I commend your prose, good sir. The choice of wording is light and enjoyable to read. I think you've got talent in this area. Have you ever done anything related to journalism? Worked in the field, taken classes... ? If I were a game dev, I'd hire you for flavor text and content wording. This is commendable stuff.
Uhm... yeah. I've got over a million words (really) of tabletop RPG stuff published -- search for "Iron Lords Of Jupiter", or "Fields Of Blood", among a frackin' smegload of others. I recently got a novella published by Blackwyrm Press ("The Rainbow Connection"). I also do reviews for some computer magazines online, sadly not gaming focused though I do get to do a few games now and then.
But, hey, I'm always looking for more work.[1] I'd really love to do flavor text/quest/lore for online games, but a lot of them don't want to deal with telecommuters, and my life situation is such I really can't move anytime in the next few years, if at all. And there are no game companies in frackin' Southern Indiana.
[1]I spent a very, very, long period of my life not writing, because I kept waiting for magical angels to appear and give me work. Then I discovered that the secret to successful writing is not talent, not creativity, not a keen insight into the human condition, but the willingness to sell yourself like a crack whore every chance you get.
Then I discovered that the secret to successful writing is not talent, not creativity, not a keen insight into the human condition, but the willingness to sell yourself like a crack whore every chance you get.
I realize my entry into the thread's progress was one of innocent trolling, but so be it. The thread's title encourages a break from molds, and this tangent is one fitting for the forum medium!
I do hope you find your place. It sounds like you not only have the creativity, the insight, the desire but the willingness to do what it takes. Sounds like a package. Southern Indiana... ouch
Isolated text: I commented you on a light and enjoyable read, and suddenly things got dark and graphic! Oh noes!
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
Robsolf, in the interest of science (Science!), I propose an experiment. Read your post aloud to a cat. Or a goldfish. Or a wall. This is the control group. Then see if you get a response from the Usual Suspects that indicates they understand what you're saying any more than the control.
No fish, but here are the reactions from my other critters:
Cat: (eye contact for 2.5 seconds)
Dog: "Well, duh!"
(Honestly, no matter how many times you pound on the point that there's 250K+ players, they never seem to get it, and anyone who thinks they can generate actually interesting content procedurally that will satisfy that many players for 5-10 years is seriously deluded. Ditto any kind of "world state engine" or "server split" or whatever. Have even EIGHT decision points, and you have 256 possible "world states". So that's either 256 servers, or players on a single server will "see" 256 different worlds -- including players in the same group/guild/clan/wahtever. LOTR has its "phased" content, which works, but can also lock players from each other until they've advanced along the storyline to "sync" themselves -- and that's not what the OP is asking for, anyway.)
Closest I've seen is City of Heroes, and like you predict, it's not as interesting as it is on paper. There's a PvP area where, as you take or lose control points, the area cleans up or gets trashed depending on whether you're a hero or villain. Also, folks on the street talk up your exploits against certain factions. And the biggest one, Mission Architect, where you can create your own missions. And as you might expect, there have been many exploitable missions. And yep, they're exploited. Of course, all these things are temporary or occur in instances. Again, nice touches, and they deserve credit for adding it, but I hope it didn't take much time to implement.
The big thing is trying to figure out WHY they want the things they claim they want. I think, primarily, it's not about just having things change; you can just go to a different zone and see something different, or play WoW and wait for Catacalysm; or play Second Life. I think it's more a case of being able to say to themselves and others, "I did this. This occurred because of me". It's about ego.
Now, even taking griefers out of the equation, along with bugs, unforeseen consequences, etc. Assume that you have a world in which the players can change, shape, and/or form things within it and that all those players have the best intentions. Bookkeepers dream comes true.
I submit, that it doesn't. It's no longer special, interesting, or unique that you changed something in the game, because EVERYONE has. "I did this." Big deal. X player did this. Y player did this. Z player did this, which ultimately changed your "this" to something else, which means your "this" no longer exists. You did squat.
The Incredibles:
Mom: "Everyone is special."
Son: "That means nobody's special."
It all becomes less novel when everyone can do it. So even when they get what they want, they quickly abandon it. Even quicker when you let those wonderful elements of development limitations and anonymous jerks back into the picture.
I wonder how Second Life is doing these days...
I mean, it's already an issue that you have players on different stages of a linear quest, where some players in a group can't complete it and others can, and you get the "Hang on, let me get 15 weasel spleens so I can get the next stage before we go into the dungeon, pleeeeease????" problem. (And this was an issue w/EQ in the earliest days, pre-instance, so it has nothing to do with WoW or instancing or any other favored whipping boy.) "Split worlds" would just take this minor annoyance and turn it into a game killer. (My personal solution is to let people do quest tasks in any order, so if a quest has "Collect 15 weasel spleens", "Kill Grog The Unpleasant" and "Kick an elf in the shins", you can do them in any order and get credit. An even better solution is to credit you for doing quests you're not even on -- you kill Grog because you stumbled on him, and then you get to town and someone gives you the reward for the quest. HOWEVER, when this was tried (during the development of WAR), it was found the server load was crippling, as the game had to check every single thing you did to see if it was part of a quest. Kill an orc? Update every possible quest which might credit you. Do you need to collect drops/tokens? Check every possible drop for every quest and then roll to see if the orc dropped it. Etc, etc, etc. In a few years, we might have the power to do this.)
Seems to me I remember the Tabula Rasa dev team talking about early credit like that, but I don't recall it being implemented in the game.
Interestingly, Dragon Age had an idea that might point the way forward. For some characters, there's a mission you have to do to get your dog; to pick an herb to heal the sick dog. If you forgot to pick up the mission before going to the quest zone, one of your companions mentions "hearing" about the dog keeper needing said herb, once you walk by it in the zone. I wonder if there's ground to be gained by making some quest pickups more passive. Have the various townsfolk talk about old Grelda by the mill meeting an elf who desperately needs a shinkicking... you get no quest guide in the map, but the mob is triggered for you to use.
Or, for cryin' out loud, just gimme an unlimited quest log, already! :P
It would help the signature mob kill quests alot. I've killed sig mobs several times before I even got the quests. Wonder how tough it would be to flag sig mobs in the database so that you can complete as soon as you get.
Then I discovered that the secret to successful writing is not talent, not creativity, not a keen insight into the human condition, but the willingness to sell yourself like a crack whore every chance you get.
LOL!
A musician at Harmony Central once wrote, to paraphrase(actually, it may be his sig), I got alot better understanding of playing in bars and clubs, when I realized that my job was not as a musician, but a beer salesman.
You are aware, Bookkeeper, that those movies total, in the extended editions, about 10 hours, right? That the reason trolls don't reappear, and the world changes, is because:
1. It's scripted
2. Movies are allowed to END?
MMO's, on the other hand, only end when everybody stops playing them, and sometimes not even then(see SWG). How much do you think the LOTR movie budget would be if they had to make a movie that NEVER ENDED?
To the point, your demands are unreasonable and unrealistic. And yes, tabletop gaming is likely the only place you'll be able to find those demands met, possibly in our lifetime. 100's of hours of content in an MMO is a MINIMUM. It's ridiculous to expect 100's of hours of personal content for each individual player at any cost, and certainly not for $15 a month.
Robsolf, in the interest of science (Science!), I propose an experiment. Read your post aloud to a cat. Or a goldfish. Or a wall. This is the control group. Then see if you get a response from the Usual Suspects that indicates they understand what you're saying any more than the control.
(Honestly, no matter how many times you pound on the point that there's 250K+ players, they never seem to get it, and anyone who thinks they can generate actually interesting content procedurally that will satisfy that many players for 5-10 years is seriously deluded. Ditto any kind of "world state engine" or "server split" or whatever. Have even EIGHT decision points, and you have 256 possible "world states". So that's either 256 servers, or players on a single server will "see" 256 different worlds -- including players in the same group/guild/clan/wahtever. LOTR has its "phased" content, which works, but can also lock players from each other until they've advanced along the storyline to "sync" themselves -- and that's not what the OP is asking for, anyway.)
I mean, it's already an issue that you have players on different stages of a linear quest, where some players in a group can't complete it and others can, and you get the "Hang on, let me get 15 weasel spleens so I can get the next stage before we go into the dungeon, pleeeeease????" problem. (And this was an issue w/EQ in the earliest days, pre-instance, so it has nothing to do with WoW or instancing or any other favored whipping boy.) "Split worlds" would just take this minor annoyance and turn it into a game killer. (My personal solution is to let people do quest tasks in any order, so if a quest has "Collect 15 weasel spleens", "Kill Grog The Unpleasant" and "Kick an elf in the shins", you can do them in any order and get credit. An even better solution is to credit you for doing quests you're not even on -- you kill Grog because you stumbled on him, and then you get to town and someone gives you the reward for the quest. HOWEVER, when this was tried (during the development of WAR), it was found the server load was crippling, as the game had to check every single thing you did to see if it was part of a quest. Kill an orc? Update every possible quest which might credit you. Do you need to collect drops/tokens? Check every possible drop for every quest and then roll to see if the orc dropped it. Etc, etc, etc. In a few years, we might have the power to do this.)
Lizard_SF,
This is only because you've been conditioned to think along certain lines. Firstly there is no reason a game even HAS to have quests in the traditional sense....MANY didn't/dont. Secondly there is no reason that you and I must experience the SAME content.... if you are in a softball league and you happen to miss one of the games.... do you demand that they replay the game for you? Nor that you must succesfully complete every quest you get. If you are playing MLB on the computer do you demand that the game never lets you strike out while at bat...or god forbid even loose a game?
Why do you assume that it a ratio of 100,000 players to one GM must be the norm.... or that every GM must be a paid employee. Did every GM back in the old PnP days get paid to do so? I don't know of a single one...but there usualy was no shortage of GM's.
Why do you assume that $15 per month standard subscription and that's it MUST be the price for every MMO. Yeah, I know that you can walk into McDonalds and get a meal for $5. Does that stop people from going to a nice resteraunt and ordering a lobster dinner for $30? Are people never willing to pay a different price for a qualitatively different experience??
Let's try this out for size. GM Bob and his volunteer staff of 6 GM's (They volunteer because GM's in this game get to actualy do things....just like in the old PnP days) decide to run an event. A maurading army of orcs will attack a farming village. They create the event and off they go.... working together to coordinate the event, spawn the mobs, even play some of the NPC's at times. Hints of something unusual going on the village start to appear (maybe they fire-off a sound file of distant drums playing for the zone that the village is in). Players nearby may start to congregate. Now Bob nows that, hey if a 1,000 players show up in this zone the server will hiccup...so after 5 minutes of hints he throws up a zone lock with a 100 player queue on that zone.
Players in the zone get to decide how they want to react to what is going on. However there are a variety of tasks which if done can give the players extra rewards.... NOTE these are NOT quests (there are no quest rings), the players may not even know about these tasks ahead of time...but there may be hints about them during the even't. For every regular orc that gets killed it drops an orc ear that a player can loot (make it Bind on Acquire...so no cheating if you like), an orc sub-chief drops a different ear, the orc war-chief drops yet another type. Villagers (NPC) that get injurred during the attack will give a thank you note to any player that heals them. Players that go out into the forest next to the village to scout out where the orcs came from may find discarded orc arrows along thier line of march . These can all be turned in for different rewards (exp) at the end of the event. Maybe the level of reward even varies depending upon whether the orcs destroyed the village or not.
At the end of the event whether the village is destroyed or not depends upon how successfull the players were in fighting off the attack. If the players loose...the village gets destroyed....not just for them....for everyone on the server...permanently (no different "states" for different folks). If they don't want the servers to permantly diverge too heavly from one another maybe they run another event a week or a month later to rebuild it.
Lets say you missed that event...and you've been unlucky catching events but you REALLY want to have some custom experience. Ever go see a movie? I don't know about you...but it costs me $15-$20 for 2-3 hours of entertainment. Willing to pay even half that for custom interactive entertainment? Sounds like pretty good deal to me. So you (and 9 other guys) but a ticket for running through a custom module for $7. For that price GM Jim.... he's a volunteer but he's worked for several months under a Senior GM and proven himself experienced and reliable.... will take you and that group through a module HE has created (using the toolset GM's get provided with) in a private instance. It's not part of the regular world, it's off in a different location ....so no worries even about messing anything up for the rest of the world.
So you get 3 hours of assured custom entertainment for $7. Jim gets $50 in his pocket for being a GM for 3 hours. Not bad pocket change for GMing for a few hours...how many college kids wouldn't like to do that instead of flipping burgers? Even more incentive to volunteer as a GM and to be responsible/reliable at it (so as to not mess up your Gig)... and the company gets $20 extra revenue..... plus offering a feature that no other competitor says they can.
Well, it seems like you haven't found the right MMO for you. I think I can help with wanting to get out of the flow and swim against the current a little bit. Try a game called Ryzom. You can try it free for twenty one days. The AI in the game is astounding. I have been peed on by creatures, stalked by a whole pack of frippos, and have spent a lot of time interacting with non hostile creatures around me. On top of that, the game itself evolves through player action. The world on the game is ever-changing so that users get a new experience whenever they log in. Check it out sometime if you are looking for a new MMORPG.
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.
NO.
RPGs talk about grand adventures.
MMOs talk about persistent worlds with multiple players share part of it somehow.
MMORPGs is a hybrid, you have some of each.
No? What is your point? I don't understand your comment, especially the last line, "MMORPGs is a hybrid, you have some of each." As far as I can see, there aren't ANY MMOs that aren't stagnant repeating worlds. If you know of any, please enlighten me. You know of an MMO that changes, where time flows forward? Where you don't do the same thing as every other player? Where an NPC that hands out a quest only hands that quest out to you? Where what I do today might change the world for tomorrow? Where a quest is more than 'fetch me ten bananas?"
