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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."
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?
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
Slashdot has problems. GNAA adds problems. I don't see how GNAA could serve any practical purpose besides allowing people to burn some extra time by posting swastikas and goatses.
"Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity." -- Hanlon's Razor
PS: Is it just me or is Slashdot REALY slow today?
It's November 3rd. Anything special going on right now?
It would be cool if it didn't suck.
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
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
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
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.
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?
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
now dont get me wrong, i am neither here nor there on this issue. considering im a relative /. newb (i havent been here nearly as long as the people who have been here before me.. ahhm...)
anyways, "good ol' days" aside, how can we get past the fact that a "non-reg alternative" was clearly posted next to the reg required link?
is there another problem at hand here or am i just to darn stupid to see the obvious peril and turmoil this *gasp* RR-linkaged is causing in the more-hardcore-/.er-then-thou crowd?
i can see if every link on the homepage was RR, is this the way it seems..?
--- Why rant when you can rave?
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.
That's really the key here that I think Bartle missed.
Respawning monsters/areas and instanced areas are both bad solution to what is a instrinsically difficult problem: Players consume content far, far, far faster than developers can possibly create it.
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.
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.
Actually, you're supporting his point. The reason you get so attached to a character is that you are allowed to get attached. If the game had included permanent death, you would never have a character for 8 months unless you were really really good. Now, because you've grown accustomed to having non-permanent death, you demand it in all of your games. When he talks about players that reject short-term-bad, long-term-good features, he's talking about you, and the fact that you disagree with him actually supports his argument.
I wish that my inferiority complex were as good as yours.
-RenderHead
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?
If I have to do it again when my character died, I'd quit at that point. I don't care if it was only two weeks, I have better things to do with my time. Perma-death is long term bad because it pushes people out of the game when they lose their character.
But what if you didn't have to replay anything when you die? You're assuming you have to replay stuff because that's what you're used to. You fall under his point #3, and hence support his argument. The same can be said about your comments on instancing and teleporting.
This is not a sig.
Permanent death is a good thing. Reaching the upper levels should be rare and it should require skill. If your character is mortal you will be forced to weigh decisions carefully, play smarter and cooperate with other players to use their strengths and cover each others weaknesses.
my password is private, but unchanged.
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.
If there's 5000 players, there's 5000 potential content designers.
I don't think the solution is to invent a massive AI, but to figure out a way to leverage the creativity of the player base.
For example, let's imagine a dungeon hack type game wherein the ultimate goal is to own your own dungeon. Players roll up characters and send them off into other player's dungeons to get slaughtered or come away with treasure (which they can use as a nest egg for their own dungeon, or to improve their characters.)
As a dungeon master, your goal would be to aquire hero corpses from as many different players as possible. You'd have to seed your dungeon with bait, come up with fair challenges, deck the halls with interesting decor, and advertise the existance of your deathtrap (perhaps via treasure maps).
Fair dungeons (with a good risk vs. reward) that change often would naturally generate the most dead heros. Too easy, and you lose your treasure stake without killing any adventurers. Too hard, and players just won't visit.
If you start a MMORPG with perma-death, a lot of players will avoid it.
Bartle seems to claim that this proves players will always hold back design. Well, maybe they only *think* they don't like it, because it's different. But his argument requires you to accept that permadeath is *always* good, and all players that don't like it are short-sighted.
Here I think he's wrong. I'm going to propose the radical ideas that people play games to have fun, and the different people think different things are fun.
If a MMORPG is designed that uses a new idea, people -will- try it. Some will turn away, either because they're narrowminded, or because they simply don't like it. Others will play it, and some of these will be newbies, who, following Bartle's logic, will then demand the new idea in other games. His mechanism for the propogation of "bad" ideas works just as well for "good" idea.
But of course, there aren't "good" ideas, just "fun" ideas. And since people have different tastes, two opposite ideas can -both- be fun...
They're just doing the same thing the author is doing. The author claims there are numerous features that are like this, and uses this one thing as an example. The critics think the author is full of crap, and use this example to demonstrate.
Really, if this is the best example he could come up with, it doesn't speak well for his overall point. If it isn't the best example he could come up with, then why did he pick that one?
