Red 5’s chasing the persistence dream
Once upon a time, there was an acronym we used for certain sorts of virtual worlds. We called them PSW’s, for “persistent state world.”
Most virtual worlds today don’t actually have persistent state. Oh, your characters do, but not the world. In fact, the ability to affect the world has fallen dramatically since the days of Meridian 59 and Ultima Online. M59 featured shifting political balance, and UO had full world state persistence. If someone killed Bob the baker, he was gone. If you dropped something on the ground, it stayed there until it rusted away (or more likely, someone came along and grabbed it — and that someone was just as likely to be a monster as it was a player).
It took half an hour to 45 minutes to save all of the world state in UO, by the way. Which meant rollbacks to your character if the server crashed. 🙂
These days, never mind stuff staying on the ground. There isn’t really a ground to drop stuff on anymore, and Bob can’t die. The idea of living in a world with actual history therefore seems slightly outre to many, as can be witnessed by some of the reactions to Zenke’s interview with some of the Red 5 designers.
That said, there’s also a bit of lack of awareness of virtual world history displayed by them in the interview as well. As many have pointed out, they seem to not to be too aware of games like A Tale in the Desert, World War II Online, Planetside, Asheron’s Call, and for that matter even the various ways in which this was handled in UO and SWG. And there’s plenty of other games that are pushing these ideas further, whether they make it out the door but garner small audiences (Wurm Online) or never make it (Wish). I could go on and on, because the examples are many.
The challenge here always seems to lie around the granularity and sophistication of what is persisted. You can’t have a one-shot complex quest be used up and consumed by a single player. Therefore you have to re-use stuff. Therefore the stuff you re-use has to be generic enough to be recombined and re-presented in myriad ways. And pretty soon you are back at the challenge of creating procedural systems that create interesting content. Then you can make that content persistent and make it interact with other stuff in the world.
There’s a zillion things that have been tried along these lines.
- Spawners that grow in power and overrun stuff.
- Spawning spawners.
- Player cities and housing, which are persistent elements affecting the landscape.
- NPC factions with tilts based on user actions
- Keystone quests that affect regions of the game, spawns, or large-scale events
- Territory control games.
These things all create emergent narrative as users change things.
In SWG we were trying for something we called “dynamic points of interest.” These were whole set pieces, such as little quest blocks, narrative staged stuff, puzzles, encounters, etc, lifted right out of the sort of dynamic encounter tables you used to see in pen and paper games. Originally, we did it in UO with orc camps and mage towers, but as housing filled up all the empty spots you eventually never saw them spawn!
The SWG ones would spawn on the map (which was procedural in part specifically so it could accomodate spawns like this) and make themselves room — flatten areas, create the burning sandcrawler, etc. Then they would hang around until destroyed or resolved. Unfortunately they got cut from the game during beta. Some of them worked, though, and at their best, they were kind of startling — the escapee slave girl running up to you, handing you a data disk, then looking around fearfully. “They can’t find it!” she would tell you. “Don’t let it fall into their hands!” Then she would run away, and group of Stormtroopers would spawn, and kill her. Then you’d hear them saying “She doesn’t have the disk… sweep the area…”
Anyway — glad to see the dream of a more dynamic world is still alive. I still think that in the end, the answer to this lies in providing players with tools and freedom, more so than just providing narrative nuggets of any sort, and really EVE Online is the evidence that this can work. It just may by nature make for a less friendly world and therefore less audience, in the same way that a wilderness park is not as friendly as a theme park, but holds far more riches for the discerning visitor.
89 Responses to “Red 5’s chasing the persistence dream”
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It’s not really ‘questful’ but check out Wurm Online if you’re interested in large persistent sandbox MMOs. It’s free, rather indie and has its quirks, but none the less is a very interesting experiment IMO. Hugely modifiable land, all players are equal, and who you become is based on what you do (skill points raise via doing stuff).
Wikipedia entry
>one-shot complex quest be used up and consumed by a single player
Can’t you?
Seems like there might be an opportunity for such thing, if you (a) make a quest to compete to be the single player – and let it be known it’s a combination of skill and chance, and (b) you record and broadcast the one winner.
Seems to be room for a spectator kind of thing where people have a chance of being ‘the one’, and if they don’t make it – as most won’t – either rooting for him or wishing for him to fail.
This is a poor analogy but Charlie and the Chocolate factory meets a reality tv show.
Sounds like one of the scripted “random encounters” in Fallout 2.
Or a few of the quests in the KOTOR series.
In SWG? That would have been great.
I think player tools and freedom are part of it, but narrative nuggets can help. The player created stories and interactions and the generated ones should interact with each other, at least by a little bit.
Also, it’s interesting how it seems like all of these dynamic systems – the one you just mentioned in SWG, and the virtual ecology in UO, were cancelled early in, before release. Do people not want dynamic systems like that because the results they create aren’t optimal, or because they are too ‘new’ and uncertain? It seems like a lot of the canceled stuff would be the most interesting parts of the game. (Take this with a grain of salt; I also got excited about the description of spawn regions in UO based on environment)
I think a critical part of this is that the world needs to have a reason for being too, not just the players.
This village that’s saved, if it’s just a trophy, that’s not very exciting and is going to lose interest. But if that village produces something that the player group sees as beneficial, now it’s much more sticky.
Why can’t that village be a player owned village?
Oooh! Let me be the first one to add that EVE Online does an excellent job at this whole persistent world thing!
There’s a compromise between the theme park and the wilderness park: the public garden. It’s not as unfriendly and vicious as a wilderness park, but it’s also not as insipidly “friendly” as a theme park. It’s beautiful, and it doesn’t revolve around you. Of course, there’s the minor issue of not actually having something to do besides walk and look…
But it’s another place to start. Begin by taming the world, with fine controls and standards set. Make it beautiful, and even somewhat self-sustaining. *shrugs*
It’s a cost issue, really. You could, but you’d better be able to reuse some of it, because otherwise, few players will ever get to do quests.
The reasons vary, and you shouldn’t infer commonality, other than perhaps “it was new and therefore didn’t quite have the bugs out of the design.” In SWG’s case the issue was with the spawning routines, as I recall, not the POIs themselves. In UO’s case, well, I discussed that in those articles…
You can’t be first if the article mentioned it! *sigh* Now I know that everyone skims, since I mentioned both those titles. 😉
The public garden is an interesting analogy. I like where you were going with it but the assumption that the developer needs to make it beautiful and self sustaining is misguided. (That’s how I read your statement so I don’t mean to put words into your mouth if you didn’t mean it that way.) I think the developer needs to seed it with something and then provide tools for the players to make it into the likeness that they want to and into the purpose they see fit for it.
I know that is vague but the point I’m taking from your analogy is the same as what I’ve been saying for years. Give the players the ability to tame the wild and put it in their best interest to do so and we should be able to arrive at a self sustaining sandbox MMO.
Once you’re there, you can implement those one time quests that are completed by a few people but have the end results of them introduce technology or magic into the world that shakes up the equilibrium established by the players. The procedural content generated from that simple event is all computed by the players and has the benefit of requiring little development team time to facilitate.
The problem here is that I do not believe you can create a self sustaining sandbox MMO to compete with WoW/LotRO/… without seriously challenging the prior history of the mechanics WoW/LotRO/… have implemented. Facilitating groups larger than the magical 250 member limit through gameplay. Seriously discussing permadeath as a means to control griefing. Gameplay mechanics to support single character multiple “guilds” membership. Taxation of guild members.(a city is just a larger guild really) Ownership and control of in-game resources by a player or group of players.
All of this is mostly unchartered territory (EVE being the imperfect exception to this rule) from the vantage point of a large scale AAA MMO title. Other games might have systems implemented to handle this stuff but none of them have mass appeal.
It’s all about presenting the illusion of safety in an otherwise wilderness like setting. In Shadowbane, if two or three cities decided to not fight, the adventuring that was had in the surrounding areas felt very PvE like. You wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between it and EQ PvE content and that would be enough for most players. Perhaps enough to allow a PvP game to gain more mass appeal.
What if the quest in question was a very hard to solve puzzle? One that takes months or even years to solve? Of course, you can’t underestimate the ability of players, so some of the clues/hidden knowledge required might even not be placed in the game until time passes. To make it more complicated, the puzzles/clues don’t have to reveal themselves as part of this “quest”, leaving it up to the players to figure that out. And it all could be hidden in among many other bits of knowledge that may be related to other quests of this nature, or just part of static lore.
What I’m thinking here is basically a “Holy Grail” sort of thing. Not all that many of them in the game, but every player that wants to would have the ability to pursue the objective.
For more common, daily game play, allot of little hidden things could be placed in the game too. That’s still not enough to satisfy ravenous players, I know. Other sorts of game play would be required, including common, repeatable quests such as “fetch me’s”. But the best thing for daily game play would be to give players the ability to create on their own. This is why I like the ability to drop items (and I’d like to see a means to keep them in the game world too), write books (add scrolls to that too), make maps (needs to be amendable by players with notes, marks, etc.), and this kind of thing. There’s allot more that could be done to enhance this. But it all also comes with the ability for players to be jerks.
OKOKOK so I did skim! But I went back and read it all and realized my gaffe :^)
Something that stands out in my mind is that there is an important factor in PSWs, and that’s how “sandboxy” they are. Wurm for example is very sandboxy. Essentially there are no NPCs or other factors creating quests or actions.
I suppose using the sandbox analogy, you could measure the worlds by how many toys are in the sandbox, how complex they are and whether new toys show up now and then. Wurm for example is basically a sandbox with just a shovel and a pail (literally!). EVE is a sandbox that’s a bit more complex with some basic quests and NPCs. Others are more complex with random encounters.
I’d venture to guess that the type of player mindset you attract will vary with these worlds. Purely sandbox worlds are somewhat niche and some players will probably deeply enjoy them. Whereas players that need to be somewhat entertained are going to be bored to death (cancellation).
er “there are no NPCs or other factors creating quests or actions” other than trees growing back and things degrading back to nature over time if left alone.
You, sir, have inspired me to attempt to create a dynamic “deep” quest generator for a UO server emulator. Generating random fedex/kill quests is easy, but generating something deep and involved that actually makes sense… this should be fun!
I thought about calling that out myself, but I decided I’ve been too snarky over the past few months. :p
You read correctly.
Over the past few years, I have had too many experiences of players being consummately unwilling to contribute anything but the bare minimum to a world, and those few who are willing to put a lot into the pot are likely to be either hamfisted or malicious. I’ve lost a lot of idealism, I guess.
There are three quintessential entities that touch the world: the developers, the players, and the computer. The only thing you can pretend to have full control over is the computer. But I also agree with the claim that virtual worlds can and should be artistic statements, in some respect.
The only way I see to blend that is to accept your argument–give the players the power to shape the world into their own likeness–but counterpoint it with the mandate that the world itself fight back. That it is not wet clay in the hands of the masses, but a frontier that bucks a shaping hand.
I think that would be an interesting device: start out with a single server, wait the length of time it takes the players to turn it into Coruscant, and then start a new server for those players being turned away because the frontierism has petered out. And leave the old servers intact, fully functional, still updating, still supported.
This assumes a lot about the power of the game engine. In fact, it assumes many of the systems that I’ve personally mapped out conceptually. But really: what if? 🙂
I think that it’s a mistake to aim for any kind of competitive position. That suggests that the only measure of validity is in reference to those who have gone before.
But it’s also absolutely necessary to examine your own ideas and recognize their influences, as well as their assumptions. Bartle has long harped on levels: why does every game have them? I’ve never liked them; I couldn’t imagine being forced to build a game around that mechanic. They break everything I conceive of.
I loved the concept of Shadowbane, and I was immensely disappointed to see how badly it turned out. And then, when they gave it away for free, I couldn’t even move after logging in. Ridiculous.
I don’t know. I don’t think that aiming for mass appeal is the right goal. I think that it’s important to keep scale in mind, to make sure that adding more players won’t break anything, to know where the threshold of believability is and then react appropriately. I think being able to wait, to be patient even in the Internet era, to expect nothing for a year or two, is important. But I think it would be a success if 10 people regularly logged in and enjoyed themselves, even alone. It would be disappointing and a bit underwhelming and almost certainly a financial disaster, but it would be a success.
