MMOG Designers Throw Down Over Instancing

jkdove writes "On November 29, 2004, Slashdot featured an article with Brad McQuaid, CEO of Sigil Entertainment and his stance on Instances in MMORPG's. Raph Koster, Chief Creative Officer of Sony Online Entertainment and Scott Jennings, Server Programmer for Mythic Entertainment quickly entered into the ongoing debate at GamerGod, offering their own contrasting viewpoints. From Raph Koster's entry: 'Brad cynically points out that the more common reasons are because there wasn't enough time or budget to develop sufficient content to keep spawn points from being contested or overcrowded.' From Scott Jenning's reply: 'I'm not really sure where he's going here. Players know when they're going through the same instance for a thousandth time, so I'm not really aware of any game that can claim this as a wedge against the Content Demon.'" Update: 12/01 17:12 GMT by Z : Updated to keep Scott out of trouble. Sorry Sanya!

Comments

Dupe

[Anonymous Coward]

Dupe from last tuesday. http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/11/29/ 2328246&tid=209. When will the madness stop...

Re:Dupe

[PhilHibbs]

No, this is NOT a dupe of the article MENTIONED IN THIS ARTICLE!

Re:Dupe

[/ASCII]

I really wish all the lamers who complain about dupes would give it a rest. Yes Slashdot does on occasion run actual dupes, but 90% of the so called 'dupes' are simply the latest developments in an ongoing event. I truly wish more newspapers and other media would be as dedicated to giving you the complete story and not be as obsessed with breaking news.

Re:Dupe

[tc]

It's not a dupe, it's just another instance...

Re:Dupe

[BinaryOpty]

Then if that's the case, why not mark the article as such? "In the ongoing event of...", "Update:", or a tag that means "ongoing event"? Right now to the casual eye this is a dupe, and thus the average user who read the original article will skip it, thus not getting the complete story, so Slashdot offering it only helps the relatively anal who actually check out the link before dismissing the post as a dupe.

Re:Dupe

[chrismcdirty]

Or they will assume it's a dupe without reading the article, and then post that it's a dupe within the comments, when it actually isn't one.

Re:Dupe

[Anonymous Coward]

Damn, I was hoping to camp it up.

Brad is clueless.

[Anonymous Coward]

Brad needs to wake up and smell reality. There are many people who love instancing. Having played in an EQ raid guild it was a job, on the contrast WoW raiding is awesome, you no longer have to mold your life around a game. EQ was a PvP game disguised as PvE, thanks to the "great vision" of Brad. His desire of players having competition and accomplishment is nothing more than who has more time to put into the game. His design ideas for V:SoH are nothing more than rehashed EQ design ideas that failed miserably. No instancing. Camping. Lot of travel. Yay! Tedium, boredom, retarded racing with another guild to kill raid mob X. Skills needed: pulse and lot of time!

Instances allow immensly more rewarding and immersive content. You no longer have to watch out for sweatshop_farmer_9412 to train you, ruin your scripted event or steal your kill. You no longer have to race a guild of college dropouts who got nothing better to do than play games 24h a day, you can assemble a group of friends, schedule the raid and do it at your own pace. Same time the hardcore guilds can easily enlarge their ePeen by competing with other guilds who kills mob X before or who has the most players on the PvP ranking board. Instancing is a win-win situation. Well no, it's a bad system for griefers, for everyone else it's a winning system.

Unfortunately Brad is clueless or he still thinks that we are still in 1999. Vanguard is dead before being released because Brad is ignoring that MMOGs brings out the griefer in many assholes. And since his game has no "anti-griefer" mechanism (instances) it will be a paradise for griefers, all in the name of competition and accomplishment. Welcome to EQ pre Planes of Power.

Re:Brad is clueless.

[Pxtl]

I think this is a very good point - the instances are there because they're needed. Imho, the problem is that the "real world" + RPG as an MMO model is fundamentally flawed.

The designer wants everybody to be able to play through all the same quests, but at the same time wants there to be only one existing version of each quest in the game world. Those are mutually exclusive goals.

At some point you have to admit that MMOs aren't really the "single massive world" they admit to be - they're a group of small single-player, co-op, and deathmatch games that happen to use the world map as a game browser. The fact is that real life has a lot of gameplay flaws, and the interest of real-life primarily comes from the obscene amount of content.

Unless the designers of an MMO want to make hundreds of in-world quests in a giant overlapping mess of the game world individually for each player, the "real world as MMO" mentality is fruitless.

Re:Brad is clueless.

[ameoba]

Did you even try to read his article?

My god, it's the worst excuse for writing I've ever seen from an "industry visonary" (or whatever they call him) - it's a big series of disorganized lists with no real connection & half-assed prose spread between them.

Re:Brad is clueless.

[DrEldarion]

it's a big series of disorganized quests with no real connection & half-assed prose spread between them.

Change one word, and you've got a wonderful description of MMORPGs.

Re:Brad is clueless.

[cowscows]

Yeah, one of the "hooks" of a game in a fantasy setting like WOW and most other RPG's is that it lets you play as a "hero". It's all about doing epic things. Real life is generally brief moments of excitement/adventure/stress/challenge seperated by longer periods of mundane activity, not the sort of thing you really want to spend $15 per month to recreate on your computer screen. So people who are playing are going to want to do all the good stuff, and if you make it too hard to do that, then people are going to stop playing. You have to let everyone experience all the good stuff and be the hero, cause that's what they're there for.

But that leads to problems. Like you hinted at, for content to be reuseable, you have to sort of ignore the consequences that an action would have. That sort of breaks the immersion factor a bit, and also detracts from the "epic" nature of it all. Nothing you do can really have too much of a drastic change on the world, because that could obsolete a whole bunch of the content that was already made, and everyone behind you loses out. The real problem is that video games generally aren't as "interactive" as we like to think. We're not directing the world as much as just choosing from a number of prewritten consequences. That doesn't really mesh easily with a whole bunch of people running around on the same server trying to create a virtual "existence".

Autogenerated content?

[Vo0k]

Instances are plain unnatural. Two guys go through the same door, they both land in identical environments but they are separate from each other.
What about approach that was present in some long-forgotten games like Elite 2: Frontier? Just pseudorandomly (randomizing with a fixed seed, so it looks random in space, but doesn't change in time) create a huge game universe, with some overriding "specials" locations/events, and vast "generic" terrains, specific to given area somehow, but without having each tree in the forest placed by hand or c&p'd from neighbouring square, but placed in somewhat random pattern.

Instead of drawing the world from scratch, let the machine generate just a "generic world" , whole map of rivers, forests, mountains, caves etc (or whatever fits given universe...) from some basic "brick" elements, without cities and roads, but with monster spawning points, completely random caves, some low-value treasure, some very generic low-paying quests/missions, possibly even with some completely random villages. Then populate it by hand, using artists and mappers' skills, add custom quests, custom enemies, custom buildings. Remove architectonical nonsenses, add roads, transportation, special places - generally add sense of order to the world.

Effect: Development cost and time cut in half or more, gameplay area expanded almost indefinitely, possibly also vastly reducing the download/install size (Frontier would fit on a floppy, with billions of stars and advanced universe), because most of the world can be generated ("spawned") just from the fixed random seed and formula, instead of having to be read from database.

Re:Autogenerated content?

[PhilHibbs]

The vast majority of the galaxy was uninhabited, you couldn't even get to it without exploiting bugs in the game as there was nowhere to get your ship repaired. The original Elite was better, it had random galaxies, but they were fairly uninteresting other than a couple of missions that were hand-coded. Randomly generating an interesting, challenging world is really, really hard, and you would just find masses of players congregating around the scripted areas or the most interesting random bits.

