What makes an MMO?

In Freedom Force, you could pretty much level every building and cars and even injure civilians. However, everytime you did, it would deduct from your total prestige gained for the mission and you'd have less points to spend on getting new heroes. A small thing...but something that actually FITS for a superhero MMO.

I do agree on the rest of your points in terms of persistent worlds. They are currently a fallacy in MMOs. We have static worlds...nothing more.

Seems pretty relevant to me. Although you do have to read the whole thing.

The same applies to most MMOs. Hel, The Abyss and The Hive here only go up to 50 players now, though that's more a thing to do with what the devs want the encounter with Hamidon to be like than it is a technical limitation.

The only response I have here is that while, yes, what matters is implementation, and not just abstract idea, the truth is that you if you DON'T have an idea, you have nothing to implement. Yes, you can try and fail. But there is no way to succeed without trying. You can have a good idea and fail to make anything good out of it, but I have a very hard time imagining having NO idea whatsoever and NO goal in design and coming up with something great. It's theoretically possible, but highly unlikely.

And as long as MMO designers plain and simple lack interesting ideas, nothing will ever change.

We seem to keep coming back to this. I've read all the posts, and some talk about immersion, others about social interaction and still others about story, but by and large what everyone always focuses on is just that - a shared social space. WoW has done a good job implementing that, certainly, but I guess my question is is that the ONLY way to implement it? Is making a WoW clone the only way to make an MMO? Should MMO developers be designing their game by taking WoW's framework and then writing their game around that, even if it doesn't fit? Is THAT what makes an MMO? Because if the MMO market is to be believed, that, only that and nothing but that is what an MMO is or could be.

I don't actually have a good idea how things could be made differently. I have suspicions and theories, but outside of actually lacking the funds, team and skill to design an MMO, I actually don't have a good enough idea of how it could be done differently. Yet I can't help but think that it CAN be done differently, and that when it is, it might make for a truly interesting game. At least when it's done differently and manages to succeed.

I'm just getting tired of MMOs essentially repackaging the same base game over and over again.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

Implementation requires the work of a whole lot of people who aren't the lead designer. The lead designer needs to compromise between the ideas they have and the capability of everyone to implement them before launch/extend the game after launch.

You're assuming that they don't have interesting ideas just because they can't implement them. I don't believe that assumption is valid.

Because seriously, who's going to talk to someone about something they've made and say "oh, here are all these really cool things I thought up that aren't in it"?

Criticizing a lack of creativity strikes me as ultimately wrong-headed. Like I said, people get mad crazy ideas all the time. The problem comes not with having the idea in the first place, but turning it into a form that a) has a design that reflects the idea, b) functions as designed and c) is actually fun to experience.

Ideas are cheap and easy. Real, working, fun game mechanics/games are expensive and hard.

Don't take that to mean that you should be satisfied with whatever pablum a company gets out the door. "Should" doesn't apply there - what you're satisfied with is up to you. But I would bet you that the vast majority of the time the pablum is not reflective of a deficit of ideas on the part of the game designers.

"By and large what everyone always focuses on is just that - traversing a landscape while avoiding or destroying obstacles. Super Mario Bros. has done a good job implementing that, certainly, but I guess my question is: is that the ONLY way to implement it? Is making a Mario clone the only way to make an action game?"

That's what I'm reading when I read that, Sam. Sonic is a Mario clone who goes really fast, has a "coin"-based health bar, and RUNS THROUGH LOOPS YEEEEEAAAAAAH. Banjo-Kazooie is a Mario clone with powerups that are intrinsic rather than transitory. Halo is a Mario clone in the first person with regenerating health and a greater variety of projectiles. Et cetera.

Most of the "WoW mechanics" you listed are just good solutions to common problems, and I'll add two more: an HP/mana bar and an on-screen minimap.

The HP/mana bar and minimap reflect that your character has a sense of their surroundings and their own capabilities that can't be communicated through your limited viewpoint.

Crafting and auction houses are both reflective of a desire to put a large assortment of gear into the game, to cater to peoples' desire to explore/enhance a specific aspect of the game/their character, and at the same time distribute that gear randomly. Auction houses let people trade gear with each other through a central intermediary. (Have you ever been in an MMO with "player shops", and seen hundreds of them clogging a town, with half the titles being variations on "lol"?) Crafting lets people produce specific gear from more generally dropped components.

The mail system can be one way to let people swap things among their various characters, and is always a way to send gifts to other players (for whatever reason).

Banks and to an extent player housing cater to the packrat in people, their desire to keep around a supply of trophies/mementos/variant wardrobes/experimental sets, and free designers from worrying about the impact of people optimizing their loadout on the fly.

Levels and XP are a gating mechanism for the various challenges to be overcome in the world and a reward for overcoming same.

Quests and faction (and achievements, if you count that as a WoW innovation) result from a player's desire to be acknowledged by the world. In a tabletop game it's easy for the GM to see my guy who likes fighting bugs and using his spear, and whip up a quest about fighting bugs to get indoctrinated into the Ancient And Noble Order Of Pointy Objects. Quests and faction standing are ways to "be acknowledged" by the world, even if they do spell out the things you have to do ahead of time.

I mean, it's not just WoW that ever did any of these things. They're all solutions for common problems. There are definitely games that "try to copy WoW", but what they try to copy are the visual stylings and the nomenclature.