That said, writing about this has given me a few ideas on how to viralize an MMO. :p But unlike the earlier “business model”, I’m holding onto this one for now. Mostly because it doesn’t make sense without context.
World change does not have to be dev or player only but it can be a combo. Think a TV series. You have a few people making content weekly or monthly and it scales to the whole audience to make it into to something. Writers respond to their audience and world\news events all the time. It is like pen and paper of old. Make a start, players move around, make a middle, players do stuff, make an end, players win. Repeat. One can even forgo something man made and just model after Mother Nature with RND world changing events.
Software tools enable a few to do much. It just has not happened in games yet. Artists, world designers, writers, are not getting any productivity gains from tools so it has to come from somewhere else.
Some games are making unlocking content a global thing so the rate of change is unique to each server. At least we could get to a constantly locking and unlocking system where rate of change is player controlled for PvE as this is already done in many PvP games.
PvP persistence.
http://go-dl3.eve-files.com/media/corp/idkfa/Sov_film_24.8_0002.wmv
It would be nice to see things like this in a game, but I don’t see it happening. People seem to be afraid to break out of the nicely-shaped cookie cutter, because they can make a huge argument that it will be successful based on past games. That’s why Red 5 seems revolutionary: they’re taking a huge gamble creating something really interesting. If they are successful, we get a new bar to measure against. Fail, and the consequences are much higher: more people being afraid to try something that might have just needed a slightly different tack, or more refinement.
I don’t know…I don’t think making a game with one extra feature being persistent as something that’s really persistent.
Eve, for example. It’s great and all, but what about the rest of the world? Err, universe.
And the same thing with Red 5, is my suspicion. What it really sounds like with what they’ve said is a 2 sided quest. Save the village/ destroy the village. Fight back and forth over it. But can you burn the freakin’ thing down? Can you build more buildings to it? Can you add a defensive wall all around it?
But maybe I’m just getting used to the failing hype so many games have pushed out there over the years. Time will tell what exactly they have in mind.
“But can you burn the freakin’ thing down? Can you build more buildings to it? Can you add a defensive wall all around it?”
Yes. Every change in this video is the results of a players making structures (military and industrial) or destroying them.
http://go-dl3.eve-files.com/media/corp/idkfa/Sov_film_24.8_0002.wmv
Two sided quest is better then static worlds. One has to start somewhere.
I’m kind of tired of everytime a sandbox discussion comes up everyone jumps all over the “Eve this” and “Eve that” discussion as if Eve is the only answer and formula to the sandbox MMO. Eve has done a good job don’t get me wrong but it is not the end all of sandbox MMOs. Most of the comments come from players that have played through the horrible newbie experience or never experienced it because they’ve played from day one. I respect the rabid fan base that Eve has but can we please move the conversation away for just what Eve brings to the table lest we box our thinking in yet again by focusing too heavily on a single instance of a MMO. If Eve were the WoW killer the fans make it out to be, don’t you think it’s subscription number would be significantly higher? 250,000 subs is a great number of subs and makes for a profitable game but not since the days of EQ1 has this amount been something more than the niche MMO that it is today.
We get it already. Only we’re not playing it so maybe we don’t see it through the same rosy glasses Eve fans do. The same goes for Second Life though thankfully that hype seems to have died down for the moment.
Well, in EVE’s case, “can you walk on the ground?”
But I don’t mean to knock them at all. They are well ahead of most other games. I just mean to say, while it is persistent, is it a persistent world (universe)?
I think the answer is no. But I can see that it’s all in the eye of the beholder to a big degree. And that’s fine. And maybe the “scope” of the game is a different subject anyways.
No.
What’s the connection between quality and being a WoW-killer? WoW is a very well done game and I still enjoy playing it but each time I log in, I am reminded how WoW is just polished mediocrity brought to near perfection.
I am pretty sure that a game that can satisfy so many people needs to make far greater compromises and therefore will be probably less appealing to me. I don’t want a WoW killer, I want a sub 250k user game that will cater to *my* taste…
I don’t buy it. If Eve were closer to the perfect MMO then it would by default have more subscribers. By not having the WoW like subscribers suggests that there is something in the design of the game that keeps people from trying it.
I don’t mind your argument that you want a sub 250k game that caters to your taste. That’s perfectly fine to have and absolutely a viable market strategy in today’s MMO landscape. Just don’t parade Eve around for something it is not. It’s not the end all be all of sandbox games. It’s a niche game that has good game play and a rabid fanbase while at the same time failing to attract mass appeal in any real way. The true sandbox game will accomodate WoW like numbers and more. A sandbox afterall is meant to be a play area that is moldable and shaped by it’s players. Eve caters well to a specific type of player and all I’m saying is let’s look beyond it to the greater possibilities a sandbox MMO can achieve. Where’s Eve’s WoW? EQ had simillar numbers and no one thought they could be beat until a game called WoW showed up. Where’s the same sandbox game that perfects the Eve experience? It’s not here yet. It’s likely not even being considered because people can’t stop gawking at Eve.
To some degree, this was (possibly unintentionally) done in EQ and EQ2 – quest lines that you could start but not complete, initially. It didn’t go over well – quests that are incomplete/broken or very obscure don’t seem to make for happy questers, because from a players standpoint it’s impossible to tell if it’s just difficult or broken. While I’m sure some players enjoy searching and finding obscure quest/lore lines, running into a brick wall for a year only to find out that the line was broken or not implement would frustrate anybody. The Frogluk quest line in EQ2 comes to mind; Iksar necromancer head gear in EQ as well (finished some two or three years later…)
While Eve is not the only answer, it seems to me that Eve is the only current sandbox-type game that has enough subscribers to serve as an example. Not knocking UO, of course, but it’s kinda winding down these days (~70k subs according to SirBruce).
I find myself wondering if that is so. I wonder if there’s that many people willing to put in the time/effort (I don’t want to say ‘work’) that sandbox games require/allow. Current MMOs (and single-player games, for that matter) seem to indicate more people are interested in being actively entertained rather than involved in building things in a VW.
Being actively entertained is critical for any game. If the only fun you find in a game that you play every day comes once a week, that’s just not good.
Everybody knows this. On one hand so many people seem to assume that a sandbox game won’t/can’t be fun all the time, yet point to EVE as a fun sandbox.
And EVE is only a partial sandbox universe (world).
I am not talking about an incomplete “quest”. I’m more after the “search for the holy grail” or Atlantis, or better yet..Troy.
Is what you wrote =). And the froglok quest line in EQ2 is an exact example of this – it was hinted at from release, and many tried to follow those hints. There were many angry people when the patch notes some time (a year? don’t remember) indicated the quest had been added/completed.
I don’t know how popular a quest line that took over a year to complete would be, considering the average mmo retention is, what, 8 months or so?
Hmm, ‘actively entertained’ maybe is not the right choice of words.
Wow is mostly just a game; little building or creating, just entertainment. And even Wow isn’t fun all the time, really. Sometimes it’s just a time passer like solitaire.
Sandboxy/worldy games, in my mind at least, and I think I’ve seen similar comments here before, can have a different type of entertainment in supplying the tools to build/create things and affect the world. Current trends seem to indicate that the Wow version is more popular, unfortunately. I like Eve, but I wouldn’t object to seeing more worldy games (I missed the boat on UO). Of course, I liked Wow for a year and a half, and EQ for 2 years, and I may like WAR for a while too.
Where the hell is Morgan when you need him?
Quality product != Sales.
Ok, first of all, “actively entertained” is for daily game play, my grand quest idea is on top of that and not the sole and only form of entertainment that I propose.
Secondly, if you run an institute for the insane, do you let the inmates run it? So what if the players/inmates complain that they’re not eating all their cake at once. 😛
Seriously, a game becomes less of what it is by giving in to the players all the time. But in this instance, there’s another problem. The players burned through the quest too fast. It wasn’t good enough. And that’s the reason I said that, as a protective measure. I know I didn’t say this and you’re right to point it out, so let me explain it further.
If I were making a set of grand quests, with rewards that top all other rewards, I’d want to protect it against the players outperforming my quest design.
So I’d do each quest in stages, and at release have the first stage designed to be really tough, and take a very long time for players to garner enough information to get the the end of that stage. And I’d leave it there, without a critical clue to move the quest forwards.
Then I’d watch the quests, and gage how easy it actually is for players. If they are too far along and moving through it much faster (easier) than I anticipated, I’d then make some changes to try to make things harder in the next stage.
If all is going well, and players are not finding their way to the end of the first stage yet, I can proceed as planned.
So you see, it’s a protective measure.
Alternately, if after several years no one is even coming close, then more clues can be added to kick start it in the right direction.
Now, I don’t know what kind of quest this was in EQII.
What I’m thinking of is quests that require finding clues on maps, in literature, and in history and ruins, landmarks, etc. Not clues that lead from one to another like leap frogging quests. Then the players would have to recognize the clues first, then solve them, and then put them all together to get to stage ends.
The idea is to give the game world a real past with real artifacts and treasures…not these repeat rewards that have no real meaning except that you’ve had the fortitude to play a game grind over and over until success.
Your last comments are spot on. I just wanted to correct your take on what I was saying, even knowing that it was my lack of explanation that caused it.
@Amaranthar, you’re describing an ARG.
They’re fun and all, and they’ve actually acquired some large followings when they’ve been coupled with very very popular franchises (I love Bees and the Heroes ARG), but they’re not exactly easy to build a business model around. Trying them to shoe-horn them into a MMOG may or may not work even, because they tend to require a certain critical mass of eyeballs, and they’re *not* easy to create. Pre-planning on them can be quite significant. They also aren’t going to appeal to the same sort of spectrum as the rest of your game necessarily will, so that’s something else you need to worry about. Fatigue is another issue; you can’t keep running these back to back. ARGs are really awesome in part because they’re finite and they’re usually not run often enough to exhaust the audience; it’s special when a good one comes along, so it’ll hold your attention for a while, but you need to be able to break from the whole thing or you start getting frayed around the edges. This is actually something that makes a strong arguement in favor of the MMOG hybridization.
The key thing is what your “moment to moment” gameplay is. Because most ARG junkies aren’t going to want to bother with mob grinding for instance, and I’m not sure how many people that genuinely enjoy mob grinding are going to want to solve puzzles. That being said, if you can find a replacement for the mob grind that’s more palatable to the ARG population, or at least people that are potentially ARG friendly, you might be able to expand the potential audience by giving them something that can be done when they’re frustrated with the current puzzle. It’s an interesting idea, and one that really deserves a lot of thought, but it’s not an easy thing to just drop into the middle of a MMOG and expect it to function as well as it should. The whole game ought to be centered around the concept.
MMO/ARG hybridization has come up a couple times on this blog before, and it’s something that’s definitely worth trying a few different ways. I think it can be done right, and that it will work.
Then why can’t the people that are interested in building things output stuff to the world that keeps the rest of the world population entertained? Isn’t that what developers do anyway with the tools they have in place in the development cycle? Refine the tools, put up some walls and parameters around just what can be done and give the tools to the players that are willing to put in the effort to build a virtual world. A whole second tier of players can be nothing more than consumers of that entertainment. I just don’t think who created the entertainment is of importance from the WoW player’s standpoint as long as it’s there. That’s how Eve or a sandbox MMO achieves WoW numbers. Eve and WoW are not all that different and there’s nothing but desire and technological know-how getting in the way of connecting the two. (and a bit of trial and error but that’s another post for another time) Think of Eve as the producer and WoW as the consumer. I’m assuming alot but it’s also why I think Eve is not the answer to all our sandbox MMO dreams. Eventually, a game will come along and replace WoW and I’m betting it’s not another WoW clone but something much more.
If the developer creates a delivery quest to transport something to someone that gives a faction bonus at the end of the quest is it any better or worse than a player that decides he needs something taken to some city and that he’ll be grateful to the person who completes the task? Give the player the ability to list the items he needs transported and work in a formula to automagically grant faction based on something in the quest parameters and you essentially have the exact same quest. One created by a developer and the other by the player. One required the developer to build a set of tools once, the other requires the developer to create the tools and then craft the content over and over again.
