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Bartle to MMOG Players - Newbs!
Gamasutra (registration required) has begun running an excellent column called "Soapbox". The first article up on the site is penned by Richard Bartle, one of the gents who created MUD1. Why Virtual Worlds are Designed by Newbies [non-reg alternate] is a great look at the lessons of past games and the foibles of designing a new one. From the article: "Virtual worlds are being designed by know-nothing newbies, and there's not a damned thing anyone can do about it. I don't mean newbie designers, I mean newbie players - first timers. They're dictating design through a twisted "survival of the not-quite-fittest" form of natural selection that will lead to a long-term decay in quality, guaranteed."
It's gotten so bad in the virtual worlds that I've given them up and have been forced to take up exercise and reading. God, I'm getting smarter and healthier, someone help me!
You are in error. No-one is screaming. Thank you for your cooperation.
Are you telling me they can be designed with PHP?
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How lame...Why on earth do "we" even bother reading slashdot anymore. The editors might as well be (un)trained monkeys.
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Feel free to hijack this thread to complain about how slashdot is going to the dogs these days... I remember the good ol' days when they used to run real live interesting tech stories...not some
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The article is login-only--please repost.
btw--first post.
The article has a summary:
Point #1: Virtual worlds live or die by their ability to attract newbies
Point #2: Newbies won't play a virtual world that has a major feature they don't like.
Point #3: Players judge all virtual worlds as a reflection of the one they first got into.
Point #4: Many players will think some poor design choices are good.
iCLOD Virtual City is based (remotely) on a real city. It is turn-based and time-based so that players won't be affected by different time zones and there are enough objectives to keep everybody occupied.
But like the article stated, it's pretty hard to keep everyone happy because they all want something in the virtual world to suit their abilities to win.
Additionally, newbies are always lost in the first instance they arrive in the city, so it requires a lot of tutorials and guides to get them settle in in order to introduce the real depth of the game to them.
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
It seems strange to crown it an excellent column if this the first article.
Just my opinion.
Who is General Failure, and why is he reading my hard disk?
Wow, is it just me or is slashdot amazingly slow right now?...
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PS: Is it just me or is Slashdot REALY slow today?
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
[Author's note: What I'm calling virtual worlds, you might call MMORPGs or MMOGs or (if you're a real old-timer) MUDs. Macro replace with your preference accordingly. Got that? Then I'll begin...]
Introduction
Virtual worlds are being designed by know-nothing newbies, and there's not a damned thing anyone can do about it. I don't mean newbie designers, I mean newbie players - first timers. They're dictating design through a twisted survival of the not-quite-fittest form of natural selection that will lead to a long-term decay in quality, guaranteed. If you think some of today's offerings are garbage, just you wait...
Yeah, yeah, you want some justification for this assertion. Even though I'm in Soapbox mode, I can see that, so I will explain - only not just yet. First, I'm going to make four general points that I can string together to build my case. Bear with me on this...
The Newbie Stream
Here's a quote from Victorian author Charles Dickens:
OK, so maybe he didn't actually write that last line.
What Dickens was actually saying is that, so long as you don't lose more than you gain, things are good. In our particular case, we're not talking olde English money, we're talking newbies, although ultimately, the two amount to one and the same thing.
Now I'm sorry to be the bringer of bad news, people, but here goes anyway: even for the most compelling of virtual worlds, players will eventually leave. Don't blame me, I didn't invent reality.
If oldbies leave, newbies are needed to replace them. The newbies must arrive at the same rate (or better) that the oldbies leave; otherwise, the population of the virtual world will decline until eventually no-one will be left to play it.
Point #1: Virtual worlds live or die by their ability to attract newbies
Newbie Preconceptions
Another quote, this time from the 1989 movie Field of Dreams:
Well, maybe if you're an Iowa corn farmer who hears voices inside your head telling you to construct a baseball stadium, but otherwise...
A virtual world can be fully functioning and free of bugs, but still be pretty well devoid of players. There are plenty of non-gameplay reasons why this could happen, but I'm going to focus on the most basic: lack of appeal. Some virtual worlds just aren't attractive to newbies. There are some wonderfully original, joyous virtual worlds out there. They're exquisitely balanced, rich in depth, abundant in breadth, alive with subtleties, and full of wise, interesting, fun people who engender an atmosphere of mystique and marvel without compare. Newbies would love these virtual worlds, but they're not going to play them.
Why not? Because they're all text. Newbies don't do text.
Newbies come to virtual worlds with a set of preconceptions acquired from other virtual worlds; or, failing that, from other computer games; or, failing that, from gut instinct. They will not consider virtual worlds that confront these expectations if there are others around that don't.
Put another way, if a virtual world has a feature that offends newbies, the developers will have to remove that feature or they won't get any newbies. This is irrespective of what the oldbies think: they may adore a feature, but if newbies don't like it then (under point #1) eventually there won't be anyone left to adore it.
Point #2: Newbies won't play a virtual world that has a major feature they don
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
I, for one, welcome our new newbie overlords...
Soapbox:
Why Virtual Worlds are Designed By Newbies - No, Really!
[Author's note: What I'm calling virtual worlds, you might call MMORPGs or MMOGs or (if you're a real old-timer) MUDs. Macro replace with your preference accordingly. Got that? Then I'll begin...]
Introduction
Virtual worlds are being designed by know-nothing newbies, and there's not a damned thing anyone can do about it. I don't mean newbie designers, I mean newbie players - first timers. They're dictating design through a twisted "survival of the not-quite-fittest" form of natural selection that will lead to a long-term decay in quality, guaranteed. If you think some of today's offerings are garbage, just you wait...
Yeah, yeah, you want some justification for this assertion. Even though I'm in Soapbox mode, I can see that, so I will explain - only not just yet. First, I'm going to make four general points that I can string together to build my case. Bear with me on this...
The Newbie Stream
Here's a quote from Victorian author Charles Dickens:
Annual income £20/-/-, annual expenditure £19/19/6, result happiness.
Annual income £20/-/-, annual expenditure £20/-/6, result misery.
Annual income £0, annual expenditure £20,000,000, result There.com.
OK, so maybe he didn't actually write that last line.
What Dickens was actually saying is that, so long as you don't lose more than you gain, things are good. In our particular case, we're not talking olde English money, we're talking newbies, although ultimately, the two amount to one and the same thing.
Now I'm sorry to be the bringer of bad news, people, but here goes anyway: even for the most compelling of virtual worlds, players will eventually leave. Don't blame me, I didn't invent reality.
If oldbies leave, newbies are needed to replace them. The newbies must arrive at the same rate (or better) that the oldbies leave; otherwise, the population of the virtual world will decline until eventually no-one will be left to play it.
Point #1: Virtual worlds live or die by their ability to attract newbies
Newbie Preconceptions
Another quote, this time from the 1989 movie Field of Dreams:
If we build it, they will come.
Well, maybe if you're an Iowa corn farmer who hears voices inside your head telling you to construct a baseball stadium, but otherwise...
A virtual world can be fully functioning and free of bugs, but still be pretty well devoid of players. There are plenty of non-gameplay reasons why this could happen, but I'm going to focus on the most basic: lack of appeal. Some virtual worlds just aren't attractive to newbies. There are some wonderfully original, joyous virtual worlds out there. They're exquisitely balanced, rich in depth, abundant in breadth, alive with subtleties, and full of wise, interesting, fun people who engender an atmosphere of mystique and marvel without compare. Newbies would love these virtual worlds, but they're not going to play them.
Why not? Because they're all text. Newbies don't do text.
Newbies come to virtual worlds with a set of preconceptions acquired from other virtual worlds; or, failing that, from other computer games; or, failing that, from gut instinct. They will not consider virtual worlds that confront these expectations if there are others around that don't.
Put another way, if a virtual world has a feature that offends newbies, the developers will have to remove that feature or they won't get any newbies. This is irrespective of what the oldbies think: they may adore a feature, but if newbies don't like it then (under point #1) eventually there won't be anyone left to adore it.
Point #2: Newbies won't play a virtual world that has a major feature they don't like.
Not-So-Newbies
Here's another quote (kind of), from a private study of 1,100 players by the Themis Group. Themis's researchers asked veterans of 3 or more virtual worlds how many mon
That is perhaps the most draconian registration process ever. Feel free to use my info:
user: numlocked@gmail.com
pass: 78b9602a
2+ ghz processor... check ... check ... check ... check .. check ... check ... Check?
$160 video card
17 inch monitor
512mb + of ram
Screamin' Soundcard
Highspeed cable modem
Telnet client
Conenction to MUD that's been running since 1990... CHECK?!
The implications are correct, the best games have been around for years, designed and maintained by old hands... and they're text-based.
Trying to use sarcasm in text-based forums does not work.
The first multi-user online "Dungeon" wasn't bartle's MUD. It would have either been Empire on Plato, or the People's Computer Company's "Public Caves", both from the late '70s. The latter wasn't concurrent multi-user, but operated as a bullten board rather than a chat system (as did most online sustems at the time), but the interactions between people were very similar to the ones on MUDs.
The author repeatedly uses the phrase "virtual world" as if MMOG's are the only type of virtual world that exists. Please keep in mind that there are many virtual worlds in existence that are not necessarily games.
> I would of read the article, but I'm not signing up for Gamasutra.
"Would of"? Maybe you should sign up for Grammarsutra.
Sorry but I had to laugh at this article. Newbies, real definition - players, are ruining mmorpgs with their demands.
Get real.
Many MMORPGs succeed. There are just many more that will not. This is not the fault of the players. What this ranter totally missed out on is the fact that players are no longer accepting excuses.
Look at Horizons, look at AC2, or look at original AO. Simply put, if you try to pull one over on the users you will get caught and they will punish you for it. Funcom made right, Turbine and Artifact Entertainment never did, those two deluded themselves into believing they were right and the players were the issue.
We no longer have to accept half-assed attempts because we have so many more choices. We are also seeing some big names getting ready to debut in this arena (well FF is already out) and it will prove that games that are developed by professionals (read: they don't have a preconception that they are godly - and they have expereience in writing WORKING software) can and will succeed.
Blaming the users, hell I am surprised he doesn't work for the Themis group.
While I am on MY soapbox. Here is one other thing that kills game, designers holding discussion sites hostage. This happens extensively on VN (IGN) boards as Turbine requires VN mods to remove messages that criticize Turbine or its people. Its good to know mods who can pass along policies, it provided a better insight into the reasons behind my problems with VN and those of others who went through similar abuse.
Combine with fake interviews where developers require questions to be preapproved, IRC chats that only cover inane questions, and you have many of the issues that cause games to fail.
In other words, its not the players, it never was.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
I agree with some of the points made in the article, however, I have to disagree with the opinions expressed regarding permanent player death. I tend to get very attached to the characters I roll in MMORPG games, and I would likely cancel my account if a character I had invested 8 months of time developing was permanently killed due to a bad sequence of events.
--It's Pimptastic!--
For more about Prof. Bartle check his site. He knows what he's talking about and "Designing Virtual Worlds" was thoroughly informative.
It'll be interesting to see how Roma Victor turns out since he's apparently involved in that, among other things.
You know, the ones played by oldbies that DO KNOW how to enjoy their experience!
i.e. "MUD for oldbies. By oldbies".
_OR_ the MUD could have different "esoteric" levels, where people in the inner circles would be able to play with different rules than the newbies.
They're designing a world that allows for players to coexist and thus increase their revenue.
Highly competetive games, especially shooters, are always being outdated by newer games and technology. Why frag (or be fragged by,) someone in Quake II when you could frag someone in Unreal Tournament 2004.
At the same time, in order to be a top player in any of those games, you must have devoted a large amount of time to being good at it. Natural coordination and skill not with standing.
However, in these "newb" MMOG's that are less competetive, and allow for less dedicated or skillful players to still perform and play with the others, the designer's guarantee a player base which will migrate less easily. Thus, in the long run, increasing their revenue.