The funny part is, no one really has a leg to stand on here. Nearly every MMO since WoW has been a failure...regardless of where it fell on the design spectrum. EVE is about the only one that gets a pass as they started really small and built into a nice niche.
You're assuming everyone posting here hasn't played an MMORPG that existed before WoW.
Lizard_SF, This is only because you've been conditioned to think along certain lines. Firstly there is no reason a game even HAS to have quests in the traditional sense....MANY didn't/dont. Secondly there is no reason that you and I must experience the SAME content.... if you are in a softball league and you happen to miss one of the games.... do you demand that they replay the game for you? Nor that you must succesfully complete every quest you get. If you are playing MLB on the computer do you demand that the game never lets you strike out while at bat...or god forbid even loose a game? Why do you assume that it a ratio of 100,000 players to one GM must be the norm.... or that every GM must be a paid employee. Did every GM back in the old PnP days get paid to do so? GM Bob and his volunteer staff of 6 GM's and a big blob of crazy theorycrafting with no basis in reality or regard for labor laws goes here. Then you get 3 hours of assured custom entertainment for $7. Jim gets $50 in his pocket for being a GM for 3 hours. Not bad pocket change for GMing for a few hours...how many college kids wouldn't like to do that instead of flipping burgers? Even more incentive to volunteer as a GM and to be responsible/reliable at it (so as to not mess up your Gig)... and the company gets $20 extra revenue..... plus offering a feature that no other competitor says they can.
You seem to completely dismiss both history and human behavior. Rather than dive deep into those, I'll just hit on the major points:
If anything is a great example of the divergence Lizard was explaining, softball leagues would be it. Set five identical leagues (shards) in motion, and think of each team as a different plotline. You only need to get a few games into each league's season to see how bad the problem can become very quickly.
Volunteer GMs = No. Suggesting a customer support infrastructure for an international subscription service is no different that DMing in your buddy's basement seems to indicate you really do not know what is involved here.
The 'premium' servers and premium service have been tried several times. It really hasn't proven to be worth the time or effort for any company that has gone that route.
You talk about offering these deep quality experiences and then suggest that this can be achieved by using untrained volunteers or low paid temps.
-- Whammy - a 64x64 miniRPG - RPG Quiz - can you get all 25 right? - FPS Quiz - how well do you know your shooters?
The funny part is, no one really has a leg to stand on here. Nearly every MMO since WoW has been a failure...regardless of where it fell on the design spectrum. EVE is about the only one that gets a pass as they started really small and built into a nice niche.
You're assuming everyone posting here hasn't played an MMORPG that existed before WoW.
No. And what? Not sure what you're getting at there?
This is to Robsolf, just some quick comments, because I think the thread has mostly reached the point where any real substantive issues have been spelled out and we're all just repeating ourselves:
"If everyone's special, then, nobody is". Ding! Got it in one, Mr. Garibaldi. One reason "achievements" are popular is that ANYONE can get a few (and feel a little special, it's the old action/reward system hardwired into our brain), and some people will get a smaller number, and only a very few people will get some special ones. There are only so many "states" a world can be in, in terms of big, noticeable, things. Many game let you affect the world in small ways -- in SWG, you build your house, and that house is only on that server, not on the others, and you can delete it or furnish it or whatever, and it's yours, and it only exists because you put it there, and everyone else can see it, and that is, indeed, cool and fun and makes the world more "real" -- BUT, there's thousands of houses. (And only 3-4 models of house, though IIRC UO added a full house design tool, very nice). You "changed the world" by building a house... but not greatly. People don't log in and say "Oh my god! A *house*!"
If you can wipe out all the orcs in a zone/region/etc, so that there's no more orcs, well, yeah, that's cool, but the game will need to put SOMETHING there, and it's probably going to be kobolds or goblins or the like. And the resources are finite, so while you might have "goblin village", "orc village", and "kobold village" spawns, pretty soon, they'll cycle. So you'll kill all the orcs, and then maybe the area will be peaceful for a day or two (at most, or players get really bored), and then the StoryEngineTM spits out a Kobold village and there's random kobold quests for a week and then all the kobolds are gone and then it's (roll dice) an orc village again, and then (roll dice) ooo, a troll village, that's a rare spawn! Etc, etc, etc. I am not saying this wouldn't be an interesting or fun game to play, and implemented well it could be a very cool feature, but it won't meet the standards of those who want a "really changing world", because you can't do that in an MMORPG with current or near future (10 years) technology. What people WANT is, basically, a tabletop DM who is there 24/7 for all players. Comparing games to MU*s is sheer folly -- a few hundred players (at MOST) vs a few hundred THOUSAND, a mostly college educated crowd with very good social control vs. a hugely diverse crowd with no manners, volunteer Wizards who mostly all know each other well vs. paid employees with no social connections, no need to make a profit (or any money) vs. an overwhelming need to make one...
I have been DMing/GMing for... damn, about 31 years now. (Started in December, 1979). I could do it online. I'd want a bare minimum of 15.00/hour, and that's well below what I get paid for anything else. (I run games for free for my friends, but dealing with some random group of 4-6 online gamers? You BETTER pay me!) Assume I run a 4 hour session. That's 60 dollars. 5 players, 12 dollars each. Assuming there's NO OTHER expenses (which is false, even 1099 employees have overhead costs), you'll need to get players to pony up nearly as much as they pay for a month to get 4 hours of "special" entertainment. Would they do it?
re:Dragon Age -- Single player games can handle this stuff. The issue isn't the algorithms per se, they're simple, the issue is the slowdown when every single thing you do triggers a database query which can't be easily batched, because something might need to be updated "live", multiplied by all the thousands of active players. (Also, you need to check the entire group -- if I'm in a group and we all do damage to an orc, and it dies, we all get "kill credit", so one dead orc mans GroupNum checks to see what, if any, quests that orc might be part of, AND what stage(s) any of us might be on regarding it without knowing, AND which have us have done the quest so we don't get credit for it AGAIN, and...)
It adds up.
One reason features get pulled, esp. "cool" features, is that developers look solely at the algorithm, and not at the cost. "Easy to code" and "easy to EXECUTE" are not the same thing. The easiest sorting algorithm to code is the Bubble Sort.
This, BTW, is why your quest list is short. Part of it is just to keep you from being overhwhelmed, but a large part is that it has to be scanned CONSTANTLY. Let's say you're just walking around. There's, say, some rocks that are quest goals. Each "rock" has a script that looks for players nearby, and it looks at their quests, and if the player has the quest, the rock tells your client "Make me glow!" or whatever. Or maybe you click on a rock, and your client asks the server "Do I need this rock?", and if the server says "Yes", your client makes the rock respond. There's a dozen ways to do it, and they ALL require constant server access, because "The client is in the hands of the enemy". If you have 20 quests, then, the code has to check 20 things in response to almost everything you do. Obviously, there's filters -- the first thing the server probably does is just grab quests targetted for the region you're in -- but it's still a lot of work, and the richer the quest interface and the more ways there are to do something, the more things need to be checked.
Wait, this was supposed to be brief?
Sigh. I don't know why I waste my time. I can explain the realities of the technology and the economics a dozen times -- and I have -- but people don't listen to truths they don't like.
Lizard_SF, This is only because you've been conditioned to think along certain lines. Firstly there is no reason a game even HAS to have quests in the traditional sense....MANY didn't/dont. Secondly there is no reason that you and I must experience the SAME content.... if you are in a softball league and you happen to miss one of the games.... do you demand that they replay the game for you? Nor that you must succesfully complete every quest you get. If you are playing MLB on the computer do you demand that the game never lets you strike out while at bat...or god forbid even loose a game? Why do you assume that it a ratio of 100,000 players to one GM must be the norm.... or that every GM must be a paid employee. Did every GM back in the old PnP days get paid to do so? GM Bob and his volunteer staff of 6 GM's and a big blob of crazy theorycrafting with no basis in reality or regard for labor laws goes here. Then you get 3 hours of assured custom entertainment for $7. Jim gets $50 in his pocket for being a GM for 3 hours. Not bad pocket change for GMing for a few hours...how many college kids wouldn't like to do that instead of flipping burgers? Even more incentive to volunteer as a GM and to be responsible/reliable at it (so as to not mess up your Gig)... and the company gets $20 extra revenue..... plus offering a feature that no other competitor says they can.
You seem to completely dismiss both history and human behavior. Rather than dive deep into those, I'll just hit on the major points:
If anything is a great example of the divergence Lizard was explaining, softball leagues would be it. Set five identical leagues (shards) in motion, and think of each team as a different plotline. You only need to get a few games into each league's season to see how bad the problem can become very quickly.
Volunteer GMs = No. Suggesting a customer support infrastructure for an international subscription service is no different that DMing in your buddy's basement seems to indicate you really do not know what is involved here.
The 'premium' servers and premium service have been tried several times. It really hasn't proven to be worth the time or effort for any company that has gone that route.
You talk about offering these deep quality experiences and then suggest that this can be achieved by using untrained volunteers or low paid temps.
No, I'm not dismissing "history"...I'm citing it...MOST of what I am talking about has already been done before in the MUD world and quite profitably I might add. Take a look at Simutronics history throughout the 90's and early part of this century for an example.
Divergence is not really an issue. Assuming you do have multiple shards (which is not neccesarly a given....with clustering/cloud computing... you really don't NEED different a logical seperation between machines...other then possibly world size to player ratio).... LET THEM diverge...it need not be that much of a problem. But there are plenty of ways to wrap parameters around such things if you really need to.... so the things you really want to count on being consistant can be.
Furthermore GM's are NOT "customer support".... thats what current day MMO's have morphed them into...but it's not truely what they are. CSR's are an entirely seperate critter/job function then GMing. Honestly GM's are PARTICIPANTS in an entertainment venue every bit as much as the players. Why do you think it is that people setup and run thier own NWN servers...or even thier own MUDS/MUSH's? They just play a different role. They DO however need some supervision/support because of what they are doing and how it can effect the player community. That's where the senior GM's who ARE paid employees come in. Furthermore, they do need a very good toolkit to use?
Honestly....have you ever been a GM for an online game?
b)I touched on some of the issues in recent reply to Rob.
c)I wish there was a polite way to say this, but.... you're clueless. Really. You have no idea or comprehension of the realities of massive commercial games, the psychology of players, or the technologies involved and their limitations. Your attempt to "scale up" from MU*s is about as sensible as saying, "Well, since all members of a family care for each other without pay, why can't the entire world work just like a family where we all take care of each other?" (You're hardly the first human to make scaling errors -- the one I just mentioned was made by a man named Karl Marx and it's killed more people than can be easily counted.) You're obviously not stupid, you just haven't done the research. Learn more, and you'll understand why your ideas have been tried, and have failed. (On the simplest note, your "volunteer" DMs won't work -- far too many risks in so many areas, including lawsuits.)
The problem isn't "thinking outside the box". The problem is, you are thinking inside a box which is battered, broken, and long since discarded. There is nothing you're suggesting which hasn't been tried before, often never making it out of alpha. There are REASONS for this. (Also, go far enough outside the box, and you no longer have an MMORPG as commonly defined, which is a way of saying 2+2=5, for sufficiently large values of 2.)
(BTW, multiple your scenario times 300K->5M players times 10-40 servers times 52 weeks a year times 5 to 10 years. How many "original" and "involving" scenarios will there be? How much will be "Oh, yay, this time it's orcs. Last time it was goblins. Whee.")
(A friend of mine is a NWN DM, and she constantly runs "events" akin to what you're describing. They work because her server has about a 10 player to 1 DM ratio, the 30-50 regular players all know each other very well, and the banhammer is wielded with Extreme Prejudice. None of these things can be scaled to a commercial MMORPG. )
PS: If I am ever told "You can't adventure in this zone, some rich snots are using it for their private quest", my account will be canceled so fast the server will smoke.
This is only because you've been conditioned to think along certain lines. Firstly there is no reason a game even HAS to have quests in the traditional sense....MANY didn't/dont. Secondly there is no reason that you and I must experience the SAME content.... if you are in a softball league and you happen to miss one of the games.... do you demand that they replay the game for you? Nor that you must succesfully complete every quest you get. If you are playing MLB on the computer do you demand that the game never lets you strike out while at bat...or god forbid even loose a game?
Your softball analogy makes no sense whatsoever. It's so far out of context I don't even know where to begin. To play on the words, the concept isn't even in the ballpark. Whether you are there or not, your team still either loses or advances. When you gate content from players for a consequence not of their own actions, you prevent them from advancing, ie, they lose by default. That makes players angry.
Why do you assume that it a ratio of 100,000 players to one GM must be the norm.... or that every GM must be a paid employee. Did every GM back in the old PnP days get paid to do so? Was the GM GM'ing in the employ of a company whose success was based on his/her performance? I don't know of a single one...but there usualy was no shortage of GM's.
1. Umm... because a game has to be affordable.
2. You put unpaid GM's into the game, and you will truly take griefing to the next level. If there is anything a griefer would love, they would love to be infamous for totally screwing up an ingame event from the inside. You can't have a grasp of MMO history and believe anything different(look up "Lord British" in the Wiki and see how not only player griefers screwed with him, but even the devs made ways of killing him as an inside joke). not to mention...
3. Unpaid GM's will not have the training to ward off player griefers.
Why do you assume that $15 per month standard subscription and that's it MUST be the price for every MMO. Yeah, I know that you can walk into McDonalds and get a meal for $5. Does that stop people from going to a nice resteraunt and ordering a lobster dinner for $30? Are people never willing to pay a different price for a qualitatively different experience??
Your premise, from top to bottom, does not equate, to me, a lobster dinner. if it were, DnD would still be huge and MMO's would leave people thinking... "meh, gimme my d20.". There would be such a massive demand for Dnd 4.0 Online Tabletop that WotC could double the dev team to get it done and still make serious bank.
