Someone forwarded me this list of OMG MMO NIRVANA feature sets. While this entire list can be succinctly summarized as “Stuff hardcore players say they want in theory, and no one really does in practice”, I thought it’d be an interesting thought experiment to run through each one and give my thoughts. Feel free to agree, disagree, or call me a clueless n00b in the commentary.
A 100% player-driven economy. NO npcs, except for possibly quest npcs, though only on a very limited basis.
My initial instinctual response: “Oh, HELL no.” To a degree, Asheron’s Call 2, and especially Star Wars Galaxies went down this path, and it just doesn’t work very well until the very top tier of the economy. After the first month of SWG, no one really wanted to sell CDEF pistols any more. You need an NPC backbone to the economy for people to travel to that top tier, and you need NPC buyers to establish a floor of inherent value for in-game items. World of Warcraft gets this almost exactly right: the first few days of gameplay, players deal exclusively through NPCs, then are weaned to the player market gradually, until after a month they play the player-run auction house exclusively.
So, player-driven economy, yes! 100% player-driven economy, no! Extremism in the defense of economy is, actually, a vice.
A Dynamic landscape. The lands that the game takes place in MUST BE ABLE TO CHANGE EASILY. Trees must be able to be cut down, rocks must be able to be moved, and the landscape must be able to display damage. (from say, dragon fire or cannon shot)
The land must follow real-world physics and cycles, and must be affected by them. When it rains, rivers and lakes rise. It becomes more difficult to walk on bare land, as it becomes slippery and muddy. When it snows, the rivers and lakes freeze (or CAN freeze) allowing characters to walk on their surfaces. After rain, fog must form above bodies of water, limiting visibility. Lightning must be able to strike tries and tall buildings, as well as characters (though the chance can be obviously low).
Sure, if your engine can support it. Design in the absence of any technical limitations is cool! Also, we should have ponies. Remember – you also want servers and clients that support hundreds of people in close proximity. Smoothly supporting that trumps working ice floes.
That being said, real-world physics, in moderation, can be a cheap and effective way to establish immersion.
Day, Night, Seasons, and other special conditions must have a real impact on characters. In the winter, characters without adequate clothing must slow down and eventually freeze, unless they find a heat source quickly. Rain must lower visibility, as must nightfall. If it rains blood and meteors, characters must be able to be damaged by falling debris.
There should be some sort of natural disasters that can occasionally occur. Volcanos, hail, meteors, earthquakes, etc, that would ruin someone’s day or damage the land and cities.
This sounds like a very grim world. Like Shadowbane. No one ever smiles in Shadowbane. MMOs are SERIOUS BUSINESS. Blood and meteors rain down from the cold, dark sky.
One of the most common comments of why many players didn’t play the Norse Midgard realm in DAOC was that it felt so cold, dark and depressing. I wonder what would have been the reaction, if in addition to the grim world design TOXIC BLOOD FELL FROM THE SKY.
Immersion is great, up to the point where it harms playability. Day/Night cycles are great, until they get in the way. One of the things I *don’t* like about World of Warcraft is its day/night cycles. They mirror reality on the West Coast. Which means that whenever I play WoW, it’s dark. Azeroth is a very dark place to me. Thankfully, the only impact is that it’s not as shiny.
Players must be able to have an effect on the game world. Players must be able to construct buildings anywhere they please, provided they have adequate materials and time, and the ground is reasonably flat, and they have the required skills to do so. Players must be able to chop down trees, haul lumber, and process minerals, etc etc.
Trees and other living features of the world must grow back over time. The rate that they return is variable, depending on how real the world needs to be. Obviously deforestation is a real problem, but in a fantasy world, perhaps they can be “helped” to grow with magic, or other means.
Buildings must be able to be destroyed. Castle walls must crumble, gates and doors must be able to be bludgeoned inward.
Fire should burn flammable things. Wooden walls are flammable. So are forests. So are people. On the same note, putting out fires should be possible if suitable actions are taken.
Sure, within limits. In Ultima Online you could build wherever you wanted. The inevitable result over time: Sosaria Suburbia, where trolls and ogres roamed forlornly, looking for prey in the middle of tract housing. Which was, actually, pretty funny, but probably not what the world builders had in mind.
That being said, in moderation, player impact on the game world is a good thing – arguably a necessary thing. Players want to feel as though they matter. Placing their stamp on the world is a path to this. The key is in limiting it so it doesn’t overwhelm the entire world.
Players must be able to form governments and rule themselves. This means that at first, sheer anarchy will rule the world, until reasonable players form powerful guilds and leagues, and begin protecting others, forming a more civilized society. Players with similar views of morality will of course band together naturally, and form the beginnings of good and evil governments. Eventually they will elect officials, or simply claim the right to rule. They will send out tax collectors, to fund the kingdom from the people who are protected by it. None of this must be hard coded into the game. Sheer human personality will make it possible, provided that the game allow such things to occur.
Yes. Next?
Players must be able to kill each other without game-engine based rules to protect weaker players. Modern society was ruled by the stronger person for years. A game will have to undergo this period also. Weaker players will be forced to either live on their own, and try to hide from the stronger players, or join more powerful guilds and governments, and remain under their protection until they are strong enough to venture out on their own.
BWAAAAHHAAHAHAHAHAheeheeheeHAHAHAHA. (finally breathes.) No. Next?
All skills, abilities, classes, and races must be completely balanced. Without this obvious step in place, a dominant race/class group will immerge based on broken game rules.
Duh. It’s hard, y0. There’s even a company that is trying to make a business model out of doing it for you. But yeah, lack of balance in a game with PvP is hot death (and arguably so in PvE as well).
There must not be any “random item drops” from slain creatures, unless it is reasonable to assume that the creature would possess such a thing. Receiving a sword from a giant wasp threatens the immersion of the game, but finding a rusted sword on an orc is not unbelievable. However, creatures and players must be able to be skinned, field dressed, and cooked.
When a creature is created with items that can be “looted” from its corpse, the creature uses those items in combat. If there is a possibility of getting a magic sword off an orc, and an orc is spawned that carries one, then that orc should USE that magic sword in combat.
Yeah, that’s one of my pet peeves, too. (Irrational item drops, not the lack of the ability to be a cannibal.)
Artifact items must be completely unique. Only one instance of each may exist in the game world at any time. Rare items must be rare. Perhaps there are 2-5 instances of a “rare” item for every 1000 players.
Someone didn’t learn the lesson of the Holy Water Sprinkler of Nem’Ankh, I see. Note well: if you make a cool game that is rare, all you are doing is ensuring that your entire playerbase will go literally insane, because they will all insist that they HAVE to have that rare item. Encouraging insanity amongst your playerbase is only good if you’re doing a game on the Cthulhu mythoi. tl;dr version: artifact rarity SUCKS.
No item gained from any creature can be more powerful than the more powerful player created items, except for artifacts and “rare” items.
In other words, “player crafted items should be the most powerful, except for the stuff that’s more powerful.” In this example, the hardest core PvPers will all go find the artifacts, because they’re more powerful. And they’ll resent it, because they have to stop PvPing to do it. And they will hate you. I mean HATE YOU. No. Really. They will hate YOU, personally. Trust me.
The takeaway you should get here is that the player craftables of your game will be the PvP baseline, because they will be the most accessible/least rare items. Balance accordingly, but also remember in general, making items terribly meaningful in a PvP context will cause a lot of resentment and hatred from your PvP playerbase.
Combat must be real time. A “push the button and watch your character engage the enemy” combat system may be required to keep dialup users in sync with the rest of the game world, but it is not realistic. Skill SHOULD play a role in combat, especially against other players. Like any good FPS game, weapons would need to have a short delay after each “firing” based on size and weight and magical bonuses.
Ranged weapons must be able to be fired at will at any place within range of the character using the weapon. A “target” should not be required to fire the weapon. Likewise, melee characters must be able to swing at any time, at any space within the range of their weapons.
Terrain, objects, and other characters should provide cover against physical attacks to some degree. Closed doors ought to block javelins, for instance. On a similar note, some attacks like magic or lasers might just go straight through. Other attacks like arrow volleys could simply arc over the wall to hit their targets.
Ah, the eternal debate about skill-based vs stats-based combat. And people who believe they have skills, of course, want skills. Hey, everyone raise your hand who’s willing to admit in public they don’t have skills? Just me? Yeah, that looks about right. Guess what – statistical analysis shows 80% of you are lying your asses off.
There are games which have twitch/player skill in PvP combat (Turbine especially favors this design, as seen in AC1 and DDO). They generally aren’t popular, because people find out they don’t like being in the 80% very much.
