The One Rule

[Slamz]

I think all MMO games must follow this one rule:
Let me play the game with my friends.

1) You can strive towards something fun and worthwhile regardless of how many people are online. 1 person online? 2? 3? 5? 9? 22? You have something worthwhile you can work on together.

1a) ...and you can pretty well come and go freely, at least as far as game mechanics are concerned. If you have a group of 20 people doing a dungeon and a 21st member logs on, he should be technically capable of joining the group. Maybe he can't get past the enemy blockade but at least the game mechanics themselves didn't lock the door on the first 20 people and tell the 21st person "tough shit".


Every fantasy MMORPG I can think of breaks this rule.

[Hoofhurr]

I think every video game ever made breaks that rule.

[Kakarat]

Everquest was the one game that you could take 150+ people to a dragon fight. There were no limits because they were not instances. I am not sure if the game has changed from that.

[Veraphim]

Everquest was the one game that you could take 150+ people to a dragon fight. There were no limits because they were not instances. I am not sure if the game has changed from that.

They kind of messed with that eventually. With the later expansions they made all these encounters that you had to do to "Flag" yourself for other encounters. In order to get flagged, you needed to be in a Raid Group that only supported 72 characters. So if you took 80, 8 wouldn't get credit. 72 was usually enough probabaly, but some large guilds would have people getting left out. At that point, only the first 72 would be able to continue to the next encounter.

EQ started to suck after Kunark...

[Slamz]

Technical limitations I'll allow, but even they should be carefully considered.

For example, Planetside had a limit on how many people could be on a continent. Fine. But it was a big limit, and layouts generally ensured you wouldn't have more than a couple dozen people on screen at a time. And at worst, you would just join the queue to get in.

Plus, you could play Planetside with 1 person. You'd just fight with the scrubs. I still had plenty of fun. It was more fun if you had 2 people or 4 people or 8 people or 17 people, but you could play with any number, really, up to the max the continent allows and what kind of newbie zerg guild would even have that problem?

Compare that to WOW or WAR which set hard limits. You log into WOW. You have 3 people. Not 1. Not 5. Not 20. 3. What are you going to do? Or you have 23. Or 18. The specifications for fun were too narrowly defined (and pugs suck in a fixed environment like a battleground where it's even numbers in a small field).


Basically you can't have an MMORPG that builds encounters and then dictates firm limits on attacking them. You need content that can be worked on solo but still be fun with any number of people. (It would also be nice if the content wasn't designed so that 1 stupid pug newbie could wipe the entire operation out just by going AFK at the wrong time.)

The good news is that "MMOPvP" is probably the best way to satisfy this rule, provided you make the world big enough with room to move enough and enough different objectives that 1-3 people can be successful in their own way, rather than always needing Zerg vs Zerg. (Planetside was good for that too. 1-3 people? Mine a roadway! Blow up a generator! Repair the turrets! Try to start something in a dead area! If you had 23 people you could just go attack a base in force. If you had 3 you could still attack the base and have some fun though. Whereas in an MMORPG encounter meant for 20 people, 3 people aren't going to do anything other than wait for 17 other people to log in.)

[Hoofhurr]

I always have to think about this in terms of competitive gaming, of any sort. I think your premise is flawed in some way. It seems to me that the number of players, the size of the field and the goals of the game are all critically linked. In most games the size of the field, the number of players and the goals are static and physically limited. You can adapt the game to the number of players you have but it changes the game in fundamental ways. Have you ever tried to play full court 2v2 basketball? Have you ever tried to play full-field soccer with 6 people? It's quickly tiring and quite silly. The dimensions of the field and the physical goals are generally static. Yeah you can switch to a game of half-court basketball or simply kick the soccer ball around with 6 people but I'd argue that you've then changed the scale of the game to such a degree that the tactics and strategy have changed fundamentally.


What about the reverse? Ever played a game of basketball with 40 people? Why does that suggestion never come up? You could flood the lane with 20 defenders forcing the other team to just take jump shots or you could expand the boundaries to include 8 adjoining courts with 8 hoops. All these modifications change the nature and the balance of the game imo. Competitive games become decidedly uncompetitive when one team can employ a set of tactics that the other team doesn't have access to by virtue of not having enough players.

