MMOs talk about the grand adventure, but they give you the same day over and over again. You kill the same things over and over. Everything stays in the same place, every day is the same as yesterday. The same guy hands out the same lame quest, to everyone, everyday. Everybody does the same lame quests. Time has no meaning, players have no impact. The MMO genre will continue to stagnate and bore the game community until some developer steps up and makes a changing living world. One where time moves forward and tomorrow is different than today.
I agree! I mean, I don't know how to realize it myself, but it is a letdown in most MMOs, especially when you play them a longer time.
People don't ask questions to get answers - they ask questions to show how smart they are. - Dogbert
The problem was the players that were taking the event too far. The plague and ghouls were being used by numerous players to outright grief others, follow them around, and kill them. I'm sure it was the worst for new WoW players as well, since I saw a huge number of ghouled players in the lowbie/starter areas repeatedly infecting and rez killing new characters. Don't blame people complaining, or for blizzard from removing it. The intended design of the event was fine. The problem was the players who abused the mechanics of it, and used it as an excuse to terrorize other players and ruin their fun.
What? Players using their ability to influence the world to harass/grief other players????
Inconceivable!
The ghoul plague in no way influenced the game world in a meaningful manner. It was a temporary mechanic that simply allowed players to circumvent regular game mechanics which prevented them from killing NPCs and other players of the same faction. It did not serve to do anything more than allow some players to negatively influence other players by killing them or killing important NPCs otherwise unable to be killed.
The biggest issue with the whole thing was that ghouled players could attack, infect, or even kill players of the same faction on non-PvP servers.
So if a temporary ability to influence the world in a transient manner pissed off the customer base, what will a permanent ability to impact the world long-term do?
If temporarily killing NPCs is annoying, what is permanently killing them like?
If logging in and not being able to go to your preferred city during the duration of the event is a pain, what is logging in and finding your preferred city was scoured from the map while you were asleep?
MMOs talk about the grand adventure, but they give you the same day over and over again. You kill the same things over and over. Everything stays in the same place, every day is the same as yesterday. The same guy hands out the same lame quest, to everyone, everyday. Everybody does the same lame quests. Time has no meaning, players have no impact. The MMO genre will continue to stagnate and bore the game community until some developer steps up and makes a changing living world. One where time moves forward and tomorrow is different than today.
MMOs talk about the grand adventure, but they give you the same day over and over again. You kill the same things over and over. Everything stays in the same place, every day is the same as yesterday. The same guy hands out the same lame quest, to everyone, everyday. Everybody does the same lame quests. Time has no meaning, players have no impact. The MMO genre will continue to stagnate and bore the game community until some developer steps up and makes a changing living world. One where time moves forward and tomorrow is different than today.
Sounds awesome! When's the release date?
Stagnation and bore the game community... well maybe FRONT MISSION Online might change that. Usually before something new or innovative comes out, there is the usual deluge of mediocrity.
MMOs talk about the grand adventure, but they give you the same day over and over again. You kill the same things over and over. Everything stays in the same place, every day is the same as yesterday. The same guy hands out the same lame quest, to everyone, everyday. Everybody does the same lame quests. Time has no meaning, players have no impact. The MMO genre will continue to stagnate and bore the game community until some developer steps up and makes a changing living world. One where time moves forward and tomorrow is different than today.
As a side note, there are things which can be done to avoid total sameness while avoiding many of the problems of "dynamic" content.
At the simplest level, make day/night and seasons matter. In old EQ, some zones became much deadlier at night. Having certain quests, NPC, mobs, etc, only "alive" during a part of the game day[1] would make the passage of time more real and give players a new factor to manage. (For this to work, the day'night cycle would need to occur 3-4 times per real world day, minimum, to allow all players access to all content regardless of their play schedule.) Seasons/weather should also occur, perhaps at a 1 real-world month=1 game world season, scale. Weather would change over time. Various parts of the world would flag on or off -- perhaps a high-level dungeon cannot be accessed during winter, when snow blocks the mountain passes. This won't satisfy the people who think that when they play a game with 250K+ other players, they can still be the world changing hero (and so can everyone else!), but it's a nice start.
On a more complex level, you can have a game world with an evolving storyline. Most game world do, it's just that the storyline unfolds very slowly -- generally, when there's an expansion pack. Assuming you invest the resources, you can plot a story for 5-10 years time and then have monthly updates which advance the story. The key here is making sure that changing/altering content represents only a small percentage -- I'd say 10 -- of the total game content. One of the key problems here is that you're going to be making your plot, and the masses of content to go with it, before you learn about your game's demographics and play preferences. You may end up with a lot of content the player base simply doesn't care about. The expansion system is generally driven by actual playstyle -- if players want X, make sure the expansion has a lot of X. Doing it another way can be risky.
Well, no one said it would be easy to make a dynamic world where time moves on and players can have some influence on the progress of the world. But just because something is hard does not mean it cannot be done. I'm on the design team behind such a project. No game engine that existed when we started could have made our game work. It has taken a dedicated team of programmers and designers five years to get this past the concept to a working prototype. But make no mistake, it is possible. Many of the points you are making about why this is difficult (or why you think it cannot be done) are absolutely valid problems that had to be overcome. But they have been overcome. Enough game content seems to be one of your main sticking points. Well, it was certainly one of ours. We found the answer in more new technology. We designed a tool to construct content faster and easier. This is not your fetch me ten goblin skulls questing. Each quest we build is over 12 hours of play (if you hurry). The stories are deep, the episodes within a single quest many. All the way through the quests you are making choices that change the quest. But it's not a simple branching model. A story is written, then that story is put through a proprietary tool that helps vary the quest and construct portions of it on the fly. This means that although the concept of the quest is written, the details of the quest are created at run time, and the player's past and present are factored into the alterations done to the quest. This creates a quest that is neither simple auto generated content, nor all hand made effort by scripting. These are tailored quests, each worthy of a fantasy novel. Just fifty of these quests would take an average players (note the word average) about two years of time to complete. Now, everyone isn't average, there are those that will chain themselves to the computer and have food delivered and play 24 hours a day. Can they power through the content? Sure. Here is a news flash... we don't care. Yes, that's right, if someone wants to power through two years content for the average player in two months, get to it. They still get their monies worth, even if they take it all at once. It's like complaining that a speed reader can power through the Lord of the Rings books in two hours. OK, so? Let them. It will take me about ten to twelve hours. Either way, we read the books. Anyway, we're tired of people telling us what we can't do, which is why a group of us who have worked at various game companies for years, and been constantly told what we cannot do, decided to go ahead and build Citadel of Sorcery. We purposely took on the hard choices and made it vastly different. Will some people hate it? Sure, but we don't need to please everyone, that's impossible. What we can do is make the game we have always wanted to play, and that's exactly what we're doing. Now that the game engine is 80% complete and the world is up and running. Most of the issues we have faced are behind us. New problems will arise, but contrary to the posts of some people in this thread, nothing is impossible.
Jatar Designer at MMO Magic, Inc. Citadel of Sorcery project.
You're my hero!
I'll definitely play this when it comes out, so long as enough other good gameplay mechanics are incorporated into it of course. It sounds awesome. Thanks for writing.
The complaining was not that a segment of the player base got extra content but that another segment of the player base got content take away from them. I really do not consider running around as a zombie infecting people to be much of 'gameplay' but I was more then willing to share the game with those that did. However, the 'zombie people' were not willing to share with the others. They took over vital parts of the cities and were unwilling to let others conduct 'business as normal'. It is this selfishness that really pissed me off. There was nothing revolutionary about the zombie event and everyone knew that it would only last about a week so why did they have to be such dicks about it? What right did they have to make it so unnecessirly difficult for me to continue on my 'journey' in the game? Couldn't hey have just slowed down and enjoyed themselves rather than becoming a pain to people who did not share their preferences?
Like I said....perhaps Blizzard, in keeping to their "make everyone happy" policy, should have made an "opt in for dynamic content" flag or something, explaining that things might occur, should you choose to opt in, that could disrupt your usual schedule. I think that would have gone over a lot better.
The problem was the players that were taking the event too far. The plague and ghouls were being used by numerous players to outright grief others, follow them around, and kill them. I'm sure it was the worst for new WoW players as well, since I saw a huge number of ghouled players in the lowbie/starter areas repeatedly infecting and rez killing new characters.
Don't blame people complaining, or for blizzard from removing it. The intended design of the event was fine. The problem was the players who abused the mechanics of it, and used it as an excuse to terrorize other players and ruin their fun.
And AGAIN...I repeat....IF Blizzard had made it an "opt in" thing, then no one that didn't WANT to be "negatively affected" would have been. Those that did not OPT IN for the event, would have been immune. This would have been similar to flagging yourself for PvP.
Am I speaking English badly here? I think I must be, because you're not getting what I'm saying. I'm saying, that as per usual, Blizzard STILL, even in this scenario, COULD have stuck to their policy of trying to make everyone happy by simply requiring an opt in for the event. Those that did NOT want to be inconvenienced (including new players) would have been rendered immune by not choosing to opt in for the event.
Anyone else reading this....am I making sense? Or is there just a problem with me and a few other people with communicating?
And AGAIN...I repeat....IF Blizzard had made it an "opt in" thing, then no one that didn't WANT to be "negatively affected" would have been. Those that did not OPT IN for the event, would have been immune. This would have been similar to flagging yourself for PvP.
Am I speaking English badly here? I think I must be, because you're not getting what I'm saying. I'm saying, that as per usual, Blizzard STILL, even in this scenario, COULD have stuck to their policy of trying to make everyone happy by simply requiring an opt in for the event. Those that did NOT want to be inconvenienced (including new players) would have been rendered immune by not choosing to opt in for the event.
