Today’s rumblings are inspired by a post made by Gav Thorpe on his blog about criticism. He’s specifically talking about criticism of his work as a writer and how he reacts to that but a lot of what he says is applicable to other fields and especially the field of community management.

In case you don’t know, Gav is a former Games Workshop games developer who is now a freelance author. While he was at GW he wrote Codex: Chaos Space Marines (an army supplement for one of the popular Warhammer 40,000 factions) which launched to mixed reactions amongst the notoriously passionate fans of Warhammer 40k. Nowadays he earns a crust by writing fiction for GW’s publishing imprint Black Library as well as for more mainstream publishers. His post on criticism is clearly a result of the huge amount of feedback readers of his blog decided to give him about the Chaos Space Marines.

So, what does this all have to do with computer games?

Well, firstly criticism is criticism. The kind of things that are useful for an author to hear about his work are also useful to a games designer. Collecting and analysing criticism is also a large part of the job of a community manager (a hat I wore for several years). Generally people are pretty bad at providing criticism for a variety of reasons, many people are also bad at receiving it for entirely different reasons. We’ll address those people later.

Giving criticism is something that a lot of people are not comfortable with. While they may have deeply held opinions, it can be hard to express those opinions without sounding hostile or rude, thus many people prefer to stay silent and keep what would otherwise be useful feedback to themselves. Not all opinions are negative of course, but the ones you hear almost always will be. This is because things that meet your expectations tend not to incite you to write about them. If things are simply ‘ok’ then we smile and move on, things have to be significantly outside of our expectation zone before we are moved to comment on them. This is usually manifested in gaming circles as a rule where, for every person posting in a 200 page threadnaught on your game forums, there are several hundred people playing the game quite happily oblivious to this apparently all consuming issue.

Another problem with criticism is that people are always right when they say what they do or don’t like but are usually almost always wrong when they try to describe it. This is because it’s easy to get hung up on symptoms without thinking through the issues to identify the actual problem causing them. A large part of being a successful community manager is listening to problems that are described by the players and trying to determine what it is that they are actually complaining about rather than what it is that they are saying.

Taking feedback can be difficult for other reasons. Gav mentions confirmation bias and that’s certainly a problem that needs to be confronted. It’s not always so much of a problem in games where a team is responsible rather than an individual but it certainly still exists. A bigger problem is enabling useful feedback at all. Most games companies run forums for fans to discuss the product, most have a community team to filter the useful nuggets from the vast seas of noise and most have some kind of feedback form or CS ticketing system for more direct contact. All of that by itself doesn’t make people want to tell you the things you need them to be saying though. Companies should be training their customers to give feedback effectively, the tools to do so should be seamless and it should be regularly solicited. If spamming customers sounds bad then incentivise it instead, reward those who tell you what they think and encourage quality over quantity. Ask people to think about your product and give you those thoughts, help them to frame them and give them the tools to do so easily.

In all the projects I’ve worked on, getting quality commentary has always been the hardest part of my job. I wish people would express their opinions more.

So, Aion then. A game that has the luxury of being a newly released game without many of the normal problems that plague newly launched software. No inexplicable crash bugs, no memory leak that the dev team swear they fixed in beta, no unforeseen balance changes in the live patch and so on.  Let’s start at the beginning.

Character creation is comprehensive in the extreme. Although there are only two races, the diversity of characters makes it seem a lot more varied than that. You can play about with an almost ridiculous number of sliders, presets and tone palettes. Customisation is a theme throughout the game that is taken very seriously. Most gear can be customised in a variety of ways. Not only do you have the usual dye options that other games allow but you also have a morph option that allows you to use the stats from one item and the art from a different one. Which is a superb idea. You can also tweak stats to a limited extent through socketing manastones into armour and weapons. Control over the appearance of a character is an important part of any RPG and NCSoft have clearly taken the decision to give the player as many tools as possible to handle that. Aion is a very visual game and the character is at the literal and figurative centre of that experience.

If the visuals are cutting edge then the gameplay is definitely not. There is some nice use of cut-scenes to introduce character story and to communicate background. A few quests also use cut-scenes for dramatic effect which is nice. However almost all of the quests you’ll get are very simple ‘kill ten [things] and bring me their [body part]‘ or simple fedex quests. Questing is thus very repetitive indeed. Combat is identical to every other DIKU variant out there, mash buttons until one of you runs out of hit points. Aggro ranges are typically very small and monsters give up chasing after a relatively short time so kiting is hard. Abilities come slowly as is generally the case and you’ll find that it will be a while before your combo chains are viable or you get access to pretty vital tools like roots, stuns etc.

