There are open source MMOs in ScourceForge that people could work from and one way people could do this would be to get people working together both on what the game should entail and then on the actual development itself.
With an open source MMO, worked on by volunteers, the costs would be connected to hosting and supporting the game.
However, due to the various committee effects discussed previously in this thread, such a project would have serious challenges when it comes to creating a playable MMO sufficiently distinct from the software/graphical base.
Some projects like this are surely underway already - the closure of CoX has spawned two, I believe.
Originally posted by AlBQuirky How do you think an MMO like this would fair? Would an MMO by the popular numbers interest you?
How would it fair? Or how would it fare? I do not think a poll-driven development process would be feasible in the first place.I feel that the best games are done by the Dev's that have a clear vision of their game AND stick to it, crowd be damned. For example, the Wing Commander series wasn't for me as it was much too shooting-minded. Yet, when Privateer (and especially later Freelancer) was released, it was more to my liking. Still, Wing Commander was a good game/series in their own right, just not for me.With MMO's i feel, it should be the same. Like Wing Commander had it's following (and many of those didn't much like Privateer, at least in my peer group), so do games like STO which i feel has failed horribly.If a Dev-Team sticks to it's idea/vision, the crowd of potential players might be smaller, but in the end more satisfied and loyal i bet than if they had tried to please everybody or "the majority" (and in doing so alienate some group of players that voted differently than the majority on one poll or the other).And really, if the general concept were "open" (and robust) enough, there's nothing in the way to make "spinoff's" to suit different groups' tastes, just like with the Wing Commander Series.
I agree. A prime example is Zenimax Online with TES:O. I did not agree with their idea that the factions' lands should be cut off from the rest of the world, but when they "caved in" to player complaints and opened them up to max level characters. I lost respect for them as a development team after that.
- Al
Personally the only modern MMORPG trend that annoys me is the idea that MMOs need to be designed in a way to attract people who don't actually like MMOs. Which to me makes about as much sense as someone trying to figure out a way to get vegetarians to eat at their steakhouse. - FARGIN_WAR
Players think because they can figure our how to log into a game and log into the forums they are experts at game design. Their highly trained hind sight is all that is required to tell devs how it is.
Forums are probably a worse place to get feedback than random people on the street that have never even heard of the game.
Yeah .. and based on all the ranting about devs not catering to their precious needs, i doubt devs are actually listening to these forums.
They have better methods, like marketing research, or actually look at data in their games to see what is popular and what is not.
Do you think WOW took away world pvp just because? Or expand the use of LFR just because?
I believe WoW took away world pvp because they're server's/engine or what ever it was or is, couldn't deal with it. There was a hell of a lot of server crash's back in the day, brought to you by world pvp
I don't know that a committee approach to game design would work. I feel it would fall into factions that accomplished nothing more substantial than argue with one another.
I think a game needs strong leadership in three basic areas -- creative (the driving ideas), financial (project and business management) and operations (product development and support). The leaders in these three areas do not need to be single individuals, but a single individual could fill all roles in a small company. I'd envision that Creative would design the game, hand it over to Operations for development with Financial providing project management with Creative and Operations jointly providing internal testing.
Logic, my dear, merely enables one to be wrong with great authority.
People, especially here, confuse idea with implementation all the time. MMOs are more about implementation than ideas. Full loot PvP does not make a game good or bad. The trinity does not make a game good or bad. People like to think it does, but it is just not true. A game is good or bad based on how ideas are developed.
The problem is that people look back on playing a game and see the enjoyment of an idea. What they enjoyed was the implementation of that idea.
It is much easier to talk in broad sweeping terms about overarching ideas than it is to talk about the specifics or details that make up the implementation.
“It's unwise to pay too much, but it's worse to pay too little. When you pay too much, you lose a little money - that's all. When you pay too little, you sometimes lose everything, because the thing you bought was incapable of doing the thing it was bought to do. The common law of business balance prohibits paying a little and getting a lot - it can't be done. If you deal with the lowest bidder, it is well to add something for the risk you run, and if you do that you will have enough to pay for something better.”