Anyone else reading this....am I making sense? Or is there just a problem with me and a few other people with communicating?
The idea that in an mmo you can have the option of opting in or out seems a little contradictory to me. Why do so many feel the need to simplify the genre. It's a gem. Treat it as such.
"Mr. Rothstein, your people never will understand... the way it works out here. You're all just our guests. But you act like you're at home. Let me tell you something, partner. You ain't home. But that's where we're gonna send you if it harelips the governor." - Pat Webb
And AGAIN...I repeat....IF Blizzard had made it an "opt in" thing, then no one that didn't WANT to be "negatively affected" would have been. Those that did not OPT IN for the event, would have been immune. This would have been similar to flagging yourself for PvP.
Am I speaking English badly here? I think I must be, because you're not getting what I'm saying. I'm saying, that as per usual, Blizzard STILL, even in this scenario, COULD have stuck to their policy of trying to make everyone happy by simply requiring an opt in for the event. Those that did NOT want to be inconvenienced (including new players) would have been rendered immune by not choosing to opt in for the event.
Anyone else reading this....am I making sense? Or is there just a problem with me and a few other people with communicating?
The idea that in an mmo you can have the option of opting in or out seems a little contradictory to me. Why do so many feel the need to simplify the genre. It's a gem. Treat it as such.
See that part up there in white? Okay....I apparently need to explain, since you probably didn't read all of this long convo back and forth before this.
I DO NOT approve, personally, of the dumbing down of the game and "opting in" or out of anything. MY preference is that people will just GROW UP and realize that the ENTIRE game is not going to cater to them personally every single minute, and that sometimes things might happen that they won't "like," but are in the interest of making the game alive and dynamic.
I really don't want to have to explain my views all over again. Suffice it to say that YOUR response....is preaching to the choir here. You need to tell all the QQ'ers that whined about a little inconvenience in their auction house runs when Blizzard did something to spice up the damn game a little bit.
My comment about "opting in" is really just pointing out how Blizzard, in ALWAYS trying to appeal to, and please, EVERYONE....ends up not fully pleasing anyone. There will always be someone whining about any changes they make...always. So why not, (tongue in cheek here), in keeping with their "please everyone policies"....let people OPT IN for dynamic content.
Understanding me now?
EDIT: And before someone repeats AGAIN that the game dynamic wasn't the problem, the asshat players WERE....how is that any different than PvP gang ganking or any other game mechanic that can be used to be a jerk? Jerks will be jerks....the game mechanics are not going to change that. You either learn to tolerate them and live with it, or you leave the game. Every single game I have ever played, the jerks will FIND ways to grief and bother people. Since this is true....should we also elimiate any forms of PvP or anything else that might "inconvenience" people that don't like what's happening? No. So what did they do? They made PvP optional.
Maybe they just need to make EVERYTHING that someone might not like....optional. /rolls eyes (yes....this is sarcastic and an attempt to point out the foolishness of expecting the game to always be to every players' liking at all times)
This is the classic problem with a dynamic world. You have to look at all the ways it could change, figure out the worst possible way (for the players) that it could change. Then ask yourself if the game was always at this 'worst' state, would people still play it. If your answer is no, then the game is a loser.
Originally posted by girlgeek EDIT: And before someone repeats AGAIN that the game dynamic wasn't the problem, the asshat players WERE....how is that any different than PvP gang ganking or any other game mechanic that can be used to be a jerk? Jerks will be jerks....the game mechanics are not going to change that. You either learn to tolerate them and live with it, or you leave the game. Every single game I have ever played, the jerks will FIND ways to grief and bother people. Since this is true....should we also elimiate any forms of PvP or anything else that might "inconvenience" people that don't like what's happening? No. So what did they do? They made PvP optional.
Maybe they just need to make EVERYTHING that someone might not like....optional. /rolls eyes (yes....this is sarcastic and an attempt to point out the foolishness of expecting the game to always be to every players' liking at all times)
It's really an issue of 'bait and switch'. People pay Blizzard to play the game by a certain set of rules and expect Blizzard to maintain those rules. If people wanted to play by a different set of rules they would be paying another game company.
Horde raiding an Alliance city is part of the game rules and as such is an acceptable part of the game. Horde killing Alliance NPCs is an understood part of the game. Horde killing Horde NPCs is not part of the game. Similarly Horde can only attack Allaince players if they are flagged and cannot attack Horder players except in a duel. These are basic rules of the game and define how people play teh game and whether they are willing to pay for the game.
Part of why I play WoW is that it has certain 'jerk protections' in place. Other players can only kill me under certain conditions and it is difficult for other players to kill key NPCs I might need to interact with. If Blizzard removed these 'protections' I might not pay them to keep playing. They are an intristic part of the product I am paying for.
A key part of WoW is that PvP is mostly optional on Normal servers and PvP is Horde vs Alliance. Blizzard removing these rules for the scourge event was the equivalent of a restaurant puttting meat in my veggie burger or a soda company putting suger in their sugar-free drinks.
And AGAIN...I repeat....IF Blizzard had made it an "opt in" thing, then no one that didn't WANT to be "negatively affected" would have been. Those that did not OPT IN for the event, would have been immune. This would have been similar to flagging yourself for PvP.
Am I speaking English badly here? I think I must be, because you're not getting what I'm saying. I'm saying, that as per usual, Blizzard STILL, even in this scenario, COULD have stuck to their policy of trying to make everyone happy by simply requiring an opt in for the event. Those that did NOT want to be inconvenienced (including new players) would have been rendered immune by not choosing to opt in for the event.
Anyone else reading this....am I making sense? Or is there just a problem with me and a few other people with communicating?
The idea that in an mmo you can have the option of opting in or out seems a little contradictory to me. Why do so many feel the need to simplify the genre. It's a gem. Treat it as such.
See that part up there in white? Okay....I apparently need to explain, since you probably didn't read all of this long convo back and forth before this.
I DO NOT approve, personally, of the dumbing down of the game and "opting in" or out of anything. MY preference is that people will just GROW UP and realize that the ENTIRE game is not going to cater to them personally every single minute, and that sometimes things might happen that they won't "like," but are in the interest of making the game alive and dynamic.
I really don't want to have to explain my views all over again. Suffice it to say that YOUR response....is preaching to the choir here. You need to tell all the QQ'ers that whined about a little inconvenience in their auction house runs when Blizzard did something to spice up the damn game a little bit.
My comment about "opting in" is really just pointing out how Blizzard, in ALWAYS trying to appeal to, and please, EVERYONE....ends up not fully pleasing anyone. There will always be someone whining about any changes they make...always. So why not, (tongue in cheek here), in keeping with their "please everyone policies"....let people OPT IN for dynamic content.
Understanding me now?
EDIT: And before someone repeats AGAIN that the game dynamic wasn't the problem, the asshat players WERE....how is that any different than PvP gang ganking or any other game mechanic that can be used to be a jerk? Jerks will be jerks....the game mechanics are not going to change that. You either learn to tolerate them and live with it, or you leave the game. Every single game I have ever played, the jerks will FIND ways to grief and bother people. Since this is true....should we also elimiate any forms of PvP or anything else that might "inconvenience" people that don't like what's happening? No. So what did they do? They made PvP optional.
Maybe they just need to make EVERYTHING that someone might not like....optional. /rolls eyes (yes....this is sarcastic and an attempt to point out the foolishness of expecting the game to always be to every players' liking at all times)
There is already an opt in/out system in WoW with regards to the level in which players can influence each other. It's rolling on a PvP or PvE server, and PvP flagging. The whole point is that Blizzard completely neglected their own system and put many players in a position where they were effectively forced into a play style they had already opted out of, for the duration of the event.
Yes, players that took things too far were the problem. But that's the exact reason why so many players opt to play on a PvE server and optionally participate in PvP from time to time. It's because they don't want their game severely negatively influenced by another player deciding to be a jackass for no other reason than because they know they're frustrating other people. And when you force people who have already made their decision to avoid being in situations such as this, by rolling on a PvE ruleset server, you better believe many of them are going to be upset when you suddenly make their decision irrelevant and force them into the exact situation they were trying to avoid.
As per the people complaining about the event. I ran into more griefers that were upset than I did players who were going about their business. Most players would just move somewhere else, but some did complain. It was when the players who fought back however, that the crying really started. It baffled me as to why so many people would get incredibly upset when I would mow them down on my Ret paladin when they were a ghoul trying to kill and infect same faction players and NPCs. They were complaining that they weren't being allowed to grief.
I got hate tells from a couple players that I would repeatedly cleanse or kill. Why? Because they kept getting infected and running straight to the auction house to try to infect everyone and all of the NPCs. They were basically calling me a griefer for killing them, when essentially they were complaining that I wasn't letting them grief other players.
The real complainers weren't the people who didn't want to participate, even though there were some. The biggest whiners in the whole event were the people who were trying to grief everyone else as a ghoul by trying to infect and kill everyone and everything. Which I simply don't understand, because there was absolutely no reason for doing so other than "you could". It was basically just an excuse for them to grief.
But this issue has little to do with dynamic world content. It was one short, and in the end meaningless, world event that went as quickly as it came, and made zero lasting impact on the game world. There are many ways to make world content dynamic and give players some measure of influence without giving them a free license to grief. So long as you make fundamental rules of gameplay, and you don't violate them or give players the opportunity to circumvent them or at least get away with circumventing them for long, then there won't be any issues.
The idea that in an mmo you can have the option of opting in or out seems a little contradictory to me. Why do so many feel the need to simplify the genre. It's a gem. Treat it as such.
