEST impact cuts--oddly, something like entertainers was a far higher impact cut, so it stayed in. It's evident that ALL of them needed to be there, but the absence of vehicles was less impactful to the rest of the game as a whole. This makes it difficult to plan a world platform that can grow to include a wide variety of activities.

3. An obvious point, but choosing to create a platform where you can add various types of games requires that you do some things in advance, and some of them may be difficult. As platforms, many of the games out theere right now would not easily adapt to the addition of certain features, simply because they were not envisioned as worlds first, but as games only. Because of this, EverQuest can easily accommodate something like instancing, but has a hard time accomodating a player economy or a full-blown housing model; the assumptions made in building the platform simply didn't include these things because it was designed "game first."

So yes, you're right (you too, Zaphkiel), but it isn't quite as simple as "just do it this way," not if you want to expand the game later, not if you want to reach a diverse or different audience, not if you want the games to be added later to mesh seamlessly with the whole.

you're actually building a MUD, pleasing everybody is not something one could responsibly shoot for (just because you can doesn't mean you should!).

It's interesting how often the "you can't please everybody!" mantra comes up. You all do realize that we're not even close to that, right? That in fact, we're failing to please even the expected MMORPG audience, much less the total audience of gamers, much much less the broader audience outside games that would dig virtual worlds, right? For all the philosophical schisms among you guys on things like PvP, treadmills, levels, or game vs world, you guys are all IDENTICAL and all muds are IDENTICAL to a large group of gamers out there. By doing these things we're not trying to appeal to some mythical "everybody." We're trying to appeal to a group larger than "hardcore hobbyist."

While the total worldspace might encourage people to stay longer (i.e. people who extended their subscriptions logging on to UO once a month to refresh their house or into EQ just to chat with your guildmates or SWG to try a different playstyle type), it's imbedded games which get people to stay at all.

Yes, that's definitely true. We're not talking so much about stay here, as we are about "show up in the first place."

Ideally, you want both; do lots of things and do them ALL well). Since I don't think you can get both currently

Someone has to keep trying, or else we'll just do the other, and the genre will stop growing. We have to actively work on tools to make it feasible even though it may not be practical currently. Otherwise, what you see now is roughly what you'll get. Budgets will not rise because the audience will not justify it, and therefore new games will have fewer features, not more. You'll end up with one game with a highly polished combat model, another with a fantastic tradeskills model, and each game will be one-note.

Why does someone have to give up the pretty stuff (graphics etc) for content? I am sure the quests in LegendMUD are fine and dandy, now figure out a way to squeeze them into other games.

Cost.

I'd dare say this is the design goal with WoW as well. They seem to be doing a somewhat good job of it so far.

No offense to Bliz folks, but, uh, no, WoW is not a summary game. I leave it as an exercise for you guys to make a list of all the lessons since 1996 and all the important features since 1996 that they are leaving out.

5c. These stats need to bounce FAST. Spend some pool, and it's back within seconds. Unconsciousness is caused by repeated successful hits that are perfectly timed.

I suspect this is where most people's problem with HAM comes in, that and what follows in your next part. In principal I like the idea behind it, though to be honest, it is a bit...complex. Heh.

I should have put an "oops" next to that one, because we didn't hit that one either.

That said, it's actually simpler, rules-wise, than a traditional stats system. In those, you have independent regen and spend rates often on a per-ability basis, some of them completely invisible. In some cases, you have them on a per-class basis (WoW again). On top of that, you have levels to account for, and associated power differentials. You usually also have damage types, and so on.

A lot of this extra complexity got layered onto the HAM system as well, once it became apparent that the core of it was not functioning quite correctly. But I would assert that the reason why it didn't is the lines marked with "oops."

It was impossible to make some kind of specialized character in SWG cause you always had a huge glaring weakness that was easily exploited.

You just described classes. :) That's intentional, by and large. Now, there's matters of degree, but those are not systemic, they are a tuning factor.

You need to realize that the way it was supposed to play was that you healed your HAM FAST. Think of the HAM bars as being only like mana. It would come back within a few seconds. You might get knocked out from losing it all, but it wouldn't last because of the rapid regen. Getting in a deathblow would be a lucky thing or something that required a lot of team coordination. You'd die from wounds, not from HAM. That's not how it plays at all, but that was how it was intended.

