Virtual Worlds News points to the latest Gartner report, which shows virtual worlds (primarily from an enterprise adoption point of view, maybe?) as being on the trough of disillusionment, but going mainstream in 2 to 5 years or so.
I wonder where Gartner would put the gaming worlds?
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I’d put gaming worlds at about the same place – smack dab in the middle of the trough of disillusionment for precisely the reasons explained in Gartner’s definition:
From my discussions with my own customers, reading of developer blogs, and other readings about the industry, it seems like disillusionment is at an all time high. This has as much to do with player expectations as developers being in a hideous rut.
We seem to have really taken a huge step back in the gaming world business. I play graphical MMOs nowadays and boggle at the lack of features. I was playing MUDs 10 years ago with 50 times as many features. To a new entrant into the market, you’d think that killing mobs and killing players was the only thing to do in an online game.
Mini games are barely existent.
Player housing is even starting to become rare.
Variety in gameplay has been abandoned.
So the trough of disillusionment is largely our own doing (as developers).
-Michael Hartman
Blogging about Online Gaming and Virtual Worlds:
http://www.muckbeast.com
I think a large part of it is that many developers have forgotten to actively encourage the world side of the equation, in favor of the game side of the equation. I’m not even talking about exploration or houses here, I’m talking about creating areas of interest to RPers and places in which it’s easy to hang out and be sociable. The non-combat spaces are designed to get you in and back out as fast as possible, with little to no side games, and terrible social architecture.
James Howard Kuntsler had a great TED talk about the problems with the modern suburban landscape. I think the gist of what he says applies to modern virtual world games as well. We are creating spaces along what people seem to be asking for, but that isn’t getting us really good virtual spaces that are cohesive and functional. I mean, why would anyone stop and take the time to enjoy the moment in what amounts to a circle of quest givers and buildings empty of interest?
Michael Hartman wrote:
One more to add: player-on-player pilfering is long-gone.
I would put gaming worlds at 10 years out. The game industry is rapidly falling behind in tech and building\release large software systems. There is still not much middleware or open source providing standards.
Content is not something that is leverage that well by tools except in a few isolated cases. It still takes time to write text, record VO\music, make models and layout worlds for example. People that are good and want to excell at those areas do not make games. There is no need to integrate with others and share the wealth when the tech is letting all of them go direct.
What is meant by the white point on the far right of the curve, “Basic Web Services?”
Only recently have I begun to see Web Services offered as a standard feature of most business software packages. The idea is to create your software and then expose the innards of it through web services so that integration can be had by other pieces of software that you did not write. It’s what was sold to businesses in the early part of this decade and has largely failed to become a reality. So called SaaS.(Software as a Service)
Recently, however, there’s been a resurgence on the SaaS front after the technology fell out of favor as a marketing point. What I think happens to these technologies is exactly what I see happening in the MMO space. A couple of big success stories creates a pile of me-too’s in the market. This ushers in a big boom and the press gets wind of the new technology. Between the press and a the frantic rush to be a me-too, the technology gets a huge gust of wind behind its sails. Soon come the stories of the technologies pitfalls. It only does what’s advertised if all you’re willing to do is kill mobs and kill players or in the case of Web Services, only if you use them in this specific way. (ie without cross web service transactions)
The hype then dies down, the press abandons the technology and moves on to The Next Big Thing ™. The competitors left in the market are forced to compete for a somewhat smaller audience and they refine their offerings looking for any edge they can get which typically makes them own up to the prior advertising. Lastly, there’s a push to get the public to recognize the technology again and how it can really help them this time. That’s where Web Services is right now and it’s doing a much better job this time around because for many more cases it does as advertised.
MMO’s will get to that point as vendors try to break through the disillusionment mentioned above. Players are leaving the shallow game designs behind and eventually they will remember that they have a subscription on their credit card and their wallets will follow. MMO developers will play to a stagnant if not decreasing marketspace for a few years while all the promises made of fantastic virtual worlds are actually delivered over YAWOWC. (Yet Another WoW Clone) Eventually, the true power of the MMO medium should become its own industry in its own right, forever connected to games but games will be seen as a subset of the MMO industry rather than the reverse. (See Raph’s Single Player game extinction writings or maybe I’ve gone off the deep end with respect to how much potential the MMO genre has for the future.)
So that’s the long winded answer to your Web Services question. Web Services have been through the technology trough. They have a bright future ahead and I for one hope that MMOs do the same thing because many a technology has never made it through the trough.
> One more to add: player-on-player pilfering is long-gone.
Oh yeah, that’s gone for good. That sort of thing is considered griefing, and is therefore sinful.
-Michael Hartman
Blogging about Online Gaming and Virtual Worlds:
http://www.muckbeast.com
Can one truly live in grace, if there is no sin?