Eolirin, yeah, I know it’s not easy. And the whole point is exactly to place it in a sandbox game where players can break away from it as often as they want, and still come back to it. It’s a race, sure, but not one of speed but rather intelligence and diligence.
An example would be UO. There are levers and even a statue that you can move like a lever. None of it seems to have any significant meaning now, and if these ever did it was long ago solved and not of any major significance. But what if there are clues in the game world, and what if they have a major significance? What if UO’s in-game books have hidden clues? What if the runes scattered on the lands mean something? What if the phases of the moons play a part in it all? What if certain odd landmarks hold clues as well? Wouldn’t all this be remarkable if someone figured it out and found something really cool?
It’s not game play for everyone, but neither is just about any other style. It can’t be the only thing in a game to play for, certainly. But once the story gets out, everyone will be interested in it (with few exceptions). It adds a depth to the lore and “worldlyness” of the game. It makes this game world special.
It’s “National Treasure” game play in a sandbox game world.
For it to be worthwhile, the rest of the game, the moment to moment game play, the daily rituals of playing, has to be really good. As in any game of this nature. If only 100 people are playing the game, and one of them solves the great puzzle, big deal. But if 500,000 are playing and someone solves a great quest/puzzle like this, after several years of game play and only because they have been around enough to recognize things, to know the history and lore, to figure out the unusual and have taken an interest in it and seek the meanings, than that’s something special.
This idea isn’t the main part of a game. It’s the frosting on the cake, not the cake itself. It’s meaningless without a great game to start with.
To make this work, you need a highly interactive game world, where players can touch things, move things, make things work, and use tools. It wouldn’t work well in WoW because the game style just doesn’t promote environmental interaction, but it would in UO the way UO originally was, maybe not quite so much these days since they’ve changed the way tools work.
Because the builders are outnumbered by the players by at least 100 to 1, and by the destroyers by at least 3 to 1. And that’s if you include the paid developers.
And because 90% of everything is crap. That may or may not include the paid developers =)
Now, if only someone would come up with a means of making it easy to develop browser based virtual worlds so anybody could make one… oh, hey, waitaminute…
Amaranthar, I’m not sure if you’re drawing the right conclusions there. ARGs are very interesting beasts, but you’ll find that for the most part, none of them are actually solvable without largish groups of players. This is because the puzzles inevitably require much more knowledge than a single person is likely to have. And that’s actually the core component that makes them compelling. They are, out of necessity, group challenges. They do *amazing* things for community building. And having a way to have that community hang together in the lulls, and have an outlet for dealing with burnout, would allow you to harness that power.
But I think it very much needs to be central for the most part – that the rest of the gameplay mechanics need to attract the sort of players that’ll enjoy the ARG-like elements – because otherwise the ARG players don’t stick around after they solve a puzzle, and you lose that wealth of communal identity. You end up with two communities of players; the ARGers who go nuts whenever something new is discovered, and everybody else, who mostly sit on the sidelines when something’s going on, and maybe occasionally participate but don’t really develop the same community bonds. You need to be able to integrate those two communities, at least to some degree, so that the greater whole is stronger than either part would be. So while you can include an ARG like puzzle in a very worldy game, something that the players can stumble upon, sort of a hidden treasure, it almost defeats the point if you don’t really make it central (I say almost, because it’s still very cool, especially for the player that discovers it, but you really could do so much more with that concept if you’re more ambitious about it).
And it doesn’t at all require a worldy game where you can shift things around. Actually, having too worldy a game makes doing this very difficult, because your clues end up being destroyed by the playerbase as they walk over them. For instance, if you’ve got a book that you need players to read, but those books can all be picked up and don’t respawn, then you run the risk of a player taking the book, never putting it back, and then never logging back on. You need to walk a fine line between two much and too little interactivity if you want the ARG-like gameplay to function.
Eolirin, yes, agreed on all counts.
I think a sandbox game would attract the kind of players, who, among them, would be the sort who would love this kind of stuff. The “Ultima Dragons” ring was a testament to that.
But your last paragraph I think I should debate. First of all, while mechanically you don’t need an interactive environment to more of a degree than required, the sorts of players who play your game will determine if enough of them actually have the interest. WoW could have this kind of stuff in it. They have a few doors that open with keys, they have chests that rogues can pick the locks on, they have books. But their player base isn’t used to searching like this. Their game play isn’t about this kind of thing.
Make a game where the world is full of things to search for, daily game play that includes finding small clues, using things on a hunch, etc. That game’s players would be much more inclined to wonder about things, and follow up on clues, talk with friends about strange things, etc.
Secondly, yes on items. You can’t have one of a kind clues being scarfed up and locked away by one player. Clues either have to be “locked down”, or I’d say placed on unmovable objects like walls, floors, obelisks, etc., or they have to be in abundance. Such as copies of maps on tribal orcs, commonly available books, books or scrolls in libraries of the kingdom, artifacts in public displays and guarded, etc.
Related to this, I will never forget something that’s happened several times to me while playing UO. Working on events and searching for possible answers, along with other players, several different times the exact words were said to me by different players. “They don’t do things that way”, a response to trying something new. I thought, “why not?”, but they were right. heh
It shouldn’t be that way though. And players should not be considering game mechanics, they should be considering possibilities.
You’re missing my point entirely. You’re still viewing content creation through the lens of developer-centric/scripted content creation. Something as simple as a fed-ex quest is easy to create and consume on a massive scale. It’s trade turned into a quest system and has thousands of producers and thousands of consumers all acting on different quests all at the same time. There should never be a need to create a bring this box of stuff to so and so in a far away land. Players are perfectly capable and willing to create this type of content. That and it’s defined enough where the vast majority of it will not be crap.
Beyond the low hanging fruit of fed-ex quests, it’s possible to design lots of other player-generated content mechanisms. In Eve, transporting a player from one place to another is common place and often required. Turn it into a real supported game mechanic instead of simply a social mechanic and you have tuns of player generated content that has meaning. Put heralds in the world that bring news to areas of the world. Formalize the blogging and political posturing done on web sites into something that can be trafficed as a real good in game. Simply implementing documents in any rudimentary form allows contracts to be handed out for outlaws and allows information to be shared. How about collecting client side databases of information like a personal knowledge database. Then provide ways for the players to annotate that data and sell it as a real object in game. Need to know about a certain dungeon, great, I take my knowledge stored in this client side DB and I put it into a document and sell it to you. Now you and your friends can go adventuring.
There’s a million different ways to add guided mechanisms to games to allow players to create content that doesn’t suck. Everyone just assumes the problem space is too hard to solve and gets lazy. Not all content from players has to suck and most of us here are smart enough to challenge that line of thinking and come up with ways to solve those issues. Unless of course all you want to get out of the MMO genre is Eve, WoW, Second Life and a pile of web based MMOs. If that’s the grand sum of the MMO potential then fine, otherwise I challenge you to think out of the box. Ask yourself why Shadowbane failed and how it could succeed. Ask yourself why Eve doesn’t have 20 million players. IF WoW can get 10 then certainly something, somewhere can top it or are we done?
@Derek: why do you think one should retain the D&D/DIKU like gameplay in a sandbox?
LEGO does well in the real world. Why? Flexibility and good quality all around. The competing platic brick toys feel cheap in comparison. If you want to do sandbox, you’ll have to focus on doing that well, if you go for D&D as the primary entertainment then I doub’t you’ll end up with a great sandbox-construct.
I don’t get where you get this. Or are sandbox games not supposed to be in a medieval/fantasy setting? If the sandbox is designed to be in a setting of fantasy swords and magic and dungeons and cities, I’m just not following your thought here.
@Ola: Not sure where you’re coming from. I would think my response to Baredil could apply just as easily to a sci-fi setting as it could to a swords and sorcery setting. Glad to answer if you don’t mind elaborating on what you read from my post.
Mostly because Eve is hard. The PVE/gamey aspects are lacking, for most people. And, like Shadowbane and early UO, it has open PVP, which most people seem to not like.
Wow has 10 million subscribers because it was made by Blizzard. Just about anybody who enjoyed Warcraft (1,2,3), Diablo (1,2), or Starcraft tried Wow. It’s a great PVE action RPG in a persistent world.
On one hand, I don’t see where Derek is presuming D&D/DIKU gameplay anywhere. He’s giving examples of things you might be able to do and using existing architecture to describe it, sure, but all he’s really saying is that player content creation can be guided.
This isn’t new: all content creation is highly guided right now. It’s more a question of balance (which is what I think Derek is arguing: balancing the amount of guidance versus freedom) or of figuring out some perpendicular dimension that hasn’t come up and may not exist (which is what I think Ola is suggesting).
D&D != medieval/fantasy.
D&D is a completely different ruleset, but just a ruleset. It doesn’t work well with a sandbox, because it’s designed around a GM telling a story, rather than a world that merely reacts to actions. It would be a feat of designer acrobatics to put both D&D and a sandbox together. And I think it would suck.
As I understand it, though, Vanguard went in that general direction. I don’t know enough about that game. I can’t find any reference to whether or not they allow you to build your own cities, which is what a couple friends and I had planned on doing if we had started playing.
@Derek EVE doesn’t have 20 million users because it’s an inherently niche game. It’s early game is so harsh that I’m sure it bounces a great deal of players off almost immediately (I know it did for me), and there’s not much that’s all that well built in terms of content or gameplay if you’re not really into corps and pvp, both of which present a high bar to entry.
Something can top WoW, and actually quite a number of things *have* topped WoW, but it has to be more accessible to a wider number of people than WoW is, and that means you’re not going to be able to put in what are essentially “hardcore” (and I hate using that term, but I’m not sure what else to replace it with here, because I’m not talking traditional per se, I’m talking barrier to entry) systems. EVE like systems, no matter how they’re implemented, will never be as accessible as a low impact game like Club Penguin or Habbo Hotel (which do have more users than WoW, even active users).
You’re chasing two different things. If you want to focus on interesting gameplay, especially interesting dependant social gameplay, you need to stop chasing numbers and only look to getting enough to support your gameplay systems and make a decent profit. If you want WoW like numbers, or to surpass WoW like numbers, you need to look toward an extremely accessible game, and those two things are almost entirely mutually exclusive. Requiring good graphics bounces people off due to system reqs, requiring grouping or forcing interaction between players bounces people off due to having to interact with strangers, requiring time commitment bounces people off because of scheduling issues, requiring a monthly fee bounces people off for obvious reasons.
If you look at WoW, and compare it to what came before, you can see that it actually manages to hit all but the last of those: low system reqs, no grouping required before you hit the level cap as you can solo the entire game without ever needing to enter an instance dungeon, the time commitment while there is vastly less than the games that preceded it, you level a lot faster and there aren’t very many time sinks. WoW pre-raid is *very* accessible. And you can take look at Guild Wars, which is even better than WoW in terms of hitting those points, the time commitment is even more minimal, the system reqs are similar, grouping isn’t required anywhere thanks to hero and henchmen npcs, and there’s no monthly fee on top of it. And Guild Wars has hit over 5 million people, which seems like it’s far less than WoW, until you take into account that the Chinese market never got into the game, (iirc it’s actually been pulled from the Chinese market). When you compare the non-Chinese player base numbers of WoW they’re actually fairly similar, and WoW had a massive IP to build on. GW’s one other flaw, the thing that really holds it back, is the lack of a strong community, primarily spurred on due to the heavy reliance on instancing. I suspect that if GW2 manages to inspire a greater community structure, and they are adding large non-instanced adventure zones so that’ll help, that it’ll do exceptionally well. It’s got a name to build on now too.
And here’s where I need to clarify something… Having community interaction be mandatory is going to inherently lead to a less accessible game, for better or worse, but not having one at all isn’t a good thing. It does need to be there in the background.
Michael Chui:
In a letter to D&D fans about Michael Goldfarb’s comments about D&D fans, Greg Leeds, president at Wizards of the Coast, wrote, “Wizards will continue to promote D&D as the great heroic fantasy game that it is …” (Emphasis added.)