Re:Autogenerated content?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is this really viable for a persistant world? Surely once you start having people running around in it, you can't rely on a seeded rng (or similar) to generate the correct results without it being severely limited. Not only that, my machine can barely keep up with a simple pre-designed world (i.e. WoW) without thrashing itself to death every time I step into a large city, so do you expect it to generate the world itself with a seed from the server? Maybe have the server generate it and download everything? Have you seen Second Life (which has such a streaming system)? It's sluggish even on a 2Mb connection...

Maybe it would be viable in 5 / 10 years or so, but really, are our computers and networks up to it yet?

Re:Autogenerated content?

[Vo0k]

"Randomly generating an interesting, challenging world is really, really hard"

I agree. But instead of iteratively creating the world bit-by-bit, why not enter another spectrum and spend the same time and effort on tweaking the parameters of the random creation (or not so random, but macromanaged - say, you draw the world of the map, with one pixel relating to half a mile square of gameplay terrain, then generate the world with terrain made corresponding to the map). Then once the method of rapid creating the world has been developed, practically the developers can add new custom content faster than players could discover it, especially that 80% of the time the players would spend on "generics", random encounters in the wilderness, exploring, treasure-hunting in generic caves - or just doing the usual socializing in the cities.
Really little work would go into changing a common "generic" into an interesting "custom" taking the generated world as your friend. A generic area inhabited by strong enemies - just place a single more expensive (if generic) item in the middle, and leave a rumor in the tavern. And you have a challenging quest. With making quests that easy, the game could be a huge success. And since the development goes on while the game is running, the world could keep growing all the time, and there would be always something new to do/find, new features being added all the time etc.
The game would NOT be very ballanced, but still fun, and realistic. A newbie faces a randomly spawned enemy of some 60th level? Yay! Run for the city gates and yell for help! That completely generic cave a few paces from the capitol, thousands of players went through, but one bothered to pick up a rock and found a note with a hint for a hidden cave, not really far, but quite well hidden.
Besides "generics" and "customs" there could be "specials", items, events, challenges unique to the whole game, happening just once. What about a big meteorite striking some big area in the middle of the map? What about an earthquake changing the face of Earth? Or a sea drying up by some rare magic spell? Just think of the opportunity to make heroes to be sung about, just by providing unique quests that are doable just once (not once by player, once total!) and having huge impact on the world? Want add some new kind of monsters? Don't make them appear overnight. Make a quest that ends up with a single player screwing up some important spell badly (scripted but unexpected) and summoning them. From then on, that single player would gain world's fame. Everyone could do it, and they would happen rarely enough to make them precious, but often enough that you could have a fair chance to stumble upon one. Real stories to tell, and proofs walking the earth, no "I've beaten X" "I've beaten X too!" "I've beaten X as a kid" as with instances where everyone repeats the same quest over and over, but as truly notable events.

Re:Autogenerated content?

[Anonymous Coward]

I have thought about this several times myself.

If you are up to date on many published papers on Computer Generated content you will realize that there are many techniques for 'building' computer generated trees, buildings, terrain and towns that are more than superficially tied to reality; that is they appear realistic on the surface. The techniques that combine computer generation with human content creation can be very effective.

Now, what you have is a very large (very borring) world built in a couple of 'developer years' that you can then build off of.

Re:Autogenerated content?

[CoderBob]

The game would NOT be very ballanced, but still fun, and realistic. A newbie faces a randomly spawned enemy of some 60th level? Yay! Run for the city gates and yell for help! That completely generic cave a few paces from the capitol, thousands of players went through, but one bothered to pick up a rock and found a note with a hint for a hidden cave, not really far, but quite well hidden.

I dunno about anybody else, but I play a game for fun, and to escape reality. Also, balance is very important, or most of your player-base will end up leaving the game. Random spawns are also much less realistic than you think. How would a creature of any type end up as strong as a level 60 when surrounded by weak creatures? Think about it- the entire concept of a powerful creature in a fictional world (dragon, lich, whatever you creature may be) is that they have an area that people shy away from. They don't just hang out on the streetcorner, waiting to accost passers-by.

I'm all for randomly generated content, just not random worlds. In fact, I wish the instances in WoW were more like the dungeons of Diablo or the terrain of Diablo II- It's not as much fun when you know exactly where the mob you need to kill is. But as for having a completely random world? Well, once you've generated it, you really can't change it on the fly, so why not just design it to be what you wanted in the fist place? Changing the fabric of the world while people are playing just seems like a bad idea.

Really, random content is where instances could truly shine- once they get a method of generating a decent looking instance in a random manner.

On a different note, you said:

Make a quest that ends up with a single player screwing up some important spell badly (scripted but unexpected) and summoning them. From then on, that single player would gain world's fame.

Hell, no. This is the kind of thing that pissed me off as a D&D gamer, and would continue to piss me off in a MMO game, in which I create my character's story- not the developers. They provide me a world. I provide my story.

Re:Autogenerated content?

[will_die]

Can you have a almost completly random MMORPG, SWG kind of does.
Once you leave the cities, and if there is no other player around to lock down the area things will change.
For instance I once went far outside of town and left the game. When I left it was a plains. Log in hour later, an empiral stronhold. hour later plains and a few spawn points, later a small rebel camp, later mountains.
That type of randomness is not good.

Re:Autogenerated content?

[ameoba]

Wouldn't a much more appropriate example be Nethack/Angband/etc where you're actually generating dungeons?

Re:Autogenerated content?

[Anonymous Coward]

Instances are plain unnatural. Two guys go through the same door, they both land in identical environments but they are separate from each other.
What about approach that was present in some long-forgotten games like Elite 2: Frontier? Just pseudorandomly ...
- You confuse a random generated instanced dungeon with a carefuly designed and scripted MMOG instance.

That said, In EQ, the endgame dungeons (not raid zones) where nothing more than boring campfests. Named mobs who dropped loot where nothing more than a bit harder versions of yardtrash in the same dungeon. Oooh, that big Fungus King is nothing more than a random Fungus Reaver with more HPs and it hits a bit harder. Whooopeee doo! This is Brad's vision. Doing dungeons in EQ was simple: Zone in, shout to check what's camped and what isn't. Move towards the spaw spot of a named mob that isn't camped. Set up camp, mindlessly slaughter the same mobs until the named pops who is nothing more but a carbon copy of a random mob you kept slaughtering for hours but a tiny bit stronger. This again is Brad's vision.

Fast forward to WoW and 2004.

Zone into some high level dungeon, not even endgame dungeon, Blackrock Depths. First event is in cell. You talk to an NPC, 5 mobs attack you. Move deeper, a judge calls you infidel and whatnot, you have to face his "justice" by fighting a few waves of monsters then a named mob spawns (drops unique loot) and you get access to a new area of the dungeon. Do a quest, and you get access to another area of the dungeon (West Garrison). Here is the real fun. First event is General Angerforge, standard boss + minions event. Kill, loot. Move deeper and face Golem Lord Angersomething. Now, if you make the mistake in not killing 4 specific golems around him, he gonna call them to help. This dwarf isn't just a bit stronger dwarf, it's much stronger and has special abilities. Kill, loot, move.

Welcome to the Bar. Plenty of fun events like insult a named goblin and he'll attack you with his guards, if you completed the Love Potion quest you can give it to a Succubus and watch a WoW version of cyber with a dwarf, or smash some barrels of booze and get attacked by another group of dwarves or get one dwarf drunk, watch a giant golem break a door open, kill golem and get access to a new area of the instance. All this time you get interesting loot.

