The MMORPG Thread.

You've played so many hours on your favorite MMORPG that the person you see in the mirror when you brush your teeth in the morning, the "real you", is an alt. You say "el oh el" "eye are el". You have spent more time honing your crafting skills than working on your resume. Games are life, but MMORPG's are more than just games. Therefore, MMORPG's are more than life itself. It's the happiest you've ever been when you hear the title screen music, when you log in it's like the world disappears and you're back where you belong.

Needless to say, in all those many hours of gameplay, you've had a few ideas of your own. You could probably make the best MMORPG ever made if you were given the chance. Maybe you just can't enjoy the games that are out there, and you're making your own. Or maybe you just find the world of The Matrix fascinating. Whatever, this is a place where you can discuss anything related to MMORPG's.

To start the discussion, here's some common points if discussion that come up with MMORPG discussions every time.

- Addiction
Is it real? Is it serious? Your experiences with it.

- Griefing/destructive play
People are jerks. Without the risk of PK, some people don't have as much fun.

- Death - Permadeath/Penalties
New ideas for handling death. How much punishment is right?

- Alternative leveling
What if I just want to be a merchant? A healer? Why must I kill to level? Why won't this go away in games?

- Community
Can't we all just get along? What games have/had good/bad communities?

- ???¿¿¿
Whatever you want to talk about.

+ Judgement free zone.
+ Friendly discussion please.

 

OK, I'll start. Let's talk grinding.

When I was younger, I played the heck out of Runescape. Now I can't stand it, and it's not because it's changed - it has, but I think mostly for the better. No, I can't play it anymore because I need to catch ten million fish or kill a hundred thousand demons to gain a single level - and I need three more levels before it gives me any noticeable benefit.

Why is this a design element in the game? Why do I despise it while other gamers eat it up? Could the game fix the problem without destroying what made it popular in the first place?

I have ideas on the first question - MMOs, at least back in the Golden Age before the Freemium Apocalypse, typically made their money from subscriptions. So it doesn't exactly do you much good if your players exhaust all your gameplay before their first month of membership is up! You need a way to slow them down, keep them busy while you make more content.

 

I think it's possible that we have changed. We have less free time, more responsibilities as we grow older. Been there, done that... so its just repitition that wastes precious time. Newer players have more free time than ever. Unemployment is high. People are waiting longer to start families so there's more idle time as 20's blend into 30's to grind, grind, grind... people just burn through content and quit, on to the next thing.

It's a catch 22 designing games for the people who buy them the most, because they're the least loyal.to any particular game. You can't make enough content, so you have to stretch it out. People seem to approve.

 

IMO RPGs and (and by extension MMORPGs) focus too much on numbers and not enough on feelings. The quests are all "bring me 3 fish" or "gain 3,000XP to gain a level" and very few are "rescue the farmer's daughter from the wolfmen."

While I wouldn't completely drop the numbers, but I would tone them down until they're a background concern, instead of the primary motivator for the gamers.

Of course, this is a *lot* harder game to design than the standard (MMO)RPG, so it's pretty rare these days. The budget gets put into graphics and code instead of writing and design.

 

"bring me 3 fish" or "gain 3,000XP to gain a level" and very few are "rescue the farmer's daughter from the wolfmen."

I think it's based on research, people don't read the quests... People don't read. Period. Quest trackers can count the numbers of X monster killed or N items collected. This allows the game o automatically track progress so people can play who are barely even cognizant that they are protecting a farmstead, rescuing a kingdom. Plus the constant +1 item is part of the feedback loop, that's where MMORPG's derive their crack-like addictive qualities from.

I wonder if there will ever be a high-end MMO with higher subscription costs, for people with a longer attention span? I think people could pay $24.99 a month for an exclusive, amazing MMO experience in the future.

 

People don't read the quests in MMOs because they've been trained that they don't *need* to. I'm talking about a new (or rather, reborn) experience where the player is responsible to paying attention and is not hand-fed everything. Where the solution to the quest is never "kill 3 wolves and collect pelts from the loot box". The solution to my "rescue" quest above would be for the player to spend time figuring out where the wolfmen took the girl, planning an attack on the area (whatever it is), and getting the girl out alive. (Yes, she could die if you do it badly. Or the player could.)