Originally posted by WhiteLantern We get along so well here. What could go wrong with this idea?
The group decision-making process has plenty of weaknesses without "us" being involved at all.
"The defining characteristics of “design by committee” are needless complexity, internal inconsistency, logical flaws, banality, and the lack of a unifying vision."
Yep, that kind of does sound like us.
Self-pity imprisons us in the walls of our own self-absorption. The whole world shrinks down to the size of our problem, and the more we dwell on it, the smaller we are and the larger the problem seems to grow.
Originally posted by MMOman101 No.People, especially here, confuse idea with implementation all the time. MMOs are more about implementation than ideas. Full loot PvP does not make a game good or bad. The trinity does not make a game good or bad. People like to think it does, but it is just not true. A game is good or bad based on how ideas are developed. The problem is that people look back on playing a game and see the enjoyment of an idea. What they enjoyed was the implementation of that idea. It is much easier to talk in broad sweeping terms about overarching ideas than it is to talk about the specifics or details that make up the implementation.
Some features I agree with you. There are a lot of features, though, where it does not matter how it is implemented, I will not like them, personally.
One of those features you mentioned that matters not how it is implemented is full loot PvP. For me, no matter how it is woven into the game, I will not enjoy it. I am not a PvP player, so the only implementation of PvP I like is a system where I do not have to PvP, especially at some other player's whim.
Now, a feature that DOES depend upon on how it is implemented would be crafting. Simply having crafting in an MMO does not mean it is good.
- Al
Personally the only modern MMORPG trend that annoys me is the idea that MMOs need to be designed in a way to attract people who don't actually like MMOs. Which to me makes about as much sense as someone trying to figure out a way to get vegetarians to eat at their steakhouse. - FARGIN_WAR
I think I'm going to have to disagree with you on that one.
I'm going to have to disagree with your disagreement. Unless of course my personal taste reflects the quality in everything. It doesn't so yeah I will have to disagree. There's a difference between liking something and that something being well designed or not.
BTW chess is essentially full loot PVP.
For every minute you are angry , you lose 60 seconds of happiness."-Emerson
Originally posted by Quizzical Game design is more about filling in many thousands of little details than the few high-level things that we mostly argue about here. For a committee to argue about every little detail would paralyze game development. For a committee to mandate big picture things without understanding the little details wouldn't end well. They'd probably end up mandating various contradictory things.
Given any game design document that isn't self-contradictory, a good game design team could create a highly polished game following every meaningful instruction to the letter that the author of the design document hates, simply by making a ton of unspecified details not what he wanted. And the "highly polished" part of that is by far the hardest part.
Good points, but I was thinking the "pollsters" would be the "idea people" and the devs would "make it work." Some details would be needed to be specified, for sure, and would bog down the process.
This would just reinforce my premise that this MMO would not be very good, if it ever reached a point where it could be launched
Yet some players seem to think that many polls and similar posts on game forums should be taken seriously and seem to get upset when ideas are ignored.
The people coding the game need to have, at minimum, major input into the details, because they're the only ones with any clue on how hard things would be to implement. Sometimes when you're working on something, you might realize, this feature would be really cool, and I can add it in ten lines of code, because much of the structure it needs is already present for other purposes. But if things were structured differently in a very similar game, implementing exactly the same feature might require redoing thousands of lines of code and probably breaking a ton of other things in the process.
If two features would be equally cool, but one would be a hundred times as much work to implement as the other, that's a pretty good reason to prioritize the easier feature over the harder one. But apart from things that are intrinsically hard, you can't really know how hard a new feature would be to implement in an given game unless you've worked with the code extensively.
There's a difference between liking something and that something being well designed or not.
If your customers have asked for a fridge, there is no design of oven that will be good.
( what I'm trying to point out here is that there is a difference between "build it and they will come" views of whether a design is good or bad and "the game is a service" views of whether a design is good or bad ... and, in the service model, if you ignore what your customers like/dislike, you're going to end up with a bad design, no matter how much it appeals to some artistic sensibility )
Are some players expecting too much from a developer? Should developers listen to the players and their hundreds of polls?
