Mmorpg Graveyard

#61 Wow, someone mentioned duris.

Heya Ithaquua, how's digs? ;)

(No topical content in this post, I guess)

#62 @Josh:

Quote:
Commitment to your title is the indie's greatest strength. I believe this now more than ever.

Then why do you continue to deride other project's commitments to their "titles"?

That is seriously my only "issue"...your "title" was a serious business risk. Single Player Adventure, released under GPL (or something similar)...why does your success (current or pending) mean that your business development plan is the only one worth striving for?

#63 @Josh: A bit offtopic but, how do you plan to solve the GPL "issues" related to your product? Correct me if I'm wrong but as a GNU licensee, you need to supply the source code for your game when you distribute it.

#64 Business development plan? What business development plan? I am operating from the gut doing what feels right. I think hard. I work hard. I execute my plan hard.

I have been and am worried about the (current) lack of $$$... but none of the issues you present above gave me concern. That is, once *I* had come to my own conclusion on the matter. Make your own conclusion, forge your own path. Who gives a rat's ass what some guy in North Dakota thinks about the prospect of an indie MMORPG.

Maybe, do what feels right for you? Maybe, grow some skin? Perhaps, spend more time developing a game than talking about developing one? I don't have any answers for you... though, you seem to think I do.

Seriously, if a few comments from myself and others rock your boat this hard... you have a long, long road ahead of yourself.

-Josh Ritter
Prairie Games

Edit: @Stefan: I'll solve the GPL issue by following the GPL. The code is already out... even though, technically it doesn't have to be at this point. I view the source code's availability as a very big feature, a strength, a plus. We are playing a wide, wide field.

#65

Quote:
Seriously, if a few comments from myself and others rock your boat this hard... you have a long, long road ahead of yourself.

Doesn't bother us at all man, but as a senior community member, (based on time alone, not even mentioning the contributions folks have attributed to you), you have to realize that your inputs are taken as "mostly gospel".

Why be negative in a community that is basically designed to push the boundaries of what is "expected"? Especially as a senior/active member...sure, the project that expects artwork to cost $10 a model, and code to magically appear out of nowhere should be guided to something less intensive, but when you unilaterally denounce every single project that even smells like an MMOG, and you have senority/presence in the community, it's really demoralizing.

#66 @Josh regarding GPL:

I am assuming you have and will be releasing all your engine source code. The game however, will not be free because the content (models, maps, etc) will not be GPL. IIRC, quake II loaded DLLs for what other engines used scripting. Do you have any DLLs that are not GPL? (Just wondering, because that gets you into the gray area on what does and doesn't constitute the GPL'd work. I'd hate for you to have any zealots gunning at you.)

BTW, why that choice of engine?

#67 Nice, another thread that started out as useful now flushing itself down the toilet...

Can we stop this stupid bickering and get back to bs'ing about MMO's and their problems? Thanks in advance.

Getting back on track: There's at least a dozen indie PW's being developed right now. Fact is, they all stand a slim chance of survival. There's legitimate concerns about the dated interfaces and systems in use in today's mainstream PW's, however, I see more people stating that than stating what could be done about it.

What we need to do is not to state the problem, that's been done already. We need to start tossing out solutions and getting them beat like pinattas by other indie developers, poke holes in them, break them, and then make them stronger. In this way, everyone benefits from the innovations.

I have plenty of gameplay ideas, and I'm not shy about sharing them. What I think we should do is start a series of "roundtable" threads that deal with a specific area of the peristent world design, and have people put ideas on the table for beating and reforming. Everyone can benefit, and one or two people may walk away with much better ideas than they had in the first place. Everyone will be able to read through the thread and see the opinions of others(and the reasons behind the opinions), and be able to use that feedback in their own designs. Also, in this way, we don't hijack this thread with things that aren't directly related to the topic.

#68 @Josh-""""Nice to see another MMORPG game thread stretch the limits of verbosity... Whilst treading the same ground, over, and over, and over..

*BURP*""""

Sorry we can't all be MMORPG experts like you. While I respect the work you have done on your game, I do NOT respect remarks made that simpy jab everybody on the thread. We have stuff to talk about. If you have anything you would like to add to the discussion that is NEW feel free to do so, but simply commenting on the "oldness" of our subject matter without putting anything new in the pot yourself is pretty lame isn't it?




@stephen zepp """"I'm trying my best to keep things on a polite keel, and not trade insults/project depradations with you, but honestly, who is it asking for donations from a community that they don't even contribute to with code--much less actually purchasing (one or more) licenses? Give it up already.""""""

