video game thoughts : comments.
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(no subject)
- Any economy which does not have an (out) box as big as the (in) box will simply inflate. Therefore, if you want a working economy (and your support notion falls here, I think), you have to include a notion of entropy.
- The notion of entropy does not mix well in a persistent world where a given individual is not on all the time. Does your character/their assets degrade while they aren't there? If you build a wall, how fast does the wall decay? If your character existing is all that it takes to keep the wall up, then you have the creation of mule characters; characters who do nothing but sit and maintain infrastructure while you're off with a different character doing whatever, but still benefitting.
- The notion that no one wants to spend time doing boring stuff. I don't want to sit while my character 'chops wood' for the palisade my clanmate is building. Thats not fun.
- People do not have reasons to create civilizations in MMORPGs. They just don't. A low level societal structure arises, yes, but the sort of thing you're talking about has many more underlaying foundation levels that people do not have the time or interest in. A civilized cultural example is the Romans; but can you honestly see PCs forming legions, maintaining their ranks and files for better shield protection, and so on? Simply because they're part of a 'civilization'? Knowing that anywhere from 10 to 90 percent of your player base are adolescent boys out to screw up the system?
- MMORPGs are excellent models of Darwinism; the structures that arise are the ones that make the best use of the system in place. But expect every niche of that system to be explored beyond the ability of the programmers to forsee.
Honestly, I think the next interesting iteration of MMORPGs will come when the design leaps from one-to-one Player-Character interactions to where players go anyway; one-to-many interactions. Imagine, instead of being part of a clan, playing a clan. You can take control of any one of those characters in the clan, tell them what to do, watch them grow old and die, have the resources they gather at your disposal, etc. You can have one or more of them be 'leaders'; champions that you spend time developing while the rest sit around and build walls and whatnot. But then random person x is going to have a hard time wiping out your clan; they can't just kill you, they have to kill all of you. Further, you can develop your corner of the world, and if you develop it well, take part in the play between nations - which often ultimately boil down to the interactions of particular characters in charge.
I expect the technology needed to handle such huge worlds (where a given player of the 10k+ online at a time is handling anywhere from 100 to 100,000 characters) will be here soon enough. Its mostly just scaling up what we have already.
But in order to achieve the sort of interaction you're looking for, such outside of the box solutions are needed - especially considering the complications of the online environment and the need to focus on fun interactions.
[Ego]out
(no subject)
But... (there is always the but...)
I'm still going to defend things / explain things / say "good point, didn't think of that" anyway...
Inbox-Outbox -- good point. I imagine that this could be handled by a low-level maintainence skill set, which drains some resources. Thus, ultimately, the world could only support so many walls, so many weapons, etc. I imagine that anyone with the skill set could handle maintainence of anyone else's work.
"No one wants to spend time doing boring stuff--" My impression has always been that the high-level MMORPG player spends most of his time hanging around, chatting with other players, waiting for one mechanical part of a giant strategy, or sitting around, waiting for baddies (read-- resources) to respawn so that he can whack them and get a tiny amount of XP. The excitement here seems to be the social interaction / levelling up, rather than the actual gameplay.
In Feudalism, there are some complications to resource gathering. First of all, a wood-cutting expedition is dangerous shit. Disrupting enemy supply sources is a time honored strategy, so you are likely to get zapped by barbarians or a rival group. Thus, you want a bunch of soldiers along, and you need to stay alert. Secondly, cutting wood is giving you XP -- just like a mechanical racking exercise would. Of course, this assumes that the digital violence doesn't hold a thrill, which is wrong.
Thus, it is probably better (new idea) to have resource gathering function "automatically" (or by NPC peasants) as long as the territory was reasonably "safe." (ie -- there had been no fighting there in the last 5-6 hours). That is probably, in the end, a much much better solution. In such cases, the PC role would be an "overseer" type skill tree which would allow the delegation of boring tasks to NPC noncombatant bots. Much less boring.
On civilization and culture -- From what I've heard, Everquest clans are quite organized. But, further, I feel that this is because civilization is not well supported on most MMORPGs. Groups are considerably more effective than individuals, but not wildly moreso -- and there is still a real incentive to be a "lone badass" and take on everything.