It seems we cannot let it go. I mean wheel reinventing.
First thing first. According to extensive studies of historians and philosophers, democracy is not a most effective way of doing things.
Secondly. Would you even consider drivers poll to decide which way automobile industry should go? Or clothe design? Would you consider to use a poll to tell couture artist which way to go? You need to be a specialist (or at least professional) for your opinion even to count. Lately (starting from Darwin theory public discussion), we all start to believe that we do not need to have some specific education to have a valuable opinion in such a professional areas.
So, let us not overestimate ourselves. Or we will end up voting which Law of Nature is true, and which one is not.
It seems that some of MMO crowd especially delusional in this matter. Is it because virtual world requires competency less and less? Some of us used to find there an alternative life. Nowadays people are looking there for La-Z-Boy – Remote combo.
Anyone who's spent time on a variety of ad-hoc committees will tell you that.
Besides, pedantically speaking, you're not suggesting "design by committee" as much as "design by democratic vote". In your model, it sounds like the committee only gets to make design suggestions, the forum voting public makes the actual decisions. That is arguably an even worse way of trying to do it
Originally posted by SpottyGekko Do We Need An "MMO By Commitee"?No, we don't !Anyone who's spent time on a variety of ad-hoc committees will tell you that.Besides, pedantically speaking, you're not suggesting "design by committee" as much as "design by democratic vote". In your model, it sounds like the committee only gets to make design suggestions, the forum voting public makes the actual decisions. That is arguably an even worse way of trying to do it
Good point, but "MMO By Popular Vote" just isn't as catchy
- Al
Personally the only modern MMORPG trend that annoys me is the idea that MMOs need to be designed in a way to attract people who don't actually like MMOs. Which to me makes about as much sense as someone trying to figure out a way to get vegetarians to eat at their steakhouse. - FARGIN_WAR
Originally posted by Scot Well gaming companies use focus groups, so in many ways they are made by a committee.
There's an enormous difference between "we're going to ask the opinions of these people" and "we're going to do whatever a majority of these people say we should".
Originally posted by Scot Well gaming companies use focus groups, so in many ways they are made by a committee.
There's an enormous difference between "we're going to ask the opinions of these people" and "we're going to do whatever a majority of these people say we should".
A difference, not sure it is an enormous one. If they use focus groups I would say the company is quite keen to follow what they say. If you are sure of your vision you won't use such a mechanism. I do realise that in the modern age this would indicate no one is sure of their vision in the entertainment industry. But as I believe that's the case, it proves the point.
Originally posted by Scot Well gaming companies use focus groups, so in many ways they are made by a committee.
There's an enormous difference between "we're going to ask the opinions of these people" and "we're going to do whatever a majority of these people say we should".
A difference, not sure it is an enormous one. If they use focus groups I would say the company is quite keen to follow what they say. If you are sure of your vision you won't use such a mechanism. I do realise that in the modern age this would indicate no one is sure of their vision in the entertainment industry. But as I believe that's the case, it proves the point.
Sure there is an enormous difference. Focus group is directed. The designer has to come up with the design idea before it can test it with a focus group.
Don't you think creating new ideas is very different from just tell people your preference of ones put in front of you?
Originally posted by Scot Well gaming companies use focus groups, so in many ways they are made by a committee.
There's an enormous difference between "we're going to ask the opinions of these people" and "we're going to do whatever a majority of these people say we should".
A difference, not sure it is an enormous one. If they use focus groups I would say the company is quite keen to follow what they say. If you are sure of your vision you won't use such a mechanism. I do realise that in the modern age this would indicate no one is sure of their vision in the entertainment industry. But as I believe that's the case, it proves the point.
Sure there is an enormous difference. Focus group is directed. The designer has to come up with the design idea before it can test it with a focus group.
Don't you think creating new ideas is very different from just tell people your preference of ones put in front of you?
