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Murder, FFXI, and Ninety-Nine Nights
Gamasutra has a few great writeups of some of the sessions I didn't make it to. Murder, Sex, and Censorship covers some of the moral elements that go into game creation. Creating a Global MMO was a talk given by some of the folks behind FFXI, on the challenges of creating a multi-hemisphere online title. All about Ninety-Nine Nights was an examination of the character design put into the 'massive warfare' title for the Xbox 360. Interesting stuff. The morals session actually became quite heated, thanks to the presence of CA Assemblyman Leland Yee. From the article: "'How many people do you think have been hurt by video games? How many people have been helped by video games?' Gee asked. 'This technology will allow us to have a full spectrum chemist, or a full spectrum virus,' which school children, scientists, or doctors are able to experiment with in a safe environment. Gee also noted that, socially, legislators should care not only about keeping children from harm, but also about helping them."
I've played the demo, and it seems to be just a button masher. I expected a lot better from the Rez/Meteos guy. Maybe someone who's had more time with it can say if it has any depth/skill/strategy to it at all?
Here's the correct link to Creating a Global MMO.
"Think of the children" appearantly only applies when it doesn't cost money. Or, worse, time.
It doesn't cost you money to go all crazy about "porn" or "violence" in games. You can hype yourself into hysteria and when the game creator finally gives in, you feel like you've accomplished something.
At the same time you use TV and computer as a cheap replacement for a babysitter. Spending time with your kids? What a horrible idea! Spending time with your kids at something they want to do (like, say, playing computer games or surfing the 'net)? What an incredibly horrible idea!
Instead you install net-nanny on your kids' computer and hope it keeps them away from the dreaded porn. And you make sure they don't get to play anything more violent than Barney in Teletubbyland.
Then they go out and get their lunch money taken away...
Prepare your kids instead! Life ain't fluffy and cute. If you keep them from learning and keep them gullible, you pretty much work into the hands of every con artist out there.
Or why do you think scams are so efficient?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The title should be something like "Why not ask the World of Warcraft developers about global MMORPGs?" but that's way too long to fit, so, what's there will have to do.
FFXI has, according to the article, 500,000 subscribers. WoW has 6 million subscribers and is also a global MMORPG.
So why FFXI? Because they were the only MMORPG company stupid enough to dump the entire world on the same set of servers. Technically challenging? Of course. Allowing people from China, Japan, North America, and Europe to play together on the same set of servers is an interesting technical challenge.
It's also a completely worthless one. As most people know, very few people in America speak Japanese. Many people in Europe would also like to play with people who speak their native language. Which means that most players would like to be segregated by region anyway. (In fact, Blizzard had to add "Australia perferred" servers which are hosted in North America, since peak Australian hours are almost exactly opposite peak NA hours.) Dumping the entire world onto one set of servers is essentially worthless, since most players will attempt to segregate themselves back into regional groups anyway.
Then you get the latency problem. Between the east coast and the west coast of the US I get, on average, anywhere from a 70ms to a 100ms ping time. Between me and Japan, it's considerably higher. (We're talking 200-500ms, well beyond reasonable.) With WoW, I get local servers and a good ping time. With FFXI, I'd get a lousy ping time because I'm connecting to Japan. (Well, maybe not directly to Japan. It's speculated that they use "edge servers" in each region which then use a single dedicated line back to the "core servers" in Japan, but the article never mentions that, and that's still an added hop.)
Oh, and I wonder if anyone else found this amusing:
They also focus on making game updates as smooth as possible by having the player download only the bare minimum of files required for functioning, as they want to make sure anyone with narrow bandwidth can still play the game. For any massive updates they just make sure to include it in the expansion packs.
When released in NA, the game required a 7000-file download to update. The first new expansion pack in NA required a 1500-file download to update. The update servers are frequently down, and the entire thing is often a mess.
Compare with World of Warcraft. They distribute a single update file via a custom BitTorrent client. The client has to download the torrent, and then the torrent downloads the potentially large update. Much less hastle than FFXI's "one file at a time" method.
I really think I prefer WoW's approach to global MMORPGs far, far above FFXIs.
I've been accused of stating the obvious before. I know it's obvious (at least for me, it is), but since it is, why can still so many people not see it?
Maybe because it sure is comforting for the own consciousness. Neglecting your kids isn't something you should do as a responsible parent. Now, it takes a lot less energy and time to get hyped up about something than it takes to actually do something sensible with your kids. Unless you do it with some efford, but then it feels like you're REALLY doing something.
Unlike when you, say, play some game with your kids. That's not really something. That's just playing.
But when you go out and rally some other parents behind you (who, in turn, take this as the cheap exit in their attempt to be a "good parent"), you feel in charge. You're moving something. Where, why or how soon doesn't matter anymore, as long as you got the feeling you're doing something GOOD for your kids.
That your kids need something completely different, namely YOU being there for them, listen to their problems (the real ones, not the ones you imagine), that doesn't matter anymore. After all, what do your kids know, huh?
Concerned parent coming through, who cares about collateral damage?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
PSO had a good way of handling regions. There were servers that were located in each region (and they were clearly labeled). However, you could travel to them whenever you wanted.
This lets you stay with people that speak your language, while at the same time being able to go to other regions whenever you want to.
This is out of the question with World of Warcraft, because Blizzard has a huge interest in keeping them separate. The Chinese version is *much* cheaper than the American version, and American players would flock to the Chinese payment system the instant they could do that and still play with other Americans.
(There is also the problem of gold farming, but because so many people have a racist viewpoint on it I'm not going to bother discussing that.)
Melissa
"Screw Sun, cross-platform will never work. Let's move on and steal the Java language." - Visual J++ Product Manager