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If this "private" flag relies on cooperation from clients, then it is broken.

I agree, any system that requires clients to be trustworthy is fundamentally broken.

There's an ancient quote from the Mudding world that talks about this:

(From The Laws of Online World Design)
"Never trust the client.
Never put anything on the client. The client is in the hands of the enemy. Never ever ever forget this."

It's amazing to see how often we software developers forget the lessons of the past.

This guy lost all credibility with me when he put out the steaming pile that is SWG. If he had put out a good game, I might be more apt to listen to what he has to say.

SWG was his chance to prove his 'design theory' in practice.

Those who can, do. Those who can't write a crappy blog about it and promote their folk music.

This guy lost all credibility with me when he put out the steaming pile that is SWG. If he had put out a good game, I might be more apt to listen to what he has to say.

SWG was his chance to prove his 'design theory' in practice.

Those who can, do. Those who can't write a crappy blog about it and promote their folk music.

This is a reprint of something that has been around forever. Here is the original posting at Raph's website.

Anm

This is a reprint of something that has been around forever. Here is the original posting at Raph's website.

Anm

Playable versions of the original "MUD" were available as early as 1979, mainframes only. Multiplayer mainframe Zork was created even earlier. I remember playing multiplayer Zork on a Dartmouth university mainframe back in the early 80's.

In 1980, MUD1 was online on the internet.

Compuserve was first able to put Islands of Kesmai up as a commercial offering in 1984.

In 1985, Galacticomm's MajorBBS and Compuserve's British Legends were both available.

The BBS software that Galacticomm wrote was called MajorBBS, and I used to help run a BBS, and customize some of the programming and configuration for it. (Borland C with DOS Extender on a 286!)

What made Galacticomm unique was their invention the Galactibox, which was a large computer case with 16 ISA slots that connected to a PC via an interface card -- of which you could have multiple. This allowed BBS operators to put together the hardware to run 16-64 modem lines much cheaper than, say, Compuserve.

I used to help run a MajorBBS in Michigan called SOLARIS until the con-man that owned it skipped town and left all of the hardware, so my then girlfriend and I decided to run it out of our home. We were always in the red over the phone bill, so we eventually closed it down.

Here's an interesting timeline to check out if you're interested: http://www.legendmud.org/raph/gaming/mudtimeline.h tml

Why is there a monthly fee? I already talked about this before. But, let's give it another go, shall we?

I'm familiar with this topic because I run my own online RPG, Meridian 59. It's not quite as large as WoW, but there's still a lot of basic costs that do scale up appropriately.

A discussion on about the monthly fee for larger games can be found at http://www.legendmud.org/raph/gaming/busmodels.htm l which was written by Raph Koster of UO and SWG fame.

Essentially, these games take a lot of money to develop and then to maintain. The box fees help defray the costs of maintenance, and a large part of the subscription fees go towards maintaining the game world. Every time a gameworld in WoW goes down, there's a team of programmers and at least a few network center administrators working on the problem, most likely. These people don't come all that cheap, and a team of people working like this is fairly expensive. This is a necessary cost, because people expect unusually high uptime for these servers considering most people are only paying $15/month or so. I've had more broadband downtime over the past year than people would accept in M59.

I won't go too much into how good a price even $15/month is. You'd expect to pay that much if you watch pay-per-view shows a couple times per month. An online games will provide you with more than a few nights of entertainment per month.

There are alternatives out there, though. Meridian 59 doesn't require a box purchase and is only $10.95 per month. Sure you're not going to get the prettiest graphics and the slickest UI, but you will get a very balanced game that has superb uptime. You'll also get gameplay that's considerably deeper than most of the games out there. We don't have pre-defined classes and there's no levels.

One of the biggest things about the monthly fee is that no business runs at no profit. Every business needs a little bit to keep growing and developing, otherwise the company stagnates and eventually dies. One of the problems our company is having is that we feel our lower monthly fee is a better deal for players, and we want people to be able to play our game, but it's hard to make significant profit to fund development of new games. We'd love to do something a bit more modern than M59, but it's tough to do when you're on fairly thin margins.

Some information, as usual.

Has Blizzard or any of the other MMORPG guys ever posted the actual cost of running such a service vs. how much money they are taking in on it?

FWIW, I run a smaller online game called Meridian 59. My costs are a bit different since we're a smaller company. I'll talk about that later.

Anyway, you can find a discussion on this topic at http://www.legendmud.org/raph/gaming/busmodels.htm l which was written by Raph Koster of UO and SWG fame.

To summarize: Development costs are high, especially for more recent games. WoW and SWG each cost tens of millions of dollars to develop, which is a lot of money in game development. They employed large teams of people, much larger than your typical standalone game charges.

Now, running the game is an ongoing cost. The biggest expenses are bandwidth, network support, and customer service. People get very cranky when they can't log onto the game, and will post mean things if they cannot. (See other posts in this very thread for examples.) Network administrators don't come cheap, and when you're talking about hundreds of machines running these games, you're going to need a large number of these administrators. And for those times when your service is unavailable, you need CS representatives to handle the crushing wave of calls you will undoubtedly get. All this doesn't come cheap. Now figure in the cost of things like development of bug fixes and expanded content (including content you can't just charge for in an expansion), and you have a lot of expenses.

In all honesty, the price paid is probably too low. As someone pointed out, playing 1 hour per day means you're only spending about $.50 per hour to play the game. Compare this to watching a Pay-per-view movie where you'll probably pay $2-3 per hour for that entertainment.

Further, low subscription rates hurt the smaller developers. Meridian 59 is significantly cheaper that other games (only $10.95 per month instead of $15 like other large games) and doesn't charge for expansions. However, we make much, MUCH less money than a large company does and it is harder to maintain and expand the game on that much smaller of a budget. We mostly run M59 as a labor of love, though, so this isn't as big an issue for us. But it's unrealistic to expect an online RPG that is run on centralized servers with as much uptime as possible and that is expanded on a regular basis to be free or even significantly cheaper that current rates.

Some information for you.

Have fun,

This guy has been around for a while and he really knows his stuff. There's always going to be conflict among casual gamers, hardcore gamers, role players and the developers. If anyone has the experience and is qualified to at least make an educated ATTEMPT to resolve those conflicts it's Raph. For a better understanding of the guy check out his page . In particular, click the gaming link and read some of his essays. -ru

The person who squarely deserves credit for the rediculous and pathetic starting "vision" of SWG is none other than Raph Koster.

You can thank him for taking such an amazing franchise and turning it into a huge mess.

Oh, and he got promoted by the way. You can certainly blaim SOE (and the ashes of Verant) for that.

Raph Koster, overseer of Ultima Online, and previously of Star Wars Galaxies, has had some very specific thoughts on this topic.

Read on if you're interested.

And they'd be wrong. In the US, Meridian 59 is the first graphical MMORPG. Depending on your definition of MMORPG, it's not unlikely there's even an earlier candidate.

Could you send a pointer to something official (or at least semi-official) that says Koster has been put in charge of all SOE games? This link, on his own website, says he's just in charge of the Austin studio where SWG was made.

They aren't designed with the intention to be addicting. In fact, Raph Koster, the creative designer for both UO and SWG states on his website how concerned he is that the current generation of MMORPGs may be addicting.

Check out this guys site, he really have pretty grand visions of the future, and seems truly tortured that so far some limitations of these games haven't been overcome.

This is the mantra of every armchair game designer out there. Thanks to Raph everyone thinks they could be a better designer.

Yet every online game that comes out has a hack in the client! I promise you that SWG will have one as well - despite the fact that Raph works on it.

Hate to break it to you, but 250,000 * $50 = $12.5 million

There's less than 30 games that have ever sold a million copies. You'd recognize every single name (and a substantial amount of the list is from our friends at Blizzard :) ) A game that sells a half million is a huge hit. In fact, a game that sells lifetime 250,000 is doing really, really well. The vast majority of games released do not break 50,000 units, and the vast majority of games released do not make back the money it cost to make them. To my knowledge, only two MMOs have ever sold over 300,000.

Hate to break it to you, but 250,000 * $50 = $12.5 million

There's less than 30 games that have ever sold a million copies. You'd recognize every single name (and a substantial amount of the list is from our friends at Blizzard :) ) A game that sells a half million is a huge hit. In fact, a game that sells lifetime 250,000 is doing really, really well. The vast majority of games released do not break 50,000 units, and the vast majority of games released do not make back the money it cost to make them. To my knowledge, only two MMOs have ever sold over 300,000.

Please, no! I'm too young to be modded down. :-(

This sort of thing has been happening for years in online worlds. Interesting how games that supposedly degrade a person's civility can harbor such a beutiful testament of pure respect.

Please feel free to mail me corrections and additions to the timeline. The vast majority of it was not written by me, it was written by others who submitted material.

Some blanket replies to clarify the intent of the timeline:

Tolkien is listed because he was very influential on the people making those early games (annd still is to this day). To take another example, Lord Dunsany is comparably important in the development of fantasy as a genre, but has not had very discernable influence on online worlds specifically.

The Sega channel probably does deserve to be listed. Please feel free to send details. Note, however, that this timeline is specifically about online worlds (aka muds, MMORPGs, virtual realities, what have you), not about peer to peer gaming except insofar as instances of peer to peer gaming serve as bridges towards online worlds. Hence the absence of things like Case's Ladder or Kali. Heck, Quake is only in there because it brought greater awareness to online worlds in the process of being a big hit.

Lastly, concerning the title... AFAIK, there are only four significant timelines on the history of online worlds on the Net. There's George Reese's, there's The MUDDex's, there's Jessica Mulligan's on Biting the Hand, and there's mine. Of these, George's is centered on LPMuds, The MUDDex centered on MOOs and MUSHes, Jessica's on commercial games, and then there's mine which tries to cover all the above. Plus, George and Jess both contributed to mine. As of right now, there is no more comprehensive source on the Internet--at least, not that's indexed by any search engines. Believe me, I've looked. For a preliminary links list of resources for online world design, I refer you to my list.

The genesis of the timeline was actually as some research to help out Dr Amy Bruckman (MediaMOO, MOOse Crossing) for a Game Developer's Conference panel we were both on. It has been posted regularly to rec.games.mud.* newsgroups and the MUD-Dev mailing list as well. It's very much a community effort, and not based on my personal preferences save for the criteria by which I determine whether or not something is an actually an online world.

I see a lot of posts here in the replies which I intend to scarf up and add to the timeline, though. So thanks to those posters. :) Certainly one area where the timeline is deficient is the entire area of BBS games, so submissions are definitely welcome there.

-Raph Koster

In EQ people lose all the time.

Umm, no. They might *die* all the time, but they don't actually *lose*.

The pain of death is lessened by the fact that you don't really lose much. You can go out and reclaim your corpse and its posessions.

You see? This has nothing to do with the zero-sum economy as you are suggesting.

The key is to make the consequences of losing commensurate with your investment in the game. If you have to spend hours and hours building your character, then death shouldn't be a huge penalty. [...] As long as you return to the game reasonably close to where you left, there shouldn't be a problem.

But that is contrary to a zero-sum economy! In a real (capitalist, at least) economy, your risk goes proportional with your investment, i.e. the more you have invested, the more you can lose. What you're demanding is an economy where people have a guaranteed return on investment, or at least are protected from losing too much of their investment. This is not a zero-sum economy, at least not a competitive one.

The main problem with a zero-sum game you'll run into is that those who have lost can simply quit the game and restart with a newly created character. This implicitly will make your game non-zero-sum: the wealth (money, objects, whatever) that they've lost to others cannot be taken away from the players who have won it, but whenever a new player joins the game, the total amount of wealth must be increased (otherwise the economy as a whole would become poorer whenever a new player joins). So you have a constant supply of extra wealth by players who join the game, lose, then quit. Note that this system is not only non-zero-sum, it will probably also be exploited heavily.

The only option is to make sure that players never lose or gain too much, but then the economy wouldn't be competetive any more and doesn't generate any real conflicts by itself, so you'd again be stuck in a game that requires you to introduce artificial conflicts (e.g. the inifinte supply of monsters that current games have).

It needs to be stressed that it's a *game* and that people lose.

Not true. It's a gaming world, not a game. The fact that you don't mind losing e.g. a board game is that a board game is designed to be a competition. This means you're starting of equal and that you're competing for a limited period of time. In an online gaming world, you expect players to stay forever, so *everyone* must have some motivation to stay. "You've lost" might be fine if it's at the end of a fun game, but not if the next time you're starting the game you're starting of where you left. Imagine playing Monopoly, losing, and when you start the next time, being asked to start with only the money you had when the previous game ended. Would you want to play? That is the situation in an online gaming world.

BTW, here is an article describing that a more competitive economy has been tried in UO, but failed due to the exact problems described by the parent post -- players don't like to lose.

Raph Koster has a very interesting behind-the-scenish snippet titled "MMORPG, Business Models 101" about the costs involved in running an MMORPG. It's on his website under Gaming->Snippets or here (sorry for linking into a frameset). Very informative and yes, it does bring up advertising (albeit briefly).

Raph Koster has a very interesting behind-the-scenish snippet titled "MMORPG, Business Models 101" about the costs involved in running an MMORPG. It's on his website under Gaming->Snippets or here (sorry for linking into a frameset). Very informative and yes, it does bring up advertising (albeit briefly).

I make Copernic use them for me. hmmm, do they have a linux version? I am too busy to look.
Okay, so I had to check, seems they don't, but hey, it's a Canadian company ;-)

Going on means going far
Going far means returning

> In short, there will always be assholes abusing the system.

Agreed. I mentioned this in another post: People can be jerks within ANY set of game rules, which I think is part of the problem. :-(

Is there a solution? I don't think so. Whatever rules you do provide, someone, somewhere, WILL exploit it, or figure out a way to annoy other players with it.

> P.S. I develop online games professionally.

Small world. I'm a 3d game programmer at www.cyberlore.com

Designer Dragon has some interesting articles on online games:

> In short, there will always be assholes abusing the system.

Agreed. I mentioned this in another post: People can be jerks within ANY set of game rules, which I think is part of the problem. :-(

Is there a solution? I don't think so. Whatever rules you do provide, someone, somewhere, WILL exploit it, or figure out a way to annoy other players with it.

> P.S. I develop online games professionally.

Small world. I'm a 3d game programmer at www.cyberlore.com

Designer Dragon has some interesting articles on online games: