Zen of Design ;

This post is the best thing Raph’s posted quite some time. Of course, it helps that his thoughts mirror a lot of my thoughts on online worlds, especially the new meme of ‘everyone can open their own virtual world’. The fact that Raph is aware of this problem gives me a lot of hope for what they’re working on.

Chasing after and bending the rules towards casual players for an MMO ignores an obvious issue - an online community is ultimately as interesting and compelling as its members. Casual players will not give a place its own personality. Consider, if you will, how interesting Cheers would have been without Norm, Cliff and Frasier.

Once you start building a game design based on the idea that interesting social ties MIGHT occur inside a space, the designer is basically depending on serendipity to occur. This is, as one might imagine, a pretty scary basis for a business model. As such, we start putting in game mechanics designed to make the game stickier (collecting minigames), have tactical interest (PvP), take longer (levelling curves and raiding games), and forcing more positive social interactions (multiplayer-required content). Serendipity is still the fulcrum that determines whether a game (or even a server/shard of a game) lives or dies, it’s the designers job to make that landscape as fertile as possible.

My Canadian coworkers got a kick out of this: our gaming neighbors to the north do not have to pay an entry fee to enter Blizzard’s arena tournament. However, they do have to <a href=”http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/pvp/tournament/legal.xml”>sharpen their number two pencils.</a>

Canadian residents are not required to pay an Entry Fee in order to enter. Instead, Canadian residents may enter by submitting a 250 word typewritten essay comparing the video gaming culture in Canada to the video gaming culture in the United States on 8 ½ x 11 inch paper and mailing their essay to Essay Entry for The North American Blizzard Entertainment Arena Tournament, P.O Box 18979, Irvine, CA 92623. Essay entries must be received no later than March 31, 2008 in order to be eligible. Essay entrants represent and warrant that the essay is their original work and does not infringe the rights of any third party. By entering, essay entrants hereby grant, without further consideration, all right, title and interest in and to their essay to Sponsor.

Also, it is not an acceptable excuse that your sled dog ate your homework. I kid! I kid! Anyway, it’s nice to see a new growth industry for gold farmers.

I almost missed it because he refuses to get a working RSS feed, but not long ago, Claus Grovdal, producer-designer of Darkfall, poked his head out of his hole, saw his shadow, declared two more months of crunch, and scurried back into his rabbit hole.

But before he did, he boldly asked the question, “Why Shadowbane didn’t make billions”, and then went on to say, and I quote:

Shadowbane was a great concept and a great game, and the only reason it wasn’t a massive success, was buggy and outdated technology… If Shadowbane had released without all the client crashes, with a better server solution and with a graphical engine that could compete with other games released at the time, it would have been a HUGE hit.

As someone who worked on the game and who loves the vision behind it deeply, I’m of two minds on this one. There was a huge - HUGE - market appetite for the game when we launched. A week before ship, there were more ‘Shadowbane’ google hits than ‘Star Wars Galaxies” ones (the two games launched in the same time window). Our sell-through was - well, it was pretty hefty. People loved the IDEA of Shadowbane. They just didn’t stick around.

Of course, loving the idea of a hostile PvP world and not sticking around isn’t exactly an original problem, nor limited to the little guys - most people are not as hardcore as they think they are, and most MMO designs account for this very poorly.

In Shadowbane’s case, though, Claus is right - and wrong. Shadowbane’s technical challenges are well-documented, and took nearly all of our resources to tackle, but even if we had fixed them fast enough, there were huge design challenges waiting in the wings. Chief of those being the wholesale butchery of new players and the utter inability for vanquished guilds to get back into the risk game. Dear future PvP games: please try to at least make different mistakes.

Anyway, better tech and graphics would have helped quite a bit. The game was very well-balanced for a PvP experience, and had a deep and interesting character building system. It was fun - despite its flaws. But ‘billions’ seems… a bit much.

I’m changing hosts, which hopefully will result in, say, being allowed to post again, as well as possibly get rid of a host of other various issues I’ve had with performance in the past. Please pardon the dust as this (and any email to this domain) goes through the traditional period of adjustment.

Also, thanks to my wife, who knows how to make all this shit work.