The aforementioned decay in quality is a side effect of this shift. But if you're not a power gamer, this decay might not be easily perceived for some time.
http://extensions.roachfiend.com/index.php#bugmeno t
But you're not going to have any impact in a non-instanced world either.
You interact with people in the instanced universe the same way as you do with the rest of your groupmates when you're doing something grouped in a non-instanced universe.
The only difference is that when you and your groupmates/guildmates decide to Whack the Foozle of Bigness, you actually get to whack the foozle, rather than stand in line for six hours waiting for your turn to camp the spawn. (Or worse, stand in line for six hours, only to find that you've had your chance to WtFoB stolen by the group standing in line behind you.)
No disrespect intended, Bartle -- but you're wrong on this point. Maybe you're right for a game with 500 players, but spawn-camping doesn't scale. By the time you've got 5000 players in a world, instancing isn't a noob-friendly thing, it's a veteran-friendly thing.
Where's the sense of achievement? It's in the loot, badge, bio entry, or shared experience that says "We whacked the Biggest Foozle In The Game" Not in "We camped the spawn for three days before getting a chance to whack it."
If a game sucks so hard that the only sense of accomplishment for veterans comes from having the patience to camp the spawn for three days, rather than actually doing the goddamn quest, then that game sucks.
And if any MMORPG developer is put off by the corollary to "We whacked the biggest foozle in the game" (which is "...so far, and now the Developers have to give us something new to do"), well, tough. If you want me to pay you $10/month for a year, then by God, you'd better give me a $120 worth of new foozles to whack over the course of that year.
Whacking bigger foozles is boring? Hire a writer to make it interesting. Single-player RPGs can give me 20 hours of enjoyment for $50. Most of that cost is sunk into developing the engine, not writing the story. If you're a MMORPG developer, hire a friggin' writer. Soap Opera writers write banal stories that seem to be able to draw in viewers for periods of time measured in decades. Why have MMORPG developers (who have access to better tools and far more interesting universes) failed to achieve "soap opera" level of literary ability?
I think MUDs still have appeal to old schoolers because we grew up on the dos promp and the pong paddle. eye candy was when you got a balloon to move across the screen after 6 hours of typing Poke and Peek commands on your trusty C64. MUDs work, because they focus was a story. Deep, rich, and twisty. That was their only outlet for creativity. The visuals were left to your imagination. Pen and Paper D&D was/is the incarnation of the MUD. Every now and then, you will find a game that breaks the mold through and through, and resets the bar a notch higher. But those are rare, and more and more gamers are becoming more and more jaded in their expectations. A classic can be made in a week (ie. Bejeweled) and a bomb can take years to pop (ie Daikatana) so what do we know... Tastes are transient, technology moves on, but a good story is always a good story.
haha
We controlled our own expansion sprinkled constructive input from players. Players did not dictate our design. Of course, we were "free" to play so nothing was owed to the players. This is perhaps the key difference - not having to catering paying customers. So, while I agree partially with Bartle, I disagree that there is nothing we can do about it... make your MMOG games free. :)
Speak truth to power.
I've been MUSH*ing since 1995 or so,which makes me... well, not all that much of a newbie (though neither am I really a vet, compared to some others I know :). And this is my view of things, directed mostly at MU* community (text-based one). MUSHes are relatively easy to set up these days, and not terribly difficult or expensive to run- text-based games have low server requirements and free off-the-shelf systems such as PennMUSH or TinyMUSH are quite simple to configure even for newbies.
What does that mean? That means there are no real barriers for any n00b wishing to try his hand at MU* administration - if you want it, you can do it. And then, everything comes down to creativity, imagination - and lots of patience. I've seen great MU*s created by a handful of newbies - they were sufficiently down-to-earth to create a small gameworld to start with, paying attention to playability and setting. And then there were others (i.e. me) who decided they want to turn their fave P'n'P RPG into a MUSH (I tried creating Paranoia MUSH, followed by HOL. Disasters both, to boot.) However, as opposed to (semi)professional graphic MMORPG designers who frequently are not too familiar with RP concepts, most of people trying their hands at MUSHes do have at least some amount of tabletop roleplaying experience.
And I've digressed and started losing my thread. Anyway, my ponit (if only I can remember it):
Experience does not a RPer make - although it does improve one. There are people who've been MMORPGing for years, and they're still as clueless as they were in the beginning. And then there are newbies who will give you some truly great RPing experiences. Contrary to the featured article's statement, newbie-created MMORPGs don't necessarily repulse players - to the contrary, they're often refreshingly new and original, and a newbie is far more likely to accept creative input than someone who considers himself a badass old gamer. And then there is the matter of evolution - old and experienced players have, frequently, set-in-stone ideas of how setting and gamesystem should look - they had years of playing to develop their preferences. Newbies, however, are not so adamant. As a consequence of that, newbie-run MMORPG is far more likely to evolve through player input, changing into something closer to players' wishes, even if glitchy, whereas veteran-staffed MMORPG might posess a very detailed setting and glitch-free gaming system - but be a far cry from what players actually want.
--
*MUSH = Multi User Shared Hallucination (more RP-oriented offspring of MUDs)
'...computers in the future may have only 1000 vacuum tubes and perhaps weigh 1.5 tons...' Popular Mechanics, 03/49'
You are absolutely right!
Take a look at SWG or any other sony MMO game, they're released when they still have a long way to go to get out of beta and there are enough MMO's out now to where we as players don't have to put up with half baked MMO games.
It isn't the players! And you don't have to be a 20 year MUD vetran to make one. SEE: WoW
But I don't think the user is being blamed here; at least, that's not what I got from the article. It seemed more to me that the problem is that the game developers must respond in sometimes less-than-ideal ways to cope with market pressures. These pressures do come from the users, but it's not their fault. They're just consumers.
He suggests several ways of reacting in a way that is beneficial for the game as a whole, also; something no MMORPG has been good at (yet).
I played EQ for about four years before recently quitting; and many of the symptoms of decay Mr. Bartle enumerates are easy enough to see, at least in my experience with that game.
The author is guilty of exactly the same things that he blames the newbies for, and his arguments are anything but airtight.
1) Permanent Death. Okay, the author is convinced that permanent death is better. I'd like to see an example of a permanent-death game that did better than one that didn't have it? He can theorize all he likes that it's better for game design, but the simple fact is that nothing has yet shown that it in fact is.
2) Instancing. Again, the author is convinced that instancing is evil. A lot of people might agree. However, "instancing" is a very, very big concept. One can argue that the separate servers in mmorpgs are all "Instances", but that's hardly something most people would call particularly harmful. There's a whole range of instancing from one-person-per-instance to hundreds-per-instance.
The author never manages to show that he's doing anything more than what he accuses newbies of, since while he claims that there are things that are long-term-bad that he likes, he doesn't actually back up such assertions. Then, as above, his examples are ridiculously under-supported.
The ringing of the division bell has begun... -PF
Amén
The entire article tries to take on a position of authority on the subject, but provides no concrete proof for any of its assumptions, and it makes many assumptions, and only manages to come across as elitist.
For example, the author describes permadeath:
Nevermind the fact that in a modern, treadmill-driven MMO, adding permadeath would also lead to in-game cowardice (because no one wants to lose the character they spent the past 6 months building up), much grief (because no one wants to die to the lowbie mob that aggroed them while they had a lag spike), and makes the assumption that players need to have their characters forcibly changed so they don't grow board and leave (many people actually like their characters, and grow attached to them over the bazillion hours they spend playing them).
What's even more absurd is the assumption that killing off a player's character and forcing him to play the same content over repeatedly is somehow preferable to one, constantly growing character.
Here's a hint: if people want to replay the same content from a different point of view, they can make a new character without having their old one killed off.
No doubt, there's some truth to his points, but the way it's presented, the author comes across as a troll.
The article has quite a few objectionable "truths". For example, permanent death might be nice for the economy and the world itself but it's f###ing frustrating for the player himself. MMOs are timesinks, to particxipate in the endgame you need to spend months as an average player. Losing all that progress because one day you overestimated yourself and got killed is REALLY frustrating.
Or teleporting. Sure, encouraging people to make new friends is nice but the main problem is that spending hours running from one point on the map to another just plain out isn't fun. Instancing is important because virtual worlds have an extreme overpopulation of adventurers and there just can't be enough dungeons for everybody (and even if, people would restrict themselves to two or three that give the best "loot").
Fun and world integrity don't always go hand in hand and instead of looking at things from a global perspective, try to look at how the player perceives the world because a bad perception will result in a bad reaction. Make sure the downtimes are short and the players have fun, fun should be the first goal of any game.
Many MMOs tend to neglect the beginning, pretty much telling you to work until you are someone. That's a harsh welcome. Why should I spend days to reach an adequate level in an MMO when there are games available that allow you to jump in and play? A game must be fun from t=0 if it wants to attract newbies.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
Hrm.
On the one hand, he says that Instancing is an example of a short term good, long term bad design decision.
On the other hand, if you disagree with him on this, then it's clear that you're one of those players who can't recognise a bad design feature. Yet he fails to satisfactorily explain why Instancing is actually a bad design decision.
Nice argument there, Bartle.
I personally think Instancing is a good thing all round, if it's used wisely. City of Heroes does a good job there, and I can think of ways it could have been used effectively by other MMORPGs (Star Wars Galaxies spring to mind).
-EvilMagnus
I haven't heard of too many decisions where governments and especially businesses would make a minor sacrifice to affect a larger benefit in the future.
1. Permanent Death
I disagree that it is a given that this is a naturally good thing. I do agree that there are some players who prefer to play this way, and while I'm not one of them, I can understand how that could be a thrilling experience. I, on the other hand, am looking to enjoy myself and experience the content. He claims that by adding permanent death content would be more replayable because we'd see it through the eyes of man characters instead of uber-character. Like I said, I think there's a case to be made for a permanent death option, but please, this is not it. It's precisely because I don't want to repeat the same damn content over and over that I don't want permanent death to be a fact of life. He overlooks the simplest answer of all: have both options available, a la Diablo II's Hardcore Mode. Mark these players out as special somehow too, so we can marvel at their Hardcore-ness if need be. I don't mind. But don't prevent me from seeing the cooler upper-level spells and areas because you think non-permanent death removes your eliteness.
2. Instances
I'm not sure what he was smoking on this one. Instances are fine. I've been playing WoW for three months and I've rarely ever gone into an instance with the same people even twice. I meet random people and head in. Instances prevent a far, far worse concern that he completely ignores, namely the camping of quest-integral mobs and items. Because yeah, it's FUN to hang around at the end of a dungeon for 8 hours for that rare boss spawn. Just ask old-time EQ players.
Even his arguments against make little sense: that it will fence players off from each other. Moronic. Again, in WoW, there is maybe one, sometimes two such instances in a zone. Instances probably make up, what, 4% of the game's area? You spend maybe 5% of your total playing time in one? And this fences you off? Or, we could let everyone camp mobs, and a fun dungeon experience could be ruined by group of asshats spamming "You are teh sux0r" and corpse camping you. Yeah, that's fun. His four points about newbies may be true. I can see some truth in his argument. But he still can't use that to prove which features are inherently good or bad. That's ridiculous. Of course, since I'm disagreeing with him, I'm almost certainly a 'newb'. Well, he can think what he wants, just like I will think what I want.
Wood Shavings!
- Godai
"survival of the not-quite-fittest"
Alrighty, it already happens in America, what else is new?
Online backup with Mozy, sounds like Ozzie, but more!
The article is full of interesting issues and correctly points to the problem of bad design.
The real issue is Implementors and how they react to the inevitable whining by the players. No matter what you do, players will complain about something.
Here are the reactions from implementors:
1. Ignore the Whining
2. Attack the whining player back
3. Carefully consider the players complain and act or
4. Ignore everyone and do it your own way.
I mention these because A combination of 3 and 4 are the most effective way of creating and maintaining a game.