THIS

After seeing the pitiful excuses for narrative in AION and WAR recently, I've come to worship the MA and the abundance of story-goodness we are showered with in CoH.

Compared to CoH, WoW IS a tortuous grindfest.


I tried AION recently and was utterly depressed. If this is the latest thing in the world of MMORPGs, then Life itself is Retarded. CoH is from the future, obviously, a future where Fun and Plot are important.

FFS, NCSoft, advertise CoH, why don't you!

Eco.

Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow [The Incarnate System is] Jack Emmert all over again, only this time it's not "1 hero = 3 white minions" it's "1 hero = 3 white rocks."

Yep, CoH was the first MMO I played seriously and it spoiled me rotten. I tried playing WoW and while I did level a character almost to 80 and greatly enjoyed the storyline coming back to CoH was a relief (especially being able to Super Jump across a zone in no time and being able to fight multiple enemies at once). Also teaming tools in CoH are wonderful compared to WoW, I can search for characters without regard to where they are and I don't need to worry about their spec.

Just clipping out this bit: No. Cloning WoW is not the only way to make a shared social space commonly termed as an MMORPG.

The MMORPG genre is quite wide-open, but I'd say that in ALL of them, your character is significant in more than just the direct gaming-combat situations. Let me explain what I mean:

If you play a custom-RPG in Warcraft 3, your character is ONLY used in reference to the actual combat and enemy-killing of that game. In lobbies, your character basically does not exist. Because it's a lobby system like that.
In Diablo 2, your character really only appears in the section considered to be "in-game." Fighting stuff, etc. But when interacting with the many people who play, you're just a name in a chatroom. Your character really has nothing to do with that.
In EVE, your character (who is inside that spaceship, we swear) in a way matters, even when you're just farting around talking with people. Sort of get what I'm saying?

But if you consider a shared social space where players' characters can explore/defeat the world/other characters to be cloning WoW... um.. I don't know what I can say.

Funny little thing in response to this- I play two MMO's at once right now. CoH and WoW. Know what got me into playing WoW again? Aion. I played it and after a few weeks was like "You know what? WoW does all of this far better. If I'm playing this, I might as well be playing the best in the realm of WoW clones."
Something has to scratch my 'RPG-style PvP' itch, after all. I'd play WAR, but something about it just seemed a little off (in spite of the ******* awesome pvp). Also they screwed over RP servers. I'll give them another shot in... *checks calendar* four months? five months? Heh, getting closer than I thought.

I'm starting to feel like you're intentionally misreading me and injecting tangents just so that you can contradict what I'm saying. Let me see if I can reword this:

I don't care what ideas they have interesting ideas IN THEIR HEADS, I care if they have interesting ideas IN THEIR GAMES. And they don't. And I assume they don't have interesting ideas in their game because I didn't see any interesting ideas in any of their trailers. Only derivative work. It is completely and utterly irrelevant what kind of great ideas people have when I don't see them, which is why when I say "they don't have great ideas" I mean "they don't have great ideas THAT I CAN SEE." I took that to be obvious from my wording, but it needed to be said.

My grief with MMO designers isn't that they, as people and artists are uncreative, but that the GAMES they make are uncreative, uninteresting and derivative. And that is a valid complaint.

Granted. And how many Mario clones do we see TODAY? I'm talking about clones of the old Mario Bros game. We get new Sonic games, but they are most certainly not clones of that, not as of Sonic Adventure, at the very least, and I suspect since even before that. And, really, making the argument that "Halo is a Mario clone, only not really" borders on hypocrisy. Mario Brothers was a successful game back in its day, and it spawned an array of clones and derivative games. That was then, this is now, and those games ARE NO LONGER BEING MADE.

But the original Mario Bros game was made in 1983. Today is 2009, so that's a lifespan of 26 years until today, but how long was it before the series evolved and moved onto other things? EverQuest was released in 1999. That's 10 years ago now. How long until we break out of its mould and start making other kinds of MMOs that can't trace their game mechanics way back to then? But then, StarCraft 2 is just Mario Borthers, but without any of the Mario Brothers stuff, so I don't know...

And "gear" is the only way to achieve this? Even in worlds and settings where "gear" doesn't even apply? I'm not going to per-point quote all of these, but really - I'm tired of gear, loot, items, drops, etc, etc. If THAT is all an MMO is going to be, then why would I want to buy it and play it, when I have exactly that in the bazillion other MMOs that have come out already? Let me put it simply - why play Lord of the Rings Online when I can play WoW? Why play Aion when I can play Lineage II? Why play 9Dragons when I can play EQ?

On the other hand, despite all the bad things I have to say about it, the question of "Why play Champions when I can play City of Heroes?" DOES have a meaningful answer. For an unashamed WoW-clone as Champions is, it still manages to cram plenty of innovative ideas into the game. Innovative enough to get even ME to admit I'd really, really want to see them. Granted, the implementation of a lot of those is embarrassing, but they are innovative and interesting all the same. BioWare are going the opposite direction - instead of making the game eccentric, they make it more story-driven, something which MMOs most decidedly are not. Ask most WoW players what a Naxramas is and they'll shrug their shoulders, because their MMO mould has them reading a quest's objectives and absolutely nothing more.