Abilities are learned from books as you go up levels, you don’t automatically gain new skills when you level up. Your existing skills do get better but you need to purchase a skill book for any new skills you might be able to learn. This is good in a way because it means you can purchase the skill books in advance and carry them with you, thus saving you a trip back to town and interrupting whatever you might be doing at the time, on the other hand of course it means that if you’re broke, you can’t gain new skills until you’ve earnt some more cash.

Cash is an area that seems to suffer from some schizophrenic design. A player will earn a lot of money from questing and looting, however the game monetises everything. Your inventory and vault are laughably small to begin with and expanding those costs money. Learning a craft costs money, learning skills or spells costs money, transport around the world costs money and then of course there are costs for consumables, gear upgrades and other NPC services. Crafting is a huge cash sink until the very highest levels. Gold sellers will make a fortune out of this game. There are other economic decisions that don’t seem to make sense, you can have a private store for example where you sell items to passing players. This effectively turns your character into a stationary merchant, thus interrupting your play while your store is open. There is an auction house system too but I’m not convinced that forcing players to afk while selling is a good idea.

For a game that has wings as one of its USPs, the number of places that don’t allow flight is disconcertingly large.  Gliding is a fun mini-game in it’s own right but there are too many places early on where flying is prevented.

Crafting is another AFK activity. While crafting your UI is largely disabled apart from chat functions, you simply queue up your jobs and go and make a cup of tea or something. If you enjoyed copying Amiga games back in the day and love to watch bars moving across the screen then crafting is engrossing and fulfilling, for the rest of us, not so much. All crafting is recipe based (and guess what? You need to buy recipes!) and there are usually several levels of production to go through before you can turn raw materials into actual useful items. This is an idea that DAoC had in the original crafting system and wisely scrapped after a while. Let me say that again; a terrible crafting system dropped this feature because it was a bad idea. There is no good reason why anyone should be copying anything from that system, let alone a feature that was dropped because it was too horrible even for DAoC crafting.

The game is visually stunning, uses current technology well and yet, it could have been designed back in 1999 as far as the game mechanics are concerned.

I was playing Aion over the weekend in the closed beta preview event. For what it’s worth I thought it was a very pretty game with a lot of promise (I only managed to get to level 10 and out of the newbie area so I never saw any of the higher level gameplay or any PvP). I felt that it was a very traditional MMO (in the context of a genre that’s still only a decade or so old) and that – flying aside – it didn’t seem to advance the genre at all. This seems to be a game that (graphical aspects aside) could have been designed ten years ago. I will almost certainly play it some more in the open beta and commercial release but I’m not sure how long the prettiness alone will keep me interested.

A lot of people have predicted that Aion will kill various other titles. The more excitable ones are saying it will kill WoW, others are saying that Aion’s release will be the deathblow for WAR. That got me thinking about ‘gamekillers’ and, to date I don’t think we’ve seen one. I remember working on DAoC when WoW was gearing up for release and the common wisdom held that WoW would kill our game. That didn’t happen and, if WoW can’t kill a game then I don’t think anything can. WoW didn’t even kill EQII which had the double misfortune of launching the week before WoW and of not being very good at launch. Even that one-two punch didn’t deliver a deathblow to the game and now, while EQII may not have been as huge as perhaps Sony hoped, there’s no doubt that it’s a very solid game that’s been turned around into a successful product.

Aion will certainly bleed some subscribers out of existing games and will take a chunk of the market share but I’m not going to predict any closures as a result.

By now the latest EvE dramaquake is old news but the discussions are still happening. Scott Jennings gives a pretty flippant account which then turns into a threadnought in the comments as is usual. The actual story is pretty simple once all the extraneous bits are trimmed away – guy gets fed up with life in one gigantic power bloc, defects to different gigantic power bloc and turns the lights out as he leaves the building.

People have argued the morality of the issue and whether or not that should be cheating but I’d like to concentrate solely on the question of how much power should a game invest in a single player?

