NWN 2 Multiplayer Beta test signup

[Trippy]

http://www.atari.com/nwn2betatest/multiplayer/

[Fargull]

Thanks for posting!

[Ironwood]

Am I wrong to still be holding out hope for this ?

[Signe]

Am I wrong to still be holding out hope for this ?

No, I like it too.  And you are so cute when you still have a glimmer of hope!

[Alkiera]

Am I wrong to still be holding out hope for this ?

If by 'hope' you mean you expect something more than 'NWN1 with a patch to use mesh-based ground instead of tile-based'... then yes.  There may also be some additions to the mod-making software to make that end of things a little easier... and if they don't include a lot of the stuff that's been written since NWN1 as a stock part of the mod software, with drag-n-drop like simplicity(for hidden doors, more complex traps, etc), then they're going to disappoint a lot of people.  From what I've read, NWN2 is not supposed to have any more support for Persistant games than NWN1 did, and perhaps less, given clients will have to download the modules for the PW game ahead of time, rather than just connecting and getting data as they needed it.

Really, I think NWN2 is more like NWN1.1.  New single player story, maybe new shiny, and new mesh ground instead of tiled ground... but otherwise, same game, same engine.

--
Alkiera

[Koyasha]

The main things I hope for are: A toolset that's easier to work with and more robust in it's capabilities, a DM client that has more options - or at the very least, that all the options WORK without being insanely buggy, and more optimized module building and loading.  NWN would get ludicrously slow even on powerful computers when the modules started to get somewhat big in the toolset; I don't want to have to break up my module into 20 modules with 4 areas a piece.  I don't want a max map size that I can't actually get anywhere near to, because performance slows down so much, and so many other issues.

[Ironwood]

I don't care about persistant worlds.  At All.  I think those who look to NWN to do that for them are mental.

However, I would like a computer RPG that I could make my own modules easily.  I'd like NWN2 to have a better handle on D&D than 1.


What I've seen so far is NWN with prettier graphics.  I've seen nowt of the toolset at all.

So, Hope.  But not much.

[GenVec]

I don't care about persistant worlds.  At All.  I think those who look to NWN to do that for them are mental.

The mechanics suck and the world builder is beyond esoteric, but NWN persistent worlds are an RP Mecca.

It's a sadly overlooked fact that NWN persistant worlds are the only quasi-mmo option that are not run with the "bottom line" as the only concern. Freeing game administrators from the need to turn a profit leads to some astoundingly positive developments.

[Ironwood]

Like I say, mental.

[geldonyetich]

I'm actually working on an article right now on Grimwell's where I'm suggesting that games without a definate end are only destined to have the players walk away with them in boredom and therefore are conditioning all players to figure all games are boring.  Therefore I'll jump on the bandwagon labeled, "Persistant worlds are mental".

Yet, there is a certain something that attracts me to the idea.  (Not that my being totally mental overly creative should surprise anyone on F13 at this point.)  The idea of achieving something in a virtual space holds a certain level of fascination.  So, maybe if those persistant world writers would go a little further and allow players to make meaningful changes to the state of the game world as simulated, we'd see something special.  Throw in the player DM factor and we've got magic.

[Koyasha]

So, maybe if those persistant world writers would go a little further and allow players to make meaningful changes to the state of the game world as simulated, we'd see something special.  Throw in the player DM factor and we've got magic.

I've already seen this in the couple PSW's I was involved in.  Most of the scenarios thrown out weren't pre-scripted with specific endings intended, and the actions of the players tended to be recorded in the module by changes to the areas and NPC's and such by the builder.  In terms of affecting the world and feeling like our characters had meaning, there was a lot of that.  As one of the DM's, I tried to make sure that every player's character got at least some opportunity to step up and do things that would matter, too, and it was helped by the mod builder redesigning areas when it was necessary due to changes that happened.