I don't think he was asking for donations, from what I have seen I believe they were offered (and I think they are well-deserved), but I fail to see what "contributions to the community" have to do with anything. I have been hanging around since before TGE was released and I haven't contributed much except maybe a few links to sites that might do somebody some good, a few flames on forums and helping people get their art into torque. What's so wrong with not contributing code? Hey I have some character sketches and a few scene renders for you if you want em, how's that? Is that contribution enough? And there are plenty of people here who haven't bought a license. This is not a TGE-only community and CERTAINLY not a programmer-only community.



Sorry but if you two guys have some kind of axe to grind with each other that's cool but please do it without insulting the entire community. (These two guys are carrying on as if they are the gods of game-development and the rest of us are puny mortals, that irks me).

(please send all donations by paypal to blackplastick@aol.com, thank you for your cooperation)

#69 Here's a thread where we can discuss roleplaying improvements in MMO's and PW's...

#70 @Ted - I like that idea. Probably should be moved to another forum. Few threads I can think of off the top of my head.

1) Best User Interface for MMOG's
2) World Persistance
3) Character Reward/Advancement
4) RolePlaying vs. Non-RolePlaying
5) GM'ing a MMOG.

#71 @Entropy: You re right. The comment was lame. When I have more time/energy I'll do better.

#72 Interesting editorial I just ran into about Subscriptions/Payment Models in MMOG's

#73 @Chris: I would suggest that the author is missing one of the additional costs of revenue for an MMOG provider--bandwidth and servers. Providing the infrastructure for a MMOG is in -no- way a trivial expense, and the subscription model goes a long way to not only cover those recurring expenses, but providing additional profit margin with the recurring revenue over a large period of time.

If your target market expects that for their subscription fee, they should be provided with constant and consistent upgrades to content, balance, game mechanics, art, and other areas, and are not aware of the costs of infrastructure, I think you would be in a rough situation in the long term.

Just my $.01.

#74 @Chris: Threads 3, 4, and to a lesser extent 5, are rolled into one with that thread I started. Reason being, those are pretty closely tied to the "roleplay experience" as a whole, and should be addressed together. But I'm not stopping any other threads from popping up to address more specific points :)

A thread on interfaces is definitely something we need, so we can benefit from feedback and get a smoother interface for our games. #2, I'm not sure what you mean by it, or if you mean how to get persistence to advance in general(terrain modification, etc). Also, we'd need threads to cover:

1) AI advancements.
2) Back-end systems infrastructures(not much innovation to be had from us here, but there's tips we can share with each other to help everyone out).
3) Business/Marketing.
4) Legal issues(yeah, this needs it's own thread).
5) Other stuff I can't think of right now, but probably will as soon as I test out my new cable modem tonight ;)

#75 There is an MMORPG that has successfully gotten around the XP/LVL treadmill. Eve-online managed to do it very well. There are no experience points rewarded for doing things, no character levels. There are skill levels, you start with some and can buy more as needed. To level up those skills you right click on it and select "Train to level x" x being 1 to 5, and it tells you how long it takes to train it. The time it takes to train up a skill depends on your attributes. The least amount of time I've seen is about 20 minutes. To get to level 5, the least I've seen is about 5 days, the most I've seen so far is 40 days. The skills level up in real time and there's almost no way to make it go faster, unless you train up the learning skills and get implants. Implants don't come cheap, and doing agent missions to get them doesn't happen right away either. I read somewhere to max out all the skills would take years, in real time. Other than learning skills or implants, nothing else affects your training. You can do agent missions, mine, hunt NPC pirates, PvP, whatever, still takes jsut as long to level a skill. The agent missions affect your faction standing with the corporation that owns the station the agents at, there are hundreds (or it seems like) of corporations you can do missions for.

I wouldn't go copying this idea into a game I make simply out of respect, and plagarism isn't cool anyway. But it proves if you work out an idea long enough, you can come up with something to avoid the trappings of the MMORPG herds. :)

#76 I disagree. It's still a horrible level treadmill.

A typical session when I played it:

newbie:
1. Mine lots, hoping one doesn't get attacked by NPC pirates
2. Store ore back at station or in your cargo canister (if you're lucky)
3. Pray you get enough training (XP) to buy+use a better ship/use a better gun so you can defend yourself.

not so newbie:
1. Mine lots, hoping you don't lose your (very expensive) ship when the NPCs decide to get ridiculously harder in the sector you chose as a newbie because it's nice and quiet.
2. Get bored with mining so go hunting for low level pirates to pick off interesting items or stuff to recycle.
3. Pray you get enough training so you can evenually get that nice vessel with 30 or so guns so you don't get killed quite so often.