Easy solutions to common problems does not make those solutions good, and they get worse and worse as time moves on. Once upon a time just having a virtual world to simply BE in was mind-boggling to people. Now, making an MMO that's JUST a virtual world with no quests or missions to do in it would have you laughed out of the union. Things change. They have to.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

Yes. But it may not be one the people who actually do the work of realizing the game have the capability to address, or even recognize.

Over the course of development, ideas and goals change, and compromise is made between design and feasible implementation. Often this compromise is gradual, with the result that even the lead designer may not consciously be aware of what the game has become. More on that below.

Well now, I wouldn't say that.

No, StarCraft 2 is a Herzog Zwei clone.

And so is Brutal Legend. Except it's an incompletely implemented one, and the lead designer has gone on record as saying it's not a real-time strategy game. Aside, presumably, from the parts where you're trying to accomplish strategic objectives in real time, which comprise most of the game.

See what I mean about games changing right under the dev team?

Huh. Okay, I'll justify "gear" for you, starting from (my) first principles.

Games (all sorts) are copies of social interactions. Georg Simmel called them "Kampfspiele" or "conflict-games". He said that people enjoy playing games because they can experience a measure of the satisfaction of successful social interactions while ameliorating or eliminating the attendant risk. So to use some modern examples: winning football teams rarely kill the losers, you don't starve to death under a bridge when you lose at Monopoly or labor under an oppressive regime when you lose at Risk, et cetera.

Talcott Parsons proposed that every "social unit" has four forces at work in it. One that sets external goals, one that coordinates internal efforts to achieve them, one that adapts to external obstacles to accomplishing them, and one that quells internal conflict that can lead to backsliding. "Social units" are generally comprised of smaller independent "social units", with a single person being the smallest functional "social unit".

"Gear" is that portion of an MMO social "avatar" that adapts to external obstacles. This also includes money, tokens, merits, badges, and other game elements whose sole or chief purpose is to be exchangeable for gear.

What must gear be, essentially? It's something you can change in response to an obstacle. Your capacity to use it should be throttled so obstacles can seem significant. It's okay for it to degrade (actively or passively) or be used up entirely in surmounting an obstacle, as long as you can get more of it. And for an added wrinkle, the gear you acquire need not be limited to your use only. You can even acquire more than you can use, so you can trade or gift it to other players to help them overcome their external obstacles.

Ta-da! "Inventory" and "economy". A game without gear is a game that can't create obstacles. Either your capabilities are so fixed that you can't overcome them, or so flexible that what appears to be an obstacle is a challenge in configuring yourself properly.

Because, to quote Hillbilly David Hume, people can think up any damn-fool thing they please, but that don't make it real. However much stock people may place in reviews and sales figures, entertainment and "fun" are ultimately personal and subjective, and a list of features, even a list of what a developer thinks are important features, even a demonstration of a list of what a developer et cetera et cetera, is not a workable substitute for playing a game for yourself.

Of course, playing a game takes time and generally costs money, and you have to decide for yourself how much of both you want to give up to make sure. I can't very well run the numbers for you.

The people who implement the solutions make the solutions good. Or, y'know, not.

You wouldn't dismiss something as a "WoW clone" if it was actually fun for you. What "WoW clone" means in that context is either "WoW did this better" or "I don't know anything that did this better, but WoW is the cultural baseline for this kind of thing". Before "WoW clone" it was "EQ clone" and in the fullness of time it'll probably be a clone of something else.

Wait, what? ALL games are copies of social interactions? What kind of social interactions is, say, Tetris a copy of? Or Sudoku, for that matter. Or the many Breakout games. I can agree that, to some extent, MMOs can be billed as social experiences, but even then not every part of them is one.

Wait, I'm obviously missing something. Last I checked, say Street Fighter didn't have anything I could describe as "gear," yet last I checked, it was one of the most popular games out there. Pac Man has no "gear" unless you count the power pellets, and that's a REAL stretch. The original Load Runner had no gear, either. More contemporary Need For Speed have something which would qualify, but older Need For Speed games did not.

Or are you saying an MMO can't exist without gear? And even if you were, you missed my point by a mile. I never said I don't want the system in the game as such. I asked why it had to be GEAR. Why does it have to be swords, hats, shoes and armour? Why, even in contemporary games? Why, even in games that don't actually NEED items that you hold on your hands or put on yourself? Even Champions Online, the purportedly revolutionary game, still has me dressing myself up, albeit in items in name only. City of Heroes had a good idea, in my opinion. Enhancements - abstract concepts that enhance your abilities in ways OTHER than directly putting something on your body (a lot of the time).

There was an old game called Harbinger that had a very interesting idea. Two of its three classes were perfectly standard Diablo ripoffs, but its third, the "Gladiator," was a robot who didn't actually use almost any weapon or armour. Instead, all of his "items" came in the form of upgrades that you installed inside his body. Power cells, hydraulic pistons, shield generators and so forth. I think Skaarj-style blades were the only thing you could put on the outside.

I'm not saying I don't want items as a concept. What I don't want is items literally implemented as items. Plenty of games have been more than capable of working with alternate systems, such as "equipping" abilities, using enhancements or altering your characters, but apparently if you can't pick up a sword off the ground and swing it, it's not "items enough."