It's perfectly valid to criticize his examples, even if they're only examples of the points he's trying to make. His inability to find good examples is telling.
It's a perfect illustration of his "short-term-bad, long-term-good" feature argument.
And that's the point you seem to be missing. If this is his "perfect illustration", and it's so laughably flawed, his point doesn't hold much water now, does it? If it's both short-term and long-term bad, that's a much more understandable and probably explanation why games don't incorporate it.
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
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
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!
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.
"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.)
So using that logic the most successful long term game would be one in which you are given a brand new character with every log on so you don't have any chance of becoming attached? There's nothing wrong with attachment to a character and in fact attachment to their character has probably kept many EQ players playing for far longer than they would have if they did not have that attachment.
Which is not to say that permadeath can't be good as well. Permadeath is simply a game mechanic and is only good or bad in the context of the entire game. Assuming anything else is formulaic and is comprable to saying that since a well written death scene in a story can be very good every story should be written so that the main character dies.
Unfortunately, your response suffers from similar problems as the original article. Fewer, but nontheless.
1) Your argument assumes that player improvement is constant and content increase is not. This is not, in fact, required to be the case. Now, in current MMORPGs the rate of expansion is significantly less than the rate of player improvement, and this is dictated by economics to some degree. However, as long as we're talking about theoreticals, here...
Consider how MMORPGs actually work. You start off at the beginning of the game, and you're working your way toward a mythical high point where you've done it all- except that, of course, that's not actually a place you want to stay. At the same time, a return to where you've been before is also hardly what you're interested in. What players want is a permanent existance in the "in-the-process-of-winning" state that they played in between levels 1 and MAX_LEVEL. Permadeath is a "hack" to achieve this- if you keep resetting to 1, of course you can't hit MAX_LEVEL.
Permadeath doesn't actually *solve* problems, though. All it does is reduce the number of people willing to take a risk-free path long enough to reach and stay at the top. Unfortunately, most players don't find the risk-free path particularly interesting. There needs to be risk, as always... but if the risk is too big, and for most players permadeath is almost always too big a risk, then people will avoid the risk if there's anyway around it. And since quitting is always an option...
2) Instancing. Your leap from quests to quests causing instancing to quests are bad is, quite frankly, fully of a few too many holes. The cause of instancing is, quite specifically, having too many players for a given amount of content. Take content A, which can support at most Y players, and must have at least X players to be "interesting" in a game that's intended to be group oriented. If the number of players is below X, well, there's not much anyone can do about that except find ways to draw more people there (possibly causing the same problem elsewhere, but that's another issue). However, if the number of players is above Y, we have two options, at least we have two that have been used thus far: instance content, or add new content. Designers of course attempt to go for new content when possible, as it improves player retention (and makes for a better game, who would argue that?). The problem is, again, one of economics: instancing is much better "bang for the buck". Assuming sufficient content to keep players *interested*, if there are still more players than the content will support, instancing assists in that regard. Especially given the knowledge that player population fluctuates during the course of the MMORPG lifecycle as the average level increases and lower zones become less crowded, instancing can help alleviate the problem of having too few players for a set of content by merely reducing the number of instances of that content.
As for quests being bad... I don't think you know what you're arguing for there. What you want constantly dynamic content and quests, which is a great idea- except for infeasibility and player annoyance at not having a chance at content, as I posted about elsewhere. Quests only give the game linearity if you force them to, doing one quest, then another, then another, in a perfectly linear sequence ad infinitum. That's hardly the only way to play a game, thouogh, and personally I find that the occasional quest adds some spice to the game. If you'd like to read every spoiler site out there so that you know every quest backward and forward, then sure, everything becomes robotic. Spoiler sites are hardly required reading, however.
Also, quests hardly cause the game to have an end. Player improvement outrunning content addition causes the game to have an end. Quests really have nothing to do with it except that they are part of that content.
A note on emergent gameplay. There's a limit to how much of this will occur, and developers know this.
The ringing of the division bell has begun... -PF
However attatchment keeps people playing. If you had no attatchment to your character, you would be less likely to renew in some circumstances
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
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
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.