Let's try this out for size. GM Bob and his volunteer staff of 6 GM's (They volunteer because GM's in this game get to actualy do things....just like in the old PnP days) Again, despite being "grumpy", you assume that if you give a volunteer GM power, they'll use it with the best intentions. If they get to actually do things, they will be able to actually SCREW UP things, intentionally or not. decide to run an event. A maurading army of orcs will attack a farming village. They create the event and off they go.... working together to coordinate the event, spawn the mobs, even play some of the NPC's at times. Hints of something unusual going on the village start to appear (maybe they fire-off a sound file of distant drums playing for the zone that the village is in). Players nearby may start to congregate. Now Bob nows that, hey if a 1,000 players show up in this zone the server will hiccup...so after 5 minutes of hints he throws up a zone lock with a 100 player queue on that zone.
You've basically described WAR's public quests, except with GM intervention, and in a way a GM run takeover of a CP in Tabula Rasa. The GM's might possibly "play" orc mobs, and could spawn more orcs if necessary, and may also cue when the next scripted event occurs.
Yes, I say there would have to be scripts involved. Why? Because for one, when the orcs hit town, it would seem silly to have all the townsfolk and vendors just wandering about, going on with their business. And if you just have them set to run when a monster comes in range, you'll have griefers running trains through town to keep people from using vendors. So you'd have to script a time where the townsfolk flee, and some take up arms, and others might begin to coordinate some other defenses; Act 1, Act 2, Act 3 type stuff. Otherwise, you've got yet another static event where time stands still.
Devs have to code this. That means you can't just be a GM that sets these up in random places. So, if they're the wonderful thing that you seem to think they would be, you'd have many guilds camping these places. You'd be back to EQ mob boss camping, which was ever so wonderful...
Yes. Charge, more than 15 dollars per sub, to serve 100 players at a time for a largely scripted mixed PVE/PVP event. In the meantime, if your game is halfway successful, that means you kick thousands out of the zone or otherwise prevent them from participating. Prepare to enjoy board posts of "I pay the same $$$ as X player, why do THEY get to have this content just because they have time to camp???"
In summary, you're going to demand more money for your MMO due to content that only 100 players can enjoy at a time, than a MMO in which ALL players can enjoy any content in which they are capable?
Players in the zone get to decide how they want to react to what is going on. However there are a variety of tasks which if done can give the players extra rewards.... NOTE these are NOT quests (there are no quest rings), the players may not even know about these tasks ahead of time...but there may be hints about them during the even't. They'll know when they search the internet for the event in question, where they'll find countless guides showing optimal camping areas, a list of potential objectives in the area, etc. . For every regular orc that gets killed it drops an orc ear that a player can loot (make it Bind on Acquire...so no cheating if you like), an orc sub-chief drops a different ear, the orc war-chief drops yet another type. Villagers (NPC) that get injurred during the attack will give a thank you note to any player that heals them. Players that go out into the forest next to the village to scout out where the orcs came from may find discarded orc arrows along thier line of march . These can all be turned in for different rewards (exp) at the end of the event. Maybe the level of reward even varies depending upon whether the orcs destroyed the village or not.
Now, you're pretty much describing skirmishes in LotRO. At least now you're describing a feature that people enjoy enough to keep a game afloat. Skirmishes offer skirmish points, which drop from mobs and you get when you complete objectives, which can be turned in for rewards. There are different kinds of skirmish coins that drop from lieutenant and boss mobs which you can use for more specific things. Skirmishes also have randomized optional objectives, coincidentally one being to collect arrows for your archers.
The only thing that's missing is that there isn't a GM there taking over mob ai or triggering the next scripted event manually. It happens automatically once certain conditions are met.
At the end of the event whether the village is destroyed or not depends upon how successfull the players were in fighting off the attack. If the players loose...the village gets destroyed....not just for them....for everyone on the server... permanently (no different "states" for different folks). If they don't want the servers to permantly diverge too heavly from one another maybe they run another event a week or a month later to rebuild it.
(ie through no fault of their own, other players are then gated from town content and vendors permanently. Frustration hits the boards about the 100 idiots who camped and prevented the elite players from saving the town)
Lets say you missed that event...and you've been unlucky catching events but you REALLY want to have some custom experience. Ever go see a movie? I don't know about you...but it costs me $15-$20 for 2-3 hours of entertainment. Willing to pay even half that for custom interactive entertainment? Sounds like pretty good deal to me. So you (and 9 other guys) but a ticket for running through a custom module for $7. For that price GM Jim.... he's a volunteer but he's worked for several months under a Senior GM and proven himself experienced and reliable.... will take you and that group through a module HE has created (using the toolset GM's get provided with) in a private instance. It's not part of the regular world, it's off in a different location ....so no worries even about messing anything up for the rest of the world.
So you get 3 hours of assured custom entertainment for $7. Jim gets $50 in his pocket for being a GM for 3 hours. Not bad pocket change for GMing for a few hours...how many college kids wouldn't like to do that instead of flipping burgers? Even more incentive to volunteer as a GM and to be responsible/reliable at it (so as to not mess up your Gig)... and the company gets $20 extra revenue..... plus offering a feature that no other competitor says they can.
The company would go broke. Period. $20 "extra" revenue? You say that as though it costs nothing to develop the system, maintain it, and run it on solid servers! To spend the kind of development resources required for such a thing, then put it in the hands of a $17/hr GM and 6 volunteers? You think $50 is incentive, but I'll remind you that griefers enjoy doing things that get them banned from games after they paid $50 for the box and sub fees.
And... assured... how do you assure that entertainment? What if you get a group wipe 10 minutes into the content? How do you as a company deal with the GM conflict of interest for making the content easier so that they get better ratings from the players? What again, about the griefer volunteer GM that sabotages an experience which directly costs players money? You give the money back and don't pay the main GM?
Then there are the sales aspects. You want the experience to be scalable so that fewer or more people can participate, or else you limit sales to people that can find "exactly X people" to play. How do you handle toons of different power levels? Rewards? Do you provide rewards at all seeing as you'll get people complaining about "paid raids" being nothing better than item malls in a game they're already paying more than $15/month for? If you don't give quest rewards, be honest when you tell me how popular it would be...
And again, this experience is out there to be had, already, for less money, it's just not micromanaged by GM's. And if GM's are mandatory in your view, there's DnD 4.0 virtual tabletop, which as I mentioned before, has carried so much a buzz that they haven't gotten around to releasing it, yet, 3 years after revealing it at GenCon.
Really it's the difference between watching a baseball game and PLAYING in one. There is nothing wrong either activity.....but they are entirely different activities. Watching a baseball game is an entirely passive activity........ and surprisingly so is playing many MMO's. Yes you are pressing buttons.....but ultimately WHATEVER you do doesn't matter a bit to the course of action that occurs. You WILL get to level X....may take you an extra week but you'll get there. You WILL kill Throg the Unready... it may take you 50 tries... but you always get another and eventually you get him. You WILL get the sword of monkey-butts as a reward for killing him.... even though it may take you 10 hours rather then 2. Ultimately after Throg falls (on the 51st attempt) the story WILL progress to Chapter 2, the son of Throg...no matter what.
It's like playing in a baseball game where the results of every play is scripted in advance. Yes you may have struck-out on the 1st at bat in the 5th inning but according to the script your SUPPOSED to get a double...so keep redoing the at bat until you get a double...then we can proceede to the next at bat. How BORING is that?
The only variable is hour many hours of mouse-clicking it takes you to get from A to B to C in the story THEY wrote for you. A big part of the fun of the RPG experience is that it is a COOPERATIVE experience where you participate (at least in part) in writing your OWN story.
In may ways, Single Player RPG's are LESS passive then MMORPGs. Look at a game like Dragon Age.... at least some of the details of how the game progresses can change based upon the players actions. For instance, if you choose not to help a certain NPC...they won't be around to help you later on in the game. If you choose not to do certain things in the early part of the game.... other details will be slightly different in the later part of the game...and that WILL effect game-play in certain ways. Even the details of the END of the game...will be slightly different....if only in description a bit. You (and your actions) are actually helping to create/write the story.... that's an awesome improvment in the entertainment experience.
With MMORPG's the ONLY variable seems to be the how much time you put in.... that's BORING AS SAND... after you've had a taste of a more interactive experience.
Robsolf , Really it's the difference between watching a baseball game and PLAYING in one. There is nothing wrong either activity.....but they are entirely different activities. Watching a baseball game is an entirely passive activity........ and surprisingly so is playing many MMO's. Yes you are pressing buttons.....but ultimately WHATEVER you do doesn't matter a bit to the course of action that occurs. You WILL get to level X....may take you an extra week but you'll get there. You WILL kill Throg the Unready... it may take you 50 tries... but you always get another and eventually you get him. You WILL get the sword of monkey-butts as a reward for killing him.... even though it may take you 10 hours rather then 2. Ultimately after Throg falls (on the 51st attempt) the story WILL progress to Chapter 2, the son of Throg...no matter what. It's like playing in a baseball game where the results of every play is scripted in advance. Yes you may have struck-out on the 1st at bat in the 5th inning but according to the script your SUPPOSED to get a double...so keep redoing the at bat until you get a double...then we can proceede to the next at bat. How BORING is that?
The 'eventually you get him' part is a fallancy. You will only get him if you improve enough to beat him. ie in baseball terms if you are not good enough to win the World Series, you keep redoing the baseball season till you get good enough (or in RL get fired or too old).
If you beat a challenge, the story will progress. If you cannot beat the challenge the story could progress in a different direction but if you keep failing challenges in that direction as well you soon run out of story directions that feel 'epic' or interesting.
No, I'm not dismissing "history"...I'm citing it...MOST of what I am talking about has already been done before in the MUD world and quite profitably I might add. Take a look at Simutronics history throughout the 90's and early part of this century for an example. How is Simutronics an example of volunteer staff in a post-AOL volunteer lawsuit world? Divergence is not really an issue. Assuming you do have multiple shards (which is not neccesarly a given....with clustering/cloud computing... you really don't NEED different a logical seperation between machines...other then possibly world size to player ratio).... LET THEM diverge...it need not be that much of a problem. But there are plenty of ways to wrap parameters around such things if you really need to.... so the things you really want to count on being consistant can be. I get the feeling from that paragraph that you might not understand all this as well as you think you do. Furthermore GM's are NOT "customer support".... thats what current day MMO's have morphed them into...but it's not truely what they are. They are now, and always have been, part of the customer support team. You are confusing PnP DMs with online GMs. Honestly....have you ever been a GM for an online game? I used to work directly with them in UO when doing the volunteer content stuff (RPCs, mini-plots, server quests, etc) as a Seer. I've worked with them in various capacities for a range of virtual worlds from standard fantasy to craziness like vMTV where we ran events and hosted in-world parties for various bands and MTV cast members. I currently work with a room full of those crazy bastards (I firmly believe you have to be completely crazy to be a GM) and I'm even married to one. I've never been a GM, but I think it's fair to say that I have a more than adequate familiarity with what they do and what their job entails.
I think the best way for you to understand is to try it for yourself. You sound familiar with MUDs so tag one of your friends that knows an admin and see if they'll let you run an event. Keep in mind the planning time, time to learn the tools, coordination with other members, and how many people in the game world it affects. Also keep in mind that if people are paying for a premium experience then the ones that don't make it to the event are going to either be upset or expect that something is done for them as well.
It's a great idea, but there is a lot that goes into it that you probably won't realize until you try it.
-- Whammy - a 64x64 miniRPG - RPG Quiz - can you get all 25 right? - FPS Quiz - how well do you know your shooters?
No, I'm not dismissing "history"...I'm citing it...MOST of what I am talking about has already been done before in the MUD world and quite profitably I might add. Take a look at Simutronics history throughout the 90's and early part of this century for an example.
OMG. MUD's are so much different a beast than MMO's it's not even funny. Forget that it's so much easier to prevent people from griefing in a game where you can generally only choose to walk in 2-3 directions at any time, but ok, I'll bite.
Simultronics... I played DragonRealms for several years, so yeah, I know what you're talking about. The closest thing to what you describe that was in Dragonrealms is weddings which are GM ASSISTED. They are still scripted events, and surprise surprise, are INVITATION ONLY, in a room where no outside players can access. In other words, an INSTANCE. They also had GM "events" which I'll get to later.
While being remarkably sophisticated for text, MUD's are nowhere near the complexity of even your most basic MMO, particularly in terms of thwarting system logic for exploitation. Even in the most sophisticated MUD, you can't just, say, "fall through the earth" and escape a player that you just stole from. You can't manipulate and manuever around all the scenery the text describes unless the dev's gave the option to do so. Even so, people still got screwed over.
One example was a "catch all" emote option DR implemented, which allowed you to type any kind of action you could think of; much like modern emotes, have no real effect whatsoever:
/emote hands you 50 copper pieces.
"Robsolf hands you 50 copper pieces."
This was often used to dupe people into "trading" items. As I recall, Simu created an "accept" system so it was easier to tell a legitimate trade, but they still managed to fool many noobs.
and, players kept doing stuff like:
<during PvP>
"OK, I GIVE I GIVE! YOU WIN!"
/emote retreats from you. He is now at polearm range.
/emote retreats from you. He is now at bow range.
/bash grump
/emote uses <made up special item>. His wounds are now completely healed.
etc...
And, as an aside, I'll remind you that NOWHERE in the DR game was there an ability to change any of the descriptive area text, to any permanent effect. Other than being able to drop a bunch of garbage on the ground that everyone could see, each area was static.