Move forward, kill Ambassador Flamelash. Loot, move forward and reach the Tomb of the Seven. You can do a quest here to learn to smelt some specific ore or simply, insult a ghost, get wave after wave of dwarf ghost to attack you, and ... yes, gain access to another area of the dungeon. Here you can zone into the raid zone Molten Core or continue towards the boss of the dungeon, Emperor Dagarwhateverishisname. Next challenge, the Lycaeum. Groups of 15+ dwarves with 1 minute respawn. You also need to find 2 key keepers and kill them for the keys. Keys last 5 minutes. This room is a perfect example of a challenging room yet something impossible to do in a non instanced area.

Move into final room, kill a named giant, move into throne room, kill the senators, kill king. Get the chick (if you are alliance or have specific quest), get loot, sit on throne and yada yada yada.

Can designers implement a dungeon like WoW's Blackrock Depth in a non instanced area? Nope. BRD is a fine dungeon with many scripted events, rich backstory and when you do it feels like conquering a dungeon instead of sitting in the same place camping the named mob that has 10% chance of spawning.

Compared to Brad's vision of non instanced dungeons, it's lightyears ahead. Because of instances the designers can do some pretty amazing and fun events. One of the coolest is the WoW Gordok tribute run where you become king of ogres by killing the king. There is also BRD, UBRS Rend event and plenty of other scripted events that would be impossible to do in non instanced environments. Instances also allow good loot distribution. You can reward players w

Re:Autogenerated content?

[Anonymous Coward]

Random spawns are also much less realistic than you think. How would a creature of any type end up as strong as a level 60 when surrounded by weak creatures?

These would be way more rare than normal ones. How would that creature get there? Just came from its far place. Happens. Rarely. In real life too. And the world is big and wild. People don't need to shy away from these places. They just don't know they exist. If they learn (the hard way), they will start shying away from them.

Well, once you've generated it, you really can't change it on the fly, so why not just design it to be what you wanted in the fist place?
Because designing it piece by piece takes ages and costs a fortune. You end up with a small crowded world where people stand in queue to a spawn point to get a single kill, and pseudo-solutions to that problem like instances that just change a MassiveMORPG into a group of MinimalMORPGs with some centralised common non-adventuring "massive" areas. This would be a method of rapid, cheap development that would allow for a world where you can take a breath, where you can walk through the forests and mountains whole days without seeing another player, but still finding new, original quests. And pathologies like spawn-killing and dungeon-harvesting would be easily ended, instead of 2 spawn points per player average, spawning a monster 30 seconds after it was killed, make 10.000 spawn points per player, each spawning a monster less than once a day on average. Zones near cities would probably be hunted clear, but just move a bit further, and suddenly density of players drops, up to the point where you find more prey than you can chew on, and you start becoming the prey, and to gain experience and resources you would either take up a peaceful job or have to start REALLY exploring. Not treating an attack on a nearby evil fortress like a trip to the supermarket for weekly supplies. The nearby evil fortress has been long looted and a mages' guild is organising its headquarters there. But there's a rumour of that evil wizard running up to the coast, and some fisher having a clue where's the new hideout. More roleplaying, less hack&slash.

Changing the fabric of the world while people are playing just seems like a bad idea.
If it's done in an invasive way, like the other responder to your post described, yes, it's a horrible idea. But such a world could easily do it in a good way:
a) attach a single bit flag to every item (on the server side): "seen". Change places/things no player has seen before. There will be a plenty in such a big world. Mapmaker will be a valuable profession. No such thing like entrance to a new maze appearing out of the blue. You just didn't see it. Nobody ever did. (might be a timestamp instead too, you've seen it a year ago, but it has changed since...)
b) make the changes a part of the roleplay/story. Major events foretold by sages, results of natural disasters, effects of ultimate quests. And of course development of the civilisation, buildning new houses, cutting down woods etc.
c) hooks. A group of rocks collapses one day, revealing a narrow entrance to the cave. Digging the foundations for a new temple, the workers discover some forgotten ruins. Simple development from b) taking unexpected turns. Don't overuse though.
d) discoveries. Just extending a) in space and size. Far islands in parts of sea never seen. A town in the valley of far mountain range. A village of some strange creatures in the middle of a far, unexplored forest. Some things could exist in the game for weeks undiscovered by any player until someone gets there and brings word on mouth and a map back. Or until an obscure hint from the developers appears.

This is the kind of thing that pissed me off as a D&D gamer, and would continue to piss me off in a MMO game

You would have about as much choice about your fate as you have in your current life. Quite likely you'd know the risks and you'd have the opportunity to turn back. (and some other p

Re:Autogenerated content?

[CoderBob]

I'm going to leave the rest of your post alone- suffice it to say you make some good points, even if I don't necessarily agree. However:

You would have about as much choice about your fate as you have in your current life. Quite likely you'd know the risks and you'd have the opportunity to turn back. (and some other player would botch the spell...) If you want to create the history of your character yourself, well, create the past before the game as you wish. But the only real fame you have is the one you've gained through the actions in the world. If you've proven yourself a coward, no amount of storytelling about your invented past will reverse it. And if you hate the fame you earned with what you just did, either hide it well (never admit, slay witnesses) or you can always create a new character.

I thought we were playing a game? You know, something which we do for entertainment? I wouldn't bother trying to hide it or create a new character- I'd leave that game behind, and find something else. That's why I enjoy these games as they are- I can gain noteriety or fame through my actions, but it is always from a decision I made- Do I take on those two 24 elites with my 23 Druid? Can I? If I fail and people laugh at it, oh well- I made the choice to try. Or do I succeed, and gain the respect of my group and guild? The concept of the spell backfiring is one of deus ex machina, and that is never a good idea in gaming. The player needs to feel like their character is in their control.

All of my characters in WoW have had their own "personalities", from the bitchy priest to the can-do druid. They've all done a different series of quests, as I decide where I'm going to explore and what quests I want to do. I don't need scripted events to make that happen- the different interactions I've made provide it for me.

Re:Autogenerated content?

[Anonymous Coward]

Surely once you start having people running around in it, you can't rely on a seeded rng (or similar) to generate the correct results without it being severely limited.

In case of the landscape, natural terrain features and all that stuff, I can. With limited hints of the database (hints like: next 30 miles is a flat desert, another 5 miles should be covered with dunes).
The random results would be quite limited of course, thus "customs" next to "commons", objects, events, places, NPCs created by traditional means, overriding the rng. Just like in a classic MMORPG. Except in a classic MMORPG, as a developer, you spend a week developing a "generic labyrinth" and seeding it with monsters and traps in somewhat random pattern, then 2 hours adding a storyline. Here, you'd spend 5 minutes picking a seed that creates a cool generic labyrinth with some features you like, a hour tweaking it somehow to remove generated nonsenses and make it more tricky and cool, then 2 hours adding a storyline. Meaning you could make about 15 such labyrinths a week, not one, and each being an unique adventure.

so do you expect it to generate the world itself with a seed from the server?
Frontier worked on a 7MHZ Amiga rather smoothly. Daggerfall is too fast for a Pentium II. Actually, considering the amount of details that have to be stored in memory and the size of the look-up tables, generating things is faster than loading them. And can be done "on leisure", flexibly and seamlessly, not in blocks like "loading sectors". it would be just as hard (or lighter) on the GPU than normal games, and really, with current CPUs, no problem. Consider generating/computing 1000 items a minute (by swapping them in/out of cache), in face of creating a few hundreds of polygons in 1/60th second (software rendering mode). And by a common seeds you greatly reduce the network usage too.