Now lets delve into the truth of reality.. and fantasy. No matter how great your graphics are they cannot compare to the ability of the mind(imagination). Text based games are much more "graphical" than any true graphical game due to the amazing brain. It will take many decades before graphics can come even close to matching the brain in processing.
What does this mean overall? It means that you should find a Good text based game with Implementors willing to listen and come up with original ideas.
I recommend The Mage's Lair at www.mageslair.net port 7060 as it has been around many years.. and yes.. like the article said it does not lead to many muds as people tend to stay around.
Spend money or play a better type game in Muds.
I can program myself out of a Hello World Contest!!
Take Everquest for instance. This game has been running so long that the people in "one age" aren't the same people in "the next age".
In the beginning the imfamous idea foisted by the creators was called "The Vision". It was basically a creedo of how they thought the game should behave in form and function. It wasn't perfect (for instance non-magic classes were left devoid of any extra skills) but it was a solid framework to start from.
But as time moved on, these people who created "The Vision" left to do other things and this was slowly dismantled. Each expansion that has come afterwards seems to have gotten more haphazard with adding features. Things are added to the game by designers who have little knowledge of the hsitory of the game (or possibly don't care) which turns the game into a hodpodge of skills and monsters that don't grow with time.
Although showing its age and probably on its last legs, Everquest at this point is shaken ever expansion due to this effect. Designers only seem to know or care about their current creation instead of creating a solid and sound system that will stand the test of time.
It isn't so much that MMOGs are designed by Newbs. They are designed by people who probably aren't going to be working on the same project a year from now.
I have this image of two old geezers sipping cocktails and trying to play some MMOG..
Okay, so for us MUD-less ones, how do we get started? What are some popular MUDs? Or is that even the right question?
I think part of the problem with MUDs is that there's a larger learning curve than for getting into Everquest or FFXI. So, would some MUD veterans like to give some suggestions on how to reach MUD enlightenment?
Who said Freedom was Fair?
Time-base skills..
The main example I know of is a game I play eve-online..
Basically it is real-time skills with levels, each level of each skill is progressive in taking a longer amount of time.
Some users choose miner/builder skills and go that route, other go solid fighting. But you do cap-out and because the times are progressively longer to train everyone at a certain point reach the same level (basically, but in their respective/specialized fields..)
After playing some of the others like Lineage and EQ etc.. I think this way is better..
For some skills at huge level they can take days and days to train up (in many cases as long to train up the all the prior levels in that skill).. The game does not require constant play to stay competetive which for me as a programmer is beautiful because I get obsessive over games but still need to maintain a real life.
A new player can come in and be competetive (except actual player skill) with an oldtimer within four months.. Which in other games with players years old is just not even remotely possible..
Anyway, good game
anime+manga together at last.. in real time.
As a teenager, I weened off playing computer games and role-playing games while pursuing "soft" drugs. Unfortunately I started having a lot of problems with my new "friends." I don't wanna preach, but really do regret finding unhealthy alternatives, rather than healthy alternatives to gaming
WoW is created by EQ "ubers".
The problem with MUDs/MUSHs/etc.etc.etc. these days is that players don't have to wait up 'til 2am to try to connect to an obscure computer housed in the south east of England via an X25 PAD using a long string of numbers and then try to use the small number of suspended connections before someone else did.
:-)
Hmmm..
PAD> CALL 0000 4960 0000 1
[2653,2653]
MIST
Ahhhh..
If newbies had this they'd be very happy with all the long-term good inovations.. as long as they didn't get instantly killed by an archwiz with a chip on their shoulder, that is.
Agrajag: "Oh no, not again!"
I agree with most of this article, but I think that even experienced players drive bad design in MMO games. The reason is that almost all players will prefer a feature that helps them over one that makes for a good world.
Player death is a good example - I can see how it would make the game world better, however the idea of continually accreting power is incredibly seductive. Of course, the root problem may be the huge range of powel levels in these games, if I have to play for months just to get to a stage I can challenge any interesting monsters I'm certainly not going to accept player death.
Nuclear War Mud
/. not like me much anymore... *sigh*
http://mud.astrakan.hig.se/index2.html
Cyberpunk type mud... old and established and has an automated tour guide if a live one is not available.
If you want a head start on the mud experience, start spending 14+hrs a day at the computer, ignore friends and family, and leave your phone off the hook (flashback to dial-up days) so nobody can reach you.
If you are a student, drop all your classes as well. They get in the way of real mudding excellence.
Posted anonymous, cause somebody at
For many years, I played a small MMORPG called Drakkar. Drak had a couple hundred players, a well established social structure, and in general a great community of people to play with. There was great respect for the few players who had the dedication to master the game, and these players generally acted in an honorable fashion to inspire others to do the same. The game went through several changes of hands, as with such a low subscriber base it was far from a money maker. Eventually it wound up back in the hands of its original creator, who had become an EQ addict since selling the game off. He saw the success of EQ and saw dollars and cents, so started changing the game. Balances were destroyed, characters were nerfed, advancement was greatly speeded, massive sections were added to the game...
And it no longer "felt" like Drakkar. Old-time players left in droves. Players who had been dedicated to this game, building characters for YEARS, left in disgust. The Drakkar community now had quick turnover, rude players, no social structure... everything that made it a great game was gone. Yes, there were more subscriptions, yes it might have been making money, but the game itself started to suck. Now, people start and might play for six months, then get bored. New players are the only thing keeping subscriptions up, and as the graphics and engine become more dated and bloated, the game will undoubtedly die. If it had kept its original flavor, I have a feeling the old-time dedicated players, such as myself, would have stayed with it for many years to come, and while not profiting, the game would have survived as an example of the really cool communities that can develop on the internet. Now, it's just another example of a big pile of filth thrown out there to milk a percieved cash cow. Shame, really... it was a great game, once.
I will give Bartle his due - his contribution to game/social theory when it applied to MUD, the 'Bartle Article' was a damned fine piece of work.
However, since then he's sort of gone downhill, as he were stuck in the idea that the sort of gameplay and dynamics of text-based MUDs would translate over beyond their original environment.
We've got this article, which any halfway experienced MMORPGer would easily decry as completely.. idiotic?
Other past articles by him have been along similar lines, proposing techniques and ideas for the new era that may sound nice, but are in truth completely unworkable. Just browse his site and see.
One of his game 'sketches' even describes a sex-based MUD idea, based entirely off preset commands, RPG-style character builders (including penis size and fetish!), and 'urges'. An interesting idea, but... poor. Juvenile, even.
I'm just disappointed by the work Bartle's put out since his 'Players who Suit MUDs'. I was expecting some more profound insights and got.. the banality of the common blogger. Mr. Bartle, you can do better.
"Point #1: Virtual worlds live or die by their ability to attract newbies
Point #2: Newbies won't play a virtual world that has a major feature they don't like.
Point #3: Players judge all virtual worlds as a reflection of the one they first got into.
Point #4: Many players will think some poor design choices are good."
Substitute Linux for MMOG and the above also fits.
"But like the article stated, it's pretty hard to keep everyone happy because they all want something in the virtual world to suit their abilities to win.
Additionally, newbies are always lost in the first instance they arrive in the city, so it requires a lot of tutorials and guides to get them settle in in order to introduce the real depth of the game to them."
Ditto here too.
Ha! It occurs to me that Slashdot and similar "news" forums suffer from exactly the same problems that the article describes for MUDs. I think its a situation that arises for any public network, including the Internet itself.
A lot of what he says in the article applies to all on-line communities. Prodigy, Compuserve, AOL, they all suffer from this ebb and flow of oldbies and newbies. One case in point is this community Gaia Online. It's a simple world built around phpBB with some clever avatar scripting built in (among other things). It's currently still in beta but has suffered through various periods of transition where oldbies will up and leave, exhibiting the same behavior as the author stated in his article.
AnimeNEXT anime convention
The examples reveal this guy to be just as tainted as the gamers he disdains. Let's run it down:
Permanent Death
He lists all kinds of advantages of a Permanent Death world, and they are real and worht considering, but he conveniently ingores the downside: PD discourages risk-taking. Once people play a character long enough, they become invested in the success of that character, and want to keep playing it. Therefore, they will avoid any challenge which they are not certain to survive. Fantasy adventures are supposed to be about getting in over your head once in a while, not simply chopping up little bunnies with your sword often enough to be called a hero.
Instancing:
He laments that this will make you feel like you are not interacting with the world, but how is that any different from "monster farming", where you are still making zero impact on the gaming world. Raid the orc city as many times as you like, and wipe them all out including the king. In five minutes, they will all still be there. Instancing reduces lag and allowes you and your team to go on small adventures where your characters are the sole heroes, and return to the main gathering places as champions who went off and did something where help could not be called for. It works remarkably well, unless you have been trained to believe that this is not The Way It Should Be.
Teleportation:
Anybody who traveled by foot and boat from Erud to Kelethin back in the early days of Everquest before 'ports became easy to come by will be able to tell you that teleportation is a TERRIFIC idea. Few things in a Graphical MMORPG can possibly be more boring that running, by yourself, across miles and miles of terrain which you've seen before. You can't even get up and fetch a cup of coffee while doing it, as you need to be careful to avoid running into unwanted conflicts. This is Not Fun. Why would anybody want to play a game which is Not Fun?
Banks:
In any convincing reality, people should have places to keep stuff besides their pockets and backpacks. City of Heroes has "guild halls" planed for this purpose, which will even be exposed to the chance of burglary raids by PC super-villians, adding yet another dimension of interesting game-play.
This line was telling:
Player: You don't have teleporting! How can I rejoin my group if I miss a session?
Designer: Well gee, maybe by omitting teleportation I'm kinda dropping a hint that you can have a meaningful gaming experience, without always having to group with the same people of the same level and run a treadmill the whole time?
Look, I have often enjoyed meeting somebody from Bumblefuck, Egypt and striking up a friendly conversation followed by a couple hours of gaming together, but most of us play multi-player games for the sake of enjoying the company of steady associations, either among friends from outside the game, or among a tight group of friends who meet in-game (which is the whole reason people form guilds in the first place.) Anything which makes it more difficult to team up with people you know and like being around should probably be considered a design flaw.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
I have played several MMORPG's
I do understand and like some of your points but they are being implanted in MMORPG's.
My comments to the another of the would be, you
Sound like something I heard from Rev. Jessie Jackson
The elected officials are caving to the people
1) Wish is supposed to be a non instance ultra MMORPG's with non-static story line. http://www.mutablerealms.com/
2) If you want to play a game where you die and you are dead play Diablo 2 hard core.
3) Quit whining, if you do not like the MMORPG's then make you own game.
PS: The free market dose wonderful things.
I was going to mod you down, but felt a response was in order. In case you hadn't noticed, there is the typical volume of 'registration required' complaints. This isn't unique to NYT, and in this regard Slashdot is depressingly consistent.
So your post is (-1) Uninformed. Sentiment is 100% correct though.
MMO combat will be broken for quite some time. How can you provide a combat system with depth of design and provide multiple builds, like SWG, but also include balance between them in a rpg game? You definatly dont let the n00b's complaining dictate the changes! The mods to the system have to come from the experienced players! If you let the masses of (required-for-survival as the article states) nubbles decide the combat system, you almost ensure that a system of depth and balance will never evolve! You will always be nerfing and removing the wrong (skills/feats)to the tune of the nooblet whining.
To use a very popular game, Counter-Strike, as an example: Immagine if the CS team changed the game to suit it for players that have less than 6 months of FPS/CS experience. Result: The weapons and tactics the experienced players use that give the game depth are removed (AWP for example), and the game sucks.
---
My sig was stolen - the insurance company replaced it with this one.