As far as GM-run events, they mostly consist of GM run vendors during special events that give unique items (CoX occasionally has parties in Pocket D that gm's attend, and don't charge you for it beyond your sub). Their GM-assisted quests were on rare occasions. And if you go there now(play.net) you'll see there are none planned. So it seems they aren't quite the success you make them out to be, or else they'd be running them all the time.
I assure you, that if DR had 250,000 players, not all of those players could access GM run events. The proof is on the site. Even with their tiny player base of thousands(if that) You have to have a platinum membership to even be eligible to participate, which I recall being around 30 bucks a month; paid, likely by only a few hundred players.
So as you can see, even in MUDs GM run events are difficult things that can only be run for a small number of people and are too costly to be worth it, and do little to grow the player base beyond what it already is.
Speaking of, let me ask the platinum question. If it can be done in MMO, WHY AREN'T THEY DOING IT? Hero's Journey, Simultronics 3D MMO, has been in development since WoW came out and hasn't gone much past concept art. The last entry of any kind was in Sept, 2008.
Q. Will Hero's Journey offer live events run by GameMasters?
A. That is one of our goals.
That's far from a "yes".
That's marketing speak for, "we'd like to, but we have no idea how we're gonna do it".
Furthermore GM's are NOT "customer support".... thats what current day MMO's have morphed them into...but it's not truely what they are. CSR's are an entirely seperate critter/job function then GMing. Honestly GM's are PARTICIPANTS in an entertainment venue every bit as much as the players. Why do you think it is that people setup and run thier own NWN servers...or even thier own MUDS/MUSH's? They just play a different role. They DO however need some supervision/support because of what they are doing and how it can effect the player community. That's where the senior GM's who ARE paid employees come in. Furthermore, they do need a very good toolkit to use?
One place where we might agree, is that I don't like that customer service is referred to as a GM. Don't like it one bit. There is a difference. Call it whatever game immersing thing you want "DEM" for deus ex machina, or whatever. But not GM.
I really don't understand why some people are so vigorously trying to stamp out the idea of the possibility of a dynamic MMO world with depth, that is feasible to develop and maintain.
A lot of the components and idea necessary to create such an MMO already exist, and have been used in fragments scattered around the MMO industry for over a decade.
The key to success is to take all of the ideas that worked over past MMOs, and then take them to the next level by making them interact together in a meaningful way. Ultima Online was the first MMO to attempt something like this. Sure, it fell short, but the main reason was not simply that they did not have the time or resources.
Origin was flying blind -- No one had made an MMO to that scale or methodology before. It was the first time an online virtual world was created on that level of detail and interactivity. They didn't know what mechanics were hits, what were misses, nor how to tweak them just right. Furthermore they were greatly limited by technology. All of the variables to store, the bandwidth to communicate between server and client, and the client's ability to render a dynamic world. 10 years ago, they were extremely limited compared to what can be done today. This I think was a large part of the reason why they had to drop the dynamic NPC behavior and dumb down the AI, not only because it took time to tweak it, but because they had to keep it simple so their servers wouldn't get bogged down.
As I said earlier, many different MMOs in the past decade have introduced some very innovative and fun gameplay options and mechanics. Some of which allow players to impact the world in some manner whether it be to construct a player city on the landscape, or impact NPC towns or world events. Some MMOs like SWG and CoH allow players to generate content for themselves and others through a quest creation system. Other MMOs offer procedurally generated encounters and instances, to keep things different and fresh. Other MMOs let players battle each other to control territory, which gives them access to rare resources and to construct upon. And these are just a few of the examples of innovative game mechanics that empower players or give the game world a sense of actually being a living world.
Most of the trial and error has already taken place, so all that needs to be done is for someone to step up and take all or most of these great game mechanics, and assemble them in a meaningful manner.
So just because it hasn't been done yet, doesn't mean it's impossible, or even that it's not feasible. It simply hasn't been done because no one has stepped up to do it.
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.
ok so spend all your time making new content each day for a game
1) Don't insult me. If you want to compare tech e-peens we can sometime. I work in Tech....have for 20+ years now. I'm an infrastructure manager for an ASP for living....we serve Fortune 500 clients. I know Tech.... and I know the SaS model (which is what MMO's basicly are). The only reason I'm not working for an entertainment company is that I'd have to take around a 50% pay cut for the same sort of position I hold now.... not worth it.
2) Like it or not you ARE conditioned to think in a certain manner..... and it's limiting what possibilities you can envision.
3) The type of game I'm talking about certainly wouldn't be for everyone. However neither are todays MMO's.... ALOT of people are entirely disatisfied with todays flavor of MMO to the point that they are not buying/subbing to them. For people that WANT nothing more then todays stale/static/boring MMO offering....then yeah the current model works just fine. It would certainly be much easier to build/run then the kind of thing I'm proposing. There certainly ARE technical (and orginizational) challenges to the type of thing I'm proposing.... but they are far from insurmountable. Furthermore there is a very large payoff for overcoming them....implimenting these sorts of systems creates a VERY significant product differentiator then the rest of the compitition.
4) No offense, but the design architecture you are talking about sounds entirely inefficient and inflexible. Why would you ever hard-code a mobs behavior with a script directly? You need to think modular design. What you would do would be to have thier behavior (or rather behaviors...as I'd assume you'd want to break it into multiple bits...probably for multiple conditions as well) as a property of thier object (or maybe child-object of thier object...depends on how complex you want to get with the design for mob behavior). You would have a pre-built library of behaviors (These indeed would be built by coders) that you could select from to populate that property. All the GM would be doing.... through the use of thier tool-kit would be modifying the behavior property of the mobs in question to the appropriate one selected from the pre-built library. Once modified, the server objects for the mobs would obviously have to load in the behavior to know what to do and you would be off and running, for that. You'd probably never even touch the Data Tier in that instance...unless you wanted to permanently change the mobs behavior.
Why would you want to force a GM to have enough technical profficiency to script behavior directly.... furthermore, why would you want to have such a script aplicable to only a single set of objects on a single occasion? That's a very inefficient use of resources. You'd have coders write the scripts and add them to a library....and they likey could be reused for many, many situations and objects.
Your "rock" example also sounds like an entirely inefficient design. Firstly, I'm not even convinced a game NEEDS a Quest system in the traditional sense.... but lets assume they have one. Checking every action against a list of quests that you have to see if it satisfies a condition is NUT's in terms of efficiency. What you would do would be have the rock have a response (maybe multiple ones depending upon how sophisticated you want to get) in response to an action (say clicking on it if that's how your UI works). So your Client tells the server I just invoked a click on rock object #45731 does that object have a response (or maybe rather it tells the server that your character object invoked an interact method on that object) ? The server checks the rock objects response properties and says "Yes I have a response of type = update quest, data = quest #56789". The server checks your character object to see if quest #56789 is on it's list...if it does then it updates it. NOTE that it is only at this point that there is any real interaction with the Data Tier (you want to keep disk i/o to a minimum with these sort of things). If your character has that quest then the server tells the information store to record that it is updated. More likely what happens is it hands it off to some sort of write-behind engine to handle that transaction. I'm sure that's how most MMO's handle things...they have a transaction engine that's built to efficiently handle writes to the Data Tier asynchronously..... even with really kick-arse hardware... your not going to want to have the server wait around to do the work of writing each transaction before proceeding. That would by why you sometimes see "time warps" in the event of an unexpected crash. Basicaly the server is going to want to preload as much data as it can localy into memory to work with...rather then constantly doing I/O to the data store....and it's going to want to hand-off the work of writing stuff back to a seperate process/engine that can do it at it's own speed. The only thing you really need is a method for signling a server object that it's data store has been updated.
Note there was a good reason in the scenerio I described that I used orc-ears and arrows as objects to reward the players. They are essentialy quests without much of the overhead of quests. What is the basic function of a quest? It rewards the player with experience and possibly item's/gold, it may also write something in the characters history log, etc.... Well guess what, a token that a mob drops can do the exact same thing when turned in.
Robsolf , Really it's the difference between watching a baseball game and PLAYING in one. There is nothing wrong either activity.....but they are entirely different activities. Watching a baseball game is an entirely passive activity........ and surprisingly so is playing many MMO's. Yes you are pressing buttons.....but ultimately WHATEVER you do doesn't matter a bit to the course of action that occurs. You WILL get to level X....may take you an extra week but you'll get there. You WILL kill Throg the Unready... it may take you 50 tries... but you always get another and eventually you get him. You WILL get the sword of monkey-butts as a reward for killing him.... even though it may take you 10 hours rather then 2. Ultimately after Throg falls (on the 51st attempt) the story WILL progress to Chapter 2, the son of Throg...no matter what. It's like playing in a baseball game where the results of every play is scripted in advance. Yes you may have struck-out on the 1st at bat in the 5th inning but according to the script your SUPPOSED to get a double...so keep redoing the at bat until you get a double...then we can proceede to the next at bat. How BORING is that? That's the same argument you could use for only having one season of softball and never playing the game again. Sooner or later, Team X will beat team Y. It's just a matter of waiting til' team X is too hung over to play right, etc. But I'm done arguing over the metaphor. The only variable is hour many hours of mouse-clicking it takes you to get from A to B to C in the story THEY wrote for you. A big part of the fun of the RPG experience is that it is a COOPERATIVE experience where you participate (at least in part) in writing your OWN story. And yet, whose OWN story, with its twists, turns, and consequences should take precedence in the PERSISTENT world? In may ways, Single Player RPG's are LESS passive then MMORPGs. Absolutely agreed! Of course they are! It's the advantage you have in creating a SINGLE PLAYER GAME! Look at a game like Dragon Age.... at least some of the details of how the game progresses can change based upon the players actions. For instance, if you choose not to help a certain NPC...they won't be around to help you later on in the game. If you choose not to do certain things in the early part of the game.... other details will be slightly different in the later part of the game...and that WILL effect game-play in certain ways. Even the details of the END of the game...will be slightly different....if only in description a bit. You (and your actions) are actually helping to create/write the story.... that's an awesome improvment in the entertainment experience. And WHY IS THAT? WHY can Dragon Age, a single player game, have that kind of effect? Because you are the ONLY ONE PLAYING! First off, AoC attempted just that, to the complaints of many. It has a traditional single player experience in the main quest line, though it is still pretty linear, and people bellyache about THAT! "Yeah, everybody is the hero with 'the mark of Acheron'. How stupid is that? I'm my OWN character, and THEY FORCE THIS STUPID STORY ON ME!". Right back to my Incredibles quote. As a little spoiler... let's put DAO into MMO context. How much better or immersive would the experience be, if NPC X was impregnated with the the babies of 250k players? I don't know what more to say to you that Lizard hasn't already said. People in MMO's have a hard enough time finding groups to finish group quests as it is. Imagine if those people were divided into some 256 shards of reality? Even if you were able to piece the shards together to where you had at least 50% of the quests of any other given shard, how could you logically group 6 people together and stay sane? "Hmmm... in player 2's reality, this quest giver is dead. Let's do the mage tower. Oh... this guy did it already and it's burned to the ground, now. Let's go see the elves in the forest and do their quest chain. What? Player 5 is KoS there cuz one of the city elves saw him wipe out the city elf leader?" Grouping would be an absolutely absurd mess, or would lack all the player continuity of your personal story. With MMORPG's the ONLY variable seems to be the how much time you put in.... that's BORING AS SAND... after you've had a taste of a more interactive experience. And yet, people HAD a more interactive experience in PnP DnD and single player games, AND YET many of them are now playing MMO's and having a blast! Go figure! SPRPG's have been around longer than MMO's, yet many of those people still play and enjoy those MMO's.
I really don't understand why some people are so vigorously trying to stamp out the idea of the possibility of a dynamic MMO world with depth, that is feasible to develop and maintain. I don't like people stamping out the idea that I can make my own lightsaber. A lot of the components and idea necessary to create such an MMO already exist, and have been used in fragments scattered around the MMO industry for over a decade. And they ARE fragments for a reason. It wasn't like they decided to start making a dynamic world, got lazy, and stopped. By the way, a lazy developer in this economy is an unemployed one.
Most of the trial and error has already taken place, so all that needs to be done is for someone to step up and take all or most of these great game mechanics, and assemble them in a meaningful manner. This reminds me of all those talks I had as a kid with friends, over "what would make the best band, ever?". You'd end up with stuff like "Neil Peart on drums, Les Claypool on bass, Stevie Ray Vaughan and Eddie van Halen on guitar, and Steve Winwood on keys".
It doesn't take long for me nowadays, to realize that that would be probably the most horrendous sounding pile of crap you could ever imagine. All it took was thinking about, not what I think is the best of the best, but what pieces fit together to create something brilliant, and what pieces don't.
I like pizza. I like chocolate. but I don't like chocolate on my pizza. So just because it hasn't been done yet, doesn't mean it's impossible, or even that it's not feasible. It simply hasn't been done because no one has stepped up to do it. That's exactly the point. It's NOT impossible. It's just a recipe for disaster that would leave devs with negative subscribers. And your last sentence is nonsense. People stepped up. People did it. Then they went, "Holy crap!!!" and busted tail to fix the mess they made. People have listed tons of examples in this thread, alone.
No, I'm not dismissing "history"...I'm citing it...MOST of what I am talking about has already been done before in the MUD world and quite profitably I might add. Take a look at Simutronics history throughout the 90's and early part of this century for an example.
OMG. MUD's are so much different a beast than MMO's it's not even funny. Forget that it's so much easier to prevent people from griefing in a game where you can generally only choose to walk in 2-3 directions at any time, but ok, I'll bite.
Simultronics... I played DragonRealms for several years, so yeah, I know what you're talking about. The closest thing to what you describe that was in Dragonrealms is weddings which are GM ASSISTED. They are still scripted events, and surprise surprise, are INVITATION ONLY, in a room where no outside players can access. In other words, an INSTANCE. They also had GM "events" which I'll get to later.