Other great things that happened in such PSW's were that the players often came to the DM's with their own ideas on new things they wanted to do that required DM or mod builder support, and they were almost always implemented in some way or another.  Obviously this sort of personal involvement is completely infeasible in any mass-market MMOG, and that's why I think that any future that actual roleplaying has in these kind of games must be found in small games like NWN.

If someone made a game specifically designed to support PSW's, it has the potential to turn out very well, at least in the gameplay and personal gaming experience sides.

[Merusk]

Having helped run a few RP-oriented muds, let me say they're all a joke.   Because of the nature of their size (All wil be smallish) they all, without fail, eventually fall into the trap of the popularity game.   The devs/ admin will have their favorites and their hated. Small abuses of power that add-up over time are commonplace.  Worst case, they'll also have folks they're fucking 'in character' or sleeping with IRL who'll get even larger special tweaks.

Such abuses are what drew me to MMOs in the first place. Someplace professionally run with too many people around for the devs to get to know, and some sort of internal oversight to catch those who did abuse power.  Not that it's stopped a few high-profile events over the years, but at least the populace was large enough that the impact wasn't as great.

[Koyasha]

That does absolutely happen, but it's mitigated by a few things, mainly the fact that if you don't like this PSW because of how the DM's and builders are treating you, you can pick up and go to another one of many.  And if each one ends up with the regulars that are favored and having fun, and everyone else going off to find other, more adequate PSW's to their tastes, that seems like the ideal situation.  But beyond that, it's a matter of choice too.  While you like giving up the personal touches and the roleplaying in exchange for the fair playing field where the devs and the game don't give any advantages to anyone over you, there are also those, myself included, that would rather give up some fairness for the roleplaying and the personal involvement.  Even as one of the non-favored, I believe I would enjoy myself more in a world where the players' actions still change the world from day to day, and the world doesn't follow the script that the designers write for it regardless of our actions.

An event in EQ was one of the things that discouraged me from participating in GM events in MMOG's anymore.  Two separate events, in fact.  First time was Bloody Kithicor.  On my server, I was there, and I witnessed Lanys T`Vyl strike down Firiona Vie.  Why?  Cause players got involved, and while we couldn't attack the GM controlled characters, we could heal and buff them.  And a huge number of dark elves showed up to help Lanys T`Vyl, while less people showed up to help Firiona Vie.  What happened?  The actual outcome, which was the result of actions by at least 150 players, was utterly ignored, and history went on to record that Firiona Vie killed Lanys T`Vyl at the Battle of Bloody Kithicor.  The second event was an RP event around the time of the Kunark opening.  Lord Mayong Mistmoore was appearring regularly over the course of a week and giving quests.  One of those quests turned out to be a sort of a hide-and-seek event, where we were called to find a dwarf that had some knowledge and was considered to be able to steal some shard that Lady Vox possessed.  Myself and two or three others spoke a lot during the event, interacted entirely in-character, and finally found the dwarf.  When the crowd gathered as the dwarf was presented to Lord Mayong Mistmoore and his servants, someone was picked, seemingly at random, to recieve the prize.  It was none of the people who spoke up the most, it wasn't the person who actually found the dwarf, it was some random person.  He behaved slightly in-character at best, making vague remarks about lore-type stuff.  The real participants, though?  Nothing.  And what really gets me is that even if absolutely no one had shown up, or every single person there had refused to help Lord Mayong Mistmoore, the history would have played out exactly the same way, with not the slightest change in the course of events.  Participating in both of those events was fun, something I remember fondly even after all these years.  However, the ending to both of them left a bitter taste in my mouth that has left me avoiding any active participation in GM events since then, other than looking for the loot pinata to break open.