Because when UO came out with "No opt out" PVP, and then EQ came out a bit later with "Only Opt-In PVP " (Remember the Priests of Discord?), UO started bleeding customers to EQ, and they kept bleeding until they did Trammel/Felucca, whereupon they bled slightly more slowly.
Because (and no matter how many times I say this, it never sinks in), most people don't spend 15.00/month to be someone else's bitch. Call them carebears or wimps or casuals[1] or whatever you want, the bulk of the potential paying customer base doesn't want other players controlling their play outside of an established contract. (i.e, a duel, a PVP scenario/battleground, or anything else where all parties go into it with an understanding of the exact risk and the exact reward or penalty. ) "All PVP, All The Time" games have this contract, as well -- anyone who cries about being ganked in Darkfall or EVE has only themselves to blame. But if a game promises one level of allowed player interaction, and then creates another, you get angry players. (UO was not pitched as a PVP game. It was pitched as a virtual world to the roleplaying types who loved the morality, quests, and stories of the Ultima single player games. It was then flooded with refugees from Diablo and Quake who had no idea of how to interact with other players beyond killing them. The roleplayers left for other pastures, the sociopaths had no one to kill but each other and got bored, and a lesson was learned by all, except posters to MMORPG.com. But I digress.
Beyond PVP, this extends to all aspects of the game world. No one wants to be told "You will NEVER be able to do X, because someone else has done it and now X is unavailable." Sure, this happens sometimes, for a variety of reasons. Some old content is eliminated or changed and people keep "legacy" prizes. Rarely, there will be one-time world events and quests. But I can't imagine a game where content is constantly swept out from under players feet on a daily basis, where you take a week off and nothing you were working on has any meaning any more. (Exception: If the content is all very trivial and basically random, it won't be nearly as problematic, but trivial and random content is boring. Again: Play Elder Scrolls: Arena. Incredibly addictive for a week.... then tedious.)
(One compromise might be semi-unique content. Imagine some uber-weapon which only one of exists on the server. Some lucky dude finds it -- and discovers each time he hit with it, there's a 1 in 1000 chance it vanishes and is placed somewhere else. If he keeps it in a vault/bank/never uses it, there's a chance each day it will just vanish. Then someone else finds it. Placement is random on a very high end boss. The server is notified whenever the blade is found or lost, and a mad scramble to be the next claimant occurs. The former owner gets some kind of title/special power/whatever.)
[1]"lrn2play n00b"? Why should you bother learning to deal with PVP if your desired goal isn't PVP? If I want to do quests and craft, and one game offers it to me without having to deal with gankers, and one game offers it to me only if I can avoid/beat the gankers, what possible reason would I have for choosing the other game? If I want PVP, I'll play a PVP game. If I don't, or don't want it all the time, why play a game which forces it on me when there's so many other choices?
But this issue has little to do with dynamic world content. It was one short, and in the end meaningless, world event that went as quickly as it came, and made zero lasting impact on the game world. There are many ways to make world content dynamic and give players some measure of influence without giving them a free license to grief. So long as you make fundamental rules of gameplay, and you don't violate them or give players the opportunity to circumvent them or at least get away with circumventing them for long, then there won't be any issues.
I repeat: First, catch a lion.
You are stating as trivial issues which have never been well resolved despite hundreds of designers trying. How do you give players "meaningful" influence and yet prevent "griefing"? You seem to be saying "Players can change everything about the world except anything that might actually matter!"
Sure, you can make the "Fundamental Rules Of Gameplay" be, in essence, "You can be screwed by anyone at any time", and make sure the players know this up front, but good luck getting enough players to support you.
What you keep saying, in effect, tends to boil down to, "It's easy to solve the world's energy problems. All we need to do is find a way to make 100% efficient solar cells that can be manufactured for about a dollar a megawatt. Why don't you engineers get on that?"
Like they used to say on college: Show your work. Why don't you spell out some of these rules of gameplay?
Maybe they just need to make EVERYTHING that someone might not like....optional. /rolls eyes (yes....this is sarcastic and an attempt to point out the foolishness of expecting the game to always be to every players' liking at all times)
You can't please all of the players all of the time.
If you want a thriving game, though, you need to please most of the players most of the time.
(This includes understanding the difference between what the players SAY they want and what they REALLY want. Blizzard, for example, has wisely resisted adding banks/AH in every podunk village, because centralizing them in cities forces players to visit the cities often, making the game world seem "alive". It also forces people to take breaks to sell/train/etc. While annoying to players in the short run, it makes the game much better in the long run.)
As I posted in another thread, the major difference between "things the game does to annoy you" and "things other players do to annoy you" is that the designers have an overriding interest in keeping you as a customer, which means they will make sure any obstacles you face can either be overcome with skill/time, or are essential to the overall game experience. Other players have no interest in providing you with meaningful challenges or long-term enjoyment; they just want to screw with you. Thus, a player is more likely to put up with built-in obstacles and problems than he is with player-generated ones.
(As a very simple example of why it's so hard to debug this stuff and why people who think it's trivial are nuts, there was a quest in Vanguard where you got an urn full of snakes. You were supposed to use the urn in some village to kill some monsters. Players found the snakes would spawn anywhere, and used the urn in crafting halls, etc, to grief. So code had to be written to change how the urn worked. Now, multiply this by all the myriad ways a "player driven" game might "empower" players and find every loophole and exploit before they're used to drive off the customer base.)
But this issue has little to do with dynamic world content. It was one short, and in the end meaningless, world event that went as quickly as it came, and made zero lasting impact on the game world. There are many ways to make world content dynamic and give players some measure of influence without giving them a free license to grief. So long as you make fundamental rules of gameplay, and you don't violate them or give players the opportunity to circumvent them or at least get away with circumventing them for long, then there won't be any issues.
I repeat: First, catch a lion.
You are stating as trivial issues which have never been well resolved despite hundreds of designers trying. How do you give players "meaningful" influence and yet prevent "griefing"? You seem to be saying "Players can change everything about the world except anything that might actually matter!"
Sure, you can make the "Fundamental Rules Of Gameplay" be, in essence, "You can be screwed by anyone at any time", and make sure the players know this up front, but good luck getting enough players to support you.
What you keep saying, in effect, tends to boil down to, "It's easy to solve the world's energy problems. All we need to do is find a way to make 100% efficient solar cells that can be manufactured for about a dollar a megawatt. Why don't you engineers get on that?"
Like they used to say on college: Show your work. Why don't you spell out some of these rules of gameplay?
Just because a game world is dynamic and can be influenced by players, does not necessarily mean that players with intent to ruin it, can do so effectively.
Lets take my example much earlier in this post where I was describing a system in which players influence a particular area, over time, by their actions and choices.
A quick synopsis of it again, is an example of an NPC town in which completing particular tasks would help grow said town, and defending said town from NPC attacks, to which the frequency and strength of said attacks varied based upon how much players did to cull the attackers before said attacks.
Such a system would be balanced in a way which a single player could not have a sweeping impact on said NPC town, at least not over a short period of time. Each player would make a small impact where they participated. Over long enough time, a single player's contribution could potentially make significant changes on their own. This is the key point. If a player were to do something negative to try to break or harm the progression of said town, then if they were the only players investing time in doing so, it would 1) take them a great deal of time to completely break it and 2) if they are the only person actively participating and investing time to influence said town, then does it really matter if they "break" it? With such a design, the sum of player actions would determine the direction of how things evolved over time. A few players doing the wrong thing might impede progress, but the majority acting toward the same goal will always win out. Additionally, there could be systems in which taking actions that are negative towards said town, will make you hated by said town, and cause you to become hostile to it and unable to interact with it any longer, possibly even flagging yourself as an "outlaw" for misbehaving. In other words, actual consequences for poor behavior.
This is just around my original example. There are many other ways to deal with 'trouble makers' in a dynamic world. Say players can create their own towns. Said towns are run and controlled completely by those who are part of it. The leader of said town, has the authority to pick and choose who can be a resident of said town, or even choose to restrict uninvited visitors in some manner. The point being, the community that created it, has control of it. If you don't like what that community is doing, then you don't participate in it and move on. Somewhat like a guild, where you pick the one that fits for you.
There have to be rules and restrictions to limit and control the flow in how players can influence the game world, and each other. Sure it may not seem ideal to some people, but it is the only way to curb a particular type of player from ruining everything in their path "just because".
There are many solutions to the issues you think make dynamic worlds impossible. You simply need to think outside of the box.
Originally posted by Lizard_SF (As a very simple example of why it's so hard to debug this stuff and why people who think it's trivial are nuts, there was a quest in Vanguard where you got an urn full of snakes. You were supposed to use the urn in some village to kill some monsters. Players found the snakes would spawn anywhere, and used the urn in crafting halls, etc, to grief. So code had to be written to change how the urn worked. Now, multiply this by all the myriad ways a "player driven" game might "empower" players and find every loophole and exploit before they're used to drive off the customer base.)
Another example comes from early days of EVE. EVE always had the 'you can be attacked everywhere but in high sec space your attacker will attract dire consequences' system. However, In the early days it quickly became apparent that those 'dire consequences' were insufficient to stop people massacring everyone in a newbie zone. CCP tinkered with the settings and the power of the Concord police force until they pretty much gave up and instead went with 'if you attack someone in high sec space you will be destroyed and if you manage to get away you are cheating' plus harassing or scamming new players can now get your account suspended. They gave up ion trying to balance the system and instead went with a meta-prohibition to cover anything they missed.
There are many solutions to the issues you think make dynamic worlds impossible. You simply need to think outside of the box.