Bartle mentions there.com as an example. When I was feeling restless at my job, I interviewed at there.com. During the interview they asked me a bunch of simple programming questions and then they asked me if I knew perlDB, I asked them if they were really designing a MOG or just some small scale accounting software (at this point I knew I did not want to work for this clueless company). MOGs are notorious for high load on resources (especially at peak times), using anything less than C/C++ with thin layer DB client (DB in at least a small cluster to start) is just asking for trouble.
:)
I asked them what they thought of the Bartle book (Designing Virtual Worlds one) and the guy never heard of it, nor did he hear of the mud-dev lists. From what I understood, they had marketing and sales tightly involved in the design process. I got out of there as fast as I could. It's like you are rocking on a chair and you lean just a little too far, that's how it felt.
Their highlight: They offered in-game items for sale for real money, however most you could buy was a dune buggy and some flashier clothes that you could use to impress members of the opposite sex (who were most likely members of the same sex). Youcan do this in real life and actually have a slight chance of getting laid.
"The author repeatedly uses the phrase "virtual world" as if MMOG's are the only type of virtual world that exists. Please keep in mind that there are many virtual worlds in existence that are not necessarily games."
:)
We're living in one right now.
What do you mean? We still bitch about the NY Times registration every time there's a NYT story. In fact, many people make it a point to bitch about the registration in the actual article posting. ie. first born required.
I remember when legal used to mean lawful, now it means some kind of loophole. - Leo Kessler
Me> Hi, I'm new here, I don't know anything about MUDding
Old Timer> Okay, well it's pretty simple. Just follow me.
> (Old Timer) Exits.
Me> Where did he go? How do I follow him? This sucks.
Likewise with instancing, if instead of letting a party kill a monster in their own space on the server, simply design the content so that the resources don't need to be campped. Come up with some completely different solution.
The arguments I've seen against perma-death and for instancing all seem to assume that a game that chooses to implement these features differently from the mainstream would still make the same fundamental design mistakes that require you to spend 2 years of mind-numbing tedium to build up a character. If you can have fun with the character right off the bat, and camping resources were effectively impossible, then perma-death becomes a lot more acceptable and instancing becomes unnecessary.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
...what if you keep the newbies and the oldies separate? Maybe there could be some kind of crossing over between newbie and oldie worlds or something. Give newbies a chance to understand the world first, then "let them" join the more mature gamers.
.. that you get your kicks by ruining the fun of other people.
Boy, you're *so* krad!
Great, so he argues that the designers should force me to experience the things that I hate the very most about MMORPGs. I love being able to play with just my friends, because in my experience 90% of other people on a given online anything suck. Occasionally I will attempt to group with other people, and occasionally I will find a good one, but good god, don't force me to play with B0N3D3WD and PL4T3D00D.
I like teleportation because I really don't want to waste my real time spending a half hour running across a massive continent to get somewhere (maybe the first time, okay) just because you really want me to have to see the trees that you placed out there and you want to slow down my consumption of content with another useless treadmill.
The funny thing is that I mostly agree with his 1-4 premises, but then he just uses those to justify lazy designer/implementer decisions. If I read him correctly, City of Heroes sucks horribly (and just happens to be fun as hell) and Star Wars Galaxies really is a much better game (that just happens to be a tedious grind).
Let's not forget what I want here. I want long term gratification through increased skills and bling bling, but more importantly small chunks of immediate gratification. I don't have time to devote eight hours a day to an MMORPG. If you insist on making my hour of play unfun because of your silly ideas of how I should be playing, I will indeed cancel my subscription.
This particularly deals with the argument against instancing. While I would agree that a wholesale implementation of instancing would likely become bland and tiresome after a while, a nice blend (such as that expected out of World of Warcraft and a few others still in the works) offers the best of both worlds in my opinion. However, one of his arguments against instancing is illustrated through the simulated conversation between the player (assumed noobie) and a developer. The author tries to make the point that making new friends = good and doing otherwise = bad. I (currently playing FFXI) sure as hell could care less about making new friends with the vast majority of the people that play with me... and yet I still manage to have plenty of fun and have a very diverse adventuring/questing experience even when not playing with my friends. Then again, maybe I'm just an exception to the rule or something... I am a Meyers-Brigg INTJ with a huge emphasis on the I (even scored "perfect" Introvert on two seperate occasions while under hypnosis... not sure if that skews the results though).
And I am also skipping some economic points that the author was, IMHO, correct on.
Point #1: Virtual worlds live or die by their ability to attract newbies...
All games do that. That's why, as the richness of games has improved, there are tutorials in Single player and other non-mmo games.Unfortunately, without a "mod scene", traditional games eventually use up the supply of newbies around. But on launch day, everybody is a newbie to a given game. Additionally, this really contradict the issues in point two (below)
Maybe the author means "settings", and not virtual worlds.
Why not? Because they're all text. Newbies don't do text.
Apparently, niether do "oldbies". It is not as if newbies play graphical games, regardless of quality, and seasoned players switch to text adventuring, du to the wide variety of quality text games out there. Text games are simply of limited appeal to the players. The most hardcore game players I know all spend most of their time in graphically-rich games, although a few spend a little time (and virtually no money) on text gaming.
So, a newbie to a virtual world has more preconsived notions than another, more experienced player? This article is getting ridiculous...
or, failing that, from other computer games or, failing that, from gut instinct.
Or, failing that, brain-lasers run by space clowns , or failing that somewhere else...
In any work of fiction, the target audience has a preconcieved notion or two when experienceing/interacting. And anything that bucks against that will cause some friction. In compelling, or carefully designed work, that may be forgiven by the critically thinking, and overlooked by by less expectation-based audiences (read: younger). Think about it, there needs to be a clear establishment of fantasy in any work that revolves around it. The "Putt-Putt" games overcome this handicap by targeting 4 year olds, who just like talking cars enough to not care. Silent Hill overcomes this with characterization and careful timing. Quake III overcomes this by offering wild eye-candy a heavily-brushed stylization. All three are dealing with offering something fictional, and the fact that the users know it isnt real. I fail to see how a newbie would differe from any other level of player in this.
They will not consider virtual worlds that confront these expectations if there are others around that don't.
Bull. I have explained the premise of "D" to two players simultaneously, both of who were familiar with platform-sty games exclusively. One was interested, one wasn't.
Put another way, if a virtual world has a feature that offends newbies, the developers will have to remove that feature or they won't get any newbies.
Almost wrong, bit not completely...some mmo-games offer different features, or more specifically, more demanding and divers features for experienced players, allowing newvies to get what they want without ruining the game for seasoned players.
This is irrespective of what the oldbies think: they may adore a feature, but if newbies don't like it then (under point #1) eventually there won't be anyone left to adore it.
And in his brillian formula the author has forgotten a vital thing: it is cheaper to keep an existing player than it is to advertise and attract a new player. Also important, disgruntled "oldbies" will poison the reputation of a gam
Looks good for your age..
The market pressures are encouraging innovation, not wholesale cloning.
It goes like this: One day, a massively successful game (Everquest) is released. People play it for hours and spend a gazillion dollars on fees.
Then, every software company clones it, probably badly. A few succeed.
Now, for a new MMORPG to get any attention, there has to be something interesting about it. That could be just name recognition (World of Warcraft), or it could be the developer consciously breaking out of the mold (Guild Wars...which has heavy instancing, so Bartle probably hates it).
The point is, when a design team sits down to make an MMORPG now, they need to stand out from the crowd. The easiest way to do that is to write something that's got a major difference. The forums will be all over it, people will be asking "How will they make permadeath viable?", the gamers will hunger for press releases and demos, and even people that say "MadHobbit's game will suck because it has permadeath" are still out there passing the name around.
By the time it's actually released, there'll be a few demos, and if you've done your job right at -all-, the online gaming rags will be saying "MadHobbit's innovative new game is a refreshing break from the repetitive gameplay of the rest of the genre".
And people *will* buy it, and if it's actually a good idea, they'll have fun (because that's what defines a good idea in a game), and you can buy a swimming pool and fill it with money. (Step 3: Profit...)
Disclaimer: I am NOT an expert on MMORPGs. I have never designed a MUD, or even played one for very long. I have never tried EverQuest or any other pay-per-month MMORPG.
/specifically/ to create a character and keep it, and watch it progress. For these people, the goal of the game is to steer their character to success in life by (completing all the quests / gaining an honorific title / becoming a PvP champion / whatever). Does that make them permanent "newbies"? Does that make their decision to grow a single character a "wrong" decision? No, it means that they aren't the same kind of player with the same goals as Bartle.
/he/ cannot design a viable, long-term world with non-permanent death does not mean that it's a bad idea. It just means that he cannot reconcile it with his idea of what an online world should be.
/excellent/ online world for people who viewpoints similar to his. But there's a universe that's a lot larger than his world, despite the fact that he can't see it.
This article looks like nothing more than whining from the old guard. Bartle talks about "a virtual world" as if there is some set idea of what this thing should be, and that there is a right way to do it and a wrong way to do it.
Bullshit. There are as many kinds of players as there are individual people on the Earth. Bartle thinks that everyone wants to play the same kind of game that he does, and he's embarassingly incorrect.
For example, perma-death. Bartle argues that it is a poor design decision, and that people who have gotten attached to their characters are only attached because of the game's poor design. Bartle has obviously never heard of The Sims.
Many people play online games
There is also an interesting (and dangerous) psychological aspect to permanent death. Virtual avatars are a way in which people express themselves. A player may build up a character to specifically match some aspect (or desired aspect) of his or her real life. For example, someone might role-play a flirtatious character because he (or she) feels socially rejected in the real world. What do you think the effect is when that character dies in a permenant and irrevocable way?
Perma-death is just one example, of course. But Bartle doesn't back up any of his claims with anything more than "that's not the way I think it should be done." Just because
And comparing the sales figures for The Sime to the total subscription count of every MMORPG / MUD in existance, I think that Bartle is strictly in the minority. I'm sure that he's capable of designing an
I think online games can take a cue from pencil and paper RPG's here. This problem is more pronounced in pencil and paper RPG's because the new character you make after your old one dies *must* be able to be a member of the same party, or else you end up being unable to play. (since there is only one "party" that the GM is running, unlike the computerized "GM" of a MMORPG.)
Well, the way a lot of RPG's fix this is that, while character death is permanent, that doesn't mean your replacement character has to be a complete newbie. Your replacement might come back a few "levels" behind the party average, but not so far back that you are useless to them.
Maybe the same could be done in an MMORPG. Have permanent death, but give you "credit points" for building your replacement.
Here's a further clue that Bartle doesn't understand people who play these games, note this section from his article:
There are two large problems here: 1 - these might be REAL LIFE friends who get online at the same time to go out grouped together. Maybe this isn't something Bartle understands, but people do actually game for social benefit. It's not all about the hit points and the ass-kicking. How would you feel if a GM in a pencil-and-paper game told you you can't be in the game anymore because your charcter died, so go find another group with another GM? How would you feel if the GM said, "your new character must come into the gameworld at the town square in Centersville because that is the source of all newcomers to this realm. Yeah, I know that's 1,000 miles from the party, on a different continent, but so what? Nobody could ever possibly be found starting anywhere else."
A no-teleport rule must be accompanined by the ability to bring in a new character somewhere somewhat near where the old one was, if you wish, otherwise you *are* forcibly breaking up groups of friends.
Does Bartle have friends? Does he understand how the concept works?
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
The problem with MMORPgs and "poor feature creep" and "newbie dominance" is that most companies that are putting MMORPGs on the market want to invest in the engine, and then have the game sit in maintenance mode for 5 years while people pay a monthly fee.
OF COURSE this is going to lose to newbies as the people in it the longest get bored and technology marches on making the engine seem dated. The traditional response to this is "expansions" to try and milk the existing infrastructure for more than it's worth by providing something for people who have already done everything they care to do in the original game.
