Now that we’re moving into the era of F2P MMOs, though, retention is harder than ever. If you combined this with the previously mentioned “design a toy, not just a game” mentality, you might be okay, but you would have to make sure that you manage expectations really well.

I think it’s important to create a world in which grinding/leveling isn’t as much of a goal: where new characters can have quite a lot of fun, with no repeated content (traditional, developer-created quests would be doom for such a game). There would still need to be advancement, of course, but not as large a gap between the best and the mediocre.

Someday we’re going to have to get together and make our dream game.

I realize that the game might not be up everyone’s alley, as it’s seems more like an interactive story/movie than a game, but for me it was the perfect format through which to experience the Walking Dead in game-form.

I got part-way through episode two of the game before losing interest. I’ll have to go back and give it another chance, I suppose.

I think it’s a goal worth pursuing, but trying to design tools that will give rise to emergent gameplay is difficult, especially in online games where it can lead to a huge discrepancy between experienced and new players. I think we saw that in UO: the players who knew all the systems best meta-gamed to the point where a new person wouldn’t even begin to understand how to compete, so EA bludgeoned the game into a bloody shadow of its former glory while raising subscriber counts the whole way. I’ll never forgive them for that.

For me, in for instance UO, it was a multitude of small reasons. Like the fact that I could stand out from the crowd to some degree by dressing differently, that I could create (and achieve) personal goals for my characters that weren’t the same as every other players’, that I could essentially mark out a piece of land by as my own by putting down a house there and being able to say “this is mine” and have other players see it as such. It wasn’t just a house in instance #47, it was there – in the “real” part of the virtual world.

Things like these were the main reason why I (foolishly) kept paying to keep my account alive long after I actually stopped playing the game.

I agree with most of what you say (how boring of me, I know…), but concerning 3c) in the first comment. Specialization like that can lead to a different set of problems again – “mules”. The big challenge in that context is how to encourage those inter-player relations vs players just creating enough characters to cover all their needs themselves. I guess if the skills were complex/deep/challenging enough that they would be hard pressed to excel at all of them (even using separate characters), it could work.

And as for the following question… “Whatever happened to developers taking on big challenges and developing solutions anyways?”… what happened was that the bosses and/or publishers of those developers stopped taking risks because….because… I don’t know…. “WoW doesn’t have that/do that, so we don’t need it either”. Most innovation these days seem to come from independent developers who _have_ to take risks because succeeding at that is one of the major ways they can get traction in the press/amongst gamers.

1. “equal opportunities for any character to win a battle” what does this even mean? are we talking balance in PvP? Since when should a skill-less noob-controlled character have the same chance as the spec’ed avatar of a pro player?! Who would even expect this? and how and why has such a game ever been made? this sounds like the report source summarized the paper to the point of being nonsense

2. “They should also build more selective or elaborate chat rooms and guild features to help players socialize”, OK, so having chatrooms and other guild management mechanics makes sense, but again, what do they mean by “selective or elaborate”? more useless jargon!

I’d really love to see the original study in full (not out yet apparently), but so far it provides no insight or value whatsoever – balance and tools to socialize are so basic to MMO’s that no ever has doubted their importance – god is in the details, hell, even Satan is in the details.

1. Both involve a deep understanding of the human brain
2. Both require knowledge human motivation both in terms of personal and societal needs.
3. Both are complex systems made up of simple operators following simple rules.
4. Both cases involve huge amounts of parallel information processing and information transfer between the simple elements.
5. Both are associated with a lot of false dogma and a common conception that it simply cannot be done because humans are “special” and that “simplifying humans of the world” and writing them out a set of reductionist algorithms necessarily breaks something.
6. Tackling both problems requires a fusion of knowledge among different disciplines such as physics, computer sciences, game theory and psychology.
7. So far, we have failed to achieve both. On the AI front, there are breakthroughs every day – on the persistent world side most designers seem to have accepted defeat and have been backpedalling for a many years, especially when MMOs are concerned :(

2. Change your design so that there are no bottable tasks – This is what I believe Raph Koster is advocating. E.g. if the only way to get at resources is to fight actual battles with NPCs or other players, there is no way bots can be more efficient than a highly trained farmer (IMO a highly trained farmer = a good customer & a proficient gamer who pushes other players to improve their tactics). Even if no fighting is involved, how about having resources that move around? (e.g. rabbits that you have to chase before you can get their fur, etc.). As long as it makes sense in the context of a game, it is not disruptive. E.g.