Which means precisely zilch, since those games PLAY very much the same. I've tried many of them for a while, and they all offered me pretty much the same thing. Hence my question. Let me put it like this - different platform, different manufacturers, different game names and even different graphics do not make a different game. Much like every story ever made about the three ghosts of Christmas is, at its core, just a rehash of an old story I am SICK of watching about, so very many MMOs these days are a rehash of an old system I grew bored with incredibly quickly.

Wrong. Really, do I HAVE to say it? Every time you start a sentence with "you probably" or "you wouldn't" or something like this, just stop, backspace over it and rewrite. You don't know me, so making assumptions about what I would and wouldn't do is a total crapshot. To prove a point, you are completely, totally and utterly WRONG.

I love Torchlight. More than any game in recent times. Torchlight has given me more playtime than anything I've played other than City of Heroes for YEARS now. And Torchlight is a clear, obvious, shameless Diablo clone. And I love it for that. Not only is it a Diablo clone, but it's a clone of the ORIGINAL Diablo, before Blizzard decided to overcomplicate things. Before it, Dungeon Siege, probably the cheesiest game of all times, struck the same note with me. It came out at the time Diablo 2 was in full swing, but it came out with a system much more reminiscent of the original Diablo, and like Torchlight, I fell in love with it. I'd still be playing it today if I hadn't hit a grind spot that forced me to essentially gain a lot of levels somewhere else and go back to the Utraian Peninsula.

But I've not seen a Diablo clone in years, and even back in the day, I didn't see all that many. I've seen a lot of Diablo 2 clones, including the Harbinger I mentioned, but clones of the glory days of the original Diablo are rare. In fact, remakes of truly old games like this sell not on the merit of the actual game (Torchlight isn't actually all that spectacular), but rather on the nostalgia value of the brand, and as such innovations actually HURT them. If the Ur Quan Masters started trying to re-write the game, how many people would even care?

JUST being derivative is not a bad thing. Nostalgia value or room on the market can sell a lot of clones of the same thing, and I wouldn't really complain. But there comes a point where a concept simply dries up. You can't keep re-releasing essentially the same game without bringing in something truly innovative. It just doesn't happen. Yes, you can wait 20-30 years and release the same game again, and people will buy it, but if you re-release it once every year, how long is that going to be meaningful? OK, some companies can manage it, but that's not a general thing.

And again, why are you arguing against my desire to see something new? Why does my dissatisfaction with the same old thing being re-released for 10 years now somehow make me a pariah? Are you saying that you'd rather every MMO launched from here on until we die be the exact same sword and sorcery crap under a new name? Because that's what I'm getting. I'd be happy to be proven wrong, but I'd need to understand how you can claim innovation shouldn't happen, that the status quo is just fine, and yet not vouch for exactly this.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

Man, I liked the flashing envelope of the old forums better! With these ones, I can never spot my new PMs!

Checking.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

Actually Sam, EQ had a bank and a (player driven) market from the moment it released. "Selling everything on me at torch 1" in East Commons was common. But players complained about having to constantly be present to conduct commerce so SOE in their infinite wisdom (that's sarcasm btw) brought out the Bazaar, which allowed for AFK selling.

Arcanaville described what I failed to get across (which wasn't unexpected). However, you can't blame me or him or her for how the MMO space has turned out. When new games come out with innovative features (might not be news to you but the game you're playing now fits the clone stereotype except for a handful of innovations), they often either fail outright or become so niche as to be barely worth noticing. So you really expect people to invest $25 million plus to create a game that could be an outright failure, just because it's innovative? If that's the case, why not put up the cash yourself?

I think there are many people who have totally unrealistic expectations and those people will always be disappointed. Your idealism counts for squat when it comes time to pitch a game for funding. No one's putting their money behind a 'well, maybe' proposition. Wait, let me qualify that. There aren't many people who are going to put that kind of money behind a 'maybe' prospect.

I understand your frustration, believe me. But eventually, I got my head out of the clouds and realized that this is no longer about games per se. It's business. There probably isn't a MMO that's going to get the kind of time and attention to grow from NOTHING to something like EVE Online did. I don't think we'll see another game weather the most disastrous launch in genre history and still bounce back and be moderately successful for the time (like Anarchy Online). It's business. It's also why I support games whose features interest me with more than mere words (which are meaningless). No one's going to support innovation if innovation is not rewarded. That's not personal, it's business. Talk to these or any other MMO devs. You'll see that they have tons of ideas that are new and different but that they're shackled by what? You guessed it, business.

Here's a question for you, Sam and I'm not being cute or sarcastic or anything.

Describe your perfect MMO. Go into as much detail as you can muster. I'm genuinely curious about what that kind of game would be like.

I have an idea that my perfect game would be lucky to draw 50k subs.

True, but at least it's done well enough in hiding them, even if most are hidden in plain sight. You don't have to reinvent the wheel as long as your rims are cool enough, so to speak.

It's not really about getting my head out of the clouds so much as it's about getting my money out of my wallet. I vote with my money and I only ever buy games I actually respect and enjoy. My problem is that there simply aren't any such games in the MMO genre that are being made, now or in planning. None that I know of. And that's kind of worrisome, because I know this one won't last forever.

