Azaroth

According to some.

Now, the skinny of this situation is that Sprint kicks out thousands of their own customers for requiring too much CS time. Interestingly enough, CS jockeys and, well, everyone working at a company that involves a computer or two in some way seem to be dancing and squealing with glee. Tales abound of how “crazy person” x, y, or z have taken thousands of precious CS hours that should have gone to “more worthy” customers.

And by my tone, you’d guess I disagree with the general stance that this is okay. And I do. But it’s not because I haven’t dealt with crazy retards sucking up all of my time when it should have rightfully been spent on someone who was worth it. I was the sole source of CS for quite some time after IPY launched, and even after that, generally any and all craziness was directly aimed at myself. But those are two other posts about volunteers and why they sometimes require more time than they save, and also about letting your lead people be visible and reachable by anyone who is drooling close enough to a computer.

The point here is that, regardless of how much trouble I was caused by these people, whether the situation was preventable and I’ve learned something or the person in question was just… nuts - the customer IS always right.

I learned so many lessons about handling people that I’d probably break the server this blog is running on if I typed them all out. But the point is that I learned and will be much more prepared next time. I’ll then proceed to make new mistakes, even maybe a few old ones once in a while, and I’ll learn something new (and re-learn when necessary).

For instance, one of the major things that was unearthed about this Sprint case is that some of the users who were banned from the service were exploiting systems to gain free time. Here’s a protip guys - people WILL invariably exploit anything that’s exploitable. Especially if there’s some kind of gain involved for them. But even if there isn’t. I believe that at this point, when the exploitation is discovered, it becomes Sprint’s obligation to fix the exploitable system. I realize frustration can run high and banning people is simpler — most especially when others are benefiting from the same exploitable system, but the logical step to me would be to simply revoke any and all gains acquired through exploitation of the system, and a tweak in the system’s design to disallow further exploitation.

And maybe a lesson learned.

For instance, I think I read that someone had “earned” himself $5000 of free time, somehow, through a design flaw in this particular system. He wanted it sent in check form.

Now, of course this makes you want to immediately tard smack the fellow in question. But what’s so hard about a form letter sent out to all of the people like this informing then that they exploited the system and their “credit” would be revoked, and then, you know, fixing the problem that allowed the situation in the first place. Probably not much. Any lawsuit that may follow certainly wouldn’t be avoided by an out and out banning from the service.

Of course, the next time I’m running a service, I may turn into a huge hypocrite on this issue. But one of the things that I’ve learned is that you can’t have Stallone running around Judge Dredding people’s asses in any kind of service, and especially in a video game. The Policeman can absolutely not be the Judge. That shit doesn’t work. Sorry. Decisions on bannings/jailtime/executions/whathaveyou MUST to come down from an (at least generally) impartial source. This is why these Sprint bans remind me of something some lone shard admin would pull while doling out his own brand of frontier justice while wearing white jockeys and a six shooter in his computer chair. It just can’t be like that.

However, some others regaled the internets with stories of generally innocent, yet lonely, woman who called constantly because a certain CS representative’s voice was “sexy”. Obviously she’s putting a large strain on the amount of available customer service left over for others who actually have problems. But she’s not doing anything illegal, or even shady… she’s just annoying and lonely. What’s the answer here? Is the customer wrong once again?

Of course not, and banning this person is silly. However, implementing legal speak into the ToS about using large amounts of CS time revoking your right to phone time with people (relegating you to email only, which is easier to deal with and less time intensive), or whatever, may have been a better idea. Of course this is pushing something into the contract with everyone else that they might take note of and raise a stink over. Which is in turn affecting everyone to settle one problem. However, you’re also solving this problem in the future. And I doubt the first idea off the top of my head would be the best one that could be concocted anyway.

The fact is… learn from your CS situations, adapt, and move forward better suited for, well, Customer Service.

And put some pants on guys.

Although I haven’t seen the exact way that they calculate subscribers, I’m guessing that it’s fluffed in one way or another. I’m just a cynical like that. How many of you would be playing if WoW listed its current subscribers as 250k? The answer is “not as many”. Also, don’t call me Alex.

The most interesting part about all of this is, I think, all of the hate coming from other individual game developers. Which is natural. Jealousy breeds hate. And it’s easy to conclude that “WoW is ruining the chances of every smaller MMO on the market… which must be the reason mine isn’t doing well!”. However, I think this conclusion is downright silly, and I’ll tell you why.

First of all, these subcribers don’t, for the most part, come from existing MMOs. I’m sure UO has lost 75,000 subscribers to WoW, as have other older games. However, the biggest MMO prior to WoW happened to be EQ, and it happened to have 500,000 or less subscribers. Very simply, the majority of the 9 million current WoW subcribers are playing their first MMO.

Now, if it weren’t for WoW, theoretically I suppose that these people might be playing other MMOs. However, the fact that they weren’t playing onlines games before WoW makes this highly improbable. The fact is that these people were brought in by Blizzard and Vivendi, where the chances are that they wouldn’t have been brought into the online gaming universe otherwise. In fact, just the simple act of announcing extremely high account numbers brings more people in. Everyone wants to be part of the phenomenon. Nobody wants to be a part of that thing that 100,000 people worldwide do - except existing gamers.

So it’s a given that World of Warcraft brought these people in, but opining that it’s a bad thing for them to have them because they brought them in is a little silly as well. There’s always a hemorrhage of players, and Blizzard can’t hold all of those 9 million subscribers indefinitely. Admittedly most of them will disperse into games in China and Asia in general, since that’s where a lot of them are, and where a lot of the future market is. But here in the west, the facts remain the same. No matter what games Blizzard opens in the future, or what expansions they put out for WoW, they won’t be able to hold these 9 million people indefinitely. In fact, the churn of accounts has already meant big things for the MMO industry. Specifically for games like Eve, I imagine, and even Vanguard. By its budget, Vanguard is supposedly quite a failure. However, I last saw its subscriber level listed at around 200,000. With 250,000 in Eve, 350k in EQII, 60k in UO, and, hell, countless others in smaller games and even free MMOs… you’ve already surpassed the previous count of MMO subscribers sans-WoW by leaps and bounds.

So like I said on another site, because you start wishing death destruction and cocacola on Blizzard’s datacenters, just remember that they’re bringing in people that wouldn’t have been playing these games otherwise - and that a lot of those people will end up playing other games, even if WoW’s subscriber base remains relatively the same. 50% will leave over the next couple of years, and another 4.5 million will come in to replace them in all likelyhood.

And remember that shutting off the servers entirely as some have suggested out of general spite would be a worse idea then letting these players disperse organically when they’ve become fed up with WoW. Force them to find a new game, and you’ve got a bunch of cynical players looking to tear apart every feature and magnify every bug. Let them get terribly sick of WoW (which, trust me, is very possible with any game that’s heavily PvE dependent), and suddenly they’re praising the next game they choose to play in part to coax their guildmates and friends over, and in part simply because because they’re sour.

So if you’re a developer of another online game, or even just a player of a smaller MMO, remember - something like WoW only increases everyone’s potential in the long run. Stop hating yo’.

Even I’ll admit, when I took a look at the UO:KR screenshots, I was impressed.

Not because the art was some kind of next-gen marvel. It wasn’t. It isn’t. People are criticizing it, saying it looks like they updated from 1997 to 1999. And it does.

What I liked about the art, however, was the fact that it retained the LOOK and FEELING of UO, I thought. As much as it could be retained with new graphics, anyway. I thought they did a good job of that. Like I said, I was actually fairly impressed and surprised. However, others seem to be harder on graphics than I am. I suppose I’m not enough of a graphics whore to be cool these days.

The main point is that, if they managed to keep the system spec requirements down - these graphics were great. They felt great for what they were, they looked great for what they were. Just keep the specs down.

After all, UO was released in 1997. A lot of the long-term users are “forced” into playing out necessity or inability to upgrade their old state of the art 486, and thus they’re unable to even consider playing the newer MMORPGs. Even some of the newer players are younger, older, or just, in general some kind of user subcategory that’s NOT tech nerds running two month old PCs and able to deal with 124GB clients and incredible hardware demands.

Thus, many of them are likely running some sort of hand-me-down machine.

I’ll digress here, but the point is that UO’s new client needs to be three things:

A) Nice looking. Or else what’s the point of spending the time, money, and effort on the upgrade?

You’re going to run this client, hopefully, until UO dies in (EA prays, anyway) about 2020. You’re probably not going to ever upgrade the client again. It won’t be cost effective. You also want to make this client upgrade count, you want a rejuvenation of your playerbase. You want the new players that’d never come in with the mid-90’s graphics.

B) “Classic” UO in art style. Don’t scare anyone. These UO players have been around a long time, and can probably be very ornery in their old age.

They don’t want things to look totally different. Or, probably, very different at all really. UO is all about nostalgia and familiarity for a lot of people, especially after ten years.

C) EASY ON THE HARDWARE SPECS.

Like I said, you can’t alienate your current playerbase - which is made up of a lot of people on a lot of old machines. Pulling a Vanguard would mean certain death.

Or, I suppose you could go hardcore, purposely alienate your loyal userbase, and hope for a TOTAL rejuvenation of UO. That’d be one strategy. It’d also be one real bad strategy. If you want to do that, remake the whole game - art is the most expensive part. And nobody wants to play “that old game”. Even if the graphics were totally updated, you’d garner more attention with a new game. Yeah, they’ve already got Warhammer coming anyway.

So, the problem is?

UO:KR is failing on all three fronts.

People REALLY hate the look. Now, I don’t get it. But like I said, I’m a bit easier on the graphics than most people. However, as far as I’ve read, I’m in a serious minority here. Even among people on the UO Stratics forums, which is usually nothing more than a love-in for all things UO related.

They didn’t retain the look of the graphics enough for some people. Hey, I don’t get it (again). I think they did alright. But one female player commented that her pets didn’t look like “her” pets anymore, and she’s had them for something like four or five years. And she may quit now.

You may find this strange. I may find this strange. However, these are the types of problems that you run into with such an ancient game. People are going to get attached in strange ways (especially with the type of player UO has gone looking for, and succeeded in attracting - but that’s not a dig), and they are going to get pissed off in even stranger ways when you change things. Especially so drastically. And especially of a visual nature. Much in the way one becomes attached to the small imperfections and tiny details of a long-term companion’s looks, personality, demeanor - these people just don’t want their ten year old world changed so drastically.

Is it entirely logical? At first glance, probably not. I think they anticipated that to some degree when designing their new art, too. Apparently it just didn’t go far enough in not going anywhere.

Along with all of that, I’m seeing a lot of comments about how the game looks during actual gameplay. In a word, that word seems to be “Bad”.

Apparently it’s “impossible to pvp”, among other things. People are claiming that the screenshots put out for public consumption have been doctored to look better, and that when the game is actually “moving”, it looks terrible.

I have no idea about any of that, I haven’t taken a look personally. I probably should if I want to talk about it, but I’m just not interested. Sound strange?

Here’s the straight 411 99dope tuberculosis bling bling snoop dog:

You could change the look of UO all you want, I’m not interested in the gameplay.

Lineage 2 looks awesome. I don’t want to play a Korean GrindfestTM. Sorry NCSoft, I just don’t. No offense.

I think they’re missing this basic law of MMO nature. If they’re trying to attract new players. Who knows, maybe they’re just attempting to provide more fertile ground in which to cultivate their current playerbase’s tasty, tasty walletjuice for a longer period of time.

I think, if they’re doing that, they’ve missed the point again.

Really, really missed the point.

Not that it isn’t a noble attempt, and a seemingly good idea. They’re just missing the point.

Graphics are secondary. As much as players, and especially prospective players, make them seem like the be all and end all. Itself, UO specifically hasn’t been about graphics.. ever. I wasn’t really impressed with the graphics in October of ‘97, and I promise you that I’m not now.

What got me into UO, what kept me in UO, what got me into ANY MMO, and what has me STILL writing about UO to this day.. is gameplay.

Think on that for just a minute.

Now, if you’re looking for a windfall of new players, do you honestly think that upgrading the graphics two or three years forward on a ten year old game is going to be a magic bullet toward that goal?

If you want to concentrate on graphics, you upgrade to 2007. If you don’t want to kick all of your current players out, and only want to come halfway (or less) in the graphics department - you can’t just go “Alright. There. Halfway. Our jobs here are done”.

No. You need a complete plan of action. That includes, surprise, changes other than graphical (and the same thing you’ve been doing with your expansions for the last seven or eight years).

More people seem to be pissed off with the changes than are happy with them, anyway. The old players were already happy with the way the game looked. Familiarity. Nostalgia. And most importantly… it ran on their computers. Apparently, UO:KR just… isn’t.. working in that.. fashion. You know… the fashion of working. The amount of complaints I’ve read is staggering. People are getting pretty upset. And that’s their right.

The most important thing about UO:KR was that it run, smoothly, on the computers of the existing users. That’s why I found the graphics totally acceptable, and I considered them “good”.

I don’t mean to bash here. That’s not my intention. I’m just reporting what I’ve read.

At one point, I suppose that my point is that I don’t totally understand the new client. I can understand where they’re going with it, but you can see how it may fall apart for them in some important ways.

Maybe the only way I truly understand this move is if the UO subscription rates were crashing at an alarming rate, and they needed “the big fix”. If they’re slightly misguided, I could see them as determining this a decent fix. At best I’d call this a decent fix. Without a full plan, without the other “half” of the equation, I don’t see how anyone who really put some thought into this could see it as any more than a decent fix. Unless someone truly thought that UO’s current mishmash ruleset is truly the height of MMO gameplay, and the only thing that is needed for everyone to realize this and come running, credit cards in hand, is an update to Diablo II graphics.

Hey, look. You’ve got some attention, and you’re squandering it. Another ho-hum expansion is not making the best use of the biggest investment UO has had in 39 years (or whatever), let’s be honest with ourselves. People totally don’t care that you’re introducing a new area and some quests or whatever. I promise they don’t. Not the ones who aren’t already playing, anyway. And I promise you that if anyone thinks that the current design of UO is the height of excellence is PROBABLY already playing UO, “despite” the graphics that everyone has accepted (and loves) as “UO”, anyway.

At this point in its history, UO has to become about variety. Has to. The game has a rich history that people pine for and continue to consider the top of its gameplay class in many instances of that history. Offer a set of classic servers. Hell, offer an entire set of specialty servers. Get chopping. Stop being stubborn about your ruleset. It is not for some. Get over it.

Seems like a lot of work? Well, not as much as creating an entire new client, I’ll bet you that. It doesn’t take a hell of a lot of talent or time to edit an existing set of scripts to alter a ruleset either. I’ve done it, and I’m a fantastic example of “very little talent”.

This is basic. I’m not suggesting anything gamebreaking, visionary, or outlandish here. If they did a simple test run of a classic shard, they’d fill it. Then you keep adding until you stop filling the servers, or stop a bit short so you end up with more demand than supply. That always gets people horny. Once someone logs in to “classic server” of their choice and sees the message “We apologize for the inconvenience, but this server is currently full. Please wait a few moments before attempting to log back in.”, man that’s it. They’re salivating.

“There are some problems with this. Az, you’re stupid. Solve them or else you’re stupid.”

Alright.

1) The cannibalization of current accounts.

Maybe you think that adding a set of classic servers would do a lot of shifting players around.

You add servers of five different past rulesets, you effectively end of shifting people off of their current dying shards onto the new shards.

Not only does this look bad on your current developers (and everything you’ve done for several years), but it’s a lot of work for no reward. Your current users who keep on playing on their regular servers, become disenfranchised and complain. Or even quit. You don’t play MMOs to play alone, and you especially don’t play UO to be alone in the world. Ever run around on an emulator shard alone for a few hours? God damn creepy. I usually end up hiding in the closet.

That may also just be the drugs. Or the insanity.

Listen:

The target is new money.

But you can’t spit on the old money.

Counter this problem by simply charging a certain amount for access to the set of “premium classic” servers. You can even do this individually if you feel that will be beneficial to your bottom line, but only if you start out with one server first. Maybe two. That’s aside from the point.

The point is, most of the people playing these servers will be new accounts. Or, scratch that, very, very old players on new accounts. This is where you get your “new accounts” from with UO. You’re not going to attract newer gamers. At least not until you increase popularity first in general. Your first target, and your ONLY first target, is your old players who have left due to gameplay changes.

Get ‘em back, and start down the road to rejuvenation. Small graphical upgrades alone will not accomplish this.

2) The Nostalgia Conundrum.

“But Az, you’re stupid. Obviously anyone talking about classic UO rulesets is just driven by nostalgia, and would see that the past isn’t always as great as they remember it.”

Wrong again, Flanders. People yelled this at me for years. I don’t want to toot my own horn, but I took it upon myself to fucking prove it wrong on my own. It took a year and still nobody noticed.

In fact, everyone still quotes my bitter, angry post at the end of IPY as some sort of proof positive that IPY didn’t work, classic shards wouldn’t work, and any kind of freedom in a game doesn’t work. Fact is, you either understand this post or you don’t. I’m not taking an hour to type out how it was supposed to be taken in. However, one thing I was NOT saying was “This didn’t work. This doesn’t work. This will never work. This was a mistake.”. The opposite, really. You just have to read it with an open mind and without the desire to use it to prove your own points about your own point of view.

Although there are a million things I’d do differently, one of of them wouldn’t be to mutilate or drastically change the particular ruleset if I were suggesting this plan to EA/Mythic. One of them wasn’t that freedom in MMOs sucks. One of them wasn’t that it didn’t work.

I’d offer some NEW rulesets though. I think you’d be stupid not to do this on a delay. One in particular that I’ve been yelled at by many an ignoramus for not freely sharing. Obviously I don’t have one, or it sucks. Apparently I didn’t run and closely observe an extreme example of a classic, sandbox, UO ruleset for a year of my life after playing the game for x years and writing about it for however many more. Impossible that I know anything on the topic. K anyway.

