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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."
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?"
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!--
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?
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.
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*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'
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 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!!
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.
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.
I think you have to expand your paradigm a bit. For example.. do you truly object to 'Permanent Death'.. or are you really objecting to 'Replaying the same content again'? What if you started a game that each character was truly unique, there were no 'newbie' areas to begin, and each game was fresh. Would you object if there was PD in that game?
;).
I do believe there are ways to do this. For a couple of years I've had an idea for a game that foregoes levelling and loot mongering. But.. it would have permanent death. Its a rather long story why this would be an important feature.. but, I do believe that PD is offset by the fact that you don't have to 'replay' the same portion of the game over and over.
But.. I recognize that just the mention of 'Permanent Death' would cause tremendous uproar. No further discussion would likely be possible. I agree with him on this point. So.. the game idea is pretty much worthless (not that I have the $100M to get it off the ground, anyway
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.
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
As a game programmer/designer, I completely understand. You can never make everyone happy, and the masses happen to be n00bs :/
I currently develop http://www.archspace.org/ with some of my other friends and the game is dieing. The game used to have thousands of people but now it seems that is just a memory. Currently we are forced to consider changing the dynamics of the game to make it more "n00b" friendly. Such changes include protection, attack cool down, etc. I fully detest such changes, but it seems we have little option for the game is dieing.
We have tried to avoid making such changes, and added other features to the game... Our last ditch effort will be integrating irc into the game so hoefully the n00bs wont feal so disconnected from the archspace community.
Then this might just simply be the natural life cycle of this game for it is over 4 years, but when I compare to games such as outwars.com (yes i know im biased) I see that www.archspace.org has much more in depth strategy, and yet fewer players. I fear the majority of people don't like games with a little complexity anymore, and simply want it to be mindless :(
rots.us, port 3791 (Return of the Shadow)
Hahahaaahahaaahaa. You're a fan of RotS? RotS is an example of almost everything that can go wrong with a MUD, including: unfair benefits to (some) immortals; pandering to newbies to the detriment of the older, established players; adding whiz-bang quests instead of repairing broken game mechanics; adding new super equipment (which always ends up saturating the game, no matter how hard you make it to get); and finally, refusal to reign in endlessly stupid players.
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.
The second problem could be worked around by downloading a reasonable amount of data that you might need in the not too distant future as encrypted chunks to a cache directory (I don't think we need to take steps to avoid trafficanalysis, but noop chunks could be included if need be). Then when the server wants you to have access to some picture/sound/video/other rich content, it just needs to send you some sort of UID of the piece and a decryption key. That should work fast enough, without violating the principle of not giving the client unneeded information (unless you consider strongly encrypted information accessable). Once you have had access to a chunk, you might be able to catch the decrypt, but since the server might never call for that piece again that doesn't matter much (as far as I can figure).