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The Laws of Online World Design
Next Gen has an article up republishing Raph Koster's seminal laws of Online World Design. The piece is one of the basic texts used to think about the way to put a MMOG together. From the article: "Design Rules - The secrets to a really long-lived, goal-oriented, online game of wide appeal : have multiple paths of advancement (individual features are nice, but making them ladders is better), make it easy to switch between paths of advancement (ideally, without having to start over), make sure the milestones in the path of advancement are clear and visible and significant (having 600 meaningless milestones doesn't help), ideally, make your game not have a sense of running out of significant milestones (try to make your ladder not feel finite) "
Rule #2: Ignore all of those useful insights when designing the Jedi class in SWG.
FTA (emphasis theirs):
Is it a game?
It's a SERVICE. Not a game. It's a WORLD. Not a game. It's a COMMUNITY. Not a game. Anyone who says, "it's just a game" is missing the point.
I think this is exactly the WRONG point of view to be promoting among devs. Heh, I guess I miss the author's point, but to me he describes exactly the mindset that has lead to all these so-called games that are really just FIFO inventory models.
MMORPG's exhibit no required skill, they just present a time-sink that anyone with enough life-energy to click a mouse can participate in. Some make it to lvl 60 (or 100, or whatever the max is) quickly, others more slowly, and some never, but there is never any real test of gaming ability other than, "I'm more persistent at putting up with this repetative crap than you are, that's why I'm higher level."
Pen and paper D&D at least had an element of outsmarting the other players and/or GM. To succeed you had to think, act, strategize, out-intellegence, and talk your way to a victory. This type of experience is sorely lacking from modern MMORPGS, in my experience. It's more an excercise in collecting the sparkly eq that the giant glowing snail drops and selling it to noobs. MMORPGs as we know them are not games, in the traditional sense of video games, or role-playing games. I would suggest that they are barely even games.
"Online worlds are a PLATFORM first and foremost. Putting games in that platform is certainly one of the top things you can do, and if you do so, you had better make sure those games are fun, certainly. But it's also not that hard to make an online world that has a fun game in it and yet ignores the other factors of worldness, community, and service, and have a disaster on your hands--there's plenty of examples of that."
But in practice there are plenty of examples to the opposite too.
E.g., TSO comes to mind. It had a world, it was designed to be more of a community than any MMO ever made (there wasn't much else than social interaction in it anyway), and it was based on _the_ biggest franchise name in PC gaming history. (The Sims outsold all Warcraft games combined.) And it flopped. It peaked at about 35 times less players than WoW has, and again, WoW started from a less big franchise name.
The problem: well, it was everything _except_ a game. The "game" part was about as exciting and fun as watching paint dry.
E.g., to be nasty: UO. It _invented_ a genre (not to mention was based on the biggest RPG franchise name) and quickly ended up in third place. It peaked at about 1/14 as many players as WoW currently has, or 1/2 of what Everquest had without a franchise name or anything.
And again, we're talking about inventing a genre. Look at what Wolfenstein 3D did for Id, to understand by contrast the _massive_ failure of UO.
The problems were many, including, yes, an utter failure to even try being fun or balanced as a game. Gameplay was pretty much non-existent, whole skills were utterly useless (e.g., was there _any_ use for tinkering, except traps to kill newbies?) or conversely had 2/3 of the possible actions in the game under one single skill (ever seen even miners or sheepherds without magic skill in UO?), and so on.
Oh yes, it concentrated on being a world and a platform instead. At all cost. Even if it meant alienating the players. _Years_ were spent into trying to justify why it's good and realistic for newbies to be pk-ed on sight, for example, while players were leaving en-masse to AC and EQ because of it. Or in various failed band-aid experiments which were _already_ proven not to work on MUDs. Had the world and platform ahead of what the players wanted for so long, that it just lost most of those players.
"Online worlds encompass game worlds like EQ and WoW, social worlds like There.com and Habbo Hotel, user-created worlds like Second Life and Furcadia, educational worlds like MOOse Crossing and military training sims, research-oriented worlds like MediaMOO, and much more. Thinking that they are all games is exactly the point of this law."
Heh. Compared to the population of even the worst MMO flop, a MUD is a spit in the bucket. Even if some of those are examples of "but look, you can make an online world even without much of a game", then the rightful second half of that phrase is "and be an utter and total flop, compared to worlds which _do_ have a game."
We can learn a lot of valuable lessons about human interactions and such from MUDs, yes. But if we're talking about designing a world that's a _commercial_ _success_ on any reasonable scale, let's stick to the likes of EQ and WoW, please.
Plus, it's a skewed comparison anyway to compare a world which has a 15$ per month price tag, to a MUD that works for free through Telnet. Something that requires people to reach into their wallet and _stull_ has 3000 times more players, well, I'd say it did something a _lot_ better than those research MOOs.
Plus, if we are including free online worlds like MUDs and MOOs, and consider the genre as broad as to include pretty much anything online including those... then we also get plenty of games which are counter-examples to the "But it's also not that hard to make an online world that has a fun game in it and yet ignores the other factors of worldness, community, and service, and have a disaster on your hands" point. Th
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