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Player in-game voting that influenes game events
DrDread74
Member UncommonPosts: 308
I would like to see some sort of player "voting" in an MMO game. I don't mean voting on what feature to add next, although that would be cool to, I mean "In character / In Game" voting. It can be low level like in an 8 player group doing a quest of some sort, there would be interactions (which everyone can see) and the group can vote on the next action to take or next dialogue to follow in a Roleplayiing way. It can also be higher level such as a "Town wide quest" where the players influence it's direction with their vote when they visit that town. "Should the town pay off the dragon at the expense of angering the Elves or should we march into it's lair and start a temporary raid dungeon?". Your vote can carry more weight if you're higher level or happen to be in an appropriate character class etc. They can even be multi stage like some sort of MMO Crowdsources Choose your own adventure game.
What do you think about a feature like this?
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Comments
I'd say that there's no sense in trying to have meaningful choices like that in a multiplayer situation until you can get it working well in single player.
Which is why endgame is so raid heavy. Since those players tend to stay longer, and be more loyal to the game.
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It's just too useful a tool for no one to have attempted it before now. My guess is that developers (and the money that backs them) have been too focused on doing-what's-already-been-done to focus on innovation.
Logic, my dear, merely enables one to be wrong with great authority.
One nice thing about Aion is that they always had little survey icons popping up, asking about your opinion on certain game elements, which is a lot like voting. If you took the survey you instantly received some sort of bonus foods or potions. Great idea which gives constant player feedback.
"We all do the best we can based on life experience, point of view, and our ability to believe in ourselves." - Naropa "We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are." SR Covey
Firstly, for player voting to mean anything, there needs to be significantly different outcomes. If there are different outcomes, some players are going to complain that they "missed out" on content because they went one way but the vote went another. To counter that, you can make the content instanced and repeatable, but that removes the whole point of having a vote.
The other option is to make the votes cosmetic, i.e. no matter what way you vote, you eventually end up down the same route. Again, that defeats the purpose.
What ended up happening in SW:TOR is about 2 weeks after launch, we all realised that the voting choices in conversations were all pointless. Most of the time, they didn't change anything, and when they did change the gameplay, it was in such minor ways that again, nobody cared. As a result, their ingame voting just got ignored by most people. Personally, I always just chose the darkside option every time, not because it mattered to the gameplay but because it helped with my alignment.
That said, I do believe player voting should be a thing in MMOs, but I think you need to think bigger. I want to see player choices have a lasting effect on the game world so that even though the code is the same, each server ends up being different due to the communities choices. Territory control is a big feature that I love to see implemented, even in PvE games. So, perhaps at launch, a zone is primarily controlled by Orcs. As a server, you decide you hate orcs and so work on eradicating them in that zone. After a month of hard work, the server succeeds, so the zone becomes neutral - orc spawn points are replaced by generic beast spawns, encampments become ruins etc. However, if left untended, orcs will creep back in, so 6 months later it's back to orcs again.
Player actions, especially community wide actions, really should shape the world we're occupying.
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This combinatorial explosion of path options can get out of hand in a hurry if you're not careful. In order to make a long story, you have to have massive merging of paths. It's hard to do that and keep the story coherent. So to have real choices that seriously affect the story, it can't be very long.
Another problem is that not very many people can write them. If you go to a site that hosts amateur fiction, a lot of it is complete garbage. But quite a bit is of a quality that would be acceptable as MMORPG quest text. While shy of the caliber of best-selling novels, a lot of people can write that quality of story.
If you look at amateur efforts at creating a choose your own adventure type of story, it consists almost entirely of:
1) offer path options and let people vote, but then choose only one of the options to continue writing,
2) have only one real path and any effort at going off of that path results either in an instant ending or some slightly different flavor text before forcing you back onto the main story path, or
3) writing several chapters that branch off far too much, realize that it's intractable, and give up and abandon the story.
Whether or not you like (1), it's not an option for a game where you expect to play your chosen path the day you choose it. Maybe it would work if you're satisfied with letting players choose storyline options that the developers will then implement and you get to play several months later. But a quick turnaround is not happening.
Option (2) isn't real choices unless you're happy with slight variations on flavor text. Option (3) in gaming is called vaporware.
I'm not saying that it's impossible. The choose your own adventure books exist. But the talent pool that can write stories like that is much smaller than for your usual MMORPG stories.
If you want a story on the scale of an MMORPG and you want early choices to commonly and substantially affect the story many choices down the line, that's just shy of impossible. You could have a bunch of small stories that each have three or five or eight endings but don't affect each other in the slightest, but that's probably about the best that you can do.
Once you bring other people into the mix, you add more problems. For starters, with a book, you can see how one branch goes, the turn back to where you branched off and see how the other branch goes. More to the point, you can do this without having to re-read everything in the story up to that point. If a story has six endings, you can see them all without having to re-read the start six times.
In an online game with other people in the group, you can't do that, but will have to repeat the starting portion a bunch of times. That's pretty much guaranteed to get old, and fast.
In a single-player game, you can choose different options just because you haven't seen them before and see all of the options. If you have to vote, you'll have other people voting to see options that you've already seen, and you'll have to see a lot of the paths multiple times before you see other paths for the first time. So you get a variable story, but you don't get to shape it how you want it.
In a single-player game, you could change the game world by perhaps having a city built here rather than there. In an MMORPG, you can do that in your own private, instanced portion of the game world. But in open parts of the world that everyone else can see, different players will make different choices which leads to the game world needing to appear in contradictory ways.
What they could do is have regular events at least once a month where the players' decisions have a direct effect on the direction of the game's main story. I don't just mean having a big pvp battle and the change is just that the winning side has control of something until next event.. That's boring and pointless.
The best way I see to give players a real say in how the game itself progresses is to somehow have them directly interact with those who write the game's story and create the content.
I'm suggesting that GMs/devs (or a specialized event team) would act as D&D-like dungeon masters for large scale interactive story events. They control monster spawns, bosses and even take control of main character NPCs to RP as them to directly interact with the different player factions and even individual players in some cases. The outcomes of these events would determine what happens next in the game's main story progression.
Making the main story more like a series of massive D&D sessions would give players a reason to roleplay and make the collective actions of the community actually matter. Individual players would be satisfied knowing they did what they could to help get their desired outcome. If not, they can find others who share their point of view and form a plan to try to change things to their favor in the next event.
Sadly nothing like that has been done in a major MMO since 'The Matrix Online'. Their live events were unique but far from perfect. For example, the event times were inconvenient to people in different time zones. Some people were logging on at 3am in their time zone just to be on for the events. Another problem I remember was the event outcomes were different on each of the servers. That made the main story different on each server for awhile and created extra work for the devs. Even with all the problems, players still enjoyed those events and it was one of the best things about that forgotten, underrated MMO.
I still believe most players want to have a way to be a part of a game's world instead of merely playing through it. Unfortunately the companies who host games probably aren't willing to pay for extra GMs and/or devs to do this sort of thing anytime soon.
This is a symbiotic story telling approach between the players and the creators.
Its the most innovative idea in story telling out there, fairly untested and new.
The abandoned space station that a player found will become online once the players in the game deliver all the goods and the NPC character stuck inside will become grateful and likely reward the faction that gave the most goods.(non literal example here)
as an example
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Add to that, if two paths offer good rewards, players eventually want to be able to have both.
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