Example A) Bandits jumping out of a rock when you mine it : BAD
Example B) In a space-trader game, having to fight cargo/pirate ships to get resources : GOOD

3. Fight botting, by creating a semi-realistic economy. See, in an MMO e.g. you can click a rock to get an iron ore. Then you can smelt the iron to get an iron ingot which you can sell for a profit and if you find a way to automate this process, you are a made man. This is NOT how the real world works.

a) In the real world it takes skill and knowledge to discover ore in the first place. It also takes knowledge to build an efficient mine/extraction method without killing yourself in the process. This is beautifully replicated in Minecraft when people have written mathematical analyses on optimal mining (http://www.voxelwiki.com/minecraft/Elites_of_Minecraft%3a_The_Miner)

b) In the real world, automation is more complex than repetitive low-yield actions. If you want a unit of sand in the real world, you need a shovel – if you want 1000 tons of sand, you either need 10000 people working for you (with pay, organizations, etc.) or you need a few bulldozers and loaders (which are hard to operate, and need tons of engineering, blueprints, materials, etc.) but are a LOT more efficient. Traditionally, games will not allow you to create/operate bulldozers – hence the 10000 bots people come up with. Assuming that it is possible to have the equivalent of bulldozers, wouldn’t this ruin the economy by flooding it with sand? NOT if the sand can be put to good use. NOT if there is a huge market for sand. Traditionally, games use the sand to make other items, and so on which culminates in making the Uberweappon. This is ridiculously short-sighted. In the real world, no amount of sand or other basic materials will allow me to create a stealth bomber – I need knowledge – knowledge that in itself is compartmentalized, licenced, and secretive. Imagine e.g. that creating an uberweapon involved 10 different items, and each of those required 10 different materials. Also imagine that getting those materials needed real skill and making each item needed a license or scroll that needed to be licensed (rented from the system as it were for a lot of money), and that different guilds or people had ownership of a limited number of those licenses because they are expensive to rent, limited to N per server and because they are lootable from the corpse of the license holder – new game mechanics would evolve around complex trading/sub-licensing/politics/assassinations, etc. agreements that bots can’t really handle.

c) In the real world even the best miner CANNOT own/fly/operate stealth bombers and nukes. It is not necessary for good gameplay to give all players the SAME opportunities, Rather you should allow each player to evolve in the direction of their choosing. You should be able to be an ace pilot without having to own an F-35! In a game this would translate e.g. to: Separate weapon building skills from weapon usage skills so that players have to pick between being soldiers (who use weapons), blacksmiths (who build weapons), wizards (who use spells) and alchemists (who prepare spells), etc. The finer the breakup, the more interesting the economy and inter-player relations.

There are many other ways in which a real-world analog can help us design robust MMO economies, but there is also one painful lesson to be learned from the real-world:

DISRUPTIVE TECHNOLOGIES ARE GOOD!

The introduction of the automobile forced a lot of inflexible horse breeders out of business – yourgame economy needs to allow for disruptive technologies by merit of being complex, requiring huge amounts of cooperation and constant monitoring by designers who know about economics. In the real world, e.g. just owning a car that can do 200 mph doesn’t give you the right to speed on urban roads. If you do, you will be punished by the families and friends of people you are bound to run over (or by the State as it were). This highlights the need for a minimal amount of realistic physics, and a political structure in which a community of players can organize themselves and by doing so control the fate of the world and other players, but that opens up a whole new can of worms some designers would say – I would say it is a challenge that others tried to meet, and some did it better than others. Whatever happened to developers taking on big challenges and developing solutions anyways?