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I'm sure the Austin Game Conference (which ended a couple days ago) would be more than happy to host anyone no longer welcome at E3. Austin is a major game development hub, and the conference has a very impressive list of attendees.

I'm sure the Austin Game Conference (which ended a couple days ago) would be more than happy to host anyone no longer welcome at E3. Austin is a major game development hub, and the conference has a very impressive list of attendees.

I know about the technical issues I play Quake and you learn all you need to know about ping and latencny playing first person shooters.
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This isn't a shot at you FYI. So maybe you're not skilled enough or have enough schooling to design game mechanics/network engine around the 'challenge' of latency but other games have done just that.

I'll pretend for a moment that you're not a troll, even though you've tried very hard to not insult me by insulting me.

For what it's worth, I've been working on online games since 1992, staring with text MUDs. I've been doing this professionally since 1998 with the game Meridian 59, which was originally launched in 1996 (prior to UO). I've done quite a bit more than just "play Quake", so I know what I'm talking about. I am recognized by my peers as someone quite informed about online game development, and I'm even on a panel at the Austin Game Conference talking about "Building Massively Multiplayer Games on a Budget".

At the core, it's a design issue and not a technical issue. The root issue is that the primary feature of online games is persistence. That's the reason why you have to pay the monthly subscription fee, because the server stores everything that happens. Everything that happens in the game permanently affects your character.

Consider what happens if you're playing Quake and suddenly you hit a lag spike. Someone nails you without you being able to react. Now what? Well, you respawn, grab some weapons, and go back into the firefight. Your Quake character is a throwaway shell that you don't really care about in most cases. But, now consider what happens in an online game. If that same thing happened, that death would permanently affect your character. You might lose some of your accumulated experience or skill points, perhaps some of the equipment it took you some time to collect. A lag spike leading to death isn't an "Oh, well, try again." moment. Trust me, I deal with this on a regular basis. Therefore, most games are designed to be a lot more latency-tolerant, so that lag doesn't disrupt the game, leading to permanent results.

You specifically mentioned PlanetSide a few times in your post. They've used latency reducing measures in their game, but you'll notice that PlanetSide is more like an FPS than a traditional online game. There is much less focus on persistence in PlanetSide, so they can focus more on twitch gameplay. Notably, a death on PlanetSide has very little impact overall.

It's also interesting to note the popularity of each type of game. According to the currently available version of a chart tracking online RPG subscriptions, you can see how some of these games stack up. Sony Online Entertainments two flagship products, EverQuest and Star Wars Galaxies are pretty easy to see; EverQuest is the big yellow line that dominates most of the chart. You might have to look hard to find PlanetSide, which is a the small black line down in the lower right-hand corner struggling to get over 50,000 subscribers. Oh, and FFIX, the game you think is dreadfully boring? That's the red line shooting up the right-hand side of the chart, reaching a fairly hefty half a million subscribers. (Caveat: it's widely accepted that some of the numbers on that chart aren't 100% accurate, but they're not too far off the mark.)

There are no interesting game mechanics in MMO's that haven't been done MUCH better in single player games.

Except for the whole being able to play directly with a hundred, a thousand, or even more other people.

Okay, perhaps that's a bit too general. How about a real mechanic, then: political intrigue. There's plenty of that even in Meridian 59. When is the last time your game of Quake had players electing other player(s) to positions that directly affected gameplay? People

by Dave Rickey
2003-09-23

To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heavens:

A time to be born, and a time to die;
a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted;
Ecclesiastes 3:1-2

In his keynote for the first day of the Austin Game Conference, Mark Jacobs divided the history of online games in three eras, with the current era being the Age of Disappointment. I can't really understand the logic for doing so, however. Mark is certainly well-acquainted with the history of online games, he was a part of much of it. But history did not stop when Mythic emerged from the contract-development wilderness with Dark Age of Camelot. There were failed games before DAoC, there have been two successful games since (TSO may have been an underwhelming success, but it only counts as a failure when measured against the expectations that were set for it, if AC was a success then so was TSO). In truth, we are solidly in the growth phase of our market, and our largest related markets have yet to really open up.

That's a bold statement, I know, but I think I can make a good case for it. First, I would refer readers to the MMOG Subsciptions Chart maintained by Bruce Woodcock. Bruce seems to have made good use of his visit to the Austin conference, he has firmed-up figures for quite a few games compared to his earlier versions. Bruce also makes available the source Excel spreadsheet that he uses to generate his chart. A few minutes work with Excel plotting the growth of the US/European OLRPG market makes it pretty clear that the market is seeing continued growth, although with a possibly significant flat spot extending for 6 months prior to the launch of SWG.

There's a classic progression of the acceptance of innovation/market growth, which is pretty widely accepted these days. It runs "Innovator" (4%), "Early Adopter" (12%), "Early Majority" (34%), "Late Majority" (34%), "Late Adopter" (12%) and "Laggards" (4%). If you plot that curve against that from Sir Bruce's chart, you get the inescapable conclusion that the US/European OLRPG (I'm using that outdated abbreviation deliberately) market is somewhere in the Early Majority phase. Where in that phase is hard to say, but at any rate the market (at around 1.4 million subscriptions) is no more than halfway done with its growth, and correspondingly at least 4 years short of effectively flat market growth ("A growing market forgives a lot of sins." Yes, quoting myself is bad form, but at any rate the market is growing and that growth is fueling a lot of misplaced effort and allowing a lot of mistakes to be washed away with a shot from the newbie hose. For the next few years, good games will succeed and bad games will fail, just as they have been doing for the last 5 years. After that, things gets interesting.

No game has, to my knowledge, ever seen more than a 15% drop in subscribers due solely to the release of a competitor. Even SWG has created barely a blip in the subscriber counts for the already existing games. What is typically seen is a few months of increasing churn and reduced re-subscription leading up to the expected release, followed by a slow decline in churn and increase in re-subscription back to near the starting level. Rather than wholesale exodus, what is seen is a collective "Waiting for Game X" that results in a slight depression of the subscriber base. Nowhere was his more pronounced than with SWG, which cast a near zero-growth shadow over the entire OLRPG market for more than 6 months. But the main thing here is that nothing happens *quickly*, trends develop slowly and can be hard to spot. However, the market shows classic growth profiles that are fairly easy to project into the future.

If I'm tip-toeing around

It's sad that most MMORPG developers seem to be bent on profit and refuse to let go of this obsolete payment model. Either go for monthly supscriptions or go for a one time fee. NOT both.

At the Austin Game Conference last weekend, John Taylor of Electronic Arts and (previously) Kesmai, among many others, explained that almost the entire profit of the boxed game goes to the publisher, which is often a different entity entirely from the company that runs the actual online service. The profit on the retail box is an incentive for the publisher to distribute the game widely, a necessity for the online service to build its audience.

Yes, the MMORPG developers are bent on profit -- being, you know, businesses -- but they're not holding onto an "obsolete payment model" out of greed for the box profits. The boxes are only the means to an end.