Honestly, that's one of the things I mentioned before. I don't KNOW what my perfect game would be like, since what I would instinctively want is not only unrealistic, but from what I can tell out and out impossible. Within the realm of possibilities, I don't know what I would want, outside of saying that it's something OTHER than what the MMO market is currently flooded with. I'm actually fairly confident that the "guaranteed returns" bubble will burst at some point, I'm just worried it will last long enough to sour me on MMOs altogether.

Once upon a time I'd started drawing out a concept for a possible action RPG style game, but that was long before I started playing MMOs and most of what's in it is both largely unimaginative and actually inapplicable to MMOs, not to mention driven by lack of knowledge or planning. I'll see if I can't resurrect the idea at some point.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

Sudoku isn't a game. It's a puzzle. A relevant difference between a game and a puzzle is that you can lose a game -- it can end against your will.

You can give up on a Sudoku puzzle. But the puzzle doesn't care about that. It'll just sit where you left it. Waiting. Watching.

In computer games, such as Breakout and Tetris, the computer fills the role of another person or people. Often an antagonist.

What are Breakout and Tetris? Well, they involve hand-eye coordination and spatial judgement at an escalating pace...

They're tests. Passing a test, or "acing" a test, feels good in and of itself, regardless of what other effects it may have. Failing a test often comes with unpleasant consequences, but the game sweeps those under the rug. Your Breakout cartridge does not implode if you don't beat your high score. And while you might be able to recreate Tetris in real life with, say, an accelerating grocery belt, things are going to get messy when the blocks reach the top.

I missed your point by more than you thought. I wasn't answering the question "must gear exist?". I was answering the question "why does gear exist?"

Let me describe a Street Fighter scenario. Imagine a single-player game of Street Fighter II, consisting of fighting eight opponents with steadily increasing A.I. difficulty (we'll say one step every 2 fights) and then three bosses. Now, let's say you have selectable difficulty, so that you can start the game at any difficulty, and you can beat any character including the bosses at difficulty 8... except for Dhalsim. You don't have much of a chance against him above difficulty 5.

So what are your options? Get better at fighting just Dhalsim, somehow? Play a game easy enough to contain a Dhalsim you can beat? Risk playing a game that might contain a Dhalsim you can't beat, forcing you to fight him over and over or just reset and try again?

What if you could earn, say, "technical tokens" by doing well in earlier fights, and use them to make the fight against Dhalsim easier, either by directly spending them to drop his difficulty or indirectly, by "buying" an Awesome Headband, +5 vs. Yoga Fire?

That's the seed of "gear". Everybody's difficulty is personal and different, so give them a resource they can use at their discretion to smooth out the bumps.

MMOs without this sort of gear exist. World War II Online, or Planetside. You have what is technically "gear" in both those games, but it spawns in with you. It's how you use your abilities. A sniper has a sniper rifle, an infiltrator has smoke grenades. Significantly, both games have the bulk of their challenge provided by other players.

Advancement in both games involves expanding the range of gear you can spawn in with. There are very few things you can't, in principle, have access to by making a minimal time investment.

Well, if you use actual physical possessions, or at least virtual representations thereof, to represent the tunable aspect of your character called "gear" they come with a lot of things people already understand. Limits on use - you can't, say, wear two pairs of boots. Intended purpose - armor protects you from damage, visors enhance your sight. Tradeability - you can give your old gun to a buddy when you get a new one. Degradation and destruction - you drink a healing potion and the bottle's empty. Convertability to a medium of exchange - go go gadget pawn shop!

These are called "affordances" -- bits of an object that people already know how to use. They're kind of a double-edged sword if implemented incautiously, in that people will wonder why they can't give gear to a buddy, or sell certain parts of it, or why they can wear 25 cybereyes at once.

People have spent most of their lives acquiring and using possessions to overcome obstacles. You have to be really, really good to toss all that aside and come up with something people can understand to work in the same way.

Otherwise you end up with something like, well, Influence. Which is functionally money in spandex and a mask, and has a canonical explanation that sounds neat up until you wonder how you get more of it by giving things to shopkeepers or trade it to someone else or spend/gain it at Wentworth's, at which point it becomes apparent that it's money in spandex and a mask. There's nothing wrong with that. I mean, do you know how long it took people to come up with money? Money isn't a bad idea at all!

So... you found out for yourself that they are what you thought they were? That's why you'd play a new game that seemed to be the same thing. Whether it's worth your time/money to do that is your call, but that's why you'd do it.

Uh, that doesn't prove your point, man. You told me I was wrong in the first sentence, and wrote that paragraph to convey to me the depths of my wrongness. I fail to see how the last clause there is anything but an accurate summary of your point.

So here's the same words in a different package: "clone" can, in practical use, have both positive and negative connotations when used to describe a game. A positive clone capably executes mechanics that you've seen before. A negative clone incapably executes mechanics you've seen before.

I'm saying you're pointing your dissatisfaction at the wrong people: the designers. How the hell are they supposed to know how to design a mechanic which can be faithfully implemented as what you consider a novel idea? Not only can they not predict the future, they've never even MET you.

It's not that it's wrong to WANT more out of games. But telling designers how dissatisfied you are with their product after the fact isn't going to go a very long way towards GETTING you any of it.