While being remarkably sophisticated for text, MUD's are nowhere near the complexity of even your most basic MMO, particularly in terms of thwarting system logic for exploitation. Even in the most sophisticated MUD, you can't just, say, "fall through the earth" and escape a player that you just stole from. You can't manipulate and manuever around all the scenery the text describes unless the dev's gave the option to do so. Even so, people still got screwed over.
One example was a "catch all" emote option DR implemented, which allowed you to type any kind of action you could think of; much like modern emotes, have no real effect whatsoever:
/emote hands you 50 copper pieces.
"Robsolf hands you 50 copper pieces."
This was often used to dupe people into "trading" items. As I recall, Simu created an "accept" system so it was easier to tell a legitimate trade, but they still managed to fool many noobs.
and, players kept doing stuff like:
<during PvP>
"OK, I GIVE I GIVE! YOU WIN!"
/emote retreats from you. He is now at polearm range.
/emote retreats from you. He is now at bow range.
/bash grump
/emote uses <made up special item>. His wounds are now completely healed.
etc...
And, as an aside, I'll remind you that NOWHERE in the DR game was there an ability to change any of the descriptive area text, to any permanent effect. Other than being able to drop a bunch of garbage on the ground that everyone could see, each area was static.
As far as GM-run events, they mostly consist of GM run vendors during special events that give unique items (CoX occasionally has parties in Pocket D that gm's attend, and don't charge you for it beyond your sub). Their GM-assisted quests were on rare occasions. And if you go there now(play.net) you'll see there are none planned. So it seems they aren't quite the success you make them out to be, or else they'd be running them all the time.
I assure you, that if DR had 250,000 players, not all of those players could access GM run events. The proof is on the site. Even with their tiny player base of thousands(if that) You have to have a platinum membership to even be eligible to participate, which I recall being around 30 bucks a month; paid, likely by only a few hundred players.
So as you can see, even in MUDs GM run events are difficult things that can only be run for a small number of people and are too costly to be worth it, and do little to grow the player base beyond what it already is.
Speaking of, let me ask the platinum question. If it can be done in MMO, WHY AREN'T THEY DOING IT? Hero's Journey, Simultronics 3D MMO, has been in development since WoW came out and hasn't gone much past concept art. The last entry of any kind was in Sept, 2008.
Q. Will Hero's Journey offer live events run by GameMasters?
A. That is one of our goals.
That's far from a "yes".
That's marketing speak for, "we'd like to, but we have no idea how we're gonna do it".
Furthermore GM's are NOT "customer support".... thats what current day MMO's have morphed them into...but it's not truely what they are. CSR's are an entirely seperate critter/job function then GMing. Honestly GM's are PARTICIPANTS in an entertainment venue every bit as much as the players. Why do you think it is that people setup and run thier own NWN servers...or even thier own MUDS/MUSH's? They just play a different role. They DO however need some supervision/support because of what they are doing and how it can effect the player community. That's where the senior GM's who ARE paid employees come in. Furthermore, they do need a very good toolkit to use?
One place where we might agree, is that I don't like that customer service is referred to as a GM. Don't like it one bit. There is a difference. Call it whatever game immersing thing you want "DEM" for deus ex machina, or whatever. But not GM.
Responses:
- ANY computer application has ways to exploit it....what's your point ?? MUDs were exploited all the time...so are modern MMO's.... so are Single-Player RPG's.... so are Online FPS (like Battlefield series). So will anything implimented in future to the end of time. All this is a non-issue. You deal with exploits on the technical side by puting in controls. You deal with problem/disruptive customers on the CSR side. No difference in that between the type of game I propose and the type of MMO's that exist now.
And yes, I remember the /emote exploits.... they dealt with it from a technical perspective by making text from /emotes appear differently then text generated by the system....and from a customer service perspective by BANNING Accounts that were exploiting it.
- GM's very much had the ability to change room descriptions when they wanted. It wasn't even particularly hard to do....they just didn't happen to do it very often. WHO do you think BUILT all those rooms you wandered through?
- GM run events happaned FAR more often then you intimate. Invasions, plot-lines, NPC's coming to down....these used to happen almost EVERY night....at least in Gemstone....not sure about DR. The "Weddings" were just a small part of it.... and yes they were a nice little offering. The vendor events were just one of the sorts of things that the GM's ran.
- Simu's player-base certainly wasn't tiny.... After the move to the web, on a typical night you'd see between 1-3,000 players online on Gemstone on AVERAGE. That's actually pretty close to the average server population in a typical MMO on a typical night. We're talking a TEXT based game here.... that was competeing with Free to Play Muds mostly.
- As far as the GM thing.... I have done just that in a MUD (not one of Simu's)..... I know what's involved. With a well designed toolkit....it's not really ALL that difficult to do.....especialy if the scope of the event your doing isn't insane. You do need some time to get used to the tools though....and a little practice to get good at running an event......and if your working with a crew of others...you obviously need some orginizational skills.
- Platinum was around $60-80 per month....and pretty well booked.... on top of that you had other events which were sold individualy. Don't assume that the kind of audience for these games is all poor. There are plenty of people that are willing to pay good money for entertainment.
- RE: Hero's Journey..... yeah that's a big letdown...but totaly understandable. Simu is busy developing, selling and supporting the Hero Engine (from what I understand).... You know the one Bioware is using for TOR. Simu isn't a big enough company to realisticaly tackle that many projects at once. So when the opportunity to commiditize thier engine came along (It WAS the engine they were building for HJ).... they seized it....as it was an immediate ROI (read lots of cash now)... rather then waiting for HJ to be developed, go gold and start pulling in revenue. That's where thier focus went.... can't say I blame them.
Comments
Uhm... yeah. I've got over a million words (really) of tabletop RPG stuff published -- search for "Iron Lords Of Jupiter", or "Fields Of Blood", among a frackin' smegload of others. I recently got a novella published by Blackwyrm Press ("The Rainbow Connection"). I also do reviews for some computer magazines online, sadly not gaming focused though I do get to do a few games now and then.
But, hey, I'm always looking for more work.[1] I'd really love to do flavor text/quest/lore for online games, but a lot of them don't want to deal with telecommuters, and my life situation is such I really can't move anytime in the next few years, if at all. And there are no game companies in frackin' Southern Indiana.
[1]I spent a very, very, long period of my life not writing, because I kept waiting for magical angels to appear and give me work. Then I discovered that the secret to successful writing is not talent, not creativity, not a keen insight into the human condition, but the willingness to sell yourself like a crack whore every chance you get.
I realize my entry into the thread's progress was one of innocent trolling, but so be it. The thread's title encourages a break from molds, and this tangent is one fitting for the forum medium!
I do hope you find your place. It sounds like you not only have the creativity, the insight, the desire but the willingness to do what it takes. Sounds like a package. Southern Indiana... ouch
Isolated text: I commented you on a light and enjoyable read, and suddenly things got dark and graphic! Oh noes!
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
Robsolf, in the interest of science (Science!), I propose an experiment. Read your post aloud to a cat. Or a goldfish. Or a wall. This is the control group. Then see if you get a response from the Usual Suspects that indicates they understand what you're saying any more than the control.
No fish, but here are the reactions from my other critters:
Cat: (eye contact for 2.5 seconds)
Dog: "Well, duh!"
(Honestly, no matter how many times you pound on the point that there's 250K+ players, they never seem to get it, and anyone who thinks they can generate actually interesting content procedurally that will satisfy that many players for 5-10 years is seriously deluded. Ditto any kind of "world state engine" or "server split" or whatever. Have even EIGHT decision points, and you have 256 possible "world states". So that's either 256 servers, or players on a single server will "see" 256 different worlds -- including players in the same group/guild/clan/wahtever. LOTR has its "phased" content, which works, but can also lock players from each other until they've advanced along the storyline to "sync" themselves -- and that's not what the OP is asking for, anyway.)
Closest I've seen is City of Heroes, and like you predict, it's not as interesting as it is on paper. There's a PvP area where, as you take or lose control points, the area cleans up or gets trashed depending on whether you're a hero or villain. Also, folks on the street talk up your exploits against certain factions. And the biggest one, Mission Architect, where you can create your own missions. And as you might expect, there have been many exploitable missions. And yep, they're exploited. Of course, all these things are temporary or occur in instances. Again, nice touches, and they deserve credit for adding it, but I hope it didn't take much time to implement.
The big thing is trying to figure out WHY they want the things they claim they want. I think, primarily, it's not about just having things change; you can just go to a different zone and see something different, or play WoW and wait for Catacalysm; or play Second Life. I think it's more a case of being able to say to themselves and others, "I did this. This occurred because of me". It's about ego.
Now, even taking griefers out of the equation, along with bugs, unforeseen consequences, etc. Assume that you have a world in which the players can change, shape, and/or form things within it and that all those players have the best intentions. Bookkeepers dream comes true.
I submit, that it doesn't. It's no longer special, interesting, or unique that you changed something in the game, because EVERYONE has. "I did this." Big deal. X player did this. Y player did this. Z player did this, which ultimately changed your "this" to something else, which means your "this" no longer exists. You did squat.
The Incredibles:
Mom: "Everyone is special."
Son: "That means nobody's special."
It all becomes less novel when everyone can do it. So even when they get what they want, they quickly abandon it. Even quicker when you let those wonderful elements of development limitations and anonymous jerks back into the picture.
I wonder how Second Life is doing these days...
I mean, it's already an issue that you have players on different stages of a linear quest, where some players in a group can't complete it and others can, and you get the "Hang on, let me get 15 weasel spleens so I can get the next stage before we go into the dungeon, pleeeeease????" problem. (And this was an issue w/EQ in the earliest days, pre-instance, so it has nothing to do with WoW or instancing or any other favored whipping boy.) "Split worlds" would just take this minor annoyance and turn it into a game killer. (My personal solution is to let people do quest tasks in any order, so if a quest has "Collect 15 weasel spleens", "Kill Grog The Unpleasant" and "Kick an elf in the shins", you can do them in any order and get credit. An even better solution is to credit you for doing quests you're not even on -- you kill Grog because you stumbled on him, and then you get to town and someone gives you the reward for the quest. HOWEVER, when this was tried (during the development of WAR), it was found the server load was crippling, as the game had to check every single thing you did to see if it was part of a quest. Kill an orc? Update every possible quest which might credit you. Do you need to collect drops/tokens? Check every possible drop for every quest and then roll to see if the orc dropped it. Etc, etc, etc. In a few years, we might have the power to do this.)
Seems to me I remember the Tabula Rasa dev team talking about early credit like that, but I don't recall it being implemented in the game.
Interestingly, Dragon Age had an idea that might point the way forward. For some characters, there's a mission you have to do to get your dog; to pick an herb to heal the sick dog. If you forgot to pick up the mission before going to the quest zone, one of your companions mentions "hearing" about the dog keeper needing said herb, once you walk by it in the zone. I wonder if there's ground to be gained by making some quest pickups more passive. Have the various townsfolk talk about old Grelda by the mill meeting an elf who desperately needs a shinkicking... you get no quest guide in the map, but the mob is triggered for you to use.
Or, for cryin' out loud, just gimme an unlimited quest log, already! :P
It would help the signature mob kill quests alot. I've killed sig mobs several times before I even got the quests. Wonder how tough it would be to flag sig mobs in the database so that you can complete as soon as you get.
LOL!
A musician at Harmony Central once wrote, to paraphrase(actually, it may be his sig), I got alot better understanding of playing in bars and clubs, when I realized that my job was not as a musician, but a beer salesman.
For changing worlds, I can direct you to GW2, if it's as good as they say.
You know it, the best way to realize your dreams is waking up and start moving, never lose hope and always keep up.
Robsolf, in the interest of science (Science!), I propose an experiment. Read your post aloud to a cat. Or a goldfish. Or a wall. This is the control group. Then see if you get a response from the Usual Suspects that indicates they understand what you're saying any more than the control.
(Honestly, no matter how many times you pound on the point that there's 250K+ players, they never seem to get it, and anyone who thinks they can generate actually interesting content procedurally that will satisfy that many players for 5-10 years is seriously deluded. Ditto any kind of "world state engine" or "server split" or whatever. Have even EIGHT decision points, and you have 256 possible "world states". So that's either 256 servers, or players on a single server will "see" 256 different worlds -- including players in the same group/guild/clan/wahtever. LOTR has its "phased" content, which works, but can also lock players from each other until they've advanced along the storyline to "sync" themselves -- and that's not what the OP is asking for, anyway.)
I mean, it's already an issue that you have players on different stages of a linear quest, where some players in a group can't complete it and others can, and you get the "Hang on, let me get 15 weasel spleens so I can get the next stage before we go into the dungeon, pleeeeease????" problem. (And this was an issue w/EQ in the earliest days, pre-instance, so it has nothing to do with WoW or instancing or any other favored whipping boy.) "Split worlds" would just take this minor annoyance and turn it into a game killer. (My personal solution is to let people do quest tasks in any order, so if a quest has "Collect 15 weasel spleens", "Kill Grog The Unpleasant" and "Kick an elf in the shins", you can do them in any order and get credit. An even better solution is to credit you for doing quests you're not even on -- you kill Grog because you stumbled on him, and then you get to town and someone gives you the reward for the quest. HOWEVER, when this was tried (during the development of WAR), it was found the server load was crippling, as the game had to check every single thing you did to see if it was part of a quest. Kill an orc? Update every possible quest which might credit you. Do you need to collect drops/tokens? Check every possible drop for every quest and then roll to see if the orc dropped it. Etc, etc, etc. In a few years, we might have the power to do this.)