It requires a lot more work for both the devs and the players. But the result is so much more satisfying for both of them as well. Instead of the player remembering it as the area they played 30 times to gather enough XP for level 13, they'll remember it as the time they saved the farmer's daughter from the wolfmen bandits in the ruined fort.

 

This is going back in time more like the way games used to be. I watched a video in the past few months or so where the author was talking about the evolution of these aspects. How it seems like everything is being "dumbed down". Generally it was seen as a good thing but his point was it treats the player like they are a simpleton.

I agree with you both. To me that is the adventure in such games. Sure give me or let me find a mission but let me do it finding and figuring out things for myself.. Don't walk me through it in baby steps... go to the so and so... get the key to get in... open the gate.... enter the.... find the.... kill the.... get the... return the.... it is a little ridiculous.

 

I don't think games are to blame for the dumbing down of the populace, I think games are just a reflection of what people are willing to play and what they like. I think the dumbing down of people in the 21st century starts with an education system that promotes weak retention, short attention spans and trains people to think in terms of little bite-sized pieces rather than a continuous train-of-thought.

So the games have to be designed so that people will play them.

Within that context, could games be used to break people out of this zombie like state? I mean are engaging MMORPGs potentially the solution and maybe we need to start looking at it that way?

Television reshaped the world for the worse. Is it possible, in anyway, that games could reshape the world for the better?

 

As much as I love to blame the modern education system, I don't think it's quite the issue here. It's more an innate part of the human psyche - reading is a very cognitive-intensive process! You have to convert visual symbols into meaning (and possibly into sound first - but I don't remember the exact research there), without any of the tonal and nonverbal cues that usually accompany language.

Combine the comparative difficulty of reading an extensive narrative with the fact that the reason you're playing the game is to interact with it (When I want to read, I do so with a book, not a game), it's only logical to strip down all quest objectives to the absolute essence of what the player has to do to complete it, not why they should complete it in the fictional world. (Because frankly, players don't care about that either. They're more interested in the +5,000XP from completing the quest than saving the farmer's daughter.)

But I agree there's an issue here. the simplification of objectives. A broad objective ("Rescue the farmer's daughter" - maybe even marking her location on the minimap) is not much harder to read than a specific one ("Kill 5 wolfmen"), and makes for a much more interesting quest - especially if you open it up to multiple approaches. Maybe you try to sneak in without being detected. Maybe you disguise yourself as a wolfman. Maybe you try to negotiate for her release with your Amulet of +18 Charisma. Or maybe you just charge in, guns/swords/staves blazing and hope you survive. (At least you have chicken!)

The hype train for Assassin's Creed: Unity seems to be based on this premise. We'll see how it plays out, but I do have to wonder if the idea would translate to an MMO. Would it kill the mood if you're trying to sneak around unnoticed and somebody Leeroy Jenkins in and blows your cover? Or if you're trying to negotiate and, while the wolfman is distracted talking to you, somebody sneaks in and rescues her? (actually, that latter idea sounds cool, but only if the two of you had planned it in advance XD)

 

I think maybe the "dumbing" down of quests in games has more to do with the commercial game studios wanting to expand their player base to the masses, including more casual gamers. When one has only a few hours a week to play games, rushing in and killing a bunch of stuff is more efficient than having to follow puzzles and run all over a map looking for clues. Commercial games need the players, usually hundreds of thousands of them, maybe more these days, in order to be successful to their shareholders. Games have been canceled before release because these numbers are not there. Plus there are so many competing games these days that the pool of players is spread out pretty thin.

So, they make a game where you can play it a little bit each week and still enjoy yourself. Fun, exciting, nothing too deep and certainly nothing too time consuming.

 

I think a big reason is what we now know as casual gaming. Most casual gamers don't want to think (not too much I mean). Or have grand quests to go on. For casual gaming tiny concrete objectives are a perfect fit. Let's face it a lot of people simply don't have the brain or will power or time to figure out stuff for themselves. People like us enjoy that kind of thing. Give us a quest and a general direction to head off to and we are happy. But to open the games up to a massive audience the designers needed to break everything down into very tiny concrete objectives. Collect 5 coins. Build 1 farm. Dodge the bananas for 15 seconds. By taking the player's hand and leading them through the game step by step it opened the games up for a huge audience to be able to play.