Nope, it is certainly different in the way you describe but that's not what I was getting at. I think that designers and companies who create their own ideas and don't need focus groups to test every last aspect of their design are showing the courage of their convictions. If you filter everything you have created through a focus group it shows you lack that conviction.
Now I know that focus groups in the entertainment industry today are a standard requirement. But they did not used to be and I would suggest to you that they have steered entertainment to providing people with what they already want. Rather than what they might want if they gave it a go. Its a case of "I know what I like and I like what I know."
Are this years games, TV and films "better" than those of twenty years ago when focus groups were hardly used? Do less TV shows and potential gaming franchises get cancelled than back then? I doubt it.
Over reliance on focus groups creates an industry that just gives us more of the same. That's great for Coca-Cola, not good for entertainment.
Nope, it is certainly different in the way you describe but that's not what I was getting at. I think that designers and companies who create their own ideas and don't need focus groups to test every last aspect of their design are showing the courage of their convictions. If you filter everything you have created through a focus group it shows you lack that conviction.
I don't play games for designers' "conviction" nor "courage". I play them for fun.
I care less if a devs have conviction or not. I don't think there is any evidence that more conviction or "courage" from a devs will result in more fun to me.
Seeing some recent posts about certain MMOs and sometimes the general attitude of some players, it seems that an MMO should be made by the players, instead of developers with an idea and a direction.
Are some players expecting too much from a developer? Should developers listen to the players and their hundreds of polls?
To make it more fair, the polls should be simple 2 choice (either "A" or "B") questions, so a majority is reached without a huge division of the voters. A question like "What kind of PvP do you like best?" would be all over the place to reach a good majority vote. It would have to be asked in multiple steps to get an accurate count, I think.
How do you think an MMO like this would fair? Would an MMO by the popular numbers interest you?
What are your thoughts?
It would be interesting to get an idea of what the general populace (of this forum) are in favour of on a range of issues.
The questions would have to be very simple and clearly stated.
I'm quite the opposite. I think game developers should stop listening to the community and build the damn game they originally envisioned. Some people will like it and some won't. You can't make everyone happy.
The trouble comes when they start listening to the "community", which only wants a game custom-made to their personal tastes. Problem is, everyone's tastes are different. You try to be all things to everyone and you wind up appealing to no one.
I'm quite the opposite. I think game developers should stop listening to the community and build the damn game they originally envisioned. Some people will like it and some won't. You can't make everyone happy.
The trouble comes when they start listening to the "community", which only wants a game custom-made to their personal tastes. Problem is, everyone's tastes are different. You try to be all things to everyone and you wind up appealing to no one.
I agree with that. In games, you need a consistent vision. Everything affects the game as a whole, and it all has to come together. And players very often want things that hurt the overall vision.
Developers should focus on what they are doing, on their vision, and make it the best they can according to that. While not all players are going to like any game, you stand a better chance of success with your game if you "make some people happy all of the time".
I'm quite the opposite. I think game developers should stop listening to the community and build the damn game they originally envisioned. Some people will like it and some won't. You can't make everyone happy.
The trouble comes when they start listening to the "community", which only wants a game custom-made to their personal tastes. Problem is, everyone's tastes are different. You try to be all things to everyone and you wind up appealing to no one.
I agree with that. In games, you need a consistent vision. Everything affects the game as a whole, and it all has to come together. And players very often want things that hurt the overall vision.
Developers should focus on what they are doing, on their vision, and make it the best they can according to that. While not all players are going to like any game, you stand a better chance of success with your game if you "make some people happy all of the time".
This is exactly what I was trying to get at with my post about the use of focus groups. We all know how dodgy listening to official forums can be for a game. By using focus groups you bring in that blinkered rule of the majority when the game is still in the design stage.
Comments
There are open source MMOs in ScourceForge that people could work from and one way people could do this would be to get people working together both on what the game should entail and then on the actual development itself.
With an open source MMO, worked on by volunteers, the costs would be connected to hosting and supporting the game.
