Tag Archives: Game Design

[Dream mmorpg] Preventing the servers to crash and burn at release

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I wanted to shape and explain my idea a bit better so that I’m able to show more clearly how and why it can work. Just as an exercize.

Requirements: Obviously the idea is possible only if the programmers are able to implement it. From my point of view it’s nothing fancy but there are non-trivial parts. The biggest issue to solve is that the databases need to communicate between each other. Some of the data of a character will be moved (cut and paste, not simply copied) from a database to another and the problem is a possible data loss during the transition. Now I’m not a programmer but I imagine that it’s something solvable in a creative way, for example using a system similar to the journalized filesystems (ext3, XFS etc…). There shouldn’t be other problems since what I propose is simply based on the possibility of that operation/transition. So, once this problem is solved, the rest should work.

The goals: There are three different goals. The first is to regulate the load on each server/shard, so that the population is spread equally on the servers, avoiding overcrowded, crashing servers and totally empty servers. The second goal is to regulate the balance, so that the population is more even between the factions of a PvP environment. The third goal is to insert the previous two into an in-game mechanic/gameplay. So that this system is part of the frame of the game, within the frame of the roleplay and not just an Out Of Character mechanic based on the technical data coming from the math on the servers.

Beside these functional goals there are other three “design” goals:
– Create an united, global and massive environment that doesn’t artificially encapsulate the players inside air tight spaces.
– Allow the players to travel cross server, meet and play together with their friends and reorganize and build new guilds without the need to restart from zero or create alts specifically to overcome the limits in the current mmorpgs. The choice of a server won’t be “tragic” (as an unavoidable consequence that cannot be made up) as it is in other games.
– Break the overall community into smaller, manageable units-per-server through the shard system (too big communities are overwhelming and, paradoxically, make social ties nearly impossible).

“There were a lot less of us back then, so it was easier to get to know most of the folks around you. Since there were so few players reletive to current community sizes, you become friends of friends of folks and a lot sooner you really end up knowing virtually everyone whos playing, or at least are familiar with guilds.”

How it works: For this example I decided to simplify more and more my idea to show how it works in the core. All the rest are layers allowing a more precise control but the core is what it makes it a valid idea. For now I don’t need fancy data, what World of Warcraft shows in the server login screen is enough. It just tells the load of a server in three different states. Low, Medium, high. That’s all I need. At release it’s obvious that I cannot achieve the third goal I explained above (transforming the system into an in-game PvP action) so for the first month it will work in a “special” status.

The idea is that the world is still differentiated into cloned shards. Each shard has a perfect identical copy of the landmass of the game-world. On each shard you can find two types of portals. One to leave the shard you are in, like an exit, and one to arrive from an external shard. To understand better the server structure you need to look this diagram:

As you can see the shards aren’t directly connected between each other. The exit portal doesn’t bring directly a character to another shard, instead it brings it to a “limbo area” working like an “hub” (similar to Guild Wars or Tabula Rasa, but the hubs are unique and not instanced). So the transition is:

Shard(a) => Static Plane => Shard(a-z)
From a shard you can only exit to one of the planes/hubs, from a hub you can exit to every shard in the gamem (if the portal is open).

Now. As I said we know just the load of each of the shards in a three-way status. The portals simply work on the following way:

– If a server is flagged as “low” population, both “in” and “out” portals are open.
– If a server is flagged as “medium” population, same as the first case.
– If a server is flagged as “high” population, the “in” portal is closed, the “out” portal is open.

At release when you create a character you *cannot* choose a server. The game will randomly pick a “low” population server and send you there. Once you are in the game you can freely leave the shard and follow the portals rules as I explained them here. At any time players in a “high” population server can leave to migrate to a less stressed shard. Noone can get in that high populated zone till the population number will decrease under a set limit. This means that the server will never crash for server-load issues. Once a server is capped the players can leave, but not come in. The new characters instead will be sent to “low” population servers. This will help to have the players equally distributed.

