On Building And Policing MMO Societies

Thanks to GameSpy for their feature on the history and continued shaping of MMO communities. The article discusses lessons learned from Ultima Online's "growing pains" over conflict resolution ("There was a group known as the Dread Lords who went around attacking other players, decimating the population of entire towns and forcing the developers to change the rules for PvP, which ultimately minimized its role in the game"), and points out that "...subverting developer intentions is a significant part of an MMO, whether for good or ill", referencing The Sims Online Mafia as an example. When should 'authorities' step in, if ever, in massively multiplayer games?

Comments

gameplay

[tmp_user]

Simple: whenever not doing so prevents the game from being played as intended

Re:gameplay

[Anonymous Coward]

It's too late once it gets to that point. It's better to harness the emergent behaviors, and futile to fight them.

The developers need to put a lot of thought into what behaviors they want to allow, why, and what their effects might be. Early play testing should be agressively pursued with wargames style, probably with bonus money on the table, breaking the game in the most horrendous, buzz killing, obnoxious, show stopping ways they can coopratively manage.

It's not wishful thinking and esoteric moral platitudes that will keep a damn from breaking, it's solid engineering.

Re:gameplay

[tmp_user]

Your refutation only supports my statement. If, when released to the public after "testing", a horrible situation that hadn't been intended to be able to happen does, then those "emergent behaviors" mentioned should be looked at to decide what needs to be done to restore the intended gameplay. Also, solid engineering would be based upon using some well thought-out ideas for solving a problem and becoming more inventive only after the base was thoroughly stable - if after gameplay breaks, despite best efforts to prevent such, then fixes should be applied... "engineering" sounds like a fairly good title for that process to me.

Re:gameplay

[skinfitz]

what makes open MMORPG's interesting is the fact that emergent behaviour and gameplay will always be unpredictable.

I'm sure that many developers have designed an MMORPG only to discover after a while that players do things they never ever intended.

A successful developer will observe this behaviour and work with it rather than against it.

Ultimately it's the players that pay developer's wages - keeping them interested and happy is what it's all about. Preventing PvP play for example will cause many people who enjoy that sort of play to leave. From what I see many MMORPG developers try to keep people happy by having "no PvP" zones. The developers of Neocron have implemented this, however they received that many requests for no "safe" areas that they provide an entirely seperate server where there are no safe areas.

Re:gameplay

[jefeweiss]

I think that, unless what is "broken" is more like an exploit of the games rules, the people in charge of a game are better off providing tools for players to help take care of the situation. I played EQ for awhile, and it got pretty boring. It could have done with something like the Dread Lords going around killing off townsfolk. Perhaps when something like that happens a "Special Edition" of town newspapers could go out saying where they were and encouraging players to help come and defend the town.

I think that a lot of the time solutions that simply change the game rules to reduce chaotic type situations end up making the game less interesting. Sure the Dread Lords might rule the place for awhile, but once people get involved with trying to stop them it makes the game much more interesting for everyone. And when the defending group finally wins everyone can breathe a sigh of relief as the Dread Lords slink off into the shadows to try to regain their power. Which is a classic Fantasy world plot. The stories never go "And then the Mighty Wizard Dungeonous Masterous changed the rules of combat so that the Evil Dread Lords couldn't do anything about it."

Once the people who make games start using player created imbalances as creative acts then maybe MMORPGs will start to take on a much more interesting flavor.

Except..

[Kwil]

..in the real world who wants to pay to pretend to be a cop all day?

One of the problems with trying to develop a good society in a game is that any good society depends a large amount on a lot of people doing work. Except people generally don't pay money to do work, people pay money for entertainment.

Aside from this, there's also the issues that being a griefer (as opposed to a simple player-killer) often has a much lower penalty in the virtual world than it does in the real world.

Say you've killed the griefer in the virtual world. What does he care? His only purpose was to get on there and get attention and piss people off. By having a force dedicated specifcally to getting him, his existance has been validated, and he'll likely just come back and do it again. After all, in the virtual world, if the cops hunt you down, you have an exciting battle, and if you lose, you lose a few stats or something, oh well.

In the real world, if the cops hunt you down, the battle probably isn't very exciting as cops generally come in with a superior force of numbers and weaponry, so that you submit rather than permanently die, and then the consequences likely involve you being placed in uncomfortable positions by large men who'll happily cause you severe injury. Not fun.