I'd also say something that needs to be added to this is that people don't like to be forced into a different personality mode either. The best example of this is PvP.

I would have cited the current Jedi system as the best example myself.

PvP is a far more complex issue.

I know that instancing is usually applied to dungeons, where each player gets his own copy of the area. But the effect the mission system had on SWG is very similar

They were directly inspired by AO's missions, with the thought that "if we've got an interesting world, doing missions will be more interesting if they happen in the world and not in a pocket zone."

-Raph

[Wukong]

Raph, you keep citing EQ's inability to accomodate a player economy to prove your contentions, but since the release of Luclin, the player driven portion of the economy has in fact become an important addition. I'm not just referring to the bazaar, but to the addition of crafted equipment that is often the best a non-raiding character can hope to attain, along with the farming of crafting components which is often the best way to raise money for said equipment. It seems to me that EQ is actually a great example of how you can actually add to a world and appeal to different players well after launch.

[Nyght]

Someone has to keep trying, or else we'll just do the other, and the genre will stop growing. We have to actively work on tools to make it feasible even though it may not be practical currently. Otherwise, what you see now is roughly what you'll get. Budgets will not rise because the audience will not justify it, and therefore new games will have fewer features, not more. You'll end up with one game with a highly polished combat model, another with a fantastic tradeskills model, and each game will be one-note.

I personally believe the genre has stopped growing. Or has reached a point in the business cycle where growth is much more moderate and akin to what might be expected in traditional businesses.

I know that back in fall and spring of MMOG love as few years back, and the success of DOAC, the air was all light and sweet and there were visions of coins tink tinkling in the heads of producers and developers alike.

A lot of industry pundits would come to this community and other forums and insist that there was this great untapped market just over the next release.

Now, here we are in the hard winter of reality. Its pretty much the same group of players.

A lot of us play very little anymore but have been replaced by a next generation of players.

Casual gamers? Female gamers? I know a lot of them. They all play pogo or single player games or other less time committed gaming models.

Small niche games that do one or two things well would be fine. And we're not gonna play any one of them for all that long either. Not like we did with UO or EQ.

I think what has happened here is that this community has matured to accept the realities of the genre. Many of us like the old music, but realize we will never hear it again. If one note is all we can have, then that's better then no music at all.

[Zaphkiel]

The one eating the sandwich is playing the mmorpg.

This is one of my biggest problems with the current trend in mmog's.  The games lack challenge, contain too many mundane/repetitive elements, and have almost no consequence for failure.

My mom plays freecell for hours... the game takes a modicum of skill and most players will lose more often than they win.  i.e. winning the game becomes its own reward.  If you lose, you start over.  Pretty simple concept but it has kept her interest for years (go figure).

Tetris is a different variant.  Tetris ends when the game becomes too difficult for the player.  The challenge (or fun) is derived from obtaining the highest possible score before the game beats you.  

Hell, even the New York Times crossword puzzle is a game that is lost more than it is won... I and MANY others look forward to it.  

Board games, chess, sports, and others all have winners and losers.  These games have flourished for years.  MMOG's seem so bent on making everyone feeling fuzzy that they lose sight of the reason why many people play games... the thrill and challenge of winning.

   When I lose at chess, or sports, I feel, with a good deal of certainty, that the other player played better than I did that day.  I might even learn something about the game in the process.  With MMOGs, when I lose, I feel, with a great deal of certainty, that the other person was a better exploiter/cheater/macroer/bigger catass than I am.  The only thing I've learned is that in order to "compete", I need to exploit, cheat, macro and quit my job to get better.  Big difference.

[Zaphkiel]

Ah, the thread would not be complete without Zaphkiel. I've missed ya, man!

But basically, he's right.

-Raph

    Sorry I'm late.  Great discussion so far, but I think the conclusion ( that you won't want to accept) that we're going to find is that the technology and business just isn't there yet for virtual worlds.  It's not possible to make a virutal world of the quality that players need, with the present limitations.  Stick to good games, and leave as much room to expand as you can.

[dogles]

Perhaps we should switch tracks a bit, because I think everybody here is mostly in agreement in priniciples, but things fall apart when it comes down to implementation. Let me submit that perhaps the issue is not the 'laws' or the way that Raph and other designers view these games/worlds/whatever, it's the process of building them that is screwed.

Here is my impression of a typical MMP development cycle, feel free to correct me if I'm way off base here.

1) Designers want to make an online world because it's cool/interesting, and execs want to do it to make lots of $$$. At this point, there is a rough scope/budget already in place, based on the strength of the IP or amount of private funding, etc.

2) Designers spec out the gameplay environment, consisting of several large systems (e.g., Combat, Crafting, Player Cities, blah blah) and make their best effort to forsee how each system will play out, and how the systems will interact with each other. This is the planning stage, but typically production starts happening at some point before planning has finished, hopefully starting with systems that are seen as unlikely to get revised later. Near the end of the planning stage, once development time has actually gotten scheduled out for these specs, the designers scramble madly to cut features, trying to fit within time/budget constraints while still providing a fun experience.

3) The systems are built to spec. This usually starts happening midway through the spec-writing process; often the specs will change on a frequent basis, with everyone shifting around to try to adapt to them.

4) Now that you've built all the systems for the game, hopefully you're still on schedule. Problem is, the game turns out to be not very fun. Some individual systems might have some fun bits, but lots of things don't work as intended. I would guess that most of the time, interactions between system doesn't work anything near how the designers envisioned it. At this point, you have two options: go back into planning and trash/revise lots of existing systems, or move forward, hoping that you can take what you have and make something cool by rearranging the minutae.

5) At some point, beta occurs. This is usually at some point during production, likely before all systems have been fully implemented. Everyone knows the game is screwed up; at first, the developers hope that the implementation of missing systems will fix the game, then later it becomes pretty obvious that the design that was specced out didn't forsee or aknowledge a lot of problems. In late beta there is a mad scramble to tweak rules and numbers, but many of the problems are systemic.

6) Ship! with lots of missing, broken, or useless features because the developers were scrambling madly to make what they had at least vaguely fun.

7) Hopefully, continuing development will happen on the game to address these issues, but meanwhile people are playing and getting pissed off when the game world changes underneath them.

What can be done? You could blame the designers, after all they specced out a game that wasn't fun. I don't think that's really productive though - even the most experienced developers in the industry fall into the cycle outlined above. Hiring new designers won't get you anywere - it just means the specs will be that much farther out of alignment, because experience is likely the only semi-reliable thing that you can use to gauge whether a system is going to suck or not before building it. The process is the problem, not the designers.

You could also inflate your production schedule to account for the inevitable collapse of the game's systems. I'm sure most developers do this already to some extent, especially the ones that have been making these games for a while. I don't think this is the correct solution either, ultimately. Trying to fix a broken game is like trying to fix an ugly painting. You see lots of things to change, but changing those things requires changes in other things, eventually you end up with something not-too-ugly that wasn't anywhere near what you originally envisioned.

I submit that it's far easier to build from the ground up, rather than from the top down. First, come up with a small, fun mini-game. Iterate on it until it is a polished gem. Then build new systems and game mechanics on top of that. If you build and polish combat, you know that at least will always be fun. Don't bother thinking too much about crafting or player cities or whatever until combat is fun. Once it's fun, don't mess with it - higher level systems should be designed within the constraints of lower level systems. I'm glossing over a lot here of course, much easier said than done.

The only MMP I know of that was built like this is Puzzle Pirates. They had a solid base to work off of (I believe all of the puzzle games were complete derivatives of existing games). They put those already fun games within incrementally larger contexts - play these puzzles in cooperation with others to pilot ships, coordinate larger groups to fight over land, etc. The core moment-to-moment experience is fun, which I think is a requirement of any larger context being fun.

I think Puzzle Pirates was able to do this because, as Raph mentioned, Indie titles have more flexibility in a lot of ways. The larger the company, the more they seem to follow a top-down process more suitable for manufacturing than game development. There are a lot of reasons for this, accountability being a major one. A bottom-up process is a lot harder to manage than a top down process.

I'm sure all of this is nothing new for Raph or most game developers to hear. It takes a long time for lessons learned to be carried forward, but I don't think that MMP games are anywhere near stagnating in design and follow-through.

dan
PS. I haven't played SWG much, my comments are directed more at the industry as a whole.

[Raph]

Wukong, EQ has done a STELLAR job of extending the game with new modes to play the game. The additions they have made on the economic and trade front are really good.