Lizard_SF,
This is only because you've been conditioned to think along certain lines. Firstly there is no reason a game even HAS to have quests in the traditional sense....MANY didn't/dont. Secondly there is no reason that you and I must experience the SAME content.... if you are in a softball league and you happen to miss one of the games.... do you demand that they replay the game for you? Nor that you must succesfully complete every quest you get. If you are playing MLB on the computer do you demand that the game never lets you strike out while at bat...or god forbid even loose a game?
Why do you assume that it a ratio of 100,000 players to one GM must be the norm.... or that every GM must be a paid employee. Did every GM back in the old PnP days get paid to do so? I don't know of a single one...but there usualy was no shortage of GM's.
Why do you assume that $15 per month standard subscription and that's it MUST be the price for every MMO. Yeah, I know that you can walk into McDonalds and get a meal for $5. Does that stop people from going to a nice resteraunt and ordering a lobster dinner for $30? Are people never willing to pay a different price for a qualitatively different experience??
Let's try this out for size. GM Bob and his volunteer staff of 6 GM's (They volunteer because GM's in this game get to actualy do things....just like in the old PnP days) decide to run an event. A maurading army of orcs will attack a farming village. They create the event and off they go.... working together to coordinate the event, spawn the mobs, even play some of the NPC's at times. Hints of something unusual going on the village start to appear (maybe they fire-off a sound file of distant drums playing for the zone that the village is in). Players nearby may start to congregate. Now Bob nows that, hey if a 1,000 players show up in this zone the server will hiccup...so after 5 minutes of hints he throws up a zone lock with a 100 player queue on that zone.
Players in the zone get to decide how they want to react to what is going on. However there are a variety of tasks which if done can give the players extra rewards.... NOTE these are NOT quests (there are no quest rings), the players may not even know about these tasks ahead of time...but there may be hints about them during the even't. For every regular orc that gets killed it drops an orc ear that a player can loot (make it Bind on Acquire...so no cheating if you like), an orc sub-chief drops a different ear, the orc war-chief drops yet another type. Villagers (NPC) that get injurred during the attack will give a thank you note to any player that heals them. Players that go out into the forest next to the village to scout out where the orcs came from may find discarded orc arrows along thier line of march . These can all be turned in for different rewards (exp) at the end of the event. Maybe the level of reward even varies depending upon whether the orcs destroyed the village or not.
At the end of the event whether the village is destroyed or not depends upon how successfull the players were in fighting off the attack. If the players loose...the village gets destroyed....not just for them....for everyone on the server...permanently (no different "states" for different folks). If they don't want the servers to permantly diverge too heavly from one another maybe they run another event a week or a month later to rebuild it.
Lets say you missed that event...and you've been unlucky catching events but you REALLY want to have some custom experience. Ever go see a movie? I don't know about you...but it costs me $15-$20 for 2-3 hours of entertainment. Willing to pay even half that for custom interactive entertainment? Sounds like pretty good deal to me. So you (and 9 other guys) but a ticket for running through a custom module for $7. For that price GM Jim.... he's a volunteer but he's worked for several months under a Senior GM and proven himself experienced and reliable.... will take you and that group through a module HE has created (using the toolset GM's get provided with) in a private instance. It's not part of the regular world, it's off in a different location ....so no worries even about messing anything up for the rest of the world.
So you get 3 hours of assured custom entertainment for $7. Jim gets $50 in his pocket for being a GM for 3 hours. Not bad pocket change for GMing for a few hours...how many college kids wouldn't like to do that instead of flipping burgers? Even more incentive to volunteer as a GM and to be responsible/reliable at it (so as to not mess up your Gig)... and the company gets $20 extra revenue..... plus offering a feature that no other competitor says they can.
Well, it seems like you haven't found the right MMO for you. I think I can help with wanting to get out of the flow and swim against the current a little bit. Try a game called Ryzom. You can try it free for twenty one days. The AI in the game is astounding. I have been peed on by creatures, stalked by a whole pack of frippos, and have spent a lot of time interacting with non hostile creatures around me. On top of that, the game itself evolves through player action. The world on the game is ever-changing so that users get a new experience whenever they log in. Check it out sometime if you are looking for a new MMORPG.
www.ryzom.com
NO.
RPGs talk about grand adventures.
MMOs talk about persistent worlds with multiple players share part of it somehow.
MMORPGs is a hybrid, you have some of each.
No? What is your point? I don't understand your comment, especially the last line, "MMORPGs is a hybrid, you have some of each." As far as I can see, there aren't ANY MMOs that aren't stagnant repeating worlds. If you know of any, please enlighten me. You know of an MMO that changes, where time flows forward? Where you don't do the same thing as every other player? Where an NPC that hands out a quest only hands that quest out to you? Where what I do today might change the world for tomorrow? Where a quest is more than 'fetch me ten bananas?"
Phrasing by LOTRo and WoW
You're assuming everyone posting here hasn't played an MMORPG that existed before WoW.
You seem to completely dismiss both history and human behavior. Rather than dive deep into those, I'll just hit on the major points:
If anything is a great example of the divergence Lizard was explaining, softball leagues would be it. Set five identical leagues (shards) in motion, and think of each team as a different plotline. You only need to get a few games into each league's season to see how bad the problem can become very quickly.
Volunteer GMs = No. Suggesting a customer support infrastructure for an international subscription service is no different that DMing in your buddy's basement seems to indicate you really do not know what is involved here.
The 'premium' servers and premium service have been tried several times. It really hasn't proven to be worth the time or effort for any company that has gone that route.
You talk about offering these deep quality experiences and then suggest that this can be achieved by using untrained volunteers or low paid temps.
- RPG Quiz - can you get all 25 right?
- FPS Quiz - how well do you know your shooters?
You're assuming everyone posting here hasn't played an MMORPG that existed before WoW.
No. And what? Not sure what you're getting at there?
This is to Robsolf, just some quick comments, because I think the thread has mostly reached the point where any real substantive issues have been spelled out and we're all just repeating ourselves:
"If everyone's special, then, nobody is". Ding! Got it in one, Mr. Garibaldi. One reason "achievements" are popular is that ANYONE can get a few (and feel a little special, it's the old action/reward system hardwired into our brain), and some people will get a smaller number, and only a very few people will get some special ones. There are only so many "states" a world can be in, in terms of big, noticeable, things. Many game let you affect the world in small ways -- in SWG, you build your house, and that house is only on that server, not on the others, and you can delete it or furnish it or whatever, and it's yours, and it only exists because you put it there, and everyone else can see it, and that is, indeed, cool and fun and makes the world more "real" -- BUT, there's thousands of houses. (And only 3-4 models of house, though IIRC UO added a full house design tool, very nice). You "changed the world" by building a house... but not greatly. People don't log in and say "Oh my god! A *house*!"
If you can wipe out all the orcs in a zone/region/etc, so that there's no more orcs, well, yeah, that's cool, but the game will need to put SOMETHING there, and it's probably going to be kobolds or goblins or the like. And the resources are finite, so while you might have "goblin village", "orc village", and "kobold village" spawns, pretty soon, they'll cycle. So you'll kill all the orcs, and then maybe the area will be peaceful for a day or two (at most, or players get really bored), and then the StoryEngineTM spits out a Kobold village and there's random kobold quests for a week and then all the kobolds are gone and then it's (roll dice) an orc village again, and then (roll dice) ooo, a troll village, that's a rare spawn! Etc, etc, etc. I am not saying this wouldn't be an interesting or fun game to play, and implemented well it could be a very cool feature, but it won't meet the standards of those who want a "really changing world", because you can't do that in an MMORPG with current or near future (10 years) technology. What people WANT is, basically, a tabletop DM who is there 24/7 for all players. Comparing games to MU*s is sheer folly -- a few hundred players (at MOST) vs a few hundred THOUSAND, a mostly college educated crowd with very good social control vs. a hugely diverse crowd with no manners, volunteer Wizards who mostly all know each other well vs. paid employees with no social connections, no need to make a profit (or any money) vs. an overwhelming need to make one...
I have been DMing/GMing for... damn, about 31 years now. (Started in December, 1979). I could do it online. I'd want a bare minimum of 15.00/hour, and that's well below what I get paid for anything else. (I run games for free for my friends, but dealing with some random group of 4-6 online gamers? You BETTER pay me!) Assume I run a 4 hour session. That's 60 dollars. 5 players, 12 dollars each. Assuming there's NO OTHER expenses (which is false, even 1099 employees have overhead costs), you'll need to get players to pony up nearly as much as they pay for a month to get 4 hours of "special" entertainment. Would they do it?
re:Dragon Age -- Single player games can handle this stuff. The issue isn't the algorithms per se, they're simple, the issue is the slowdown when every single thing you do triggers a database query which can't be easily batched, because something might need to be updated "live", multiplied by all the thousands of active players. (Also, you need to check the entire group -- if I'm in a group and we all do damage to an orc, and it dies, we all get "kill credit", so one dead orc mans GroupNum checks to see what, if any, quests that orc might be part of, AND what stage(s) any of us might be on regarding it without knowing, AND which have us have done the quest so we don't get credit for it AGAIN, and...)
It adds up.
One reason features get pulled, esp. "cool" features, is that developers look solely at the algorithm, and not at the cost. "Easy to code" and "easy to EXECUTE" are not the same thing. The easiest sorting algorithm to code is the Bubble Sort.
This, BTW, is why your quest list is short. Part of it is just to keep you from being overhwhelmed, but a large part is that it has to be scanned CONSTANTLY. Let's say you're just walking around. There's, say, some rocks that are quest goals. Each "rock" has a script that looks for players nearby, and it looks at their quests, and if the player has the quest, the rock tells your client "Make me glow!" or whatever. Or maybe you click on a rock, and your client asks the server "Do I need this rock?", and if the server says "Yes", your client makes the rock respond. There's a dozen ways to do it, and they ALL require constant server access, because "The client is in the hands of the enemy". If you have 20 quests, then, the code has to check 20 things in response to almost everything you do. Obviously, there's filters -- the first thing the server probably does is just grab quests targetted for the region you're in -- but it's still a lot of work, and the richer the quest interface and the more ways there are to do something, the more things need to be checked.
Wait, this was supposed to be brief?
Sigh. I don't know why I waste my time. I can explain the realities of the technology and the economics a dozen times -- and I have -- but people don't listen to truths they don't like.
You seem to completely dismiss both history and human behavior. Rather than dive deep into those, I'll just hit on the major points:
If anything is a great example of the divergence Lizard was explaining, softball leagues would be it. Set five identical leagues (shards) in motion, and think of each team as a different plotline. You only need to get a few games into each league's season to see how bad the problem can become very quickly.
Volunteer GMs = No. Suggesting a customer support infrastructure for an international subscription service is no different that DMing in your buddy's basement seems to indicate you really do not know what is involved here.
The 'premium' servers and premium service have been tried several times. It really hasn't proven to be worth the time or effort for any company that has gone that route.
You talk about offering these deep quality experiences and then suggest that this can be achieved by using untrained volunteers or low paid temps.
No, I'm not dismissing "history"...I'm citing it...MOST of what I am talking about has already been done before in the MUD world and quite profitably I might add. Take a look at Simutronics history throughout the 90's and early part of this century for an example.
Divergence is not really an issue. Assuming you do have multiple shards (which is not neccesarly a given....with clustering/cloud computing... you really don't NEED different a logical seperation between machines...other then possibly world size to player ratio).... LET THEM diverge...it need not be that much of a problem. But there are plenty of ways to wrap parameters around such things if you really need to.... so the things you really want to count on being consistant can be.
Furthermore GM's are NOT "customer support".... thats what current day MMO's have morphed them into...but it's not truely what they are. CSR's are an entirely seperate critter/job function then GMing. Honestly GM's are PARTICIPANTS in an entertainment venue every bit as much as the players. Why do you think it is that people setup and run thier own NWN servers...or even thier own MUDS/MUSH's? They just play a different role. They DO however need some supervision/support because of what they are doing and how it can effect the player community. That's where the senior GM's who ARE paid employees come in. Furthermore, they do need a very good toolkit to use?
Honestly....have you ever been a GM for an online game?
Grumpy, I could write a really long reply, but:
a)I am supposed to be writing Java code.
b)I touched on some of the issues in recent reply to Rob.
c)I wish there was a polite way to say this, but.... you're clueless. Really. You have no idea or comprehension of the realities of massive commercial games, the psychology of players, or the technologies involved and their limitations. Your attempt to "scale up" from MU*s is about as sensible as saying, "Well, since all members of a family care for each other without pay, why can't the entire world work just like a family where we all take care of each other?" (You're hardly the first human to make scaling errors -- the one I just mentioned was made by a man named Karl Marx and it's killed more people than can be easily counted.) You're obviously not stupid, you just haven't done the research. Learn more, and you'll understand why your ideas have been tried, and have failed. (On the simplest note, your "volunteer" DMs won't work -- far too many risks in so many areas, including lawsuits.)
The problem isn't "thinking outside the box". The problem is, you are thinking inside a box which is battered, broken, and long since discarded. There is nothing you're suggesting which hasn't been tried before, often never making it out of alpha. There are REASONS for this. (Also, go far enough outside the box, and you no longer have an MMORPG as commonly defined, which is a way of saying 2+2=5, for sufficiently large values of 2.)
(BTW, multiple your scenario times 300K->5M players times 10-40 servers times 52 weeks a year times 5 to 10 years. How many "original" and "involving" scenarios will there be? How much will be "Oh, yay, this time it's orcs. Last time it was goblins. Whee.")
(A friend of mine is a NWN DM, and she constantly runs "events" akin to what you're describing. They work because her server has about a 10 player to 1 DM ratio, the 30-50 regular players all know each other very well, and the banhammer is wielded with Extreme Prejudice. None of these things can be scaled to a commercial MMORPG. )
PS: If I am ever told "You can't adventure in this zone, some rich snots are using it for their private quest", my account will be canceled so fast the server will smoke.