Sorry for being incommunicado. Wordpress has decided to not allow me to post. In order to prevent me from saying anything stupid, I suppose.

I’ve done a lot of work on the back end, upgrading the version, deleting a lot of old data, and other improvements that will hopefully improve performance, but I haven’t yet found the magic bullet that will let me fix this issue (This post is coming from writing directly into the DB). Stay tuned….

So far, it has some of the most spectacular scripted events I’ve ever seen in a video game, visually.

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Magic: the Gathering has had, over the years, a debate over the use of what they call proxy cards, or the use of stand-in cards to represent more expensive, harder to find cards. Often times, these proxy cards are little more than writing the words ‘Black Lotus’ over a worthless land card, but in today’s day of low-cost color printers, many players attempt to make more ‘perfect’ ones, by downloading the art and pasting it to the back of a cheap common.

The Proxy Wars are interesting to me in that they are, in many ways, the reverse of the classic RMT problem in MMOs. The players who use proxies argue that they cannot afford to compete with Mr. Suitcase, who buys a new booster box or two every time an expansion comes out. The people that DO go to the trouble and expense to acquire these rare cards are relatively incensed by this end-around on how things are supposed to be. THe people who have more money than time don’t want the other guys in their playpen.

The last time I checked, Wizards of the Coast had a zero tolerance policy on the use of proxies in any official tournament, even down to the sponsored ‘Friday Night Magic’ nights they sponsor weekly nationwide. This, of course, makes perfect sense - Xeroxing cards is a direct assault on MTG’s core business model. Say that Xeroxing cards is all right, and suddenly booster sales dry up.

But their stance appears to be weakening. MtG now has a ‘Vintage’ tournament bracket, which allows the players to play with any cards from any era of Magic’s existence. In these tournaments, MtG allows for a small, select number of proxy cards to be declared and used. Similar to WoW’s Arena Tournament, the rules have been changed in one part of their magic circle to accomodate special needs.

Much like RMT policy, the shift in policy reflects the will of the incumbency. 10 years ago, a larger share of Magic players would have had access to the Power Nine (the nine most broken cards in existence), and would have felt it was only fair that their investment in playing the ‘collectable’ part of the game be rewarded. Now, the incumbent market has changed, and is full of people who never had, and likely never will have, a Black Lotus or a Time Walk. They are more than willing to see a gameplay format open up that lets them play with these lost wonders. However, the game is still, most assuredly, a money game.

The whole GTA-like open city thing…. did it ever occur to you that someone might want to run the same race twice in a row?

Please, find the designer/producer that foisted this horrible decision on an otherwise great game, and bop him on the back of the head once for me. Kthx…

The real issue of RMT is basic fairness. Which is less basic than you might think.

It’s really not about world disruption. Or gold spam. “Game Gods” who run these games are not necessarily opposed to RMT, and some have tried to monetize it already. More will in the future. It has a lot to do with a shockingly high number of customer service calls - which can also become legal issues, which is why most companies make the decision to either disown it (so that its not their problem) or integrate it into the game service in order to reduce the flabbergasting amount of fraud that surrounds RMT on external sites (that players somehow expect us to address). But in terms of why game players respond to it negatively, it’s about basic fairness. (more…)

Here.

“When you criminalize free trade, only…criminals engage in free trade. That’s why you see the thuggish behaviour you do.Legalize the trade, as some games and worlds have, and you have harnessed legitimate and normal human activity, and then can more easily identify and prosecute the criminals, i.e. those who use fraud, spamming.”

An homage, if you will, to the idea that legalizing prostitution will end street prostitution, and make it respectable and safe. Or that legalizing drugs will reduce crime surrounding drugs as well as overdoses caused by bad drug batches. In both cases, political stances I’m not automatically opposed to.

But for RMT, I’m not buying it. If you believe that gold farming causes disruptive game situations such as kill stealing, then legitimizing RMT in this case is more likely to cause disruptive behavior, rather than reduce it. As the EULA stands now, gold farmers are incentivized to hide their activities, and not leave any sort of paper trail of CSR complaints that might show up in logs. Make it legal, and players will no longer ‘play it safe’, and can bring out any anti-social behavior in order to protect valued turf.

There are good arguments for RMT. This is not one of them.