Whether D+D was a sandbox game or not depended entirely on the DM.
But I don’t get the point. Because D+D often wasn’t “played in a sandbox”, does than mean all medieval fantasy games must be excluded from sandbox designs? I don’t think so.
Sometimes I wonder what other people mean by “sandbox”. There’s different things involved….but I think I’d have to think on it for a while to come up with these. Persistence, certainly. But what exactly does that require?
@Derek: I am coming from Norway…(tic) You seemed to focus on designer-guided creativity in your post, so I assumed that you meant that one could take status quo and add guided user-creations to out-perform WOW. I am not so sure, because I think wide adoption requires expectations to be met. LEGO doesn’t set any expectations beyond the quality of the bricks, so it doesn’t matter if most creations are crap. I also don’t think guided creations are good enough for creative types. If you want a true sandbox you’ll have to accept the possibility of havoc&mayhem and focus on establishing infrastructures that allows affected players to restore order.
Ola, heh, Derek’s been trying to get funding for his game that’s all that and more. I’ve followed it for years, talked allot on his message boards. It’s true sandbox and pretty deep in scope.
This has never been a discussion about setting, only about gameplay elements.
Diku and sandbox are almost completely incompatible (and I mean that almost, you can get some of it to work, if you stretch them both enough). D&D is something of a misnomer, but D&D is closer to diku than it is to EVE or UO. By the rules as written at least, and especially if we go back to 1st edition. 😛
Oh, also, as a side note. D&D != D20. D&D is a fantasy setting *only*. D20 is a generic ruleset that can be applied to any setting. Just like even though I could rip out the WoD ruleset and use it for a hard sci-fi game, WoD would still be modern horror.
And that’s why D&D should never specifically be brought up when discussing gameplay because it’s more than the gameplay elements. Diku-style play is probably a more accurate description in this particular context anyway.
@Ola: I agree with what you are saying. Especially the last part about setting up infrastructure for players to restore order to havoc and mayhem. I believe it’s absolutely essential to allow the havoc and mayhem but give the players the ability to police it back to whatever the social norm tends to be. That idea is so fundamental to me that I fail to see why other designers just don’t take it for granted. That said, I’m still looking for funding for my game built around that philosophy so maybe my failing to see something has something to do with why AoA hasn’t launched yet.
I keep telling myself that the current crop of MMOs isn’t all the genre is about and believing that there’s an investor out there willing to take the plunge with an off the beaten path studio to achieve something new. How many MMOs must Sony and NCsoft build to mediocre results before they look elsewhere??? At least that’s what I keep telling myself.
Derek, I’m thinking about what Eolirin just said about D+D and context and all, and remembering back to my days playing it, and how many people perceive it now. And there’s a correlation to why you’re having difficulties, I think.
I started playing AD+D (Advanced D+D) just after it came out. The game was supposed to be about a DMs own world. All the modules that originally were produced under Garry Gygax were only aids. They were not the sole content. Most good DMs had their own world developed, or at least parts of it far and wide enough to handle the players as they traveled through their world. Much of it was made up on the fly, the hallmark of a good DM, because players were allowed to go where they wanted, when they wanted, and it was supposed to be pretty “worldly”.
However, most DMs weren’t that good, and there were allot of the lazy entrants into DMing. Naturally, not everyone gets into things that much.
On top of that, it was very easy for a “cheap” DM to just give out wilder and wilder rewards to make his players happy with his campaign. The term “Monty Haul” came about from that. Do you see the correlation? Ding, ding, ding. It was all the same way back then, as it is now with MMO’s, and likely was with MUDs I would guess. The masses are demanding and it’s easier to just give them what they want.
I think this led to the common perception that D+D was like EQ, and then like WoW. But it was never supposed to be. And it never was really, not even in the most generous campaigns. D+D had D20, which boiled down to 1-100, or a percentage chance (and the rules specified that there was always a 5% chance for both success and failure, except in cases where the DM ruled something just wasn’t possible, leading to the joke about the thief stealing the pants off of someone without them knowing it). EQ, WoW, and others go way beyond that.
But basically, everyone expects to get and to give a Monty Haul campaign these days. The thing is, players are learning that that’s just no fun, in the long run. Just as many DMs in the old D+D days started out that way, and if they stuck with it, learned that it’s not the most rewarding long term game experience.
So, what I would expect to see in the MMORPG scene is this. New players will always want the WoW experience. Many will fall off of MMORPGs as they get tired of them, and won’t have the desire to stick with them. Many others will want to stick with gaming in MMORPGs, but will be looking for that better experience. A more mature and a little more serious sort of game. These are the gamers you are after, and they are growing in number, if I am right. Then there’s always the few who want everything to stay just the way it is, and most likely because they were the “elite” of the status quo.
If someone could get accurate numbers, I would bet that for every year’s “class” of new players, in every succeeding year there are a number of them who become unhappy because the game play isn’t as “worldly” and rich as they’d like. I would expect this percentage to increase the first couple of years and then start to decrease, but leaving that “class” after some years mostly wanting a better experience. With each new year, it would be the new classes that keep the Monty Haul campaigns going strong, combines with holdovers from previous years. But it wouldn’t take too many years before the majority of gamers are looking for that better experience.
It’s people inside the industry that are leading the mantra that it’s new “content”, and that meaning is specific as in “more of the same”, that these unhappy players want. Hey, they’re the experts, right? But some of us have questioned that from the beginning, and just as the example of the unhappy players growing, so is our voice. Only this voice is a little behind the other. But we’re getting there. I sense now, from message boards around, that the numbers who are seeing that it’s a better experience rather than more “content” that players really want, are growing fast. It’s like a campfire that sputters and sparks, then suddenly takes off. My guess is that it’s started to take off, and will very soon be burning brightly.
Prediction, Warhammer will do pretty well, stealing numbers from WoW. But it will be the nail in the coffin of static game play, as players see that even a new game isn’t any better than new “content”, when it’s “more of the same”.
@Aramanthar, I really don’t think that worldy is at all superior to gamey, except in that it’s more community focused and thus potentially stickier. But some people don’t like having to deal with community features, or the inherent loss of control that ends up happening when you go worldy, so it’s also got an inherently higher barrier to entry..
And this is the core element of what keeps getting missed here. Worldy games are not a “better” experience at all. They’re a different experience. You’re aiming after totally different things. Some people really just want that guided experience, and having a sandbox to play in would do absolutely *nothing* for them.
We can have all of these philosophical discussions that we want about which style of play is better, but the truth is there’s not very much overlap in terms of what the player’s looking for in playing the different type of games. IIRC, at some point the UO live team basically said that while they saw a dip in numbers at the release of other major MMOGs, like EQ, those numbers typically came back after a few months. SWG was the only one that they saw any sort of long term loss over. It’s because the gameplay that the UO player was looking for was not the same as the gameplay being offered by other games. Similarly, someone who enjoys WoW’s pve game a great deal is not going to suddenly go play a worldy game. It’s not what they’re looking for.
These various styles of gameplay are not mutually exclusive, nor are they inherently compatible. You’ll get some cross over, because people can like more than one thing, but you’re not going to suddenly steal all the gamey players because they’ve gotten bored with their current gamey mmog. For them it really is all about the content. Well, that and design flaws, like balance issues. But they’re not going to shift gameplay paradigms.
@Derek,
What you’re missing is that thus far there have been many spectacular failures of the “players can police themselves” experiment, and absolutely zero successes. Even EVE doesn’t demonstrate players policing themselves, it instead demonstrates that if you make the game focused enough on gang warfare, you’ll end up with nothing but gangs. There aren’t any demonstrations that players will step up to the plate, that as Raph bemoaned being unable to pull off, that there’s a way for the good guys to win. Now this doesn’t mean that it can’t be done… it merely means that no one’s yet demonstrated that it can. And since those systems have historically lead to a relatively degenerate gameplay situaton… I can understand the hesitation to throw money at the problem.
I’m also not sure what your background is like… but, if you don’t have a proven track record of making great games, things get even harder, regardless of how awesome your concepts may be.
@Derek: Ah, good to hear that you are actively pursuing that ideal. I didn’t remember you as a “simulationist” from mud-dev, but that’s a long time ago, already, so maybe my memory is hazy… 😛 I don’t think I’ve heard of AoA, do you have a link?
@Eolirin, I’m acutely aware of that. Back when I first started looking for funding, I thought having a decade of MUD experience, a business degree and multiple startup company experiences was enough. I’m no longer looking for total funding. I’m now looking for someone that gets the concept that can help me find the funding. It’s been so long that it was nearly impossible to keep together the original team beside the founders so when I find someone that is willing to help champion the cause with me, I’ll assemble the team and finish the funding search. At this point I’ve exhausted every last personal resource I have and I’m looking to get in touch with people that can help us get where we need to be. We’ve tried all sort of demos to get that to happen and either we’re looking in the wrong place for an investor or the investors aren’t seeing what we’re trying to get across. So in short, I’m very aware of the challenge ahead of me and I won’t stop trying until I succeed.
The level of soul searching I’ve done in the past 7 years is crazy. But, here I am putting together our fifth tech demo and getting back into the funding search after about a four month break from the last round of craziness.
@Ola: I’m not going to use Raph’s blog to advertise but there’s a link on my blog to it on the right hand side. You can get to my blog through my name link on this blog. I’ll post the link here if Raph is ok with it but thought I’d give him the courtesy of approving it before I did. I’m happy to discuss anything there and the forums are pretty well filled with comments from fans that have hung around with us for these past 7 years. … waiting for the day.
Eolirin, of course a worldly game is a better experience than gamey. It offers so many more possibilites and things to do, the least of which is a hugely wider range of freedom. Sure, some players would like the gamey experience better, but I can’t believe that they aren’t a small percentage. I can’t prove that with MMO’s but I can make a strong argument with Oblivion, which sold more copies in the US than WoW did in their respective first years if I’m not mistaken. So in the single player games where there’s actual competition, the worldly game was the clear choice…by a long shot.
There has not been a “worldly” MMORPG yet that didn’t have major problems.
But lets first recognize that the term “worldly” has to be taken in perspective. No game has been, or ever will be, completely worldly. It’s not possible. Players log off, how worldly is that? From there up, it’s really all on a scale.
UO was the most worldly that I know of. I don’t know about the SIMs, and most of the others I never played.
But UO had rampant PKing because there just wasn’t any means for players to effectively police it. There was no real penalty for PKing, it payed off much better then not, and all the advantages belonged to the PKers.
Every game I know of that went for worldly and included free-for-all PvP had the same problem. There was no effective means to police it, etc., etc.
They all suffered hugely because of it.
As a result, there has been no worldly MMORPG that can be used to compare.
You can’t police your game, as a player, if you can’t affect the PKers. Killing them means nothing in itself.
There’s several issues here…
-first of all, players need a foundation to coordinate from. That foundation needs more oomph than simple guild structures as we know them.
-secondly, there has to be a punishment that the players can dish out. One that the PKers cannot get around. It has to be effective.
-thirdly, the players have to have a means to catch up with the PKers, somehow. Logging off for the night can’t be an escape clause. Coordinating PK efforts can’t be foolproof.
-and finally, the good players need to be able to meet out a punishment that is a true deterrent.
That’s a mechanical failure. Look at ATiTD’s self-policing mechanisms instead.
A “police force” is a civic institution meant to keep the peace. You can’t get that without actual governments. EVE seems, to me, to come closest via sovereignty, but it falls short because while they have governors, they don’t have governments. They don’t have a civilization. There is no purpose beyond eternal warfare: why would anyone keep the peace and make it safe for people to … do … what? Research plans to build warships? Make loads of money off… warship components?
ATiTD would be a good example if it ever grew a little. I mean, just mentioning it invites Derek to tell me how few subscribers it has compared to WoW. I keep meaning to play that game, but I have no direct experience with it.
