Measuring progress thru the story

If asked "how far are you into the story and lore of [some expansion]", most players wouldn't be capable of giving a concise and succinct answer. Apart from not knowing how much more there might yet to be encountered (fair enough), they'd also not have a strong grasp on just what they have accomplished.

If asked "how far are you into getting to the level cap", most players would be able to give an exacting answer. Some would even be able to tell you their XP/hour rates and projected play times. All the numbers are there.

When I look at a few of the top MMOs, the reason why is pretty plain: the latter is measured in game, while the former is presented only ephemerally. Once you've completed various quests, they are wiped from your in-game quest log UI. There is no built in mechanism for remembering whether you've met various NPCs or not. A cursory exploration of a zone unlocks and reveals all of a map, and deeper and more thorough exploration is not rewarded beyond that.

There's an untapped opportunity to take a future game design in a new direction.

Quick, while he's distracted!

Fun boss fight mechanic I've not seen yet .. every time a player dies, have the boss start some elaborate process (eg. a ritual of raising a ghoul, dragging the body to some ejection chute or hungry pet, or simply teabagging the corpse,) ... during which time he's not doing damage or is even more vulnerable.

Ah, those noobs in your pug raid are useful after all.

Permadeath vs twinking

If you had a friendly guild that could fully twink out any new character you roll, even helping out with power-leveling and such, would that soften the blow of permadeath?

Warp travel & navigation - another take

Reading Down with Star Trek: Sector Space over at Bio Break and the bulk of solutions to the un-fun Sector Space navigation mechanic in STO is to simply present a list of destinations and then you'd warp there. The further away the longer it will take. And apparently without risk of plotting a warp through the centre of a star.

So, while the clumsy non-fun mechanics of Sector Space have been removed, nothing fun is suggested instead. It simply becomes a time-sink.

Here's my idea:

OK, start by selecting a destination from a list (squinting at a map to find a particular destination is one of Syp's complaints), and then asking your navigation officer to lay in a course. He will then select a heading, a speed, and a duration. You can adjust those settings if you want.

If your warp gets too close to any gravity well (stars, planets, massive comets, black holes, mysterious anomalies) you either fall out of warp or your heading gets a bit messed up (which could either deliver you well off course at the end of the warp or put you at greater risk of running too close to a subsequent gravity well).

The game now is to shoot the gaps, to adroitly navigate.

There is scope for RPG advancement too:

• Your starter ship doesn't have a compass and gymbal which are accurate to 27 decimal places, so until you upgrade your equipment you'll have a greater chance of not heading exactly where you wanted (and risking warp drops or unwanted slingshots).
• Your starter crew are not the greatest navigators, so of course they mess up too: if you ask them to auto-plot a multi-jump route they either don't find the most efficient route (like taking one small jump in the opposite direction to set up a long straight jump, vs many small hops dodging the mess directly ahead), or misjudge the safe radius for systems and risk a warp drop, or are overly conservative and keep a wide berth around gravity wells (and thus less efficient routings).
• Your early maps would of course have all the major star systems plotted, and sufficient info on their planets to avoid their general orbits - but better maps would include precise orbital timings so you'd be able to skirt close to one side of a system because you know all the planets are on the other side.
• The early maps might also be missing some black space gravity wells - rogue planets or comets or black holes, floating in the inky interstellar voids. Not all bad news of course - stumbling across stuff like that is all part of exploration.

All these provide scope for upgrades and advancement, and if the personality of your chief navigation officer is randomly selected everyone's experience could be different too (which impacts the usual gaming strategy of look up the optimal grinding pattern to upgrade and then whine endlessly about the boredom of grinding).

Of course, with this navigation system a player could instead forgo all the upgrades and do all the steering themselves - like I said, it's a game of shooting the gaps. Start the game with most players having better skills at navigating than the Navigation Officer to kick start this learning curve. Some players won't like doing the navigating and will spend their resources on upgrading their officers, ships, and maps; others won't mind and maybe even find it fun, and would prefer to spend hard earned credits on weapons systems instead.