EvE is something of a contradiction to established MMO wisdom. Players are very much in the driving seat when it comes to the big political movements in the game. Because of the almost complete freedom for players to interact with each other, players have a lot of individual power and, the more players they are associated with, the greater the scope for issues. Add to this CCPs very hands-off stance on intervention in player interactions and the stage is set for some industrial grade drama. Some people hold the belief that CCP actively encourages this kind of thing, personally I believe it’s simple pragmatism that drawing a line and upholding it is hard work and open to misinterpretation. In any case, it is possible for EvE players to amass a staggering amount of ingame power and responsibility – which translates into a gold plated opportunity to shaft a huge number of people at once.

For many EvE players (myself included), this freedom is precisely what attracts us to EvE in the first place and thus any attempt to restrict player power needs to be approached carefully by CCP in order not to alienate a very large chunk of the playerbase. This very open and abusable framework is not found in other games, limits are placed to prevent the damage that a single player can do to his ‘friends’.

I’ve advocated before for greater freedom in player interactions, I’ve also been fairly open in my conviction that players cannot be trusted to run important parts of the game so where is the happy medium?

For EvE, I don’t think there is one. Checks and balances can be put in place to prevent this particular issue from arising again, but enterprising players will always find ways around them or entirely new ways to be jerks to each other. For a hypothetical new game though, I think this should underline why community systems and player accountability should be at the core of the design and not simply a fancy LFG UI and some chat tabs.

Basically there are people who aren’t us in our game. Sometimes they’re annoying and we want to smack them. Sometimes they’re awesome and we laugh and laugh until our eyes are red, there’s bizarre white goo coming out of our nose and the wife has wandered in to make sure we aren’t having some kind of seizure. Mostly though they’re background, they are an ever changing tapestry of additional content that we can sample and pick through as we like.

Still though we increasingly tend to play by ourselves.

I’m as guilty of it as anyone. In all the MMOs I play (3 currently) I have a fun and supportive guild or corp, I have plenty of virtual friends and a network of people I can tap up for help, advice or just a chat. I don’t mind sharing my toys, I have no funny ideas about the purity of solo play, I don’t care too much if I put my advancement on hold to go and help out my friends but still I end up logging in and running around pretty much solo the whole time. It’s like playing a slot machine, you pull the lever, see how the reels fall, collect the shinies and then reach for the lever again. It’s safe, it’s mostly predictable, you get something at the end of it but it’s still pretty much the least fun you can have in the house.

I’ve been in terrible groups to be sure where I was convinced the other players were friends in disguise playing some elaborate prank on me. I’ve been in groups where every member appeared to be actively hostile to every other member. I’m aware that a decent percentage of other players suck and that people will tend to do crappy things at bad moments for no readily discernable reason. However in all my time in MMOs, across every game I’ve played, I can’t remember one truly awesome moment that I had when I wasn’t in a group. Every defining experience I’ve had has been when I was with other people.

Playing with other people is hard work. You need to put a little bit more effort into it than just logging in and getting on with whatever you were doing. It’s often frustrating, people have different priorities and you often stand around doing nothing at all because someone else thinks feeding the dog is more important than being your healer. It’s totally worth it though.

Games in the current market need to cater for the solo player, there will always be people who can’t or won’t make friends, there will always be times when you just don’t want to have to deal with other people but you still want to play for a bit. That’s all fine, I’m not suggesting that solo play is necessarily bad all the time. Some games seem to actively discourage you from grouping – at least in some gameplay aspects. EvE online missions for example are horrible to run as a gang. Low level quests in most MMOs are often faster and easier to run solo than they are in groups too. Exploring is hard if all the other guys want to do is set up next to a big spawn and farm all night. The game should never put itself in the way of players however. Games with a stronger co-operative element form stronger and more durable communities. Stronger communities bring better retention and better word of mouth.

How do you play? Do you find that your reality is more massively single player these days?

Looks at datestamp for the last post here.

Yeah I know.

Anyhow, I’ve been super busy and in fact still am super busy. I’m off to Dreamhack tomorrow which will be fun in new and exhausting ways. Then I’m back in the office for a couple of days before gadding off again, this time to a field near Derby where I’ll be on holiday doing much the same thing that I do at work but with fewer creature comforts and without the whole ‘online’ thing.

Anyhow, I wanted to talk today about something I read in a magazine recently.