That being said, auto-attack-and-wait-for-death has its own sin – being boring. Your combat should probably not be boring, especially if it’s what your players are doing constantly. Luckily most modern MMOs punish auto-attack-and-wait-for-death, well, for most players anyway. (guess who’s been levelling up a paladin in WoW! and is so bored out of their mind with it they retreated to Second Life! Uh huh.)
Characters must not be able to walk through other characters, trees, shrubs, rocks, or any other “object” large enough to reasonably halt an average adult.
A noble concept in theory. However, this adds a ton of processor cycles to your server. Is it worth everything cool that you’re going to have to ditch to make that happen? Server processor cycles are not an infinite resource. Server-side collision detection is VERY hard on your server. Client-side collision detection is your game wearing a silky red dress and saying “Hey, big boy, want to code an exploit? No, really. Don’t. I’ll hate it. Ooh.”
Characters must eat. Not eating must cause weakness after several meals are skipped. Likewise, characters must sleep. Going without sleep for some time must cause fatigue.
Yes, everyone *loved* having to regularly eat muffins in Everquest.
I thought we had moved beyond the “punishing your players is cool!” paradigm of game design.
Death must be permanent. Perhaps lower level characters could be able to respawn, until an average level.
You know, this could be a great interview question for a game designer. “Do you think permadeath in a persistent world, giving the customer a dialog box that says “You have lost the game, all your work invested in your character is history, you should stop giving us money now” is a good idea? You do? Thank you for your time, we’ll be in touch.”
A creature or other player that is able to deal damage to another player must be worth experience to that player. Any creature or player not able to damage another player may be worth no experience.
Bottom feeding is cool! Other then that snark I tend to agree. Of course that experience should be weighted. Which may approach the theoretical limit of zero based on risk vs reward. I wonder if this bullet point is just a reaction to some game’s risk vs. reward cycle being broken.
Except for an obvious magical field, the landscape should hold no boundaries, provided that a character has the required skills to “climb” or “swim”, etc. A vast ocean could be unswimable, but boats should exist, crewed by players with the appropriate skills. (and built by other players with the appropriate skills!) A magical field should only be a boundary as a placeholder for further expansion as the game grows.
Um. You do know that these worlds aren’t real, right? That they’re hosted on a game server that has to actually have the content for the world stored somewhere?
I suppose you could just track someone’s X-Y-Z and let them wander off into a THX-1138esque prison of whitespace. That sounds like a lot of fun.
There must be a player-based resurrection system in place. (for instance, cleric or healer players can resurrect dead players) This helps the permanent death situation.
So, it’s permadeath. Unless you have friends. Sucks for you if you don’t have friends. Wow, I’d sure hate to be a new player in this game.
Once dead, any player can loot your corpse, taking whatever items they wish. This is how artifacts get redistributed
I tend to agree, within strict limits. Those limits make the design interesting. The limits are also necessary since the ability to steal items that took a player real-life hours or weeks to acquire are a permadeath-level “You Lost!” cancellation decision point. Of course, the author of this point I suspect would wildly disagree with my given limits. My guess is the word “carebear” would be used in a forum post.
Reasonably Intelligent creatures should be able to loot your body and use whatever weapons and items they find.
If not for the points listed above, this is actually almost funny enough to implement.
Creatures that are assumed to be “intelligent” should use tactics in combat. And yes, something a little more in depth than the “bring a friend” dynamics of the current crop of mmorpgs.
I tend to agree. With the following caveat: if you have smart monsters and stupid monsters, players will make a beeline for your stupid monsters, to the extent that you can use metrics to find your stupidest monsters simply based on killcounts.
Realistic Vehicles: Spaceships, speeders, and steeds shouldn’t just be a quick way to get from point to point. A horse that only follows a pre-programmed path is a waste of good glue. Players should be able to control the movement of their vehicles, as well as fight from within or atop them.
Sure. Willing to wait a year while your artists do all new animations and models so you don’t look like complete ass while fighting on horseback? Is my producer willing to wait that year? Again, the game of game design involves working within resource limits. Given that, horseback/vehicle combat is almost always the first thing lopped off because of that – it’s the low hanging fruit. Everyone always promises that it’ll get added in the first expansion. They lie like dogs.
The use of basic items should not be restricted to trained-only characters if it doesn’t make sense. Just because you don’t have any points in the “Shield” skill doesn’t mean you can’t figure out how to hold one up in front of you in a fight.
There’s a hell of a lot more to melee combat then “holding stuff in front of you” – watch fencing videos sometime, they’re all over Youtube. That being said, if you let everyone use shields – amazingly, everyone will use shields. Which makes the people who actually picked the Shield skill feel pretty damned stupid. Hey, I get a 5% chance to block blows for free! You paid skill points to get a 20% chance! Loser!
No global channels. Everything should be restricted to distance. Instead of a vender channel, implement a player advertising system, such as local billboards or something similar (be creative).
You do know these are social games, right? Inhibiting socialization in a game built on socialization as a basis may not be a good idea. Of course global channels should be opt-out (thank you Barrens, for reminding me to turn off /1) but restricting it (or even such insanity as removing /tells) based on “realism” simply lurches into “punishing your players for the sake of presumed immersion” territory. Which, if you have not been taking notes, is bad.
Players need to start out in a completely random area. This not only keeps things from being too systematic and unrealistic, but it also solves the problem of people just waiting for “noobs” to log it so they can take part in a slaughter. (Agreed, but with the addendum that random starting locations should be limited by the average zone level, if there is one. Starting new players off in a random high death area is a bad idea.)
I like it that the list author pointed out the reason why this won’t work for me. This blog entry was getting long anyway!
And finally, to close with the remainder of items to which my reaction was basically “yeah, that could be cool”:
Disguises: Some players could benefit from being able to disguise their faces and names with an appropriate skill or spell. Disguised players might infiltrate the enemy as spies, assassins, and saboteurs… or they could just dodge that bounty on their heads for a while. Maybe they could even get a shave and a haircut.
Multiple crafters and builders should be able to help each other make items and structures. Speed and/or quality of the craft could benefit.
I suppose I could be seen as too dismissive or snarky in dismissing most of this list. As dreams go it’s a fairly articulate one. But dreamy lists like this tend to ignore limits, like budgetary constraints, time constraints, demands of the market, and the sheer limits to what current server and client hardware can accomplish.
Of course in time all these limits will look like so much Luddite ravings. And a successful game will pick maybe one of these things, and say “this is how we are different!”. But most game developers aren’t literally stupid people, message board traffic to the contrary. Sometimes decisions that look idiotic were taken for very non-idiotic reasons.
Broken Toys 
They will send out tax collectors, to fund the kingdom from the people who are protected by it.
Ah, this game will teach us how to run our own organized crime ring! cool! “It would be a shame if somethin’ happened to your noob avatar”. How was I? Good?
Sheer human personality will make it possible
Running your government on a Cult of Personality. /shrug well it worked for Lenin and Hitler …
Reasonably Intelligent creatures should be able to loot your body and use whatever weapons and items they find.
So THAT’S how the wasp got that vorpal sword!
Players must be able to chop down trees … Trees and other living features of the world must grow back over time. … perhaps they can be “helped” to grow with magic, or other means.
Heh I can imagine players trying to chop magicaly regenerating trees down. “I swear I chopped halfway through then turned around. When I looked back it regrew!”
“ok no more sauce for you old timer”
Oh dear, everything but the Fetapult. But then again, they have cannibalism.
I can’t wait until games are so realistic that I’ll log in to discover that my house and all the possessions therein have burned to the ground because some anonymous level 1 psycho with a torch wandered past it earlier in the day.
And it’ll be my own fault for not having paid off the local fire brigade, made up of players who apparently have nothing better to do all day long than to run around from house to house making sure nothing’s burning.
tl;dr.
The whole original document was designed with nothing in terms of reality in mind. A fair number of the things aren’t halfway thought out and some of them have already proven to be really hard, if not impossible, to implement in an MMO. Them being so silly, it’s hard to pick a favorite, but I think I’ll go with number five and suggest this person never did play UO in the original housing boom.
I remember someone telling me that Will Wright, genius designer that he is, thought about allowing players to set fire to buildings in Sims Online might be a good idea. He further thought that players would form volunteer fire brigades to put out the fires others would set.
I remember almost falling out of my chair laughing.
The most common pitfall MMO designers, at least lead ones, run into is imagining player behavior in terms of ideals for the game design they want to implement, rather than trying to tailor their design for how real human beings are apt to behave in a virtual world with limited consequences. Unlike the real world, no one has to live in a virtual world, and unless there are rules enforced by someone other than players, no one’s going to care enough about their fellow players to accept any code of conduct.
You need an NPC backbone to the economy for people to travel to that top tier, and you need NPC buyers to establish a floor of inherent value for in-game items.