To make it more fun, to make it more of a game, it would be necessary to provide feedback and scoring to players: have the game system report their best travel times across maps, and the shortest routes, even have it score the time it takes a player to lay in a course before hitting the warp button, and keep a leader-board for players to compete against (will anyone beat Han Solo's Kessel run record of 12 parsecs? [yes, different game, different universe, bite me])

"Sandbox" or "Dynamic"?

In writing that last post I almost tagged it with "dynamic" .. but instead decided to tag it "sandbox". (A new tag on this blog - I now have to trawl my archives and do some re-tagging).

Is there a difference? In my mind: yes. A sandbox world is one which players can shape and change in whatever direction they want, while a dynamic world changes in response to player actions according to it's own rules.

The roll out of the Isle of Quel'danas content progression in response to player actions is dynamic, albeit simplistic. As is the flipping of Halaa in Nagrand. The freedom of construction of structures in A Tale in the Desert and in Second Life makes them sandboxes.

You don't however see the Second Life world develop a global warming problem or rampant wild weather in response to all the rampant development going on. When a Second Lifer plants a thousand trees on an island you don't see a change in the wildlife. Thus, SL isn't dynamic.

There is of course potential for a huge overlap, and a world which is bother dynamic and a sandbox would be a very interesting place to live and play.

What do you think? Do these distinctions between the terms make sense to you?

That's a Terrible Idea: Sandbox MMO Design Problems

Evizaer writes about Sandbox MMO Design Problems.

In addition to the Logging-out problem he mentions I would add the subtle corollary of the Logging-in problem - if the world is a sandbox you can change then the safe haven you logged out in could well become a most unfortunate place to log into some time later. Ouch.

I agree the Player-is-a-Peon Problem is tedious. I'd like to play a sandbox world where there was an interactive and dynamic NPC population which players would vie to control and dominate. Think SimCity rather than The Sims. This might also go some way to addressing the Excessive vertical advancement problem too since advancement could be measured in resources at your beck and call, not your avatar's personal capabilities.

Glyph on Dynamic Worlds

Glyph the Architect has written some thoughts on designing for a dynamic world. Go read it and add a comment - this is a topic I'd love to see more bloggers explore.

Self referential MMORPG concept

With so many wannabe MMORPG designers in the blogosphere, would it be possible to build an MMORPG whose concept is not hack-n-slash dragons+wizards, not space opera, not sekrit squirrel spies ... but instead an MMORPG design environment.

Classes would include Graphic Designer, Model Maker, Quest Writer, and so on.

Hmmm ... and bosses would be, of course, bosses.

Shaping community behaviour via NPC interactions

There have been multiple games where a quest-giving NPC is interacted with via a dialog tree. It would be a safe bet that virtually all of them presented fully immersive RP dialog options. If only the devs put in a dialog option for what the player is really thinking ("Yo! Quest .. gimme now! And skip the life story twaddle!") ... of course many players would choose it, especially if it did skip an interaction step or two.

Let them do that a few times, and then have the NPC offer only measly rewards to quests, or give false information, or send you on a quest which is much more dangerous than apparent .. that is, have the NPC learn from these interactions and treat these jerks as, well, jerks.

If the player wants better quests and better rewards they'd soon enough learn that the jerk-option is non-optimal. When you come down to it, the actual dialog in the options is as irrelevant to the NPC as it is to the player - the player is simply choosing option J over option A, B, or C.

Now ... what might be the knock-on effect in the rest of the game, especially with the player's interactions with other players? Will they take out their frustrated meanness and jerkwadness by being jerks to other players, or will the "be nice = optimum route to loot" lesson be unconsciously ingrained and applied onto other players? Will players, when confronted with jerk behaviour, model their response on how the game treats such behaviour (ie. disdainfully unforgiving) - if NPCs punish players for being jerks, is this not permission for players to punish jerks too?