If MMOs had a 1-2 year lifecycle target (about the development time for a major game these days) instead of these 5 year business plans, you wouldn't need to worry about getting newbies in while retaining the veterans and constant grief/nerf patches and confusing expansions. You would just say "Look, here's the game. It has a scripted timetable and is designed to play through month X of year Y, after which we will phase out support for a new game." Now this will obviously draw heat from "Well what if I didn't get on when the game started and now it's half over it's not fair!" Well there's lots of competition in the market now. Some people want to jump onboard early to become major powers. Others don't care as much and just want a game that they know is stable and has good content, so they'll wait a bit. I'm sure there'd be enough to go around for everyone as this would create more games in the market at once.
People will go buy your new game if your old game was good. This is proven over and over. Gaming is becoming more like hollywood in that gamers are becoming sensitive to the names behind the product and following the ones they like. You don't need to design a game to last forever hoping to keep people, what you need to do is design another better game with the things people like and improve upon it. Then people will buy the new game.
Also, it's about time we need to see MMO games adopt more flexible pricing structures. If you're an addict with no job, school, or life, then $14.95/month is a pretty good deal for 1000 hours of play per month. If you're a "normal" person who can only play an hour a day and maybe 5 on the weekends, then it's not such a great deal. If you're someone who's gotten talked into trying it out by your friends and only want to log on for an hour on saturday to see what everyone's up to, then it sucks. We need to see things like price per game hour plans, or limited time per month plans. Things like $3.99/month for 3 hours/day max, or $4.95 for 50 hours of gameplay whenever you get around to it. Yes the unlimited pricing is good, but you'll attract a whole new class of people if you make the pricing more attractive for the casual gamers, AKA newbies. Also, trying to do this per game is taxing on people playing multiple games from the same studio. If I want to play everquest and starwars galaxies, I should only need to pay one monthly fee. It's pretty obvious I'm not going to be playing both at once, I'll haeve to split my time between them. MMO monthly fees should be company-wide. The price per game hour plans would negate this issue and make pricing fair for players of multiple MMOs.
Also, seeing MMOs take advantage of the tendancy of people to sell off their stuff would be interesting. Instead of banning ebay in the license agreement, why not embrace it and have your own in-game market where you take a percentage? Alot of people have money but not time. Right now they're at a huge disadvantage to those with time but not money. If I work full time and my friend doesn't, I can't keep up with him in game. If I could buy my way up then it wouldn't be as much of an issue. If people could sell their high powered characters and equipment then they could probably fund their entire experience with some effort and not have to pay monthly fees they might not be able to afford. Second Life does something like this now, and it seems to work.
Introducing the new Occam Fusion! Now with sqrt(-1) fewer blades!
is that you could replace "Virtual World" with "Prostitute" and the article would still make fairly decent sense.....
We have known about this for a long time now. I played Tribes some, which has a pretty hardcore community, and despite Tribes Vengeance getting excellent reviews from a bunch of press magazines, the game has failed to net the elusive 'mass appeal.' Meanwhile, people are more than happy to play Counterstrike: Source, which is the same bottom-of-the-barrel-pure-twitch gameplay that had its heyday with Quake 1 (at least in Quake 1 there were items to control and techniques like strafe jumping to practice). And the reason they did not pick up Vengeance is simple: it isn't like other FPS games, and it was barely even marketed.
As long as the mainstream doesn't demand more gameplay than you'd find in CS, then we won't see this change. Case in point: Halo. It is a well-produced FPS game on a mainstream console. Despite the ridiculous control setup, and the very basic gameplay, it caught on like wildfire, and people are convinced that Halo 2 will be the best game ever because they haven't had much experience with FPS games.
Here on planet earth where the rest of us live, there are plenty of posts here complaining about GamaSutra's registration. I have no idea what thread *you're* reading.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
I haven't seen evidence of this. Posts on VN regularly criticize Turbine, complain about AC patches, mercilessly mock AC2 at length, and so on. Agree with the rest of your post, though.
Here's a summary:
Players prefer features that are "bad".
Seriously. That's the article.
The author is assuming that there exists the concept of some 'ideal universal mmorpg' that everything should be compared against. The entire article is biased based on what his defintion of this 'ideal mmorpg' is. He then goes on to explain why the features that players like drive the market away from this 'ideal'.
I suspect that if anyone suggested that maybe we don't want to compare our games to his 'ideal mmorpg'; that maybe the _players_ should decide what games are good and bad, that he would gasp and cry hearsay.
He didn't come right out and say what his 'ideal' was, but his primary measuring stick was 'how long will a player continue to play'. The longer they play, then the "better" the game. That's certainly a valid metric for the quality of a game, but it's definitely not the only one, and debatably not even the most important one either.
Aw crap, ninjas!
It doesn't work in a massively multiplayer setting, because:
In a P&P game, you're only playing for a few hours every week, and even those few hours are 10x slower than an MMORPG. If you speed it up to MMO speeds and consider that people play every day or every other day, you'd be dying at an incredible rate.
This doesn't even take into account the fact that in P&P games, you have a human controlling the other side, who can back off if they're leniant and don't want to wipe out an entire party - and can create an encounter to directly match your party strength from the start.
In a P&P game, the DM has the luxury of providing new content every time the group plays, whereas a MMORPG doesn't.
"It lets them play from other angles" is just plain designer railroading, forcing them to see the same content over and over again because, hell, you spent a lot of work on it! Everyone should see every nook and cranny of your work.
How about no? If I want to see it from other angles, I'll create multiple characters.
The 'default fiction' for real life is dying if you don't eat and drink in a few days. The 'default fiction' for the middle ages is that you die if you get any kind of major wound. These things aren't fun, which is the reason we play games.
While I agree that Player Death in MMORPG's at the moment leaves something to be desired, saying "These noobs have no idea, back in the day..." isn't a valid solution either.
I personally think Instancing is a good thing all round, if it's used wisely. City of Heroes does a good job there, and I can think of ways it could have been used effectively by other MMORPGs (Star Wars Galaxies spring to mind).
You have to understand where Bartle is coming from. He is not disputing that, for example, City of Heros is fun, he is saying that instancing is bad for a virtual world.
One of the things people like Bartle are trying to move towards is a persistant world, where players can make a difference in the world. This does not just mean a difference in the social life of the world, but in the physical world too.
Consider a tree in the game. Your character marks directions to a dungeon on the tree. This may be a creative and useful addition to the game.
In an uninstanced world, that change can easily be permanent, but in and instanced world there are many identical trees. Which tree was marked? All? None? It's harder to have persistance in an instanced world.
Part of the point of a virtual world is that the players can all make changes to the world. Otherwise you might as well be playing Quake.
Only a total n00b spells n00b "newb". Come on, this is day 1 stuff here people.
It's OK! I'm a limo driver!
There's this new idea in the software community called User Centered Design. Professor Bartle might find it a bit radical. It revolves around the idea of actually identifying what potential users want out of your product, and what the most natural method of achieving these requirements are for your portential users. A big part of UCD is knowing when to ignore your users, but to claim that it is an inherent property of users to always want what they don't really want is a pretty big leap. It is an arrogant claim that merits more serious justification than the axioms this article tries to pawn off on its audience. I'm not being entirely fair with the above. I think there is a definite place for virtual worlds that explore the ramification of world laws that might never be accepted by commercial audiences. Hobbies and Academia are wonderful things.
I totally missed where he proved the base case. Back to discrete math with you Mr. Bartle!
"Mind over matter: If you don't mind, then it doesn't matter"
Wow ... he is way off in what makes game design fun.
Permanent Death: Yes, a lot of game designers love this one. However, go make a list of the successful games with this 'feature'. It's short because people don't enjoy losing their investments. Permanent Death closes exactly one door. It does not open any that aren't already typically available to the players who want them.
Instanceing: This is an adequate solution to the crowding problem. A better one is to provide sufficiently breadth not to need instanceing. Build a game without need for instanceing and you'll have a hit, guaranteed.
Teleportation: This is a solution to the problem of how do I play with my friends. When to make new friends and when to play a game with your existing friends is a decision best left to the player.
Treadmill: Every game requires goals. A treadmill is one kind of goal that is very appealing to certain kinds of players. Make a game in which the other goals are super fun, and players won't demand a treadmill.
Bottom line, this guy just doesn't know game design. (And yes, I do, I did game design on multiple multi-million sellers).
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
I really hate that kind of snottiness. We could stroke our chins and try to come up with an intellectual analysis of EverQuest; and I'm sure if we were all Super Smart Game Designers like him, we might enjoy different games than as casual riffraff. But the truth is, if it ain't fun, we ain't gonna play it; and if he thinks we're un-cultured, well... sorry. You gotta play by our rules.
Guild Wars isn't an MMORPG. It's closer to Diablo 2 where the strongholds are just graphical representation of the chatoom.
If you're a old-time MUD refugee like me, you're invited to come by IMVU and make your own 3D environments, avatars, or games. No corporate control - make whatever you want and sell it.
Can your IM do this?
from the article: Virtual worlds are under evolutionary pressure to promote design features that, while not exactly bad, are nevertheless poor. Each succeeding generation absorbs these into the virtual world paradigm, and introduces new poor features for the next generation to take on board.
Sorry but I just had to say this. A comparison of something with evolution is misused in soo many ways, that it makes me uncomfortable sometimes.
So for the record: games are intentionally designed with the goal of attracting newbies. Evolution is without a preset goal. In this case creationism would be a far better example than evolution.
IANAL, but imagine a beowulf cluster of in Soviet Russia all your belong are base to us welcoming the new SCO overlords.
The terminology is poor. He's not saying that the designers are new to RPGs, he's saying the design decisions are mandated by the newbies to RPGs.
I hope that helps somebody.
BTW, I LOVED the article. MMORPGs are the absolute best potential with the absolute worst reality.
--Welcome to the Realm of the Hawke--
Let me plug a MUD I do work on and have played for the last 7 years. (The MUD is about 8 years old. Everything is mature except the combat system, but it's an RP-based MUD so combat is not a high priority.)
See the website at esmud.com. We're very newbie-friendly but, as I said above, VERY RP-based... if you are not interested in role-playing a character, you will not find much on ES to interest you.
Comment of the year
Does anybody know if any MMORPG game uses social networking concepts to help players choose their server? I haven't played any MMORPGs recently so I am not sure if the idea has been tried or is even practical.
:))
My idea is that when you log in to your client, it tells you how many of your "friends", "friends of friends", and "friends of friends of friends" can be found on each server. It could probably also tell you how many of your "foes" can be found, and if you want help gaining up on them, how many of your "foes of foes" can be found.
The premise here is that servers that contain a large number of people in your social network might provide a better gaming experience.
Further, if you restrict games such that the only people who can join must be within a certain number of degrees of you in your social network then:
* Newbies are automatically banned (until they get the proper sponsorship)
* If somebody misbehaves, the game can ban him and can lower the reputation of a person befriends him.
-- Jared
I've never played MMOGs or muds beyond a thirty second test period on a friend's computer before exiting in disgust, so I won't comment on what makes a great timesink, because that's not what I want out of my games.
/Tired of crappy games. Where are you DNF?
Right now I'm going to discuss my biggest peeve: the noobing of first person shooters. It seems like there are two types of first person shooters now. There is the tournament style, deathmatch, hyper-speed, perfect aim, jack rabbit on crack matches, then there is the snail-paced, "simulation," camp fests.
I've found, much to my annoyance, that all games that are a balance of the two have been essentially wiped out. It has become acceptable for weapons to have either pinpoint aim or horrible accuracy, game speesds to be faster than light or slower than molasses.
What I am talking about is the "counter-striking" of games.
First, start with a game which has decent speeds, decent weapon accuracy, essentially decent gameplay. Add massive amounts of newbies, and you get the game developers doing one of two things: nerfing the gameplay so that a 10 year old who picked the game up yesterday will do just as well as someone who has been playing for years, or make a game that the 10 year old will need to play for five years just to become proficient.