But the points are these:

- People don’t suffer from UO-related nostalgia as badly as you think. These people aren’t/weren’t lovesick puppies looking with big eyes and floppy ears back on the past simply because it is the past. There is actually a reason, based in reality, why these people enjoyed UO in its different flavours. I never understood why this is hard to figure out, but I could see how someone without any actual experience playing UO in the timeframes referenced would think that way. It’s simple to draw the unfortunately prevalent, and very incorrect conclusion that nostalgia and nostalgia alone drives desire for past rulesets. How could you possibly understand if you weren’t there? How could you understand, doubly so, if you WERE there and were one of the people who HATED it?

Fuck, I hate raiding. I think it’s the stupidest, most assinine activity you can base a world around. I also think basing your entire game around it is akin to selling your soul to the devil for cash. I think you’re abusing the very addictive nature of MMOs for personal gain, and offering people nothing but lost time and lighter wallets.

But I can admit that SOME people may enjoy playing PvE raiding games, and I’ve actively participated in PvE raiding myself. Just because I hate it for every reason under the sun doesn’t mean that I can’t possibly understand why people would enjoy it.

- The effect is a valid point, but not because of a nostalgia burnout. More because of the the various simple truths of the rulesets and the game itself. This is why you offer a natural evolution. The creation of this ruleset would take time, care, and overall, digging your hands deeply into the old rulesets and understanding why they failed - and offering a new ruleset based on this experience and designs - not to change the game for the sake of change -, but to offer the same game with valid, healthy, considered changes to correct various fatal design errors AND offer a new experience for people.

- People will keep an account open to revisit the server for a very long time. It’s UO. This truth be self evident, say I. It’s been demonstrated with normal UO, it’s been demonstrated with IPY. Even when natural, fatal ruleset/design errors cause a person to discontinue their play - they’ll probably be back. If you don’t change everything.

Solution. Don’t delete accounts, WoW does a good job at this. I’d never have come back twice if they didn’t. Also, possibly moving to a long-term subscription for classic servers may be beneficial after they’ve been up for a while.

Worrying about this first is stupid though. Just getting a significant amount of new accounts back for UO would be a magic trick in itself. Diversification and ruleset evolution should be enough to keep those who love UO but truly tire of the old rulesets. The others, and even the former, will continue to play those old rulesets. Possibly just more and more infrequently as the years pass.

However, in general, how can you go wrong? There are a million simple strategies for holding onto players. You have to bring them in first.

3) The Selfish Factor.

“Why aren’t the devs working on MY ruleset? They’re wasting their time working for OTHER people.”

I won’t make any snide remarks. This isn’t about logic, this is about pleasing the customer. Sometimes the customer can be slightly illogical, especially in a selfish manner.

And this is, selfishly, a very valid point. If not, again, totally logical.

Here’s some logic. Increasing the general account holdings of UO will increase the longevity of UO. Increasing the general UO population will probably increase the population on YOUR shard. Immediately there may be a balanced in/out effect, or even a negative effect, but as the game becomes known as more popular, more people are just going to come in. You move up on the long tail chart (nobody will understand that pingback once they see it on Raph’s site).

By moving up in popularity, more and more people gravitate to your game. IPY had a great ruleset, but if people logged in and saw 5 people online, they’d log back out. When they saw 1873, and everyone was yammering about it on various guild messageboards and various outlets in general, it became the place to be. People were given the chance to NOTICE that it was good, and a fun time was to be had by all.

But that’s not something people will think of off the bat. And we’re concerned with the people who will be confused and angry right now, not the centered, positive people who look ahead logically.

Hire people, or move people over from other projects for a short period of time. Tell your players that your team got bigger to deal with this, and that their ruleset is still being worked on. And really, still work on it. Give them a shot of logic, tell them that everyone’s ruleset becomes stronger when UO becomes stronger as a hole, but deal with their immediate “selfish” reaction.

Even if you only hire 2 people. Even if you hire nobody, and only bring 3 coders over for 2 months. Even if the rulesets are done on coffee, tears, and overtime. Give them the straight dope, but make sure their stuff is still being worked on. Let ‘em know that.

4) Scripting.

Stop this. Solve this first.

Apparently they say they have with the new client. If they have, good. If they haven’t, do it. And do it right.

I can’t even begin to explain how many ways scripting destroys the game. Economically, competitively, everything. Once people start to pick up that those guilds got their towers and castles running mining scripts while they watched Iron Chef and ate cheetos, or, even worse, that the guild that just demolished them in PvP did so because they were running PvP scripts… it’s over. They either join the scripters, or they leave. Eventually you have 20 people on the server running pvp scripts.

Not cool. Not fun. Not a good long term plan. Set up a Quake server for these players.

5) Ruleset Problem X:

Yeah, various classic rulesets have various problems. I’ll admit this AND I’ll admit that I’m not going to solve it in this post. I just don’t have three days to type. Just make sure you have an experienced person at the head of the team and tweak where absolutely necessary without changing the ruleset.

Any real errors in the ruleset are corrected in your new rulesets. Start offering these 12 to 18 months in. Perfect them through tedious design and careful observation of your current classic server rollout. This ends up being a huge part of your long term viability. Don’t fuck it up.

But. The point in general is that you have what may be your last opportunity for mass attention with UO:KR. I think they really need a strategy that includes more than “hey, new graphics, cool.. right?” - mainly because UO wasn’t about the graphics. Not to the people still playing, not to the people who quit, and you’re not going to bring in anyone new with those graphics alone.

I hate to be so belittling with my opinion, but I think it’s the truth. More importantly, I think they’re missing an opportunity here. Graphics upgrade (properly executed): Good (poorly executed: VERY BAD, but that’s all been said).

Proper strategy: Very good.

Graphics upgrade WITH proper strategy: Very, very good.

But is the situation so dire? Is the new client, like I assumed, more than an extended invitation to new players, more than a longer term strategy for holding onto players - but a kneejerk reaction to drastically falling subscriptions?

It’s possible. When the question of UO subscriptions is brought up just about anywhere nowadays, SirBruce’s two or three year old numbers of 135,000 is brought up. It’s generally accepted that half or more of that number is from accounts in Japan. I’d also argue that the number is inaccurate, and high. And probably nowhere near that two years later.

Recently I found some data put together by a player a few years ago, relating to the number of guilds on each server over the years - apparently compiled from data on the old MyUO guilds page.

And apparently my theory about UO subscriptions was more or less correct.

With the amount of guilds on most American shards at around 1,800-2,500 in 2001, by 2004, the amount of guilds had dropped by, it seems, around 1,000 on these shards. That’s pretty drastic. My old shard of Atlantic seemed to be doing pretty well, with a drop of only 650 guilds.

However, many servers such as Great Lakes, Lake Superior, Chesapeake, Catskills, Pacific… all lost around 1,000 guilds.

Now, this isn’t the BEST way to judge population. It’s also not the worst, and could possibly be very telling.

I’d also like to mention that the drop in population was certainly not linear, but more exponential as time passed. The drop from January ‘01 to late ‘02 was totally insignificant compared to the drop in numbers from late ‘02 to early ‘04.

As a random example, Chesapeake only lost an overall total of 143 guilds in the first 20 months of the data collected. In the next 18 months, there was a drop of 975. This is a general rule for the data shown, not an exception by any means.

THE exception in this case is, however, the Japanese shards. In many cases, you’ll see that these shards often GAINED in total number of guilds from ‘01 to ‘04. Is this trend still continuing? Maybe, maybe not. But it’s obvious to see where the strength of UO lies, and it’s in the far east. So you get ninjas and samurai swords in the game. Fine, okay.

But there IS a way to inject a shot of strength back into your Western numbers.

With the rich history of UO, the name it’s built to so many people after so many years, and the pristine relationship its memories regarding different rulesets have with people’s memories - why aren’t you taking advantage of this? Are you nuts?

But then again, maybe it’s too late. I haven’t been paying attention to the UO community for about three years now. That’s a longer time than it’s felt like. So maybe I’m totally mistaken. I know that I, personally, feel as though they’ve missed the boat (six or seven times over). But it all depends on whether there’s still a demand out there, not what I think.

It’s possible people have totally moved on, but I think that it’s equally possible that a new game released with all of the things I mentioned above wouldn’t come close to the popularity that a ten year old UO would if they employed the same strategy and philosophy.

I really should have made this post longer. I won’t talk about this for a while now, and there’s so much more to say.

Interesting.

Although, they’re being incredibly self righteous about it. I suppose they are about anything they do.

I’m not sure I support lawsuits for this kind of thing, although these guys were going pretty far. They had a pretty sophisticated spamming operation set up on (as far as I know) every server. When I went back and tried WoW out for the 10 day trial earlier this month, there was constant /whisper spam. To the point where I set up a macro to spam them back just incase they had actual people doing that (which I sincerely doubt, but it’d be worth the 5 minutes to set the macro up).

What’s even funnier is that I always bought gold in WoW. I got real sly with the auction house and made MOST of my money that way, but if I really needed gold for something and just didn’t have it, it wasn’t out of the realms of possibility that I’d snap some up. Mostly early in my WoW career when I didn’t have much gold. At one point anything of worth becomes BoP anyway.

Although I always found it funny to listen to guildmates talk about “farming for x days” for their gold, etc. I just couldn’t imagine it. I’ll fully admit that I became a sad, sad raid monkey at one point (it almost cost me a relationship…) - but endlessly grinding at Tir’s Hand for gold? Man… can’t be done, sorry.