Of course if the programmers screw up with a sloppy, inefficient 3D rendering machine (like in case of SL) it is bound to suck.

Re:Autogenerated content?

[Anonymous Coward]

Zone into some high level dungeon, not even endgame dungeon, Blackrock Depths. First event is in cell.

(some 3kb of talk)

  Get the chick (if you are alliance or have specific quest), get loot, sit on throne and yada yada yada.

And you have a typical MinimalMORPG. You either come back and replay everything, or never come back. But whenever you talk with other players, they've all seen the same thing, they've been there. You know this instance by heart. Hardly a chance for discovering something nobody else did or getting too far from the predesigned script. It never matters you're in a huge city full of people.

Some people boast that they finished DiabloII 80 times. They love playing the same story over and over. What about those who would like to feel the taste of discovery? Of finding adventures nobody, or few seen before? Actually selling the secret of a location of a forgotten city to other players, who would be willing to buy it? :)
Remove mundane job of carefully crafting -every- detail, and you're left with enough time to craft true masterpiece from details that matter, and make a lot of them.

Re:Autogenerated content?

[toriver]

Instances are plain unnatural.
As opposed to the lack of collision detection, the very concept of hitpoints, respawning, and that every quest giver gives the same quest to thousands of people?

"We congratulate J. Random Playah for bringing Van Cleef's Head no. 1,000,000!" quests are very unnatural.

MMORPGs and "unnatural" fit like hand in glove. Instances reduce spawn competition and hence helps the game aspect greatly.

Re:Autogenerated content?

[Vo0k]

Now, what you have is a very large (very borring) world built in a couple of 'developer years' that you can then build off of.

Yes.
Arbitrarily large. As huge as I only desire. As many developer-years as I desire, by just turning a knob.
As for "boring", not necessarily THAT boring. Sometimes the game engine itself creates cool challenges. With medium amount of effort you can generate huge amount of medium-interesting content - hunting, mapping, mining, discovering resources, etc. This alone could keep some players occupied for weeks. But true, with extra content it would get very boring after some time. Thing is, you need very little custom content combined with the generated area to keep things interesting. Development of interesting world gets really cheap.
True, as opposed to instanced world, not everyone can become a king twice a day. But all the more becoming a king gets valuable. And the chances you will, some day, are fair.

Re:Autogenerated content?

[Vo0k]

With this method you can remove or minimize most of the above "unnaturals".

Re:Autogenerated content?

[Vo0k]

If you know in real life they are 24-level... Otherwise, well... The challenge is even cooler.
As for spell backfiring, true if it's a lvl1 magic missile you use two times a minute, it would suck. But if you're up to a great ritual you've never done before in your life, very risky and very dangerous, you know what you're doing. And screwing up in a creative way may be just as fun (or even more) than succeeding.

Re:Autogenerated content?

[Vo0k]

Similar idea, but not such HUGE world. I mean, what, 99 levels? :)
(plus they get randomly generated everytime you enter. Same reason I didn't list Diablo. The idea is that the world, though generated, remains pretty much fixed thorough the time.)

2004?

[Lewisham]

2004 eh? Those comments have a long time coming. Jeez, and I thought waiting for WoW 1.9 was taking too long.

I like instancing

[rAiNsT0rm]

I actually prefer instanced quests and common towns... however I think a blend of the two is actually the sweet spot.

Have towns and areas around the town as common areas and then quests be instanced. To me this is something that no one has tried yet and could be the real answer.

I don;t want to have to deal with waiting for rabbits to appear to kill and get their fur when 20 other people are doing the same to complete a quest. But have a nice area around each town that is common and maybe even contains a few high level monsters and a super badass one that require teaming and grouping for decent rewards.

Also I feel that every MMO should have at least a single soloable dungeon that players can enjoy when friends/guildmates are not on. Have it get stupidly tough near then end and ensure that players really will have to continually work to clear it over the life of their character. Also, have every weapon/item that is attainable in the regular quests be able to be had in this dungeon... that way every player has equal opportunity and is not penalized for their style of play.

I also believe that player created quests should be implemented. I know many times when I've been gold rich but really wanted a single weapon I couldn't get either due to skill or time. Instead of standing around saying "WTB - Uber Dragonslayer sword of insight" I could go and post a quest saying "1,000g to the first adventurer to bring me an Uber Dragonslayer sword of insight" and let bored/enterprising adventurers fulfill my request.

I also believe player created villages and towns would also draw peopl ein and lend a sense of ownership. Then when a warring faction comes and raids your village and you have to rebuild... you now have a real sense of hatred and loyalty.

Re:I like instancing

[AdamWeeden]

Have towns and areas around the town as common areas and then quests be instanced. To me this is something that no one has tried yet and could be the real answer.

Sounds like City Of Heroes to me.

Re:I like instancing

[rAiNsT0rm]

I'll have to claim ignorance here as I've never played COH. I tend to play only fantasy based MMO's.

Would you mind explaining how this works in COH? Are towns and surrounding area common while quests are instanced?

Thanks, and if I'm worng here I will fully admit it. I have yet to find a fantasy MMO that does this.

Re:I like instancing

[AdamWeeden]

In CoH everyone lives in one BIG city (hence CITY of Heroes) of which there are about 15-20 neghborhoods, each neighborhood being a square that is about 5-10 minutes walk wide. Each neighborhood is common, and there are "monsters" in the streets you can fight. Major quests however are all instanced. When a NPC assigns you a quest, they'll typically say something along the lines of "Go to this building in this neighborhood." When you click on that building's door to enter you (and your party) are put inside an instance of that building, so even if someone else is on the same quest where you have to (for instance) go kill a gang leader, everybody gets their own shot to kill the gang leader without having to worry about kill stealing or lines. When your quest is over, you can teleport out of the instance (back to the entrance) and you're back in common ground. Hope that explains enough.

Re:I like instancing

[chrismcdirty]

Actually, that sounds more like Guild Wars to me. You can join a party/get quests/buy things in a city, but you will never encounter another character who is not in your party outside of any city or town.

Re:I like instancing

[rAiNsT0rm]

Yep. Crystal Clear, and exactly what I had been dreaming of in a fantasy MMO. Like all good ideas, someone beat me to it apparently :) Story of my life, day late, dollar short.

It sounds like you may be a COH player, and if so, may I ask how well this works in practice? It seems like the perfect blend of gameplay for an MMO.

In games like Guild Wars where everything is instanced, you are left with a empty feeling. In WoW it feels too crowded at times and is frustrating (just MHO). This system seems like a perfect mixture.

Re:I like instancing

[2Flower]

It sounds like you may be a COH player, and if so, may I ask how well this works in practice? It seems like the perfect blend of gameplay for an MMO.

It works pretty well. Generally you never have to 'street hunt' to reach your next level; instanced quests are readily available and can be soloed or teamed. Nice thing is that the number of enemies and their strength balances against the size of your team, so you're rarely over or under whelmed once you go into that instance, even solo.

The disadvantage is that, as was suggested earlier, it makes the neighborhoods into a glorified 'game browser' where, once you have your travel powers (flight / speed / teleport / leaping) you're just moving from instance door to instance door and not bothering fighting the enemies outside unless forced to.

They're working on things you can do outside, though. Most neighborhoods have neighborhood-specific events and giant monsters to fight, which require impromptu teamups. There's also hidden exploration-based badges you can earn for poking around outside, some of which accumulate into combat bonuses.