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This is how the idea works at its core. Then there are a lot of “complications”. The first complication is about the real math formulas used. We cannot simply calculate the load of a server in a precise moment. Instead we’ll have an algorithm that will keep track of:

– The load on a precise moment
– The average load in the last hour
– The average load in the last twelve hours
– The average load in the last day
– The average load in the last week

The server will then combine this data and decide (giving to each a percent of relevance) if a server has “high, medium or low” load. This means that you won’t see these three statuses change sharply as the players log in and out. Instead it will be a relaxed movement. The formula isn’t done, though. Because the server also needs to track the number of unique characters it holds. This because we cannot forbid a player who logged off on a shard to not log back in because the server is set as “high”. So another percent of relevance must be granted to the number of passive (not logged in) characters inside the server. And that value must be considered once again in the calculations to sort out the status.

At this point we have a strong system to enforce *always* a precise load on the servers. Avoiding overcrowding issues and obtaining an even load on each server. But this isn’t the end. The complete system that will trigger *after* the first month after release will have three progressive “checks”:

– The first check is the one I explained above, unchanged. Each server/shard calculates its load. If it’s “red” the “in”-portal is closed. The other two checks aren’t needed. The portal is marked “red” and cannot be unblocked in any way. The players can only move out. Instead if it’s “green” or “yellow” (the load isn’t heavy) we move to the second check. At this phase the portal is still marked “red” and blocked at the eyes of the players.

– The second check is about the PvP balance. The server/shard calculates the proportion of the various PvP factions of the game, following a similar algorithm used to calculate the server load. It’s at this point that the players could see the portal change its status. If the players belong to a prevalent faction the “in”-portals are blocked even if the server load is low. Instead if you are in a faction with lower numbers AND the server load isn’t high (previous check), you’ll see the portal marked as “yellow”. It still isn’t open and usable.

– The third check is more complex because it’s about the third goal I explained above. From the player perspective the first check is hidden, passed or not. Then we pass to the second if the first was passed. If the second check fails (still red due to PvP population unbalaces) the players still have the “in”-portal blocked and red. But if the second check goes ok, the portal changes its color and becomes yellow. Now the portal CAN be opened but still isn’t opened. And we are at this third check. In this phase the system becomes gameplay. The players need to organize and conquer (PvP) power nodes inside the shard where they play. When they own enough power nodes the portal finally becomes “green” and can be used.

This is how the system works in the long run. We achieve the first goal because the server load is always under control, we achieve the second goal because the PvP faction population is as equilibrate as possible (within a threshold), we achieve the third goal because the portals are an in-game mechanic requiring you to *play*. To go out, take part in the PvP, conquer the land and then be able to move to the limbo areas where there will be access to an instanced form of high level PvE (the “adventures” in the diagram I showed above).

Have fun ;p

P.S.
As I explained here the shards will be PvP zones where the RTS layer (and the economic system) of the game takes place. But in order to participate in the conquest system and build/own/maintain properties the players will have to be organized in guilds and alliances. A guild can only set one “home” shard and cannot conquer or own territory on multiple servers. A guild can still relocate its “home” but only after giving up all its current assets.

This means that the cross server travel is always a possibility but won’t be part of the daily use. The mechanics of the game, as explained, encourage the players to organize and settle down in the home shard they choose. It’s in their interest to maintain and consolidate their progress there and not take everything and move somewhere else without a major motivation.

What is retained can carried over in a server move is the character and its possessions, plus the guild identity (if the whole guild decides to move and select a new “home”). But not the guild progress and status in the former server.

Death penalties and risk/reward

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Both Jeff Freeman and Damion Schubert are discussing death penalties in massive online games. Observing the trend and commenting. The focus is about these penalities becoming less relevant, becoming lightened-up.

Jeff’s conclusion is:

Note that these are very different things than “Make death something players want to avoid”. Players don’t want to die anyway. In considering what should happen when a player dies, that is not a consideration in my mind. Or at least not a top one. We already want to avoid death, just eliminate any benefit that would result in us suiciding in spite of the fact that we don’t want to die.

That is enough for the game to work, but not so much that only the hard-core will play it.

Damion’s conclusion is:

We need to figure out how to get players to be willing and happy to take more risks, because risky play is what gets the adrenaline going, and is by extension more interesting and engaging gameplay. This means that designers will continue to monkey with death mechanisms far in the future.

In particular I agree with everything Damion wrote before this ending line. Because instead I strongly disagree with his conclusion.