That's... And awfully abstract interpretation of social interaction. I mean, I have a hard time accepting even SIMULATED social interaction (that is, talking with NPCs) as something which counts, but I'm willing to concede on that part. But Tetris as a social interaction because you have a computer which governs the internal rules of the game? But that interpretation, chopping wood or clipping your toenails could count as social interaction.

I'm sorry, maybe I'm not smart enough (no snark involved) to see things for what they are, but I can only call something "social interaction" if it has other people or people simulades in it. REAL people simulades, not just abstract concepts that, if you squint and tilt your head, sort of remind me of something that kind of maybe looks like a very vague simulade. The border is understandably ill-defined, but Tetris would most certainly fall far, FAR on the OTHER side.

I just don't see how the ESSENCE of a game has to be social interaction each and every time. Yes, I'm sure an abstract argument can be made that every game is, even games that aren't, but that's much in the same vein as the arguments that can be made as to whether SuperMan is Natural or Science origin. I really don't buy that the point of every game is to act as surrogate social interaction for the things we can't have in real life, specifically since I, myself, and not actually interested in social interaction in the slightest, yet I've played games since I was 6.

That scenario would pretty much ruin the game and everything it stands for. I grew up on the old arcades and I forged through all of their cheap, cheesy, unfair and downright malicious design. I suffered through Sunset Riders where getting shot once cost you a life and all your upgrades, I toughed it out through Knights of the Round, where one mistake could land you on the bottom of a dog pile. And because I didn't have unlimited cash as a kid, every play session of mine was limited to about three or four credits for the day.

Most significantly, I managed to play Crusader: No Regret from beginning to end without using a single save, because the game I had was bugged in some way, I don't know how or why. It just didn't let me save, so my days would consist of waking up, launching the game at, say, noon, and then finishing the game at about 6-8 PM in the evening, never having died once, because if I died, the game would start me over from the beginning. And that's a game where one wrong step can put you on top of instant-kill mines or get you a fatal face-full of rocket turret rockets.

But all of those games depended pretty much solely on my ability to play them and pretty much not at all on random chance or ahead-of-time preparation. Yeah, sure, some of them depended on having a good gun or having enough upgrades, but only tangentially.

I like how Battlefield 2142 did this. Everyone has a standard kit, with players unlocking some nifty gadgets and weapons as they gain ranks in the game. For the most part, the most vital things (like a defibrilators or grenades) can be unlocked right out the gate, but pretty soon you're fighting with the same equipment as everybody else. This is one reason I used to like FPS games so much - they didn't depend on who put in more time or who came more prepared, they depended on who was just plain better. I was never a twitch fighter, which is why I've kept off FPS in recent times (that, and they haven't been very good), but I actually wrote a big guide on UT2004 for this precise reason. A person who knew his guns and knew his tactics could reliably beat a much stronger foe who just played on twitch.

This is one thing that is sorely missing in contemporary MMOs. Battles are almost never won because you, as a player, are just that damn good. They're decided because you had the right build, the right gear and knew the right tactics. Stay out of the tunnels so you don't summon the Whelps, as it were. Action RPGs HAVE existed, and I'm actually pretty sad I haven't seen more games like Revenant in recent times. To a certain extent, games like Devil May Cry have some RPG elements, but as time moves on and EA make more games, this is becoming more of a tacked on time sink than an actual draw fro the game.

But whether or not focusing on gear is a good thing, that's where MMOs are. I'm just tired of seeing this gear presented as swords and shields you pick off the ground, especially in settings NOT set in Fantasy Land. Why can't I visit elemental forges and imbue my Soul Reaver with an element? Why can't I put cybernetic legs on myself and jump higher? There are interesting variants out there, we don't need to keep repeating ourselves.

"Play," within the context of an MMO, usually means "spend more than a few hours on a free trial." The question wasn't why I'd TRY a new MMO that was just a rehash of the same old, same old and not just KEEP PLAYING the MMO I'm already playing which gives me the exact same thing. It's like the saying goes: "You don't drag people away from WoW by offering them the same things WoW offers them. If that's what they wanted, they can just play WoW. You drag people away from WoW by offering them things WoW DOESN'T offer." Like... Loot, an auction house, banks, crafting and... Yeah, that.

I seem to have misread. The point was, I suppose, that a new game has to offer something more than an old game if there is to be any point to play it. Why would I stop playing WoW, for instance, if another game offered me exactly the same things and nothing more? At the very least, WoW is "the big thing" AND the game I'm currently playing. "Same old, same old" is not enough to shift me.

If my choice is between telling designers that their baby is ugly and sitting on my hands, I opt to tell them. All else aside, feedback counts. If it's just me, then who cares about me? But what if it's not? What if many people feel the same way? If all of us, then, tales the time to let designers know how we feel, that just might make a difference. The same way I vote with my money. If a game sucks, I don't pay for it. If a game is unimaginative and derivative, I don't pay money for it. I don't expect to wag my finger at people and have them turn red in the face, but I'm not going to keep my opinion of them to myself, either.

And it's not just about making things I, in particular, want. It's about making something, anything, that is new and novel. They CANNOT survive by remaking the same basic framework over and over again. This is not going to last. It cannot last. Sooner or later someone is going to have to innovate, or someone is going to go bankrupt. We'll see how the Star Wars MMO does, but sooner or later something somewhere will have to give. The MMO genre can't subsist on clones indefinitely.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

It's already failing to do that. Two of the biggest launches recently, Age of Conan and Warhammer: Age of Reckoning didn't perform as they were expected. And the teams behind those games are now scrambling to try to keep them profitable. Both have been through server merges.