If I cared about the game, sure. If the game was more than a PvE (or sad, sad, PvP) progression fest - k, fine. I’d have to really be into the game, and it’d HAVE to be a sandbox game. Just not going to grind so I can rade bettar. I was known to GM a miner out on OSI in ‘98, and even get a smith to like 98.9 or something back when it took MONTHS to accomplish that.

But WoW just isn’t the type of game that I’m going to invest time in like that. Maybe no game is these days, just yet anyway.

And I comment!

http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=10058.35

Nobody has offered me the Producer job yet, though. Their loss, imo.

Over at Raph’s glorious example of maniacally dedicated blogging (the man, himself, I think doesn’t actually exist. More logically, I assume, he died in 1984.. but not before programming a computer version of himself specialized in computer game design, blogging, and offering mugs from cafepress), we see a post on Google patenting the process of, well, uh.. watching you.

Or, watching you play games at least.

Some commenters found the implications troubling. Others, possibly market analysts with degrees from Gudger College, compared this to a car salesman watching you and basing his pitches from what he observes in real time.

In case it’s necessary, I’ll explain the difference very quickly.

A used car salesman watching me studiously in order to more effectively jump my bones is one thing (and it’s not a particularly welcome thing).

Programming a computer to analyze my speech patterns and body language through a thousand cameras when I step into a department store so as to more effectively target me for intracranial advertising is quite another.

I wouldn’t particularly like anyone watching me at home, either.

Although I can see where this could be going. There’s a rise in the creation of online games, and a lot of them are having a difficult time turning a profit. Games like Shadowbane are actually going with predominantly in-game based advertising schemes for making that profit, and a lot more of them use generally unconventional means of making their monies.

In comes Google MMOAdsense. Make big bucks for letting us put a camera under your users’ desks! We promise we’ll NEVER abuse any of the seekrit pictures we take! All for Silas… all for Silas…

I mean, uh, Hayden.

Cough.

Ah! What a telling title!

Actually, what’s been going on is a blog-to-blog topic, spreading around like a virus, on the topic of the lowest end cost of a MMO. Someone said two million. Then someone else said 3.5. Matt Mihaly, in the latest incarnation of the topic, says less than one.

I fully respect and endorse this point of view. Eschewing the silly notion of in-house artists, central offices, and dedicated QA/tech/legal teams - there’s no reason why you should have to budget around something more than a million dollars for a respectably sized MMO.

Brian went on for some time about taxes, benefits, lawyers, “business guys”, PR managers, etc. I say nuts to that. If the budget is what it is, it is what it is. Sometimes things that seem very important when you have larger budgets simply fall by the wayside through the process of rational thinking when you have a set budget, or have a need to ship a product with the lowest possible budget. Suddenly a PR manager doesn’t seem as important as, say, ART FOR THE GAME. You know.

One thing Brian certainly had right was the notion of outsourcing. Find yourself a quality producer of art in India or China and you’re crusin’. Not such a good idea with code.

Can’t find something to your liking overseas? There are plenty of very high quality art contracting solutions in the western world. They’ll cost you more, but budget accordingly. A quality visual presentation is your user’s first impression. Where do you click first when you visit the site of a new MMO? Screenshots!

As far as a dedicated marketing person, I think Mr. Mihaly hit the nail on the head:

5. A marketing person is nice but I don’t think you really need one. A project this size lives and dies on word-of-mouth. Marketing and advertising certainly do not hurt, but thus far I’ve been handling our marketing efforts (though we recently opened a blog on IGN’s RPG Vault with about an article a week written by one of our interns). It’s not THAT hard to get some coverage for your game. Google “earth eternal” and see. I’ve largely just sent out a few press releases that I wrote. A press release is not rocket science. We’ve also allocated funds for advertising but won’t spend on that until we’re into open beta.

Now think back to IPY. For what it was, its population was huge. And that population was created solely by? Of course, word of mouth. Paying $50,000 a year to a dedicated marketing person is overkill when I can personally forge relationships with MMO websites, place a few strategic advertisements in print media, and write press releases with the greatest of ease.

Would a marketing person provide more than a good bang for my buck at 50k a year?

Sure, probably. But what if I don’t have that 50k in my budget. What if that 50k is more wisely spent actually creating a game TO market. I could take the entire budget and spend it on massive amounts of marketing if I want, but if all I had were 3 classes of grey, black, and red stickmen running around on a green 2d field - word of mouth is going to kill me very quickly. Just like, in the ever tight knit MMO community, word of mouth will propel the name of my game and my URL through the cosmos at light speed if I actually have a decent product.

But it all depends what you want to put IN to your game. I suppose word of mouth is hard when you don’t have many features, and/or no specific hook. Matt’s snowball will start rolling from his work on successful and quality text MUDs. My IPY snowball started rolling because of my years of Pre-UO:R rants, where I did that ranting (many very popular websites, including a few of my own), and the main basic fact that I was filling a need with a comfy, visible brand. What better to satiate someone looking to play oldschool Ultima Online with than… oldschool Ultima Online? Now THAT’S marketing.

Would IPY have been as successful had I hired a team of programmers and graphics artists to create a 2d MMO with the exact same ruleset? Or was the name and the familiarity that came with it the most important part?

Of course, word of mouth and popularity can ultimately be a bad thing if your game design is fatally flawed in relation to your market. See IPY. See Darkfall. See the same result. But that’s more of a sidebar comment.

In the end, I totally agree that it’s possible to get a MMO done with a budget of under a million. It just takes creativity, and people at the helm that KNOW they’re not going to compete with WoW (and don’t try).

This post started out as a personal exercise/design intro, and I’m not exactly sure what it ended up being. Stick with me though, it does eventually end up going somewhere. I think.

These days, when you peruse the feature sets of AAA MMOs, you can *almost* understand why they cost so much money to build. They’re feature rich in many very expensive ways. However, they usually tend to spend their battle chest in the direction of their subgenre. Almost exclusively, this is the achievement-based direction. Which makes all kinds of sense of course, since you play to your market. And with big budgets, you pick the biggest markets to play to.

Back in the day, there wasn’t really the extreme segregation of playstyles that you see today. One might say that was a good thing. Obviously many did not, but I’m not so sure that they aren’t somewhat overlooking the benefits of a melting pot. For instance, Ultima Online was not only designed to be a melting pot of all different types of people and playstyles, but it had the advantage of being “first”. It was the first MMO to reach mass appeal (depending on what you consider mass appeal, but I’m not sure this is entirely arguable unless you’re a huge fan of Gemstone IV or Meridian 59, etc). As such, unlike today where everyone can pick and choose through a bevy of online offerings to find the one that fits their specific playstyle almost exactly, everyone was thrust into one magical, diverse world full of different people with differenet playstyles and very different goals. Most people break this down to be as simple as “PK vs. Non-PK”, but that is, of course, a drastic oversimplification. Since that’s the most visible rift, it does get keyed in on.

Which is fine, but it’s also just another reason why it’s up to the developer to engineer a diverse world, if that happens to be the goal. Some would argue that players don’t need to be shown what they like, but should be treated like adults and given the right to choose what they like. That’s fine, I don’t entirely disagree. But that’s also what leads to niche play. World-y games are a niche/subgenre in themselves, and, ultimately, people will choose them based on what they are and what type of experience they provide just like any other MMO niche.

It’s a funny situation that we haven’t already seen more games like UO, but I suppose that developers feel they can include tidbits of playstyles in a mainly Diku package, and that’ll be enough to satisfy everyone. Or maybe the numbers of non-achievers are so small that they don’t need to be taken seriously these days. World of Warcraft, in all of its achiever-centric glory, may actually be the closest we see to a behemoth melting pot for a long time. While they’ve included PvP, crafting, and… little else, these things have also been twisted and contorted into nothing more than another achievement grind by the Blizzard developers. Though their PvP+ servers thrive, which is somewhat surprising to me (through sheer force of numbers, peer pressure, basic player type ratios?). With all of that in mind, I honestly expected WoW to look a lot more like EQ than it actually does. And it does.

But that’s the future. Big budgets will go toward the same type of MMOs that they have been since EQ came out, lesser-funded developers will continue to delve into the niche worlds. The same as always. Some say this isn’t the future, because the popularity of “choice” and niche games is growing - and nobody can compete with WoW. I wonder why not, though. Are the profits they’ve experienced not incentive enough?

As the years pass and WoW becomes more dated, I’m fairly certain someone will roll out another behemoth to raise the bar even higher - or at least take the crown away. Let’s face it, these cries of “we can go no higher! budgets have peaked, subscriptions have peaked, nobody can POSSIBLY dethrone the king!” were heard back when everyone was playing EQ, too. History often repeats itself.

But regardless of my rants in that direction, niches ARE gaining in popularity. Especially very tight niches. Children’s games, puzzle games, purely social games especially. But none of these truly encompasses what MMOs are about, in my eyes. Aren’t they (respectfully) more tastefully labeled and looked at simply as “online games”? Is there a niche for “everyone else” that isn’t interested in either extreme, but a more well rounded experience similar to what they experienced in the late ’90s with Ultima Online (am I just a UO fanboy)?