Some of you may have seen or heard about the review of WAR that was published in the June edition of PCGamer. They were fairly critical of the game which is their right and I’m not going to get into a long and involved post about the specific criticisms they levelled at the game – I think you can guess what my general editorial tone towards WAR would be. Instead I want to talk about a claim that was made at the start of the article.

I’m paraphrasing a little here because I left my copy at work and I’m writing this at home but essentially it went like this:

“The first ten minutes in an MMO is critical. If the game fails to grab you in that time then it has lost.”

Basically the first couple of paragraphs is expounding on the opinion that an MMO has ten minutes to hook you in.

Rubbish I say.

Unless the game is so horrible that it’s physically painful to play, the first ten minutes is not even a factor. Of course you want people’s first impressions to be full of shiny, but after they’ve futzed around in the character creation system, logged in and got an eyeful of your starter zone the next ten minutes is purely groundwork.

If anyone quits after ten minutes then your game is either so broken that even a killer new player experience won’t save it or that person was always just going to quit after ten minutes and you had no way to convince them to do otherwise.

The first MMO that I played properly was Dark Age of Camelot*. I really don’t remember my first ten minutes although I suspect it involved hitting frogs near Ardribard’s Retreat in an ineffective manner. My first ten minutes in EvE online was probably spent wondering how much longer the tutorial was going to go on for. In LotRO, my Tolkien fanboy rage was rising as I found that I had to rescue Elrond (Elrond!) from a couple of not-very menacing looking Goblins within seconds of logging in with my brand new Elf. In fact that’s pretty much the only MMO intro I remember with any clarity, even more recent forays like Pirates of the Burning Sea and Hellgate: London don’t especially grab my attention. I vaguely recall PotBS having a rather irritating scripted intro that went far too slowly but it wasn’t that which made me decide not to subscribe.

While the initial experience should be as awesome as possible, it’s rarely if ever any indication of what the game proper will be like. For the most part the first ten minutes are spent introducing you to the various parts of the UI and explaining the backstory to a greater or lesser extent. Here’s a huge generalisation for you because we like lazily pigeon-holing people around here:

There are two kinds of MMO gamers. You have the clickers and the readers. The clickers want to get going as fast as possible so they click on all the guys that look important and ‘accept’ on all the dialogue boxes as soon as they open. The reader wants to know why the Secret Goblin Cabal is trying to get the Sceptre of P’lotdev Ice and why them having it would be a bad thing. He (or more commonly she) reads the quest information, looks for the NPCs who give the backstory spiel and doesn’t do anything actually game related until the scene has been properly set and the main actors identified. Both of these people care about the new player experience in different ways, the clicker wants to get on with blowing the crap out of stuff without all that boring exposition and tutorial stuff, the reader wants to know that there’s more to the world than just random monsters to thump. What turns one of these players on will be a disappointment to the other.

There is however an important demographic for whom the first ten minutes is critical but it isn’t the MMO player.

It’s the MMO reviewer.

* I had previously tried to play UO but it was ugly and hard. I still gave it significantly more than ten minutes however.

Everyone knows that when an MMO launches the real hard work has only just begun.  Despite the fact that typically these games are in development for more than 3 years, there is still a lot to do post launch. Bugs to be corrected, new content to add so that the players don’t run out of things to do and of course balancing. Now this last item is probably the hardest thing about any MMO and that counts double when the MMO has any kind of PvP mechanic in it. We can all think of several games that have massively missed the balance bus and we remember them for just that and not any of the otherwise great features they may have had.

Worse, every single player, developer, community manager and forumite has wildly different views onwhat needs to be done to achieve this mythical balance. Nerf this class? Buff that one? Rework this mechanic? Add utility to here? Strip overpowered abilities from there? It’s all a bit like spinning plates on poles except that the plates are invisible and your hands are tied behind your head. Oh and you have to spin the plates with your ears.

Since Mythic was acquired by EA, they’ve had access to some of the sharpest and slickest coding teams around, people who can put games out on the shelves at a staggering rate and that’s the kind of expertise that EA Mythic are going to put to use on WAR. What will happen is that rather than continue to patch WAR for balance and content, a new version will be shipped every year. This new version will completely remix all the class abilities and power balance so that everyone will have to figure out from scratch what is over and underpowered – and by the time they’ve done that, a new version will be hitting the shelves!

Here are some FAQs

Q: Will there be no patches at all?

A: The only patches will be to fix game stopping bugs. Such bugs include but are not limited to:

• Bugs that prevent you from logging into your account
• Bugs that adversely affect the stability of a user’s PC.
• Bugs that threaten to destabilise reality and cause the End Times to occur.
• Bugs that open rifts to alternate dimensions.

Actually we’re just kidding about that last one. Rifts to alternate dimensions are awesome. They may be filled by hot blue alien chicks and that’s a risk we’re prepared to take frankly.

Q: What will change from each version to the next?

A: Lots of things! The developers will use their expert judgement and a state of the art binary RNG system to determine which features will carry over from one version to the next. Each version will be numbered for easy identification and so that players will always know that they are using the latest (and greatest!) client. So this year you will be playing WAR ’08 and just in time for the busy Christmas season you’ll be excited to get your hands on WAR ’09! Not everything will change of course, large bits of code will be copied and pasted into the next version with only enough differences to justify a new version number and shake up the experience for players. Who said making games was hard?

Q: Will different versions be able to play together?

A: Sadly no. You will always need the latest client. This is for technical financial reasons that are all to do with server architecture, shareholders, platform leveraging and shareholders.

Q: Can you comment on the rumoured console release for WAR?

A: Not at this time but look out for cross platform functionality added in WAR ’11 and ’12! We’re excited to be working with some of the biggest players in the console market – Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft and those people who make the’150 retro games on a preloaded console’ things.

Phew!

I am very much anti-RMT in games that aren’t designed specifically around the concept and mostly I think these developments are all positive. Certainly the Blizzard/P4H settlement is a major breakthrough. It’s not a judgement so it sets no legal precedents but it does serve to draw a line in the sand and demonstrate that the major developers are prepared to back up their anti-RMT policies with action. It’s fair to say that Blizzard are very much leading the charge against undesirable ingame activity.

Obviously the settlement only affects one of the many RMT operators active in WoW, but with any luck this is a shot across the bows of the rest of them and further action will be forthcoming from Blizzard’s legal department.

The other WoW lawsuit, the class action suit against IGE is probably going to end less happily. I’m not a lawyer but I don’t see this case getting anywhere. There are too many technicalities and murky waters to navigate. Hopefully though, Blizz themselves may decide to weigh in, emboldened by their success against P4H and point their legal deathrays at IGE. One of the contentious points is that IGE asserts that they are not signatory to the ToS or the EULA. If nothing else comes out of this lawsuit then hopefully this will be clarified and a legal precedent set. However the court decides I think this will be a good thing for game companies. Obviously if the court upholds EULAs then a big sigh of relief willecho around the industry, if the decision goes the other way then the various legal departments involved will have to come up with a robust and enforceable alternative. Either scenario is going to be better than the murky on/off situation we have now.

Staying with IGE, the lawsuit brought by former IGE exec Alan Debonneville against former IGE CEO Brock Pierce also has a lot of potential. Not only is it nice to see jackals turning on themselves, the  allegations that are flying around are serving to demonstrate exactly why these sort of operations harm games. In his depositions so far Debonneville has laid out how companies like IGE ruthlessly exploited bugs and duped gold to sell in the quest for profits.  The only downside to the whole drama is that only one of them can lose.

Finally then we come to the Sony Station Exchange episode. For those who haven’t been paying attention, this was launched a while ago as a way to have specific servers enabled for RMT via a secure interface – essentially players could buy and sell item. The idea was to reduce the support overhead that RMT brings with it by controlling the RMT channels. I commented at the time on the white paper that SOE published on it.

Now it seems that although support overheads have dropped, the basic problems remain unscathed. Strangely the farmers didn’t decide to stay away from the servers where their RMT was sanctioned. Whodathunkit?  So now the service has been ‘transitioned’ over to Live Gamer – an RMT company that has been trying hard to get developers on board to legitimise its activities. The main reasons  given are that it was hard to prevent fraud and also that it didn’t deter farmers. For the first issue, making it someone else’s problem is a bonus for Sony but not really one for the players. Presumably if the fraud issue was a major problem for SOE, then it will also be one for Live Gamer and so the players will still have to jump through some hoops – except this time they will be third party hoops – in order to do business. The second issue is even more puzzling. Embedded in the arrangement with Live Gamer are various clauses preventing them from dealing with known farmers and anyone that SOE tells them not to. I find it hard to see how SOE can keep the same level of oversight in the activities of a third party partner that it does over its own system. Again, this smacks mostly of deniability, now all the problems will be someone else’s fault.