I never said "impossible". I said "impractical', or, more precisely, "the cost of the resources invested into solving these problems will not attract substantially more players than investing the same resources in other areas of game design".
Both of your examples have been tried and implemented to some degree in other games. Let's look at how they worked, shall we?
In Warhammer, cities began at "level 1". By doing quests, etc, you could raise the status of the city -- each level unlocked new features. How it actually played out:
Players quickly got bored of doing the same quests over and over.
The promised level of "dynamism" did not match the delivered. Or, rather, the player base made up in their minds how it would work, and the reality wasn't as good as what they imagined.
Despite general boredom with the quests, the cities quickly maxed out and most players never noticed the "new" features because they'd always had them.
Some of the "new" features, like guild areas and high level dungeons, were deemed so important they became "level 1" features. This mattered because attacks on a city could lower its level.
As an additional note, you can easily end up with a little red hen scenario -- a few players "unlock" content and then anyone can use it whether they 'worked" for it or not. Limit content access only to those who "helped", and new players can't access it -- it's already been unlocked.
In SWG, you could create player cities with limited access to buildings, controls on who could build, etc. (I do not believe there was a limit on just walking through, though there might have been PVP faction cities built by players; I honestly don't recall.) The various editors, layout tools, etc, needed to be constantly tweaked and adjusted to prevent griefing by placing buildings, walls, etc, in such a way as to block content. At the same time, constant messageboard feuds arose between harvesters/crafters, who could plant mining/farming/etc machines anywhere, including in the city, and city runners, who didn't want ugly machines ruining their view. PREVENT this, and you open the route to people locking down high-resource areas by putting a city on them. ALLOW it, and you get the above, "private' cities filled with other people's junk. Also, SWG turned off maintenance requirements after a while, and the game became littered with abandoned cities. (Some games have fixed spots where you can place cities, which solves a lot of the above problems and tends to create others.)
Now, I would say that SWG "worked", in that buidling cities, etc, was something which actually attracted people to the game and the bulk of content players were those involved in city building, management, trade, and economics. However, there weren't a lot of players (out of all players possible) who enjoyed that, so the so-called "New Game Engine" came along, completely upending the game, driving off the people who liked the crafting/economics aspects and not attracting anyone new.
(In UO, player building in the early days led to all SORTS of interesting problems, such as houses built inside dungeons with people inside sniping out, untargetable. Eventually, a lot of restrictions were placed on where people could build.)
Even given all that, these are relatively static things, fairly simple to program. You design X stages for a town, and when the "quests done" counter ticks over a certain point, the Level 1 town vanishes and the Level 2 town appears. I won't say this is a bad or uninteresting feature, and I wouldn't mind seeing it implemented, but I think it falls far short of what the OP wants -- because on every server, you do the right quests and, bing, there's Town Level 2. Eventually, if anyone cares at all, every town is capped. (If the town level "degrades" over time, this can make things interesting, but it also tends to annoy players who feel they're being "forced" to keep doing the same quests to keep the town they've already "won". (EQ2 used to have decay for guild levels -- that didn't last long.))
You also have the fact that what the OP wants is a sense of individual contribution, whereas what you describe is much more collective. You go out and kill orcs, and so does everyone else, and eventually enough orcs are killed that the town "dings", and no one really can say, "Oh, look, I did that!"
(In Vanguard, Diplomats could activate town-wide buffs by doing a large amount of Diplomacy, these buffs would last an hour or two. Two or three diplomats could turn on a buff in about 10 minutes of work, so there was a feeling that "you" did something. Some buffs could cancel others, so, if the game had thrived, I'll bet you would have seen "buff griefers" working to turn off buffs just because they could. As it was, there weren't enough players to see that behavior evolve.)
IAE, you make my point -- you nerf the ability of any one player to have a meaningful impact. You can collectively "turn on" a town, but you can't bring it down or stop others from doing so, so you can "affect the world" only in one way, which the designers have predetermined. (BTW, any system of "outlawing" or "consquences", Does. Not. Fracking. Work. This has been proven time and again. Between alts, friends, and exploits, no player has ever had their actions curtailed by a fear of the so-called "consequences". The only "punishment" which ever actually showed an impact was stat loss in UO -- because you couldn't stockpile stats, borrow your friends stats, or make an alt with the stats. "Reds" who died w/stat loss could face hours of tedious grinding to recover them, and THAT scared them, which told me all I needed to know about the kind of people who claim to want "PVP with consequences" when what they mean is "PVP with consrequences only for my targets".)
(Side Note Ninety-Six Or So: Any system which gives one faction/side/whatever a meaningful in-game mechanical advantage quickly fails, because everyone joins that faction, so it gains more of an advantage, which gets more people to join it, etc. This is why most faction-based PVP games do not ever let one side "win" or give "real rewards" for victory.)
MMOs talk about the grand adventure, but they give you the same day over and over again. You kill the same things over and over. Everything stays in the same place, every day is the same as yesterday. The same guy hands out the same lame quest, to everyone, everyday. Everybody does the same lame quests. Time has no meaning, players have no impact. The MMO genre will continue to stagnate and bore the game community until some developer steps up and makes a changing living world. One where time moves forward and tomorrow is different than today.
Another example comes from early days of EVE. EVE always had the 'you can be attacked everywhere but in high sec space your attacker will attract dire consequences' system. However, In the early days it quickly became apparent that those 'dire consequences' were insufficient to stop people massacring everyone in a newbie zone. CCP tinkered with the settings and the power of the Concord police force until they pretty much gave up and instead went with 'if you attack someone in high sec space you will be destroyed and if you manage to get away you are cheating' plus harassing or scamming new players can now get your account suspended. They gave up ion trying to balance the system and instead went with a meta-prohibition to cover anything they missed.
UO in beta had guards which used pathing to find you and which could be killed, though it was hard. It quickly became obvious how easy it was to foul the pathing algorithms or slaughter the guards en masse, so by release, the guards teleported and were unkillable.
It's interesting how people need to keep learning the same lesson, over and over. On the one hand, if everyone stopped trying after the first failure, there'd be no innovation or progress. (Edison, "500 ways that don't work", yadda yadda) On the other hand, sometimes, the reasons no one's succeeded at doing something is because it can't be done. (Perpetual motion machine) Knowing the difference between "No one has figured out how to do this, but I will.", and "No one can do this" is the difference between being a genius and being a loony.
I say get the Devs or GMs more involved with handing out and monitoring quests. Even daily or monthly events that players could look forward to would go a long way in lowering the stagnation the OP wrote about. I think it would be espcially cool to have Dev or GM faciton leaders in a faction-based PvP game who were setting up where and when to attack or defend, giving orders on the battlefield, or at least somehow influential in how the territorial lines or landscapes change.
Vault-Tec analysts have concluded that the odds of worldwide nuclear armaggeddon this decade are 17,143,762... to 1.
There are many solutions to the issues you think make dynamic worlds impossible. You simply need to think outside of the box.
I never said "impossible". I said "impractical', or, more precisely, "the cost of the resources invested into solving these problems will not attract substantially more players than investing the same resources in other areas of game design".
Both of your examples have been tried and implemented to some degree in other games. Let's look at how they worked, shall we?
In Warhammer, cities began at "level 1". By doing quests, etc, you could raise the status of the city -- each level unlocked new features. How it actually played out:
Players quickly got bored of doing the same quests over and over.
The promised level of "dynamism" did not match the delivered. Or, rather, the player base made up in their minds how it would work, and the reality wasn't as good as what they imagined.
Despite general boredom with the quests, the cities quickly maxed out and most players never noticed the "new" features because they'd always had them.
Some of the "new" features, like guild areas and high level dungeons, were deemed so important they became "level 1" features. This mattered because attacks on a city could lower its level.
As an additional note, you can easily end up with a little red hen scenario -- a few players "unlock" content and then anyone can use it whether they 'worked" for it or not. Limit content access only to those who "helped", and new players can't access it -- it's already been unlocked.
In SWG, you could create player cities with limited access to buildings, controls on who could build, etc. (I do not believe there was a limit on just walking through, though there might have been PVP faction cities built by players; I honestly don't recall.) The various editors, layout tools, etc, needed to be constantly tweaked and adjusted to prevent griefing by placing buildings, walls, etc, in such a way as to block content. At the same time, constant messageboard feuds arose between harvesters/crafters, who could plant mining/farming/etc machines anywhere, including in the city, and city runners, who didn't want ugly machines ruining their view. PREVENT this, and you open the route to people locking down high-resource areas by putting a city on them. ALLOW it, and you get the above, "private' cities filled with other people's junk. Also, SWG turned off maintenance requirements after a while, and the game became littered with abandoned cities. (Some games have fixed spots where you can place cities, which solves a lot of the above problems and tends to create others.)
Now, I would say that SWG "worked", in that buidling cities, etc, was something which actually attracted people to the game and the bulk of content players were those involved in city building, management, trade, and economics. However, there weren't a lot of players (out of all players possible) who enjoyed that, so the so-called "New Game Engine" came along, completely upending the game, driving off the people who liked the crafting/economics aspects and not attracting anyone new.
(In UO, player building in the early days led to all SORTS of interesting problems, such as houses built inside dungeons with people inside sniping out, untargetable. Eventually, a lot of restrictions were placed on where people could build.)
Even given all that, these are relatively static things, fairly simple to program. You design X stages for a town, and when the "quests done" counter ticks over a certain point, the Level 1 town vanishes and the Level 2 town appears. I won't say this is a bad or uninteresting feature, and I wouldn't mind seeing it implemented, but I think it falls far short of what the OP wants -- because on every server, you do the right quests and, bing, there's Town Level 2. Eventually, if anyone cares at all, every town is capped. (If the town level "degrades" over time, this can make things interesting, but it also tends to annoy players who feel they're being "forced" to keep doing the same quests to keep the town they've already "won". (EQ2 used to have decay for guild levels -- that didn't last long.))