Yeah, probably. Although I’m going to go out on a limb and presume that you’ve guessed that I’m going to say that by now.

While UO was what it was, and a lot of people enjoyed it and even look back fondly on it, my experiences (including the “classic free shard” scene) have taught me several things about the nostalgia people feel for Ultima Online. First, the good news of course - and that is, these people aren’t operating on full-on, unadulterated nostalgia with little reason behind it. UO really was a unique experience, mostly in the early days of the game. That people pine to repeat that experience actually holds some logic beyond nostalgia. There aren’t any games that provide a sandbox gameplay and a social experience on par.

For instance, if EA/Mythic were to implement a classic server (although I can’t currently speak for the community like I once could, I certainly haven’t been the least bit involved for the last two years), the chances are that it’d attract a wide variety of players (as I’ve said, in what numbers I’m not TOTALLY sure - which is beside the point for now). This wide net effect is much unlike the current, and usual, crop of free servers. They tend to attract, as is the current trend and the inevitability when you provide copious amounts of choices for play, a very niche audience.

For example, many free servers have followed and mimiced IPY. Most of them end up with the very same 300-400 players online, somewhat because there are also 5,000 other free servers of every possible texture and flavour, and people have decided on what it exactly is that they like by now.

But then that 300 turns iinto 200, then 100, then 50, and then the shard either closes or becomes neglected, and the players move on. This all tends to happen within the space of six months, give or take. Beyond being EA’s biggest fear in regard to putting up a classic UO server (and I guarantee you that it’s been observed with some interest), what does this ultimately say?

Ultimately, it says that classic UO never had as many features as people gave it credit for. While it has what it has, and you inevitably get the crafters and socialites on a good classic server (thank God), the fact of the matter is that a LARGE majority of players end up breaking the experience down into a race to macro their skills to the max level (made ever easier by the unaddressed scourge that are 3rd party scripting programs), getting a house, getting resources together, and then participating in a no-holds-barred PvP fest. What other avenues of play there are have been ‘done to death’, and simply didn’t age well with the advent of extreme powergaming.

But in turn, this play style drives off every other type of player. Those being driven away are interested in the setting and the ruleset, but not what it’s being used to create (which is a heaving, twitching, spasming mess).

Once this happens, the shard closes.

Once the shard closes, someone gets the bright idea to put up another one.

Once they do, the remnants of the last shard filter over.

Inevitably, what’s being filtered, through each incarnation and shard closing/opening, is the same thing that’s being actively filtered while the shards are open:

The “other” players.

What’s being filtered IS Ultima Online. Due to many factors, what’s left behind is an increasingly large concentration of purely PvP players. In a free, PvP+, full loot environment… this problem only propagates itself. Before long, the lesser PvPers become the equivalent of the “other players”. They are dominated by the experienced, determined, and, often, the cheaters. Basically, those with the time and desire to become “the best” at this particular flavour of player versus player combat. Before long, through a very natural process, what you’re left with is an online RPG version of Quake. Complete with the auto-headshot programs.

This is, in a way, what was troubling Origin when they implemented the Trammel facet and UO:R. Of course the more visible problem was subscriptions and what would become of them, but the problems are the same thing when you’re charging for your game (which most free shards don’t do - although some find creative ways to make profit).

The UO:Renaissance expansion in 2000 had its heart in the right place. The direction behind it was on target in relation to addressing the perceived problems, I’d personally argue that the design and execution were not. What was being addressed, was, of course, the PvP situation for which Ultima Online was already notorious. The PvP-restricted Trammel facet provided a retreat altogether from the problem. The rock/paper/scissors simplified PvP combat design provided a more equal, less elitist footing for the players who, in the facet left behind, would become the sheep amongst the wolves. Or the skinny guy in prison. Whichever you like. But I don’t believe the designers fully considered the impact of their plans. I’m not sure they thought far enough ahead. The UO:Renaissance expansion was a knee-jerk reaction to a set of problems that sacrificed the future to address the problems of the present.

But why?

Well, the players can’t be at fault. They’re simply playing with the ruleset they’re given (those artificially playing outside of it are always another matter, but that’s -almost- a different topic). And ultimately, the developer assumes (rightfully) that if the design allows for one player to take advantage of another, especially in a forceful manner, a certain amount of the population will simply do so. Although this assumption is somewhat rash when you happen to be applying it in a blatantly reactionary way. It’s imperative to keep sight of what makes your game unique when reacting to the problems of the day. At least to a world like Ultima Online. I’m not sure it’d be as damaging to inflict artificial limitations and sweeping changes to a game like EQ, where artificial limitations are the nature of the beast and everyone is just there to work around them as well as possible to succeed in spending their hard-earned DKP on phat lootz.

However, the “thing” causing the problem is the same thing that allowed UO to grow into such a legend, such a unique experience, and such a unique world: The designer.

Players are just playing with what they’re given. With the increase in choice of game styles, avenues for niche play, those that have been most neglected flock to the game that offers the best experience. It sort of makes me wonder why there isn’t a revolution of crafters pining for better days. But I suppose they make due with the scraps they’re thrown these days, and, of course, a world full of crafters doesn’t work that well. They’re dependant on being somewhat of a minority. Not that a world full of PvPers works well, but a killer can always kill another killer. I’m sure there are some smaller niche worlds where crafters are content crafting for other crafters (ATITD?), but that’d take a unique design. Certainly, a base UO setting wouldn’t work like that.

It does, of course, work as a setting for a big war supplemented by “minigames” of crafting, housing, pve farming (yes purely farming, since I doubt too many people playing UO like that haven’t ever been to the depths of Deceit before) and such. And on unofficial servers that haven’t rigidly directed gameplay in a fashion seen suitable by its developers, it has somewhat.

What needs to be given to people is almost as simple as “more”. The design is that good, that it can be used as a base to build off of ten years later. But we’ve seen where the flaws lie. Especially when you provide massive choice for online gaming, and segregate populations. As a design, classic UO might even succeed today if EA put up a server of that ruleset.

The success would depend on the audience, of course. UO was always what the players made of it, in every aspect. When we were kids, we were entirely happy to pretend we were Marvel (don’t sue?) super heroes, running around playfighting. As soon as we got older, and there were more choices of what to do with our recess time, the population became segregated. Some kids played soccer, some kids played baseball, some kids played tag, and some kids hung out in the far corner of the yard smoking cigarettes because they were too cool for any of that. Friendship circles were formed.

The point is that, now that we’ve gotten a little older and there are many different choices as to what to do with our recess time, it just doesn’t cut it to play with our imaginations anymore. And while UO had a FANTASTIC base to provide us fertile ground for imagination play, there are too many focused experiences out there now for that. People are naturally gravitating toward those focused experiences, and finding friendship circles of likeminded players - creating a more and more unbridgeable gap between the segregated playerbases.

But in the end, I think we all still know that playing with our imagination was fun. There just needs to be some structure too. It needs to be more of a contructive experience. In short, UO is a fantastic base for moving forward, as well. But as it is, as it was, it’s simply not designed in a way that is able to withstand the extreme passage of time and evolution in direction of MMOs and MMO players. This goes beyond the feature set, although the design itself, the general direction, is solid.

So what’s the answer? Well, I think I’ve already basically broadly outlined the answer - but the answer, like the problem, lies within the designer.

That is, however, the other 99% of this post that I’m not willing to share with the world. If you would like to read more, you can subscribe to my private newsletter. It costs a lot of money.

During a writeup on a MMO Rountable that he moderated at the GDC last week, Damion mentioned several non-traditional settings that came up. That is, settings that have nothing to do with swords, magic, dragons and unicorns.

While I’m not interested in discussing the pros and cons of traditional fantasy versus, say, a post-apocalyptic setting of some kind (for the record, I think most futuristic settings are terrible ideas for MMOs - sort of like I think the traditional fantasy setting is inferior for a single player game… it’s a simple matter of wanting a wide variety of players to live in your world for months and years versus trying to attract more hardcore, non-social gamers to spend two weeks being interested in your game - and how those particular settings work in regard to either of those aims), one of the mentioned settings was Highlander.

Why is this interesting?

Well, I’m not a Highlander nerd. I can’t remember the last time I watched the entire length of one of the movies. So that’s not it. Although, admittedly, I’ve almost definitely spent more time watching the mid-90s TV show than I have watching the movies. Adrian Paul is just THAT dreamy. Plus it makes me want to fucking kill people with swords.

But moving on.

I found the suggestion of a Highlander MMO setting more interesting than, say, Cyberpunk or insert_dark_futuristic_setting_here MAINLY because I’m not sure that I’ve seen it suggested before.

Yeah, everyone suggests Neuromancer/Cyberpunk. There are a million “Anime” MMOs already (you just have to speak Korean…). Hell, a Firefly MMO is in the works. And I mean no offense to Browncoats, but shit. Can you say 15k subs?

Because when a huge, international name like Star Wars gets thrown around and you max out at 250k, we learn a few things:

1) Not every fan of a particular IP is going to pick up a copy of your game because it has R2D2 on the box. Stop dreaming. Yeah, I remember the massive numbers predictions before SWG launched. I think SWG had a fine design, I’m not on a gripe about the game whatsoever.