To have real participation in the events of the world, I and others with my attitude will give up some of the fair play.  I doubt I'd play in a world where the DM's cater to every whim of some of the players and pretty much ignore the others, but I'll gladly accept a world in which some of the players are slightly favored over the others.  It doesn't stop me from enjoying myself if some characters get to play half-gods that have their divine daddy's ear or something like that.  As long as I have some amount of involvement, I'm going to be happier than my only goal being to get geared up so I can go kill Overlord Mata Muram or Lord Mayong Mistmoore and get even more uber loot.  Cause unless I'm in Fires of Heaven, Afterlife, or the current uberguild equivalent, I'm never going to have the best loot in the game.  And even if I did, I still don't see how it would be more satisfying to be decked out entirely in +400 HP gear than to burn down half the town or start a war between the elves and the gnomes, or stop it, knowing that it was the choices and actions of me and my fellow players that led to that conclusion, not a script written by someone 2 months before the events even took place.  And if I'm the sidekick instead of the hero, or the henchman instead of the villain, I can live with that.  At least I'm not the completely irrelevant entity without whom the events would go by exactly the same way.

[Merusk]

Perhaps you would enjoy it.  I didn't, and the search just wears you down after a while.

Each new PSW is a starting-from-scratch experience.  Like any online game, you don't realize the politics until you're a good way along the progression, or actually involved in the world.  Once you've realized them, if you decide that they suck, or realize you've made the 'wrong' friends along the way you've become inested in the world. So, to pick-up roots and move along to another world with politics you find less-shitty you're giving up that investment PSW-ers are so into.

Then, you need to add-in the rule that say "90% of all things are crap" whose name eludes me.  Yes, several worlds you can tell right from the first few hours, others take a little time.  Still others show promise and you give them a shot for a bit.  Then you catch-on that the 'promise' has been there for over a year, and the Admins simply are your typical lazy computer geegs with a free codebase and excess cash.  Things aren't going to move things along at even a Blizzard-like pace, so once again you move on.

THEN, you also have the times where you find a good place, it's groovin' along and you're getting into things and gelling with the folks around you, only to have Admin politics blow the place out of the water.  Some admin fucked some other admins girl, or loses interest, or has a huge blowout with the other admins, or decided they were 'too old for this shit, but I'm taking the codebase with me.'  So, through no fault of your own, or the players, things collapse.

Much like internet communities.

Some people can do it and enjoy it, I simply couldn't stand it anymore.  Non-professionals running a game means you're going to get non-professional behavior more often than not.  I'd rather toss the $15 a month at a business and get the experiences we've been getting than have to deal with such internet drama again.  YMWV.

[lamaros]

I quit playing a RP mud because of stupid things like that. Gods have their favourites and people are retards who can't really RP properly (can't diferentiate between a character they're meant to be playing, and the personal relations they have).

One girl tried to lead a coup to take over the guild, we all stood up and told her that she was a traitor and against the beleifs the guild stood up for (she justified it by saying that we wouln't get anywhere without her because the city leaders and Gods didn't like our GM - ironic because he was the most consistent character regarding the RP aspects of our city, and one of the best rpers i've ever plyed with), and because she was friends with one of the main Gods of our city (one who was meant to be remoreless, violent and not favor the weak) everyone got fucked up over it, drama beyond the bounds of RP, so me and a few others quit. It was just a wanky little club, really.

So I went and played another one and the same thing happened. Small RP games become social clubs with cliques and all, and it's not fun to play if you're not interested in that.

[Xilren's Twin]

Some people can do it and enjoy it, I simply couldn't stand it anymore.  Non-professionals running a game means you're going to get non-professional behavior more often than not.  I'd rather toss the $15 a month at a business and get the experiences we've been getting than have to deal with such internet drama again.  YMWV.

Of course, "90% of everything is crap" seem to apply as well to professionally developed pay to mmorpgs as it does to muds/freeshards.  Just with different kinds of suck.

So why is no one interested in occupying the middle space between free small muds/NWN games, and massive static worlds with thousands of users?  A boutique game aimed at shards of a few hundred, but with the ability for server divergence, world modability, staff lead events.  Obviously, that would be more expensive to run, BUT as with most high end products you should be able to charge more for it as well.  Like EQ's Legends server, except done well and with a better game designed for the ground up to take advanatge of this stuff.

Sad to say, NWN has been about the only program than you can even make a stab at that middle ground with.