This is not true in Feudalism. The basic idea is that being civilized (or, at least, fighting in groups) is the best possible way to minmax. It is totally, far and away, ridiculously unbalanced. It is the giant, flaming system break which is painfully obvious and everyone uses. Yes, every niche of the game will be explored and exploited, but this will be designed to be so vastly big that it (hopefully) will overshadow any unintentional system effects.
This does have the possibly erroneous assumption that many MMORPG players are not twinks, merely minmaxers. If they are twinks (read: personally anti-social), then, of course, they have no desire to be civilized at a base level.
But... there are two important things here. First of all, twinks are vastly underpowered compared to garden-variety minmaxers. Thus, they are not nearly as obnoxious, because they are more easily defeated. The second is that the twinks will probably gather in small groups to fight (this is seen on other systems, yes?) which is what I meant when discussing "barbarian" forces that are all combat-types and gain items and such from raiding more civilized groups.
Perhaps, if %90 of the game was twinks, the game would turn into "the one bastion of civilization, surrounded by barbarian hordes." I think that this would be fun to play from either side, honestly, as long as the civilization had some strength.
Multi-PC MMORPGs -- cool. Very interesting. Essentially, it's a persistent RTS. I like this... I think that the real trick is to recognize it as MMORTS, and as such eliminate much of the cruft that comes from the RPG architecture, such as repeatable "quest" mechanics and so on...
(no subject)
>The excitement here seems to be the social interaction / levelling up, >rather than the actual gameplay.
Yes and no. Thats the way gameplay is now, and the truly hardcore people stay with a game for social reasons, largely. But the games are marketed as adventure games (have you seen the new Playstation commercial for EQ?) and that is why people gain interest - and lose it. I no longer play EQ because beyond a certain point (Level 20 by my *very* scientific analysis) its simply a glorified chat room. Good computer games have always been more than that, and the current generation of MMORPGs have failed to be - but thats fine, the area is still maturing.
>In Feudalism, there are some complications to resource gathering. First of >all, a wood-cutting expedition is dangerous shit.
And, unfortunately, cutting wood only holds so much thrill. I can see doing it under fire as being interesting, but I gaurentee that 95% of your player base doesn't want to be combat engineers - they want to be combatants. And thats simply not reasonable if you're trying to realistically model a society.
>On civilization and culture -- From what I've heard, Everquest clans are >quite organized.
The EQ clans are stupidly well organized. The problem isn't that - its that it doesn't encourage any real development of a society. They've found the ideal setup for a clan, and stick to it. There is no real incentive to improve it or change it. Everyone is assigned a role - often very meta roles - and they're expected to fulfill it to maintain their social standing in their clan. Which is a civilization of sorts, but I don't think the sort of thing you're looking for - more of a real-world sort of model.
>But... there are two important things here. First of all, twinks are vastly >underpowered compared to garden-variety minmaxers.
Well, I'm curious as to how you'd design it so that twinks are distinct from min/maxers. But also realize that the disruptive quality of players is much higher than anyone ever assumes. If you give people the opportunity to mess with other players, they will. You have to be incredibly careful with the controls over how they are allowed to do it if you don't want it blown out of porportion. Do not underestimate the annoying 13 year old who spends months working his way up in the hierarchy to get pissed one day at something stupid and then marches an army of other players to their death. A good example in this context is the following: do you allow walls to be moved? Ie, torn down and rebuilt?
If you do, then the players can move walls as things change, as their tactics improve, as new things are needed. Also, in an emergency they can tear down a wall to get at a threat.
But also expect annoying players to run around tearing down walls for no reason other than to mess with other people's work.
If you don't, however, then you can avoid that problem. People's works are protected and more permanent change on the world. On the other hand, now the twinks switch sides and suddenly you have a wall in front of the gate to your castle, a wall in the middle of the street, a wall facing your wall. Walls everywhere you don't want them to be.
Clearly neither solution is really useful; you have to find something in between, but if you make the rules draconian then it becomes less enjoyable to play. (Wait, I need a permit, and permission from 10 other players and have to lay a foundation which has to survive for 10 days out of game and gather special stone and ...?) Likewise, with such things you have to find the right balance between ease of Doing and ease of Undoing.
[Ego]out