MMO Success, PVPer vs. Newb, lamer, RPer, My promise to world

#1 Good luck!

#2 Thanks. :(

#3 Well if your so for killing other players why don't you just play an FPS?

RP'ers and newbs will always complain when there are people like you going around killing people when they feel like it. To some people being killed when you are just trying to get to know the place or go somewhere is actually quite annoying, believe it or not, or have you always been at the top of your 'leetness' from day one? RP'ers play the game as a different person, they aren't just going round poppin' people off as they please striving to get to the next level so they can get an extra 3 points on their strength.

To be honest with an attitude like that you won't have the greatest game ever made, especially an MMORPG. Also it is people like you that make developers choose to go with consentual pvp, otherwise they would just end up with another FPS.

Good luck, you will need it!

#4 If you're still learning arrays, I'd back off a bit on the development part of things, maybe concentrate on your game design while you get your programming skills up to snuff for game development.

And yes, the l33t attitude is going to hurt you. The key part of an MMO is the fact that it's massive, a thing that indie game developers should not strive for, unless you have huge amounts of money to toss at it. You can, however, get a persistent world off the ground with a good number of players, but the good number won't compete with the smallest of the MMO's you mentioned, population-wise.

The one thing that sinks most persistent world teams is that they put together a team way before they're ready, and that's what you're doing. I had over a hundred pages of design document done before I started going forward on my plan, and I haven't stopped documenting things. The idea is to front-load the team with information, so that as you go through and accomplish your tasks other than documentation, you can still dole out tasks to your teammates. Because, trust me, you will fall behind on your tasks, and so will your team.

So prepare yourself, and read as many of the books on the subject as you can, because this is not for the faint of heart, and most teams just give up rather than fail, and even before they have any development started.

#5 As someone who does business software professionally and dabbles in writing games, I have to agree with Ted Southard on the importance of documentation.

You need to have everything documented.. Maps, character types, skills, weapons, technology, crafting, etc.

All the little details like at what skill level can someone craft plate mail.. How do you calculate if they did an exceptional job, etc. If you don't have everything documented it will make the development slow and sloppy.

Another trouble spot is in keep the documentation up to date. If you add/delete/change something make sure it gets added/deleted/changed in all the documentation.

Learn from the other games on the market.. What did they do right or wrong.

Ultima Online was marketing to 2 incompatible user groups. The first group were the old hard core crpg fans.. They were expecting to immerse themselves in the world they knew and loved.. Adventure with friends and kill the baddies of the land.

PvPers wanted to compete against each other.. Kill each other and see who is the best of the best.

Origin tried to appease both sets of people. Personally I think they failed miserably. The two groups are oil and water.

Don't forget to take into consideration the power imbalance between new players and old players. In a cooperative environment it can help the community come together. In a PvP environment it usually keeps new players out (they get killed all the time).

For some games, the gap is impossible to close. In EVE skill training takes real time. Anyone who has been in the game a year has a year more of skill points. It's an impossible gap to close. There is no way to "earn" extra skill points to close the gap. EVE is almost a hybrid of strategy and rpg. Skills, cash, ships, items, minerals, blueprints, alliances and what territory you hold are the most important things...
One thing some people miss is that while mining they can discuss plans and strategy.. Do we buy the very expensive battleship blueprint? Do we move into region X. Company Y has attacked some of the alliance, etc. Solo play just isn't a viable option. It's that strategy planning that adds the depth to the game. What little story line CCP provides is subtle at best and largely ignored.

Some of the problems that CCP has run into include: Promising things and then being slow about or not delivering at all. When the game came out last year one of the beta skills was Reverse Engineering. Everyone wanted it. In one of the CSM chats the developers said it's in. It's still not in the game.. It's being held back for "balance".

Another thing they did was after a few months, they reset the asteroid distribution and security settings of the entire universe. Suddenly places people knew that held rare minerals were gone. Stations way out on the fringes in high security areas suddenly became very dangerous (.9 security to 0.0 security). This was done without warning and caused alot of animosity with the players.

DAOC addresses some of the PvP issues by keeping the PvP in special areas. But what ends up happening is that unless your maxed out your not very effective in PvP.