On the flipside to what someone earlier said about innovation being risky and that no one want's to invest in it. I think a lot of this is based off the fact that lots of the innovative ideas we do see get mired by either shoddy execution or they are implemented alongside the incorrect game mechanics.

Here's a case in point. Tabula Rasa actually had a few nice nice ideas. The control points that could be taken over by either players or the enemy and fought over. NPCs fighting each other and sending in reinforcements etc. The Logos stuff.

But, and this is just my opinion, they sank those ideas into the framework of a very traditional RPG type of combat system. It still came back to how you built and what gear you had rather than your actions in the midst of a fight. And THAT is what felt so wrong about it. Instead of lightning quick battles like you'd expect from a high tech war on a distant planet in a sci-fi universe, you still had to burn a whole clip of ammo to take down one or 2 enemies. Player combat vehicles were absent and this lead to more a one sided feel because your enemies had huge freaking mechs and fliers.

The Logos powers were ok...but still felt badly balanced and not right for the job in a lot of cases. In the end, the feel of the game was wrong. Not the fault of innovation, but the fault of incorrect execution. But of course innovation will become the scapegoat.

Yes, it's very abstract. You have to file a whole lot of fiddly bits out of a given social interaction template to produce something people can understand in a reasonable amount of time.

I don't really have anything to say about this, I just love the idea of real fake people. Presumably as distinct from fake real people and fake fake people.

For someone who's not interested in social interaction you write an awful lot of letters.

Anyway, it's not that people must use games to substitute for social interaction, though certainly you can call to mind cases where this happens. Social interaction is enjoyable, and people enjoy games to the extent that they produce the joys of social interaction, however distorted. And games continue to exist even though they _aren't_ a good substitute for the upsides of social interaction because they also ameliorate the consequences of failure.

And how did that "pay to suffer" business model work out for them?

Well, yes. That's because you, as a player, are statistically unlikely to be that damn good. A game where you pit your skill against another player's directly is eventually going to bring you face-to-face with the actual extent of your skill, which is likely worse than you think it is.

And since "pay to suffer" doesn't work too well, the people who keep losing will quit, and then the "better" people will start losing more often, and eventually only one player will be left.

Perhaps he will /broadcast "Victory! Victory! Immortal fame!" before he, too, quits for lack of things to do.

Well, how do you sell that sort of thing? How do you replace it? How do you give it to someone else? And how do you tell people that they can do any of these?

I mean, just to use a personal example here, I had no idea you could put more than one of the same enhancement in a power when I started playing. The illustrations in the instruction booklet had all different ones, so that's what I went by.

You know what one of the big reasons I keep playing CoH is?

The robust bind system.

No, seriously. Remappable keyboard controls are not a standard feature in games these days. Native keybinding support has changed the way I play this game so much from when I was using the default controls.

I told you that story so I could tell you this one: you never know what'll grab you. There are games that do try to copy WoW, right down to having buttons in the interface that don't actually do anything just so it looks like the WoW interface. But the ones that aren't so blatant? They're trying to paint their game as "all the things you liked about WoW except the one that made you quit".

Your money is going to make a lot more difference than wagging your finger. I mean, what, the designer is going to go into a meeting with the producer and say "we can't put this in the game! People will be mad at us! ON THE INTERNET!"?

Tell customer service when you quit the game, and PR when you don't want to play the new one they're hyping. Tell them why.

If a company pays any attention to that kind of thing at all, customer service and PR are more likely to be able to gather complaints from people and present them to decision-makers. Designers will just have a pile of anecdotal evidence.

And if a company doesn't pay any attention to that kind of thing at all? Well, they get what's coming to them.

So that's why Counter Strike, Team Fortress 2, The Battlefield Series and other games like that are so unpopular? Thanks for clearing that up for me.

Also, why is it about PVP? Why can't battles with NPC enemies be more about player skill? Or at the very least more so than what we have now?

I'm curious to know how many times companies have to watch other companies 'get what's coming to them' before someone wises up and does something different.

400 players per continent was the hardcap. Iirc with all 3 Empires present on a continent the last one to reach 100 players was capped at that, the second one to reach 133 players was capped at that, and the most populous empire could have up to 167 players present on that continent - but don't quote me on that, as it's been a while.

I think CoH has spoiled us all - any level is able to play with any level, any team composition can work for most tasks, you can log in for 15-30mins and still feel a sense of achievement and get something done, one player is equivalent to multiple enemies so we feel powerful, customisable difficulty levels for missions, almost everything is soloable but grouping is made very easy, more tactics than most "tank & spank" MMOs have, lots of replay value with alternate characters (not only do archetypes play differently, but powersets within the same archetype can play differently), incredibly customisable characters (costume/power/weapon appearance, plus power performance fully customisable with slots/enhancements), user-creatable content, travel powers, etc etc. Very few MMOs have even a few things off that list, and lots have none. I'm still totally mystified that this MMO doesn't have at least half a million subscribers.

