Mmorpg

#21 Feel free to add or comment on that list, it's just off the to of my head.

With regards to competition, it is very important. It's competition that drives many players to play. But what is the first thing that players turn to as an excuse when they are on the losing in? Rather than put the blame on themselves (where it may belong in most of the cases) they turn to a way to justify their loss (most particularly in a PVP game). The game is imbalanced, or the other guy isn't playing fair.

I'm a PVP guy, I enjoy team-oriented PVP. But I've split my time over the years between PVP and PVE titles... In a pure PVP setting, maybe instanced dungeons lose a lot of their value, maybe it's desirable in those environments for other players to jack you unexpectedly during the middle of a boss mob fight. That's debatable but at least one can make a fair argument for it. In a PVE setting though, all that the competition over boss mobs does is cause bad blood and waste time of CSRs who are forced to try to mediate between guilds and figure out who is telling the truth and who is in the wrong. In a PVE setting where guilds can not challenge themselves in battle against one another, they are forced to gauge themselves in battle against monsters. How many times over the years have you seen a guild kill mob spawners, camp mobs they don't need, train other guilds during fights, taunt other guilds in fights, etc. If there is no way for players to respond, then this is a form of griefing.

In regards to generated content and how this works best with instances... It's a matter of how you plug the content in. There are some things you can generate that work fine in a non-instanced zone. Generating quests can work fine, generating items can work fine, generated special encounter types can work fine... But I'm referring to generated zones.

Anarchy Online for example had their mission generator, which created a special instanced zone for players that featured generated goals (not always just kill X mobs) based on player criteria. There were generated areas for both solo players and for groups. These missions were hugely popular. TES: Daggerfall however (which I know you are familiar with), featured one my my personal favorite systems with their generated dungeons and goals. It worked very similar to Anarchy Onlines, but was an all-around better system. With MMOGs developers are facing a huge dilemna when it comes to content building. I'm not talking about Everquest's LDON style missions which really were just a selection of palletes. This is a logical step.

I don't see a way for it to work without instances. You must access these dungeons in some way. Typically you would receive a quest from an NPC and then visit a location (or be teleported, click a map location, whatever) and be granted an instanced zone. Playing devil's advocate here I suppose you could generate large amounts of content every week or so and have all players download this content and have the world either continously grow at a rapid pace, or to fill in a large barren world rapidly. That would be one way around it without resorting to instances, and it deserves mentioning. It still wouldn't allow the type of interaction though or opportunities for puzzles, traps etc that you could have through instancing.

#22 Quick question, what exactly are the drawbacks to instanced content? That you can't see people running by you or competing with you inside of a dungeon? And a quick response to the often-used "why not just make a single player game?" is that you then lose all of the advantages that you have in a massive multiplayer game. You also then lose the ability to add to the game on the fly without patching.

When it's all said and done though, I'm not saying that instances are a perfect solution. They are the best solution though that anyone has come up with thus far. I've been an advocate of them for a very long time, I wrote an article in October of 1999 at Gameznet which was pushing for them heavily back then, so I may be a bit biased towards them. I would change my tune in a heartbeat though if a better solution came along, but I've yet to hear one (and MMOGs are one of my favorite subjects). In the past couple of years instances have become close to standard in MMOGs, and I will agree the implementations could have been a lot better than what we've seen. So far developer's aren't taking advantage of all the bonuses they can get from instancing. They've been pretty well accepted by players though (in a poll at EQ'Lizer 6 months ago 70% of players were happy with instances in Everquest, and only 11% had a strong dislike for them). If a million people believe a dumb thing, it's still a dumb thing, though I don't think it will matter to the publisher. Maybe someone will come up with a better solution some time soon, but until they do, it's the best solution for a number of problems.

#23 Two major points really:

1) I wrote code that has NPC's breed, age, mature, and eventually die off 8 years ago. NPC's didn't "spawn" in a zone, they moved in and "lived" there. When an NPC dies--it's dead. It doesn't magically come back to life %respawnTimer minutes later.