That said, if you do a graph of the EQ economy today versus that of SWG or even UO, or for example the Tale in the Desert economy, I think you'll find some very significant differences. Huge areas of a full economic model turn out to be missing or abstracted to a very high degree. Is there an economy driven to a degree by players? Absolutely--there can't NOT be once you have item trades. But is it what we call usually a "player-driven economy"? Well, no. But then the problem there lies in the term "player-driven economy" which isn't all that descriptive.

Nyght, what you describe is a recipe for contraction, or for disruptive innovation that comes along and crushes the entire currnet market.

Zaphkiel, the phrase "lose at MMOs" struck me--I assume you're referring to PvP, but it's interesting how many folks consider this to be the case even in PvE.

I think the conclusion ( that you won't want to accept) that we're going to find is that the technology and business just isn't there yet for virtual worlds. It's not possible to make a virutal world of the quality that players need, with the present limitations. Stick to good games, and leave as much room to expand as you can.

I agree with your conclusion.

But if nobody tries, then the tech and business models won't ever get there. Someone has to push at it.

Dogles, what you describe is the process for all games development. One big reason is that currently, there is no science or craft of fun, whereas there is for music, for writing, for art. As a result, that middle stage you describe is a lot of fumbling about with intuition, or a lot of copying of known models.

The process you describe is why you see the industry you see today. If there was one lesson I'd want you guys all to take from this thread it's this:

Every time you moan about yet another clone game or another polished slick but not interesting sports title, or whatever,

compare it to what you're saying about playing it safe and refining the core and "just give me a fun game!"--

the one leads to the other. The market forces are ALL on your side there, and you are reaping what you sow.

[dogles]

But if nobody tries, then the tech and business models won't ever get there. Someone has to push at it.

Dogles, what you describe is the process for all games development. One big reason is that currently, there is no science or craft of fun, whereas there is for music, for writing, for art. As a result, that middle stage you describe is a lot of fumbling about with intuition, or a lot of copying of known models.

I'd argue that we're not that far away from music, writing, art, movies, etc in terms of craft and practices. I.e., they don't really know what they're doing either. There are theories, tools, guidelines and tips, but a skilled and highly trained musician can still make a crappy song. You can have a well crafted script for a movie, but if the production doesn't go well, the movie will be crap. Why do so many crap movies get made? Someone must have thought the script was at least decent...

Game design isn't new, there are plenty of recommended theories, tools, and practices for a designer (Raph being among the best when it comes making this publicly available). MMP games don't invalidate these. Fun is something that any entertainment medium strives for, and making a book "fun" to read is just as difficult as making a game "fun" to play. When an book author fails he doesn't say "well, there is no science of fun", he realizes that somewhere along the line he screwed up. He's a generally talented and creative writer, he started with a good idea, maybe a bunch of good ideas, maybe even a well-crafted outline, but there was a problem somewhere in the process that got him from there to here.

We don't know how to make fun games yet, that's true. What the studios need to recognize is that the process (the "how") needs refinement more than the design prinicples. The worst part imo about this is that the larger the number of people involved, the harder it is to iterate on a process. Since MMP games are so notoriously expensive to create, the process tends to get improved at a very slow rate.

On another note. I think a big problem historically with MMPs that Raph alluded to is that the genre has been the same as the platform. I think we're finally seeing movement away from that, with non-fantasy themed games and games with different play mechanics. CoH, Sims, Planetside, SWG, and Puzzle Pirates are all games that have broken the mold in various ways. They were obviously shooting for something different, even if many of them ultimately did not succeed in making something fun. I think WoW will bring in a lot of new people because of brand recognition and hype, but I don't expect the majority of those people to stay - these are the same people that tried EQ/UO/AC/whatever years ago and didn't like it, so there's little chance of them liking WoW. We'll see, I guess. I think the MMP genre is quickly getting burnt out, but the platform has a long future.

dan

[Nyght]

Nyght, what you describe is a recipe for contraction, or for disruptive innovation that comes along and crushes the entire currnet market.

As a consumer, I can certainly hope it's the later. But from my observations hovering high above these and other forums, as I think I stated in the previous post, the former seems more likely.

If I was working in the industry, I'd be praying for even or just slightly better.