So,

2) How in the jeezly fuck do you expect to transfer people of all walks of life from an ages-old, massive IP to a very specific type of computer game?

Obviously that was a lot harder than most people expected it to be.

So how do you figure transferring people from a “cult” IP that’s barely known to most people beyond squinting their eyes and asking “… wasn’t that a show that got cancelled years back?” is going to work out?

You’ll get your hardcore Firefly fans playing a Firefly MMO. Of course. But you’d better not make any wild predictions as to your final account holdings. As such, you’d better not design too ambitiously, because turning a profit will be a magic trick of balancing budget versus expected revenue. Which furthers hurts you, because your game is not simply incapable of wowing anyone OUTSIDE of the hardcore Firefly fan circle.

So what is the ultimate lesson? Is it that you can’t expect to use existing IP to boost sales of a MMO?

No, absolutely not. Ultima Online broke barriers. World of Warcraft smashed preconceived notions of how big the market for MMO games could possibly be.

The lesson is that taking hugely popular non-computer game IP may not cause a fanbase transfer. Especially not if you’re creating numbers based purely on wishful thinking.

But there are exceptions to this, as anything. Ever hear of The Sims Online? Probably not. And that’s no offense to its developers, either.

I remember the massive number predictions before The Sims Online launched. Numbers don’t even translate from single player social computer game > online multiplayer social computer game.

Why? Well, in the case of The Sims, I’m betting that a lot of its players were more interested in dinking around with their own character leisurely for 30 minutes whenever they wanted than they were in dealing with real assholes online, and paying a monthly fee for it. In fact, I bet a lot of people barely saw the difference between the title they had to buy to get online and the title they already had at home. Not to mention that the new box said that they have to pay EVERY MONTH.

So there’s another reason why typical fantasy settings work well. You can transfer from existing computer game fanbases, it seems, with some success.

But StarCraft Online was a douched notion, as far as I’ve heard. Is this as simple as the fact that Blizzard may not want to compete with itself, or is this because a StarCraft setting, for the simple reason that it’s futuristic and the even simpler reason that it’s NOT fantasy, wouldn’t meet numbers expectations? Do YOU honestly think that StarCraft Online would, given the exact same amount of content and polish, compete on the same level as WoW?

I don’t.

There’s a big fanbase for StarCraft. It’s existing computer game IP. It’s recent. The company even knows how to do a MMO.

But how many off-center MMO demographics are going to be drawn to the lure of the Zerg? How many 60 year old grandmothers are going to be interested in playing the all-mighty Protoss (Protoss ftw) with their 12 year old granddaughters?

Yeah see, I’m guessing not many. I’ll take a huge leap and guess that rolling up a little dwarf paladin and running around goldshire is a little more attractive to these people. And guess what - there’s a lot of them. This isn’t 1997 anymore. A successful game can’t be based largely on attracting fourteen year old boys.

And that’s a good thing. Because you can actually HAVE half of the WoW servers using a PvP+ ruleset without complete fucking chaos. The mix in demographics offsets what I like to call the “faggot factor”. Named thusly when I completed my time with IPY. IPY was a game based on those early days of heavy faggot factor. In fact, IPY was populated almost entirely by fourteen year old boys that were SO attracted to the style of gameplay that allowed them to act up, that they came back and played IPY like it was a job when they were 22, becoming so engrossed that I think I got a threat on my life once a week.

So now that we have SOMETHING akin to parity among the major demographics, can something like Highlanders Online be attempted?

Well, maybe not as a blatantly open-PvP game. Which one might expect, given the setting. See, rulesets still attract certain types of players. WoW, for all of it’s all-encompassing blackhole like suckage of MMO players, DOES mainly appeal to the Achiever crowd. By sheer volume of all types of players, one might fail to notice.

A better example is going to be something like Darkfall when it comes out. Putting aside the vaporware/not vaporware argument or the cries of “it’s been seven years, they have no idea what they’re doing, it’s going to be buggy as hell” for a moment - it’s clear to anyone who has ever looked into Darkfall even slightly that they’re buttering their bread on the PvP side. Which I suppose would be the side that’s slightly burned, because it was more hardcore and got closer to the coils.

But even with the current equality of the demographics we have going in MMOs today, you still have to be very careful what you wish for. IPY was a good example. Darkfall will be a better one.

“Hardcore” PvP players feel somewhat starved, and as much as minority as they may seem (and are), they WILL all flock en masse to the people providing the most PvP-oriented ruleset.

So there you go. Great idea for a built-in, automatic fanbase.

Right?

Well, if you believe that, etc about bridges and whatnot.

Aside from that, there are also quite a lot of examples of how you attract other specific playstyle oriented players to a game. There are especially a lot of smaller, casual, social games out there that cater to the opposite spectrum of people that Darkfall will, or IPY did (for the most part).

So let’s get back to the point, just for a moment. As much as the idea of a Highlander based MMO is intriguing, you may not want to make it as hardcore PvP oriented as some may expect it to be. In fact, you may not have to. In fact, you may not want to for actual gameplay issues that are beyond the problems PvP players bring to the table.

Obviously, “permadeath” would be a near necessity in the setting. Another immortal chops ya’ block, you die. Lightning and fire ensue. Etc.

But this may, at least for the most part, rule out random, thoughtless PvP. People will fear the deaths of their OWN characters. It’d be almost like if EVERYONE playing UO in ‘99 had statloss. But even more extreme.

They would, mostly, think of the health and safety of their own characters. First and foremost. Except, as always and under any ruleset, when in a large group of patrolling gankers.

Highlander may uniquely solve this problem without much imagination from the developers.

Most battles in the setting take place purely one on one. This is good. I love one on one, honourable PvP in a game. Especially a MMO. I can’t despise 20v1 combat any more than I do. And even group vs. group has many, many flaws to it. From WoW’s battlegrounds to random guild warfare in UO, but I’ll digress for once in my fucking life. I think I’ll write on that topic some time, but I won’t. So we’ll leave it at that. It sucks (but only for certain reasons, and sometimes it rocks). That’s my official review.

But because there IS a (albeit rather slipshod at times) code of honour in the Highlander universe between immortals, what you’ve got is an easy, “lore”-justified reason to end ganking. Now you’ve got a reason to yes, base a game around PvP to a large extent, but also include a duel system of a sort. Not exactly being a “PK switch”, but more of a “PvP Lock” like I proposed on the IPY messageboards at one time. To, of course, only be shot down furiously… the lesson being don’t ever fuck with a “classic” ruleset, even if it’s the only ruleset you have on your servers and has MAJOR flaws in need of fixing. Which I don’t disagree with, totally. IPY was what it was, and should have died like it did. It gave people what it advertised, and died for the same reasons that the original UO was changed. C’est la vie. The damn thing was classic right down to the players, the atmosphere, the problems, and the death.

Digressing again (ADD rarely helps with writing, apparently), the PvP Lock would more or less lock a single attacking player into combat with their chosen opponent. While PvP would be free, it would also have rules of conduct, to a small extent. This doesn’t prevent group warfare. It just prevents auto-targetting, mass nuke dumps, 6v1s, etc.

This also obviously wouldn’t apply when it came to monsters or NPCs. Yes, I’m sure monsters could exist. Although much questing would be focused around both “real world” storylines as well as slaying the all-powerful (but NPC) immortal.

And speaking of NPCs, the game would also have to be largely NPC driven. In fact, I think, in a way that hasn’t really been seen so far. The amount of NPC related content that coders would have to push out would be phenominal, because, as an immortal, I think you’re living in a world - able to come and go into and from different aspects of society as you please. Regular humans (NPCs) would need to provide a living, breathing world for the players (Immortals) to exist in. The game can’t simply be about 1v1 immoral r0×0ring, and it CERTAINLY can’t be about raiding Molten Core with 39 of your closest immortal buddies for leet gear.

Your world would HAVE to be populated largely by normal human beings, that perform normal human being tasks and can be interacted with on MANY different levels. You have to be able to recruit people to go on a Crusade with you, you have to be able to work your way into the King’s service, you have to be able to ruthlessly climb the ranks to become a high ranking commander in the army, you have to be able to walk into a town and watch people scrubbing pots.

You have to be able to interact with NPCs of various sorts and professions in many different ways, with many different outcomes. And, in fact, the world itself needs to be so large that Immortals aren’t gathered 100 strong in Ironforge constantly, with the odd NPC walking past. You’d really need to flip-flop the balance between PCs and NPCs, in a way.

So would it make a better single player game? Possibly.

Would it make a better LMMORPG (that is, a LESS massive multiplayer online roleplaying game) of, say, 100 people to a server?

Maybe.

But not if you have the capability to make the world massive enough to nearly allow every player his own little corner. Not that you’d want nobody to run into each other, or you’d want people to be loners. But the world needs to be large enough that you aren’t ALWAYS around 25 other immortals.

That in itself I think is a necessity that makes the creation of a Highlander setting MMO difficult. The addition of massive amounts of heavy-interaction NPCs playing the roles of regular humans makes it worse.