Overall it's a good system, ideal for casual gamers and people tired of waiting in line to kill Garignak the Terrible and get his rare shoulderpad drops.

Re:I like instancing

[AdamWeeden]

I tend to be a pretty nomadic gamer, so I don't play anymore, but while I was playing I really couldn't complain. Only thing that was annoying was people can grief you with "monsters" (only happened to me a few times). Basically "monsters" inside neighborhoods hang out in groups of 10-20, and if you attack one of them (or if you're lower level than them, just walk too close to them) they all go after you. Some people do this than lure the group to a lower level section of a neighborhood and the groups will start attacking anybody within reach.

Re:I like instancing

[Red Flayer]

"Instead of standing around saying "WTB - Uber Dragonslayer sword of insight" I could go and post a quest saying "1,000g to the first adventurer to bring me an Uber Dragonslayer sword of insight" and let bored/enterprising adventurers fulfill my request."

Don't most MMOGs have forum marketplaces for this exact thing? You post what you want and the price you'll pay, and you can either monitor the forums, or give your userID for people to whisper you in game.

Sure, it's not an official quest, but it amounts to the same, no?

Re:I like instancing

[rAiNsT0rm]

Guild Wars doesn't, and`there are a number of other titles that dont.

Re:I like instancing

[Red Flayer]

There is no way in Guild Wars to post static content that is viewable by other players? Odd.

Is there a guild directory, where someone could post a guild website with such requests on it?

Another thought is that people who develop a network of 'friends' in-game, or belong to a guild, have a method of letting people know that they've got something for sale or want to buy something.

I get whispers several times a day asking if I'm buying or selling X; if it's someone I don't know, I drop the Ignore-hammer. But my social network has helped me fnind goods at the right price many times.

Re:I like instancing

[rAiNsT0rm]

Nope, Guild Wars has no mechanism in place at all. For a modern product, it is pretty unbelievable. All you have is the ability to go to a crowded district and yell "WTS - Sword of Uberness" over and over while it gets lost in the 1,000 other people doing the same.

Then once you get a reply, you have to actually give some clue as to where you are or they can't even find you to come buy your sword of uberness. it is about a silly and cumbersome a system as I have ever seen. I don't play anymore, even with it being free, the game itself is pretty crappy on top of the other problems.

Re:I like instancing

[geminidomino]

When you click on that building's door to enter you (and your party) are put inside an instance of that building, so even if someone else is on the same quest where you have to (for instance) go kill a gang leader, everybody gets their own shot to kill the gang leader without having to worry about kill stealing or lines. When your quest is over, you can teleport out of the instance (back to the entrance) and you're back in common ground.

How is that any different from WoW's instancing?

Re:I like instancing

[AdamWeeden]

How is that any different from WoW's instancing?

Don't know. I've never played WoW.

Re:I like instancing

[Zorikin]

In CoH, 1 instance = 1 mission, so you don't stand around in the door deciding which missions to do. Most instances scale with the party, so you can go solo or with a group and get a similar level of challenge either way. You can also raise your difficulty level in the game, if you want greater challenges and rewards, and the instances will scale accordingly.

Re:I like instancing

[Guppy06]

"Have towns and areas around the town as common areas and then quests be instanced. To me this is something that no one has tried yet and could be the real answer."

Phantasy Star Online.

Thanks for the shout out, but...

[Scott_Jennings]

...I'm actually a server programmer at Mythic. Our Internet Relations Manager is Sanya Thomas, and if she finds out Slashdot gave me her job she might hit me. Please don't make her hit me. It hurts.

Re:Thanks for the shout out, but...

[vertinox]

Lum is that you?

Re:Thanks for the shout out, but...

[Why's_This_Fish_So_B]

Scott is Lum, yes.

Ob. Simpsons reference

[madeye the younger]

If that's not Lum, he's done his homework...

Unnatural?

[madeye the younger]

Did you ever see a movie or read a good book where at key points in the plotline anywhere from 5 to 500 OTHER main characters show up, are standing in line, or just exit the conflict the character you were identifying with was headed to? *Thats* unnatural. There's an astoundingly obvious, and good reason why stories don't progress that way. If you want to play one of the random ants in a swarm, be my guest.

For myself, when I pay money to play a game I expect content to generally unfold according to MY character's actions. I don't pay to stand in line. I don't pay to be griefed. I don't pay to watch a herd of 30 d00ds vaporize my archenemy without breaking stride, and be lavishly rewarded moreso than if I had won a hard battle myself.

Address the problem with instances, 'infinite' worlds, or whatever, but please do recall that there really isn't a good reason to take the choice of who you want in your story away from the player.

Re:Unnatural?

[SharpFang]

Did you ever see a movie or read a good book where at key points in the plotline anywhere from 5 to 500 OTHER main characters show up, are standing in line, or just exit the conflict the character you were identifying with was headed to? *Thats* unnatural. There's an astoundingly obvious, and good reason why stories don't progress that way. If you want to play one of the random ants in a swarm, be my guest.

That's why the world needs to be big enough. And "respawns" rare enough. So that a team of 5-10 main characters (each different, cooperating) enter a conflict, fight it through, win, and come back to town to boast about what they achieved. Or have their ass kicked and look for more people to join and come with them. And others listen with interest, because nobody has ever been there before.
With classic development model: Forget about it, there's too many players, they finish quests too fast, and creating a quest takes way too long. So, instances. Each main character faces the same challenges, but they don't see, don't feel, don't know about each other. Here the developers could not only catch up, but seriously overtake the speed at which players explore and play, and provide them with enough original content that every main character would have a totally different story.

Instancing is necessary with pre-scripted content.

[Kaldaien]

It is hard to find anything bad to say about instancing. It addresses two paramount issues in MMOGs. The first being the initial over-population all major MMOGs experience at launch, which guarantees that no matter how much content a game has, there will always be more than one group of players working on the same quest or camp.

The second is the eventual crunch that happens as the casual player base evaporates and moves onto other games. With server populations dwindling, and the bulk of active characters on a particular server being high-level / dedicated players, it makes it difficult to win any new customers over; considering the lack of low to mid-level population. One might argue that EQ2's new mentoring system was designed for such a purpose (the advancement of low-level/new characters), but you would be wrong. Granted, it helps low-level characters, but it only works when the person knows someone else playing the game. New players, who are not so fortunate, have to meet other players in their same level range to progress.

The obvious solution to under-population would be to begin merging servers, however, as I already stated, many of the active characters fall into the high-level dedicated range and merging would cause overcrowding for contested raid zones/mobs, quests, etc... Therefore, instancing allows server merges and the associated high-level overcrowding with only minimal inconvenience.

Raiding in WOW is a job.

[Shivetya]

I don't know what RAIDs you are referring to buy many are long and convoluted. Everyone has a job and I have seen people banned from RAIDS for making simple mistakes or not doing their job fast enough. All because sweatshop_farmer_9412 or should we say nolife_liveinbasement_9472 is just a jerk with no life but a penchant of blaming anyone else for problems? WOW is all milk and honey. Numerous RAIDS are out door affairs that are subject to intense griefing. Having a RAID over 10 people even in an instance is a path to griefing whether it is ninja-looting or clique looting.

Brad wasn't totally wrong but instances are not the anwser either. They are an unnatural solution to a problem. Simply put the worlds are not big enough and varied enough to support the number of people they allow to play. Instancing works better as an anti-asshole system than content promotion. Small instances, in WOW this would be a 5 man raid type, are good mainly because the lack of competition.

Re:Raiding in WOW is a job.