And:

Every time you moan about yet another clone game or another polished slick but not interesting sports title, or whatever,

compare it to what you're saying about playing it safe and refining the core and "just give me a fun game!"--

the one leads to the other. The market forces are ALL on your side there, and you are reaping what you sow.

Well, all I can say is it seems like the chickens have come home to roost. Through the past years we have seen buggy releases and shallow games time after time with only a few bright spots or exceptions to point towards. And so our credit cards have become tired and cracked.

Hell, I'll admit to funding most of those bad launches, including the last one of yours. And I'll admit that I'll probably do it again for the next big shiney (EQ2?).

But if the industry needs the kind stick-to-it accounts of UO or the big numbers of EQ, well, I'd be tuning my guitar or writing my first novel if I were you.

I read the IGN interview with the guy that did CoH. He was beaming at 100k accounts.

That my friend, ( and I do mean that because you have worked so hard to try and please me over the years), is the future.

[Raph]

Dan, as someone who has trained quite a lot in writing and in music (and art, and other areas) I can tell you that there most definitely is far more science and craft to them that is established and accepted, than there is for games. Tons and tons, seriously.

[dogles]

Dan, as someone who has trained quite a lot in writing and in music (and art, and other areas) I can tell you that there most definitely is far more science and craft to them that is established and accepted, than there is for games. Tons and tons, seriously.

Yeah, and a lot of it is crap, seriously. I know lots of people that went to college and further for music and it did them little good as musicians. They might get the mechanics down, along with a lot of theory about art and writing. But often that doesn't mean they'll be able to write better songs. There are lots of artists that would say formal eductation will ruin an artist, putting arbitrary boundaries on expression and so on. I don't fully subscribe to this, but the supposed rules of music and art and writing sure seem to change every few years, just like the rules of game design. Not to say game design is "there" or even on par, just that it isn't that far off in this respect.

Perhaps you're referring to the actual mechanical aspects and less about the ethereal, which I can start to agree with more.  Designing a game system is tough, and there's little out there in terms of standard notation schemes, common language, structure guides, etc. You're pretty much on your own. This is not true for the other fields you're talking about.

But my point being that we can argue about design theory all day, but I don't think that's the big weakness here. There are plenty of known fun game mechanics out there, such that I'm not even sure it's necessary to come up with new ones to satisfy people right now. Doesn't matter - in an MMP, a designer is trying to mishmash all of these (hopefully) cool little mechanics and hope that something fun will emerge from that. He ends up sacrificing each mechanic for the benefit of the other, until he gets a steaming pile. It doesn't matter what you put into the grinder - you'll just get out mush.

There has been this notion that designers should be able to understand and anticipate all of the interactions within a system or collection of systems before actually building it. They CAN'T. This should be obvious now, look at any postmortem for any game out there. Stop trying, build a process that makes it so you don't have to anticipate everything ahead of time. Then give me something fun to play! :)

dan

[Raph]

Dan,

Yes, I am referring to the mechanics. Without the mechanics, there's fumbling. It's the difference between a folk art and one that has developed further. I am not speaking so much about the ethereal.

I have to admit that your last paragraph sounds exactly like "there's plenty of known plots out there, quit futzing around and give me another mystery novel," or "there's plenty of known chord progressions and melodies out there, don't deviate from I-IV-V, I just want something I can dance to!"

So I'm going to, in the end, put on my artist hat, and tell you "hell no" on that one. :) No offense, but what a horrible world you want. :)

[dogles]

Dan,
I have to admit that your last paragraph sounds exactly like "there's plenty of known plots out there, quit futzing around and give me another mystery novel," or "there's plenty of known chord progressions and melodies out there, don't deviate from I-IV-V, I just want something I can dance to!"

So I'm going to, in the end, put on my artist hat, and tell you "hell no" on that one. :) No offense, but what a horrible world you want. :)

Ultimately people want something to enjoy, and people aren't going to appreciate half-baked attempts at greatness. And if your first priority is an artistic statement, start with an easier platform! Go back to 2D or text, rip out all the miscellaneous crap so that you can more quickly flesh out the game. Throw out the movie licenses! Work in your basement! :P

If you actually want to entertain large numbers of people, start with what works. I'm not saying that there isn't room to play in the future, it just seems to me that someone should try and get the basics right first. Maybe you feel like you've already done this, in which case I could understand wanting to do something else. :)

Anyway, nice talking with you!
dan

[Zaphkiel]

I think the conclusion ( that you won't want to accept) that we're going to find is that the technology and business just isn't there yet for virtual worlds. It's not possible to make a virutal world of the quality that players need, with the present limitations. Stick to good games, and leave as much room to expand as you can.