Or in MMORPG terms, how can anyone really be a hero with no villains?
By now we should have great leaders and builders of cities, conquerers and war lords, thieves dens and knights orders, royalty and masters. All from the players themselves, by, for, and made up of.
Instead, it’s all gone backwards and been herded into one stockade, a place where none of this is possible. Where virtues are hobbled.
“By now we should have great leaders and builders of cities, conquerers and war lords, thieves dens and knights orders, royalty and masters. All from the players themselves, by, for, and made up of.”
That all in Eve.
Players manage organization numbering in the thousands.
Players own structures in game.
Spies steal information, money, ships, player owned structures, etc.
Bribery, kickbacks, extortion are the norm.
But EVE is not for the masses.
There’s a lesson here. If you want a game that allows the crimes, there has to be a means to punish them too. Otherwise, the criminal activities run rampant.
Other than that, I don’t know enough about EVE to say much. One thing though, is that there’s out of game activity in this fashion too. I wonder if a game’s design can eliminate most of that.
Reputation is very meaningful in Eve both a good one and a bad one. They also have a standing system that makes players KOS to NPCs. You can punish people by doing the same to them or paying some one to do it for you. I am still waiting for an MMO to implement a system like the Ebay ranking to add to social reputation common in MMOs.
I have yet to see any faction system really work. EVE, if I’m not mistaken, has a “safe” zone. Going into the PvP zone is accepting ganking, or warfare, if I understand it correctly, and in effect turning on the PvP switch. It’s similar to UO’s Trammel/Felucca facets.
What’s wrong here is that it really doesn’t work. In one zone, you are completely safe, in the other you are completely open to being killed. And similar also to UO, to be at the best and most competative in the game, you have to suffer the battle zones. Or else pay others for what you didn’t get yourself. You have to pay the PvPers, one way or another. It’s a face only a PKers mother could love.
As far as socially, there is something wrong if you have to create “safe” zones. If non PKer players cannot effectively stop a course of action, then they have no social glue as a whole, where as the PKers do because they are working from the other end of the rope, and it’s working great for them.
There is no safe zone in EVE, other than docking at a station (about the same as logging out).
There is no PvP switch. You are always in danger. The question is whether or not anyone sees you, and whether or not they feel like taking you, and whether or not they can do it.
That’s why reputation is so important: it’s the basis for whether or not an Empire accepts you, whether or not a corporation accepts you: and the protection offered by several people at your back is paramount to not only success, but also to survival.
I kinda miss playing, heh. Even if I suck and can’t survive solo. =P
It has Empire. Ganking still happens but with a cost. Non-consentual PvP can happen any where in the end if they bring enough friends and fork out the money. A corp can pay a war fee and declare war on any corp which means no where is safe, except at station. It is also possible to be a complete carbear if one wants to. Ya one might have to read a website for five minute for the hunters to get bored and leave, but then again not much in Eve is “fast”. PvPers pay the Empire players as that were most of the production occurs and +95% of the equipment in game is player made. There is one area that is PvP for everyone and that is the economy. Eve does some amazing stuff that no other game has but it is not for everyone with its might make right, game wide politics, travel times, and death penalities.
If you can’t survive solo, I guess I have a question. Can anyone? Not just survive, but prosper, without having to grind and re-grind and proceed at a very slow pace.
There’s no doubt that EVE does amazing stuff with the economics and politics. That stuff comes free of charge with any game that allows freedom and has the foundations for such activity. Heck, UO didn’t do anything for politics, but it had loads of it due to the need. Not like EVE, but just a point that’s important.
But why is EVE “not for everyone”? No game is, really. But when this is said about a game, it means it’s extreme in an aspect, and we all know what it means in this instance. But that’s my point. If it’s not for everyone (gernerally speaking), why not? What’s wrong? It’s in this aspect of the game, we all know that. That’s why I say it’s still broken.
The real question is “what’s missing”.
The most of the people want play in “easy mode” and for plain “FUN”, EVE is a complex game with a “serious” gameplay, some people likes that but many others not, for that is not a game for the masses. The learning curve is very hard and dangerous, and only very mottivated players accept that, EVE is for people that really likes MMOs, not for people that only wants a fun time, or only plays the current “big thing”.
For me EVE is how a hobbie, many people have hobbies, but hobbies inherently not are for everyone, some people likes flowers, other paint, others mount car models, other collecting things, other modding games, etc. and some people likes a complex MMOs with deep features, the same complexity that find in other hobbies. But also the same people see TV or movies, entertain for the masses.
The cuestion is, ¿MMORPGs must be entertaining for the masses or specialiced hobbies? Many people plays MMOs, but less want go deep in MMOs, currently the MMO quest is conquer the masses, leaving the deep in the road.