[Anonymous Coward]

Having a RAID over 10 people even in an instance is a path to griefing whether it is ninja-looting or clique looting.
- Your random pickup Scholomance "raid" sure is! Once you graduate from WoW kindergarden into Molten Core, you will notice guilds go with strict loot rules, usually DKP. Can you ninja? Sure! But it will be your last big raid with that guild, and quite possibly on the server. 10 man Scholomance or 15 man UBRS is not a raid. Just a slightly bigger group doing a dungeon. What you described happens in every game where more than 2 people are in a group trying to achieve a goal. However in instances you deal with only this factor (if you are not in a guild) vs this + trains from morons + assholes + kill stealers + polluted general chat by k00l d00d and co. Once you are in a guild, you can do (as many people do) instances with your guild only or people who you trust. Friends you made in the game. This whole ninja looting won't be an issue. And of course in big guilds who do big game hunting, it would be cyber suicide if you'd started to ninja loot.

Simply put the worlds are not big enough and varied enough to support the number of people they allow to play.
- Simply put, players always gravitate towards the path of least resistance. EQ during Kunark had many high level dungeons. Only Karnor and Sebilis were populated. Why weren't many people in Chardok or Howling Stones? Until content is perfectly balanced, people will gravitate towards the best bang for the buck dungeon.

Instancing works better as an anti-asshole system than content promotion.
- Can anyone design a dungeon with highly scripted encounters (a la WoW) without instances? No, because scripts can be defeated easy if more people are in the area. Instances, in WoW, cap the number of people. Group X that is camping area Y already killed the named that is triggering event Z at another area. Oooh darn! Instances allow content designers to add far more depth into a dungeon or area that it was perviously possible without instances.

Small instances, in WOW this would be a 5 man raid type, are good mainly because the lack of competition.
- No. They are good mainly because (1) I don't have to read garbage spewed by illiterate morons with IQ below room temperature (Celsius) on general chat. (2) I don't have to deal with these same retards. (3) Griefers can't affect me. (4) I don't have to race anyone to kill a mob. (5) I can do it whenever I feel like, not wait until a group that is camping this area is done. Instances are made enjoyable because *EVERYONE* has access to the same *CONTENT* without needing to give up their jobs, spouses, lives just to camp at 2 AM the rare spawn.

instancing = normal multiplayer

[pocopoco]

It's kind of sad to see instancing take over. To me it feels like the popularity of MMORPGs has climbed such that the players are almost all terrible now. Hardly any of them want to roleplay. What I used to call competition they call griefing. PvP is rarely allowed or otherwise it is utterly nerfed (eg. you don't lose lots of levels and equipment when you die). Some people spend all their time levling as if it actually mattered. Oo

Why are these people playing MMO if they just want instances? Go play a normal multiplayer game if you don't want to interact with others to create a world. The unpredictability of who you meet, team up with, and kill in an MMO is one of the greatest things and these people want to remove it. MMO isn't supposed to be a chat room, it's supposed to be something above and beyond what you can get playing against a computer.

Brad's Vision

[dr00g911]

I'm half tempted to start a testy little essay of my own about how the games Brad's designed represent the flaws that all others in the market have been striving to overcome.

His design philosophy seems to take delight in a survival-of-the-fittest gaming approach. Call it MMO Darwinism: only those that are willing to live in these worlds 24x7 are entitled to any rewards at all, and the majority of content post-launch is tailored to the hardcore/uber-guild. If you don't like it, tough... it's the Vision, you see. Most of his fans are the "hardcore" element, and his games are designed catering almost exclusively to them, although they're a tiny fraction of the market. They like the fact that the hardcore heart of the games are exclusionary by design.

Loot from hardcore camps is required to move on to the next tier of challenges, so he's forcing player generated content (camping/kill stealing/griefing in this case) to fill the hole where compelling story and *GAMEPLAY* should be.

Brad's games in general are rat mazes -- social engineering experiments, as opposed to the *game* that is WoW.

Honestly, I'm a gray area between a casual and hardcore player. I go on hardcore PvP binges (yeah, WoW is a sandbox, but a fun one), but after my Everquest and DAoC experiences, I'm sick of guild drama and therefore guildless, so I miss out on the very top dungeon raids in WoW unless on a rare occasion I get asked to fill a slot for a no-show in another guild. It doesn't feel like work, and when it does I get resentful and stop playing for a while.

If I want to solo, WoW lets me. If I have a quest to kill Bob the Evil, no one is going to take Bob the Evil's head from me after he's dead (he'll drop a head for everyone in the group that needs it) If I want to invest 5 hours in a raid, WoW lets me -- and no one else is camping Rend when I get in his room. It feels like a game. I can log on, have fun for an hour... always accomplish something toward a goal... and log out. I don't *need* an enormous time investment or a social support umbrella in order to enjoy the experience. Matter of fact, before the end game, WoW rewards me for taking time off (rest XP).

Instancing in moderation, like WoW, is a perfect mix of MMO social interaction and immersiveness.

I mean, seriously, if I have to fight to keep a spot killing a single skeleton in the northeast corner in the third room of the Dungeon of Doom over and over and over again, sitting on my ass for 5 minutes between each spawn, it's not exactly epic, immersive or story-driven, is it?

Re:Brad's Vision

[JDAustin]

First off, I am a EQ player and part of a high end raiding guild (Anguish+ leve). Contrary to popular belief, being part of the high end game does not take away your life. Instancing changed this since now you know you can log in at a set time, have a set raid, and know it will go for a given amount of time.

I constantly hear from EQ players who are going to move to V:SoH when it comes out. Many of these are players who have played EQ since it's early days. In response to them, I remind them of what the EQ under Brad and his Vision gave us:

- Ragefire(ver1) in SolB. Players would stay up for DAYS on end waiting for him to spawn so a cleric can finish their epic.
- Pained Soul camp. Killing a green con skeleton spawn for 12-20 hours.
- Raster. People have been known to camp him for 36hours+ straight.
- Stormfeather. Spawns every 18 hours, but can skip spawn. Commonly KS'd since the resulting quest item is irreplaceable.
- Veeshans Peak (ver1). Once you zone in, only way out is the zone out. No gating. You wipe in VP, your fucked.

These are just a few of the things that players of V:SoH have to look forward to....

Re:Brad's Vision

[Kris_J]

as opposed to the *game* that is WoW

Not knowing the names in the industry (and not having read the article) I thought you were describing WoW prior to the statement I quoted above. You mean there are MMOGs that focus more on 24/7 gameplay and raid grinding for equipment?

Re:Brad's Vision

[dr00g911]

As a person who's played EQ1 (and the first 3 expansions for it), DAoC, SWG and a few other obscure MMO's, I can say in all honesty that World of Warcraft is as close to a "casual gaming" experience as I've seen.

First off, the 24/7 gameplay (PvP or loot farming I assume you're talking about) and raid griding are endgame passtimes. I mean, you could (in theory) kill 500 spawns of the exact same Murloc camp to get from levels 20-30, but WoW gives you a much more enjoyable progression through the levels. I hate to get cliche, it's the journey (discovery & progression) not the destination (endgame raids & PvP ladders) -- Quests lead you through the world and can get repetitive, but you never feel like you're forced to mindlessly grind. At least nowhere near as much as any of the games I listed above.

You only "have" to do those raids or grind reputation 24/7 if competing with hardcore players is your goal in the game. That's a small, small subset of the market though. They're the loudest, but the smallest, if the subscription numbers mean anything.