Lizard_SF,
This is only because you've been conditioned to think along certain lines. Firstly there is no reason a game even HAS to have quests in the traditional sense....MANY didn't/dont. Secondly there is no reason that you and I must experience the SAME content.... if you are in a softball league and you happen to miss one of the games.... do you demand that they replay the game for you? Nor that you must succesfully complete every quest you get. If you are playing MLB on the computer do you demand that the game never lets you strike out while at bat...or god forbid even loose a game?
Your softball analogy makes no sense whatsoever. It's so far out of context I don't even know where to begin. To play on the words, the concept isn't even in the ballpark. Whether you are there or not, your team still either loses or advances. When you gate content from players for a consequence not of their own actions, you prevent them from advancing, ie, they lose by default. That makes players angry.
Why do you assume that it a ratio of 100,000 players to one GM must be the norm.... or that every GM must be a paid employee. Did every GM back in the old PnP days get paid to do so? Was the GM GM'ing in the employ of a company whose success was based on his/her performance? I don't know of a single one...but there usualy was no shortage of GM's.
1. Umm... because a game has to be affordable.
2. You put unpaid GM's into the game, and you will truly take griefing to the next level. If there is anything a griefer would love, they would love to be infamous for totally screwing up an ingame event from the inside. You can't have a grasp of MMO history and believe anything different(look up "Lord British" in the Wiki and see how not only player griefers screwed with him, but even the devs made ways of killing him as an inside joke). not to mention...
3. Unpaid GM's will not have the training to ward off player griefers.
Why do you assume that $15 per month standard subscription and that's it MUST be the price for every MMO. Yeah, I know that you can walk into McDonalds and get a meal for $5. Does that stop people from going to a nice resteraunt and ordering a lobster dinner for $30? Are people never willing to pay a different price for a qualitatively different experience??
Your premise, from top to bottom, does not equate, to me, a lobster dinner. if it were, DnD would still be huge and MMO's would leave people thinking... "meh, gimme my d20.". There would be such a massive demand for Dnd 4.0 Online Tabletop that WotC could double the dev team to get it done and still make serious bank.
Let's try this out for size. GM Bob and his volunteer staff of 6 GM's (They volunteer because GM's in this game get to actualy do things....just like in the old PnP days) Again, despite being "grumpy", you assume that if you give a volunteer GM power, they'll use it with the best intentions. If they get to actually do things, they will be able to actually SCREW UP things, intentionally or not. decide to run an event. A maurading army of orcs will attack a farming village. They create the event and off they go.... working together to coordinate the event, spawn the mobs, even play some of the NPC's at times. Hints of something unusual going on the village start to appear (maybe they fire-off a sound file of distant drums playing for the zone that the village is in). Players nearby may start to congregate. Now Bob nows that, hey if a 1,000 players show up in this zone the server will hiccup...so after 5 minutes of hints he throws up a zone lock with a 100 player queue on that zone.
You've basically described WAR's public quests, except with GM intervention, and in a way a GM run takeover of a CP in Tabula Rasa. The GM's might possibly "play" orc mobs, and could spawn more orcs if necessary, and may also cue when the next scripted event occurs.
Yes, I say there would have to be scripts involved. Why? Because for one, when the orcs hit town, it would seem silly to have all the townsfolk and vendors just wandering about, going on with their business. And if you just have them set to run when a monster comes in range, you'll have griefers running trains through town to keep people from using vendors. So you'd have to script a time where the townsfolk flee, and some take up arms, and others might begin to coordinate some other defenses; Act 1, Act 2, Act 3 type stuff. Otherwise, you've got yet another static event where time stands still.
Devs have to code this. That means you can't just be a GM that sets these up in random places. So, if they're the wonderful thing that you seem to think they would be, you'd have many guilds camping these places. You'd be back to EQ mob boss camping, which was ever so wonderful...
Yes. Charge, more than 15 dollars per sub, to serve 100 players at a time for a largely scripted mixed PVE/PVP event. In the meantime, if your game is halfway successful, that means you kick thousands out of the zone or otherwise prevent them from participating. Prepare to enjoy board posts of "I pay the same $$$ as X player, why do THEY get to have this content just because they have time to camp???"
In summary, you're going to demand more money for your MMO due to content that only 100 players can enjoy at a time, than a MMO in which ALL players can enjoy any content in which they are capable?
Players in the zone get to decide how they want to react to what is going on. However there are a variety of tasks which if done can give the players extra rewards.... NOTE these are NOT quests (there are no quest rings), the players may not even know about these tasks ahead of time...but there may be hints about them during the even't. They'll know when they search the internet for the event in question, where they'll find countless guides showing optimal camping areas, a list of potential objectives in the area, etc. . For every regular orc that gets killed it drops an orc ear that a player can loot (make it Bind on Acquire...so no cheating if you like), an orc sub-chief drops a different ear, the orc war-chief drops yet another type. Villagers (NPC) that get injurred during the attack will give a thank you note to any player that heals them. Players that go out into the forest next to the village to scout out where the orcs came from may find discarded orc arrows along thier line of march . These can all be turned in for different rewards (exp) at the end of the event. Maybe the level of reward even varies depending upon whether the orcs destroyed the village or not.
Now, you're pretty much describing skirmishes in LotRO. At least now you're describing a feature that people enjoy enough to keep a game afloat. Skirmishes offer skirmish points, which drop from mobs and you get when you complete objectives, which can be turned in for rewards. There are different kinds of skirmish coins that drop from lieutenant and boss mobs which you can use for more specific things. Skirmishes also have randomized optional objectives, coincidentally one being to collect arrows for your archers.
The only thing that's missing is that there isn't a GM there taking over mob ai or triggering the next scripted event manually. It happens automatically once certain conditions are met.
At the end of the event whether the village is destroyed or not depends upon how successfull the players were in fighting off the attack. If the players loose...the village gets destroyed....not just for them....for everyone on the server... permanently (no different "states" for different folks). If they don't want the servers to permantly diverge too heavly from one another maybe they run another event a week or a month later to rebuild it.
(ie through no fault of their own, other players are then gated from town content and vendors permanently. Frustration hits the boards about the 100 idiots who camped and prevented the elite players from saving the town)
Lets say you missed that event...and you've been unlucky catching events but you REALLY want to have some custom experience. Ever go see a movie? I don't know about you...but it costs me $15-$20 for 2-3 hours of entertainment. Willing to pay even half that for custom interactive entertainment? Sounds like pretty good deal to me. So you (and 9 other guys) but a ticket for running through a custom module for $7. For that price GM Jim.... he's a volunteer but he's worked for several months under a Senior GM and proven himself experienced and reliable.... will take you and that group through a module HE has created (using the toolset GM's get provided with) in a private instance. It's not part of the regular world, it's off in a different location ....so no worries even about messing anything up for the rest of the world.
So you get 3 hours of assured custom entertainment for $7. Jim gets $50 in his pocket for being a GM for 3 hours. Not bad pocket change for GMing for a few hours...how many college kids wouldn't like to do that instead of flipping burgers? Even more incentive to volunteer as a GM and to be responsible/reliable at it (so as to not mess up your Gig)... and the company gets $20 extra revenue..... plus offering a feature that no other competitor says they can.
The company would go broke. Period. $20 "extra" revenue? You say that as though it costs nothing to develop the system, maintain it, and run it on solid servers! To spend the kind of development resources required for such a thing, then put it in the hands of a $17/hr GM and 6 volunteers? You think $50 is incentive, but I'll remind you that griefers enjoy doing things that get them banned from games after they paid $50 for the box and sub fees.
And... assured... how do you assure that entertainment? What if you get a group wipe 10 minutes into the content? How do you as a company deal with the GM conflict of interest for making the content easier so that they get better ratings from the players? What again, about the griefer volunteer GM that sabotages an experience which directly costs players money? You give the money back and don't pay the main GM?
Then there are the sales aspects. You want the experience to be scalable so that fewer or more people can participate, or else you limit sales to people that can find "exactly X people" to play. How do you handle toons of different power levels? Rewards? Do you provide rewards at all seeing as you'll get people complaining about "paid raids" being nothing better than item malls in a game they're already paying more than $15/month for? If you don't give quest rewards, be honest when you tell me how popular it would be...
And again, this experience is out there to be had, already, for less money, it's just not micromanaged by GM's. And if GM's are mandatory in your view, there's DnD 4.0 virtual tabletop, which as I mentioned before, has carried so much a buzz that they haven't gotten around to releasing it, yet, 3 years after revealing it at GenCon.
Robsolf ,
Really it's the difference between watching a baseball game and PLAYING in one. There is nothing wrong either activity.....but they are entirely different activities. Watching a baseball game is an entirely passive activity........ and surprisingly so is playing many MMO's. Yes you are pressing buttons.....but ultimately WHATEVER you do doesn't matter a bit to the course of action that occurs. You WILL get to level X....may take you an extra week but you'll get there. You WILL kill Throg the Unready... it may take you 50 tries... but you always get another and eventually you get him. You WILL get the sword of monkey-butts as a reward for killing him.... even though it may take you 10 hours rather then 2. Ultimately after Throg falls (on the 51st attempt) the story WILL progress to Chapter 2, the son of Throg...no matter what.
It's like playing in a baseball game where the results of every play is scripted in advance. Yes you may have struck-out on the 1st at bat in the 5th inning but according to the script your SUPPOSED to get a double...so keep redoing the at bat until you get a double...then we can proceede to the next at bat. How BORING is that?
The only variable is hour many hours of mouse-clicking it takes you to get from A to B to C in the story THEY wrote for you. A big part of the fun of the RPG experience is that it is a COOPERATIVE experience where you participate (at least in part) in writing your OWN story.
In may ways, Single Player RPG's are LESS passive then MMORPGs. Look at a game like Dragon Age.... at least some of the details of how the game progresses can change based upon the players actions. For instance, if you choose not to help a certain NPC...they won't be around to help you later on in the game. If you choose not to do certain things in the early part of the game.... other details will be slightly different in the later part of the game...and that WILL effect game-play in certain ways. Even the details of the END of the game...will be slightly different....if only in description a bit. You (and your actions) are actually helping to create/write the story.... that's an awesome improvment in the entertainment experience.
With MMORPG's the ONLY variable seems to be the how much time you put in.... that's BORING AS SAND... after you've had a taste of a more interactive experience.
The 'eventually you get him' part is a fallancy. You will only get him if you improve enough to beat him. ie in baseball terms if you are not good enough to win the World Series, you keep redoing the baseball season till you get good enough (or in RL get fired or too old).
If you beat a challenge, the story will progress. If you cannot beat the challenge the story could progress in a different direction but if you keep failing challenges in that direction as well you soon run out of story directions that feel 'epic' or interesting.
I think the best way for you to understand is to try it for yourself. You sound familiar with MUDs so tag one of your friends that knows an admin and see if they'll let you run an event. Keep in mind the planning time, time to learn the tools, coordination with other members, and how many people in the game world it affects. Also keep in mind that if people are paying for a premium experience then the ones that don't make it to the event are going to either be upset or expect that something is done for them as well.
It's a great idea, but there is a lot that goes into it that you probably won't realize until you try it.
- RPG Quiz - can you get all 25 right?
- FPS Quiz - how well do you know your shooters?
No, I'm not dismissing "history"...I'm citing it...MOST of what I am talking about has already been done before in the MUD world and quite profitably I might add. Take a look at Simutronics history throughout the 90's and early part of this century for an example.
OMG. MUD's are so much different a beast than MMO's it's not even funny. Forget that it's so much easier to prevent people from griefing in a game where you can generally only choose to walk in 2-3 directions at any time, but ok, I'll bite.
Simultronics... I played DragonRealms for several years, so yeah, I know what you're talking about. The closest thing to what you describe that was in Dragonrealms is weddings which are GM ASSISTED. They are still scripted events, and surprise surprise, are INVITATION ONLY, in a room where no outside players can access. In other words, an INSTANCE. They also had GM "events" which I'll get to later.
While being remarkably sophisticated for text, MUD's are nowhere near the complexity of even your most basic MMO, particularly in terms of thwarting system logic for exploitation. Even in the most sophisticated MUD, you can't just, say, "fall through the earth" and escape a player that you just stole from. You can't manipulate and manuever around all the scenery the text describes unless the dev's gave the option to do so. Even so, people still got screwed over.
One example was a "catch all" emote option DR implemented, which allowed you to type any kind of action you could think of; much like modern emotes, have no real effect whatsoever:
/emote hands you 50 copper pieces.
"Robsolf hands you 50 copper pieces."
This was often used to dupe people into "trading" items. As I recall, Simu created an "accept" system so it was easier to tell a legitimate trade, but they still managed to fool many noobs.
and, players kept doing stuff like:
<during PvP>
"OK, I GIVE I GIVE! YOU WIN!"
/emote retreats from you. He is now at polearm range.
/emote retreats from you. He is now at bow range.
/bash grump
/emote uses <made up special item>. His wounds are now completely healed.
etc...
And, as an aside, I'll remind you that NOWHERE in the DR game was there an ability to change any of the descriptive area text, to any permanent effect. Other than being able to drop a bunch of garbage on the ground that everyone could see, each area was static.
As far as GM-run events, they mostly consist of GM run vendors during special events that give unique items (CoX occasionally has parties in Pocket D that gm's attend, and don't charge you for it beyond your sub). Their GM-assisted quests were on rare occasions. And if you go there now(play.net) you'll see there are none planned. So it seems they aren't quite the success you make them out to be, or else they'd be running them all the time.
I assure you, that if DR had 250,000 players, not all of those players could access GM run events. The proof is on the site. Even with their tiny player base of thousands(if that) You have to have a platinum membership to even be eligible to participate, which I recall being around 30 bucks a month; paid, likely by only a few hundred players.