Xilren

[geldonyetich]

I'm seeing this conversation as working on two different levels.

What Merusk is talking about is corruption.  Those in power levying favors to their buddies are corrupt.  Ideally, you get yourself somebody in power who isn't such a pandering jellyfish, but that isn't always easy and neither is who is running it a fault of the game design.  Even in EverQuest there have been cases of corrupt GMs playing their favorites, and the only thing to admire about EQ is that there was a higher up yet to fire them when they were caught plying their jellyfish ways.

What Koyasha and myself am talking about is offering the players at the bottom the ability to influence the game world in major ways.  Like putting a new faction of NPCs in charge of a city, or planting a new forest, or burning one to the ground.  That's in the game design, and the GM influence factor is just icing on the cake because it allows more intelligent dynamic changes than you can have occur automatically.  To clarify, I'm talking about having both the GM and the automatic dynamic world changes, not one or the other.

At the root of the problem was just that persistant worlds that sit around and stagnate, like your average EverQuest server, are inevitably boring and hard to generate any real care for.

[Merusk]

Corruption is inherent in any small community.  People are wired to see things in an "us" and "them" duality as a survival mechanism. 

Cash will allow you to mentally separate "us" and "them" into "workers" and "customers" so you don't have as much of that corruption.

 However, it also sets you up for a more adversarial position when it comes to allowing "them" to make changes.  You'll start to see more 'bad' GM behaviour to force things along the lines they had forseen, or simply twisting power into the early EQ "kill the players" scenarios. 

Not to say that nobody can do it.  I'm sure someone can.  I'm just not holding my breath for a small, intimate-feeling world that doesn't succumb to some sort of corruption any more than the rest of you are holding it for a large one that lets you alter the world.

Of course, "90% of everything is crap" seem to apply as well to professionally developed pay to mmorpgs as it does to muds/freeshards.  Just with different kinds of suck.

Of course it does.  However, since people are forced to part-cash to obtain said experience, there's also a much broader network of information about them and a greater number of places to pick-up reviews than just a few volunteer sites.  In the MUD world we'd all have had to play Auto Assault or gone to someplace as "useful" as MMORPG.com to find out what it was like.

[El Gallo]

64 people just isn't big enough for me.  How many people can a NWN2 persistent world support?

NWN with a new story, new shiney and new graphics is enough to make it an easy buy for me.  But a small step towards a make-your-own-mmo toolset would be outstanding.

[geldonyetich]

Corruption is inherent in any small community.  People are wired to see things in an "us" and "them" duality as a survival mechanism. 
[...]
Not to say that nobody can do it.  I'm sure someone can.  I'm just not holding my breath for a small, intimate-feeling world that doesn't succumb to some sort of corruption any more than the rest of you are holding it for a large one that lets you alter the world.

I know I could do it, but that's because I'm a fanatic.  I believe that The Purity Of The Gaming Experience Must Be Maintained, and I would turn down offers for blowjobs to perserve this.  Like I said, a fanatic.  However, I can see why negative experiences with people who aren't quite as... devoted would jade you against the whole idea of small communities running persistant worlds.

64 people just isn't big enough for me.  How many people can a NWN2 persistent world support?

I think 64 players per server is the improved amount, at least that's what a little google-fu determined. 

To an extent I agree that a game that doesn't support massive amounts of players has no business pretending it's an online persistant world.  However, I did come across an interesting realization that's made me a bit more forgiving along those lines, and it goes something like this:

In EverQuest, or any other massively multiplayer game, how many players are your going to interact with simultaneously?  By interact, I mean actually have something to do with besides seeing them from afar.  In EQ, I'm looking at 5 other players (in my group) plus one more (if I'm trading somebody), and perhaps a dozen or so more through communication channels (guild and local).  Still far under 64 players.  (These days, you're lucky to find 64 players a zone in EQ.)  So maybe a NWN/NWN2 server competes better than I think, in terms of actual good I get out of the number of simultanously logged in players.   If somebody's made a NWN/NWN2 scenario provides better quality interaction, then that's another can of worms entirely - EQ suddenly has no quantity advantage and a quality disadvantage.