EVE has a player-driven economy that is actually working quite well. No one ever sells to NPCs, and the only items bought from NPCs are those that can’t be crafted by players. Admittedly, the economy wouldn’t work without NPC money sources and sinks, so it’s perhaps 99% player driven 🙂
The takeaway you should get here is that the player craftables of your game will be the PvP baseline, because they will be the most accessible/least rare items. Balance accordingly, but also remember in general, making items terribly meaningful in a PvP context will cause a lot of resentment and hatred from your PvP playerbase.
Again, EVE has this straight down: The most powerful items are rare NPC drops, but most people use player crafted items, especially in PvP. The risk of your rare artifact exploding or being looted by your opponent makes a strong argument for using easy-to-replace player crafted items.
Interesting – this list looks suspiciously like it was crafted by an old-school UO player…
Definitely lacking in reality. The author doesn’t seem to realize that when they log off, the game keeps going. What happens if the “leaders” of the government cancel thier accounts and don’t pass it on to anyone else? What happens if I decide to torch your house while you’re at work? Who’s really going to stop a gang of jerks from tearing through a vilage and destroying it? If they get blacklisted, they can just make new characters. Considering there’s permadeath, they’d have to.
The vast majority of players are doing just that: playing a game. To most people, it’s the same as playing cowboys and indians, and grabbing a super soaker full of ice water out of the garage. Sure, it disrupts the game, but it was fun.
Ah… a rehash of the world vs game really. I already have one world that logging out of is rather permanent, I’d really rather not deal with a second.
“Reasonably Intelligent creatures should be able to loot your body and use whatever weapons and items they find.”
It’d be a hoot to strip naked except for my level 90 sword (with ubar enchantz), then die to a level 1 gnomish pantymancer. Watching him loot the sword and one-shot every noob in the starter zone for the next three weeks might just be worth the perma-death.
DAoC implemented this feature.
wait for it…
It was called crafting.
What? Too soon?
Also Scott, I will be sorely disappointed if your game does not have bloody cannibal perma-death dealing meteors.
This missed an old(and good one) Its been done before and people still ask for it but rarely see it.
No classes or levels.
Just have skills. All skills would have progressively harder to obtain levels, but no limits on the number of skills. Over powered old characters would be prevented by linking skill use to specific equipment.
I think I have seen hard-core players ask for that everywhere. But maybe it can work so it doesnt belong here.
These requests sound like the rantings of a sociopath, one who likes torturing small animals but cries whenever momma raises her voice. The parts of it that aren’t twisted and horrible ideas sound technologically impossible given the writer’s abhorrence of instancing.
Permadeath is such a bad idea. It’s one thing for tiny closed-systems, like your average Sunday tabletop group that meets at the game store. But in something that takes months or years to hit max level/see all content? It is so terrible that even the argument should be foregone.
There are only three ideas I even begin to like:
No Global Chat: Global chat really serves no purpose other then attention-whoring, RMT spam, and as a substitute for a decent LFG system. Any real social networking takes place over local chat, guild chat, party chat, and person-to-person messaging. Restricting access to global chat, while providing point-and-click social management tools, was one of the few smart things Planetside did right.
Multi-crafter Construction: Horizons did this, and it didn’t totally suck. WoW does this with the Transmute relationships between Alchemists and everyone else. So its out there, sort of.
Disguises: This is a neat idea, but its inefficient. Alts will always be the perfect disguise.
Why is it that lists like this are always written by those who typically assume their POV in world is the one that matters, and never give any thought to how even minor tweaks of mechanics can cause cascading waves of destruction when multiplied across thousands (if not millions) of users?
“Players must be able to form governments and rule themselves.”
This is another one of those “sucks for you, if you don’t have friends” designs and I’d like to know more as to why you endorse it, Lum. People who solo in MMOs (the ones that allow it) are just as plentiful as guilded people if not more plentiful. If the only governments are guild-based, all guilds will share some of the same interests, one of which is preventing solo players from doing anything meaningful.
“All skills, abilities, classes, and races must be completely balanced.”
It’s quite amazing that MMOs as a genre have always been highly plagued by this. I don’t think any other game in any other genre has as much pressure to assure an even playing field as MMOs do.
“Ah, the eternal debate about skill-based vs stats-based combat. And people who believe they have skills, of course, want skills.”
Like choosing what physics will be in your game, I consider this just another design choice. I’ll play a skill or stat-based MMO, but the reality is there’s only two skill-based MMOs out there (Planetside and WW2OL) and it sure would be peachy if we had more than two.
Player governments, done right, are one of the most powerful ways players can make a real impact on their world.
You need to work on your griefing skills. No need to risk your high level type guy when you can use an alt.
I think that perma-death could work in single quest time instances where you risk everything to gain much but a whole game would just be too much. Of course since nobody thinks they are going to die you do run the risks of pushing someone towards the cancel subscription quest but since it’s not my paycheck I think it could work.
Perhaps the silliest idea was the no global chat channels. This will be the first thing people will get around, either by 3rd party aps or by open voice servers. While it might save a few coins you do lose some of the trust with the customers in the “do they know what they are doing” arena by not coding something so common to games now and that is a price that they shouldn’t be so willing to play.
I want to play on the server that can do all the things they dream. I don’t want the features; I just want the horsepower.
Heh, the “no global chat” is actually why I assumed this was an ex-UO player… I don’t know any other MMO that has purely location-based communication. (And UO’s working real hard to move away from that, actually)
I’m having flashbacks from Dawn.
Anyway, you would have to charge a lot to make money off the 2000 or so hard-core people who would keep playing a game with those features. But hey, we don’t produce games to make money, we produce them TO CRUSH! Or to put it another way… MONEY: BAD! HARDCORE: GOOD!
These definitely sound like the rantings of an old-school UO player (me being one myself)…
Dynamic landscapes scare me. Look at the amazon rain forest, and we KNOW deforestation is bad for the world. Can you imagine what it would look like in a virtual game where folks really don’t care about the ecology?
And considering what folks did in UO when they stole house keys, I can’t imagine having housing be flammable and there be no NPC’s to put the fires out. No one’s gonna sit in game waiting for a fire somewhere just so they can run and put it out.
I love how they request permadeath, but say that it won’t be permanent if you have a friend or some other kind of resser. This would be the type of person who’d have a ressing alt logged off near their ambush spot so they could quickly log on and res themselves after they die so they can loot their enemies.
Players must be able to kill each other without game-engine based rules to protect weaker players.
That just scares me, and summarizes their whole list. They want to be the stronger person who can slay anyone they want without consequences. And they will, because they’ll group up with other griefers just to pray on the weak indefinitely and ensure that no one reaches their level of power.
Some of the ideas are great, but too many of them remind me of griefers.net….
Player governments, done right, are one of the most powerful ways players can make a real impact on their world.
Sadly, not always for the better. Giving them the power to make significant difference usually just shows the majority of players that the game is out of their control and broken when the government makes choices they don’t approve of. They’ll take this impression of a broken government as that of a broken system, ad a broken game.
If you allow everyone to have control of their own little government so they can do things their way, then their ability to make significant impacts on the world fade away almost completely.
Lum making snarky comments on Virtual World Design! I knew there was a reason I endured all those posts about RMT.
There’s way too much to comment on. I’d rant like a lunatic for hours, but it wouldn’t really make much difference. Although I will say that I think a truly advanced world needs mandatory PvP. I know it sounds incredibly stupid, and there’s no game that exists that could implement it without everything turning to shit; But there needs to be some way for a large group of players to tell a small destructive group of players to “go to hell, because we don’t want you around”. You can’t just keep giving the players more and more freedom without providing others with some method of stoping them. Otherwise, you’ll just end up like UO, with a forest full of houses and no way to get rid of them. But that’s for me to go insane thinking about.
The only other thing worth commenting on is the “dynamic world where you can do everything”; I’ve run the math for a world with transformable terrain. It’s hard. Really hard. Forget about dialup, broadband is a requirement for such a world. It’d burn through bandwidth like nobody’s business. That, and if there’s a bigger path to exploits, I don’t know it.
Well shit. Now I have to go and design.
“Players must be able to form governments and rule themselves. This means that at first, sheer anarchy will rule the world, until reasonable players form powerful guilds and leagues, and begin protecting others, forming a more civilized society.”
As a self appointed rep for the PK community, may I just say, Oh yes, please please please, pretty pretty please, I will pay double please. And if you could implement the whole thing about the blood of my victims actually staining the grass ofr a limited amount of time, that’d be pretty damn cool too (think of the artistic possbilities!)
I’ve fought Haven way back when. It wasn’t quite a fair fight, but they made good sport of it.