So as you can see, even in MUDs GM run events are difficult things that can only be run for a small number of people and are too costly to be worth it, and do little to grow the player base beyond what it already is.
Speaking of, let me ask the platinum question. If it can be done in MMO, WHY AREN'T THEY DOING IT? Hero's Journey, Simultronics 3D MMO, has been in development since WoW came out and hasn't gone much past concept art. The last entry of any kind was in Sept, 2008.
Here's a telling bit from their FAQ http://www.play.net/hj/info/faq/ :
Q. Will Hero's Journey offer live events run by GameMasters?
A. That is one of our goals.
That's far from a "yes".
That's marketing speak for, "we'd like to, but we have no idea how we're gonna do it".
Furthermore GM's are NOT "customer support".... thats what current day MMO's have morphed them into...but it's not truely what they are. CSR's are an entirely seperate critter/job function then GMing. Honestly GM's are PARTICIPANTS in an entertainment venue every bit as much as the players. Why do you think it is that people setup and run thier own NWN servers...or even thier own MUDS/MUSH's? They just play a different role. They DO however need some supervision/support because of what they are doing and how it can effect the player community. That's where the senior GM's who ARE paid employees come in. Furthermore, they do need a very good toolkit to use?
One place where we might agree, is that I don't like that customer service is referred to as a GM. Don't like it one bit. There is a difference. Call it whatever game immersing thing you want "DEM" for deus ex machina, or whatever. But not GM.
I really don't understand why some people are so vigorously trying to stamp out the idea of the possibility of a dynamic MMO world with depth, that is feasible to develop and maintain.
A lot of the components and idea necessary to create such an MMO already exist, and have been used in fragments scattered around the MMO industry for over a decade.
The key to success is to take all of the ideas that worked over past MMOs, and then take them to the next level by making them interact together in a meaningful way. Ultima Online was the first MMO to attempt something like this. Sure, it fell short, but the main reason was not simply that they did not have the time or resources.
Origin was flying blind -- No one had made an MMO to that scale or methodology before. It was the first time an online virtual world was created on that level of detail and interactivity. They didn't know what mechanics were hits, what were misses, nor how to tweak them just right. Furthermore they were greatly limited by technology. All of the variables to store, the bandwidth to communicate between server and client, and the client's ability to render a dynamic world. 10 years ago, they were extremely limited compared to what can be done today. This I think was a large part of the reason why they had to drop the dynamic NPC behavior and dumb down the AI, not only because it took time to tweak it, but because they had to keep it simple so their servers wouldn't get bogged down.
As I said earlier, many different MMOs in the past decade have introduced some very innovative and fun gameplay options and mechanics. Some of which allow players to impact the world in some manner whether it be to construct a player city on the landscape, or impact NPC towns or world events. Some MMOs like SWG and CoH allow players to generate content for themselves and others through a quest creation system. Other MMOs offer procedurally generated encounters and instances, to keep things different and fresh. Other MMOs let players battle each other to control territory, which gives them access to rare resources and to construct upon. And these are just a few of the examples of innovative game mechanics that empower players or give the game world a sense of actually being a living world.
Most of the trial and error has already taken place, so all that needs to be done is for someone to step up and take all or most of these great game mechanics, and assemble them in a meaningful manner.
So just because it hasn't been done yet, doesn't mean it's impossible, or even that it's not feasible. It simply hasn't been done because no one has stepped up to do it.
ok so spend all your time making new content each day for a game
Guys,
1) Don't insult me. If you want to compare tech e-peens we can sometime. I work in Tech....have for 20+ years now. I'm an infrastructure manager for an ASP for living....we serve Fortune 500 clients. I know Tech.... and I know the SaS model (which is what MMO's basicly are). The only reason I'm not working for an entertainment company is that I'd have to take around a 50% pay cut for the same sort of position I hold now.... not worth it.
2) Like it or not you ARE conditioned to think in a certain manner..... and it's limiting what possibilities you can envision.
3) The type of game I'm talking about certainly wouldn't be for everyone. However neither are todays MMO's.... ALOT of people are entirely disatisfied with todays flavor of MMO to the point that they are not buying/subbing to them. For people that WANT nothing more then todays stale/static/boring MMO offering....then yeah the current model works just fine. It would certainly be much easier to build/run then the kind of thing I'm proposing. There certainly ARE technical (and orginizational) challenges to the type of thing I'm proposing.... but they are far from insurmountable. Furthermore there is a very large payoff for overcoming them....implimenting these sorts of systems creates a VERY significant product differentiator then the rest of the compitition.
4) No offense, but the design architecture you are talking about sounds entirely inefficient and inflexible. Why would you ever hard-code a mobs behavior with a script directly? You need to think modular design. What you would do would be to have thier behavior (or rather behaviors...as I'd assume you'd want to break it into multiple bits...probably for multiple conditions as well) as a property of thier object (or maybe child-object of thier object...depends on how complex you want to get with the design for mob behavior). You would have a pre-built library of behaviors (These indeed would be built by coders) that you could select from to populate that property. All the GM would be doing.... through the use of thier tool-kit would be modifying the behavior property of the mobs in question to the appropriate one selected from the pre-built library. Once modified, the server objects for the mobs would obviously have to load in the behavior to know what to do and you would be off and running, for that. You'd probably never even touch the Data Tier in that instance...unless you wanted to permanently change the mobs behavior.
Why would you want to force a GM to have enough technical profficiency to script behavior directly.... furthermore, why would you want to have such a script aplicable to only a single set of objects on a single occasion? That's a very inefficient use of resources. You'd have coders write the scripts and add them to a library....and they likey could be reused for many, many situations and objects.
Your "rock" example also sounds like an entirely inefficient design. Firstly, I'm not even convinced a game NEEDS a Quest system in the traditional sense.... but lets assume they have one. Checking every action against a list of quests that you have to see if it satisfies a condition is NUT's in terms of efficiency. What you would do would be have the rock have a response (maybe multiple ones depending upon how sophisticated you want to get) in response to an action (say clicking on it if that's how your UI works). So your Client tells the server I just invoked a click on rock object #45731 does that object have a response (or maybe rather it tells the server that your character object invoked an interact method on that object) ? The server checks the rock objects response properties and says "Yes I have a response of type = update quest, data = quest #56789". The server checks your character object to see if quest #56789 is on it's list...if it does then it updates it. NOTE that it is only at this point that there is any real interaction with the Data Tier (you want to keep disk i/o to a minimum with these sort of things). If your character has that quest then the server tells the information store to record that it is updated. More likely what happens is it hands it off to some sort of write-behind engine to handle that transaction. I'm sure that's how most MMO's handle things...they have a transaction engine that's built to efficiently handle writes to the Data Tier asynchronously..... even with really kick-arse hardware... your not going to want to have the server wait around to do the work of writing each transaction before proceeding. That would by why you sometimes see "time warps" in the event of an unexpected crash. Basicaly the server is going to want to preload as much data as it can localy into memory to work with...rather then constantly doing I/O to the data store....and it's going to want to hand-off the work of writing stuff back to a seperate process/engine that can do it at it's own speed. The only thing you really need is a method for signling a server object that it's data store has been updated.
Note there was a good reason in the scenerio I described that I used orc-ears and arrows as objects to reward the players. They are essentialy quests without much of the overhead of quests. What is the basic function of a quest? It rewards the player with experience and possibly item's/gold, it may also write something in the characters history log, etc.... Well guess what, a token that a mob drops can do the exact same thing when turned in.
No, I'm not dismissing "history"...I'm citing it...MOST of what I am talking about has already been done before in the MUD world and quite profitably I might add. Take a look at Simutronics history throughout the 90's and early part of this century for an example.
OMG. MUD's are so much different a beast than MMO's it's not even funny. Forget that it's so much easier to prevent people from griefing in a game where you can generally only choose to walk in 2-3 directions at any time, but ok, I'll bite.
Simultronics... I played DragonRealms for several years, so yeah, I know what you're talking about. The closest thing to what you describe that was in Dragonrealms is weddings which are GM ASSISTED. They are still scripted events, and surprise surprise, are INVITATION ONLY, in a room where no outside players can access. In other words, an INSTANCE. They also had GM "events" which I'll get to later.
While being remarkably sophisticated for text, MUD's are nowhere near the complexity of even your most basic MMO, particularly in terms of thwarting system logic for exploitation. Even in the most sophisticated MUD, you can't just, say, "fall through the earth" and escape a player that you just stole from. You can't manipulate and manuever around all the scenery the text describes unless the dev's gave the option to do so. Even so, people still got screwed over.
One example was a "catch all" emote option DR implemented, which allowed you to type any kind of action you could think of; much like modern emotes, have no real effect whatsoever:
/emote hands you 50 copper pieces.
"Robsolf hands you 50 copper pieces."
This was often used to dupe people into "trading" items. As I recall, Simu created an "accept" system so it was easier to tell a legitimate trade, but they still managed to fool many noobs.
and, players kept doing stuff like:
<during PvP>
"OK, I GIVE I GIVE! YOU WIN!"
/emote retreats from you. He is now at polearm range.
/emote retreats from you. He is now at bow range.
/bash grump
/emote uses <made up special item>. His wounds are now completely healed.
etc...
And, as an aside, I'll remind you that NOWHERE in the DR game was there an ability to change any of the descriptive area text, to any permanent effect. Other than being able to drop a bunch of garbage on the ground that everyone could see, each area was static.
As far as GM-run events, they mostly consist of GM run vendors during special events that give unique items (CoX occasionally has parties in Pocket D that gm's attend, and don't charge you for it beyond your sub). Their GM-assisted quests were on rare occasions. And if you go there now(play.net) you'll see there are none planned. So it seems they aren't quite the success you make them out to be, or else they'd be running them all the time.
I assure you, that if DR had 250,000 players, not all of those players could access GM run events. The proof is on the site. Even with their tiny player base of thousands(if that) You have to have a platinum membership to even be eligible to participate, which I recall being around 30 bucks a month; paid, likely by only a few hundred players.
So as you can see, even in MUDs GM run events are difficult things that can only be run for a small number of people and are too costly to be worth it, and do little to grow the player base beyond what it already is.
Speaking of, let me ask the platinum question. If it can be done in MMO, WHY AREN'T THEY DOING IT? Hero's Journey, Simultronics 3D MMO, has been in development since WoW came out and hasn't gone much past concept art. The last entry of any kind was in Sept, 2008.
Here's a telling bit from their FAQ http://www.play.net/hj/info/faq/ :
Q. Will Hero's Journey offer live events run by GameMasters?
A. That is one of our goals.
That's far from a "yes".
That's marketing speak for, "we'd like to, but we have no idea how we're gonna do it".
Furthermore GM's are NOT "customer support".... thats what current day MMO's have morphed them into...but it's not truely what they are. CSR's are an entirely seperate critter/job function then GMing. Honestly GM's are PARTICIPANTS in an entertainment venue every bit as much as the players. Why do you think it is that people setup and run thier own NWN servers...or even thier own MUDS/MUSH's? They just play a different role. They DO however need some supervision/support because of what they are doing and how it can effect the player community. That's where the senior GM's who ARE paid employees come in. Furthermore, they do need a very good toolkit to use?
One place where we might agree, is that I don't like that customer service is referred to as a GM. Don't like it one bit. There is a difference. Call it whatever game immersing thing you want "DEM" for deus ex machina, or whatever. But not GM.
Responses:
- ANY computer application has ways to exploit it....what's your point ?? MUDs were exploited all the time...so are modern MMO's.... so are Single-Player RPG's.... so are Online FPS (like Battlefield series). So will anything implimented in future to the end of time. All this is a non-issue. You deal with exploits on the technical side by puting in controls. You deal with problem/disruptive customers on the CSR side. No difference in that between the type of game I propose and the type of MMO's that exist now.
And yes, I remember the /emote exploits.... they dealt with it from a technical perspective by making text from /emotes appear differently then text generated by the system....and from a customer service perspective by BANNING Accounts that were exploiting it.
- GM's very much had the ability to change room descriptions when they wanted. It wasn't even particularly hard to do....they just didn't happen to do it very often. WHO do you think BUILT all those rooms you wandered through?
- GM run events happaned FAR more often then you intimate. Invasions, plot-lines, NPC's coming to down....these used to happen almost EVERY night....at least in Gemstone....not sure about DR. The "Weddings" were just a small part of it.... and yes they were a nice little offering. The vendor events were just one of the sorts of things that the GM's ran.
- Simu's player-base certainly wasn't tiny.... After the move to the web, on a typical night you'd see between 1-3,000 players online on Gemstone on AVERAGE. That's actually pretty close to the average server population in a typical MMO on a typical night. We're talking a TEXT based game here.... that was competeing with Free to Play Muds mostly.
- As far as the GM thing.... I have done just that in a MUD (not one of Simu's)..... I know what's involved. With a well designed toolkit....it's not really ALL that difficult to do.....especialy if the scope of the event your doing isn't insane. You do need some time to get used to the tools though....and a little practice to get good at running an event......and if your working with a crew of others...you obviously need some orginizational skills.
- Platinum was around $60-80 per month....and pretty well booked.... on top of that you had other events which were sold individualy. Don't assume that the kind of audience for these games is all poor. There are plenty of people that are willing to pay good money for entertainment.
- RE: Hero's Journey..... yeah that's a big letdown...but totaly understandable. Simu is busy developing, selling and supporting the Hero Engine (from what I understand).... You know the one Bioware is using for TOR. Simu isn't a big enough company to realisticaly tackle that many projects at once. So when the opportunity to commiditize thier engine came along (It WAS the engine they were building for HJ).... they seized it....as it was an immediate ROI (read lots of cash now)... rather then waiting for HJ to be developed, go gold and start pulling in revenue. That's where thier focus went.... can't say I blame them.