SWG has the imperial/rebel/neutral limiters on PvP. You can choose to remain outside of PvP if you want. Which usually just ends up making the PvP crowd mad (name calling like gay, carebears, etc).

Know your game, know your market, build accordingly.
Just some thoughts to keep in mind while your designing your game.

-Jerry

#6 @J. Mills, Brett F.
How come you say "newbies" are "rpers"? These are two completely different words: "role players" are those who role play (doh) in RPGs, and are not necessarily newbies. Some of them could role play and still defeat you in a 1x1 duel.

I couldn't read all you post, but an examination of your profile was enough to tell it won't take long until you give up on this MMORPG idea. By the way, I'd not rate someone who's still learning advanced arrays/flow control as an intermediate programmer.

Listen to the wise advices that other (more experienced) people have posted here.

#7 I wont give up on my idea.

#8 I think your mistaken with the various groups of people who play games.

"Newbies" are people new to a game
"RPers" are people who like to actually roleplay in a roleplaying game (god forbid they do that
"PVPers" are people who like to do consentual player vs player combat
"PKers" are people who just kill other people regardless.

PKers are the problems in MMORPGS. The ones who kill anyone weaker they come across, the type that prey on the people outside of starting towns, etc. The real reason for the world split (other then the need for more land) in UO.

You sound more like the Player Killer type then a PVPer. A PVPer would have no problem with consentual PVP as they aren't interested in just killing others for the hell of it. Whats the point of killing someone if theres no challenge to it I'll never know, but maybe you can explain it to us.

Oh, and I'm more a RPer then a PVPer, not that I mind some PVP, but I prefer it when I've agreed to it. And RPers respect peoples choices to PVP, no one respects peoples choices to PK. Player Killing ruins the experience for others, its hard to respect that kind of choice. I'm sure you would have appreciated getting killed over and over when you first started playing UO for no reason other then someone else thought it was fun to do.

[Edit]
Figured I'd add in that FFXI recently added Player vs Player Combat that is a nation vs nation scheduled event. Its almost like a sporting event, alot of fun to watch people do it. You pay to participate at certain times, players not participating cant help ones that are and vice versa. Really fun, and *doesn't* take away from the experience, it only adds to it.

#9 @J: Out of curiosity, how old are you? Not flaming you and I'm not going to say that a kid/teenager can't learn how to make games, but there's a certain tendency of the younger ones who are new to indie games to pop up and say that they want to make the best indie MMO that the world has ever seen. Then, when you look at their bio, they have "gamer" listed as a skill(advanced, of course), and think that qualifies them to be a team leader.

You may or may not have the passion to see the project through-nothing wrong with that, no matter what your age is. The thing is, you state in your bio that you're still learning if-then statements and arrays. Game programming is a lot harder than that, especially getting into persistent world stuff. Here's a few of things to consider that I've run into on my own persistent world project:

1) Tools and PW-specific subsystems! Oh my God, this is the biggest problem I had aside from #2. Basically, I've been coding a lot of tools and subsystems for the game, because they don't exist. mapExporter for trueSpace/gameSpace came from my need to be able to use those apps to create interiors. I was about to get into the DTS side, but fortunately for me Dark Industries took care of that(and better than I could have). But still, there's problems with animation tools not being up to par with Max, mapExporter not being able to do "polygon soup" levels yet, etc.

And then on top of that are all the persistent world modules that you'll need, which noone's got freely available: Mission generation, AI, etc. AI is probably the easier of those two, unless you have specific ideas about, say... emotional-modelling and such, like I do. So that took months of brainstorming just to know what I wanted the archetecture to be like. And it's not even in it's second-generation yet, very behind schedule, even though the first generation yielded very interesting results(apparently, my system allowed an NPC to "snap"). But beyond that, there's the Mission generation system. I have the module to generate indoor maps, ala Anarchy Online(just about), and I have a lot more to do, which means a few more months to get it where it needs to be. Probably just in time for when I want to get ready for launch, at the end of the year. All of this is well beyond basic programming.