However, due to the various committee effects discussed previously in this thread, such a project would have serious challenges when it comes to creating a playable MMO sufficiently distinct from the software/graphical base.
Some projects like this are surely underway already - the closure of CoX has spawned two, I believe.
- Al
Personally the only modern MMORPG trend that annoys me is the idea that MMOs need to be designed in a way to attract people who don't actually like MMOs. Which to me makes about as much sense as someone trying to figure out a way to get vegetarians to eat at their steakhouse.- FARGIN_WAR
I believe WoW took away world pvp because they're server's/engine or what ever it was or is, couldn't deal with it. There was a hell of a lot of server crash's back in the day, brought to you by world pvp
"Be water my friend" - Bruce Lee
I don't know that a committee approach to game design would work. I feel it would fall into factions that accomplished nothing more substantial than argue with one another.
I think a game needs strong leadership in three basic areas -- creative (the driving ideas), financial (project and business management) and operations (product development and support). The leaders in these three areas do not need to be single individuals, but a single individual could fill all roles in a small company. I'd envision that Creative would design the game, hand it over to Operations for development with Financial providing project management with Creative and Operations jointly providing internal testing.
Logic, my dear, merely enables one to be wrong with great authority.
No.
People, especially here, confuse idea with implementation all the time. MMOs are more about implementation than ideas. Full loot PvP does not make a game good or bad. The trinity does not make a game good or bad. People like to think it does, but it is just not true. A game is good or bad based on how ideas are developed.
The problem is that people look back on playing a game and see the enjoyment of an idea. What they enjoyed was the implementation of that idea.
It is much easier to talk in broad sweeping terms about overarching ideas than it is to talk about the specifics or details that make up the implementation.
--John Ruskin
The group decision-making process has plenty of weaknesses without "us" being involved at all.
"The defining characteristics of “design by committee” are needless complexity, internal inconsistency, logical flaws, banality, and the lack of a unifying vision."
Yep, that kind of does sound like us.
Self-pity imprisons us in the walls of our own self-absorption. The whole world shrinks down to the size of our problem, and the more we dwell on it, the smaller we are and the larger the problem seems to grow.
I think I'm going to have to disagree with you on that one.
One of those features you mentioned that matters not how it is implemented is full loot PvP. For me, no matter how it is woven into the game, I will not enjoy it. I am not a PvP player, so the only implementation of PvP I like is a system where I do not have to PvP, especially at some other player's whim.
Now, a feature that DOES depend upon on how it is implemented would be crafting. Simply having crafting in an MMO does not mean it is good.
- Al
Personally the only modern MMORPG trend that annoys me is the idea that MMOs need to be designed in a way to attract people who don't actually like MMOs. Which to me makes about as much sense as someone trying to figure out a way to get vegetarians to eat at their steakhouse.- FARGIN_WAR
I'm going to have to disagree with your disagreement. Unless of course my personal taste reflects the quality in everything. It doesn't so yeah I will have to disagree.
There's a difference between liking something and that something being well designed or not.
BTW chess is essentially full loot PVP.
For every minute you are angry , you lose 60 seconds of happiness."-Emerson
The people coding the game need to have, at minimum, major input into the details, because they're the only ones with any clue on how hard things would be to implement. Sometimes when you're working on something, you might realize, this feature would be really cool, and I can add it in ten lines of code, because much of the structure it needs is already present for other purposes. But if things were structured differently in a very similar game, implementing exactly the same feature might require redoing thousands of lines of code and probably breaking a ton of other things in the process.
If two features would be equally cool, but one would be a hundred times as much work to implement as the other, that's a pretty good reason to prioritize the easier feature over the harder one. But apart from things that are intrinsically hard, you can't really know how hard a new feature would be to implement in an given game unless you've worked with the code extensively.
If your customers have asked for a fridge, there is no design of oven that will be good.
( what I'm trying to point out here is that there is a difference between "build it and they will come" views of whether a design is good or bad and "the game is a service" views of whether a design is good or bad ... and, in the service model, if you ignore what your customers like/dislike, you're going to end up with a bad design, no matter how much it appeals to some artistic sensibility )
It seems we cannot let it go. I mean wheel reinventing.