Now you could argue that virtual worlds are more flexible in this regard. And they are. Nevertheless, it's much easier and I would argue necessary to design a game where the field and goals are static. Why necessary?

The reason is psychological. The number of players, the static field and the physical goals act as the metric by which we mentally calibrate our selves for success or failure. If someone moved the hoop higher as soon as we got close to dunking the ball and kept moving it higher and higher never letting us dunk it then we would never taste success. Have you ever played on a court with short hoops? It's fun to pretend you can dunk the ball but in your mind you know it's not a real dunk and therefore the success of slamming the ball down the hoop is really diminished.

In the same way you could bring 20 of your friends to the court and build a human pyramid, climb to the top of the pyramid and throw the ball down the hoop but again that's not a dunk in the visceral, satisfactory sense of a Mike Jordan jumping from the foul line type of dunk.

Would these changes make the game more accessible to players? Undoubtedly. All these modifications however destroy the mental calibration of success and failure among and between players or competitors imo. Virtual games have the capability to keep the field static, the goals static, and allow the number of players to change and to change the relative power of those characters to the field/goals.

You could keep Ogre_01 at 100 hitpoints and design it for 5 people who do 5 damage a second or you could force 100 players to do 0.1 damage per second fighting that same ogre. I don't think that's a satisfactory solution either.

I, for one, would not trade the satisfaction of achieving a goal for accessibility to that goal. I'll just find another game to play. If I have 4 friends let's go play 2v2. If I have 40 friends let's go play sloshball. If I'm by myself I'll play minesweeper or Half-Life2.

When you conform to the game you know that everyone else playing that game plays by the same rules and a defined measure of success. If you change the game to fit the players or broaden the goals so much that the number of players is irrelevant then no two people can compare their gaming experience. If you can't compare your performance to the next guy where is the competition?

The future of gaming accessibility is having a means of quickly finding friendly players and quickly finding one of a number of games for the number of people you have; not making one game appropriate for a broad range of players. Adult lives, personal preferences and a global internet create a play matrix that's simply too fractured to be sustained by a single game.

[Slamz]

I think that's an interesting element to discuss:

"Game" vs "world".

Basketball, like a WOW battleground, is a self-contained game. You could throw away all of WOW, create JUST the battlegrounds and have yourself a perfectly viable stand-alone game similar to TF2 or Counterstrike. Teams are even, the field and objectives are well defined.

But it suffers from the same problem. How do you play baseball with 5 people? How do you play a 10v10 battleground if your side has 14 people who want to play? Generally, the more well-defined a "game" is, the more restrictive it is with regards to how many people can play or how you can play. There is certainly a place in the world for this type of well defined game but the average gamer may find them to be inaccessible: he doesn't have access to the right number of players or can't play a solid 2 hour match, etc, and may find "pugging it" to be unenjoyable for a variety of reasons.



The alternative, I think, is to not define a "game" so much as a "world".

Games are very specific in that they have objectives but they also have a potentially long list of rules and requirements before you can even start. A world should still have objectives but it should have very few rules or requirements governing how you achieve those goals.

Games are meant to be fair, which is why they are so restrictive.
Worlds have to aim for fairness in a round-about sort of way.

For example, Planetside aimed to inject some overall fairness by creating 3 teams, such that it was hard for one team to completely lock the map down (as there would always come a point where it became 2v1).

WW2O aimed to inject some fairness by having finite spawns per town, such that while it might be 20 players vs 50 players, it was still 1000 spawns vs 1000 spawns.

By creating a "world" rather than a strictly defined "game", Planetside and WW2O both allow you to log in with any number of people and play together and work towards some goal and while fairness may not be present on a small scale, there were still elements of it on a bigger scale.


So I actually think where WOW and WAR go wrong is by trying to create a strictly defined game similar to a sport. It has its benefits but it necessitates the formation of cliques -- groups of exactly the right size and composition to engage in the specific requirements for the type of match they favor. It's popular enough but it drives out all the players who don't have a clique or who whose real life demands make it hard/impossible for them to find a clique that meets their needs.

[Kakarat]

Slamz,

Your idea of a stand-alone battlegrounds. Just create so many scenarios where you can do 1vs1. 2vs2. 3vs3. up to 20vs20.
Depending on how many people you have online, depends on which scenario you choose to do.