I explained all this in an analysis I wrote in April.

I follow exactly the same line of thoughts but my conclusion is different. Right now Warcraft does exactly what Damion wants (go check my analysis): take risks, push the experience further, try new things, explore etc… Exactly because the game doesn’t try to punish you constantly as you *dare*. What is obsolete is the risk/reward mechanic used as the ONLY core of a mmorpg. Everything in this genre is designed after this model and I’m NOT saying that the balance isn’t optimized, I’m saying that the model itself is obsolete.

I proposed months ago a way to tweak the death penalty in WoW, trying to incentivate the group survival. Instead of adding an XP loss I proposed to build a bonus. The more you kill monsters without dying, the more you accumulate a % bonus on the exp you gain. Till a max of 20%. If you die the bonus goes to 0. In a group this mechanic is based on the survival. If 51% of the group survives the encounter the bonus goes up. It goes to zero if 50% of more of the group is killed.

This makes the death less trivial. Originally I imagined the system to encourage the PvP. Based on DAoC’s realm points. The problem was the continue run of players in a battle, over and over, giving zero importance to a possible death (well explained by Jeff as the “death penalty objective one”, go read). What Mythic did? They added two stacking res sickness, preventing this dumb combat style by adding a timesink. So you cannot play anymore if you died. The result is that the death has now a meaning and the survival is encouraged because you don’t want to sit down and wait. But this is stupid, because to give a meaning to a part of the game they made it extremely unfun and annoying. It’s obviously not smooth design already in the premise and, as a side effect, it’s extremely hard to understand. Penalties and sub-penalties. With exceptions and different timers with each a different mechanic. A design mess.

There are better ways to give a meaning to a system without punishing the player? Yes. My solution is simple even for a child: instead of punishing you can work on “positive bonuses”. Someone a bit more clever will say that the gap between a bonus and the absence of a bonus is exactly the same concept of “penalty” but I do not agree. The core system where is the reason why WoW is “different” is that the penalty isn’t “faked” directly as a bonus. Instead the penalty is never *negative*. That’s the point. In a progess-driven game you aren’t loosing that progress in ANY way. You CANNOT loose experience, you CANNOT loose your items. What you can do is advance more or less slowly. This is the real difference between a “positive penalty” and one that is negative.

DAoC’s RvR is another system that I can define successful. I hope we can agree here. Why? Because it’s again a progress-driven game where the penalty is ONLY positive. You CANNOT loose your realm points. But you can loose a battle, you can loose a keep, you can loose a relic and so on. You can see the point? The “winning” direction is about shifting the focus from the mechanic itself to THE GAME. The penalty should be about A PURPOSE. Instead of punishing the players because they try, the game should offer them reasons to fight, goal to accomplish. OUTSIDE the limit of their single characters.

The point is that in a mmorpg a death already doesn’t exist. Giving a meaning to it is just another way to break the game itself. The market already demonstrated that positive penalties are way more successful than risk/reward mechanics. Risk/reward pivots around frustration. A game based on the frustration isn’t a good game. It isn’t fun, it isn’t compelling and it isn’t deep. It’s a game with a workaround for an unsolved problem. So we need to solve the problem and make the game pivot on stronger and more valid elements.

There’s also another side of the truth. What’s the gameplay offered? Games like Everquest or DAoC (pertinent to PvE) simply offer a repetitive gameplay often seen as “work”. It’s not interesting, it’s not compelling. But it does the trick because the focus is the advancement and the work is the gap which separates the different goals. The death penalty here is a tool to regulate and control the “pace”. Again following the risk/reward mechanic. In WoW there’s finally some more. There’s an experience that is more near to a single player game. We follow a story and that’s the focus. The death penalty is something completely “outside” the gameplay. What we do is already fun and involving and doesn’t need a side-system to become “excused” or valuable. This is why we can finally play and only as a consequence we also advance. The game has something to offer. The death penalty isn’t anymore an obstacle and a system clashing with another. It is coordinated with the rest of the game. The game simply wipes even the effort at reproducing a win/lose mechanic. There’s an experience and all the mechanics of the game are focused to make this experience possible and fun. It isn’t anymore a Pindaric flight about messy game mechanics desperately trying to reproduce and balance various consequences. Blizzard here simply focuses on what is meaningful and designs the game so that it goes straight toward that precise goal. Simple, logic and completely self consistent design that makes sense and doesn’t need any form of workarounds and bandaids.