And it IS necessary to have all aspects of society run by NPCs and all regular humans NPCs, because you can’t EXPECT people to NOT want to play an immortal in Highlander online. You also can’t force people into a non-Immortal role. “When you open your account, it will randomly be flagged Immortal or Human. Enjoy.” or some other such nonsense would be completely unacceptable to a paying customer logging into a Highlander MMO.

So you’ve got an idea that’s truly interesting, can be expanded upon to solve some gameplay-related problems with ease, and even provide a fantastic PvP setting with the NECESSITY of an updated UO-style world. I don’t even think it’d be desirable or even possible to create the setting in a Achiever-style based MMO, which is something like EQ or WoW. Much unlike a Transformers setting, which almost demands it.

It all sounds fantastic to a guy like me, which is really why I wanted to publicly think on the idea here for a moment. But you run into many fundamental problems as well. Chiefly being how do you provide the world of humans without reducing them to the state that NPCs are currently in MMOs? NOBODY wants to play the humans - and they shouldn’t have to.

But I think a game like this would fail without an interesting non-Immortal world for the Immortals to live in. Especially since the world would have to be pretty large (being another huge development and budget strain). Not only can you not have 5 towns populated mainly by Immortals LFG Molten Core, but you can’t have a huge, huge world with a million roaming, mindless NPCs. There has to be a lot of coding time behind each one, some more than others.

The very point of the game, as I envision it (and I think it’d be a hell of a game), would be undercut by any type of large budget restriction. Which comes back to the same problem Firefly has. You have to budget for your audience. If you spend large amounts of money on a game based around IP that will have limited transfer from it’s current fanbase (and/or already has a limited fanbase), you run the distinct risk of spending more than you could ever possibly make.

On the other hand, if you had about $150 million to blow, it’d be a grand social experiment. Maybe the government would like to set it up and monitor what people act like in a world surrounded by lessers who they consider insignificant.

Oh wait. That already goes on outside.

Oh well. What would YOU do with Immortality?

…

Yeah, I’m working on a slogan already in hopes of that massive government grant.

I can post this kind of crap if I like.

http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/07064/767020-61.stm

Famously, the Penguins have been trying to get a new arena for ten years from their local and state politicians, who gave one to both their baseball and football teams. Talks have been ongoing after a whole bunch of squaw-fucking, but after the slots license was lost to the Politician buddy system, “shit got real”.

Now it’s gone farther. The Penguins are “aggressively seeking relocation”. And honestly, Penguins fans wonder why. I happen to post on a Penguins board, and I’d say the large majority of the fans there are flipping and blaming ownership.

Now, I don’t see a lot of Pittsburgh TV. Just what I get on Centre Ice during the games, and the internet media I read from the city. But even I’ve seen a staggering about of spin from the local politicians involved, in a very obviously concocted manner for their own PR. Obviously Mario doesn’t know the right people, hasn’t scratched enough politician back in his life. Because if he had, it wouldn’t come down to this. It didn’t for the Pirates. It didn’t for the Steelers. It didn’t for the fucking random dude from Detroit that wanted the city’s slots license.

The Penguins want a deal that they’re able to get SEVERAL other cities to give them. Hell, they’ve been offered free $300 million dollar arenas. That are already built. They could move in tomorrow, rent free, if they so chose.

But it’s their fault because the politicians are breaking their balls over the deal, asking them to pay several million dollars every year toward the arena, sharing profit, paying for a parking garage, etc?

The fact is that they’ve been playing in the NHL’s oldest, most broken down arena for some time now. They lose money because they’re not able to offer the suites, seats, and amenities that other teams are. But they should be alright with that, they should struggle to talk to politicians for ten years, and THEY should be blamed when they’re fucked around for ten years and beyond, even when they’re being offered free facilities and $175 million buyout deals because they’re the team in the NHL with undisputedly the brightest future and the greatest collection of young stars that the league has seen since the Oilers of the 80s?

Are you truly a fan if you only support a team because it HAPPENS to be in your town, or if you turn on anyone and everyone from the team because they’re being banged in the butt by politicians playing games, if you literally threaten to burn down the house of the man who has kept their team in their town, repeatedly, even though he’s had to purchase it after it was losing so much money that its ownership had declared bankruptcy, and CONTINUE to take losses waiting on the city and state’s politicians to get off their asses and make a fair deal?

Damion tells us about his recent Burning Crusade experiences, about replacing his dagger from Scarlet Monestary with a green BC quest reward something akin to an uberweapon you’d find inside of AQ40 pre-expansion.

He goes on to explain why it’s probably necessary to even everyone up, but then asks - what will we do with all of this old content?

I’ve seen people asking this since BC was announced. No doubt Blizzard will come up with something lame like reducing the maximum allowed players inside these instances and beefing up the rewards a little after a while.

But Jeff Freeman poo-poos the silly notion of expansions, instead preferring the release of new games much more often. As good as the idea sounds on paper, I’m not sure how simple it’d be to move everyone over. Even if it was REALLY simple to move over. Inevitably, some of your population just wouldn’t. Some would want to play the old game TOO. Of the latter, you’d have people paying for two boxes, two subscriptions (barring some kind of all-access pass, or discount), splitting their time between two iterations of, essentially, the same game. Of the former type of people who DIDN’T move over, I’m sure they’d be rather disillusioned both with the abandonment of “their game”, and with the fact that there really aren’t many people playing “their game” anymore. And that’d be The Company’s fault.

Myself, I haven’t played WoW since well before the expansion. I think I may have logged in a couple of times, but as of right now my account is inactive. I’ve even deactivated the monthly fee. I’m disinterested enough to know that I probably don’t need the option of logging in right now if it’s going to cost me money.

But what is it that I’m disinterested in?

I like that they’re evening everyone up. Sort of. I think it’s most certainly done in a cheesy, broken way. But it’s the thought that counts. Sort of.

I like the release of new instances that have less of a manpower requirement. I’d really rather do a five man than deal with thirty-nine jackasses soundboarding in ventrilo. But mainly, I just can’t dedicate the time necessary to keep up with those thirty nine people, and all of the other people like them.

At first glance, this is what Blizzard seemed to have been trying to fix. Evening up the gear, eveyone starts fresh, more focus on 5 man, 10 man, 20 man content. No more 40 man dungeons.

Except the fact that they’ve been dedicated to implementing reputation/faction-gain based dungeon rewards since ZG. If you’ve never grinded faction for gear, it takes a LONG FUCKING TIME. They did it with ZG, they did it with AQ 20 and AQ 40, and they did it with Naxxramas. If I’d read nothing about, I’d assume they’d be doing it with their BC instances too. But I have read something about it, a long while ago, and I’m fairly certain they are.

See, they’ve gotten so caught up in pandering to and satiating the powergamer crowd (and I’ll admit, it’s very hard not to - they do tend to be the loudest) that even their solution was essentially nothing more than an illusion that introduced a LONGER grind.

I have no problem casually romping into Stratholme to get some gear. Even “pro mode” challenges like “UD45″ were a lot of fun. It took teamwork. It took skill. It took experience, timing, and concentration. Best of all, it took fourty-five minutes.

In the end, this is what I can’t deal with. Yeah - when I was fourteen, I spent nearly an entire summer smacking mountains with my miner on UO. I was gonna GM blacksmithing. I never did. I dont’ know if that speaks to my lack of focus or my lack of patience (or maybe the fact that I had some kind of life back then, still, almost).

But what I do know is that I can’t do that shit any more. I really can’t spend three months accomplishing something in your game. I’m sorry. And if you want to cater to the kids who CAN, you’re really going to piss the rest of us off - and those kids are going to reach the peak of your reward mountain anyway.

That’s why I can’t stand the general Diku design, that’s why I can’t GM a smith in UO, and that’s why I haven’t logged into BC. Evening me up just to send me along with a pat on the head into new and improved grindfest v2.0 isn’t fooling me.

Is the answer to limit expansions to X and refocus on new games more often? Maybe. If done right, the plan has its advantages. I just don’t think it’ll work out as well as one might initially plan.

Expansions are great. They keep things new, they refocus the powergamers, they keep that money flowing without the necessity to spend another $50m making a whole new game. Because really, the old content is still good. It’s still there. A lot of people haven’t experienced it yet.

Maybe you want to add a new type of server to your list, though. Most games already rock PvP and PvE ruleset servers. WoW adds RP, and even RP-PvP. That’s really nice of them. How about “Classic”?

Shouldn’t that be a requirement of releasing each expansion? Or at least… once in a while?

Personally I’m a big fan of WoW in those days that I could casually run through the five or ten man instances to get gear that was a little bit better, and totally cool looking. But when you ask me to grind rep - no matter how many people I need to take with me - my answer is just going to be no. I don’t need to be enticed, evened up, or even tricked. The answer is just no. I couldn’t believe how many people were participating in Blizzard’s PvP system before the expansion pack. It boggled my mind.

And as long as there’s “something more to go on to” beyond the classic servers - that being, the regular servers - you’re not losing customers. I can play away casually on WoW circa 2005 or whatever, enjoying the fact that nobody in tier 5 is going to stroll along and smack down my entire group of friends without any effort. Then, if I would like to, I can go back and play a regular server if I suddenly have a change of heart, get desperately tired of the casual game and need more, hit the content wall and need to go through really badly, etc.