Such a perspective sort of shattered my belief that massively multiplayer is a big deal.  If the developers add massively multiplayer activities, like 200 person raids, then that's something.  Last I heard, raids generally hover around the 60 player point, so NWN could do that just fine.

[Koyasha]

Well, in my experience, while an NWN server supposedly handled 64 players at a time, getting that many actually online on anything but a top of the line server box back then would make it chug, and getting that many in a single area was nigh impossible.  As one of the DM's on one of the servers I was on, we always had to take that into account - in fact, the limit was really much lower since the server wasn't running on uber hardware.

But simultaneously logged in players means less to me than how many players are regulars on the server.  Cause every person on the server is affected by my actions, and vice versa, in some way or another.  Furthermore, in a raid, I know there's other people there, but even among my own guild and the 36/40/54/72 (depending on raid/game) people that I'm raiding with include a lot of people that I barely know.  I know a certain group of people, and I know a bunch of others by name, but rarely actually talk to them.  We are allied in order to achieve our goals, but I don't really know them, and they don't affect me except to enable me to defeat enemies that I otherwise couldn't.  Even someone who plays at a completely different time on an NWN PSW, who I never actually meet in person, still affects me in more ways, I'd say.

200 person raids would never really work, by the way.  At least, not in any form of 'interesting raid' beyond 'gather 200 people and whack this foozle'.  Only military precision and instant, unquestioning following of orders could organize something more complex on a scale like that, and as effective as some of the raid guilds become, even they don't come up to that level of coordination.  It's hard to imagine any large group of gamers that would.

[Engels]

200 person raids would never really work, by the way.  At least, not in any form of 'interesting raid' beyond 'gather 200 people and whack this foozle'.  Only military precision and instant, unquestioning following of orders could organize something more complex on a scale like that, and as effective as some of the raid guilds become, even they don't come up to that level of coordination.  It's hard to imagine any large group of gamers that would.

Uhm, did you play any of the Planes of Power and later expansions of EQ? 200 person raids were not only common, but often considered required.

[caladein]

200 person raids would never really work, by the way.  At least, not in any form of 'interesting raid' beyond 'gather 200 people and whack this foozle'.  Only military precision and instant, unquestioning following of orders could organize something more complex on a scale like that, and as effective as some of the raid guilds become, even they don't come up to that level of coordination.  It's hard to imagine any large group of gamers that would.

Uhm, did you play any of the Planes of Power and later expansions of EQ? 200 person raids were not only common, but often considered required.

I think the point he's making is that: Can you make a 200+ person encounter require a level of precision in its members beyond "Don't stand here if the ground is on fire" and "If the boss points at you, don't do a damn thing" (besides individual competency in playing their characters)?

When the "hard part" of a large raid stops being the logistical task of 'Tard Wrangling and instead becomes the actual execution of the encounter, that's when they become "interesting". Not too sure anyone's pulled that off yet.

[Koyasha]

Yeah, consider raids like Jelvan and Hatchet, to say nothing of Overlord Mata Muram.  In the Jelvan event in Anguish, three groups must separate and fight three enemies, keeping them within a few % HP of each other.  We often have trouble doing this with 54, requiring much yelling in order to get the group with faster DPS to slow down.  Imagine attempting the same thing with 200.

With Hatchet, personal competency is required, as is complete attention and immediate reaction.  Periodically, hatchet begins a charge, and the individual being charged gets a single emote line: "Hatchet locks eyes with you and snorts."  That individual must immediately run away, taking Hatchet to the other corner of the room, because when Hatchet catches him, it fires off an AE death touch.  If one person misses that emote or screws up, it can easily kill the raid.

Planar Age raids were simple in comparison, and tended to revolve around 6-15 people doing the complex setup and work, while the remainder of the people killed what was put in front of them.