You also have the fact that what the OP wants is a sense of individual contribution, whereas what you describe is much more collective. You go out and kill orcs, and so does everyone else, and eventually enough orcs are killed that the town "dings", and no one really can say, "Oh, look, I did that!"
(In Vanguard, Diplomats could activate town-wide buffs by doing a large amount of Diplomacy, these buffs would last an hour or two. Two or three diplomats could turn on a buff in about 10 minutes of work, so there was a feeling that "you" did something. Some buffs could cancel others, so, if the game had thrived, I'll bet you would have seen "buff griefers" working to turn off buffs just because they could. As it was, there weren't enough players to see that behavior evolve.)
IAE, you make my point -- you nerf the ability of any one player to have a meaningful impact. You can collectively "turn on" a town, but you can't bring it down or stop others from doing so, so you can "affect the world" only in one way, which the designers have predetermined. (BTW, any system of "outlawing" or "consquences", Does. Not. Fracking. Work. This has been proven time and again. Between alts, friends, and exploits, no player has ever had their actions curtailed by a fear of the so-called "consequences". The only "punishment" which ever actually showed an impact was stat loss in UO -- because you couldn't stockpile stats, borrow your friends stats, or make an alt with the stats. "Reds" who died w/stat loss could face hours of tedious grinding to recover them, and THAT scared them, which told me all I needed to know about the kind of people who claim to want "PVP with consequences" when what they mean is "PVP with consrequences only for my targets".)
(Side Note Ninety-Six Or So: Any system which gives one faction/side/whatever a meaningful in-game mechanical advantage quickly fails, because everyone joins that faction, so it gains more of an advantage, which gets more people to join it, etc. This is why most faction-based PVP games do not ever let one side "win" or give "real rewards" for victory.)
You've pretty re-iterated what I've been trying to convey. I never said it would be particularly easy to design a system that gives players 'just enough' power to impact the game world to prevent the trouble maker players from abusing it, yet to still keep it fun.
The main aspect of achieving this was touched on in your post. It is that many MMOs have had features here and there which offered players some level of influence, but in the grand scheme it was only a small part of the game. My counter to that is, well, put these types of features in as many parts of the game as possible.
Have NPC cities that can dynamically expand, or contract based on player interaction, or lack there of. Have player constructed, controlled, and maintained structures and cities where those who are a part of it have exclusive control of that land. Have a vast gameworld where it doesn't matter if a city is blocking a particular resource area, because you can simply search for another. Have consequences that deter players from trying to grief others through these mechanics.
Again, not easy to do it all, but the right formula of all of these elements which have been done before, and the sum of each of these 'smaller scale' dynamic game world impacting features will equate to a much larger whole, which is a truly dynamic persistent game world which players feel that their actions make an impact in.
The problem is simply that no developer has taken on the challenge to make a game that focuses on these aspects. That is, not since Origin made Ultima Online, and then SoE made SWG. The focus these days is mostly on character progression and endgame content, rather than actually making a game world that players interact with, rather than simply serving as a backdrop for quest and level treadmills.
Most MMOs no longer take place in virtual worlds, they take place in a static backdrops.
Knowing the difference between "No one has figured out how to do this, but I will.", and "No one can do this" is the difference between being a genius and being a loony.
Innocent troll comment for fun. This is an interesting way of putting up the divide between the two, albeit they are all derivatives of one another: 'the distance between genius and folly is measured by success' etc etc.
That is exactly right, and we're not saying NO to save WoW, because it is already a lost cause. We are saying NO to dissuade the next group of greedy suits who decide to emulate Blizzard and Cryptic, etc. We can prevent some of the future games from spewing this crap, but the sooner we start saying no, the better the results will be. So - Stand up, pull up your pants, and walk away. - MMO_Doubter
Why do you think it is so important everyone has the same experience? That makes a bland conversation
For ex I like to talk to my friends bout Dragon Age Origins. But if we all made the same decisions, its a boring conversation. But if they did something different I ask them why, what they saw, and how can I get the same result.
I see what you mean, but can you seriously see an mmo that each player (in the thousands to start) each have options to create a personalized story unique to him by choices made? Really, it takes yrs as it is to make a huge world that everyone can experience. To add such variables as to cater to each and every player with something that no one else could see is overwhelming even in concept, let alone in execution. Stick to single-player RPGs for those, that's what they can do.
I don't see this happening anytime soon.
Text based MUDS used to do this quite a bit. As some-one else mentioned you also see this sort of thing happening in NWN. It could be done now..... you just have to have GM's that are allowed to be GM's not glorified customer service reps ....and a good toolset for them to use. Heck...you can even have a staff of volunteer GM's drawn from the player base to do alot of this....you just give them supervision from the Senior GM's and provide them with a more limited set of powers so they can't mess things up too badly in an unapproved manner. Alot of old MUD's operated on that very principle. People often forget that in the old PnP days it was every bit as much fun if not more to play as GM rather then PC for many people.
The only real difference was that they were displaying text rather the graphics. But with advances in engine technology....you SHOULD be able to do a heck of alot more in terms of controling graphical objects on the fly then you were back in 1990.
Comments
I agree! I mean, I don't know how to realize it myself, but it is a letdown in most MMOs, especially when you play them a longer time.
People don't ask questions to get answers - they ask questions to show how smart they are. - Dogbert
What? Players using their ability to influence the world to harass/grief other players????
Inconceivable!
The ghoul plague in no way influenced the game world in a meaningful manner. It was a temporary mechanic that simply allowed players to circumvent regular game mechanics which prevented them from killing NPCs and other players of the same faction. It did not serve to do anything more than allow some players to negatively influence other players by killing them or killing important NPCs otherwise unable to be killed.
The biggest issue with the whole thing was that ghouled players could attack, infect, or even kill players of the same faction on non-PvP servers.
So if a temporary ability to influence the world in a transient manner pissed off the customer base, what will a permanent ability to impact the world long-term do?
If temporarily killing NPCs is annoying, what is permanently killing them like?
If logging in and not being able to go to your preferred city during the duration of the event is a pain, what is logging in and finding your preferred city was scoured from the map while you were asleep?
Sounds awesome! When's the release date?
Sounds awesome! When's the release date?
Stagnation and bore the game community... well maybe FRONT MISSION Online might change that. Usually before something new or innovative comes out, there is the usual deluge of mediocrity.
I feel your pain Brothers!
As a side note, there are things which can be done to avoid total sameness while avoiding many of the problems of "dynamic" content.
At the simplest level, make day/night and seasons matter. In old EQ, some zones became much deadlier at night. Having certain quests, NPC, mobs, etc, only "alive" during a part of the game day[1] would make the passage of time more real and give players a new factor to manage. (For this to work, the day'night cycle would need to occur 3-4 times per real world day, minimum, to allow all players access to all content regardless of their play schedule.) Seasons/weather should also occur, perhaps at a 1 real-world month=1 game world season, scale. Weather would change over time. Various parts of the world would flag on or off -- perhaps a high-level dungeon cannot be accessed during winter, when snow blocks the mountain passes. This won't satisfy the people who think that when they play a game with 250K+ other players, they can still be the world changing hero (and so can everyone else!), but it's a nice start.
On a more complex level, you can have a game world with an evolving storyline. Most game world do, it's just that the storyline unfolds very slowly -- generally, when there's an expansion pack. Assuming you invest the resources, you can plot a story for 5-10 years time and then have monthly updates which advance the story. The key here is making sure that changing/altering content represents only a small percentage -- I'd say 10 -- of the total game content. One of the key problems here is that you're going to be making your plot, and the masses of content to go with it, before you learn about your game's demographics and play preferences. You may end up with a lot of content the player base simply doesn't care about. The expansion system is generally driven by actual playstyle -- if players want X, make sure the expansion has a lot of X. Doing it another way can be risky.
[1]Ultima IV managed this on a 64K Apple IIe!
You're my hero!
I'll definitely play this when it comes out, so long as enough other good gameplay mechanics are incorporated into it of course. It sounds awesome. Thanks for writing.
The complaining was not that a segment of the player base got extra content but that another segment of the player base got content take away from them. I really do not consider running around as a zombie infecting people to be much of 'gameplay' but I was more then willing to share the game with those that did. However, the 'zombie people' were not willing to share with the others. They took over vital parts of the cities and were unwilling to let others conduct 'business as normal'. It is this selfishness that really pissed me off. There was nothing revolutionary about the zombie event and everyone knew that it would only last about a week so why did they have to be such dicks about it? What right did they have to make it so unnecessirly difficult for me to continue on my 'journey' in the game? Couldn't hey have just slowed down and enjoyed themselves rather than becoming a pain to people who did not share their preferences?
Like I said....perhaps Blizzard, in keeping to their "make everyone happy" policy, should have made an "opt in for dynamic content" flag or something, explaining that things might occur, should you choose to opt in, that could disrupt your usual schedule. I think that would have gone over a lot better.
The problem was the players that were taking the event too far. The plague and ghouls were being used by numerous players to outright grief others, follow them around, and kill them. I'm sure it was the worst for new WoW players as well, since I saw a huge number of ghouled players in the lowbie/starter areas repeatedly infecting and rez killing new characters.
Don't blame people complaining, or for blizzard from removing it. The intended design of the event was fine. The problem was the players who abused the mechanics of it, and used it as an excuse to terrorize other players and ruin their fun.