It’s heartening to see that developers are tackling RMT, either aggressively through the courts like Blizzard, or through trying to exert a modicum of control as SOE are doing. I’m not convinced that SOE are doing the right thing but at least they are creating talking points rather than just sweeping it under the carpet. All of this demonstrates admirably that if you’re looking at ways to deal with RMT after your game has launched then you’ve started about 3 years too late.

Firstly I think we need to determine what a PvP MMO is, or at least what a marketable PvP MMO is. WoW apparently isn’t a PvP MMO despite the fact that the main end game activity is fighting other players in ranked arenas. EvE might be a PvP MMO but it has carebear areas so the jury is still out on that one.

If you ask a veteran PvPer what they want then their eyes will mist over and they’ll go back to glory days of shivving noobs on pre-Trammel UO, Shadowbane, Mordred/Camlann or whatever. What these players are looking for is an open world, free for all environment in which might makes right and the devil take the hindmost.

Games like that existed five years ago (practically an epoch in computer game terms) but generally don’t any longer. People who played them and clamour for something similar again claim that mostly this is due to those games launching in a hideously broken state. Probably this is mostly true but not entirely.

The real reason as to why those sort of environments don’t last long is because making games like that which work is hard. Along with the multitude of pitfalls waiting to trip up unwary designers in PvE centric MMOs are a whole new bunch of evils that lurk beneath the surface ready to pounce. Mostly these are community problems and are to do with the way that people play games like this. Additionally they are to do with the reasons that people stop playing games like this too.

I’ve said it before but when you are pitching an MMO to your audience, you aren’t so much offering people a game but a community. You’re asking them if they fancy spending four nights a week and the occasional weekend at your place for the next 18 months or so. Early adopters are impressed by shinies and game design, latecomers go where their friends are. So anything that kills your community will also kill your game. Bad development can assuredly do that, only masochists stick around to play broken games, bad design or bad management however can do it just as well. Anything that kills your community will also kill your game, and the problem with most free for all PvP games is that they aren’t conducive to strong communities.

So, before you start figuring out how much damage a fireball should do or whether stealth as a mechanic is fundamentally broken, you need to answer a few questions

• “What will keep people who get their arses kicked, playing my game?”
• “How do I foster a strong sense of community while not allowing unbeatable hegemonies to arise?”
• “How do I reward people for fighting each other without making the loser quit and the winner invincible?”
• “How do I give new people in this game a fighting chance against a mature population without trivialising the achievements of veterans?”
• “Why are there thousands of Darkfall fans camping my forums, telling me how to design an MMO?”

Actually that last point can mostly be solved by employing a suitably gnarly crew of moderators, but I digress. In FFA PvP games the design needs to work against large scale community and co-operation, you want people to fight each other not to hold hands. If people are too chummy then you get some snowballing powerblocs and pretty soon the endgame can become irrelevant for anyone who hasn’t jumped on board with the cool kids. So you split people up and as a result people feel distanced from all the stuff that makes for healthy subscriber numbers.

Churn is an important point too. The early adopters will race to max level and form the primordial power structures, some people will quit for all the usual reasons and hopefully new players will join to take their place. These new players will also quit pretty sharpish if their experience consists of being repeatedly violated by the early adopters and their friends. At this point you are entering a recursive loop where people are leaving because they don’t enjoy getting owned and the people doing the owning are leaving because there’s no-one to wtfomgbbq.

FFA players want to be able to create their own societies and their own factional communities but in reality this is too important a point to be left up to players. Half of them won’t bother and then quit because the game doesn’t cater to soloers or casual players or players with wildly erratic playtimes, the other half will bother and get it wrong. Because it’s not their job to balance your game.

If the players can’t be entrusted with this then it has to come from development – and core development at that. It’s not enough to tack on a guild system or an alliance chat channel, there have to be pre-existing affiliations that will support players who don’t want to or are unable to create their own and which are capable of replacing player systems for any given player. These can run parallel to player structures (as in EvE’s NPC corporations) or vertically (as in the RvR systems of EA Mythic).

So what have we learned?

• Whatever you do is wrong
• Anything you get wrong will break your game
• Making players run the game is bad
• Making a PvP MMO in the traditional DIKU mould will probably fail
• If it doesn’t fail then it probably wasn’t a PvP MMO to the people who care about such things
• You will be by default attracting the type of players that other MMOs would pay to give you
• Those players will work against your efforts to win over the type of players that you really do want
• When your community dies it is your fault, notwithstanding the above point
• Community is hard and you have to design around it from the beginning.