What a wonderful world it would be!
Actually, I have implimented this, and it’s quite funny, more so when a PC fumbles and accidentally drops their weapon/shield.
“”Players must be able to kill each other without game-engine based rules to protect weaker players.””
What’s weird or funny about this at all? The single best experience I’ve ever had in an MMO, bar none, was Asheron’s Call Darktide (pre-housing – Housing destroyed what it once was), and it operated on precisely this principle.
I agree this sounds like a UO ol sK00| r0xd!!!! type who went to college and learned how to spell in the last ten years. But there is one underlieing point that makes people keep referencing back to Raph’s dark dystopian world, it did a hell of a lot of things that the 3d games still haven’t done. Horses are hard? Fuck it has been ten years since sprites and we still can’t do horses?
Not a computer genius, but that sucks, resource breaker or not.
Anyways this thread is making me cry from laughing. Torch wiedling newbies fighting uber sword equipped mongbats. Now there’s an idea.
“”I’ll play a skill or stat-based MMO, but the reality is there’s only two skill-based MMOs out there (Planetside and WW2OL) and it sure would be peachy if we had more than two.””
In keeping with the above point, Asheron’s Call was and is a *relatively* skill-based MMO… that is, if two people are within a broad, rough equivalent level range to each other, who wins is largely up to skill. An example being that a level 150 with skill can handily beat an unskilled level 275, and so on. Though, to be fair, this aspect of the game has been lessened over time with the inclusion of ‘elder game’ content.
There will always be players who delight in the idea of getting smacked down hard, throwing off the oppressor and making successive revenge kills.
These players typically have trouble understanding why they are a minority.
Even the most stable internet connections go linkdead sometimes. As soon as you hit the instance where your “risking it all”, you’ll go LD guaranteed!
Heh. I had a hand in writing this a few years ago. Im surprised its still getting tossed around. I haven’t updated it in forever. Some of these points have been used in more recent games, and if I should probably note that somewhere. I check Scott’s blog fairly often and was surprised to see this on here.
You all are raising really good points, most of which we considered when the list was written. The most obvious problems deal with current technology. Deformable terrain is nearly impossible when its not instanced, for example.
As for perma-death… We debated that for a while. The point of the majority of the list is to integrate the players fully into the world as much as possible. Perma-death, except with the one caveat of a player-based system of resurrection, means that your healer class becomes crazy important. Likewise, the healer could then charge for the service, once again pushing the economy into a deeper player-focused system. We don’t want to punish the players as much as make it very important to tread carefully. I suggest that it adds realism, and a far higher sense of accomplishment when you have defeated a particularly hard quest or enemy. Likewise, it helps to keep the player base from being dicks, because you rely on players to resurrect you.
I wonder if I should throw some forums up on the list. I really enjoy reading everyone’s opinions.
And I never really played UO seriously, I think I might have had it for a month or so, but I couldn’t tell you what version I was playing or anything. I know none of the other people that helped write the list have ever played it. Most of the motivation for the list actually springs from irritation with other games.
ADDENDUM: I went and checked the referral links after seeing this on here to see if anyone else picked it up.
Ouch!
http://www.sok.org/board/viewtopic.php?t=41815
I hadn’t realized it was whiny. Now I’m a sad panda.
Player governments, done right, are one of the most powerful ways players can make a real impact on their world.
This could be because they’re almost the only way players can make a real impact on their world, aside from world events and opening keep doors. but on the other hand,
This is another one of those “sucks for you, if you don’t have friends” designs…People who solo in MMOs (the ones that allow it) are just as plentiful as guilded people if not more plentiful.
Well, these are social games. You design everything knowing that players will be working together, then you go back and decide what to add/adjust for alternative playstyles, like strict soloing. Otherwise, what’s the point of all that network code?
Except for an obvious magical field, the landscape should hold no boundaries, provided that a character has the required skills to “climb” or “swim”, etc. A vast ocean could be unswimable, but boats should exist, crewed by players with the appropriate skills. (and built by other players with the appropriate skills!) A magical field should only be a boundary as a placeholder for further expansion as the game grows.
If he’s talking about the actual world boundaries being merely “temporary,” then Lum’s right. He’s insane.
However, if he means zone walls in general, then I agree with him vis-a-vis WoW and Everquest and the like. The “chokepoint-field-chokepoint-field” design choice is artificial, stilted, and even more annoying in WoW than in EQ; at least EQ occasionally had zone lines longer than the clipping plane distance. One of the things I liked best about DAOC, and missed when I left, was that a gradual change in scenery and a chatbox message were the only indicators that you’d moved into a new zone.
I prefer to think the list is for game designers in UFP (United Federation of Planets), who boldly go where no one has gone before. For they would probably never encounter the low-end computers, lousy internet quality, cheating players/hackers, and the problem of all problems : the improvident boss/publisher.
Further more they have a miraculous tool called HoloDeck. 🙂
Perhaps this list doesn’t aim on East-Asia market anyway…..
*smokes cigarette*
Wow. For a couple glistening moments I felt like I was back in the Classic Age of Lum again.
Player governments (with real powers) would be great if they were elected and thus had to answer to the governed (the players). But more, I think any government needs to be tied to something like a city, or union type faction, and these need to be inclusive of players who want to join, not just those accepted by the governing body.
Permadeath, while I’d play it, I think it’s a bad idea for most players, or for a game that wants to have numbers. Heck, I want to play a game with plenty of other players to. That’s why I’d shun a permadeath game. But I think a high risk that includes permadeath, for a top end reward would be fun and cool.
Screw the players that complain over selfish reasons. They’ll play anyways if the game is great.
(And another good reason that Devs and GMs don’t have direct contact with players in any form)
Open PvP. This one has always gotten to me. The problem isn’t that players got PKed. The problem was that they couldn’t do anything about it and were helpless against it.
When UO tried to implement a justice system, the first thing I noticed was that it was really hard to find a PKer. That’s the first good thing about a justice system. The second thing I noticed was that alot of (otherwise) carebear type players were out and ready to take down PKers. That’s the second good thing about it. The third thing I noticed was, when PKers and other players alike realized that “blue” healers remained “innocent” when they healed a PKer, and this tactic became used commonly by PKer groups, these carebear players realized that the justice system wasn’t working and gave up again.
Include an effective justice system and you can allow the crime. Allowing the crime adds to the game play, risk, and social environments.
Characters blocking characters, jeeze, give players a battle stance they can use when not moving that blocks movement. This allows players to guard doorways or seal off an area. Adds to battles and tactics.
Realistic vehicles…automakers and dealers used to say that people didn’t really want air conditioning. The point being that people really did.
Global chat ruins alot for players who want more than a chat game. But guild chat is neccessary, and outside sources would be used anyways.
Something I want to through in. Social environments, if a game wants to expand on them in a “worldly” fashion, really needs for the idea of level zones to go away. Both is land zones and zones of influence such as in items. Land area zones cause players to divide, and that’s not good for social efforts. Same with trade skills. If a player makes a sword, it should be equally usable to any other player and not limited to his “level”. Adding magical properties is another story, and so is fine tuning the creation, in a give and take sort of way. (stronger but slower, etc.)
But if you don’t have the ever increasing godmode level system, you need to make the game enjoyable in other ways. That’s the whole idea for most people in “worldly”. No “end game”, building in some other fashion besides levels, rare item collections come in big time here, and challenging game play that’s fun just for the challenge.
Amaranthar: Characters blocking characters, jeeze, give players a battle stance they can use when not moving that blocks movement. This allows players to guard doorways or seal off an area. Adds to battles and tactics.
My amazing psychic powers predict that players will be enthusiastic about this right up to the point where griefers start using it to block the entrance to the bank/housing/dungeon/etc, i.e. about five seconds after it’s implemented.
Guild Wars does have body blocking, but only in instanced areas; it’s switched off in towns, probably for the reason I just mentioned. Originally it applied between all entities in instances, but after a while they switched it off between friendlies, so players and their NPC retinues can walk through each other, but players and mobs can still block each other (because the dimwitted AI running the allied NPCs kept blocking players by accident).
Ross, there has to be a deeper PvP system to go with it, but I don’t want to get into that much depth.
But I’ll say this, taking this blocking stance would be a semi aggressive action, sort of like a personal war declairation, and anyone attacking this blocker would be like accepting the war challenge. But in cities and guard zones, the NPC guards can come into play so to prevent abuse that way.
Now, yeah, this means that a guild can block off a dungeon entrance, and you have to fight to get in. Lots of players won’t like this. But a worldly game, I would think, strives for something other than complete “carebear”. I think there are alot of other players like me who are very tired of the monotony of complete safety and eventless games such as we have now, and those same games would still be available for those who don’t want a little setback from time to time.