But the real potential of MMORPGs how worlds is that they can have both, in the same game you can have casual features and deep features. For me the EVE fault is the lack of casual features, all in the game is hard. And that is a general problem, actually some are hard and the most are for the masses, but not both.
The problem with Eve is not the learning curve (it ain’t that complex, some skills let you use some items, that is not complex at all. Nor is setting up a ship in a template that lets you exploit various tactics.) or the support of antisocial behavior (that is actually its saving grace). The problem with Eve is that it is nothing more than a game of Risk and the players are nothing more than Risk pieces.
Eve shows you the reason why devoting most of your resources to guild content is a bad idea. The single player becomes fodder to die/kill over and over again in pointless battles to lose/gain a country (system).
Eve is mostly a MMO Strategy Game where you are the zergling.
–Then there is the developers cheating and the removing of important start up files during updates, but that is another topic.
I agree. And the trick is to make the game so that these seemingly separate play styles can be played together, intermingled, as one game, one world.
And this is a critical point. Any game that builds support for massive groupings of players, in a nation or otherwise, has an inherent flaw built in. RMT. There will be those who will try to control things for their own real profits.
I don’t know if this is the case in EVE, and I’m not saying so. But that risk can kill the game for the other players under that kind of control.
There has to be a way to bust that up. To make the game for the average player, not the few.
Probably not. Can you survive and prosper, by yourself, in the real world? Granted, I have heard stories of some people who seem to be loners as well, who have prospered in EVE. But they also have aptitudes that I don’t have, from an enjoyment of number crunching (which I just can’t do) to actual skill in combat (which I’m unwilling to immerse in).
The last (unfulfilled) objective I had in the game was to get a Command Ship. I didn’t want a Battleship. I wanted a CS, because those are designed to help coordinate others in a fight. I’m pretty good at that. Being an ace pilot… not so much.
I don’t know if you’re just looking for a reason to hate a game you’ve never even looked into or what. You seem to be flailing at any criticism you can draw out of the abstract theoretical. I mean, have you actually heard of a player group milking EVE for real currency? Where do you even get the notion that EVE is a game “for the few”?
What do you want?
The same thing that’s missing from every MMORPG: a reason to strive towards eternal peace. I don’t know if that’s a bad thing. But I, for one, would really like to see it somewhere.
Another thing that’s missing: innovation fundamentals. You can’t construct new objects, unanticipated by the designers. I want to see that very badly, too.
It’s really not so hard to admit: EVE is a well-built game. It’s one of the first of its kind. It’s an MMORPG where PvP actually scales somewhat decently, all the way to shifting territorial maps. Of course it has flaws. Of course it could be improved. I don’t really like the fact that it’s space opera, even though that helps it dodge the typical idiotic tropes of fantasy archetypes.
And if every appeal to reason still fails, I’ll fall back on an appeal to authority: Richard Bartle still considers it his favorite design.
I’m still pretty confident I could do better, given enough time and resources. I’m less confident than I was years ago, before EVE had even come out. I recently started work on designing a system that could actually blend conflict with peace in a way I like.
It is no flaw but a feature of the game. Now not everyone will like it or use it but it is just a feature of the game and the choice is available to the player. Eve does a good job of providing choices that matter and if they are liked or hated is second to have the choice be available.
Any game with more then one player in it will have someone trying to control things for their own real profits.
Ok, so does EVE have, or not, massive corporations with leaders who use it for their own RL RMT profits? Is this my “abstract theoretical criticism” or is it a “feature”?
I don’t hate on EVE Michael, I’m just searching for fact and commenting on game design.
The thing is, in RL there are lots and lots of small business owners. Everyone in RL doesn’t work for some big conglomerate and live under their thumb of control. But isn’t this the case in EVE?
When asking me what I want, it’s better to ask what I don’t want. I don’t want to “play” a game for the sake of others who turn my enjoyment into real money.
😛
I can’t seem to make a post. Does this work? It doesn’t say awaiting moderation. It just reloads the page.
Let’s try this again.
I don’t know. I haven’t interviewed every single CEO quite yet. But I certainly have not heard of such things, and unless you have, you’re drawing it out of thin air.
I will do some research on your behalf:
EVE Online Political Map
List of Corporations
Usual Anti-RMT Stuff
Third party take on EVE’s RMT policy
Something from Massively I don’t remember
If you were honestly interested in the design of EVE, I would have expected a question about how it worked, and some personal initiative to actually go and find out rather than throwing questions like monkey poop. Be honest: you have no intention of playing the game, nor do you have any desire to. It would not be hard, after all, to go and try it out and quit if the ailments you’re querying are present. It would be even easier to run a couple searches, as I did.
Still, here are a few articles to help you out, either way. They were posted initially on Terra Nova, which is how I found out about them many years ago:
The Great Scam
The Great Heist
Enjoy.