And AGAIN...I repeat....IF Blizzard had made it an "opt in" thing, then no one that didn't WANT to be "negatively affected" would have been. Those that did not OPT IN for the event, would have been immune. This would have been similar to flagging yourself for PvP.
Am I speaking English badly here? I think I must be, because you're not getting what I'm saying. I'm saying, that as per usual, Blizzard STILL, even in this scenario, COULD have stuck to their policy of trying to make everyone happy by simply requiring an opt in for the event. Those that did NOT want to be inconvenienced (including new players) would have been rendered immune by not choosing to opt in for the event.
Anyone else reading this....am I making sense? Or is there just a problem with me and a few other people with communicating?
President of The Marvelously Meowhead Fan Club
The idea that in an mmo you can have the option of opting in or out seems a little contradictory to me. Why do so many feel the need to simplify the genre. It's a gem. Treat it as such.
"Mr. Rothstein, your people never will understand... the way it works out here. You're all just our guests. But you act like you're at home. Let me tell you something, partner. You ain't home. But that's where we're gonna send you if it harelips the governor." - Pat Webb
The idea that in an mmo you can have the option of opting in or out seems a little contradictory to me. Why do so many feel the need to simplify the genre. It's a gem. Treat it as such.
See that part up there in white? Okay....I apparently need to explain, since you probably didn't read all of this long convo back and forth before this.
I DO NOT approve, personally, of the dumbing down of the game and "opting in" or out of anything. MY preference is that people will just GROW UP and realize that the ENTIRE game is not going to cater to them personally every single minute, and that sometimes things might happen that they won't "like," but are in the interest of making the game alive and dynamic.
I really don't want to have to explain my views all over again. Suffice it to say that YOUR response....is preaching to the choir here. You need to tell all the QQ'ers that whined about a little inconvenience in their auction house runs when Blizzard did something to spice up the damn game a little bit.
My comment about "opting in" is really just pointing out how Blizzard, in ALWAYS trying to appeal to, and please, EVERYONE....ends up not fully pleasing anyone. There will always be someone whining about any changes they make...always. So why not, (tongue in cheek here), in keeping with their "please everyone policies"....let people OPT IN for dynamic content.
Understanding me now?
EDIT: And before someone repeats AGAIN that the game dynamic wasn't the problem, the asshat players WERE....how is that any different than PvP gang ganking or any other game mechanic that can be used to be a jerk? Jerks will be jerks....the game mechanics are not going to change that. You either learn to tolerate them and live with it, or you leave the game. Every single game I have ever played, the jerks will FIND ways to grief and bother people. Since this is true....should we also elimiate any forms of PvP or anything else that might "inconvenience" people that don't like what's happening? No. So what did they do? They made PvP optional.
Maybe they just need to make EVERYTHING that someone might not like....optional. /rolls eyes (yes....this is sarcastic and an attempt to point out the foolishness of expecting the game to always be to every players' liking at all times)
President of The Marvelously Meowhead Fan Club
This is the classic problem with a dynamic world. You have to look at all the ways it could change, figure out the worst possible way (for the players) that it could change. Then ask yourself if the game was always at this 'worst' state, would people still play it. If your answer is no, then the game is a loser.
It's really an issue of 'bait and switch'. People pay Blizzard to play the game by a certain set of rules and expect Blizzard to maintain those rules. If people wanted to play by a different set of rules they would be paying another game company.
Horde raiding an Alliance city is part of the game rules and as such is an acceptable part of the game. Horde killing Alliance NPCs is an understood part of the game. Horde killing Horde NPCs is not part of the game. Similarly Horde can only attack Allaince players if they are flagged and cannot attack Horder players except in a duel. These are basic rules of the game and define how people play teh game and whether they are willing to pay for the game.
Part of why I play WoW is that it has certain 'jerk protections' in place. Other players can only kill me under certain conditions and it is difficult for other players to kill key NPCs I might need to interact with. If Blizzard removed these 'protections' I might not pay them to keep playing. They are an intristic part of the product I am paying for.
A key part of WoW is that PvP is mostly optional on Normal servers and PvP is Horde vs Alliance. Blizzard removing these rules for the scourge event was the equivalent of a restaurant puttting meat in my veggie burger or a soda company putting suger in their sugar-free drinks.
The idea that in an mmo you can have the option of opting in or out seems a little contradictory to me. Why do so many feel the need to simplify the genre. It's a gem. Treat it as such.
See that part up there in white? Okay....I apparently need to explain, since you probably didn't read all of this long convo back and forth before this.
I DO NOT approve, personally, of the dumbing down of the game and "opting in" or out of anything. MY preference is that people will just GROW UP and realize that the ENTIRE game is not going to cater to them personally every single minute, and that sometimes things might happen that they won't "like," but are in the interest of making the game alive and dynamic.
I really don't want to have to explain my views all over again. Suffice it to say that YOUR response....is preaching to the choir here. You need to tell all the QQ'ers that whined about a little inconvenience in their auction house runs when Blizzard did something to spice up the damn game a little bit.
My comment about "opting in" is really just pointing out how Blizzard, in ALWAYS trying to appeal to, and please, EVERYONE....ends up not fully pleasing anyone. There will always be someone whining about any changes they make...always. So why not, (tongue in cheek here), in keeping with their "please everyone policies"....let people OPT IN for dynamic content.
Understanding me now?
EDIT: And before someone repeats AGAIN that the game dynamic wasn't the problem, the asshat players WERE....how is that any different than PvP gang ganking or any other game mechanic that can be used to be a jerk? Jerks will be jerks....the game mechanics are not going to change that. You either learn to tolerate them and live with it, or you leave the game. Every single game I have ever played, the jerks will FIND ways to grief and bother people. Since this is true....should we also elimiate any forms of PvP or anything else that might "inconvenience" people that don't like what's happening? No. So what did they do? They made PvP optional.
Maybe they just need to make EVERYTHING that someone might not like....optional. /rolls eyes (yes....this is sarcastic and an attempt to point out the foolishness of expecting the game to always be to every players' liking at all times)
There is already an opt in/out system in WoW with regards to the level in which players can influence each other. It's rolling on a PvP or PvE server, and PvP flagging. The whole point is that Blizzard completely neglected their own system and put many players in a position where they were effectively forced into a play style they had already opted out of, for the duration of the event.
Yes, players that took things too far were the problem. But that's the exact reason why so many players opt to play on a PvE server and optionally participate in PvP from time to time. It's because they don't want their game severely negatively influenced by another player deciding to be a jackass for no other reason than because they know they're frustrating other people. And when you force people who have already made their decision to avoid being in situations such as this, by rolling on a PvE ruleset server, you better believe many of them are going to be upset when you suddenly make their decision irrelevant and force them into the exact situation they were trying to avoid.
As per the people complaining about the event. I ran into more griefers that were upset than I did players who were going about their business. Most players would just move somewhere else, but some did complain. It was when the players who fought back however, that the crying really started. It baffled me as to why so many people would get incredibly upset when I would mow them down on my Ret paladin when they were a ghoul trying to kill and infect same faction players and NPCs. They were complaining that they weren't being allowed to grief.
I got hate tells from a couple players that I would repeatedly cleanse or kill. Why? Because they kept getting infected and running straight to the auction house to try to infect everyone and all of the NPCs. They were basically calling me a griefer for killing them, when essentially they were complaining that I wasn't letting them grief other players.
The real complainers weren't the people who didn't want to participate, even though there were some. The biggest whiners in the whole event were the people who were trying to grief everyone else as a ghoul by trying to infect and kill everyone and everything. Which I simply don't understand, because there was absolutely no reason for doing so other than "you could". It was basically just an excuse for them to grief.
But this issue has little to do with dynamic world content. It was one short, and in the end meaningless, world event that went as quickly as it came, and made zero lasting impact on the game world. There are many ways to make world content dynamic and give players some measure of influence without giving them a free license to grief. So long as you make fundamental rules of gameplay, and you don't violate them or give players the opportunity to circumvent them or at least get away with circumventing them for long, then there won't be any issues.
Because when UO came out with "No opt out" PVP, and then EQ came out a bit later with "Only Opt-In PVP " (Remember the Priests of Discord?), UO started bleeding customers to EQ, and they kept bleeding until they did Trammel/Felucca, whereupon they bled slightly more slowly.
Because (and no matter how many times I say this, it never sinks in), most people don't spend 15.00/month to be someone else's bitch. Call them carebears or wimps or casuals[1] or whatever you want, the bulk of the potential paying customer base doesn't want other players controlling their play outside of an established contract. (i.e, a duel, a PVP scenario/battleground, or anything else where all parties go into it with an understanding of the exact risk and the exact reward or penalty. ) "All PVP, All The Time" games have this contract, as well -- anyone who cries about being ganked in Darkfall or EVE has only themselves to blame. But if a game promises one level of allowed player interaction, and then creates another, you get angry players. (UO was not pitched as a PVP game. It was pitched as a virtual world to the roleplaying types who loved the morality, quests, and stories of the Ultima single player games. It was then flooded with refugees from Diablo and Quake who had no idea of how to interact with other players beyond killing them. The roleplayers left for other pastures, the sociopaths had no one to kill but each other and got bored, and a lesson was learned by all, except posters to MMORPG.com. But I digress.