 

@Teila we were writing at the same time and thinking the same things.

 

LOL
You must be a very cool person!

 

That's up for debate but I think we are onto something with the quick and easy accessible game play!

 

Honestly, I think there is a market for game-play that is more complex. As the big companies make their games simpler, then we should be making ours more interesting, less shallow. This is sort of what has happened over the years in the tabletop and board game industry. The big companies have given up long-playing, complicated board games and are giving us simple, happy, party games. Fun, great in a large group, and full of laughs, but really requires better social than thinking skills. Smaller companies, especially European companies, are filling the niche for those hardcore gamers with very complex games, with pages of rules and lots of little parts.

In our community, many groups of board gamers are popping up all over the place, and most of these are Eurogamers, playing those complex European games. I actually have a stack of them in my house, overflowing the shelves and now occupying a cupboard next to our fireplace (seldom used here in Florida). My kids love them and while most of them are a little too strategy based for me (meaning my kids always beat me), occasionally I feel the need to pull out Catan or Kill Mr. Lucky.

What does this have to do with MMOs? Like those Eurogamers, I think it is the small studios that can fill that niche for MMOs and even RPGs. That means narrowing our audiences and pulling out some of the things that are successful in commercial games. It means taking some risks to be noticed and not underestimating our chosen player base. And it means a lot of hard work and dedication. This is tough to do and not for the faint of heart. Most of what I see in the Work in Progress forum are games that are almost identical to games out there commercially and that is okay. It takes a pretty big leap to go some where else. Sort of like jumping off a cliff without a parachute.

The first thing one should do when designing an MMO or any sort of multiplayer game, is to figure out the goal of the game. Who is your intended audience? Do you want to appeal to casual gamers or hard core? Is there a way to appeal to both but still not directly compete with the commercial games? How do I design features that can do both?

Of course, this is my own personal opinion. I have played commercial games with a variety of success but most of my work has been in niche gaming, so I am a bit biased.

 

Well Planescape: Torment is considered a classic and it involves pretty much nothing but reading and they are working on a new one right now(https://torment.inxile-entertainment.com/, also made with Unity). If you want players to read it needs to be something worth reading and the choices you make in conversation should be as important or more than combat otherwise why not just skip over it to get to the important stuff. Ie. if something doesn't involve progression, skip it.

For a MMORPG I think the main challenge with this is generating that amount of (good)content. It's a massive undertaking for something like the new Planescape, which is single player, can only imagine trying to do it for a online world people are expected to pay for every month and expecting new content for constantly.

 

I would say it has only been in the last ten years that the dumbing down notion is a reasonable argument. Before that, it wasn't like the issue of simplifying wasn't a response to things legitimately being too complicated. When you had text based adventures with their 'pickup fruit-gate,' you had some pretty solid evidence that simplifying might be a good idea. On the flip side, nobody looked at Doom and thought it would have been so much better with a leveling mechanic.


As far as getting people to give a S*** about quests, I would say it's mostly an issue of immersion. If you can actually get people to stop treating the game like a three dimensional spreadsheet that needs to be optimized, then it might be possible. It might also be about how the game is presenting what it's about. If the tutorial stage was dressed as a murder mystery, I would be willing to bet most of the players would be far more interested in elaborate quests than grinding combat.

 

I agree with you on this. Constantly generating new content can be difficult. However, I have played successful games there the only new content generated for months and months was generated by the players. In an MMO, at least you have the randomness of other players. If you create a game where players have an impact on the story or even easier, on the community, then your new content may be be able to come from them.

My earliest experience was in text based games. Most new content was not these massive expansions that you have now, but simple things, like a surprise festival in town, or a new group of mysterious NPCs that appear in the corner of a map. We made our content by creating our own dramas. I have much more vivid memories of the player created content, such as a rebellion against new laws in the kingdom, overthrowing a ruler, participating in role play events, etc., then I do of any content created by the game developers. My stories are more about original events rather than about some new Level 50 area that opened up for $50.