I’m not going to jump on you over subscription numbers. I’ve never played ATiTD because I’m not keen on its episodic game sessions and its total lack of an adventuring game. Mind you, I have never played it so my assumptions could be wrong and derived from the media coverage of the game. Closest I’ve come to the game is a drunken night at GDC discussing it with the company’s owner a year after they launched. I was in some hotel after partythat was/is a popular hotspot in San Jose during GDC. I forget the name of the place but I believe it began with an F if I remember correctly. I don’t know because I missed the 9am session I was going to attend the next day due to me staying up until 3am or so. Ah good times.
@Michael Chui, ATiTD works primarily because the population is small though. It’s a logistics issue, since the difficulty scales out of proportion with the increase in playerbase. And solutions for the small scale break when you get to the large scale. UO’s reputation system probably *would* have worked, if the player base was an order of magnitude smaller. There are issues with community fragmentation once you start exceeding a certain number of players, and community is the only effective way of maintaining any sense of order in games like this. The more people that exist outside the community structure, that don’t buy into the communities mores, the harder it is to keep the community from degenerating into what we saw in UO, no matter how good your system is. Your “good” players end up living in a house made of sugar, fighting a constant war against ants.
@Amaranthar,
Increased freedom != better. Increased freedom can in fact be vastly WORSE. Doesn’t have to be, but it can. Beyond the fact that not everyone is looking for something that makes them create their own gameplay experience (and I think you’re wrong, I think that those wanting simple consumable entertainment vastly outnumber those wanting to become highly invested in a community or tinker around in a sandbox), there have been enough scientific studies done that show that increasing freedom and choice actually makes people less happy, and less capable of making decisions. Just because you happen to enjoy the increased freedom doesn’t mean that any other given person particularly goes for it. For instance, I don’t like sandbox games as much as I like directed narrative games in the single-player space. In multiplayer space my preferences are more complicated, but I like being able to go back to Guild Wars and do stuff by myself when the fatigue of dealing with people sets in. And part of this is where I am as I age. I’m becoming increasingly less interested in immersion, freedom, and exploration in my gaming. I’ve got the real world for all those things, and boy is it more interesting than any game could be. This is not a condemnation of doing those things online, UO was in large part responsible for a lot of my development as a person, but I’ve grown past my desire to do that. Mind, I’m incapable of speaking for anyone other than myself here, but I bring this up to highlight that there are a lot of different people, and a lot of different types of players, all looking for a lot of different types of things. Assuming that worldy is the end result for all or even most of them is very narrow minded. I actually went the other way ’round in a lot of respects.
But in terms of solving the pvp problem, think about what you’re saying for a moment. Your proposed means to deal with the problem are based on two unproven assumptions: 1. That such a deterrent actually exists that doesn’t also wreck the pvp system’s intent and scales with a large playerbase. 2. Players will actually bother to use these tools rather than going to a world where they don’t have to worry about “fighting the good fight”.
I do not at all doubt that you can solve these, for certain player base sizes. I am not, however, at all sure that any solution can scale past a certain point. And that’s the crux of the problem. Your solution has to work with a player base in the millions as well as it does with one in the hundreds of thousands, and again, the problem generated by the number of psychopaths that you statistically pick up at those numbers is non-linear. The more freedom they have to impact other players, the more damage they cause. Worldy games give them more freedom, thus they’re an even bigger problem.
Or, you can accept that you’ll have lower player base numbers, and build to that, keeping only the most dedicated core and not even bothering trying to make it have mass appeal. EVE’s had some success doing that, certainly. Flawed as it is.
Oh also, I don’t want to seem like my statements are intended to slag off on what you’re trying to do Derek. And I am very interested to see your take on this stuff when it gets to a playable state.
The design issues are just *hard*. And the solutions may or may not scale. If you don’t go chasing WoW like numbers, the scaling shouldn’t be an issue though, and you can make a substantial profit with vastly less than that anyway.
@Eolirin,
How do you think we do it in the real world? It’s not as complicated as you’re making it out to be.
The hard design issue is trying to shoehorn an inherently chaotic framework into communal order. How does one design a paradox? Why should people police their community? This is not a rhetorical question. You guys have been assuming that people want to. I don’t think they do. Community policing happens in forums. It happens on YouTube. It happens on Slashdot. It doesn’t happen inside MMOs.
[Sidebar] Also, I see plenty of degenerate behavior in small-scale games. Of course, they only occur inside the game, but MMORPGs specialize in making the game eternal and immersive. There are a lot of reasons that ATiTD has minimal griefing, and the small population is a very tiny factor. [/Sidebar]
The game designs spend all their effort in indulging an adolescent power fantasy, and you expect maturity to come out? No, you get what a cursory glance could have told you: adolescent power mongers caught up in their own grandeur.
You know. Heroes. You reap what you sow.
“How do you think we do it in the real world? It’s not as complicated as you’re making it out to be.”
In some places ok but one does not have to look far to see humans killing themselves. A game following real world design and rules does not sound very appealing.
A game designed explicitly around people killing themselves is okay, though?
The primary issue I see with saying the community will police itself is the issue of preferences and enjoyability. PKers enjoy PKing, non-PKers do not. If the solution is for the non-PKers to PK the PKers, you’re asking people to face one of two choices:
1) continue being PKed
2) engage in PKing against the PKers.
The PKers enjoy PKing, thus either solution offers a benefit to them in enjoyability. Non-PKers have to make a concession in either case. Unfortunately, the only resolution I can really see to this issue is the maintaining of multiple rulesets (open PvP and consensual PvP) for people of different interests. Alternatively, some mechanic that creates a similar ‘opportunity cost’ system for PKers needs to be set up. Quite likely, the PKers will scream bloody murder at being held to account for their actions, while continuing to insist that the non-PKers are ‘carebears’ who don’t want any kind of challenge (irony, FTW).
You don’t need all the players to engage in PvP against the PKers. Just enough.
Look, the majority of PKers did it because it was an easy way to winning. It was allowed, and without any effective penalty, so ‘why not’ was their thinking. But if you give PKing a real penalty to pay, something harsh, most of those who did PK wouldn’t have. This was witnessed every time UO came out with a new justice system. PKers went into hiding until they could see how it went. And when it was found that there were still ways to get away with it, and come out way ahead, they returned. Also witnessed was all the “blues” who came out to extract some vengeance. But they always rode into more trouble than they knew, as the PKers were quick to find the loopholes.
So there’s a 3rd choice
3) Let your community handle it
That has always been the problem. Designers always tried to protect the PVP system, when what was needed was to give players the means to stop PKing. They were like “we want to stop PKing but we don’t want to hurt the PKers.” SkaROO the PKers! They kill your game, and you don’t want to hurt them? heh
But it still makes for a better game to allow the freedom and choice. It gives the “good” players some risk, it allows roleplayers to play “evil” at the acceptance of the penalties, and it give the good guys the means to protect their overall order of things.
As far as players wanting to participate…who says they have to? Enough will because they want to, many others will play around the fringes of that, and a few will play WoW. No problem. 🙂
Okay.
Switch off PKing, leave PvP in. Done. None of this ridiculous “community policing” complicating the design.
Prefab.
“A game designed explicitly around people killing themselves is okay, though?”
I am not aware of many games with perma death and those that have it allow for new characters. I guess people are driven to quit playing as the result of others. Any other losses ultimately just come down to a loss of time. Defeating other players in games is a totally different matter and it almost always short term as they can come back for another round\game\season\etc.
Entering a game is a choice every player makes. Goverments work in cases where there is no choice. Goverment models that do work would be to heavy\expensive\over engineered\etc. for games.
@Michael Chui, in the real world we have real and oft times permanent, or at the very least, inescapable consequences. It’s not a comparable situation. The solutions in one won’t work in the other. Even stuff like permadeath doesn’t count. Things that happen to your character aren’t remotely as strong of a deterrent as things that happen to *you*, no matter how severe they are. In order for us to design a feature that works as well as our consequences in the real world, we’d have to go around and kidnap players that break in game laws and keep their real person in holding with the other “criminals”, or steal their money (read: arrest, fine). Because as long as it’s on the virtual side of the screen, it’s not going to matter at all to the griefer what you do to their characters or their items. They have no real attachment to those things.
That aside, assuming a MMOG is in any way different than a forum is naive at best. The only real difference is the scale and the fact that there are increased avenues to grief. For instance, the WoW forums are about as degenerate as UO was pre-rep patch and this blog isn’t, because the scale is an order of magnitude or three higher there than here. If there were several hundred thousand people using these comment threads, we’d have just as many problems. The truth is, when someone is committed to something, when they belong to something, they do want to protect it, and they do want to maintain a sense of order. And it doesn’t matter if that something is a player run town in UO, a guild in WoW, the entirety of ATiTD – and I’m absolutely certain that its small community is most definitely what keeps that one mostly grief free, but if you’d like to point out how it could mechanically withstand large scale attempts to break it, please outline your thoughts – or forums, blogs and social networks. There is no substantial difference between a forum troll and a PK, and the response is damn near identical when dealing with similar scales and similarly strong communities regardless of whether it’s a forum or a game; the community rallies against the offender. (As such, YouTube is about as far from policed as you can get – trolls damn near control the entire site – and that just further demonstrates my point, as I’ll explain below)
It’s all about the community. Degenerate games with small scales don’t tend to have communities, or if they do, they’re in the vast minority of the playerbase, regardless of the total size. It’s all about community structures. And you brought up YouTube. Consider that they’ve got the filter for comments set to display all posts that are -5 or better, in terms of ratings, as the default setting, and this is called “average”. Your comment is considered “good” if you have a rating of 0. That’s how heavily skewed the system is to down rankings; you’re flying high if you haven’t managed to offend anyone enough for them to have ranked you at all. YouTube is in fact the single most degenerate social setting I’ve run across. And guess what? It doesn’t have any community structure to speak of, and it’s got a ridiculously large number of users.
A sense of community is an inoculation against grief. But it only works if the griefers are few in number compared to the size of the community. And communities fracture after reaching a certain size, at which point they cease to be as effective. The griefers on the other hand, remain just as effective as ever, if not more so. I would postulate that part of the reason why the impact of problems players increases exponentially with the playerbase is because the effectiveness of community structures to counter them is closer to logarithmic as the playerbase increases.
@Amaranthar,
No, I meant, if you’re going to let players attack each other, you need a reason for even allowing it. Allowing player vs player combat of any sort has to be done with a motivation in mind, just like with all your other features should be. You need to answer the question, “Why is there PVP?”
One of the reasons we had those open pvp systems historically is because artifical limitations hurt your ability to deal with problem players, and, in mud days, lead to more griefing exploits than the pvp systems themselves did. The problem is that as a solution to griefing it doesn’t scale with the player base. Once you’re past a certain point, the system becomes much worse of a cure than the disease it’s trying to fight.
The other big reason for having open pvp in is so that there’s an active challenge to the “good” players by the “bad” players, which has different considerations, but is even harder to deal with because if the good players don’t buy into that concept, they’re not going to bother with your game at all. If we look at what happened with UO though – and UO is probably the best example you’ll ever get of what happens when you’ve got a broad player base in terms of different players types; it was the only game in town so all the different types got mixed together – the number of people that would just as soon not have to deal with PKs compared to the number of people that enjoyed being antis is heavily biased toward the former. Also, even after the PK problem was significantly curtailed – and the extended timers on stat loss for reds *did* significantly curtail pking, at least on my shard, to the point that it barely happened anymore – the mere *chance* that they could have their playtime disrupted was sufficient to turn them away, regardless of whether or not it happened often. There was still a player bleed off up until Trammel, and then a huge number surge once that hit. An incidence of grief only has to happen once or twice for it to bounce someone off and any reactive systems are going to result in that happening to a non-insignificant portion of the players. But even beyond that, there are better, less abusable solutions if that’s what you want, like factions.
A third motivation is territory control, but there are better ways to deal with that than open pvp too. Factions combined with a system specifically designed to allow players to claim land gives you those benefits without the possibility of disruption to players not involved in those systems.
Any of these alternate solutions are unnecessary, though, if you’re making the game specifically for players looking for that. I submit that there are vastly less of them than those looking for easy entertainment though. And publishers have this terrible tendency of going where the big money is, even if there’s enough of a market to be profitable.