In the other games I mentioned (excepting SWG), grinding a single mob until it stops giving you adequate experience then moving on to the next is necessary so you can get to the "real" point of those games. The focus is on the endgame, hardcore aspect. That's not to say that "bring me 20 duskbat pelts" doesn't get repetitive as all hell, but fedex and bounty quests are designed to introduce you to the lore and guide your exploration of the world.

SWG didn't have a point *at all* and no real progression besides profession grinding. It was a giant social sandbox. More akin to Second Life or Sims Online than a D&D-style RPG. It could be argued that it was a "true" RPG where the roleplaying took center stage, though, I'm not sure the majority of the playerbase would call it fun. I sure as hell didn't!

Anyone who doesn't like instancing...

[DangerSteel]

should try FFXI. It's horrible to try and get good loot. At least it was when I left it to play WOW. You can tell where the mobs with the good drops spawn, because of the 20 or so people around it all the time. I mean 24/7/365. Even mobs that spawned as rarely as once every 24 hours or so... It was really getting to be irritating. So I'm glad WOW came along. It's much more fun to at least get a chance for an uber item, even if it drops .01% of the time.

Close knit group of friends! = MMO

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't get how people get the idea that working with only a close knit group of their friends/guild/clan and then isolating themselves away from the rest of the playerbase through instances makes a game a MMO. Last time I checked, the whole point of a MMO was just to play a multiplayer game and have the ever-present chance that you might run into Joe Somebody, Jack Ass Griefer or Bob Badass randomly. If I wanted to play a multiplayer game with instances, randomly generated content and largely locked me in with my own group of friends I'd play Diablo 2 for $20 with no monthly fees.

Wake Me Up

[Shihar]

Someone wake me up when someone builds a MMO(ha ha)RPG that doesn't involve camping, hunting, dungeons or anything of that matter. Would I jump at the chance to join a game where I can play a member of a mercenary company, train up by sparring within the company, then go out on missions that have meaning? Hell yes. Would I love to play a game where you can join the kingdom's army and go on military campaigns? You betcha. Can I even begin to stomach the thought of another game where I play generic fantasy 'adventure' number 13245803 who, like everyone else spends his every single waking second wandering around looking for shit to kill? God damn mother fucking NO.

Good job MMO(ha ha)RPGs, you have perfect the 'go out and kill NPCs from now until the end of time' gameplay. Now grow a pair and make a game with meaning.

This entire instancing Vs static camps just exemplifies what is wrong with MMORPGs. No one is talking about making interesting and dynamic worlds with interesting events happening all of the time. They are just rehashing the best ways to line up NPCs to be killed for f4t l00t and 3xp. Bah. What a waste.

I'll just stick to Armageddon.org. Text it might be, but at least those game designers realize that 'adventuring' by slaughtering thousands of NPCs is stupid and boring. Someone point me to another multiplayer game other then Armageddon where a band of mercenaries can be hired out to protect a wagon train and I'll be impressed. Until then, fuck these massive multiplayer online NPC whacking games.

Re:Wake Me Up

[drsquare]

Damn right. I'm sick of all these happy, flowerly, fun-land MMORPGS where everyone wins and everyone gets to live. I'd rather play MUDs where NO-ONE GETS TO LIVE!

Here's are a few MMORPG facts:

1. Unrestricting PKing is the only way. Sink or swim, survival of bad-assest. If some group of high levels come and kill your level 1 craftsman: TOUGH. You weren't bad enough to survive. And who the hell plays a craftsman anyway? The only available classes are: warrior, assassin, mage and bad-ass.

2. There's no such thing as 'griefing', only competition. If someone camps on a mob you want, what the hell were you doing there in the first place? Go and find some players to kill like a real man.

3. When you die, you lose all your equipment. There is no other way. Quit bitching and get about reequipping.

4. Mobs are not there to be killed, they're there to kill YOU. In fact, every spawn point should have a high-level aggressive mob there, just to weed out the girls who can't cope with endless death.

5. There's nothing exciting about killing mobs. The only excitement in a game comes from the unpredictability of fighting other players. If you don't like that, stick to World of Wimpcraft or Everqueer.

6. Consensual PK is for girls. If you have to agree to fight, there's no danger, and therefore no excitement. Instead of playing computer games, you might want to stick to flower arranging.

7. It should be a feature of every game that every 10 minutes players are randomly killed, just to keep you on your toes.

Re:Wake Me Up

[Shihar]

I am more then a little confused about how got "make a MUD where everyone dies" from stating that killing NPCs for l00t is boring. I think your problem is that MMORPGs have rotted your mind to the point where you are convinced that there exists only three types of online games; games where you do nothing put PK, and games where you do nothing but kill NPCs, and games where you get to do some of both.

I don't want any of the above. I just want a game with meaning. Yes, MMORPGs have proven that they pwn3 at making games where you play whack the mole for exp and skills. Now I want to see an MMORPG with a living, breathing, dynamic, and interesting world. I don't want a fairy land where everyone is an "adventurer" (that would be code for kills NPC all waking hours of the day) or a PKer.

I want a game where I can be a frigging mercenary or a soldier. Instead of killing shit for f4t l00t, I want to kill raiders who are attacking the town or a wagon train I am guarding. I want to be sent in to battle with other players in formation to fight the armies of whatever. I want a game where I can go raid the enemy's towns. I want a game a game where I do something for a frigging reason. I just want a game where whenever I go off and kill something, I can justify it. No, murdering your way through Castle Black for the 1000th time to loot Lord 3vils sword of +2 is not justification. That is idiotic.

Basically, I want a game with a fucking story, even if the story is the mundane life of Joe the mercenary. The thought of one more mindless fucking game where I play generic fantasy adventurer number 3409583 makes me want to vomit.

Seeing as how I assume the mods have all gone to bed (and even if they don't my karma is untouchable), let me put it in real simple and blunt terms. MMORPGs are the most worthless pieces of shit games in existence. They rely purely on addiction and nothing else. If one day everyone woke up and realize that "hey, killing shit for exp and l00t is fucking boring" or "hey, mindless PK kinda gets old, I should go play Counter Strike where at least it is done right", MMORPGs would be left with exactly zero subscribers.

MMORPGs are the most unoriginal, unimaginative, least daring, formulaic pieces of shit video games in existence.

Re:Wake Me Up

[Jack9]

unfortunately any game where you do something that has meaning, implies that it's a choice other ppl can make and yur either on the win side or the lose side. There is no dynamic push/pull when one side has to feel like they can win or it becomes pointless farming. I would love to hear about any other kind of repeatable experience other than PvE, or PvP, or Merchant vs Economy (which is really Player Time v Player Time with attrition), and how you would possibly implement this mystical 4th kind that doesnt exist...yet? If you dont make it repeatable, it's not saleable.

Re:Wake Me Up

[Shihar]

The capacity for interesting and dynamic content DOES exist. Some MUDs have already done this. It is just going to take an MMORPG maker some guts to break the mold. They are going to have to build an MMORPG that likely will hold little appeal to their traditional target market (spread sheet addicts). Sure, such a move would be risky, but as more then one MMORPG is learning right now, the market for addicts is limited.

If you want to see what I am talking about done in practice, try www.armageddon.org It is a MUD that is exactly what I am describing. Granted a scale up from 50 players to 1000 players is a tall order, but I don't think it is an impossibility try and incorporate some of what has been proven on a small scale and try and apply it to an large scale.