In fact, when I think about it, most of the stories my friends still tell me about their games are usually their experiences with other players. Interesting.

 

I finally have something to contribute, in light of the mention of player generated content. Let's assume that you've got an mmorpg game up and running. Now, let's imagine that you create an editor that allows the creation of an adventure. An adventure differs from a quest in that it is pure instance, the adventure author (the dungeon master) can place characters who are part of the quest using existing models. They can use the editor to make a script, establish quests within the adventure, etc.

Why would anybody choose to be a dm and create adventures? Well... geeks. But, say that the more times your adventure is played and given better ratings you could receive rep. Points. These could be used to purchase legendary items, items needed to start a guild (charters, for example) that could be sold to other players, etc.

So you reward content creators with exclusive content. Dm is the coolest title to have.

What you say?

EDIT: If this is subscription based, you could even give the top dm's credits towards their subscriptions, enough credits and you would effectively be paying them to play.

 

Well I mainly threw the Planescape reference out there to show that studios in fact are making different types of games with high quality, so it is not as bad as it seems. Inxile did Wasteland 2 just recently and I think it was a fantastic game with great storylines, again though it is a singleplayer rpg.

I think another problem with MMORPG's is they are very expensive to operate and you need constant cash inflow. I have tons of ideas for very simple online graphical MMOs but at the end of the day I know it would not be popular enough to support the bandwidth and hosting costs and I think that is a huge hurdle to overcome for a lot of server based network games.

 

There is one that I played that has this. Players can create their own adventures to share. With a rating system for the adventure. Neverwinter nights I think it is.
Seems to be a interesting thing to try doing. I just haven't.

 

I would definitely say that it has to be done in a context of a World of Warcraft style game.

EDIT: The reason being that it will all be fueled by competitiveness, ego, etc. Target audience is males 18-36, I'm sure you'll attract tons of teens and more older players.

 

The studio making the new Planescape seems to publish games that are not directed toward the average MMO player, or at least what the big commercial companies think the average MMO player is. They are funded through Kickstarter, rather than through a company's shareholders, which gives them a little more freedom. Great to see though and if the game is as interesting as it seems to be, then it will be nice to see it succeed.

MMORPG's are expensive and need constant cash inflow because they are made to support massive numbers of players, hundreds of thousands or more, from all over the world. I doubt an Indie MMO could even begin to cover that many players. The number of servers required as well as the bandwidth would be more than a small studio could handle. Most networking is scaled now, so if you have 1000 players, you pay for 1000 players. The cost should be covered by subscriptions or other ways of making cash off the players. Your game should be scaled to the size of the player base, not a massive world with 500 players.

 

NWN is a Dungeons and Dragons world and has all the limitations of DnD. It is not really so much an MMO, as a multiplayer game. You set up servers with a number of your friends, max of 64 at any given time (my source believes that to be true, but could be wrong on the number), and then another player acts as the DM, creating the story, building the mobs, etc. As old as the graphics are today, that game still has followers, which says a lot for player created content.

What I mean by player created content isn't so much physical content (or is that virtual physical content?) but the stories and experiences of the players as they interact with each other. I asked my son what his favorite experience ever was in an MMO and told me it was his dragon's rite of passage in Istaria. I asked him if it was the quest or the experience with the other players? He said the other players. It seems a group of elder dragons let the young hatch-lings on the quest, giving them advice, and protecting them, while teaching them how to be a dragon. The elder dragons were players and from my son's vivid description it sounds like it was an amazing experience.

 

I would be interested in some examples of peoples experiences around this. When I looked at services like Google AppEngine, my own dedicated Linode(s), Amazon, etc. it was not hard for me to exceed their transactions, cpu, and/or bandwidth limits fairly quickly with less than a hundred players. To me this means I definitely need to be making some monthly revenue and constantly attracting users or I'll have to pay out of my own pocket or shut it down, which seems really lame for the people who already paid. Might be good for a separate thread and informative.

 

Actually the player created adventures, well some try to be anyway, actually tell a story to make it more interesting. Some of them are really good. Just a side thing from the norm of the original story line and progress.