Proper game balance means that the game is BALANCED, but not BIASED. A game like UT2k4 is biased towards the long-term players who devote large amounts of time towards getting the perfect insta-gib, whereas games like Counter-Strike are biased towards the newbie who can't even circle-strafe.
What we truly need are games that are a mix, that are good. The issue is that truly balanced games are sorely lacking, and the few games which offer balanced multiplay are horribly boring. Why are they boring? It is because most often the multiplayer is but an afterthought to what is a good game. To be honest, the most fun multiplayer I've played in YEARS was Halo PC. Sure they nerfed most of the guns, which moves it into newbie territory, but having the deadly pistol and allowing for decent strategy at least makes it somewhat of a mix, thus interesting and worth playing.
I played Doom 3, I might play a bit of Half-Life 2. What I won't do is buy either of them, I leave that for people who can content themselves on sub-standard gaming conventions.
If you truly want any game to last, you must take into account that you need to have a balance between the eternal timesink and the newb game.
Give me a game that has excellent gameplay, decent graphics and physics, is a massively multiplayer online shooter, and just _works_ and I will play that game for years. Planetside is a game that showed much promise, but ultimately failed in the end, essentially due to massive gameplay flaws.
Merge the "instancing" with larger worlds, and there is a game worth playing. Real battles are usually not much more than multiple skirmishes fought at the same time, make a game like that, with interoperatibility, and it might have some promise.
You exit. Literally.
Permanent Death: Yes, a lot of game designers love this one. However, go make a list of the successful games with this 'feature'. It's short because people don't enjoy losing their investments.
Let's see... Nethack (and pretty much all games in its genre). Most of the X-Wing series (though you only really lose medals and rank by dying), as well as its precursors (Their Finest Hour and all that), and many other flight simulators of that era. Er... okay, I'm struggling here... any more?
Funny that there's a story about MMOGs going the way of the newb. High level FPS players have been bitching about newbie-designed games for a couple of years now.
Kingdom of Loathing
I think it's a bit of a stretch to call nethack a success.
Having a small penalty for death (ala X-Wing etc) is needed to make death have some meaning.
I would categorize death in gameplay into a 2d grid:
Nothing (you are immortal): death is not a challenge factor in such a game.
Normal (you lose something, are set back a bit, etc): hopefully finds a happy balance making the game fun.
Maximum (death means start the game over): typically not fun.
The exception for the max penalty is in fast action games where the amount of lost investment per death is very very low.
The question I would ask myself as a game designer is how much _time_ am I willing to set the player back. My rule is typically no more than one hour. Any more than that and you are making your players angry over their loss, and angry isn't as fun as you might think.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
Now I'm going to reply to your dismissal of his claims.
Permanent Death: There are 2 major things wrong with MMORPGs. The 'End game' as it's called, and inflation. I'm not even going to mention the treadmill, because I think it's a symptom, not a cause.
Inflation is a problem because everyone ends up winning. You get as many chances as you want to accomplish/gain whatever, and there's no way to actually lose. Since you can't lose, you just keep going until you win, and then you go onto the next thing. They talk about 'zero sum' things..well, this isn't.
That leads us to the other problem. The End Game. Pretty soon, in a finite system, you've been everyone, seen everything, and done just about everything a million times. What happens when you run out? What happens when you reach the end of a game that isn't supposed to have an end? If you can't lose, you're definitely going to hit it.
Permadeath gives you the ability to lose. It's the ONLY solution to the long-term problems with an MMORPG. Losing money doesn't help inflation if you're always able to gain it again. You've got to be able to lose money to the point that you die permanently.
But dying is no fun....right? The game would be designed with that in mind. No one is suggesting you go play Everquest with the sudden addition of perma-death. It's too easy, too necessary to die in EQ. However, a game with that in mind will work better than the system does in EQ.
No one would ever suggest Perma-death in Quake DM. However, CounterStrike is mostly the same thing as Quake DM while being designed around a type of Perma-death.
You wouldn't be dying ever day/week/month, and you wouldn't have a chance at dying unless you knowingly put yourself in that situation. Remember, it's just an 'oppurtunity' to lose, not a requirement.
Instancing: (I cheered when he brought up instancing as an example of 'poor'...."Finally," I thought, "someone really gets it.")
Opponents of instancing always imply that the alternative is standing in line to do the same quests that everyone else does. They think of a MMORPG as a series of Developer generated quests that they go on to gain levels and 'loot.' Anything that makes those quests more accessable must be a good thing.
That's called a SINGLE-PLAYER RPG, or even a multi-player RPG. What it's not is a Massively Multiplayer RPG Virtual World. MMOG's are not about developer content, they are about player interaction. They are about 'emergent gameplay.' The developer provides ONLY the world that you live in. How you live, what you do, who you do it with is up to you.
(To answer your specific point. You don't interact with the other 'shards' of a MMOG. That's another world, a parellel dimension that you can't reach. You can't see those people go into a cave, only to follow them in and find out they aren't there. As far as your character is concerned, the other shards don't exist...and never will. That's not the same thing as the instancing that he was refering to.)
(I'm going to make a harsh seque here, because I've been typing too long.)
QUESTS!! believe it or not are the cause of instancing, and are in and of themselves a 'poor' (in his terms) feature. Short-term good, long-term bad.
How can quests be bad?...the one and only obviously good thing of an MMORPG? Because they cause the need for camping, for instancing, for standing in line.
Without quests, you'd make your stories with the other players isntead of acting out as pawns in a canned tale. Without quests, you'd be able to dynamically alter the situation in the gameworld because there'd be no need to make sure Fuzzle still needs his red box. Without quests there'd be no spoiler sites with walk-throughs and hints.
Quests fit into the definition of 'short-term good'/'long-term bad'.
In the short term they help give the world character, give the world story. They help give the players purpose, and move them
--Welcome to the Realm of the Hawke--
That said, I also don't think he's some sort of omniscient God who is never wrong. Bartle is a human, just like all of us, with his own perspectives, prejudices, and agendas. He's as fallible as any and as likely to over simplify and draw false conclusions, which I believe is what is happening in this case.
Bartle bases his assumptions around a four point argument:
Point #1: Virtual worlds live or die by their ability to attract newbies
Point #2: Newbies won't play a virtual world that has a major feature they don't like.
Point #3: Players judge all virtual worlds as a reflection of the one they first got into.
Point #4: Many players will think some poor design choices are good.
All of these points are, at least to some extent, true. However, I can easily paraphrase those points and apply them to the television industry (as well.
Point #1: TV shows live or die by their ability to attract new viewers.
Point #2: New viewers won't watch a TV show that has a major element they don't like.
Point #3: Viewers judge all television shows as a reflection of their favorites.
Point #4: Many viewers will think some poor writing choices are good.
All of these arguments are roughly as valid as the arguments that Bartle makes. I'm a little to lazy at the moment to defend these arguments point by point as Bartle did but I think most of you are smart enough to see the truth to these statements. Following the same logic chain television is doomed to failure because for a new show to succeed it has to have the same features that caused previous shows to fail.
Obviously this is not the case. Television is a very alive and thriving industry and it doesn't really look to anyone like it is going to disappear any time soon. Certainly there is a lot of junk on TV and the industry encourages formulaic pap, but no one can really argue that the industry is in any danger of collapse.
I use this counter example because games, just like television, are a form of entertainment. They aren't an art form. They aren't a neccessity (though some EQ players might disagree if you were to try to unplug them). People play them because they enjoy doing so.
There are, of course, major differences between online games and television. Differences are things such as interactivity with the story, the ability to interact with other people enjoying the same entertainment, and the real time nature of games (you can't videotape the Nagafen raid that you are unable to attend so that you can run it later).
However, I think one of the biggest differences is simply age. Television has been evolving for over fifty years. In the beginning there were a handful of channels with a dozen shows a piece. Most youngsters probably never experienced it but it use to be that even the big networks would sign off at the end of the night and not broadcast anything until the morning because they simply didn't have enough content to show stuff 24 hours a day. Now there are hundreds of channels that run for 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.
Likewise there's only a handful of games out there right now, but the industry is growing. As it grows it evolves. Some of the evolution is bad. 'Bad genes' get passed from game to game because players demand it. As it begins to cost more and more money to make a game investors become less and less likely to invest in games that lack 'proven' features and that try to do something new and innovative, but these are the same obstacles that face TV programming right now. Shows cost far more to make than they use to. Producers are less likely to give money to shows that don't follow the typical 'formulas' because they would rather invest in something safer.
But new shows do get made. Innovative shows get made. Sure, most of television is a vast wasteland o
Newbs do not determine content. If you are creating a game for newbs, you will never get subscriptions. People will kill the account after the first free month. The economic survival of these games requires both that they attract new players, and that they hold old players. Newbs are a dime a dozen. And long term bad will pollute the system in a way that descriminates against the newbs most of all.
My first online game was Everquest. I left because I wanted something different. And I have appreciated the differences I've found since in other MMOG's far more than the similarities. I have no interest in playing another Everquest. Like everyone else who leaves, I left for a reason.
Permanent character death is fine, IF you have a perfectly balanced game with no bugs that never suffers from link death. If this doesn't apply(and it's just not possible to achieve all this) characters are going to die through no fault of the player's. No one is going to buy this, not the newbies (who have to rebuild a character a dozen times on the first night) and not the veterans (who have spent 6 months building a character only to have it killed by a bad connection.) And each time a character dies, you lose everything invested in that character, and possibly that game, which is the incentive that keeps the vast majority of the people subscribed, if not actually playing. MUDs can survive this because they're FREE, and they're free because they require little code and no artwork. Once you get into 3D online games, you damn well better have a way to pay for all those expensive assets. Permanent Death might work if you designate opponents who have the power to do this, allow people to choose whether or not to encounter them, and give extra incentive for taking the risk.
Like many a tidy theory, when applied to the real world, this one breaks.
"They're dictating design through a twisted "survival of the not-quite-fittest" form of natural selection that will lead to a long-term decay in quality, guaranteed."
Bullshit. guaranteed. Just having newbies in and of themselves dictate design won't kill a MMORPG... The first and formost benefit I see in doing this is a more common sense-centric game. One that can easily accept new players as well as seasoned veterans... Unless, for some reason you consider yourself gaming's elite and shun growth in your MMOOMOROOMPG world. If that's the case, your an elitist primadonna and the game would probably be better without you anyway, especially if you've forgotten you were new once too.
Now if they were given carte blanc authority over the entire design, I would tend to agree that this would be a bad move. The developer's original vision tend to be key to the success in any game made, but simply getting noobs to help make the game? Personally, I'd take the opposite tact-- It means they want to make the game as approachable as possible for new members that continue to revitalize the game.
In moderation, there is absolutely nothing wrong with this approach and frankly, the writers of that story sound like jaded elitist gamer bitches.
You need a FREE iPod Nano
did you actually RTFA or just skim it?
his main point seems to be a fairly articulate position that features in virtual worlds are not selected on good long time design merits, but rather on short term individual wants.
I have quite a bit of experience of this sort of world evolution from the rubber sword wielding Live Action Role Play communities in England. As most of them started very small and grew in dribs and drabs, it is fair to say the systems owe more to evolution than overall design.
To take the first point Permanent Death, you are absolutely right that people dislike it because they don't enjoy losing their investment, and i have seen many LARP systems with quick and permanent death evolve into Nerf love fests by the players (who are also the monsters in their spare time) because of precisely that reason, players hate to lose their investment, and so no one ever gets killed. The bitter twist however that those systems become very dull and because there is no real risk, and with no risk there is no sense of achievement.
Other systems that have a more gradual Perm Death System (three strikes and you're out - type affairs) don't tend to have the self-nerfing evolution, and such systems have more achievement and excitement because characters perm die.
the reason i think is simple... people choose what is good for them, not what is good for the game, and so if they have the power they will actually destroy the game they are playing...