Well, these are social games. You design everything knowing that players will be working together, then you go back and decide what to add/adjust for alternative playstyles, like strict soloing. Otherwise, what’s the point of all that network code?
Some people just want to participate in what economy there is. While that requires other people to trade with, an auction house makes this pretty much anonymous. They get the benefit of not having to personally deal with your social failings and still get to participate in an economy driven by players.
Another reason people solo in online games is because they don’t want to make new friends, just hang out with the friends they already got. Sometimes those friends aren’t on, or they only have 3 friends that play and they’re already ahead or catching up.
Whatever the reason to solo, it doesn’t make marketing sense to deny these guys, as they’re willing to spend the same cash as a catass uberguilder for less time and less resources. Ultimately, there needs to be plenty of room in this mystical dream player government for soloers, or else those government guilds are going to cut them from your budget just as fast as open pvp would.
“these need to be inclusive of players who want to join, not just those accepted by the governing body.”
That would never work. People would skew the voting with mass hordes of alts.
What needs to be done with player based governments is to give them the incentives/means to act more like shepherds than wolfpacks.
Things like BoB petcorps are the only thing I’ve seen in this direction but something basic like allowing guilds to set something like (send us 500 gold/month through our automatic guild interface and you’ll flag blue and we’ll try to protect you if you’re in our territory unless you’re on our KOS list). Right now even if an alliance in Eve (the MMORPG with the most powerful player governments) wanted to charge soloers to use their territory it wouldn’t work because the paperwork to keep track of who’d paid up on an individual basis would be insane.
Its the ‘Virtual worlds’ vs ‘Online Games’ thing again.
Unrestricted PvP, perma-death, Fetapults and a complete player run economy/government (CRIME included) sounds nice on paper as a fantasy type virtual world, but really where is the game in that? 90% of your paying customers will be sheeple, not virtual theorists – your online world may be the near perfect recreation of your idea of unfettered fantasy warfare, but for 90% of your sheeple customers, it sure as heck won’t be fun. A world full of wolves needs sheep (or sheep that thinks they are wolves), and being a sheep ain’t fun. There are limits of what a virtual world SHOULD emulate – limits that a company that hopes to make a profit should respect.
There is an episode of the Simpsons about online games. It had a nice little sequence of Marge’s online Shadowknight using Mo’s online head as a kickball, “I’m paying $14.99 a month for this?”
While we’re at it, you need to seperate out the ideas that are actually ‘nice to have’ but technologically impractical with present technology (changable landscape, enviromenr etc.) I have no doubt in 10 years or less, your going to have landscape griefing – destroying dams to grief a market city, removing all signposts, causing avalanches to block a town path, random arson to destroy a forest to stick it to the tradeskillers etc.
There is a major problem withyour comments on this list Lum. You have just created even larger expectations in my mind about your new game. You had better hit a home run or I’ll be a sad panda.
Daztur,
Actually, back when eve was relatively new Fountain Alliance – for well over a year, as I recall – offered individual, daily ratting passes based on a code-in-profile system, enforced by FA customs-patrol battleships. Never seen anything quite like that since.
Sometimes I wish more people read blogs so they could understand why certain things are the way they are. Other times I wish people wouldn’t read blogs because they’ll be mislead as to why things are the way they are. Luckily, I’m wishing the former at this time. Good article. I may completely copy you and write up my responses to that very same list, or even just start a new column on my blog called, “Bad Ideas,” addressing each of those one at a time and adding all of the other random crap I’ve heard constantly from players.
I’m not a hardcore player by any stretch. I havn’t even been a ‘serious’ MMO gamer since the couple of years I spent with Everquest – though I spent a few months playing EVE and WoW (and a few weeks playing just about everything else). That being said, I think permadeath is a great idea. As far as I see it – it’s the only solution to the grinds and the ‘end game’.
Think of Life. If you could live forever – what would you do? Nothing, I’d imagine. You’d do it all tomorrow though. Even if you could hold onto your motivation, eventually you’d run out of new content. You’d have seen and done it all. You’d get bored. It’s necessary to die to live.
In MMO terms, what does this mean? It means risk, danger, excitement. It means being careful and learning, not just rushing through without worry. The problem? Implementation.
It’s been said a hundred times and more, and it’s true – no one wants to lose their investment in their game. People spend countless hours grinding levels to get new c0ntent and see more of the world – anything that destroys that destroys the game. The only solution? Get rid of levels and leveled content.
I think permadeath can be part of a viable game design, but only on a skill based system. An open skill system, where any player can choose (maybe buy, from a trainer) and advance (through use) any skill to any level up to a reasonable ‘limit of being human’ cap. This could mean, within a few weeks of play, ‘any’, but not all, content could be available to a player. Permadeath would mean no one would ever hit the very ‘end game’.
Skills could advance quickly when you were new (young) and eventually improvement would slow both with age and experience. It’s harder to improve when your good, and it’s harder to learn when you old. Eventually, age would stop skill advancement and regress some of your skills. Provided you make it this long – it’s time to focus on an heir.
No one wants to lose everything. Some sort of heir system could give meaning to the live’s of retired or dead characters. When you die, or retire a character, your new character would start with benefits. Possibly already knowing the basics of the skills of your previous character and/or an increased rate of skill increase for skills your previous character was strong in. Your heir would inherit your belongings (other than what you lost if you, say, died on an adventure) such your house and bank holdings.
PvP could be worked into a system like this with ease; reward being high in loot and such but risk being higher in the chance of death. Killing newb characters would net you nothing, but would still be a risk since a could of young but combat experienced characters could still run down the high end uber jack of all trades. The more powerful your character, the less willing you’d be to put him into potentially deadly situations, particularly in pvp.
Now, there’s alot of flaws in this, and it definately needs some improvement – but I think permadeath needs to be given a serious reevaluation by game designers.
No one’s gonna sit in game waiting for a fire somewhere just so they can run and put it out.
Fire fighting is something that I think *could* work in an MMORPG.
Fighting off bandits to protect the newbs is practically an act of pure altruism. Putting out your neighbours fire is an entirely selfish act – fire spreads.
That being said, I also shudder at the idea of waves of torch wielding Level 1 Alts constantly trying to burn down the buildings. However, the addition of natural catastrophes like lighting strikes that start fires could certainly help solve the Suburbia problem.
Yeah, you’re right. The fucking assholes will destroy anything that’s good, one way or another. But there’s got to be a way. Maybe a ruling class for a government made up of the founding fathers, and accepted into by them for growth, etc. And still allow other players to join but without a vote that means anything other than as a poll.
But I’ll tell ya, I’m sick and tired of not being able to have a deeper game and largely because of the god damned assholes.
Andrew Crystall:
That must have been a massive bureaucratical pain to keep track of, happy to hear that despite that it was feasible. Being able to automate something like that wouldn’t be especially hard to code I would imagine…
Amaranthar:
“The fucking assholes will destroy anything that’s good, one way or another. But there’s got to be a way.”
The way is to appeal to the greed of the assholes. In the end greed is a much more powerful force than asshattery, since the greedy tend to be more persistent. Just set up a system in which the really greedy players have a reason to act in the way you want them to act out of sheer greed and you’re golden.
“Well, these are social games. You design everything knowing that players will be working together, then you go back and decide what to add/adjust for alternative playstyles, like strict soloing. Otherwise, what’s the point of all that network code?”
One of the reasons WoW is so successful compared to other MMOs is that they didn’t follow this idea. WoW was designed so that a player could solo to level 60. MMOs may be social games, but forced socialization sucks.
Permadeath: Nope. When death is just one intentionally-pulled train of mobs away, no thank you. Even when it’s not. Not something I’d pay a monthly fee for. Diablo-style hardcore ladder, probably. The whole game?
no. way.
Mandatory PvP. Absolutely not. I play MMOs to interact with other people more-or less on my own terms. I don’t want said people to be able to influence my “game experience” with out my consent (within reason). Some people enjoy paying to play a victim. Those people also probably drop a lot of bread to services advertised on craigslist.
Player Governments with real power? Please NO. See the primary objection above. I’ve experienced games where Uber Guilds are de facto governments, excluding those that solo, or even decline the 8-hour a night mandatory raid schedule. I’m not interested in entering a world where “the popular kids” make the rules about who can do what. I played THAT game about 20 years ago. We called it “High School”. Lots of fun if you’re the Captain of the Football Team. Scrawny kid who just moved to the area? Not so much.
I’ve met my fellow gamer, and I’m really not interested in giving them THAT much control over my evening’s entertainment. That would be like inviting the bum behind the grocery store to sit on my couch and control the remote. Only with slightly less “stale bile” aroma.