Re:Wake Me Up

[Jack9]

The key phrase is "Some MUDs have already done this." Of course some (small) MU*'s can do dynamic content. You can characterize Armegeddon as a traditional RPG MUD with heavy GM interaction...which is only possible in a world where (text) content is easy to create. While Armegeddon has some interesting implementations of basic game mechanics, there doesn't seem to be anything special about it from a game design standpoint. There's nothing original about their model, a model which is well-known. It's not like I'm saying Armegeddon is "teh suk", but that a model of real-time dynamic-content creation is impractical to extend to MMORPGs (UO/EQ/SB/WoW). I think what you consider "content" seems so easy when the majority of the rules are enforced manually by a small number of GMs.

I have to wonder if you've considered the questions of what happens when the playerbase is 20,000 players. Sure seems easy when it's run as a 1:many dictatorship of a small population. Where is the tiered oversight necessary to scale the GM system? Is there any kind of "plan" as to how much time should be spent creating content over administration and enforcement? Most importantly, how much are the GMs and designers getting paid and the daily costs to run and store the hardware? Most of these MUDs dont grow, because the model breaks at about 200 simultaneous participants. Running a game by volunteer is fun, as long as it's small and by definition, not an MMORPG.

If you're going to suggest games be run on human oversight, you start running into much harder questions than how many rats to get level 2.

Eh?!

[thesnarky1]

Better news:

In 2004 Slashdot featured an article that wouldn't be written for another year. They hail this as the end of dupes, as by the time the dupe comes out, the real article will be a year old!

I, for one, welcome our time-traveling new overlords.

instance significant events

[ggwood]

Instancing the whole world, as Guild Wars does, makes the world (outside cities) seem empty and basically one is playing a single player game with perhaps some friends. However, with no instancing, such as in Everquest (before Lost Dungeons and others) there are serious problems. Players compete for rare "camps" where the good mobs spawn and can negatively interact with others: people who could take down a dragon simply cannot because that dragon is not "up" - and in reality prime targets had waiting lists on them. Further, classic Everquest dungeons were rife with players intentionally or unintentionally causing grief to others by causing mobs to attack them (training mobs to them). (A glance at Vanguard's forums reveal the people McQuaid is used to talking with: people who love these old classics - even with the camping/training problems).

What is the happy medium?

Perhaps only the really significant parts could be instanced - e.g. where unique mobs are fought and unique items are dropped. Personally, I would want no interference (positive or negative) while my group or raid takes on the big nasty. I don't want to loose because some random guy trains us. I don't want to win because someone has their level 99 cleric healing us all.

The biggest problem with Eq that GuildWars (and WoW and maybe others I don't know) overcome is that the game remembers what quests I have done: thus they give me a big reward for completing the quests, but I cannot simply repeat the quest endlessly. In Everquest, unless the quest was broken (there were some) the money and exp rewards from the quests were generally not wotht the time spent. Often nice gear could be quested, but virtually none of a persons exp bar was filled by quests. As opposed to WoW, where perhaps half is.

So instance the big, final mobs - but remember which I've killed so I don't get the big reward for simply killing the same one over and over again.

This kind of one time big reward encourages people to use all the content available to them and not become an expert at one zone (or one camp in one zone!) to minimize the risk.

Many other thoughts on MMORPGs in general are in my journal.

Re:instance significant events

[Kent Simon]

that wont work, for 2 main reasons.

1. people will no longer have any competition for the unique items. thus the unique item will be more attainable, making that unique item less valuable.

2. more unique monsters will obviously have to exist, 1 unique monster per each instance, increases the number of unique item drops from that monster. The rarity of that item is then increased linearly with whoever seeks that item.

To remedy #2, the chance of drop could be lowered, but that would just frustrate gamers more. If you think you have to kill for a long time to get a unique item in modern MMORPGs, imagine how long it would take if the drop rate chance was divided by the number of other players also looking for that item.

Re:instance significant events

[ggwood]

" that wont work, for 2 main reasons...1. people will no longer have any competition for the unique items. thus the unique item will be more attainable, making that unique item less valuable."

Your reason #2 just repeats #1, that it makes the item less unique.

What I would say is that it allows big raids to all "do" a certain raid mob at any time they like. They can all be raiding the Orc King at 9pm EST if that is when they are all online. There can be 30 copies of the Orc King at once, but none at 3AM EST, perhaps, whereas in the past, in Eq, some guilds were forced to raid then because it was the only time said content is "open", or that is when the MoB is computed to respawn. (Dunno what Eq is like now).

Real uberloot would simply have really hard keys to get and/or really unblievably hard Orc Kings to kill. Make it challenging, not boring. Require really good groups with good gear to even kill the random mobs to get the keys, or really great strategy to kill the Orc King.

It can still be as rare or rarer then now. Rare content and instanced content are totally orthogonal.

Not only will it work, but I think the alternative: having mobs which spawn once per week on a server with thousands of players and tens of guilds capable of taking said mob out, worked great for Eq when people had limited choices, but simply is unacceptable in more modern games.

Have uberloot, but have more lesser loot leading up to it. The true uberloot can be just as rare, if that is really what you want...

I'm not sure anyone wants to go back to the literally 3-5 month long waitlists for epic quest components that Everquest had. It simply creates far too much pressure to ninjaloot. However, even if you want to do that, why not instance it to prevent the ninjalooting capability?

"If you think you have to kill for a long time to get a unique item in modern MMORPGs, imagine how long it would take if the drop rate chance was divided by the number of other players also looking for that item."

It already *is* divided by the number of people who want the item, of course, but in reality some people simply have more time to spend online waiting and they have an edge. In my system, these people will get the keys faster, but it will not forbid others who have limited time from keyhunting whenever they can. Further, they can raid whenever they get thier guild together.

Not only will it work, I think something like what I'm talking about is the only realistic way forward for MMORPGs. Asking your customers to wake up at 3am because that is when the mob is supposed to spawn, having the guild arrive and getting ninjaed by others simply are not sustainable customer service models.

the Content Demon

[Rabbitgod]

I'm not really aware of any game that can claim this as a wedge against the Content Demon.

I am. EvE-Online is such a game. The goal in the game is not to gain EXP rather it all about the isk (money). And they best way to get it is control of 0.0 (lawless) space. The problem? Well you need to fight for it defend it and get people to come work in it in order for it to all work. This makes the game as dynamic as the people that play it.

Most people's comments on this thread are stupid..

[eaber81]

Most of the comments on this thread agree that they are for some instancing and some non-instanced content. If people would bother to read the Vanguard boards, they would quickly realize that some of the content is in fact going to be instanced.

Immersion - RPPvP

[diskonaut]

One thing that people seem to forget in the discussion concerning immersion (after all, immersion is the real problem with instancing, no?) is the player being immersed. I am a casual WoW player, and a long time pencil-and-paper roleplayer. I agree with those who say that pencil-and-paper roleplaying is more immersive than MMORPGs, but that has a lot to do with players wanting to become immersed and making an effort to become immersed. I got to the point of being really tired of WoW after realising the huge amount of grinding at high levels. Repeatadly running the same areas or instances over and over again, killing the same mobs for some rare piece of equipment just doesn't cut it for me. Instances? Come on, it doesn't matter if the quests takes place in instances, the problem lies in other areas. What if quests really felt like they mattered, and weren't just quickly sorted into a category (collaction, mob-killing, delivery, escort etc) to be solved as quickly as possible? What if you interacted with players as if they were part of the game-world? Ok, the very fact that it is a computer game puts obstacles in the way. But perhaps those obstacles have nothing to do with game design? Perhaps a little make-believe on the players side is all that is needed? I switched to RPPvP, and after finding the right community, the game is fun and immersive again! I don't care about those who complain about instances. The problem of immersion sometimes lies in the player.