(btw the games you designed were they stand-alone or MMOGS? I ask, because he makes the point that the design evolution of the two are quite different.)
See the problem? The idea of permadeath is twofold - one, you have to be more careful, and when you die, you start over. Two - only very skilled players will have a lvl 60 whatever. People who just have too much free time to treadmill won't.
Have you been touched by his noodly appendage?
Funny you mention SWG, as that's where I picked up opinons that completely agree with what was in the article.
Take the Jedi Problem, for instance. The SWG timeline is in a place where there should be almost no Jedi. If there are any around, they're in hiding from the Empire. However, players want to be a Jedi (point #1 from the article), for various reasons, so the developers made it possible to become one. Obviously, in keeping with this area of the Star Wars timeline, Jedi numbers should at least be kept low, and those that are should be in constant hiding.
Let's go over the orginal system for becoming a Jedi, just for review (this was replaced recently, but most existing Jedi right now became Jedi like this):
There are around 30 professions in the game. When your character is created, five of them are picked at random. You aren't told what they are. If you master all five, you open up your Force Sensitive slot and can work your way through the Jedi proffessions. To help this process along, 'holocrons' were added that would tell you one of the proffessions you needed. Master that, get another holocron, and then you get the second proffession, and so on. But you won't be told what the last proffession is.
Now, that's a daunting challenge. If I was a developer sitting back 1-2 years ago, before the game was even in beta, I would have thought that this, combined with permadeath on Jedi, would be plenty to keep the Jedi population low and in hiding.
But that's not what happend. Players complained that permadeath wasn't fair, so it was removed (see point #2 and #4 in the article). The developer's big mistake, and one that I would have made myself if I was a dev, is in underestimating the willingness of some players to be Jedi (which could fall under point #3, in that the game is based on a movie, and people want it to be just like their interpretation of that movie). Optimized grinds were created that would allow many professions to be mastered in a few hours--if you were willing to go through the utter boardom of sitting there, clicking the same blasted buttons over and over again. Someone with time off and enough drive and willingness to be board out of their skull could make Jedi in a week.
Thus, there are Jedi everywhere in SWG. Many of the non-Jedi complain about the large precentage of Jedi players, which also falls under our reinterpreted point #3.
More people complain, so the devs decide to do something about it by redevloping the Jedi system. The same people then complain about that (point #4), whining that the Jedi got two major game patches to themselves. But that's exactly what it would take to fix the system!
So here's my conclusion: The Jedi Problem is more the player community's fault than the devs. The devs made a system that, in all reasonableness, would seem to be able to keep the Jedi population low. They turned out to have missed a variable (the number of players determined enough to do the grind), and they were forced to conced the removal of a key design point (permadeath) or risk having lots of players delete their accounts and take the cash flow with them.
Not a typewriter
Heck, Turbine allows critical posts on their own boards.
Methinks the grandparent is mistaking the term 'criticism' with 'flame'.
Make two games. The first game is simple and/or mindless and is designed expecting a casual/ newbie gamer to play it. Have that game fund another game which is more complex and intended for a more discerning crowd. That way you can make money and satisfy the hungry hardcore gamers out there at little extra cost (the creation of a simpler game that a broader group of people can enjoy).
Light is filtering down from above. Would you like to use DIVE?
The developers would happily agree with you on that point - they don't even call it an MMORPG themselves. It's a rather odd hybrid sort of game, which is why it came to mind when I was talking about developers making an effort to break out of the mold.
That, and the fact that I played it heavily during the recent preview, so it's been on my mind lately.
I don't think his point was that online gaming would die, any more than TV will die (as you point out). What he's saying is that the evolutionary path which is dominant in online gaming is one that leads to poor games. By analogy, the evolutionary path which is dominant for TV shows is one which leads to poor programming.
The exact same dynamic applies to both. Mindless formulaic TV drivel (e.g. reality programming) perpetuates because "newbs" like it enough to keep watching it. At some point, someone will break that paradigm with a new one, and the cycle will begin anew. I can easily see that happening to online games, and I've watched that happen to TV long enough to see that the basic logic clearly applies. There's nothing here that says TV will die any more than he says online games will die, but bad game design perpetuates just like bad TV programming.
http://www.ipyuo.com/
ITS GREAT!! its free! its UO, old school like it is suppose to be, great people. I love it.
Check it, out, you can even download the client via bit torrent.
To address only one point of his article...
...BAM...the risk jumped way up.
...BAM...now the tasks became easier again.
He makes the implication that if the players want a major change because they don't like a design feature, that this change can be motivated because of the in flux of new players with preconcieved ideas about what a virtual world must contain. And then contends that in order to keep these new players, the devs must change the game or it dies out.
To be honest, I see something different happening.
In the most recent online game I joined, I quickly discovered who drives nerfs/changes for the devs...he outspoken minority!!!!! These are the folks that post and post and post in the discussion forums.
In the game I'm referring too, one of the biggest changes they made recently was hugely talked up on the message boards but sadly the in game folks, unaware even of the forums as worth their time, were grossly surprised by it. This has happened in all the online games I've played. It isn't specifically newbs that rant on the boards, its oldbies with an axe to grind for or against their favorite feature.
Where I've seen this the most is when this game recently toughened up the tasks. This was the most requested thing on the boards, and sadly, unbeknownst to the remaining 98% of players. So they toughened up the tasks and guess what...tons of complaints from folks that were just fine with things the way they were...mostly cause folks were used to a certain amount of risk vs reward and suddenly
As for my experience, heck, yeah it got tougher but once I got used to the added risk, I actually got to enjoy the challenge. But what happened...suddenly a large number of folks decided to give some feedback to the devs and
Either is good with me I guess, as long as the content is interesting...but just speaks to the fact that it isn't always about newbies vs oldbies and who knows best, sometimes it's about who shouts the loudest.
Tojo
free server, old school rules, lower learning curve.
Best out there in my opinon of any newer mud.
http://www.ipyuo.com/
You can even download the client via bit torrent.
give it a shot, its highly populated with great people.
Visit http://www.angalon.com or telnet to angalon.tamu.edu:3011
The general theme from the story I received was a MUD programmer who is bitter about the evolution of MMO's. I would even go so far as to say he is bitter about his lack of participation in this new market. That is merely an opinion but the feel of what he wrote is less of an observation and more of a rant.
Games progress to meet gamer demand. If this was not the case, Wolfenstein 3D would still be the hottest FPS to date. However when it comes to MMO's you need a story line to justify the world you are in.
It is a matter of who your target audience is. On my old server for EQ, only one member of our whole guild roleplayed. The rest of us enjoyed the social setting and general challenge of upper end targets and the strategies you had to employ. I wouldn't say the games are designed by newbies but they are designed to have large target audiences. No matter how you look at it, the company who invests 2 or 3 years of developement needs to make money in the end. To do that you need a game that is both appealing to a vast market of individuals and you need the game to have a long progression curve.
On his death idea or suggestion, that would be a game killer. Especially one you wish to make money off of. Lets use EQ as an example. That game in its prime took weeks if not a couple months to be a mid level toon. If you added a permanent death aspect to the game then you would have to drastically change the leveling speed in which players progressed.
High end raiding would never have been an employable aspect. Same can be said for soloing, quad kiting, swarm kiting, AE kiting, fear kiting and AE Nuke Groups. Many of the fun aspects that made EQ enjoyable from a solo, group and raid standpoint would be eliminated completely. What would be the point in playing since at some point, all your hard work is going to be erased due to an accidental death.
The death model may fit a fast paced MUD but for a game as large and as vast as EQ, it will not work.
I will give him credit when it comes to the story. MUD's pretty much own that hands down since pretty much the whole game relies on description and mental depth. You cannot argue that the Kunark and Velious expansions didn't have a story that was vast. Both employed an impressive model of lore. It was Luclin and beyond that basically sucked when it came to how far the rabbit hole would take you.
The problem is that it basicaly divides games into newbies and not-newbies. The truth is that you have two diferent kind of gamers:
a) Newbie (eye candy seeker) and old (limited spare time) gamer.
b) Hard core gamer. This one is no longer a newbie but still has plenty of free time.
The problem is that you can not have both. Either you catter to (a) knowing that they will leave once the initial thrill wears off/once they get bored or you catter to (b) that doesn't mind investing several days in learning the basics and several weeks in finishing long complicated goals.
You can't have tea and no tea
Also, he does seem to take a bit of a 'if I don't like it then it's bad for long term' approach. An example of this is his permadeath arguement. It can easily be argued and even shown through games like EQ that a lack of permadeath allows people to build attachments to their characters and those attachments cause them to play longer. Yet because he doesn't like permadeath he argues that it is bad for long term design.
nh
One thing that I hate about all these new MMORPGs is the "instant" click on item X and get teleported to where ever the hell you want to go.
I think they should have real travel not teleporting unless you are some kindof magic user. Instead you should be able to purchase horses, flying creatures, etc or rent them. At first when you are a newbie you would have to walk or try hitch a ride, but as you got higher in level with more money you could splurge on faster transportation. This would be a good money sink too for the economy.
okay thats my dumb idea, bye.
"Permanent Death: Yes, a lot of game designers love this one. However, go make a list of the successful games with this 'feature'. It's short because people don't enjoy losing their investments. Permanent Death closes exactly one door. It does not open any that aren't already typically available to the players who want them."
RTFA-Again
He makes this point, that it doesn't happen because people wouldn't like it.
Except it WOULD open doors. It would open doors to anyone who gets their ass kicked relentlessly not because they suck, but because there are people who already have their characters built up who are waiting to kick their asses.
The only advantage early adoption would present is knowledge of the game. It would not GUARANTEE a super-powerful godlike character who can stomp all comers.
"Instanceing: This is an adequate solution to the crowding problem. A better one is to provide sufficiently breadth not to need instanceing. Build a game without need for instanceing and you'll have a hit, guaranteed."
People might still want it, though.
Also, you'd need to have a world which scales to the number of players, or which has areas which attract players who don't want that privacy, without depriving them of anything else. You couldn't just make a HUGE fricking world. Otherwise, you'd have it too full (like you're talking about) or too empty, either when the game starts or during off-peak hours. No one wants to play an unpopulated online game. Well, not usually.
I'd have to agree with you on the teleportation part, though. There are other solutions to that problem if you just find teleportation aesthetically displeasing though.
The "long term good" is usually just a piss-poor excuse for stuff that's just badly designed. Or for piss-poor hacked-together poorly-thought-out fixes for bad design.
A game is for the players. Period. Idiocies like "short term bad, long term good" mean no less than "it's not fun for the players, but it'll be good in the long term for the game". Which, sorry, is an idiotic contradiction in terms.
And I've yet to see any proof yet that stuff described as "long term good" is actually good in any form or shape. You're usually just supposed to believe some fucktard admin's "it's good because I want to code that. So what if nobody likes it? It's... umm... yeah, it's 'long term good'."
He also trolls his way around real issues, by dismissing them as stuff only newbies dislike. Well, gee. With a decade of playing on MUDs behind me, I think I'm anything _but_ a newbie, yet stuff like PD I hate with a passion.
Plus you'd think that if oldbies invariably loved these features, the oldbies already trained in other games would gravitate towards games offering these features, no? That you could just make a griefer's paradise MUD with PD, nowhere to hide, etc, and every grizzled veteran would gravitate to it. I mean, he says that experienced players want that, no? In practice it doesn't happen. Oldbies avoid these places just as well.
And what disturbs me about Bartle in particular is that he's always went above and beyond the call of duty to justify griefing.
E.g., he's went and argued before that you _need_ killers harrassing the socializers to have a good game. Never mind that in practice that cost Origin the number one place in a market they _created_. Origin took basically Bartle's view that being PK-ed on sight is good, while its players migrated en-masse to EQ and AC where they'd be more protected.
E.g., here not only he wants that an older griefer can _permanently_ kill you, he also wants that you have no rest and no place to hide from that griefer.