So if you have a guild of 34.
Any given night 8 people log on for the average. You can do the 8vs8 scenarios.
Then say you have 3 more log in... go ahead and do the 11vs11.

[Slamz]

That's a reasonable solution too, especially when you have such a huge population to draw from. Odds are you could create battlegrounds for 1v1 through 40v40 in increments of 2 (1v1, 2v2, 4v4, 6v6, 8v8, etc) and have people lining up for all of them.

But then there's people like me who simply like "worlds" better than "games".

I think battlegrounds, even really good ones, even ones with character development, will never do it for me long term. I miss the MMORPG world and I don't like the complete disconnect that battlegrounds have. Even in WAR, where battlegrounds have an impact on the rest of the world, you're still completely disconnected from the game world and in the end the result of your battle is a tick on a progress bar.


I think what it boils down to for me is that I don't like "artificial fairness", which is to say, "well defined games", at least not in an MMO. MMOs I expect to be more open, where players have to create their own fairness and are given the room to do so (e.g., 400 vs 100 sucks in a small room but the bigger you make the room, the less it will suck for the 100).

[Jakensama]

How do you play baseball with 5 people? How do you play a 10v10 battleground if your side has 14 people who want to play?

Theres a reason people formed rules and made baseball require 9 people on the field and 9 to bat, because its alot more fun then running around with a ball in some random amount of people.

Smear the queer is fun for a while, but people want structured games that are sporting, and sporting means some equality in sides.

[Slamz]

And most games are.

But I don't think you should do that with an MMO.

The more structured and formal you make an MMO, the less "massively multiplayer" it will actually be. Battlegrounds and dungeon runs may be sporting and fair but there is nothing "massive" about 20 people in an instance. MMOs seem to be moving away from the "MMO" model and more towards a battle.net or Guild Wars model where you meet up in an unstructured 3-D chat room before heading off into a structured, non-massively multiplayer mini-game.

WOW and WAR are becoming less like MMORPGs and more like collections of minigames.

[Jakensama]

Either way you are going to have a group of people that have no fun. If the game is too structured, people who are left out of a group or can't fill a group are left out.

Too open, and its not fun for the majority of players who aren't on the dominant side/guild/whatever.

Instancing has its place and is one of the reasons WOW became the breakthrough MMO, IMO what killed it wasn't instancing it was cross-server battlegrounds that made community pointless.

You can certainly instance but still make reasonable real world goals as well and cater to both sides. And as AI improves I think using NPCs to balance things will become a viable option too.

[Slamz]

I don't think anyone is improving AI. Gains in computing power are being spent entirely on lowering the cost-per-player rather than increasing the CPU-available-per-player.

That is, when computing speed doubles, they cram twice as many people onto a server rather than making the NPC AI twice as smart. I actually think NPCs may be dumber now than they were in original EQ (am I misremembering the early days of EQ when NPCs would blind you and then run around behind you? I think they actually dumbed the AI down over time to make it easier.)



Granted you can't have 1 game that makes everyone happy but as far as I can tell we have about 592 games that involved structured multiplayer and about...4...that allow pure open world combat.

Also, in my opinion, if you have to do instancing it means your world is too small.

IMO, instancing is done moreso to save development effort than to create good gameplay. When you have 2000 players on a server and your battleground is the size of a football field, you have to instance it. If the whole world is a battleground then you probably don't need instancing but that requires a good deal more development effort to create a "battleground" that size.


And in a two-team system you will always run up against the same problem:
Even if your world is perfectly structured and instanced and fair and every fight is exactly 20 vs 20, you still may have 2000 players on one team and 500 on the other and 1500 people are going to be bored.


So I'm not sure that instancing really solves more problems than it creates anyway.

[Hoofhurr]

Pure open world pvp fails for too many reasons. The primary reason for this imo is that successful pvp boils down to numbers or ambush style game play, neither of which are that intellectually engaging. It doesn't take much to bring more players and it doesn't take much to find some place to ambush an unsuspecting player and take his toys or avoid stronger players. Players that want competitive pvp wither from that style of pvp. Players that want to amass wealth and pve fame shy from that type of pvp.