Sigh, bloody wit of the staircase; for those of you who’re likely to see the above as tl;dr, I think I can sum thusly:
@Michael Chui: Communities can form anywhere people can communicate, of which MMOGs definitely count, and they tend to police themselves and more importantly, not grief themselves. Size is a problem because communities only function up to a certain size before they fragment, and different communities can grief each other and only effectively police themselves rather than the wider game.
@Amarathar, You need a reason to have a game system, and that includes open world PVP. If you end up sacrificing that reason in your solution to the PK problem, you may as well not include the PVP system to begin with. If giving players the tools they need to stop PKing also invalidates the reason you included open PVP, don’t bother including open PVP. “Realism” is not a valid reason to include a feature btw; immersion can be under the right circumstances though.
More nuance can be found above of course. But it’s probably better than the point gets across clearly. I talk to much. ><
They could be, but I don’t think they have to be. Basically, they should be a combination of expanded guild features and tools similar to what you see in games like Civilization (which I’ve told Derek his tend to remind me of, but like all game developers he hasn’t let the full scope out of the bag yet). Government features should be mostly tools, with a very few hard rules to make them work for the masses. What you want is a system where player’s daily activities are plugged into invisibly, but are at hand when desired or needed.
Considering that, governments need to allow for a simple and adjustable tax system, perhaps through trade systems (this could be like WoW’s auction house where you already pay something for the service, or through a “secure trade system” of any type). I’ve put forward the idea, taken from Derek’s resource ideas, that if you have a city/guild/player ability to build resource centers such as mines and lumber camps, then you could make these more productive than normal player harvesting, and then tax a percentage of that production to be placed into the cities’ coffers (similar to tactical games) for city use. So with this you have city assets above player assets, so much iron, copper, meat, grain, etc.
Also, governments should have the ability to build structures. Defensive walls and towers, gates, mills and production centers where again, players can be more productive than otherwise, and again taxed a percentage of that extra. Derek’s got some cool ideas on other city building “assets” too, like hirable NPCs who are attracted by inns and taverns inside of cities, player owned structures. So beyond tools, you have players affecting their cities by their own actions. This is very cool stuff, in my mind. It’s a high level of strategy gaming mixed in with interesting game planning on a single player level.
There’s often the negatory admonition by some people that not everyone likes that. So? Shouldn’t a wide ranging and interesting MMORPG offer allot of various game play to capture as many players as possible? If you think about this government system, you can see that any player can choose not to participate. Or he/she can choose to make use of the advantages, but stop there. Or their small guild can start building city types of things themselves. It’s loose and not forced on any player. Yet it adds an entire new level to the game. You could put all this on top of WoW and have an even better game, except they don’t have the room for players to start building cities without losing all their wilderness. It would require a huge game world. But then, there’s some people who think that’s bad for game play too (and don’t think about what’s really causing the problem…lack of social reasons to gather…like this!).
@Uns
Yes, that’s true if the only meaning your game has is a way to waste time. If your game is worth more than that, then other losses begin to stack up.
I’m still not sure how this makes it okay that mutual murder is a choice, rather than something forced on you. You enter a game for the sake of killing people. Apparently, you feel this has no consequences, so it’s okay. Perhaps you’re not discussing the same thing, but the punishment offered in games is not different from the punishment largely offered in real life: penalties of time, resource, and reputation.
And as I’m about to say,
@Eolirin,
I don’t believe in capital punishment, either. Death is irrelevant.
Murder is not a “solution”. It’s a last resort, when every other option has been taken off the table. Until every other option has been taken off the table, games mirror real life just fine.
This makes me wonder if I was thoroughly unclear in my post. My point was that MMOGs are not different from forums, except in the fact that community naturally forms in the latter, but not the former.
Here’s a thought experiment: if MySpace had been set up a little less competently, such that griefing could occur a little more pervasively than it does, would they police themselves? I’m going to say no. Because MySpace is a lot like MMORPGs: it’s about oneself, and one’s friends, and everyone else can go to hell.
When I talked about small-scale games, I was thinking of Diplomacy, Paranoia, Munchkin, and other games that revolve around alliances in the face of knowing you’re going to get backstabbed later on and figuring out how to backstab first and best, or just surviving it. These are games built around what, inside the magic circle, can be described as guaranteed murder. These games are designed to encourage griefing between the parties, because that’s the point of the game!
The difference between these games and MMORPGs is that MMORPGs don’t end, so there is no victory for which you can backstab your allies. As a result, you have the people playing this game, freely backstabbing when they have nothing better to do, and then you have the people farming exp and spending the rest of the time chatting. Golf, indeed: a game with a great “community”.
You are correct that size matters. But you’re not correct that it’s impossible after Dunbar’s number gets passed. Instead of dismissing my point that we’re doing just fine in real life, think about how they’re doing it in real life. How often is your life threatened by the government? If you decide to punch a random stranger on the street, what punishment can you expect? By who? And to make this perfectly clear, I additionally ask: do you expect Congress to sit judgment on your actions? The UN? Why not?
I mean, what do you think the government is? It’s community policing at its most mature. That’s the whole point of government: when a society becomes too large to coordinate itself through a direct democracy, those who are most adept at command, control, and connection end up in leadership positions and begin making decisions on behalf of their society. Police, constables, sheriffs, and the like are appointed on behalf of the people, whether directly by the population or not.
And people do create governments spontaneously. That’s what guild leaders are: extremely tiny governments. That’s why guilds are internally policed. And that’s why MMORPGs aren’t. There is no call to create a gamewide community that works together to achieve any objective. None whatsoever. *dramatic pause* Except in ATiTD.
@Michael Chui,
Um. No they don’t. Imprisonment is far short of capital punishment, and the basis of most legal systems, and utterly impossible in a MMOG setting. You can’t even fine or take things away from people, because those things don’t have any sort of importance in the lives of the people most likely to cause problems. You can’t even deny them the ability to continue causing havoc, because there’s no effective way to ban them from the game.
Also, if you think communities don’t form in MMOGs, you haven’t been playing any. >< UO had some of the strongest communities I’ve ever seen, stronger than most forums I’ve been to. EVE too, has some incredibly strong social settings, and even WoW has similar strength within guilds. Communities form naturally in any area where people can communicate with each other. On the other hand, there are many forums or other online networks with far less community than you find in MMOGs, like the WoW forums, or YouTube. Size is almost always a factor.
And yeah, all that stuff about government is very accurate, but what you’re failing to understand is that the legal system only works because there are enforcible consequences. Rights that you cannot defend do not exist, after all. Even ATiTD won’t work if there aren’t enough people trying to work within the rules. Given enough griefers, it would become impossible to maintain a system of rule, simply because you cannot effectively remove them from the game world. This is where the sharp divide is in real life. You can prevent a criminal from acting in the real world, because they can’t create a new account and continue on, and they can’t log off, or make a new character. Enough players that want to break ATiTD would cause it to break. Give me 5%-10% of the total playerbase in players that are acting solely with the intent to ruining the game and that use any means necessary to do it, and I’m willing to bet you I could bring the entire game to it’s knees within a few weeks. The larger the population is, the smaller the number you need is. ATiTD’s strong central goal does help prevent community fracturing, so you may be right that it’d survive longer (I could probably destabilize another game with a smaller percentage as I scaled) but it still wouldn’t survive if you scale too high.
Eolirin, if a PKers character is crippled with skill and stat loss as a penalty for being caught, he’s not going to be out there raising havoc for a while. Especially if even the weakest of his targets has some medium skill in fighting.
Prison can work too, by locking up the character with those particular skills (thieves) for a while.
In both cases, you are taking the “criminal” “off the streets”, so to speak.
This does two things in a direct manner.
1) It slows the problem down to a crawl
2) It reduces the numbers, as most players aren’t going to want to risk the downtime for any of their characters.
Now, you mentioned earlier that you need a reason for the PvP, or else it doesn’t make sense to allow it in the first place. This is true. The reason of “realism” is enough in it’s own right. But not just for realism’s sake. What this does is allow for those few who want to play these styles to do so, at the risk of being caught and suffering the punishments. There will always be those few who will no matter what, but mainly there will always be those players who really enjoy the challenge. The bigger the challenge, the better.
But still, why allow it? Because it adds a small degree of risk to the normal game play. This does add excitement as well as story, and the only problem left is when a player feels “robbed”. But they can have their justice, in the end. So they won’t feel so bad about it in the long run.
Why add risk at all? Because in a worldly game, sure fire wins just don’t fit well. And the freedom does.
I have been imprisoned in an MMOG setting, and I got to the point where I was sick of it and dropped the character. Of course, I was never strongly invested in that game; it was nice-to-have between playing a real text MUD, but stock Diku bores me.
That’s a ridiculous statement, and speaks to the lack of quality in the MMO. You’re making further and further fetched leaps to support your point and it’s simply not true. Not every griefer is Ledger’s Joker: they do want something, and it’s usually a less stupid and moronic game. Maybe you should give them that.
Ironically, many griefers actually stay in the games they grief because of community ties. Well, social ties anyways.
No, but you can continue banning them if they show up and cause havoc a second time. Welcome to the information age. You don’t have to do it perfectly; you just need to remain vigilant. At a certain point, you may even be able to call upon the real world government for help. You have some of their credit cards, don’t you? If you have international spies griefing your game, then I’m not sure you’re worrying about the right thing.
Communities. Plural. Not community, singular. Most forums have one community with several sub-communities; it is generally understood that everyone is in the same tribe, even if they have lots of different interests. Most MMOGs have a balkanized set of communities, including the griefer communities, which police themselves just fine. Griefers can and will turn upon themselves if they don’t like what a member is doing. What do you think SomethingAwful, /b/, and 4chan are? A lot of these are spinoffs because of a community disagreement.
Government only works by consent of the people. D’uh? Why do you think I’ve been hammering away at saying that you need something more than “kill everyone!” as the premise of your world?
So, to summarize, since I don’t seem to be getting my point across:
1) Real-world governmental structure provides a guide by which communities of large size can be managed. Namely, a hierarchical system of division reducing the pie to smaller, manageable chunks.
2) Real-world crime is dealt with using various means of punishment and, occasionally, rehabilitation. Similar effects can be achieved in a virtual world, dependent on the specifics of that world.
3) Community, as Eolirin says, always happens when there is significant, non-anonymous, prolonged, and purposeless communication. Arguably, this is what community is, which makes it a tautology.
4) Communities do police themselves. In fact, that’s an inherent part of a community: providing social inertia against change and especially undesirable change. Police typically develop when community members threaten the community from the inside; a militia typically develops when non-members threaten the community from the outside.
5) Communities, like real-world governments, are frequently hierarchical: whether this structure is feudal, representative democratic, militaristic, or simply bureaucratic depends on the culture of the community itself. However, there is very little question that the community itself is cohesive and mutually identifying: most of us call each other Americans no matter which part of the country we type from.
6) The community of a MMORPG, on the other hand, does not strongly self-identify. They recognize each other as “other people who play the game”, which is an echo of a community, but they never do this inside the game: it only happens at conferences and meetups.
7) Instead, people in MMORPGs form independent communities, as evidenced spectacularly by guilds that transcend the particular game they were playing and move, en masse, from game to game.
8) Thus, you have communities interested in making sure that their own space remains pristine via police, but those police never actually deal with griefers who don’t directly effect their community. Those same communities also have militiae that do their best to repel griefers.
9) When the efforts of the militiae are unsuccessful, the players turn to the forums for help from the world administrators. And unless those griefers have been wide-ranging enough to effect a diverse range of people, they are ignored or derided.
10) Providing a gamewide purpose creates a general stake in every player’s activities such that the majority of the population is tied together into a single community. Thus, there is no need for a militia, because there are no outsiders: griefers are naturally internal, and policed as normal.
Nota bene: #10 is not a necessary measure in real-world governments because of the aforementioned differences between the real world and virtual worlds, namely the ability to leave on a whim and the possibility of real death. The latter is an effective cement for real world communities, but obviously not sufficient for a virtual community.
On a side note, I gotta hand it to you. I’ve been disillusioned for years, but I’ve never reached the point of cynicism you work at, Eolirin.
Aramanthar: you’re not factoring multiple characters and multiple accounts.