Read the point against instancing again. So basically the players actually want some peace and tranquility, but nah, he's more concerned with "what with someone else wants to find them and interact with them while they're in there?"
Well, gee. For friends everyone already was more than happy to invite them to the group. E.g., if I'm in an instanced dungeon in CoH and someone I know gives me a tell, I'll promptly get out of the dungeon and invite them. Or if they need help with their mission, I've been known to leave my mission and join in theirs.
So who are those poor souls who are prevented from interacting with you? Well, the ones you _don't_ want to interact with. The griefers, fucktards, and other scum of the (virtual) earth. Those are the only ones really hampered by instancing.
I.e., again Bartle just goes on a demagogy spree to hammer his old "griefing is good" preconception.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Be warned, I want to make a MMORPG game that auguments reality. To play you'd have to actually go places and do things in the real world. That could include forms of exercise and even education. *chills*
To go on a quest you'd have to physically go to the right spot and accomplish some goal that can be verified (finding an item there and reporting the code on that item). To turn item one into item two you might have to take a class in woodworking or pass some sort of test that proves you have some knowledge of woodworking.
Take reality and add a little fantasy to it - much more fun than sitting in some fictional world and doing the same meaningless repetitive tasks over and over. Of course actually leaving the comfort of our chair might be to much for most of us.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
I read it as suggesting that new games can break the spiral, though it's difficult because of the way many players will demand those "bad" features when they start playing.
I'm with you on the PermaDeath issue, though. I think calling that an example of good game design is sadly mistaken. One of the main reasons I kept playing EQ for four years was my attachment to my main character, since I never really enjoyed playing any of the alts I made.
with no risk there is no sense of achievement
I don't buy this. There is certainly achievement without risk. In real life, when I complete a project, even a small one, I feel acheivement. What did I risk? Nothing. It was inevitable that I would finish, and I knew how long it would take, but I feel achievement all the same. In games, it's the same, only more fun along the way. If I reach some kind of milestone, risky or not, I feel achievement.
people choose what is good for them, not what is good for the game
There is no difference between the two. It's entertainment. If it's good for the players, it's good for the game. If the players are enjoying themselves, the game is going well. There is no other standard of measurement.
Live action is vastly different than computer games. Computer games are, by nature, far more limited. They don't lend themselves to evolution in the same way, because they follow such a very strict set of rules.
Soft drugs and healthy lifestyles are not mutually exclusive.
I weight train regularly to build muscle, cycle to keep fit and eat an incredibly healthy diet. I like to get stoned but I don't want the health risks of smoking so I add ground up cannabis to my food occasionally. It works for me.
I personally liked the ideas in NERO regarding death. They use a system similar to the d20 one where there's a longish period of unconsciousness wherein one can be stabilized and revived by anyone with a minor heal spell or healing skill. After that, there's a longer period during which your spirit is near enough to your body that a Life spell (higher magic, but still quite accessible) can revive you without penalty. Only if you're left dead for a long period of time do you experience true death. In that case, you can go to a circle for ressurection where you'll drawy from the life-stone bag. Basically it starts with 10 white marbles. For every time you've been raised before, one black marble is substitued for a white one. This leads to a hard limit on deaths, but a fairly high one, but making every death a risky one. In all the times I played, I only saw one person have to go to the circle to be raised. It was actually a fairly dramatic event involving him dying some distance from town. He bled out before someone could stabilize him and no one in his party had a Life spell. What followed was first a canvassing of the town for someone who could cast Life, then an epic quest racing against time for a fabled scroll in a nearby dungeon which was unfortunately too late. True death tended to be rare, and was more often a matter of being stupid, or of pissing everyone off such that no one was willing to help you. ^_^ Although one time, while serving as an NPC, I was part of a group that nearly took out a dozen of the town's finest warriors. Spider nest, and the heroes weren't keeping very good track of who'd fallen. Wound up with two warriors outside battling us while the rest were cocooned and captured inside. They only survived because the marshall decided to take pity and reduce the number of respawns we had. Still, the prospect of possibly dying added some spice to the encounters.
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.
Read my response again. Permanent death in the context of MMORGs is the 'hurt the player' solution to players becoming powerful over time. There are at least three well known much better solutions to this problem:
1) Separate the powerful players from the weak.
2) Asymptote the power growth function so that players don't remain weak for long.
3) Add a substantial penalty for fighting out of your power range.
If your game has a problem with powerful characters abusing weak characters, that's because you made a bad game design decision in how powerful and weak characters interact, not because the powerful characters exist.
If you want a successful game, you don't want to punish your players for succeeding.
Everything you wrote about instanceing agrees with my position.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
I read the article. However, I should point out that basically everything you wrote in response agrees with my side of the argument.
As I pointed out, some loss is necessary if excitement is part of your game design. Too much loss (permanent death in MMOGS) means unhappy players, which to me is not the point of a game. In any case, the basic point is that permanent death is not required to establish risk or excitement, and is typically abused by designers to solve problems not related to risk or excitement anyway.
The games i've designed have included RPGs, MOG, and MMOGs. The design principles are actually the same for all 3. Specific features in multiplayer have to account for problems brought in by extra players: crowding, abusive behavior, etc. I think the article showed a deep lack of understanding of the basic principles of game design.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
Listen to yourself. I doubt you actually read the article, since you're not responding to the points he made, only the capsule. Then again you admit that you're just soap-boxing. Seriously, wtf does Turbine have to do with this discussion? Unfortunately you're just ... wait for it... a noob, by Bartle's definition. And mine. Crying for what you want, .
To say that "Many MMORPGs succeed" is a big stretch. What's your definition of "many"? Five? Ten? It's sure not a hundred. Even in the context of MMOGs, the majority of those which have succeeded are not the 3D graphical MMORPGs you're talking about, but the text-based MUDs. Only a handful of 3D MMOGs have succeeded. And those that have sometimes suck, by some people's standards.
As for your other "arguments", they're empty and not worth even giving heed to.
This discussion, of course, can never get anywhere, because logic has nothing to do with it. There's a conflict of goals. Success in art/craft is measured by critics, self-appointed experts and regular people with opinions, while success in commerce is measured by profit. Same for books and movies and other mass-produced popular art. Which type of assessment do you care about? It would be nice to have both, but they usually work against one another, and only one can be measured objectively (in dollars).
What Bartle forgot to mention was that his argument is in no way new, and that it applied to other areas of art long before computers were even thought of. MMOGs only add a different spin, but one not especially different from television; both are a serial experience, prone to imitation and repetition. Both are generally weak thanks to the driving need to pander to lowest common denominator eyeballs, since eyeballs == $$. Before television it was serial novels.
If people want to understand the issues, it would help if they knew something about them.
Stand back. I've got a brain and I'm not afraid to use it.
I think most people would dislike PD and that's why save games and cheat codes in single-player games have existed since the beginning of time. However it's bad for game play for players never to die. A middle ground does exist though.
I'd like to see something where you have a non-killable persona that you play that can build up certain skills. However to do anything you should have to take a body which has it's own skills that can be lost when the body is killed. I think it'd be even better if it were possible to take bodies from each other or even take over NPCs in some instances. Make it so your character is some sort of spirit that can take over bodies but that will continue to live even if driven out of it's body or if the body is killed.
You could keep some of your skills you'd build up and of course keep your network of friends but you'd not be able to die and restart without consequence.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
And, of course, there is only one possible ladder of ascension by which you can measure relative power levels.
As if, in all games, there exist levels and XP. And as if, in all games that DO have these, they matter.
There is certainly achievement without risk. In real life, when I complete a project, even a small one, I feel acheivement. What did I risk? Nothing. It was inevitable that I would finish, and I knew how long it would take, but I feel achievement all the same. In games, it's the same, only more fun along the way. If I reach some kind of milestone, risky or not, I feel achievement.
That completion was inevitable and that the length of time was fixed are both untrue, just as you have no certainty that you might not wake up one morning and discover everyone you knew dead. You can say it's highly unlikely, but that's the extent of it, because you are not omniscient and are unaware of all possible factors.
However, the reason the saying "the greater the risk, the greater the reward" is true is because the risk is the reward itself. Your risk was the feeling of accomplishment due to having completed the project, which, as I said above, was not an absolute certainty. What feeling of accomplishment would you have had if your friends unexpectedly called you up and you went out to have a pizza, making the project incompletable for the rest of the night?
That the risk is negligible doesn't mean that it doesn't exist. If you were a high level character and you went up against a low level one, the risk is negligible, but it exists. Because, if there was permadeath, and you foolishly stood around and let the newbie hack you into pieces hit point by hit point, you're still dead. It's a risk you're taking by letting him do as he pleases without challenge. And it's a risk HE takes if he starts doing it without your consent. His sense of accomplishment, if he kills you, will be greater than yours, if you kill him.
You couldn't just make a HUGE fricking world. Otherwise, you'd have it too full (like you're talking about) or too empty, either when the game starts or during off-peak hours. No one wants to play an unpopulated online game. Well, not usually.
You're making unnecessary assumptions about the limits of game design. What if AI were developed to a sufficient degree that NPCs would fill up areas that ought to be naturally populated (town squares, markets, and the like). AI that passed the Turing Test (can fool a human into believing they're speaking to a human on all levels via a indiscernible medium).
The game world WOULD scale to the number of players (by making NPCs go to sleep or move off when there are a lot of players).
To quote Bartle...
# Time may heal. If you wait long enough that people forget why they ever objected to something, that something can come back. Fashions change, and who knows what the newbies of 2024 will think? Good ideas will always get a second chance to enter the paradigm, it's just that "wait a quarter of your life for it to happen" thing that's a little depressing.
# Growing maturity. Perhaps the best hope for the future is the growing maturity of the player base. First-time newbies will always assert the supremacy of their first virtual world, but oldbies who have been through the mill enough will realise that some of the features they've been taking for granted are actually counter-productive. If they're around in sufficient numbers, we may see virtual worlds appearing that do everything right and very little wrong, removing point #4 and leading us into a golden age. I can dream...
The assumption regarding permadeath and attachment to characters is that your goal is to retain subscribers.
Bartle doesn't argue that you should retain subscribers; like he says, "Now I'm sorry to be the bringer of bad news, people, but here goes anyway: even for the most compelling of virtual worlds, players will eventually leave . Don't blame me, I didn't invent reality."
In his book, he also describes some very good reasons for leaving. In short, player retention is NOT the aim for good design. Not, at least, as the final word.
I'm not completely certain what is. It's not even necessarily fun; Bartle doesn't really argue that virtual worlds are games. Ergo, they don't necessarily even have to be fun. It's hard to mount a serious consideration of what he really thinks is the criteria for good game design without the other people having read his book and knowing what his formal opinion on most controversies are.
There are good and bad reasons to include Permadeath. Whether or not you do should be a game design choice.
The designer's choice. Not the players'. Which is ultimately what Bartle's article says.
So I take it you hate Turbine.
Look at AC, not AC2. AC is a awesomely fun game. AC2 blows. MS had too many people telling turbine what to do for the second one in my opinion.
Anyway, I just think you bashed them a little too hard.
the best MMORPG ever that was destroyed by n00bs and just general losers that couldnt handle a game where anarchy prevailed, and people didnt have to fucking ask permission before starting to attack you. the change to care-bear world Trammel destroyed that game forever. is now not worth playing.
I'm not sure i understand the point of your post, but if I understand it correctly, you're claiming that something unmeasurable (perhaps knowledge of the game) is making it possible for some players to harass others, and that this attribute is not boundable by the game designer, nor can it be used to separate the players.
The problem is that if this is indeed the problem you're describing, then permanent death cannot possibly solve the problem either, since the same attributes that are not boundable by the designer in the first place remain unbounded by permanent death.
I claim that any attribute or set of attributes or set of dimensions of attributes that is boundable by permanent death can be used to affect the gameplay in more effective ways.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking