The neverending griefing discussion
I’ve been doing MMOs and online worlds a long time. And that means that I’ve written and said a lot of things on the Internet over the years, about designing them.
One of the funny things about reactions to the various vision blogs for Stars Reach is the number of people who have popped up on various MMO forums whose entire impression of me and my design approaches is formed by their experience getting playerkilled in Ultima Online twenty-five years ago. They are often quite confident that I have not adjusted or updated my opinions on griefing at all in the intervening time, despite the fact that Star Wars Galaxies did not have a playerkilling problem like UO’s — and I designed that PvP system personally.
There is something jarring about getting confronted repeatedly with this. Of course, in my mind, I made a pretty definitive statement on playerkilling back in like 2001 or 2002, in an article for the SWG community called “A Philosophical Statement on Playerkilling.” The key takeaway:
I do not want to ever disappoint people in that way again. People will come to SWG for those things, and I do not want them to discover that they cannot stay and enjoy them because the very freedoms which allow those cool, innovative, exciting features, also allow d00dspeaking giggly jerks to dance roughshod jigs on their virtual corpses.
More recently, as part of putting together Postmortems, I wrote a bunch of new retrospective material on Ultima Online, and most of the lengthy chapter on its playerkilling problems was excerpted and published separately on Game Developer. The quote from that which always sticks in my mind is
In the name of player freedoms, I had put them through a slow-drip torture of two years of experiments with slowly tightening behavior rules, trying to save the emergence while tamping down the bad behavior. The cost was the loss of many hundreds of thousands of players. Ultima Online had churned through more than twice as many players who quit than EverQuest even got as subscribers that year.
Now, none of the above means that I don’t still believe in player freedoms. To my mind, the missed opportunity in UO wasn’t just in moving too slowly on fixing the PKing problem. It was also in giving up on solving the issues of devolved governance.
Probably the best example I can use today is to point at Reddit or Discord. Both of those system use “player governance.” They do it by chopping up the service into smaller areas, and then giving the users a very high degree of control over their areas. And this method has been shown to work pretty well — certainly better than centrally managing all moderation.
MMOs never took this step, though social worlds did. Instead, they pursued the “PK switch” solution: the admins serving as the cops for all the possible forms of bad behavior.
I was completely wrong about this solution not scaling in EverQuest.
But I was completely right about it not scaling to the size of World of Warcraft, XBox Live, or today’s larger games.
The above excerpt ends by pointing out that
…[moderating] was now the admin’s job.
Within five years, they wouldn’t bother.
Where once LegendMUD would have kicked you out for cursing, we got Xbox Live chat with rampant sexism and homophobia.
Where once Ultima Online would have tracked your behavior to try to warn other players of bad apples, we eventually got Twitter, where Nazis can post freely and spam others off the Net.
By giving up on solving the hard problem of freedom co-existing with civility, I fear that the result is that on today’s Internet, we have neither.
Today’s Internet is so much worse in terms of behavior, absolutely everywhere, that people do not realize how bad it has gotten compared to what we once had. And the effect in the virtual worlds has been to instead remove freedoms, remove the ability to interact, even, in order to try to provide safety.
Anyway… that’s what today’s Stars Reach post is largely about, along with the larger question of what the game is and is not. It’s unabashedly an MMO that is about other people, and not one that will cocoon you away from other players entirely.
8 Responses to “The neverending griefing discussion”
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.
I think part of what stoked the fears of griefing and Stars Reach turning into a gankbox is that, since the times of Star Wars Galaxies, the word sandbox has become synonymous with gankbox for a lot of people. There have been an awful lot of PvP-heavy sandbox MMOGs over the past twenty years that have promised social systems to try to tamper ganking and make it unpalatable in order to appeal to “sheep,” but it has never worked. Sooner or later (and almost always sooner), the wolves will do what they do (social systems be damned), and eventually run off the sheep.
Another part is… I’ll be honest. I’m in the Stars Reach Discord server, but I only occasionally pay attention to it. I find large Discord servers with lots of people (a thousand or more people, or especially tens of thousands of people), discombobulating and unwelcoming, which is one of the two main reasons why I made the Unofficial Stars Reach Forum. But when I have paid attention to the Discord server, I’ve seen quite a bit of people who seem to be hoping that Stars Reach will be like those other sandbox games… PvP heavy and a gankbox. Again, I think the word “sandbox” has become synonymous with “gankbox” for some people, and has attracted a bit of that crowd. I can’t be the only one that has seen this, and have started to worry.
Anyhoo, I do want to thank you for both articles today. It’s been insightful, has calmed my worries, and will hopefully sooth the worries of others. I do have faith in both you and the other developers, or I would have never went so far as to spend my own time and money in creating two of the first Stars Reach fan sites. I also think you’re on the money with both what MMOGs have become, and what is needed to make them virtual worlds again.
First poster is correct. I’ve been discussing PvP (in the broadest sense of the phrase) systems in the Discord, and there are plenty of people looking for pretty full-on player combat. EVE gets mentioned frequently as an inspiration, with its “you’re never quite safe anywhere” theme. I talk Chess and Go, and abstracted competitive player interactions taking inspiration from boardgames or strategy games, and half the replies are about planetary bombardment and conquering other guilds’ planets.
What I can’t figure it is… is it griefing or grieving? Only one of the two passes spell check.
As someone who played UO for 5 years (1996-2001) and experienced first hand what is being referred to here, albeit we managed to cope with that harsh environment as a Guild “Order of the Silver Serpent. (OSS”, Atlantic Shard) by embracing both Role Play and PvP at the same time, I can understand some people’s concerns on the matter.
Then again I also Played SWG for several years (up to the killing blow of NGE) and I can attest that it had largely eliminated the Issues of UO while still providing a meaningful PvP system.
So for me, I am convinced that Raph Koster in on the right track and has demonstrated how to balance Role Play and PvP in meaningful ways that can give and have purpose to players in the emerging gameplay of a Sandbox Game from which everything else stems and flourishes.
I have to agree with Lunar Ronin here, the “Sandbox MMORPG” perception has been tainted by the many games claiming to be “Sandbox” which followed during all this time since. From EVE (saddly) to DarkFall to more recent ArchAge and Albion Online.
None of them cared to pay attention to the History to the record and what others had done before them and marched forward to repeat the same mistakes and even worse building their games around a flawed environment which resulted in total anarchy unable to foster Community Building and the Social threads which make up a breathing living world virtual experience.
It all resulted in to a pit of predators and prey where the predators eliminate all of the prey and in turn perish themselves as they try to eat each other and bring down the game with their fall.
For many of us (by now) mature players this is “been there done that” and I I see the same in the evolution of the thinking of Raph Koster which is why I am confident that Stars Reach will not make these mistakes and it might actually be the Game for Old and new to finally experience again or experience for the first time and actually have Fun doing so.
I am really not worried personally and many of my guildmates and I are looking forward to release, so we can embark on the journey assume our roles fitting its lore background and create our communities and own goals while exploring the sandbox and interacting with other groups in cooperation or competition as situations and challenges emerge.
Fare thee well, and may the Virtues shine upon thine path. 😉 (Haven’t typed that in many years).
Greetings,
An important topic nevertheless. As someone that played UO (and SWG) in the early days (1996-2001) for 5 years, and along with my Guildmates “Order of the Silver Serpent, (OSS), Atlantic Shard” experienced, endured, prevailed and survived the harsh dynamics of it and were able to draw fun nevertheless through luck and by embracing Role Play, Cooperation and PvP, I can certainly understand the concerns that many people who were not as fortunate may have.
Personally I am not that worried yet no one has to take my word for it, all we have to do is take a look at Raph’s work on Star Wars Galaxies and it’s implementation of PvP to understand that both the intention and the direction are good ones.
Consensual PvP is the way to go to avoid grief, and ambush play. It worked so well in SWG I think, and it was fun being tied to the Factional Competition, rather than to game economics resources and materials etc.
SR seems to be avoiding the flawed “Risk vs Reward” design approach that so many other games fell for such as EVE online. And I think it is important to mention because there is a difference between PvPing for fun and PvPing for economic reasons.
It is not for no reason that EVE online is dark and dystopian not only in looks and Lore but in actual gameplay experience.
And SR, I feel, aims for a brighter and while not utopian a more optimistic kind of vibe. One that maintains a challenging yet fun gameplay experience.
I think all the clues are available which point to that effect at this time. I for one am looking forward to the release of SR with great interests and anticipation.
Fare thee well!
I admit I was shocked to see the moderation model for Reddit being held to any acclaim (being someone relatively new to Reddit) given that a person whose opinion there is only 49% popular WILL find themselves squelched and acquiring negative karma in any sub where a post gets a thousand interactions. Reddit, much like Ultima Online, is a system that the players have learned to game, and they’re gaming it AS moderators.
And Yes I mean ‘game’ .. I’ve come to the conclusion that most ‘social media’ is not being used for legitimate or intended purposes, but are being gamed by external actors and interests. I feel like the problem with player behavior and social media behavior are really the same, and it goes to the point we are all really anonymous and none of these services have the ability to identify or keep out the bad actors. Users would cry over privacy issues if you were to ever require they present a photo ID (and would more than likely take a pass on your game) but I think without tying online behavior to an actual person, there is no perception of consequence. So that’s the puzzle. How do you create personal accountability in an environment where the end-user doesn’t want to be accountable themselves? It’s like people crying for laws and police but wanting personal exemption.
In any case I feel like (speaking as a 51 year old) the problem with online game culture has existed for so long in this devolved state, many of us have moved on and come to the conclusion “people are a-holes” and have started seeking single-player experiences, where no one breaks character and we maintain some suspension of disbelief. There was a novelty (and naivete) to online play in 1997 that does not exist today. I feel like interacting with human players is in many ways frustrating, unpredictable and unrewarding. Richard Garriott (I believe) once said he believed that with an MMORPG “players would create their own content” (the implication being that designers would be on the hook for less) but I want to say that was bull lol. Players might decorate their houses, but generally speaking, the content they create is junk. You can’t even have a game that is thematically consistent if you let players create.
Please make another game like UO just a fresher newer version. I’m
Begging you UO to this day is still the best game I’ve ever played by far.
One thing that came to mind when I first learned about this game was the Iron Law of Oligarchy: Every democratic system will eventually be ruled by a small group of people. This isn’t a problem necessarily, but it is inevitable. The problem comes when the founders ignore this fact and leave it to entropy. The kind of Oligarchy’s that “just happen” are a roll of the dice, and your odds aren’t great. I was curious how your game would deal with this, if at all, since a lot of designers try and pretend that it doesn’t exist.
The system you described in the article interacts with the Iron Law in a really interesting way. You acknowledge the fact that small groups (guilds) are going to exert control over large areas and numbers of people, and you give them the tools to legitimize their power regardless of their style of governance. With the tools you describe, it sounds like you enable, but don’t force, systems of governance that benefit both the rulers and the ruled. BUT, the ultimate power above all the guilds (admins/developers), creates strong borders between the planets in order to create genuine diversity in governance. What’s more, it sounds like planets are a lot more similar than subreddits or discords so the switching cost is lowered. You can have the same kind of fun, just under a better guild, by going to another planet. Network effects still exist, but it sounds like if a planet is ruled by a tyrannical guild, the cost of switching to a more friendly planet is relatively low, if that’s what you’re into. The players would loose the stuff they built on the planet, but since the game is made to be instantly fun and avoid tedious grinding…
This is all extremely well thought out. We’ll see how it turns out when rubber meets the road, but it really looks like a system built to make the most out of how people are rather than how we wish they were.