Theory by Flatfingers

Go read Theory by Flatfingers, I am.

I'll fish out my favourite posts and link from here later.

Design Challenge: mapping as a game?

Ryan Shwayder has posted a poll on his Nerfbat forums

How much quest direction do you want on the map? None? A perfect "X" every location? Something in-between?

The discussion is very interesting too, turning towards how mapping could be made into more of a game.

So, a design challenge: how would you make making maps in a game into an interesting activity in itself?

Two factions, two themes, two destinies

Setting: a border town, controlled by one faction, struggling to survive. A rebel faction is hiding out in the hills, skirmishing, scouting, waiting for the chance opportunity to take control of the border town.

In the town there would be available a number of quests, but since this is a settler outpost they would be geared around peaceful activities, and give rewards appropriately. You'd be sent out to the forest to gather firewood and chestnuts, delivering rations to guard posts, bring back reports from those guard posts, digging up ore in a mine, planting of crops and so on. Your rewards would be new mounts, fancy clothes, opportunities to learn new skills or recipes.

The rebels have no such luxury though. The rebel leaders would give rewards like magic tinctures that guard against detection, finely crafted weapons of war, special combat rations and so on. They'd want you to go raid a guard post, to intercept deliveries of guard post rations and reports, to gank the farmers in the fields and steal their crops.

If successful, the town folk become stronger in peaceful capabilities. They can mine faster and deeper, their crops are more bountiful, they learn to sing and dance and craft. The remote guardposts form into hamlets, then villages. The rebels meanwhile become stronger in hostile capabilities, become sneakier, hit harder, take less damage, negotiate dark deals with the wilder forces such as ogres and worse.

Eventually though the town defenses will fall to the rebels, and the factions switch sides. This story repeats across a dozen different border towns. The settlers flee one pillaged town to seek sanctuary in another, perhaps stronger, border town. Some rebels, their blood tainted with everburning anger and knowing they could never take up the settler's lot, will seek out some other border town to go harass.

Arnold vs Benjy

Catering to the time poor casual crowd, vs the expectation of attention for the all-you-can-eat gluttons...

Arnold = $15/month, plays 10 hours per week, keeps on playing
Benjy = $15/month, plays 50 hours per week, quits after 4 months

Arnold plods along, Benjy burns through all content in a few short months.

Arnold provides $180/year, Benjy pays just $60.

Arnold only puts 10 hours of load on the server per week, Benjy takes 50 hours of load. For every Benjy, the server could support 5 Arnolds (more like 3, given peak hour time collisions).

And yet ... Benjy is the one that whines "I pay $15/month, I play lots of hours, I deserve to be treated as the most favoured customer".

Crazy

Measuring progress in a story based MMORPG?

Evizaer posits that popular MMORPGs invert the advancement/story structure of PnP gaming such that story is simply a means to an end instead of the point of the game (and advancement being the means).

He does suggest that it would be possible to design an MMORPG where story is the point, setting the structure right again. My question then is what game mechanics might be designed to record and measure this story-based progress?

With advancement based games it's easy to see progress - the game is full of stats and abilities which can be enumerated. If I wanted to display and explain the story based progress of my WoW characters though I would have a hard time. The best I could do is point to my Achievements and to all the bric-a-brac cluttering my bank. I have very few screen-shots stashed away (the game doesn't directly facilitate keeping visual mementos), my quest log is now empty (completed quests simply disappear). It's a lot of work I have to do to show off my story progress, no wonder then that I don't.

What game mechanics would you want to see to facilitate measuring story progress?

What price for a new game?

Say you were about to release a new game. It's not a F2P. How do you determine what price to charge new players?

Well, you could simply auction off game passes. Let the market determine the price.

Pray this doesn't come back to bite you in the tuckus.

More kill 10 wolves please?

I'm levelling an alt, and thus am revisiting many zones.

In my travels I wandered into the Warsong Labour Camp in Ashenvale and saw no quests here at all. Lots of orcs, busily labouring away, but not a single quest.