Anyone remember the game The Thing based upon the John Carpenter movie? I didn’t think so. But it had “realistic weather”. If you stayed outdoors too long (it was the Arctic, after all) you froze to death. It had indoor save points, if you could find them in time. I played it for about 15 minutes. I’m amazed at my stamina, to this day.
I loved the ToA link – point made. I and my cousins quit about 5 months after ToA came out when it became apparant we could no longer RvR with even the illusion of parity in our lovingly crafted, overcharged, 99% quality gear. The sort of time sinks involved in getting things to counter all the game breaking crap that expansion introduced were way beyond our interest in continuing to play.
” No global channels. Everything should be restricted to distance. Instead of a vender channel, implement a player advertising system, such as local billboards or something similar (be creative).
You do know these are social games, right? Inhibiting socialization in a game built on socialization as a basis may not be a good idea. Of course global channels should be opt-out (thank you Barrens, for reminding me to turn off /1) but restricting it (or even such insanity as removing /tells) based on “realism” simply lurches into “punishing your players for the sake of presumed immersion” territory. Which, if you have not been taking notes, is bad. ”
You know, I find it funny that these games are still built upon socialization, when it seem they are being build more and more for the Solo / I’ve only got 2 hours a night crowd.
[…] what is certainly a meme waiting to happen, Lum posted a response to an old MMO wishlist put together by disgruntled players/avid fans (it’s all a matter of […]
You know, I find it funny that these games are still built upon socialization, when it seem they are being build more and more for the Solo / I’ve only got 2 hours a night crowd.
That’s precisely why players want better socialization tools. It’s not that they don’t want to interact at all, they just want to on their terms. No one has time to run 3 zones away to get to the one area of vendors hawking their wares or auction npc. Or if they need a group, a quick way to find players who might be interested, instead of standing around spamming channels.
There’s nothing ironic about it, quite the opposite. That sort of stuff is all the “busy work” that is ripe for replacement.
If you have a real death penalty in a game, people won’t go around starting other peoples houses and fires, and I bet there will be a fire brigade because these people want the safety of friends because they fear the death penalty.
Look at the difference in peoples pvp tactics between eve and warcraft. It’s cause of the death penalty, take it a bit further and have perma death and I don’t think people would be serial arsonists for long.
Also, an auction house is the worst tool to run a player economy. Why do you think the trade channel gets spammed in WoW. Eve online selling is best IMO, followed my lineage 2’s afk store, both far superior to WoW’s 24 hour max auction house.
Governments based on game mechanics,
No, Eve has the best “government” in the games i’ve played. That’s cause government is run on popular opinion, and if you add game mechanics to that they will just be redundant.
day/night cycles suck, they’re bad in WoW, they’re worse in Wurm.
I am rather supprised the list did not include “Bring back precasting”.
Seriously. I cannot imagine anyone, much less an entire community, suffering through such a punative ruleset.
True, because they’ll be splitting their time between serial arson and mass murder.
What will happen is, griefers will start fires, then ambush and kill your fire brigade while it tries to put out the fire.
That’s cause government is run on popular opinion, and if you add game mechanics to that they will just be redundant.
The goons think its primarily nepotism. A lot of people agree.
What happens when the other player skins your body and then rezzes you?
People invoking Eve as an example of anything need to remember that it’s the niche-iest of niche games. Saying an idea worked in Eve is like saying the idea basically failed.
And permadeath? I’ve still never seen any explanation of how this is remotely possible in a game played over the *internet*. When linkdeath = permadeath, the game simply fails. Even the uber-hardcore-peekays go LD sometimes.
Still, great post Lum. Just like good old times, as someone said above.
” Players must be able to kill each other without game-engine based rules to protect weaker players. Modern society was ruled by the stronger person for years. A game will have to undergo this period also. Weaker players will be forced to either live on their own, and try to hide from the stronger players, or join more powerful guilds and governments, and remain under their protection until they are strong enough to venture out on their own.
BWAAAAHHAAHAHAHAHAheeheeheeHAHAHAHA. (finally breathes.) No. Next?”
Don’t laugh at that. He makes an excellent point. “Game rules” is one thing. Societal rules is another. Like, in Ultima Online for instance, you couldn’t kill people in town. Not because you couldn’t cast damaging spells on them, but because the guards would get you. If it said “You cannot cast a harmful effect on another player in town”, that would be game rules, and those are lame. But you CAN do it, you just die and lose your stuff for doing it. Not only is that more fun, but it makes more sense.
I think the laughter just MIGHT have been BECAUSE of the UO example.
It didn’t work.
Hence Trammel, and a great lot of ranty goodness from the LtM archives.
Players in a game with no real world accountability, left to police themselves, will tend towards an on-line simulation of Lord of the Flies. The scale will be directly related to the playerbase size, the size of the game world, and the number of emotes that can be applied in novel and inventive ways so as to humiliate the defeated.
It’s a flawed environment for social experiments.
If you want your game to appeal to anything other than a niche of sado-masochists, you cannot hope to have any sort of open PK. Societal rules will never stop determined griefers. They may shift their activity north, south, east or west by 100 meters, but they will not stop it.
This here had me laughing very very hard.
” Death must be permanent. Perhaps lower level characters could be able to respawn, until an average level.
You know, this could be a great interview question for a game designer. “Do you think permadeath in a persistent world, giving the customer a dialog box that says “You have lost the game, all your work invested in your character is history, you should stop giving us money now” is a good idea? You do? Thank you for your time, we’ll be in touch.”
Snarkyness ftw.
As for the general direction of the “list” it sounds like a way to get people to NOT play your game.
How about using permadeath as a tool to punish negative behavior, for instance PKing in pre-trammel UO? If you prey on other, weaker, innocent players, you die permanently if they manage to kill you in return.
xuri, burro, well anyone:) : the problem is permadeath is not a deterrent to griefing. All death penalties do is force players to use better tactics in pve and pvp, but they don’t stop griefing and harassment. Look at every game that has had death penalties: they all still had griefing, even EVE does. All a griefer has to do is reroll a new character, and they’ll just use alts to grief so they don’t waste their main. Fight naked, etc.
Death penalties might make other players more likely to form anti-pk communities. BUT, will they? Or will they find a different game (or server with different rules) where they don’t have to spend time babysitting? People say Trammel ruined UO, but really that’s like saying pre-Trammel UO worked only because there were no other options for players. Once people got options they left. Even people willing to fight the PKers left, since “patrolling”, or being on a “firefighting team” is really allowing yourself to be held hostage and letting your game activities be dictated by others, instead of dictating it yourself.
[…] and Tipa have had lists of desired feature, while Lum laughs at a general one and Angus laughs at Lum. I’m kinda-sorta with Mark on all this finger-pointing: I think we […]
[…] Lum the Mad panned a list of features someone proposed as their ultimate MMORPG. Not to pick on Lum (love his […]
The only real surprise here was the statement that horses/vehicles are such a problem. From what I see in WoW, and even what I saw in UO, mounts seem to be hugely popular with the players – so much so that they spend at least as much time pursuing different mount models as they do equipment upgrades, in many cases. Remember the ridiculous prices the so-called “true black” nightmares commanded at one time in UO – despite the fact that it was exactly the same as any other nightmare?
My point is that for such a popular feature as mounts to be removed as chaff from a game is surprising. People never admit they look at this as a key feature in their gaming choices, but what I see them doing is exactly the opposite. Everyone wants a pony.
Punishment for grifers can work, I’m convinced of this. It can be permadeath, or a very heavy loss to ability. By this means, the griefer character becomes week and inneffective. It gives regular players a means to enforce “justice”, but what it really does is stop the ability to grief non-stop or even “alot”.
This stops the casual use of PKing to get ahead in the game by looting. It stops the effective use of PKing to grief more than a few times. But most of all, it give regular players a means to enforce law and order, and I think this is something that’s very attractive, and can even turn PKing into a part of the game in the minds of other players. Instead of thinking of it as grief, it might become a feature. I would expect some people to resist this thought at first, but eventually it will become more than accepted, but expected. (If it ever gets off the ground)
Punishment for grifers can work, I’m convinced of this.
What example can you cite of such a system working? I know of no MMO that does anything like this.
“What example can you cite of such a system working? I know of no MMO that does anything like this.”
J., you kidding? Of course you don’t see any examples, no one is even trying. Instead they are all doing their best to give us Brand A with raisins, or Brand M for mature. Nothing in between.
But for the closest thing, I said above:
Open PvP. This one has always gotten to me. The problem isn’t that players got PKed. The problem was that they couldn’t do anything about it and were helpless against it.