Beyond PVP, this extends to all aspects of the game world. No one wants to be told "You will NEVER be able to do X, because someone else has done it and now X is unavailable." Sure, this happens sometimes, for a variety of reasons. Some old content is eliminated or changed and people keep "legacy" prizes. Rarely, there will be one-time world events and quests. But I can't imagine a game where content is constantly swept out from under players feet on a daily basis, where you take a week off and nothing you were working on has any meaning any more. (Exception: If the content is all very trivial and basically random, it won't be nearly as problematic, but trivial and random content is boring. Again: Play Elder Scrolls: Arena. Incredibly addictive for a week.... then tedious.)
(One compromise might be semi-unique content. Imagine some uber-weapon which only one of exists on the server. Some lucky dude finds it -- and discovers each time he hit with it, there's a 1 in 1000 chance it vanishes and is placed somewhere else. If he keeps it in a vault/bank/never uses it, there's a chance each day it will just vanish. Then someone else finds it. Placement is random on a very high end boss. The server is notified whenever the blade is found or lost, and a mad scramble to be the next claimant occurs. The former owner gets some kind of title/special power/whatever.)
[1]"lrn2play n00b"? Why should you bother learning to deal with PVP if your desired goal isn't PVP? If I want to do quests and craft, and one game offers it to me without having to deal with gankers, and one game offers it to me only if I can avoid/beat the gankers, what possible reason would I have for choosing the other game? If I want PVP, I'll play a PVP game. If I don't, or don't want it all the time, why play a game which forces it on me when there's so many other choices?
I repeat: First, catch a lion.
You are stating as trivial issues which have never been well resolved despite hundreds of designers trying. How do you give players "meaningful" influence and yet prevent "griefing"? You seem to be saying "Players can change everything about the world except anything that might actually matter!"
Sure, you can make the "Fundamental Rules Of Gameplay" be, in essence, "You can be screwed by anyone at any time", and make sure the players know this up front, but good luck getting enough players to support you.
What you keep saying, in effect, tends to boil down to, "It's easy to solve the world's energy problems. All we need to do is find a way to make 100% efficient solar cells that can be manufactured for about a dollar a megawatt. Why don't you engineers get on that?"
Like they used to say on college: Show your work. Why don't you spell out some of these rules of gameplay?
You can't please all of the players all of the time.
If you want a thriving game, though, you need to please most of the players most of the time.
(This includes understanding the difference between what the players SAY they want and what they REALLY want. Blizzard, for example, has wisely resisted adding banks/AH in every podunk village, because centralizing them in cities forces players to visit the cities often, making the game world seem "alive". It also forces people to take breaks to sell/train/etc. While annoying to players in the short run, it makes the game much better in the long run.)
As I posted in another thread, the major difference between "things the game does to annoy you" and "things other players do to annoy you" is that the designers have an overriding interest in keeping you as a customer, which means they will make sure any obstacles you face can either be overcome with skill/time, or are essential to the overall game experience. Other players have no interest in providing you with meaningful challenges or long-term enjoyment; they just want to screw with you. Thus, a player is more likely to put up with built-in obstacles and problems than he is with player-generated ones.
(As a very simple example of why it's so hard to debug this stuff and why people who think it's trivial are nuts, there was a quest in Vanguard where you got an urn full of snakes. You were supposed to use the urn in some village to kill some monsters. Players found the snakes would spawn anywhere, and used the urn in crafting halls, etc, to grief. So code had to be written to change how the urn worked. Now, multiply this by all the myriad ways a "player driven" game might "empower" players and find every loophole and exploit before they're used to drive off the customer base.)
I repeat: First, catch a lion.
You are stating as trivial issues which have never been well resolved despite hundreds of designers trying. How do you give players "meaningful" influence and yet prevent "griefing"? You seem to be saying "Players can change everything about the world except anything that might actually matter!"
Sure, you can make the "Fundamental Rules Of Gameplay" be, in essence, "You can be screwed by anyone at any time", and make sure the players know this up front, but good luck getting enough players to support you.
What you keep saying, in effect, tends to boil down to, "It's easy to solve the world's energy problems. All we need to do is find a way to make 100% efficient solar cells that can be manufactured for about a dollar a megawatt. Why don't you engineers get on that?"
Like they used to say on college: Show your work. Why don't you spell out some of these rules of gameplay?
Just because a game world is dynamic and can be influenced by players, does not necessarily mean that players with intent to ruin it, can do so effectively.
Lets take my example much earlier in this post where I was describing a system in which players influence a particular area, over time, by their actions and choices.
A quick synopsis of it again, is an example of an NPC town in which completing particular tasks would help grow said town, and defending said town from NPC attacks, to which the frequency and strength of said attacks varied based upon how much players did to cull the attackers before said attacks.
Such a system would be balanced in a way which a single player could not have a sweeping impact on said NPC town, at least not over a short period of time. Each player would make a small impact where they participated. Over long enough time, a single player's contribution could potentially make significant changes on their own. This is the key point. If a player were to do something negative to try to break or harm the progression of said town, then if they were the only players investing time in doing so, it would 1) take them a great deal of time to completely break it and 2) if they are the only person actively participating and investing time to influence said town, then does it really matter if they "break" it? With such a design, the sum of player actions would determine the direction of how things evolved over time. A few players doing the wrong thing might impede progress, but the majority acting toward the same goal will always win out. Additionally, there could be systems in which taking actions that are negative towards said town, will make you hated by said town, and cause you to become hostile to it and unable to interact with it any longer, possibly even flagging yourself as an "outlaw" for misbehaving. In other words, actual consequences for poor behavior.
This is just around my original example. There are many other ways to deal with 'trouble makers' in a dynamic world. Say players can create their own towns. Said towns are run and controlled completely by those who are part of it. The leader of said town, has the authority to pick and choose who can be a resident of said town, or even choose to restrict uninvited visitors in some manner. The point being, the community that created it, has control of it. If you don't like what that community is doing, then you don't participate in it and move on. Somewhat like a guild, where you pick the one that fits for you.
There have to be rules and restrictions to limit and control the flow in how players can influence the game world, and each other. Sure it may not seem ideal to some people, but it is the only way to curb a particular type of player from ruining everything in their path "just because".
There are many solutions to the issues you think make dynamic worlds impossible. You simply need to think outside of the box.
Another example comes from early days of EVE. EVE always had the 'you can be attacked everywhere but in high sec space your attacker will attract dire consequences' system. However, In the early days it quickly became apparent that those 'dire consequences' were insufficient to stop people massacring everyone in a newbie zone. CCP tinkered with the settings and the power of the Concord police force until they pretty much gave up and instead went with 'if you attack someone in high sec space you will be destroyed and if you manage to get away you are cheating' plus harassing or scamming new players can now get your account suspended. They gave up ion trying to balance the system and instead went with a meta-prohibition to cover anything they missed.
I never said "impossible". I said "impractical', or, more precisely, "the cost of the resources invested into solving these problems will not attract substantially more players than investing the same resources in other areas of game design".
Both of your examples have been tried and implemented to some degree in other games. Let's look at how they worked, shall we?
In Warhammer, cities began at "level 1". By doing quests, etc, you could raise the status of the city -- each level unlocked new features. How it actually played out:
As an additional note, you can easily end up with a little red hen scenario -- a few players "unlock" content and then anyone can use it whether they 'worked" for it or not. Limit content access only to those who "helped", and new players can't access it -- it's already been unlocked.
In SWG, you could create player cities with limited access to buildings, controls on who could build, etc. (I do not believe there was a limit on just walking through, though there might have been PVP faction cities built by players; I honestly don't recall.) The various editors, layout tools, etc, needed to be constantly tweaked and adjusted to prevent griefing by placing buildings, walls, etc, in such a way as to block content. At the same time, constant messageboard feuds arose between harvesters/crafters, who could plant mining/farming/etc machines anywhere, including in the city, and city runners, who didn't want ugly machines ruining their view. PREVENT this, and you open the route to people locking down high-resource areas by putting a city on them. ALLOW it, and you get the above, "private' cities filled with other people's junk. Also, SWG turned off maintenance requirements after a while, and the game became littered with abandoned cities. (Some games have fixed spots where you can place cities, which solves a lot of the above problems and tends to create others.)
Now, I would say that SWG "worked", in that buidling cities, etc, was something which actually attracted people to the game and the bulk of content players were those involved in city building, management, trade, and economics. However, there weren't a lot of players (out of all players possible) who enjoyed that, so the so-called "New Game Engine" came along, completely upending the game, driving off the people who liked the crafting/economics aspects and not attracting anyone new.
(In UO, player building in the early days led to all SORTS of interesting problems, such as houses built inside dungeons with people inside sniping out, untargetable. Eventually, a lot of restrictions were placed on where people could build.)
Even given all that, these are relatively static things, fairly simple to program. You design X stages for a town, and when the "quests done" counter ticks over a certain point, the Level 1 town vanishes and the Level 2 town appears. I won't say this is a bad or uninteresting feature, and I wouldn't mind seeing it implemented, but I think it falls far short of what the OP wants -- because on every server, you do the right quests and, bing, there's Town Level 2. Eventually, if anyone cares at all, every town is capped. (If the town level "degrades" over time, this can make things interesting, but it also tends to annoy players who feel they're being "forced" to keep doing the same quests to keep the town they've already "won". (EQ2 used to have decay for guild levels -- that didn't last long.))
You also have the fact that what the OP wants is a sense of individual contribution, whereas what you describe is much more collective. You go out and kill orcs, and so does everyone else, and eventually enough orcs are killed that the town "dings", and no one really can say, "Oh, look, I did that!"
(In Vanguard, Diplomats could activate town-wide buffs by doing a large amount of Diplomacy, these buffs would last an hour or two. Two or three diplomats could turn on a buff in about 10 minutes of work, so there was a feeling that "you" did something. Some buffs could cancel others, so, if the game had thrived, I'll bet you would have seen "buff griefers" working to turn off buffs just because they could. As it was, there weren't enough players to see that behavior evolve.)