This enforced absence from actual productive work alongside my regular exposure to game related discussion has had me mulling over a few things recently. I’ve been trying to get things internally consistent before I put them down in writing but I figure that’s what the edit button is for so here, for those who care, are my thoughts on MMOs and why they are the way they are.

First off, I should begin by explaining that I’m really talking about Western style MMOs and specifically those which contain an actual game. Second Life-alikes, Micro-transaction driven ‘virtual worlds’, web 2.0 stuff and the like are outside the remit of this particular discussion. So we’re talking traditional MMOs or DIKUs (Don’t I Know You) here.

So then, let’s make a list of things that define an MMO:

1. Massively Multiplayer play. Perhaps obvious but it’s the difference between Hellgate and Diablo. The ability to have a lot of players all affecting the same game environment simultaneously.
2. A persistent world. The game should continue even when a particular player isn’t experiencing it.
3. A game. Some kind of overarching framework that ties all the activities of all the players together and gives them meaning and a frame of reference.

That’s pretty much it as far as required elements goes. All of those points are pretty vague and open to a lot of interpretation – particularly the last item. When we talk about MMOs, the game we usually take as read for that genre is of course the role-playing game.  These come with a lot of baggage and conventions from their roots in pen and paper games which were all translated verbatim into single player RPGs when we all moved to digital made-up guys. So, just like their neolithic counterparts, MMOs tend to feature levels, experience points, quests, skills, spells, magic items and so forth. Of course for sci-fi MMOs you can substitute ‘advanced tech’ for ‘magic items’ and ignore or reinterpret the whole ‘spells’ schtick.

None of the items mentioned above are specifically needed for an MMO (or for that matter an RPG), they simply provide a well-known set of reference points that players can use to orient themselves within the game that is offered. Where they come from is a need for familiar landmarks and a certain amount of assumption.

Let’s list some assumptions that drive modern MMOs:

1. The game needs to be deep. Without depth it won’t retain players – especially if they have to pay to play.
2. The game needs to reward success. Success in this case can be anything from actual victory over enemies to outwitting game elements or simply spending time ingame.
3. The game needs to provide a framework that allows players to compare their progress directly.
4. The game needs to be playable within the constraints of technology and a median level of equipment for the user.
5. The game needs to give you a reason to come back and try again if you fail.

Depth is an important point that is often overlooked. Depth in MMOs usually comes down to nested minigames within the over-arching metagame. For example the actual game might revovle around killing monsters to gain xp and advance in level but the process of doing that becomes defined by subsystems that are essentially minigames in their own right – pull the monster without getting all of its friends along too, time the special attack combo correctly, heal the party members without running out of power or letting any of them die, timing it exactly right to get the optimum number of ranged spells off before the monster reaches you, etc. Then of course you have the secondary minigames – crafting, guilds, building equipment sets and so forth.

Number 4 is an important point too. Many players bemoan the fact that combat in MMOs is still largely based on static RPG models rather than the more exciting and more interactive FPS type. Largely this is driven by factors that games developers have no control over – internet latency and the need to cater to a wide variety of client platform specs.

None of those assumptions however explicitly require the feature list for RPGs. Rather the feature list has expanded to fill the assumptions rather than a whole new set of mechanics being derived from new cloth. Some games might do away with some of those elements (EvE has no XP or levels as such for example) but, in general, they are all present to some degree.

And they don’t need to be.

How about a purely narrative game where you gained no XP for killing monsters but advanced instead based on an overarching storyline told through quests? It needn’t have levels or any of the other RPG staples either, you could grow in a non-linear, organic manner rather than along a narrowly defined track.

How about a game where you started off in control of a small group of characters (a tribe, gang, band of men-at-arms or so) and could play one of them at a time to build up their collective power? If your main PC died, you’d lose some of that advancement and would switch to a secondary character – who would have already experienced a degree of advancement thanks to your earlier efforts.

How about a game where combat is reduced to an arbitrary mechanism in which the stronger side wins and diplomacy is the main thrust of the game. Stronger in this sense doesn’t need to mean bigger, a smaller force can be the stronger side thanks to strategic positioning and tactics.