 

It probably should be a separate thread and maybe in networking. I do know that some scalable solutions will let you pay for only the bandwidth you use. So if there are no players on, you won't pay anything or at least not very much. I suggest going to the network Forum and see what others say.

 

There actually is a NWN F2P MMO now(http://store.steampowered.com/app/109600/) which is not the same as the old NWN. I haven't played it, I hear it is very much pay to win...But it does still allow for player created modules.

 

I think what is missing is that the items and exp gained from these adventures are also the same as would drop in the game. I'm not trying to describe a new type of MMO. I'm saying WoW+this could break that monotony.

@Archania - I think you would invariably see storylines better than the official ones, you just have to think of audience size. A small MMO vs a titanic MMO. The titanic MMO is a bigger audience and great storytellers crave large audiences.

 

The problem isn't when no one is on The problem is when people are on and idling around or doing random stuff for long periods of time, all of a sudden they've eaten a nice chunk of my monthly allotted bandwidth just getting game updates.

 

Not fully understanding your point here tiggus. You wouldn't be hosting the game on your home computer but on a server that is set up.
But this is off topic of l the discussion. Sorry.

 

Creation and fame are generally their own rewards. It feels *good* to have people play and enjoy your stuff. In-game benefits will never be the primary reason that people create quests in such a system as that. They'll do it for the fame, or because they just like it.

And no, not just "geeks". Most good artists started because they love doing it, and not because they were after the money.

 

Whoa... well, then I take it you'll be playing this hypothetical game.

 

Hey, Geeks are cool these days, don't you know that? My kids are proud to be geeks!

In game content can be a lot of things, not just art or mechanics. I played a game where players wrote and were involved in Tiny Plots, where they actually created a story, acted it out as the characters in the game, and involved other players in the plot. These were so well done, that the players did not know they were part of some improvised plot.

Also, I remember an early Simutronics game where the GMs set up mysteries to solve, playing various NPCs to give clues to the players. We had a group that solved the crimes and had a blast. I have to admit, I never made it past level 8 because I was so busy investigating rather than gaining XP. While this was not really player created, the mysteries created fodder for the players to start their own stories or game play, such as forming groups and alliances to solve the mysteries.

 

All I'm talking about is instead of trying to auto generate content by creating some sort of artificial superintelligence, use real human intelligence to generate the content by incentivizing its creation.

 

Examples of using user generated content that is obtained for free to make a profit:

Unity Asset Store
Steam
Newgrounds.com (and all flash portals)
Happy Wheels
YouTube
Google
SomethingAwful.com

Incentivisation methods range from "you can make money" to "you can be popular in a community" and SomethingAwful actually charges users to join the community. Then, uses their content to attract more users.

I'm frankly a little curious what the wizards of big MMO know that I don't about this, there's got to be a reason it isn't being done...

 

Well it's not quite as easy to create an "adaptive" questing system, as opposed to a (do these three things) = quest completed. This is for a standard RPG, which is generally less effort than a MMORPG (although that seems to be changing)..

Our game is based on a morality (grey area) there is no standard you're a good person bar. So you attack quests the way you want, some issues with this I'm still scratching my head with but I feel it helps immersion. Obviously there is a map pointer to the destination but after that bar a description of what's happening it's up to you.

 

I suppose the terms "user generated content" can be defined differently. I consider it to be content generated in game, such as stories or even user-created quests using run-time editors. Your links are outside the game but I suppose that even forums can be considered user generated content, just out of game. Both can be fun for players but one immerses you in the game, the other builds an out-of-game community. Again, both important but with different objectives.

 

You can really just simplify it by thinking of anything that somebody would spend time reading or viewing on the internet or playing on the computer as "content".

So when I write this post, however many people read it that's web traffic. The amount of web traffic this particular spot on the web would receive if we weren't having this conversation would be zero.

Its the same thing with games, games require content for players to play them, so if you could convince other players to create content, you are increasing your game's value.

Which means you can sell it for a higher price or sell more copies at a similar price to other comparable games.