I feel very strongly that a persistent world needs to be persistent. The entire concept of the respawn system is ancient technology, used to feed another ancient tech, the treadmill. 95% of the NPC's (100% in many fully PvE games) are simply there for players to be able to run in place on the levelling treadmill--and why make your players "wait" for a certain level/power/whatever before they can get to what is supposedly the fun part of your game? Most people call it the end game, but quite honestly, the "end game" should simply be "the game"--the fun should be all along the way, and not restricted to "once I get powerful enough, I can have fun". I could go on and on about this topic as well, but that's off topic.\

2) MMOG's provide the unique opportunity to interact with players instead of (in most cases, poor) AI. If your target market is interested in focusing on PvE, then I would suggest that you make games tailored for them, and quite honestly that doesn't include a game structure that includes "massively multiplayer"--it's a waste of resources, and most especially infrastructure costs. Since your target market really just wants an endless stream of good, quality, AI content, then instead of spending those millions of dollars monthly supporting a PvE game in a MM structure, spend that money entirely on post-production content releases. Your players will be happier, and I think that (for this market segment) you'll make a lot more money in the long run.

I also agree Daggerfall's "content generation" system was pretty neat, but instead of having a random dungeon generated, why not use that generation technology to create random scenarios instead? It wouldn't work "on instant notice" (see persistence above), but there is no reason at all that you can't use the same concepts in areas that are recently unvisited to breed up a new community of NPC's and have them migrate to new areas of the world--say, invade a region, set up camp, and provide "random" content to the players in that way.

#24 While it really doesn't matter, my experience has always been different. I'm not saying I don't like MMOs, just saying that it's been my experience that a lot of times you get with people you already know, whether you've met them in a forum, online in a chat area or whatever. From the developer standpoint, you could easily making an RPG that's multiplayer that has more downloadable content and patches and new quests and thus make it an ongoing thing without making it an MMO. You may not charge the same as an MMO would, but then again you're not trying to support all the servers and such you would need to with an MMO. At least not in the same way.

The other thing I think that makes MMOs...difficult I guess would be the right word, is that it seems to me that unless you constantly play them, you fall too far behind and will never get to experience fully the game you've purchased and been supporting each month. I know I used to play SWG but I just didn't have the time to justify spending 15 a month to play a game I played at most a few hours a week. I think that is another reason too, the cost involved. A lot of people just don't see spending that much money in order to play. Now, obviously lots do spend that which is fine. And while I definitely see MMOs only expanding and growing in the future, I think there is deifnitely an area of improvement that needs to be addressed and can be capitalized on.

#25 Stephan: I agree with you totally on the whole leveling treadmill. If I walk into another zone and see it populated with hundreds of monsters, moving about in random directions, whose sole purpose of existence is to be killed by some player for experience or loot, I'm going to puke. It's a flawed system that I hope we can eventually get away from. I always liked the idea of monsters that are bred rather than being spawned, but the problem I see with it is that if you allow players to kill a mob, even if there isn't anyhting to gain by it, they will do it.

Jonathan: Downloadable content RPGs and creation systems such as Neverwinter Nights do have a place. NWN was dissapointing to me in a lot of ways, but I still like the idea. From a networking standpoint you also take a lot of the operating and hardware costs out of your hands and put it to the end users. One idea I like is the idea of an NWN type system which allows you to zone from place to place, and store your characters in a server vault (okay sounds familiar so far), but to have restrictions to advancement. Bear with me for a minute I didn't explain that very well.

Diablo for example allowed you to move your character to other games, etc. The problem of course is that when you allow players to host their own servers, they can allow cheating, it's difficult to detect, they can make items, etc easily attainable. There's other problems of course too (player created content often not being high quality, lagging servers, etc) but that's the main one. One thing that could be done to limit this though is to have each individual player hosted server have to purchase items from the master server (or obtain them on official subscription servers). If you assigned items a unique id, the server could submit any items obtained to the master server, and if the id's didn't match up then cheating would be detected and the item would not be stored. For advancement, rather than the player servers tracking how a player actually advanced their skills (this only works really in a skills based setting) it could instead track what activities they did for how long in their play. For example the game server could send to the master server that soandso player spent their time (50% idle, 30% swordfighting, 10% mining and 10% blacksmithing) or whatnot. The master server would have tracked when that account logged in and out of the game server and could on the basis of that make a calculation for skills increases. Obviously, not a perfect system, but it sort of goes along with a few of the things stated in this thread.