It’s the same thing with UO. Might people get tired with the old content? Sure, they might. But in that context, the percentage of those who quit when they get bored to those who move onto a regular server might be XX percent. But it’s a hell of a lot better than zero percent if you don’t put the server up. And there will be those that don’t get bored of the more casual game. Some people really dont’ want to be threatened to grind for items lest they compete with the people who do. Of course, there IS a way of implementing achievement or advancement based gameplay without giving the power to lord over “the mortals”. But that’s a post for another day. In fact, it’s two. Someone remind me.

Oh Danny boy.

Obviously he doesn’t have much time for blogging, since this front page post was actually created on March 23rd of last year, but Daniel James posted on his site decrying the vile swamp of cookie cutter multi-million dollar MMOs he saw at E3. Now, Daniel is a nice guy. But I’m not sure he’s getting it. He’s both ahead of and behind the times.

In fact, he’s a lot like I was for a long time.

Daniel obviously operates Three Rings, which does Puzzle Pirates and Bang! Howdy. Clearly he’s a proponent of non-traditional MMOs, and really not big on the never ending sea of graphical DikuMUDS. That’s great. I feel the same way. So did Richard Bartle.

But a quick trip over to Mr. Bartle’s blog some time ago revealed to me that he had started, and completed, one level 60 World of Warcraft character. “Just to show them I can”, he said. “I still hate these games”, he said.

Fine. Good.

Many months later, I stopped by his site again. I believe at this point, he had three or four characters at level 60 - and was planning to level his mage to 70.

Yet, before this marathon of WoW gaming, I had never seen anything but cold hatred coming from his keyboard when he wrote about games like WoW. Alright - cold… indifference? Can I not sensationalize a little? RATINGS, baby. Can’t you tell I’m all about the money with these crazy ads all over the place?

I, myself, after being the biggest EQ hater in the world and the hugest proponent for more games in the mould of UO - I’m going to admit, I have a few level 60s on a WoW account somewhere, too.

We all love the sandbox for our own reasons. We all love various incarnations of non-Dikus for our own reasons. We all love the virtual world, as opposed to the virtual game. We’ve all done the grind before. We’re all very sorry that EQ caught on like it did.

Yet even someone like myself, even someone like Richard Bartle, and people all over that I don’t have examples of on hand (but are obviously supported by the account numbers), are falling into the trap.

So why is every game with a large budget being cut from the same pattern?

It’s safe. It’s easy. It’s proven. In that, it’s probably the only way to GET that large budget money from VCs.

It’s going to be hard enough to raise the funds for a MMO in the first place. I’m sure most investors want to be shown success, and told that you’re going to do it like THAT. Not shown success, then shown failures or mediocre successes and told that you’re going to do it like that… and hope YOU’RE the one to get it right where so many others have failed.

Because they do fail. Spectacularly. And often.

Which all kinds of MMOs do, including Diku style MMOs. But they also have the big successes, too. That’s what counts when you’re pitching something.

It’s really hard to do something “different” and succeed. Maybe Raph can get funding for that. But Johnny B. Wonderful the MMO dreamer isn’t going to approach a VC and come away with $25m for an MMO very often in the first place. Let alone when he walks in saying “I want to spend a lot of money making something that traditionally doesn’t make a lot of money. There is no example of this type of thing succeeding at the level I’m proposing, and ESPECIALLY not at the level of that big shiny one OVER THERE“.

And guess what?

We all play that one over there.

Tired as you may be of the grind since 1982, if you started playing WoW with a friend or two - you’d be in the exact same predicament as Mr. Bartle, Daniel. I’m just guessing.

I’m no graphics whore. I’m certainly not a leveling kind of guy. I hate the time = power equation that WoW, EQ, etc design themselves after. The guy that smells like the ass of a cat will always beat the crap out of my casual UBRS slash MC geared ass, because he just got done farming T3 for 20 hours a day the last twelve weeks.

But you know what?

Sometimes you just want to whomp the rats.

Solid gameplay, constant and visible, rewarded progression… well put together class designs, massive mountains of content, good graphics… it’s just too much for a puny mortal when it comes down to it. I don’t know why. But most people don’t want to learn anything else, and those that have — they still don’t mind the same basic gameplay, down to the same ‘-20′ bling bling hit points that pop up over the poor hapless goblin/frogluk/lionwing/krog/alien lizard thing as you pummel it into glittering transluscent fade-away.

I’ll admit that I can’t explain exactly why. But I do know that it’s a successful formula, and while it does require life-sucking amounts of time to compete at the higher levels - you can still log in, enjoy the content, and view tangible progression toward a goal as you play.

And since some people DO learn to eventually hate it, you can consider yourself ahead of the curve. But since all of us who already do hate it seem to be in need of learning to hate it AGAIN, I’ll also say you’re behind. You need to get in there and truly understand why everyone is trying to make WoW. Or maybe I’ve just been subliminally zombified to recruit new players for Blizzard and Sony.

I sincerely hope we see more Puzzle Pirates, ATITDs, UOs, Eves, and even Second Lifes (we can probably skip the yiffing though). But the simple fact is that these things will need to come from indie sources, probably without entirely traditional sources of funding - and certainly not funding the size of WoW.

That’s why everything you see at E3 with a double-digit million dollar budget is the same crap.

In recent days, Shadowbane got cheap.

We understand that Shadowbane is an old game, and subscriptions were likely falling accordingly (especially since it was almost shut down a few months ago). But is this the right move?

Is it the only move?

I’m assuming that subscriptions were falling so low that they decided they needed to increase their numbers by such a drastic measure. Even if it meant going to an ad revenue-based model, which is a largely untested business plan in this industry.

Obviously they’ve explored this course of action and have decided that it could increase the amount of players in Shadowbane to the point where annoying ads blasted across the screens of their players will provide more profit than the old subscription model. But even if there is a short term spike in activity, and a possible increase in revenue, is the strategy ultimately self defeating?

Let’s look at who is going to play your game for free. Or, to be more specific, who WOULDN’T be playing if it weren’t.

I pay for the MMORPGs I play, and I don’t mind doing so. It’s not really expensive for most people over the age of fourteen. In fact, most of the single purchases I make throughout the day cost more than what I spend on monthly access to a MMORPG, so I don’t consider it much of a nuisance at all. I understand the costs involved in creating and maintaining them, and that the risk involved is pretty over the top, too. So if some of these games that succeed make good bucks, good for them. But really, most fail.

And unfortunately, Shadowbane may currently be failing. So it seems they’re falling back on a plan B - at the same time, inviting an entirely new type of player to their game. Or maybe not ENTIRELY new, since ne could argue that the “Play To Crush!” design and philosophy already attracts an undesirable population to their game, and has for years. I’m sure they’ve got plenty of experience with that particular problem. But one could also argue that their design and general philosophy will be a vehicle for undesirables to cause more havoc than they’d be able to in most free games.

And ultimately, are an undesirable player’s actions more about nature or nurture? Is it simply their nature to be like they are - through a combination of things like age, maturity, and possibly some kind of upbringing that included the constant whipping of their legs by older brothers with plastic powerwheels tracks - or is the ruleset and design of the game, not to mention whether it’s free to play or not, creating these monsters?

If you take the same player and plop him down into a free to play Shadowbane environment, is he more or less likely to be the same player, ultimately, especially in his run-ins with other players and social situations, as if he were sucked into EQ by a guild of achievement-based gameplay friends? Is he a malleable product of his environment?

Possibly to a large extent. He’s also a product of those around him. Call it MMO peer pressure. And the fact that everyone else in Shadowbane is playing Shadowbane, and playing for free, increases the negative effect of that peer pressure. The result is that players are not only often a product of their environments, but of those around them - who are also products of their environment.

I hope the SB CSRs are paid well. They might also want an in-house counselor. IPY freaked me out for a good, long time - and what they’re doing is basically what we did back then. Except the ads. I should have thought about that.

I’ve also always been a huge proponent, both in proposal and practice, of a genuine and immersive experience, however. I don’t like items being sold, I don’t like GM interference, and I certainly wouldn’t like being forced to search for alternative sources of profit that included being free to play and introducing in-game ads. But in these days of advertisement inundation, is this simply the next step? What happens when all of the big name subscription-based MMOs figure out they can put ads in the game TOO, and most people won’t say boo if it becomes common practice?

Why not? Once all of these games cost $15 AND have ads all over the place, I’d certainly be willing to play one that costs $25 and has no ads. Consider it a prediction of doom. Or, ultimately, just more expensive gaming. Or more annoying, depending on your pocketbook.

In the end, I think Shadowbane’s new strategy will be self defeating. PvP players in a PvP environment + Free PvP players exploiting a Free PvP environment will equal a gradual decline in playerbase as people become disenfranchised and disgusted with both other players, and also, the company that has allowed them in “for money” (through ads and “increased” playerbase). Yeah, and the annoying ads won’t help the disposition of the playerbase either, I’m guessing.

So yeah, I’m sure they’ll experience something akin to an initial boom in numbers, but I don’t think it’s going to be a good long term strategy by any means.

Or maybe it’s just ahead of its time. Just almost definitely in the wrong environment.