 

True, Misterelmo. Websites, active forums, fan sites, all add to the enjoyment of the game and spread the word, probably crucial for the success of an indie game. While both internet content and in-game content both can attract new players and make the experience more meaningful for current players, the in-game user-generated content is probably the most difficult to imagine and implement.

 

I always thought that people should be able to do anything from defining their own character classes, to creating items, and like I mentioned creating their own quests that even others can play. I've imagined this a lot already.

I think in the end trying to explain your ideas to other people is not an effective form of communication compared with showing them.

 

I would love to see this in online games. Creativity is a powerful attraction and gamers love to be able to see and use their own creations in a game. It is one reason Minecraft is so successful.

If I saw something on the asset store that would work in a mutiplayer server/client environment and allow players to create quests/levels as well as items and use them in the game, I would jump on it.

The biggest problem with that sort of stuff is the oversight of the developers. You can't just let anything end up in the game or you risk problems. So you need a team that can approve items and levels/quests just like you need people to approve what goes on the asset store.

Some game themes might be fine with "anything goes" but others will not. The old social world "There" allowed user content you could upload and even sell. Second Life is another example, even more prolific. In those virtual world examples it works fine.

I would like to find a way to at least let a limited number of player created items into the game in the future.

 

I think what's missing from a lot of games is giving other players the power to contribute their thoughts through game mechanics. For example, if everybody thought that something was overpowered then they could express that through in-game mechanics and the more people who agreed that it was overpowered would decrease the power of that weapon, for example. You can't put one person in control, because their decisions will be flawed but if you put everybody in continuous collective control over the experience then it will be the best possible experience.

So if somebody create an item, and nobody approves of it it will never even make it into the game. But if you can get enough people to approve of the design of your item inside of the game then it can be added and after that people who are playing the game can offer feedback about the without having to email tech support... Things can be adjusted automatically in code on the fly, if something is thought to be offensive or whatever you could report it.

I think it's just a matter of applying more human solutions.

 

Wouldn't work out. What you and a bunch of people think is awesome would make another group think it's going to unbalance the game mechanics. That is a reason why if you read the forums of different games you'll have one group loving the changes to this or that class while others moaning that they just nerfed their favorite class they play. Balancing the game one way or the other and you are going to get people upset while pleasing another.never ending cycle.

 

Kind of like all of human society... I guess you could argue that it isn't working out but then again we're all still here

 

Well, human society does have some methods of protecting the rights of the minorities. A game wouldn't have that and people like me who would prefer more focus on non-combat would lose out and leave the game. The game would end up being a game that attracted an even smaller subset of players than previously planned for making much of the development obsolete.

 

You just said the solution to the problem and then proceeded to say that the problem has no solution...

"have some methods of protecting the rights of the minorities"

Like the more people think a certain way, the less value each vote becomes worth

 

So how would you do that? I can't imagine the outrage when people realize that the majority voted one way and yet the minority won. It happens everyday in real life, but a game environment is different. It is so easy to leave and shut off the computer.

 

Take a holy sword that has an ability, and let's call the current power 100.

Even though it's a rare item, people are saying its too powerful. So people have the option to go and find that item and click on a button that brings up a menu. This menu can give them several options ranging from I think this weapon is very overpowered too I think this weapon is very underpowered. In the middle is I think this weapon is just powerful enough. You will have to have a numeric value for how much you reduce the weapon's power by each negative vote, how much you increase it by for each positive as well. Now you make it so that if the overwhelming majority of people choose the same thing, say that it's drastically overpowered, but 25 percent of people say it's perfectly fine.... You modify the value each downvote is worth to be less as it gets larger. Conversely, the value of the upvotes will not be decreased and the result will be a mild powering down of the weapon rather than a nerf.

But if everybody voted that it was overpowered, say 89% then it would be moderately powered down.

Anyways that's how it would work

 

I can see how that might work for some games, but personally, it completely takes away from the immersion of the game. Things are affecting the game that are artificial, not associated with the story and the world you are playing in but by the players. Instead of escaping, you are bringing in the outside world.

I get what you are saying and I think it is worth a try. I probably wouldn't enjoy a game like that but that doesn't mean that other's wouldn't.