I do agree though that the large amount of time invested is a major problem. The "mudflation" in many of these games is ridiculous. In Everquest for example each expansion makes the last expansions equipment seem poor. The addition of alternate advancement just made players want to invest that much more time to get a gain on their fellow players. Making things too easy to advance can cause players to run out of things to do and get bored. I think that problem though is a lot easier to solve than most of the others. The current games are already making strides in that direction and I'm sure it will continue to improve over time. I don't see a problem though with the $15 a month charges. Obviously it woudl be great if they were free, and having a monthly subscription makes it hard for some players to keep an account open. It is only about 1/3 of the price (in some cases 1/4 the price) of a single player game though, and you get so much more mileage out of it, if you are a regular player.

Hopefully we start seeing some more innovations in the genre. The old model is getting old, and there's so many ways these games could improve. The potential of the MMOG though (albeit in many ways unrealized), is huge.

#26 Funny... I've been working on a solution to just exactly the above stated problems.

The solution is actually alot easier than you make it appear....

Let fans create their own content, and charge what they will for it.
Have a system in place to allow fan created content to join the rest of the realms only AFTER it has been played through by the devs.

Implement a key/portal based system in your own world that will allow transport from your servers to theirs. During the transport process a sync should be made with a Master Server of some kind requesting the players, level, race and inventory at which time it is cloned server side, and a changelog is kept on the players information,at the next key/portal event or on world leave, the players information is resynced according to timestamps and events in the playerlog. If the changelog does not make sense, throw the new information out, and blame it on the server operator.

Periodically review fan created worlds, to make sure items/skill/levels are not being simply GIVEN away.

#27 MMO's where hundreds of players join up is NOT in it's infancy, on the contrary the 'industry' is 20 years old, however what most of the big ones out there did (like EQ and UO) was taking a MUD design and slapping on graphics, this broke horribly, but everyone saw EQ's great success and started imitating them, blatantly ignorant of the more than 20 years of experience gathered by this great online gaming community.

I agree that there are a lot of bad designs out there. Spawning is something you designed a room in a mud to do, it's old and it's broken.

Instancing has been experimented with on muds too.. It can be great when used for the right reasons. Using it to fix design issues, is not.

Giving away server control? Not a good idea for many reasons... Most notably... people WILL cheat.

The skill, level and experience threadmill also come from muds (or probably the pen and paper RP game) This is something suitable for 2-6 players... It's not something you want in an mmorpg to make it successful.
This is a method used for simplicity to retain players longer, but this is doing it wrong. The players will stay for the socialization, not the threadmill. You need something else and probably more meaningfull to fill your players time with.

Remember, if you can make your player hooked on your game, and still only have him/her online for an hour or two a day, then you're cutting costs and keeping everyone happy due to lower or non existant lag issues. So it's important not to reward the power players too much (but keep them happy), because they'll ramp up 50-60h/week playing your game... that's a lot of bandwidth.

In the end, it's mostly in the balance of your game. Design with thought, don't throw in features because they would be cool. Use the ones you can make work together for a deeper and broader game experience instead.


Just my two cents (Hope you can make them valuable)

#28 Right on the money there with regards to the MUD->MMOG progression. The interesting thing to me about the modern MMORPG is that Ultima Online was pretty fresh. It felt like a computer RPG that was adapted to a massive multiplayer setting. They reached far, failed in a few areas, succeeded in a lot of others. Everquest was the first huge mega-hit though, and it was basically a DikuMUD with graphics. Many of the people who didn't get into MUDs, simply couldnt get used to a text based interface, and having it being displayed in 3D with a more action oriented feel was easier to hook players. But Everquest inherited many of the same problems of MUDs with it, and some of it's design decisions from the get go were just really bad (downtime, static mob drops for 90% of the loot, not much at all in the way of random loot, almsot everything being based on killing for experience, etc).

With regards to the notion of giving away server control... It really depends on what your goals are. Obviously any time you let someone run their own servers, your making it a lot easier for players to cheat. Your also making it a lot easier for players to get inproper or lower quality content. It takes some experience to refine concepts such as level or quest design, Second Life has seen this a lot with player created content. That having been said, there are some good benefits to giving up some aspects of server control also. The main ones being cost related:

- Every player hosted dungeon or world space, is one that you don't have to pay bandwidth on. When it comes to cost efficiency that can be a huge difference.
- Player created content means that you have to create less on your own. This means cheaper production costs.

The weaknesses once again being that:

- Easy for servers to allow cheating or easy collection of items/money.
- Many player created areas will be first or second time creations, meaning the quality level might not be up to snuff, there may be places where you can get stuck, etc.
- Player created servers are more likely to go down unexpectedly, etc.

