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IGDA Persistent Worlds White Paper Released
Elonka writes "The Online Games SIG of the IGDA has released the latest in a series of White Papers on the online computer gaming industry. The 2004 Persistent Worlds White Paper (80-page, 457K pdf) had several contributors from across the industry, and gives general "developer to developer" advice, covering everything from a quick overview of major products, to design considerations on multiplayer gameplay and dealing with online communities, to technical considerations, to some stats about the international marketplace, including the rapidly-growing Asian market. Editors included Daniel James of Three Rings Design, makers of Yohoho! Puzzle Pirates, and Gordon Walton, VP and Executive Producer at Sony Online and presenter of the Ten Reasons You Don't Want to Make a Massively Multiplayer Game talk at the 2003 Game Developers Conference."
The one feature I have enjoyed the most in any multiplayer game has been the ability to ignore other players. A simple /ignore #playerID and all the n00b, j00 suX, ph33r m3, 1337 bs get's flushed down the toilet.
That's in the white paper, right?
RIGHT!
-Teiresias
I hate pdf.
is WoW not in the report because of how new it is? how would WoW stats affect other MMO's rankings in this report?
Gordon Walton, VP and Executive Producer at Sony Online and presenter of the Ten Reasons You Don't Want to Make a Massively Multiplayer Game
Reason number 11: There ain't enough room for both of us. You just might take business away from EQ, and we'd have to send an army of IP lawyers to bring you down.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Those idiots? I was going to try and become a member back in college but my cc failed. They kept sending me things asking for my cc # again to get the purchase done so I could be a member and I just ignored it because I decided I didn't want to join.
So they stop eventually but then start sending me emails and newsletters like the sale went through anyways, I asked them to stop sending the news letter and they still send it to me! Let my email address go!!
Yes, as a matter of fact I did.
:) This is a very good starting point.
This will give people who wish to develop MMORPG, MUD...etc. but are just starting out the ability to see what has been succesful in the past. How much to charge per month, where they can release the games and be succesful.
If you want to develop an MMORPG, which im sure a lot of people do because they sure seem like cash cows.
I think this is a good idea because im sure the MMORPG world is going to get even bigger and better.
I haven't read any of the links but I feel this is a good place to provide my personal feedback on MMOGs. I am just a player.
MMOGs are addictive. The psychological gratifications that normally stem from social interactions in meatspace can be obtained through these online games. Similar gratifications can also be acheived in these games. Consider the team who works on a space probe, launches it and is able to explore a new world. Teams in these games band together to overcome challenges and are rewarded mostly only by the accomplishment. This was my favorite part of Everquest and, in my personal opinion, the redeeming factor of these games. Many who ascend to this level of gameplay eventually become distraught, though. It is my observation that these people don't hate the game. Rather, they are no longer challenged and are no longer exposed to this very satisfying "team accomplishment gratification." They all eventually try other games, find themselves unimpressed by the already-been-done game mechanics and discontinue play of the new game. Many game developers realize that there will always be a 'casual' gamer to cater to in order to secure profit. However, if they only cater to these casual masses their game will just be another lump in the pile. If you please these "hardcore" players who want to be challenged you will be rewarded with their loyalty. Your success as a game designer/developer is only limited by your imagination in game mechanics.
"In online," Walton claims, "Customer service is the business... If we were an army, customer service would be the infantry."
"Is there any upside here? NO," Walton grunts. It's simply a necessary (and frustrating) expense.
Supporting the "customer" should NEVER be a frustrating expense. Supporting your customer, Mr Walton, should be your main concern in EVERY business.
When are companies going to learn that across the whole market, CUSTOMERS COME FIRST and are not there to be bled dry and fobbed off?
feh.
"So there he is, risen from the dead. Like that fella, E. T." - Father Ted Crilly
I am bloody sick of the MMOGs as of late. I want some decent single player games that don't suck. I have enough FPS games to last until the draft of WWIII, where are the cool RPGs and innovative games?
I would consider playing an MMOG if it had a "single-ish" mode. I don't want to be disturbed by others, 90% of them are children anyway. Unfortuantely, they are necessary to support MMOGs as the primary clientelle.
Skimming that paper made me dislike MMOGs even more. Bravo, if that was the intent.
There's some real truth there. But many of those reasons are addressed by the open source model. It's just a pity that there aren't more OSMMOGs out there. Tried out PlaneShift the other day, but while it's really neat in a lot of ways, it's got a ways to go in development.
The CB App. What's your 20?
There's a great chart on page 8 of TFA which shows the number of subscribers to the major MMORPGs. I was curious and found the source of the charts, it's Bruce Sterling Woodcock's site and there's a newer version of the chart I liked here, and there are lots more.
Read Epic the first RPG novel.
Worse they seem to take the same approach to code quality as well. Most online games I have played have suffered from some horridly simple bugs that would be caught with a real Q&A process to an equally if not worse customer service response.
Game companies, especially mmorpg style, lose all their credibility when they claim they can track someone duping or exploiting but say they cannot refund you items lost to bugs because they cannot believe you.
It is a "we don't give a shit - we're gods in our ivory tower" attitude that dominates the industry.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
I didn't read the ******* 80 page pdf.
Mailing Lists are THE best MMORPG.
Pros:
* They are free...
* You get to choose from a multitude of roles: "programmer", "translator", "artist", "docwriter"
* as in all MMORPGs you get to make new friends.
* you get to use really big tools like Google and SF.net
* sometimes you might even get a real job out of this game where someone pays you to play all day.
Cons:
* graphical quality varies with the level/character...
* some level/character combinations might be a little bit boring
My undergrad thesis with a colleague of mine, back in 1999, was essentially a very, very simple realisation of persistent worlds. We created a three-dimensional version of Pong where all activity in one-half of the arena (in our case it was a cube) was handled by one machine. The other half was, obviously, processed on the second machine. The communication between hosts only consisted of periodic heartbeats and the movement deltas of the paddles. Rendering, I/O, physics and the predictive calculations were all done locally (i.e., the machine on which the person was controlling his/her paddle). When we took one machine offline, the user on the still-active machine was notified but was permitted to simply bounce the sphere against the interior of the cube until he/she got bored.
Our game was written in C using Mesa (a 3D graphics library with an API which is very similar to that of OpenGL). Our development machines were IBM boxes running RedHat Linux 5.x. We got the rendering code all working on Solaris machines too. For networking we used UDP and referred to the Stevens book alot.
The ultimate goal of our humble project was to split our arena into octants. Once all eight (8) machines were online we would remove N < 8 machines from the cluster and see how the remaining machines handled the loss of nodes. Because the network is no longer receiving heartbeats from a given machine, another machine would take responsibility and inherit all the process duties thereafter. Ideally, this transfer of duties is totally transparent to all who are watching and/or playing the game.
What drove our desire investigate persistent worlds back in 1999 was my interest in Quake 2 CTF and deathmatch. To hop from one server to the next the user had to explicity exit the server and reconnect to another. I would have preferred if I could seemlessly "walk through a doorway in the game world" and find myself in a different environment. In the background, of course, all network traffic came from a totally different host running a Quake 2 CTF / deathmatch server.
I haven't read the paper but I'm guessing it suggests you simply ignore the community and route all their emails to /dev/null.
Before the flames come let me state that this is not a PRO xxx Title comment.
I started playing Ultima Online in 1997 and have quit and returned 3 different times (currently playing). I've tried Motor City Online (defunct), Ascheron's Call (Micro Crap!), Star Wars Galaxies (pretty cool) and so on.
What needs to be understood is that when people invest a lot of time, money and energy in a game they want it to be gratifying. The problem is that when they find something like that it makes it very hard to switch to another world/game. You don't want to re-invest time and you don't want to have the NOOB feeling again.
With regular single person titles, like in a real arcade, you have the ability to divide up you time between games without losing anything. Take a couple of months off from an online world and lots of things can change.
In the end if I was heading up a team/project to create an online world I would hire some non-technical people. The interactions between people or the habbits/desires and traits of individuals is what needs to be tapped into. On my list would be sociologists, pshychiatrists and maybe even an anthropologist.
Q: I am short, useless and provide no value. What am I? A: a sig
There are many serious omissions. Issues like "how do we fill up a big world with content", "how do we keep everybody from piling up in the good areas", as well as the critical "what can people do in the world" are unaddressed.
I'm in the midst of coding a small graphical mud as a hobby, just to play with some new ideas and exercize my code skills.
Part of that mud will be a persistant world.
I can see someone reading this whitepaper, patenting something as blatently obvious as "persistant world through database storage" and suing me.
Oh well, if it involves computers, it must be revolutionary, right?
(Do other fields get patents as blatently obvious as IT? "Mechanism to attach widget arm to wodget flapper with chain" patent granted?
You meet other players at towns and outposts (each mission start at an outpost), as well as at the PvP areas and guild houses. But you won't have to deal with them when you don't want in order to play the game.