The second reason it fails is the gap between meaningful pvp encounters. Very few players have the patience or real time to sit somewhere for hours without any activity or run around a massive world playing marco polo. Jboot ring camps are a thing of the past imo. Their pvp equivalents are too. Stick me in the ADD generation because when I have time to play I want to be engaged very quickly and maintain that engagement until I run out of time. Massive worlds act detrimentally to open world pvp in my opinion.

The third reason pure open fails is because of the lack of a satisfactory resolution. Most open world encounters seem to go back and forth for hours without any score being kept. It definitely becomes a battle of attrition where attrition is brought on by boredom or real life obligation.

There were definitely nights in EQ where we would spend all night running around looking for someone to pvp against and never find someone. The joy of the kill doesn't balance against the long down times.

[Slamz]

Pure open world pvp fails for too many reasons. The primary reason for this imo is that successful pvp boils down to numbers or ambush style game play, neither of which are that intellectually engaging.

I can't disagree with you enough there, especially for ambushes. Pistols at dawn, sir!

Ambush PvP is my favorite type, both sending and receiving. Being able to stalk someone and ambush them at exactly the wrong time and knowing that someone can be doing the same to me is a real thrill, and not having this was definitely a contributing factor in me quitting WAR. I think I would have lasted longer had we chosen a PvP server. (But in my defense(!) I was mislead by the dev team's videos into thinking the game would be almost entirely open PvP, especially in the last two tiers, which turned out to not be true.) This kind of ambushing was a huge part of my gameplay in EQ, Planetside and EVE, as well as in WOW at least until the instanced endgame basically took everyone out of the open field combat.

The fact that a level 80 can ambush level 30s and murder 20 of them with no risk is a failure of the game design, not a failure of ambushing as a concept.

"Blob combat" of masses versus masses I think is more a failure of a game system than anything else as well. Planetside and WW2O has some pretty good design decisions that greatly reduced the advantages of numbers and I think those designs could be carried forward to other games for the same effect.

The third reason pure open fails is because of the lack of a satisfactory resolution. Most open world encounters seem to go back and forth for hours without any score being kept. It definitely becomes a battle of attrition where attrition is brought on by boredom or real life obligation.

Here again I think you're arguing against poorly designed systems rather than the concept in general. "Open world PvP" isn't bad, but WOW and WAR open world PvP were bad implementations of it. Open world encounters in WOW/WAR go back and forth for hours with no score being kept because they simply didn't design anything to govern it.

Planetside had complexity in spawning rules and base design that kept open world PvP fun and interesting.
WW2O had a whole logistical sub-game that kept things balanced between two unbalanced teams.

WOW and WAR simply dropped you in a pit and said, "Okay go fight" and did nothing to mitigate the problems of blob vs blob warfare and they additionally created gear/level issues that made one player exponentially more powerful than another. EVE has this problem too, though it's less of an issue in EVE because the universe is so massive, so you can usually avoid the blobs and the overpowered people.


So in conclusion, I think Planetside stands as proof positive that you can design a fun open world PvP game.

Now if they could just not build it on top of a pretty shitty FPS engine, they'd really have something.

[Hoofhurr]

Yeah I really didn't like the engine. I think I'd been playing rainbow six on the side at the time and the switch from mili-second awesome realism to out of sync choppy cartoons was hard to swallow. I enjoyed gunning for the mechs though.

So yeah. I know you like the ambush and I enjoy the actual ambush as well. It's the time spent not in an ambush that does me dirty.

And I was just trying to picture Vllad stalking something. Anything really. He hasn't posted in ages either where is he?

[Vllad]

And I was just trying to picture Vllad stalking something. Anything really. He hasn't posted in ages either where is he?

Hah,

I was in California for the past 10 days getting my daughter set up for college. It is amazing just how much you don't know at the age of 18.


I think you can set up encounters to fit any group size with out instances. You don't attack Brother Zephyl with out a group of 60 but the Paladin standing right next to him you can do with 10. It is a matter of fixing the AI. Basically you take your basketball court and change it accordingly. If you want a 2x2 half court game or a 50x50 full court game you do that by changing the AI not the court itself.

For open PVP games the problem with all previous designs with exception of Shattered Galaxy was the goals not the implimentation.


Vllad