I agree with your conclusion.

But if nobody tries, then the tech and business models won't ever get there. Someone has to push at it.

   The Wright brothers wanted to fly.  Until they found a way to actually do it, they built bicycles.  Ones that people actually found useful.

[stray]

or "there's plenty of known chord progressions and melodies out there, don't deviate from I-IV-V, I just want something I can dance to!"

So I'm going to, in the end, put on my artist hat, and tell you "hell no" on that one. :) No offense, but what a horrible world you want. :)

I'm kind of an "artist" too, so I know where you're coming from. Music, for the most part, I play for myself. Ever since I first picked up the guitar, I've always tried to explore as many routes as possible to make songs. I probably don't do as much exploring these days, and have mainly settled on playing slide, tuned to Gm. Still, it's not really something that lends itself to a catchy sound either. Not even a traditional "bluesy" slide sound for that matter (almost more arabian or gypsy-like), but I like it that way.

Yet, when I do happen to venture outside my little world, sometimes it can be just as fulfilling to do something simple like I-IV-V. Maybe not as a "musician", but as an "entertainer" or whatever, definitely. Maybe it's just that I'm still a punk at heart, but simpler forms of music are much more fun to play when you have an actual audience around. The same can't be said for "gypsy slide". It's also great to get people moving and dancing (it isn't always about you, you know?). Similar things I could say about acting (where the audience applies even more).

There's a reason why the blues have survived all this time, why the Beatles are far more loved than say, Frank Zappa or King Crimson (Yet, the truth of it is, as dumbed down as he could be, McCartney could take any prog bassist to town). It's easily understood, people can't relate to it easier, etc..

Umm..Where was I? Oh. I guess what I'm trying to say is: If you want to be heard, sometimes you just have to give people what they want. I'm not saying that you have to totally forsake all your principles (there was a St. Pepper after all), but that you can find just as much fulfillment in I-IV-V, as long as you step outside yourself a bit. It's also you're obligation, because first and foremost, you took the job, and people have paid and are here to "dance"...Not just to "appreciate" music (Besides, you can just slip in the more esoteric stuff into your set later on. By that time people will be drunk enough that they'll listen to almost anything).

My point: You're an "entertainer" whether you like it or not, Raph ;)

EDIT: 4 in a row. Bad spelling day.

[Riggswolfe]

   When I lose at chess, or sports, I feel, with a good deal of certainty, that the other player played better than I did that day.  I might even learn something about the game in the process.  With MMOGs, when I lose, I feel, with a great deal of certainty, that the other person was a better exploiter/cheater/macroer/bigger catass than I am.  The only thing I've learned is that in order to "compete", I need to exploit, cheat, macro and quit my job to get better.  Big difference.

This is precisely why I don't enjoy PvP. It's not skill. It's all the things you mentioned essentially. Frag me in a FPS, you're better than I am. Beat me in a PvP battle, well, see above.

[dogles]

Y'know, on second thought, there should be somebody to push the envelope, and you have to admit Raph has been pretty consistent in that regard over the years.

Reading from his website:

"I'm in it for the sake of the state of the art, so to speak. I actually do not see myself doing this as a career my whole life. At some point I'll probably backtrack and go back to some of the other things that have been central parts of my life: music, writing, etc. So for the moment, I am doing it for the sake for certain ideals regarding virtual communities and the like. In other words, I am an idealist on a virtual crusade.
Then again, doing it as a religious crusade gets lots of players saying you're on a hobbyhorse, grinding an ideological axe, etc (the latter is a direct quote from a newsgroup post I read once). And ya know what, they're right. :) As long as I don't cross over into fanaticism, I'll feel OK about it. ;) (Of course, if I did cross over, it's in the nature of fanaticism not to notice...!)

So um, yeah, that pretty much sums it up, doesn't it? Take it or leave it. There are plenty of other people who making simple fun games, but Raph is about the bleeding edge. Good for him. Bad for Jedi. :P

dan

[edit fixed quote]