I got horribly bored with that after about a month of play. Nice eyecandy - sucky gameplay. You're almost forced to do agent missions to begin with in short not really even an open-ended MMOG.

I however liked the amount of detail they have invested in their trade engine, though it has some serious limitations, whereas supply and demand are concerned.

Faction standings are a great idea - I just couldn't stand to invest so much of my time for so little rewards to see much results.

The mapping is also top rate, though the demo they shoed at E3 (as seen on some shaky-cam footage) was much nicer than the one that made the game.

I remember the beta being very buggy indeed, and the whole autopilot thing appeared to be tacked on right at the last minute.

All this said it's a generation better than Earth + Beyond (beta), and Jumpgate (beta - I stopped playing after they implemented weather - in space!)

I doubt that anyone will be capable of beating eve-online in the short-term as the eye-candy alone will draw people in for a year or two more I think. Also t appears to be successfully gobbling up the userbase from the MMOs that are getting killed off. I still think it has dreadful gameplay for a MMOG though.

#77 You've missed the point entirely, they've illiminated the "I gotta kill so many of this thing to get enough experience to level.." from the game.


oh hell with it, you're right...

Let's just stick to the same old xp per kill so many times to level up your character, just like every company and their brother does. That way we can keep on complaining on and on about it since any possible alternatives will be met with flames of misunderstanding.


now for the quotes:

"newbie:
1. Mine lots, hoping one doesn't get attacked by NPC pirates"

There are no pirates in 1.0 systems, which is where newbies start.


"2. Store ore back at station or in your cargo canister (if you're lucky)""

If you're lucky? This is the first time (and I read the forums) I've heard of anybody having a problem with getting their cargo full of ore and dropping it off back at the station.


"3. Pray you get enough training (XP) to buy+use a better ship/use a better gun so you can defend yourself."

Does praying speed up time or something? Getting skill point levels are automatic, obviously you don't know how the game works, re-read my initial post.


"not so newbie:
1. Mine lots, hoping you don't lose your (very expensive) ship when the NPCs decide to get ridiculously harder in the sector you chose as a newbie because it's nice and quiet."

Very few people have a problem with this, as there are literally hundreds of star systems in the game if things get too bad too handle. Most people who mine get the drones skills and let the drones do the talking. It's not uncommon to see a battleship with 8 miner lasers going at an asteroid with 5 drones orbiting it.

"2. Get bored with mining so go hunting for low level pirates to pick off interesting items or stuff to recycle."

Can't argue with that. Although some people do trade routes, others do missions.


"3. Pray you get enough training so you can evenually get that nice vessel with 30 or so guns so you don't get killed quite so often."

No ship in Eve has 30 guns, the maximum is 8. The only way you can get killed in Eve is if a PvP player podkills you. And that usually happens in systems with a security rating of 0.4 or less. NPC's don't podkill, they just destroy your ship. If you don't have your ship insured, that's your fault.


Eve online has had over 8,000 people logged on to their server at the same time! 8,000 people on the same server at the same time... are all these people wrong?

It sounds like Eve wasn't quite what you expected it to be and you became disapointed with it. But for many others, they enjoy that kind of gameplay. Put down a game if you want, just remember CCP is competition that can reduce your products success. As are other companies with addicting games.

#78 Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't sitting in the same spot watching your ship mine rock for an hour just a different form of "Treadmill"?

#79 Sigh, no, you're not wrong. That's the treadmill. It's a good way to make cash but is the most boring thing to do in the game... fortunatly it's not the only thing you can do in the game.

There's got to be some way to make a game that avoids such treadmills, yet has challenging goals to keep player interest.

#80 Apolgies if my post wasn't clear :)

When you start out most ships have a pityful cargo capacity, and you spend time running back and forwards between mining "ore X" and taking it to the station. Unless you are lucky enough to have friends (or have joined a corporation) and have a cargo cannister so you can dump your ore in, you're pretty much spending a large chunk of your time doing stuff with minimal reward. as Chris says, it's a different kind of treadmill :)
Alas it's one that you have to do to get any sort of advancement ... skills cost money (lots of it too) and time. I do like how skills have dependancies, even though it's rather (IMHO) convoluted.

As for turret count I was bein faceous. :)

8,000 people online is impressive, but even CCP don't claim 8K people on a single server. Eves architecture is a clustered environment

You're correct in saying Eve isn't the sort of game I enjoy playing, and I thought that would be obvious from what I have written. I just think it has squandered opportunities to be much more than it is.

I have seen much better gameplay in 10+ year old MUDs than the current batch of MMOGs - no wonder many MMOGs are being canned before release.

I'm a great fan of open-ended games - alas there are not many out there.