I see it just fine.
Whoops. Michael, your first three attempts at that reply got caught by Akismet because of all the links. I’m not sure why it put the final one into just moderation, but it should be all set now.
Relax Michael. It was just a comment and a question. No need to call me a monkey. hehe (I know you didn’t, it’s just a joke, and I’m sorry I feel the need to explain that…kind of.)
I did some searching, and although there’s lots about RMT and farming, and there’s some about corporations set up for such activity, I didn’t find anything on corporate leaders skimming off the top for themselves. But then thinking about it, corporations are pretty secretive even on the internet, aren’t they? Finding something about this could be pretty tough.
No, I have no real interest in EVE, and I’m not going to play it. It was a comment on game design, and that lead to the question of whether that pitfall existed in EVE.
But I can say with little doubt it exists in UO with the Felucca facet and controlling powerscrolls, which are a requirement for building a character to the top. And UO is the only other major(?) MMORPG that has this kind of control and political aspects. At least as far as I can think of. I only have a smidgion of doubt because, while it’s said to be the case many many times, and then many more times, those kabillions of statements could all be wrong.
It probably thought it was linkspam. 🙁 That’s why I tried logging in. Ah well. Thanks.
Eh, you’re used to arguing with Morgan.
I’m sorry I got incensed; I hadn’t meant to. I was a fan of EVE for a few years before I even started playing, and the activity of playing didn’t quench my awe at the sight of a real, working economy in an MMORPG. I was impressed by how they manhandled game design such that almost no one would ever buy a character, and RMT isn’t much of a big deal, as it doesn’t change the game dynamic at all. And seeing all of that flippantly accused by some vague, unwarranted paranoia is really depressing.
There are real concerns that you could have voiced of its game design. But this criticism of possible embezzlement? I would expect it to happen in proportion in any MMORPG.
Well, only a few games allow players to control territories where good stuff is to be found. Stuff that leads to RMT. As I said, UO had it with Felucca and the power scrolls. It seems that EVE has it too, but I’m not real sure.
Hence the question.
WoW doesn’t have this aspect, because of the instances and lack of territorial control. So while WoW has plenty of RMT, it’s not at the expense of other players by exclusion. And the worse thing is when the other players actually have to join the zerg guilds to have any success at all, and end up working for “the man” of RMTing.
I thought I’d throw in the answer to this specific dilemma.
So the problem I brought up is zerg guilds controlling territories to harvest RMT resources, and forcing other players to join them and donate the resources to the guild, where the leaders dole out some to keep the joiners happy, but selling off some in RMT.
The answer to this part is in layers.
1) First of all you have to make this guild structure less controlled by the leaders. It works well for the game too, to do so by size and organization, such as a city structure. And make it so that any player can join without consent. Of course, this city social structure still needs some mechanisms for banishing for their own defense. But if they try to enforce total control by banishment, they will be smaller and weaker than another who doesn’t, and thus not likely to be able to control a territory.
So, size combined with freedom of player movement.
2) Player donations/taxes. These should be mechanisms designed for both cities and guilds. While guilds wouldn’t have the loose ability to allow any player to join, they still need to have this mechanism available.
These assets need to be city/guild owned, not player owned. Spending of or doling out of the assets needs to have oversight. WoW’s guild vault system goes part way in this (maybe some other games too) in that the guild leaders have limited control, at least I think.
Particularly for cities, there needs to be some control by the people. Voting for leadership and open access to what happens to city assets is the way to go.
City assets need to be spent by the city, not by players. However, players would have to “set things in motion”. But it should require more than one elected official to sign off on “spending”, including moving of assets. And rather than giving this ability to individual players, offices should be created, where the head of any office is elected by the citizens. If an office decides to spend assets, it must have the signatures of something like 2 other offices. Also, these assets should be noted in a data base for any citizen to check up on.
Now the assets of a city are overseen by not only other officers, but also by the voting citizens.
Yes, this all could be abused, but if citizen Joe doesn’t like what’s going on, he can leave for a city that’s run better in his opinion.
The leadership of a city now becomes stewards, not dictators.
In my mind there are several reasons for this trough of disillusionment.
-The games are not “worldly”. This leads to lack of freedom in action, and a predefined linear path for the player. Players don’t feel like a persona so much as a puppet.
-Games are built for powergamers, leaving more casual players behind.
-Cheating is a turn off.
-RMT is unfair.
Michael Chui wrote:
🙂
I’d contest why on this chart that Wiki’s are listed as 2-5 years off.
Not having seen the report, I can’t judge why they think it falls in that date range, but I certainly agree they are not mainstream yet. This chart is for enterprise, so that would mean that the typical worker at a company would use one. Right now, I don’t think that is the case at all except in the tech industry.