There's no real way around #2 or #3, but there are ways around #1. You can't stop players from cheating on player hosted servers, but you can set limits on advancement and on permanently stored items/abilities by making the servers validate these with an online database. It's not the right solution in all cases, but it is an interesting idea that has yet to be fully explored.

The other area of player created content that has yet to be explored is with advanced hosted content. Allowing players to create their own dungeons for example by piecing together building blocks, and then stocking their own dungeons with monsters.

I've been living in Thailand for the past year and a half, and it's so interesting to me the difference between the asian MMOGs and the american ones. I generally prefer the american ones, but there's a lot of things that can be learned from the asian games. They are all targeted really at quick play sessions (cost effective, and really required for asian players who are usually paying by the hour) and lots of rewards, with few penalties. Things like experience loss, what's really the point? To punish the player? The notion of this long grind to max your character, yes it keeps players playing longer but too often it makes you feel like your working rather than playing.

Bored and rambling. =P

#29 Yes, I'm a firm believer in giving the player ability to create their own content. But I don't think you need to give up server control to get that.
And maybe you won't have to if you focus on fast paced gaming at a reduced amount of time per day. Some mmorpgs are so elaborate in the things you have to do to gain anything, it feels more like work than fun sometimes.

The developers idea that 'the player must die', actually must die ;)

Of course player controlled servers can be looked into more thoroughly, but you really need to come up with a good mechanism to control the rewards in player controlled territory. How about a centralized rewards server that decide instead of the world server the 'dungeon' resides on? Like a cross between of player servers vs centralized servers.
That would allow for a lot of sanity checking for balance purposes.

And I agree, UO was a lot fresher than EQ, but then again EQ presented the online players with something more familiar, so there's also something to think about in regards to success potential :)

#30 How much has been done in the realm of having key players, perhaps even paid players, that drum up huge scale battles and such. I am thinking of a world where there really is an enemy, controlled by a human leader, and all of the players in the on-line world working together fend off the ever-coming hordes?

#31 I just think there would be something seriously wrong with the game if you had to *pay* a player to do that... :)

#32 Every MMORP game I've played has them... You call them GM's :)

#33 Yeah, professional GM's would be a little bit different in my eyes.
They're hardly paid 'players' ;)

Of couse you got your volunteer core of "GM's" too, in many mmorpgs, but they usually work more like greeters/support/santas helpers etc etc, ;)

This is of interest of course to the mmorpg designer. If you design your game in such a way that you can allow volunteers to attend to the most basic support challenges (stuck players, can't find x, etc etc) that will be huge savings in form of less support personnel needs.

#34

Quote:This is of interest of course to the mmorpg designer. If you design your game in such a way that you can allow volunteers to attend to the most basic support challenges (stuck players, can't find x, etc etc) that will be huge savings in form of less support personnel needs.

Except that as Ultima Online and Everquest found (after losing the class action suit against them brought on by their very own "volunteer" crews), it's not legal.

#35 I'm no lawyer, but I imagine that would depend on what country you're operating in. What exactly made it illegal in their case, if you know?

I know for mmorpgs like Eve Online and Anarchy Online still uses them.

#36 It was basically found that you cannot expect volunteers to perform the same duties for free that you pay people for. Since the "guides" were doing the same tasks that the paid CSR's were doing, the volunteer guides sued to be paid as well, and won.

#37 And yes, it depends on the country you are in. In america though it's an issue that a lot of people are staying away from after those lawsuits.

#38 So the difference would be not allowing the volunteers to do all the same jobs as the paid staff. Or maybe make sure paid staff can't do some of the things the volunteers take care of. That sounds to me like it would sort that problem, however, I'm no lawyer ;)

But I must admit, I find using volunteers to do the exact same job as your paid staff to be a little... unethical. And perhaps a tad arrogant ;)

In any case, it's not illegal to use volunteers. It's the way you use them that will determine it's legality.

#39

Quote:In any case, it's not illegal to use volunteers. It's the way you use them that will determine it's legality.

I agree--except that in all of the posts above, the ways you mentioned using them are all ones that paid employees would do (stuck players, can't find 'x', GM's, etc.)

#40 Using them as greeters/support/santas helper I believe I said yes I was also exploring other possibilities. And I also said that instead if paying players to GM, you could design your game in such a way that players may create 'events' at will. Important thing to remember in this tho is that laws differ from country to country, so it might be wise to only allow players from nations which you know you can use without much legal implications, if you want to use them as full GM volunteers.