In game imprisonment doesn’t work so great when you can switch to another character for the duration. Crippling stat loss works great though, as long as it takes a very long while to rebuild your character, and that’s what ended up working with the reputation system in UO, with 40 hour timers (which had to be spent in game) for each murder count and a system that permanently turned you red after a point. But it still wasn’t enough to prevent the playerbase from continuing to bleed off, and it wasn’t till they gave us a PVP switch via Trammel that things stabilized and that trend reversed a bit.
As to your “they won’t feel bad in the long run”, no they won’t but they also won’t be playing your game. You’re underestimating the problem. They only don’t feel bad about it in the long run if they already buy in to the concept, and less people buy in than don’t.
Because we’re being charged to play these games, risk is almost anathema when it can’t be controlled. If I’ve got a safe experience that I can choose to make more risky that’s, generally, fine, but it doesn’t end so well if I’ve got a situation that’s always risky no matter what I do. Even if it’s a little bit. Many people bounce off of such situations; it doesn’t suit what they want in a game.
@Michael,
You could’ve just rolled another character you know. You’re obviously not thinking like a griefer. 😛
But you’re not taking into account the existing psychopathic players that exist in any game of significant size, the ones that are there because they get a rise out of annoying other people and for *no* other reason. They do exist, they’re not trying to make a statement, and they’re not doing it just cause they’re bored and want a better game. Having other reasons to grief, like boredom, does vastly increase the problem, but removing them doesn’t make it go away.
As to your list:
You never played a RP character on a UO shard. It was entirely in game, as many of us couldn’t contact each other out of game, and our out of game systems for interaction were almost non-existent, but we did self identify. So it does happen in game under the right circumstances, in a way that’s non-transferable. SWG had similar things happen. You’re right that it tends to be smaller than the entire set of players, but that’s mostly a scale issue. Some text based VWs definitely had communities that were singular and self-identified, and they had them because they were small enough that everyone could know each other. It’s the scale issue that results in fragmentation in MMOGs. And it’s similarly why forums tend to develop communities much more easily than mmogs, very few forums have truly massive scales, but even then, it’s usually just “other people who use the forum” when you’re at large scales. And then sub-groups pop up based on what people typically post about, just like you start to see with guilds. The “echo” of a community you’re talking about is entirely a scale issue.
Number 10 also isn’t quite perfect either, because it assumes everyone actually buys into that purpose. It also will have a hard time scaling to larger population sizes; ATiTD’s gameplay doesn’t scale in general; if the player base became too large, the challenges would become mostly meaningless. More generic “greater purposes” are almost impossible to pull off without fragmentation, because without direct goals you can end up with splits in the community. Even beyond that, simple scale destroys the ability for that to work too, because only if the purpose is threatened, and not the players, will it work, and losing 5-10% or so of the player base to the predations of other players isn’t likely going to be enough to threaten that at large sizes. You still end up with people falling back to only defending the areas that they personally work in and the people they personally work with, and less organized groups of players in less organized areas are still open game. ATiTD’s common purpose makes people interact with each other, and that’s what’s forming the strong community structure. But this is not enough if your population size is large enough. Once you reach self-sufficiency in sub-communities, the fact that they share a purpose with their neighbors no longer makes them interact outside of their sub group. It’s damn near impossible to make it so that the sub-groups all need each other on a direct enough level that they constantly interact, and that’s what you’d need to make a singular community in a large scale system.
So you need a governmental system that exists as a separate entity from your general community, or you can’t effectively end up with this working as it scales. Such a government can’t spring up from nothing in a VW; the tools need to be established by the devs well before hand, and then the police force needs to show a remarkable lack of corruption, be of a sufficiently large size, and endowed with special abilities to make up for the fact that the VW can’t function as the real world can. You need to close as many loopholes as possible, and there are many loopholes.
… Basically, you need GMs that smack people for in game behavior that doesn’t necessarily break the TOS, and do it short of banning accounts. Of course, even with that, I’m not sure it’s worth the trouble, since this only comes into play if 1. you have a very large playerbase, and 2. you actually use open PVP instead of a reduced in scope but acceptable alternative. And I’m still not sure that 1 and 2 aren’t mutually exclusive. If they aren’t though, that class of super-user police would potentially work, provided you had the right contingencies in place for them going rogue on you.
Also, I prefer realist over cynic 😛
But really, what it’s down to is that I’m capable of thinking like an exploiter, though I never actually exploit in games unless it’s to file a bug report, and that highlights just how fragile most of these systems are.
I did. That was my fourth character or so, who got jailed. I wasn’t trying to grief–heck, I didn’t even pay attention to the fact that other people existed in the same game. I’m simply pointing out that imprisonment is not only possible, but done. In a stock Diku, no less.
I don’t think like a griefer. As a designer, I prefer to build for 100% of my userbase, rather than the vocal 5%.
Again, you should take a look at the real world, which has plenty of psychopaths. Hey, that’s where they come from! And somehow, they rarely actually make a problem. I wonder why.
Could it be that maybe that, unlike most MMORPGs, the real world is not built as a psychopath’s playground?
I will concede that it’s entirely possible for a singular community to happen inside a game, and especially possible in certain circumstances, such as a low population.
No, it relies on the vast majority of the population buying in. This isn’t hard, if you design things well. You merely need to make it so that griefers won’t form their own community.
Not having played ATiTD, I can’t answer this directly. However, this sounds more like a content quantity problem than anything else. This can be answered by UGC, and since we already know your feelings on that, we’ll just skip the discussion.
So put the purpose under constant threat. Answers like this aren’t hard, if you look for them.
I’ve been saying this for the past few days, repeatedly.
Why not? A government is a subset of a population, remember? It’s a particular few, of a given community, who legislate, execute, enforce, and arbitrate over that community. It’s not a government if it’s separate. Public servants love and laugh and live, just as we do.
Again. Guild leaders. Sprang up from nothing. All governments initially came from nothing. Then, when some messed up, people thought about it and said, “Hey, this might be a better way to do it,” and then they tried that out. This is where the DKP system came from, for instance.
There isn’t an instance where God pops in and say, “You, you, and you. Lead the people. You tell them what to do. And you smack them if they screw up. And you just stand there and look pretty for the photo op.” Governments are necessary for law and order: they naturally evolve out of thin air.
Okay. Establish the tools, then.
Just like the police force of the real world! Or did you think it was legal for you to slap handcuffs on a person and stow them in your basement for a couple days while you figured out how to sue him?
Which is ironic, because exploitation cannot happen on theories; it can only happen on systems. ALL of your commentary thus far has been predicated on built systems, and is thus mostly inapplicable to future designs which are predicated on theory.
I certainly agree that your perspective is useful: you’re pointing out a lot of things I’ve missed and helped flesh out my theory. But it’s also depressing to see such a vicious hatred of humanity, and makes me wonder how prevalent that attitude actually is.
A realist would recognize that a lot of the scenarios you propose are worst-case and unlikely to happen (though entirely possible) even in the worst of conditions. You’re a cynic. 😛
Either that, or you have a glorious design solving everything sitting in the back that you haven’t shown to anyone except your other self and a couple of VCs.
My comment on imprisonment wasn’t that it couldn’t be coded, but that it couldn’t be coded in a way that worked; you can roll another character, and if you’re smart about it, you can alternate to the point that the jail time is never an impediment because just as one’s going in, another is coming out. It’s a system that can be completely bypassed and thus isn’t useful.
And 5% is enough to destroy a game. 5% was enough to destroy UO to the point that they had to include a PVP switch or lose the game. Even had there been more protections in place to begin with, it still wouldn’t have been enough, because they did fix it. And it still wasn’t enough. Not paying attention to that 5% of the game is suicide.
You say these are worst case scenarios that are unlikely to happen, but I’ve watched them happen. They’re much less unlikely than you think. I mean, I could call you a hopeless optimist for thinking they won’t. 😛
But, more importantly, the reason why the impact in the real world is lessened is because the players can’t leave. These aren’t problems when you’re talking about your core player base; the people that absolutely love what you’re doing and will never leave if you don’t turn off the servers. But that core is always very small, no matter what the game is, and you tend to lose just about everyone else. And that’s a problem, especially with these large community driven games, because if you fall below critical mass, the gameplay systems themselves break. They don’t scale down any better than they scale up. And faced with any amount of frustration, most people leave. They don’t fight back, they don’t try to make it work within the system, they just leave. And that is the second core difference. Because it’s not worth it and there are better things (for them) to be doing. The level of frustration that will bounce people off will vary, of course, but it doesn’t tend to be all that high for the bulk of people. This is a system that’s inherently reactionary – and if it’s not it tends to be otherwise unnecessary, as you’re no longer serving a game-play purpose; no one actually bothers using the system – and that effectively means that you’re building that frustration in, and deliberately adding something that’ll reduce the amount of people you’ll retain. This is potentially dangerous if your scope is bigger than your head at the same time. If your scope is smallish, and your systems are designed to support a smaller playerbase, this’ll work fine (ATiTD is a good example, and btw, the problem with gameplay not scaling isn’t that there’s a lack of content, it’s that the challenges that the community goes through to advance the game would become too trivialized with a huge population, or, alternately, impossible due to coordination issues). If you’re aiming high though, you’re in a very dangerous position.
And we are talking systems, not theory. Having open pvp is having a system. Having a government structure is having a system. The theory parts are all related to how groups of people act, especially large groups, but my comments are all directed toward those theory bits in relation to fairly defined system bits: open pvp, government systems, etc. There’s only one way to have an open pvp system too, there are just lots of ways of attempting to deal with the problems that having such a system creates. None of those solutions is at all perfect, and that leads us to the only other piece of real theory, which is whether these systems can scale under the added pressure of increasing populations, something I’m very skeptical of. Understand, I don’t for a moment think that much of this is a problem for a population size below a certain point. I do however believe that as you scale the chance of these problems occurring approaches one. Whether or not that wrecks the game entirely, or just puts you into some sort of equilibrium state where you fluctuate between the point where you start bleeding customers and the point where you’re gaining them, I don’t know. I would suspect the former might edge out slightly in terms of likely hood though, if only for the bad word of mouth.
And I don’t hate humanity, I just don’t trust it. 😛 Mostly because it’s never demonstrated that it deserves it. 😛
As an aside, I love UGC, but I don’t think it has a place in a persistent game world if you’re talking content creation rather than emergent content. I love aggregate portals; I dislike sandboxes that have odd interactions with the surrounding content and that are unavoidable. Emergent content is something else altogether, and vastly harder to actually pull off, but when you do, you’ve got something special. It’s also a much tricker thing to market to new players (and I mean in game as well as out). Just cause it’s hard doesn’t mean you shouldn’t address it of course, only that you need to account for the difficulty going in. And not try to exceed sane boundaries of scope.
Eolirin, yes I am considering multiple accounts. I mean, how many characters does a player have that are built up enough to be effective, whether as a thief or a PKer? And how long can that last as each one takes the penalty for “crime”?
As a thief, if you have jail time, that skill set is sidelined for the duration. Throw another character at it and they too can be sidelined, once caught. Of course there could be the rare player who’s so good at it that they escape not only normal capture, but those on the justice side who also become “very good at it”, on their side of things. And there’s some excellent game play for the participants with this, which is also pretty interesting for the rest of the player base. True fame can be earned, not some point calculations based on mechanics. But most importantly, the number of incidents keep going down, thanks to the player’s own efforts.
And of course, the same for the PKer. Fewer characters with the skill sets to use, only the best last, fame, and the best from the side of justice, fame here too, game play, stories, news from within the game world, interest in the game, and low incident rates from player policing activity. Community awareness.
I don’t think that UO’s system ever worked. It did slow down PKing, even quite a bit. But not enough. But there were two very important ingredients lacking that were the reasons it didn’t work.
1) The players still felt helpless. There were tricks and escapes from the penalties for PKers.
-Blue, unflagged characters could heal the Red, murder flagged characters. So PK guilds ran in mixed groups, and if you attacked a blue character for healing a red, you got a criminal flag yourself. Then all their blue characters could attack you with no penalty.
-PKers could pick your pockets blind, and if you attacked them they could kill you without getting a murder flag.