I've given up hope of ever finding another MMO I'll enjoy as much as CoH - I've almost reached the point where I don't bother looking anymore - I've been disappointed by too many drab MMOs that raised my expectations too far beyond what they could deliver. I used to sign up for dozens of beta tests (and got into loads too), but I've more or less given up unless the features list really intrigues me, which is rare. I currently have the shortest list of "forthcoming MMOs I'm looking forward to" at any point since I left my first MMO, EverQuest, in 2002 (after playing it for 3 years) - it consists of just two forthcoming MMOs: SW:TOR and APB. And even if I enjoy and play both of those, I won't unsub from CoH.

I agree with you about TR - I beta tested that game and it just didn't feel right to me. I love FPS games as well as RPGs and I wanted it to be an FPS in combat and an RPG out of combat - a successor to Planetside's legacy - but the game just fell between two stools and for combat we got some weird hybrid of both gamestyles - it didn't please mainstream RPG fans, it didn't please mainstream FPS fans, and it didn't please me even though I love both styles of game. Battlefield 2142 gave me a much better experience with no sub.

I think the biggest disaster for those of us wanting innovation in the MMORPG industry wasn't the success of WoW, it was the dismal failures of games like TR, Auto Assault and Pirates of the Burning Sea (all games I beta-tested in closed beta for at least 6 months, for what good my feedback did - or any tester's feedback, for that matter, judging by the forums). All of those games had innovative ideas - both AA and PotBS had really fun combat that would have been fantastic in a single player game - but for all of their good ideas they just didn't hang together as complete MMORPGs worth paying for - they were lacking in content and things to do, and gameplay became somewhat samey. And when innovative games start failing (and PotBS may still be running, unlike TR/AA, but it's hardly a success) then it just deters investors from backing other innovative games.

So sure, WoW set a new benchmark (taking EQ's place, for Western audiences anyway - I'm aware there are still a few Eastern MMOs that make WoW look small), but TR/AA/PotBS set a trend for innovative MMORPGs crashing and burning - I would argue that has more of an impact on investor confidence than WoW's success. I think the Western MMO industry is now probably the only industry more risk-averse than the Hollywood movie industry - and in both cases, aversion to risk has just led to a surplus of predictable mediocrity that smothers the innovative ideas long before they can reach the market.

Well, last I checked, there wasn't any monthly fee involved there. You buy the game, and from then on you can play it as much as you want whenever you want, no questions asked.

At least until the servers die.

Because a) monthly fee and b) people who suck don't understand how hard they suck or how to take into account feedback on their suckitude, which wouldn't be a problem if their money didn't have crisp edges and a certain legal tenderness.

Heat death of the universe. You over or under?

Paying or not paying a monthly fee doesn't change how much you suck. I'm asking why these games which should really showcase suckitude still have so many dedicated players. And a huge percentage of them aren't uber either. In fact a lot of them suck.

Whether I payed a one time or monthly fee, if sucking at a game caused me enough frustration to quit, I'd still quit. I think that applies to most people for most games. So the servers for those games I mentioned should be way depopulated. I shouldn't be getting messages for clan events every time I fire up Steam for TF2.


So basically, stupidity and lack of skill(not necessarily in that order) plus a monthly fee keeps MMOs as nothing more than what they are now. I guess its a societal problem...

This definition of "gear" seems to be: gear is something that must be collected or acquired that alters the capabilities of the player/character in ways that differentiate the capabilities of individual players.

Given that definition, it does not follow logically that "a game without gear is a game that can't create obstacles." The missing element from this argument is the question of strategy. Its possible at least in theory to construct a game with no gear, in which the defining characteristic of the obstacles is non-trivial strategic uses of otherwise universal items. In other words, there is no logical argument that states its impossible to make a game in which the goal of the game is to find innovative uses for the resources that everyone possesses in roughly equal measure.


I don't think I can accept your first principle of games either. I think in the abstract, games have a requirement for some form of "social interaction" by a very loose definition of social interaction, but the key word "copy" creates a problem. It suggests that its impossible for there to exist social interactions that can only exist within the context of games. If games are only copies of social interactions, no social interaction can ever be invented by or inspired by a game. And this places a limitation not just on games, but on human beings themselves.

Yeah, you're right. There is something more I hadn't thought of. TF2 can be entertaining even if you lose. Because firstly you're part of a team, so your individual loss isn't the end, secondly the setting itself is amusing and cartoonish, and thirdly... well, I don't know how well it holds up, but it's the difference between football and baseball. There is no such thing as an impossible comeback in baseball. Improbable, sure. But not impossible. Basically, a team need not become aware that loss is inevitable until loss actually happens.

Again, I don't know how well it holds up, but it's probably not a viable strategy to _make_ an individual person lose so frequently they get frustrated. I'm not sure how you'd even do that in TF2. Are names displayed?

So, basically, the opposition cannot create individual frustration or group despair no matter how hard they try.

And I dunno about you but I don't think Valve just lucked into that.

Okay, one more step then: you have to make a game where you're entertained even if you lose, for a sizable or even majority fraction of the people playing the game who habitually lose.

And you have to do it with some sort of persistence. TF2 has individual achievements, and I am told there are also fancy hats to be had. But the Internets exploded about the hats.

They're just fancy hats! They don't even DO anything!

But even that tiny bit of persistence was like striking a spark in a fuel tanker.