When UO tried to implement a justice system, the first thing I noticed was that it was really hard to find a PKer. That’s the first good thing about a justice system. The second thing I noticed was that alot of (otherwise) carebear type players were out and ready to take down PKers. That’s the second good thing about it. The third thing I noticed was, when PKers and other players alike realized that “blue” healers remained “innocent” when they healed a PKer, and this tactic became used commonly by PKer groups, these carebear players realized that the justice system wasn’t working and gave up again.
“If god meant for man to fly, he’d have given us wings.”
J., you kidding? Of course you don’t see any examples, no one is even trying.
So what has you “convinced” that it will work the way you say it would? 🙂 Yeah, UO had bright spots where players were able to enforce a code of conduct that some of them could appreciate, but not that everyone could. Furthermore, none of that was cultivated (intentionally, anyway) by those at OSI at the time, who were still convinced that they needed to ratchet down on the PKing by any means necessary, to stem the outflow of players to EQ.
Result? UO:R.
UO did it. Stat-loss for Reds. It was actually rather effective all things considered. I didn’t stop the problem, but it DID slow it down a lot. Because the counters would decrease over a 48 hour period, and because they were limited to about 4 blue kills before they turned red, most griefers ended up playing to the timers. At best they got the ability to cause a single kill every 8(? I forget the exact number for blues that hadn’t been turned red to lose their counts) hours, or were forced to wait 48 hours or more after they’ve died before resurrecting. That was a massive improvement on their previous ability to kill people constantly with practically no reprecussions.
@Soliae
“My point is that for such a popular feature as mounts to be removed as chaff from a game is surprising:
Don’t think Lum was talking about mounts themselves being removed, but about fighting from your mount being removed.
And had the situation with healing PKers and not getting a criminal flag been addressed, it would have worked much better. Once PK guilds started taking blue healer alts with them, who could heal them with no penalty and you didn’t dare attack them or you went criminal yourself, the players stopped trying.
They forgot a couple:
“There must be no fees at all to access and play the game. The game must be absolutely free to play.”
and
“All players must receive a pretty pony on entering the game for the first time.”
“Artifact items must be completely unique.”
This is actually possible if you steal a random artifact generator from a roguelike.
“Characters must eat.”
Personally I’ll settle for any system that doesn’t involve gaining HP for eating bread. I know a certain ancient ranter insisted that a well-designed MMO absolutely had to have player characters doing something in the offtime. He suggested that characters ate and slept for one half the time they’d been logged in before they got any benefits from offline activity. I think it’s a good idea.
“Death must be permanent.”
This is, despite conventional wisdom, doable. Make character advancement quick, and with a reasonably reachable cap. Remember character advancement includes both items and levels. Note however that this requires RPG game designers to come up with a better reason to play a game than watching R go up. Good bloody luck.
“I suppose you could just track someone’s X-Y-Z and let them wander off into a THX-1138esque prison of whitespace. That sounds like a lot of fun.”
A procedurally generated world could theoretically do this and stay interesting. Or if you’re sane, you could make the world wrap at some point. Or if you’re both sane and cool, you could end the world in a edge of the world style dropoff.
“If you have smart monsters and stupid monsters, players will make a beeline for your stupid monsters, to the extent that you can use metrics to find your stupidest monsters simply based on killcounts.”
If your combat system requires skill that isn’t twitch, then this actually means that you could hypothetically reward skill by having weak enemies with relatively high xp that have good enough tactics to require an intelligent player to combat them. I’d love to see a game where players who could handle kobold ambushes were valued over ones who could tank a gang of trolls.
“No global channels.”
They did this in Urban Dead. Everyone who plays that game gets on the forums or AIM to coordinate everything. See how well that worked?
But most of all, it give regular players a means to enforce law and order, and I think this is something that’s very attractive, and can even turn PKing into a part of the game in the minds of other players.
Oh yes I agree with that, penalties allow players to enforce decorum for various reasons: besides giving people the ability, it also makes griefing so bad that it gives an incentive for others to try to stop it. But it only works if there were only one game. The problem is there are many games. Instead of babysitting and fighting griefers, won’t those players just leave for a game where they can spend more time playing?
Hence my statement saying pre-Trammel UO worked is like saying those rules work only when you don’t give players any other choice. Once players had a choice they left.
I was reading about Prisoner’s Dilemma in , I think it was in The Selfish Gene by Dawkins, but he said studies showed that even when you told players tit for tat was the best strategy, and how to maximize points, they still tried to defect on the other player. So even with all the incentives and strategy spelled out for them: they still chose to be jerks, and in the end their scores were lower. But they kept on doing it.
Honestly, several people cite Eve as an example of a workable PvP system without seeming to understand why it works. Eve is built so that all players are expected to do some level of griefing. Piracy and corporate theft are design elements that are pivotal to the operation of the game’s economy. The entire game design is altered by the supposition that griefing is a valid playstyle. In order to attract any of the average gaming market whatsoever, CCP has had to provide a very large amount of content in protected space simply so that new players and casual gamers will be able to play at all.
The primary risk versus reward consideration for a player in this game becomes “Is what I’m carrying worth enough for another player to sacrifice their own possessions for? Will someone have enough time to kill me before the police respond?”
It’s not an atmosphere that breeds trust or friendship, as both of those attributes commonly are used to rob and destroy opponents. There is a valid game there, but it’s a game that only a certain type of player really enjoys. The majority of players don’t enjoy the level of paranoia sponsored by an open PvP system, lootable corpses, or player run governnments. Unfortunately, those players that do enjoy those things rarely realize that they are in the minority, and will continue to insist forever that player vigilantism and social darwinism are either necessary or desirable in all MMO’s, when in fact, they are usually neither.
Paul, I’m not one of them, and most people who say what I’m saying aren’t either, I don’t believe. I don’t play Eve, I didn’t play Shadowbane, and I only stayed with UO because it had so much potential (heck, they were one very small step away as indicated above), nor do I play pure (non-RP) PvP servers in games like AC, EQ, or WoW. I don’t because that’s exactly why I promote a justice system. I’m not looking for the gank, nor the revenge gank. I’m looking for a game that has a more realistic approach so the it can play with greater depth, and offer reasons for greater social depth. From this can come greater RP too.
Amaranthar are you looking forward to Age of Conan? I am for similar reasons. They are considering an FFA server. Just reading the forums there makes me sometimes excited sometimes turned off.
There is a valid game there, but it’s a game that only a certain type of player really enjoys.
I think that sums up the whole thread. That and we need more ponies.
I understand your PoV, Amaranthar. My response was mainly directed at the original article, and a few other references above. Personally, I’m a big fan of justice systems – I think they generally need to be somewhat indirect and out of the hands of players to actually work.
The other issue is that every designer, sooner or later, will underestimate the intelligence and determination of their players. Systems designed to provide justice are usually exploitable in practice. I tend to think of player behavior following game design (either intentionally or unintentionally). For instance, by including a red/blue system in their sandbox, UO was unintentionally endorsing a level of griefing. The creation of a justice system in this environment is a deal breaker for those players who specifically chose to play UO for the ability to grief. Those players will then look for ways to either abuse the new mechanic, or will quit entirely.
Starting from the ground up? The system has to be in place as a feature for the griefer. This is the only way (for this system) to reconcile the clash between player types. You cannot protect the PvE players from PvP if the mechanics allow for killers to inhabit the world. The best goal (in my opinion) is to minimize the disruption for the PvE player by making a justice system that requires a great deal of energy to evade, without being terribly punitive.
Just my .02. 😉
Yunk, no, not looking forwards to Conan. Looks like another level grind, as as far as PvP, I don’t know how anyone expects it to work with levels except in a zone kind of way. Zones, battle grounds, and other gamey ways. Might be fun for some, but for me, it completely lacks what I’m after. (Got to admit though that their combat attack system looks very interesting, and I might play for a while just for that.) Mainly though, levels are a grind and divide players. They also leave you with that “home is where the hat is” feeling, where I want a homeland to build and defend.
Paul…
“Starting from the ground up? The system has to be in place as a feature for the griefer. This is the only way (for this system) to reconcile the clash between player types. You cannot protect the PvE players from PvP if the mechanics allow for killers to inhabit the world. The best goal (in my opinion) is to minimize the disruption for the PvE player by making a justice system that requires a great deal of energy to evade, without being terribly punitive.”
I see it just the opposite. I think you allow the PvP to make for a better game for the regular player, and you limit it by making the PK character pay the price. Heavily, the burden must be on the griefer. In this way, you take out almost all those PKings that are based solely on selfish reasons of loot and infamy. What you have left are a few diehards, and roleplayers doing it for the RP. You also have the “justice” to soothe the regular players, as well as the lower rate of occurance.