-PKers with murder counts could use macros to work off the counts. They did this before the stat loss penalties started to kick in due to reaching the magic number of murder flag killings. If by chance they killed more than that number, and if they died before they could work off the murder counts (with time played), they could stay as a ghost and work it off so that when they finally resurrected they didn’t have the penalty.
2) There was no community to the self protection/justice system. Yeah, you might be in a guild. But there was absolutely no faith in justice working, and no one tried after realizing the escape tactics the PKers were using. The feeling of being alone in a game full of people abusing you was absolute.
This is precisely the kind of statement that exemplifies my inability to understand your posts. You aren’t talking about anything. Maybe you’re stuck in UO land, a game I never played and thus can’t use to understand all of your commentary, but you’re moving to the point where your only argument is, “The world will burn, and you can’t do anything to stop it,” which, quite frankly, is starting to get aggravating and knowing myself, your lack of valid argument is going to push me over the line into actual ad hominem, and I respect you more than that.
I suppose I could accept your argument: virtual worlds cannot improve, they will remain as they are, perpetually self-destructive and deservedly maligned: but I have been characterized as a hopeless optimist (and a cynic, so I know one when I see one), so that acceptance isn’t really an option for me.
You’re not saying anything. You’ve been showing how the resource of air can be exploited because people keep breathing. If you really have seen so much, I recommend actually sitting down and writing a book documenting all of these examples. Don’t pretend to generalize unless you can lay out the example, event by event, motivation by motivation, player by player, and then show how it is valid to apply those scenarios to completely different systems and games.
All you’ve really managed to say, this whole time, is “I just know it won’t work. Whatever you do.” You don’t even ask what the goal is.
@Michael Chui,
No no, there’s only one way to have open pvp, by definition. And it seems like I’m not at ALL expressing myself properly. ><
There are many ways to attempt to deal with the problems that open pvp causes, but by definition, open pvp means that you can attack anyone at any time for any reason. Anything else is not open pvp. This would be a tautology, except there’s no argument involved, open pvp is a definition, it’s not even a system. You can put up a safe zone, or a justice system, or penalties for murderers, and those are all systems designed to deal with the consequences of open pvp. Those can all be tweaked, those can all be done in a million different ways, but open pvp itself can only be done as described; it’s not really a system, but more of a concept.
I’m also not saying any of the things you’re implying in that second paragraph. VWs definitely *can* be improved, I dunno why I’m coming across as if they can’t. You must be missing the parts where I’m saying it does work, under certain conditions, and that there’s a band where all these systems function. But the systems that you can build are inherently fragile, and they can’t scale past certain points. There are limitations that are likely inviolate, due to the nature of the medium. That doesn’t mean you can’t improve within them, or push those limitations to their absolute maximum, but you can’t get around them entirely. You can widen the band in which the population numbers work, but you can’t scale infinitely. You likely can’t even scale to WoW numbers, but you definitely can scale to extremely profitable numbers. Ignoring those limitations is a particularly bad idea. Besides which, I dunno how we got from “open pvp is probably not the best idea in the world” to “there’s no way to improve the state of virtual worlds”. There are so many other vectors for improvement, so many other systems that can be developed, so many other aspects of a game world, that I don’t understand why we need to hold onto certain ones that have thus far failed to work and that have substantial problems behind making them work and that have extremely questionable benefits besides. You can get most of the benefits of open pvp without actually having open pvp. And doing it in those ways vastly simplifies the systems that you’re developing. You do lose a few things here and there, but the pvp system is less fragile. As a system compromise, you gain more than you lose. But, if you do absolutely have your heart set on it, you just have to accept the downsides attached to it, and plan accordingly.
And, though these were in posts directed toward Amaranthar, I *have* been asking what the goal was, and even presented alternate systems to deal with the most common three. His response was effectively that it made there be a constant low level amount of uncontrollable risk and that it was more realistic. I’m not sure I can support either as intentional gameplay mechanics, but there’s probably a big enough market for it to turn a profit if you don’t throw WoW like money at it.
If this were a discussion about social game play and how to better integrate community structures into the game world, we’d have a lot more to talk about. If, on the other hand, we were talking about permadeath for everyone in the game in a traditional mmog setting, my response would be much much more dismissive. These are all very small portions of what can be discussed, and being against certain ones of them is like being against certain social theories. You can look at it like this: trying to explain why communism doesn’t work outside of the tribal scale doesn’t mean that the person believes that world governments can’t be improved. It simply means that they don’t think communism is particularly the right way to go about it.
Now granted, open PVP isn’t quite that level of broken as it’s got somewhat more tolerance toward less than ideal conditions, but it does break under stress. Ignoring that means that you can’t see the rocks in the water, and thus cannot avoid them.
@Amaranthar,
You must’ve been playing a different UO than me. The blue healer exploit, if it functioned on reds, was squashed very quickly, because I have no recollection of it ever working that way. What you’re probably thinking about is how blue healers worked in guild pvp, as guild members could fight warring guilds without flagging, and attacking those characters *did* flag you as a criminal. But healing a red flagged you grey. What happened was that attacking a grey turned you into an aggressor, and then the grey could fight you without worrying about gaining a murder count. Their blue friends couldn’t jump you though, you weren’t a criminal, and the aggressor flag only applied to the grey you were attacking. But even despite that, blue healers were in the minority. And yes, the PKs could work off those murder counts by putting their character out of action for 40+ hours. That in and of itself destroyed their ability to function with any level of proficiency. After 40 hour timers went in, the number of active reds I saw dropped to maybe one or two attacks every few months, rather than one or two attacks every day or so. What I did see a rise in, was people taking advantage of the justice system and killing people that were legitimately using it for it’s intended purpose; jumping on people who flagged criminal accidentally, because they were trying to help a friend (looting a blue corpse that was about to decay so that other players couldn’t swipe all the stuff), or who were set up to do so (walking into aoe effect abilities, harassing someone till they finally attacked them, etc), stealing from someone so that they’d attack them and then be able to kill their target without worry of a murder count. A number of those exploits were fixed; insurance, aoe effects not working on unflagged characters unless you specifically target them, etc, but some can’t be fixed without gutting the pvp system or removing thieves and things like aggravating a player into attacking you can never really go away. So while you can make a more perfect justice system, you’d have to restrict available activities a lot, or turn it entirely over to the players and hope they don’t abuse their power.
But even despite that, there’s a core flaw in having any system that promotes that sort of behavior. If your justice system is not good enough, you bounce your innocents, if it’s too good, you bounce your more legitimate murderers and all you end up with are griefers who’ll grief as long and as hard as they can, and most of them probably will find a way to completely avoid the justice system. The tolerance at either end is fairly low, and trying to hit that equilibrium point is like trying to have a tea party on the back of a rampaging elephant.
Eolirin, no, they didn’t fix the blue healer thing until after Trammel came out. It was the thing that had me hopping mad, because it was the most critical part of why it wasn’t working, and I knew if it didn’t work they’d do something like a switch.
It screwed the entire picture for open PvP as well as worldly systems from that point on. Every producer was afraid of “worldly”, every player was following the standard play call that open PvP “cannot work”, and the EQ clone became the gold standard.
The blue healer situation was a bug. They may have tried to fix it once before Trammel came out, but if so it broke instantly. But it was most certainly not fixed before Trammel.
From there, everyone went to the path of least resistance. Even the PKers on their “blues”.
Amaranthar, I don’t recall it working like that at ALL, the blue healer for guilds was never really fixed for the longest time, but the “beneficial actions on greys and reds flagging you” happened really early on. I suppose I could be really misremembering, or perhaps it’s simply that Trammel was only a year or so later, and after playing for 10 years, there’s an element of time compression. I was never ganked by a bunch of blue healers. I was criminal pked a number of times though, because the criminal flag was much easier to apply either accidentally or out of necessity, especially since guild mates couldn’t loot each other for the longest time without flagging. I was also at the wrong end of a lot of “I’m going to steal from you so that you attack me and then I kill you” stuff. Eventually you stop attacking thieves and instead make sure you never get remotely close to another player. Since I left to Trammel with the rest of the RP community, any memories that I have of the PVP situation has to predate it, I didn’t really touch that stuff afterward.
Oh no, blues didn’t attack you. Reds did, but they had blue friends who healed them, and you couldn’t attack them or you’d go gray, then the blues could all attack you too. The red was very hard to kill under such circumstances.
They’d run their blue characters wherever players were, and when they found a situation they could take advantage of, a number of them would get their reds. The worst part of this was that as their targets, as a group fought back, invariably it was one at a time who’d get fed up and decide to attack a blue healer, hoping the rest would follow suit. As decisions aren’t as fast as the well oiled machine of practiced PK tactics, the PK blues would be taking out those who went gray one at a time. 3 on 1, 3 on 1, 3 on 1.
I was PKed an estimated 15 billion times. I estimate this because I became completely lost on any semblance of numbers at some point or another. I joined an anti guild and fought. I fought allot. We made a difference in Rat/Orc valley where we defended players hunting spawn there, had a castle there along with some houses. And we did it with extreme prejudice. We took no prisoners. We went hunting PKers in dungeons and anywhere they hung out. We did guard duty at PvP tournaments. One of our guys earned so much respect that he was mentioned along with only a few others by BoneDancer on his guild site, if you know who that is. We were feared, hated, and respected by PKers.
There are players who will do this. Give them a community to champion and they will have a home. Then the rest of the players who don’t find that appealing, they will have a home and community too. They can then enjoy a different play style than “the grind”. They can make a name for themselves as merchants, librarians, collectors, or whatever play style they like, in a worldly game that makes their play style matter.
Ok, clearing confusion here. That should start out as…..
Amaranthar, I mean, I was never put into a position where there were any blue healers on reds. At all. Now, perhaps it was just my shard, but it didn’t happen where I was.
Of course, I was never part of the anti group either, and the general response for most people when they came across a pk was to recall. Immediately.
Yeah, I think most players were part of the recall immediately group. I did too, when I was alone and outnumbered, which was always the case since PKers worked usually at scouted advantages.
But see, PKers had all the advantages. They could scout and go when they knew they would win. It was the rare surprise when something bad happened to them. They had learned well the tactics of success. So everyone else also learned, that if you fight there’s always another PKer around, or something else such as blue healers, or whatever. And it was exactly this hopeless scenario that made it so bad. Sure, getting PKed and losing what you were carrying was bad, but if the game is good otherwise, that one situation isn’t going to cause anyone to quit. It was this repeated loss, and the hopelessness of it all that cause players to quit.
Now turn the tables on the PKers. Make it so that players can actually stop them. Not this one time, but for a long time for each character.
Now you have happy victims. Revenge is sweet. You also have few players PKing, because they can’t succeed that way. Eternal newbdom is no way to play an MMORPG. Nor is jail time.
So, yuo may be thinking who will even do it at all? Extreme jerks who think they’ll quit anyways because they can’t have it their jerk way. But that’s pretty few, and the fact is that the “good guys” have won. What’s left? Roleplayers having fun, that’s what’s left. The kind who do it to make an interesting story. This is a good thing.
There will also be the sort who enjoy an extreme challenge. It would be very challenging to play PKer and last very long. If one or a few do, think of the fame. Wanted on posters in every city in the realm! Who’s going to get them? And when they finally do go down, as they will, think of the fame, the story, the news. Again, this adds interesting story to the game, and can only be good for it. Hell, I’d expect a few players to even brag about being PKed by “Mongbat the Merciless, the most wanted man in the realm.”
The only time there can be a real problem for any player is if they are a target of repeated attacks, unwanted, abusive grief. And it would have to be someone who can be good enough to escape, so it’s not like every jerk in the game is going to last long at that sort of grief. But if it were to happen, a rare situation, GMs can take direct action.
The best part of it is that the players are empowered, they are a part of it all. Even if they only support their city or guild through trade, and especially if the game makes use of city assets to allow building of defensive assets to help. If trades people feel like they are needed, then they will also feel like it is their right to expect protection. So it won’t bother them that someone else is doing the dirty work for them.
It’s social, it’s natural, and it can be part of an immersive game world experience.
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