Fair enough that creating interesting quests with rich backstory and characters and polish and quality checks and all that is a lot of work, but c'mon .. not even a simple request to go kill some wolves because their howling keeps them up at night, or they'd like some warm furs? Heck, a simple fedex quest back to the Mor'shan Rampart would be better than nothing. Even if the quest was grey and I could happily ignore it, it would add a bit of life to this camp.

Which gets me thinking - would adding more trivial and banal quests into a world make the epic quests stand out more? What if the trivial quests were added as daily quests, to further differentiate them?

persistence

I've noticed there's some confusion about what "persistence" means in MMOs (ably addressed by Raph and others).

Still, for my 2 bits, I like to reference Newton's Laws of Motion to explain what persistence means. Stuff is what it is until something happens.

You don't get much for 2 bits these days =(

Moderating player generated content?

It's been noted that if you let players design content, they'll design set pieces which provide maximum reward for minimum effort. The reward might be in the form of achievements, xp, or loot. It would be impossible to get devs or trusted CMs to pre-emptively moderate player content, there would simply be too much of it.

What you could do though is deem that all un-moderated content will have zero rewards. No XP, no achievements, no loot. Players would have to play the content for the love of it, and if those players rate it highly then it's likely to be interesting content. "Interesting", as defined by devs. This highly rated content could then be slated for dev oversight and moderation, and rewards activated for that content.

Another idea is to have, at least, loot being dynamically determined. If endless gangs of adventurers are able to tramp on in and kill all the monsters, it's only reasonable to assume that their treasure chest will likely be bare. If on the other hand the monsters are snacking on a growing pile of adventurer corpses it would be reasonable to expect the mobs to have accumulated more treasure.

guild math?

The math behind mechanics can be interesting.

Imagine if you could invite anyone into a guild, and the larger the guild the bigger a bonus to the power of the members. A mage in a smallish guild for example might do 1% more damage, while a mage in a larger guild might do 3% more damage.

A simple bit of math. Net result would be a game which encourages larger guilds, even your basic zerg guilds.

Add a twist - make the mage bonus be dependent on the number of mages in the guild. Now it's likely that there would be some tendency towards specialist guilds, but not that much. Consider: a guild with just 20 mages would have the same bonus as a guild with 20 mages and 20 priests, while the latter would have priests on hand to help out with healing.

One more twist then - divide the bonus by the total number of guild members, mage or not. Now, a guild of just 20 mages might have a 2% bonus, while a guild with 20 mages and 1 priest would get a 1.9% bonus, and a guild with 20 mages and 20 priests would only get a 1% bonus.

With this arrangement there is an active discincentive to forming zerg guilds, and active incentive to forming specialist guilds.

The same math might be available on other factors too - perhaps a guild of mixed classes might instead specialise in one particular form of crafting, and another guild specialises along racial lines.

So .. what ramifications does this have on the game world, what are the subtle ways this might change the way the game is played?

The eternal readiness of mobs to eat your entrails

In WoW, the difference between an unpulled mob and a pulled mob is simply their intent. The former just stands there, the latter want to eat your entrails. The combat capabilities of both are the same, there is no advantage to be gained by a sneak attack unless you have special abilities.

Consider though if mobs by default stand about in a relaxed mode, unbuffed, weapons in the rack, some are asleep, some are not even in full armour. Some might even be absent-mindedly grinding away at some craft-work like cooking or blacksmithing. The side door might be left open. A few guards keep an eye out but that is all. A sneak or rush attack here would be devastating, and would reward the well prepared adventurer group with easier kills and thus more loot for less effort.

Let the guards hear you approach though, let them see you from a mile off, and by the time you get within pulling range you'll find them fully buffed and armed to the teeth, spoiling for a fight. They won't necessarily race to engage though (why would they?). They will however keep an eye on you and if you are wounded or distracted by a tussle with some of the local wild life you just might find yourself on the end of a sneak attack to devastating effect.