What you add to the game comes in many ways. But mainly:
-you add a social need that gives a glue to social units
-you add a risk that makes everything else more meaningful
-you add gameplay in the form of justice seekers, defenders, etc.
-you add realism. Want to build a home all alone in the country? You need to be powerful, cities are safer. Want to send a caravan of guild product to the city? Defend it. It adds game play as well as a layer of tactics.
The overall effect is to reduce grief to a minimum and then pile on the “justice”, so it becomes part of the regular players game instead of the griefers game.
There are some other things needed, such as a means to track the PKers, even when offline. Here’s where the game becomes more balanced. You’ve already stuck it to the griefers with penalties to reduce the activities, now you make it more of an even game. There’s lots of ways to go here, but the main thing is you need to allow the justice seekers to home in on the “murderer”, and eventually catch up to him. He can stay offline with the character, and avoid justice that way, but eventually he’ll come back. That’s where the justice seekers need to be able to know, and to pick up the trail. The PKer player needs to know only that he has to look over his shoulder all the time, because he won’t know when someone else is hot on his trail.
Wait what? Healing PKs DID cause a blue to get flagged a criminal. It didn’t in the inital notoriety system, because there weren’t any criminal flags to begin with… the first system that had been implemented was simply based on whether you killed ‘reds’ or killed ‘blues’ as they were defined then. But there were other ways to get negative notoreity too… simply attacking someone (player or npc) with neutral or positive notoreity, or stealing, would make you go negative, and then people would just kill you since there were no penalties for it. The reputation system added an extra layer in addition to altering how one achieved red and blue.
With the rep system, the criminal flag was added. As a criminal you became attackable by anyone without any reprecussion. You didn’t get a murder count so you couldn’t go red from attacking a grey, nor did you flag criminal, meaning that no one could attack you besides the criminal flagged player without also becoming criminal flagged. Also, there were several ways of becoming marked a criminal, including stealing and looting. Because of the way the system worked, someone who attacked you for those actions would be flagged as an aggressor, which means if you killed them after they attacked you they would be unable to give you a murder count. That’s really where the system had it’s biggest exploit potential. Because attacking a criminal would allow the criminal to kill you without gaining a murder count, it was possible for people to steal from you and then kill you when you fought back. It also allowed a pk to have helpers like you’re describing, who would stay blue (but only in the long run, they’d turn grey till the criminal flag wore off). Healing a red WOULD flag you as a criminal, and you could be freely killed, but you also would not gain any murder counts if someone attacked you and you retaliated, which effectively let you get into combat through the back door. It’s not that you couldn’t fight back against the players who were doing the healing… you definitely could. It’s just that in the end, they didn’t suffer the reprecussions of the system the way the main attackers would.
Since being healed causes a situation in which you pretty much need to attack the greys that are aiding the red, you’re stuck in a situation which basically forces you to add more combatants into the fight. Of course, this wasn’t as serious a problem as you’re making out… since the greys would not be able to attack someone who DIDN’T attack them first, effectively allowing you to gank them much more effectively than they could gank you. They couldn’t aid each other outside of healing, which meant that in group situations it should be much easier to take them down than it would be for them to put up a strong resistance, you simply had to make sure that no one attacked more than one of the healers so that they couldn’t gang up on you. Of course, usually, such groups would go after solo players, and yeah it definitely did suck in those situations, but not significantly moreso than being attacked by a group of reds. The only real difference was that in those situations, less murder counts were handed out, which allowed reds to have a slightly high rate of kills due to them being able to break up into smaller groups without losing too much effectiveness.
The overall effect is to reduce grief to a minimum and then pile on the “justice”, so it becomes part of the regular players game instead of the griefers game.
There are some other things needed, such as a means to track the PKers, even when offline. Here’s where the game becomes more balanced. You’ve already stuck it to the griefers with penalties to reduce the activities, now you make it more of an even game. There’s lots of ways to go here, but the main thing is you need to allow the justice seekers to home in on the “murderer”, and eventually catch up to him. He can stay offline with the character, and avoid justice that way, but eventually he’ll come back. That’s where the justice seekers need to be able to know, and to pick up the trail. The PKer player needs to know only that he has to look over his shoulder all the time, because he won’t know when someone else is hot on his trail.
I agree with your idea. We’re not talking about different things, I think. In your game, the griefer has motivation for griefing, and it’s integral to the design. You’re endorsing the action through design, even if unintentionally. The griefer will look at your system and say, “A challenge!” Evading the law becomes the murderer’s primary purpose. And besides, what hardcore gamer wouldn’t just love the ability to go on the forums and say, “Yeah, I’m a badass! Four guys tracked me to my hideout and I thugged them all!” At the same time, your design allows for “good guy” griefing, too.
Sounds like WoW meets Eve-O. 😉
Not going to read the whole comment thread, because a quick skim suggests it’s full (as one might expect) of people who are convinced, in the absence of ever having actually worked in a design team for a real, shipping MMO, that OMG HARDKORE PVPZORZ is the way of the future, and so stupidly easy that MMO companies must be employing lobotomized flounder to have not figured it out yet.
This list is what all these kinds of lists are — and they’re all, ultimately, the same list: people who don’t know the first damn thing about design, trying to design.
Last night on my way home, I was idly drafting a proposal out loud to my housemate for a SERIOUS HARDCORE GAME in which the tutorial takes place on a battlefield in the middle of a war. Of course, it has permadeath, offering an option not seen since Traveller: the ability to die during character creation.
And I realized something, or re-realized it: ‘fun to design’ != ‘fun to play’. I’d have a blast designing a game that abusive. It would be like Gibson’s description in Neuromancer of Night City: ‘Night City was like a deranged experiment in social Darwinism, designed by a bored researcher who kept one thumb permanently on the fast-forward button.’ I’d get to watch players scurry like rats in a maze, discovering that every piece of cheese is protected by lethal traps, and the cheese is poisoned. Constructing those systems would be awesome.
But it wouldn’t be fun to play. Neither would the game implied by this list, or any of the other lists I’ve seen, including lists handed to me by would-be designers re: my game. The game implied by this list would be nothing more than a chance for otherwise empty people to fill themselves with a kind of Lord-of-the-Flies importance, engaging in behaviors that are otherwise totally unacceptable.
To the author of this, and all other, OMG HARDCORE lists: Please keep in mind that one, you will not be the assraper, you will be the assrapee; two, you will never be the guy at the top of any heap in this or any other game; three, you cannot simultaneously propose a game that requires a next-next-next-gen game engine AND propose a game that includes permadeath and open PvP looting. To the third point, I’d like to add: you might be able to find someone insane enough to invest in your little power-trip masturbation fantasy, but it won’t be enough to pay for the feature set you want. Wishing don’t make it so; you can’t wish hard enough to crap thousand dollar bills, which is what you’ll need to be able to do to ever, ever make that game.
Because its audience is about a thousand people, and its development costs would be astronomical.
In conclusion, the only thing more irritating than a player who thinks he’s a designer is a player who thinks he’s an artiste.
Unfortunately, all games must be designed first and foremost with the presumption that the player is a complete asshat whose primary joy in life is spreading misery to others – because while most aren’t, enough are that the effect is the same.
MMOs have been a great learning tool that shows exactly how thin the veneer of civilization is without the disadvantages of having to live in a hellhole like Zimbabwe.
(Sidebar: DDO isn’t really about PvP ‘skill’ combat. It has some but just as a fun diversion added post-release to amuse players. I’m not sure it’s correct to ping Turbine on this)
Paul, yes, but the main thing is to add a realism and a constant risk, but one that’s on the rare side. There’s a game with this in mind (although lacking the massive funding that I really wish they had) called Ages of Athiria, where Kressilac calls it UO3DMNG (UO in 3D, minus the gank). That “minus the gank” part is critical. If the game as it plays out doesn’t satisfy the regular player, the semi-carebear if you will, then it doesn’t work.
The point is, in any fantasy novel/story you have the crime, but you also have the means to end the criminals behind it. This does that. It allows for heroic actions as well as devilish evil. But it keeps it to a minimum, because most players by far are not going to risk their character for a brief fling with evil deeds.
But yeah, youd have the few who want to see how far they can get, and then youd have the bounty hunters. But mostly, you’d have a whole bunch of players playing in a game world that’s much more realistic and has the freedom of choice that’s so lacking in todays games, and just makes sense.
There are even more aspects to consider. Things such as allowing every character to be able to fight better than a less than developed PKer character, and a closer set of skills from newb to max, however it’s done, so that the entire social unit can be on a close enough footing that they can actually play together and intermingle. This means taking out level zones, which means other things come into play such as lag for large groups, etc. There’s a lot to consider, no feature of any game should be designed without also considering what effect it has on all other features. But there are answers.
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