2) Team turnover and experience: I'm not going to sit here and brag to you about how important I am in the community. I'm not. People know me, and I've done a few things that I hope show people that I know what I'm doing and can get things done. Of course, when you're looking for others to populate your team, that doesn't matter as much as you hope it does. Naturally, people want to get onto a team that has a future, has a plan, or just plain has a chance. And that's a highly subjective requirement. You might have a good chance. We don't know. At this point, even you don't know, honestly. But when I put the ads out, trying to sound as confident and as professional as possible(I avoid saying the game will be the "best", and I use the best grammar I can), I get very few hits from it. Really. I have about 9 or so people on my team now, only 2 of which have been with me since last year, the rest are relatively new, having come on after I was able to show some screenshots of development, showing that I was serious. And even with all the progress being made, people just aren't falling all over themselves to get onto my team. Why? Because I'm making a persistent world, and with all the teenagers popping up saying that they want to make the best game ever, and getting other newbies to indie games(and not so newbies as well), and then failing or giving up(which is worse), they're jading the whole indie game community in regards to this genre. I've seen it a hundred times, at least. So, I'm still hurting for people, especially animators, right now.

Continued...

#10 @Ted: Amen.

#11 3) Money: Developing a PW is hard. Damn hard. I spent two years rehashing design docs and talking to friends that played mmo's in different styles, for different reasons, and giving me different angles on what's wrong. At the end of that phase, I had over a hundred pages of design docs and no team, so I sought one out. What happened is covered under #2 above, but that's a different point than what I'm talking about here. People that are talented want money. Why? Because they're worth it, that's why. I hold nothing against them for it. As a matter of fact, I'm actively trying to get money for my project. Long shot? Extremely. Impossible? No. But then again, I'm 29 and know how to write a 40-page business document and walk into a bank dressed like a business man and talk to people. But without that money, things are going to be damn hard for me. Promising these guys royalties is hard when you don't know how a game will do-and let's not kid ourselves, we don't know if it's the best game ever, no matter how much we like it. Ever ugly kid out there has a mom who says they're handsome, and the same thing goes for game projects, or else every game released would be a hit.

So then, what happens if you can pay your team and launch the game? #4, that's what...

4) Post-launch nightmares: Yep, I'm expecting loads of problems at launch, and afterwards. Some of the problems I can see coming down the pike: Server outages, too many subscribers for our network, too few, unforseen bugs, credit card fraud, some kid's parents trying to sue us because their kid was able to play the game and had mental problems(pre-existing, of course) that made him ruin/end his/her life, even though the EULA will prohibit minors from playing. Then there's tech support, which I know I won't have enough of. Network operations, which will have to be a 24/7 operation, bandwidth costs, advertising, and still keeping my development team on-hand for expansions and whatnot. What's this all about?

More money... You need office-space, a dedicated NOC(if you don't know that term, just run away now), servers and servers and servers, and bandwidth far beyond what your cable or DSL modems provide. And people to work on all that, and answer phones and email, and do day to day paperwork. Money, money, money. Because even if you get to launch day without it, afterwards, you'll require it. Not only for all this, but what about the royalties you promised your team? Back pay? Benefits?

So, do you see why I say it's not for the faint of heart? It's not. It's not just a game, it's a service, and those who launch these games are service providers. It's actually easier to launch an ISP than a persistent world. You need more than the skills you have to manage your team as well, since to manage a team you need to know enough of programming and art to know what they can and can't do within what timelines(and you'll still be late on everything anyway). You need to be able to show your team that you know what you're doing, or else what they hell are they doing working for you? And more importantly, and this is the thing that kept me from giving up: When you lose team members from the infamous "attrition", who's going to shoulder that load? You? You need those same skills to do that, or else that part of the project just dies. It saved my project that I actually did shoulder a lot of the burden(and still do, which is why milestones slip all the time), but there isn't enough time in the day for me to do it all. And so, it's hard, even when I spend 90% of my personal life dedicated to it.

If you can answer or address these problems, then I say go for it. If you can't, or won't, as some people who think that this is some sort of trick to make them give up, then you're going to give up anyway.

Edit: I think the key here is: How much are you willing to sacrifice over the next couple of years?

#12 BTW, here's my project...

#13 Ted, I'd love to have a chat with you some time, via IRC or phone if you'd prefer. I'm the lead of another serious team working the small-scale persistant world angle; would be great to converse with peers in the field. =)