First thing first. According to extensive studies of historians and philosophers, democracy is not a most effective way of doing things.
Secondly. Would you even consider drivers poll to decide which way automobile industry should go? Or clothe design? Would you consider to use a poll to tell couture artist which way to go? You need to be a specialist (or at least professional) for your opinion even to count. Lately (starting from Darwin theory public discussion), we all start to believe that we do not need to have some specific education to have a valuable opinion in such a professional areas.
So, let us not overestimate ourselves. Or we will end up voting which Law of Nature is true, and which one is not.
It seems that some of MMO crowd especially delusional in this matter. Is it because virtual world requires competency less and less? Some of us used to find there an alternative life. Nowadays people are looking there for La-Z-Boy – Remote combo.
Do We Need An "MMO By Commitee"?
No, we don't !
Anyone who's spent time on a variety of ad-hoc committees will tell you that.
Besides, pedantically speaking, you're not suggesting "design by committee" as much as "design by democratic vote". In your model, it sounds like the committee only gets to make design suggestions, the forum voting public makes the actual decisions. That is arguably an even worse way of trying to do it
- Al
Personally the only modern MMORPG trend that annoys me is the idea that MMOs need to be designed in a way to attract people who don't actually like MMOs. Which to me makes about as much sense as someone trying to figure out a way to get vegetarians to eat at their steakhouse.- FARGIN_WAR
There's an enormous difference between "we're going to ask the opinions of these people" and "we're going to do whatever a majority of these people say we should".
A difference, not sure it is an enormous one. If they use focus groups I would say the company is quite keen to follow what they say. If you are sure of your vision you won't use such a mechanism. I do realise that in the modern age this would indicate no one is sure of their vision in the entertainment industry. But as I believe that's the case, it proves the point.
Sure there is an enormous difference. Focus group is directed. The designer has to come up with the design idea before it can test it with a focus group.
Don't you think creating new ideas is very different from just tell people your preference of ones put in front of you?
Nope, it is certainly different in the way you describe but that's not what I was getting at. I think that designers and companies who create their own ideas and don't need focus groups to test every last aspect of their design are showing the courage of their convictions. If you filter everything you have created through a focus group it shows you lack that conviction.
Now I know that focus groups in the entertainment industry today are a standard requirement. But they did not used to be and I would suggest to you that they have steered entertainment to providing people with what they already want. Rather than what they might want if they gave it a go. Its a case of "I know what I like and I like what I know."
Are this years games, TV and films "better" than those of twenty years ago when focus groups were hardly used? Do less TV shows and potential gaming franchises get cancelled than back then? I doubt it.
Over reliance on focus groups creates an industry that just gives us more of the same. That's great for Coca-Cola, not good for entertainment.
I don't play games for designers' "conviction" nor "courage". I play them for fun.
I care less if a devs have conviction or not. I don't think there is any evidence that more conviction or "courage" from a devs will result in more fun to me.
It would be interesting to get an idea of what the general populace (of this forum) are in favour of on a range of issues.
The questions would have to be very simple and clearly stated.
I would be an epic task.
Go!
I'm quite the opposite. I think game developers should stop listening to the community and build the damn game they originally envisioned. Some people will like it and some won't. You can't make everyone happy.
The trouble comes when they start listening to the "community", which only wants a game custom-made to their personal tastes. Problem is, everyone's tastes are different. You try to be all things to everyone and you wind up appealing to no one.
I agree with that. In games, you need a consistent vision. Everything affects the game as a whole, and it all has to come together. And players very often want things that hurt the overall vision.
Developers should focus on what they are doing, on their vision, and make it the best they can according to that. While not all players are going to like any game, you stand a better chance of success with your game if you "make some people happy all of the time".
Once upon a time....
This is exactly what I was trying to get at with my post about the use of focus groups. We all know how dodgy listening to official forums can be for a game. By using focus groups you bring in that blinkered rule of the majority when the game is still in the design stage.