IAE, you make my point -- you nerf the ability of any one player to have a meaningful impact. You can collectively "turn on" a town, but you can't bring it down or stop others from doing so, so you can "affect the world" only in one way, which the designers have predetermined. (BTW, any system of "outlawing" or "consquences", Does. Not. Fracking. Work. This has been proven time and again. Between alts, friends, and exploits, no player has ever had their actions curtailed by a fear of the so-called "consequences". The only "punishment" which ever actually showed an impact was stat loss in UO -- because you couldn't stockpile stats, borrow your friends stats, or make an alt with the stats. "Reds" who died w/stat loss could face hours of tedious grinding to recover them, and THAT scared them, which told me all I needed to know about the kind of people who claim to want "PVP with consequences" when what they mean is "PVP with consrequences only for my targets".)
(Side Note Ninety-Six Or So: Any system which gives one faction/side/whatever a meaningful in-game mechanical advantage quickly fails, because everyone joins that faction, so it gains more of an advantage, which gets more people to join it, etc. This is why most faction-based PVP games do not ever let one side "win" or give "real rewards" for victory.)
Preach it, brother!
UO in beta had guards which used pathing to find you and which could be killed, though it was hard. It quickly became obvious how easy it was to foul the pathing algorithms or slaughter the guards en masse, so by release, the guards teleported and were unkillable.
It's interesting how people need to keep learning the same lesson, over and over. On the one hand, if everyone stopped trying after the first failure, there'd be no innovation or progress. (Edison, "500 ways that don't work", yadda yadda) On the other hand, sometimes, the reasons no one's succeeded at doing something is because it can't be done. (Perpetual motion machine) Knowing the difference between "No one has figured out how to do this, but I will.", and "No one can do this" is the difference between being a genius and being a loony.
I say get the Devs or GMs more involved with handing out and monitoring quests. Even daily or monthly events that players could look forward to would go a long way in lowering the stagnation the OP wrote about. I think it would be espcially cool to have Dev or GM faciton leaders in a faction-based PvP game who were setting up where and when to attack or defend, giving orders on the battlefield, or at least somehow influential in how the territorial lines or landscapes change.
Vault-Tec analysts have concluded that the odds of worldwide nuclear armaggeddon this decade are 17,143,762... to 1.
I never said "impossible". I said "impractical', or, more precisely, "the cost of the resources invested into solving these problems will not attract substantially more players than investing the same resources in other areas of game design".
Both of your examples have been tried and implemented to some degree in other games. Let's look at how they worked, shall we?
In Warhammer, cities began at "level 1". By doing quests, etc, you could raise the status of the city -- each level unlocked new features. How it actually played out:
As an additional note, you can easily end up with a little red hen scenario -- a few players "unlock" content and then anyone can use it whether they 'worked" for it or not. Limit content access only to those who "helped", and new players can't access it -- it's already been unlocked.
In SWG, you could create player cities with limited access to buildings, controls on who could build, etc. (I do not believe there was a limit on just walking through, though there might have been PVP faction cities built by players; I honestly don't recall.) The various editors, layout tools, etc, needed to be constantly tweaked and adjusted to prevent griefing by placing buildings, walls, etc, in such a way as to block content. At the same time, constant messageboard feuds arose between harvesters/crafters, who could plant mining/farming/etc machines anywhere, including in the city, and city runners, who didn't want ugly machines ruining their view. PREVENT this, and you open the route to people locking down high-resource areas by putting a city on them. ALLOW it, and you get the above, "private' cities filled with other people's junk. Also, SWG turned off maintenance requirements after a while, and the game became littered with abandoned cities. (Some games have fixed spots where you can place cities, which solves a lot of the above problems and tends to create others.)
Now, I would say that SWG "worked", in that buidling cities, etc, was something which actually attracted people to the game and the bulk of content players were those involved in city building, management, trade, and economics. However, there weren't a lot of players (out of all players possible) who enjoyed that, so the so-called "New Game Engine" came along, completely upending the game, driving off the people who liked the crafting/economics aspects and not attracting anyone new.
(In UO, player building in the early days led to all SORTS of interesting problems, such as houses built inside dungeons with people inside sniping out, untargetable. Eventually, a lot of restrictions were placed on where people could build.)
Even given all that, these are relatively static things, fairly simple to program. You design X stages for a town, and when the "quests done" counter ticks over a certain point, the Level 1 town vanishes and the Level 2 town appears. I won't say this is a bad or uninteresting feature, and I wouldn't mind seeing it implemented, but I think it falls far short of what the OP wants -- because on every server, you do the right quests and, bing, there's Town Level 2. Eventually, if anyone cares at all, every town is capped. (If the town level "degrades" over time, this can make things interesting, but it also tends to annoy players who feel they're being "forced" to keep doing the same quests to keep the town they've already "won". (EQ2 used to have decay for guild levels -- that didn't last long.))
You also have the fact that what the OP wants is a sense of individual contribution, whereas what you describe is much more collective. You go out and kill orcs, and so does everyone else, and eventually enough orcs are killed that the town "dings", and no one really can say, "Oh, look, I did that!"
(In Vanguard, Diplomats could activate town-wide buffs by doing a large amount of Diplomacy, these buffs would last an hour or two. Two or three diplomats could turn on a buff in about 10 minutes of work, so there was a feeling that "you" did something. Some buffs could cancel others, so, if the game had thrived, I'll bet you would have seen "buff griefers" working to turn off buffs just because they could. As it was, there weren't enough players to see that behavior evolve.)
IAE, you make my point -- you nerf the ability of any one player to have a meaningful impact. You can collectively "turn on" a town, but you can't bring it down or stop others from doing so, so you can "affect the world" only in one way, which the designers have predetermined. (BTW, any system of "outlawing" or "consquences", Does. Not. Fracking. Work. This has been proven time and again. Between alts, friends, and exploits, no player has ever had their actions curtailed by a fear of the so-called "consequences". The only "punishment" which ever actually showed an impact was stat loss in UO -- because you couldn't stockpile stats, borrow your friends stats, or make an alt with the stats. "Reds" who died w/stat loss could face hours of tedious grinding to recover them, and THAT scared them, which told me all I needed to know about the kind of people who claim to want "PVP with consequences" when what they mean is "PVP with consrequences only for my targets".)
(Side Note Ninety-Six Or So: Any system which gives one faction/side/whatever a meaningful in-game mechanical advantage quickly fails, because everyone joins that faction, so it gains more of an advantage, which gets more people to join it, etc. This is why most faction-based PVP games do not ever let one side "win" or give "real rewards" for victory.)
You've pretty re-iterated what I've been trying to convey. I never said it would be particularly easy to design a system that gives players 'just enough' power to impact the game world to prevent the trouble maker players from abusing it, yet to still keep it fun.
The main aspect of achieving this was touched on in your post. It is that many MMOs have had features here and there which offered players some level of influence, but in the grand scheme it was only a small part of the game. My counter to that is, well, put these types of features in as many parts of the game as possible.
Have NPC cities that can dynamically expand, or contract based on player interaction, or lack there of. Have player constructed, controlled, and maintained structures and cities where those who are a part of it have exclusive control of that land. Have a vast gameworld where it doesn't matter if a city is blocking a particular resource area, because you can simply search for another. Have consequences that deter players from trying to grief others through these mechanics.
Again, not easy to do it all, but the right formula of all of these elements which have been done before, and the sum of each of these 'smaller scale' dynamic game world impacting features will equate to a much larger whole, which is a truly dynamic persistent game world which players feel that their actions make an impact in.
The problem is simply that no developer has taken on the challenge to make a game that focuses on these aspects. That is, not since Origin made Ultima Online, and then SoE made SWG. The focus these days is mostly on character progression and endgame content, rather than actually making a game world that players interact with, rather than simply serving as a backdrop for quest and level treadmills.
Most MMOs no longer take place in virtual worlds, they take place in a static backdrops.
Innocent troll comment for fun. This is an interesting way of putting up the divide between the two, albeit they are all derivatives of one another: 'the distance between genius and folly is measured by success' etc etc.
That is exactly right, and we're not saying NO to save WoW, because it is already a lost cause. We are saying NO to dissuade the next group of greedy suits who decide to emulate Blizzard and Cryptic, etc.
We can prevent some of the future games from spewing this crap, but the sooner we start saying no, the better the results will be.
So - Stand up, pull up your pants, and walk away.
- MMO_Doubter
I see what you mean, but can you seriously see an mmo that each player (in the thousands to start) each have options to create a personalized story unique to him by choices made? Really, it takes yrs as it is to make a huge world that everyone can experience. To add such variables as to cater to each and every player with something that no one else could see is overwhelming even in concept, let alone in execution. Stick to single-player RPGs for those, that's what they can do.
I don't see this happening anytime soon.
Text based MUDS used to do this quite a bit. As some-one else mentioned you also see this sort of thing happening in NWN. It could be done now..... you just have to have GM's that are allowed to be GM's not glorified customer service reps ....and a good toolset for them to use. Heck...you can even have a staff of volunteer GM's drawn from the player base to do alot of this....you just give them supervision from the Senior GM's and provide them with a more limited set of powers so they can't mess things up too badly in an unapproved manner. Alot of old MUD's operated on that very principle. People often forget that in the old PnP days it was every bit as much fun if not more to play as GM rather then PC for many people.
The only real difference was that they were displaying text rather the graphics. But with advances in engine technology....you SHOULD be able to do a heck of alot more in terms of controling graphical objects on the fly then you were back in 1990.