My conclusion is very simple: World of Warcraft is more self-conscious of what it is. It knows (and it chose) its limits and then it focuses on what it can do right within those limits.

At this point I wrote other considerations, in particular about the PvP. This because I identify two different phases that offer something to consider and learn. There’s a third phase I won’t directly explain here but which simply follows Blizzard’s model: try to understand where the genre holds its potential and try to deliver it aiming at its heart, without fiddling around it. What’s the content of this phase? Trying to focus the attention of the players outside their character. In the PvP this means involving them in a story which is based on concrete purposes and goals. I completely agree (and disagreeing with Damion) as I explained above that we cannot use the death system to make the PvP meaningful. But we can still offer something deep. For example building up a conquest system. Where players don’t gain anymore just “realm points” to boost their skills, instead they take part into a story with concrete elements. Where they CAN win and loose. But within a concrete structure offering a hook for groups of players playing together to reach a communal goal. Finally we remove the OOC (Out Of Character) completely and we are able to involve the player through the character. Inside the game-layer. This is an healthy process that will open positive side-effects. New potential to discover and to expand and not a closure or a sperimental attitude losing pieces everywhere and in the constant need of workarounds and bandaids.

Here below I describe the first two phases. They were the beginning of this article but then I noticed that I was triggering something too complex, loosing completely the focus. So I desperately tried to reorganize everything hoping that it makes a bit more sense.

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I think we had two different phases till now. The first phase is the loved and hated Ultima Online old-style. The PvP with substantial consequences. Many think about it as a “golden age”, an experience that cannot be replicated in any other game. But what happened? Trammel/Fellucca. The designers decided to draw a line between PvP and PvE and this destroyed the “paradise”. Many at this point consider UO loosing its soul and becoming just a shade of itself. The (partial) truth is that many, many players decided to took advantage of the new mechanic and flee away from open PvP whenever possible. The truth is partial because often the possibilities that a game offers can go against the fun and the depth and still be followed by the players. Trammel is a shield, a safe-land, and everyone obviously took advantage of this new “advantage”. But the advantage also disrupted the depth that made the whole world. So the players were offered more “guarantees” and control over their own experience, but this dumbed down the experience itself. The system was based on the “unexpected”, about being at risk always, without safety nets. When they made this risk as a possibility they made it a “choice”. And the choice of a risk is something different than *being at risk*. This is obviously a strong Out Of Character (OOC) mechanic that in the first UO was present and was wiped from the second. There’s also the other half of the truth, though. It’s a fact that the players ask for those safety nets. The success of the game is strongly dependent on those nets. This is why I consider the first phase as a niche market. It involves OOC mechanics with a strong impact but it’s a reality that involves and is fun for a minority of the players. I’d say more: the strong impact is the consequence of this unbalance. The world has a majority of victims and a minority of hunters. This makes the hunters have a lot of fun, the world is their playground. Since it’s an OOC mechanic this also brings directly to griefing. The system is “broken” because the “fun” is for a “few”, at the expense of many.

Then there’s a second phase that I identify with Dark Age of Camelot. This game demontrated that PvP not only can be fun without exploiting the winners/losers dichotomy, but it can also be commercially doable and possible for *all* the players and not just by a few hardcore. This game definitely did a step in the right direction, opening a new stack of possibilities. But then it stopped. I think that if we look at the panorama from a general point of view we *cannot* say that PvP is niche and PvE is mass market. In DAoC there’s only one PvE server against 18 where there is PvP. In EverQuest is the opposite. Now In World of Warcraft the two “factions” are even, with a slight prevalence of the PvP crowd. I think it’s obvious that the debate PvP vs PvE has no sense on its own. What matters is the implementation. None is “better”, not from the quality point of view nor from the commercial possibilities. It’s the offer that shapes the market and only as a consequence it happens the opposite. So what’s the core difference between the first phase I descibed above and this one? What is different is that the PvP is available to everyone. It is fun for everyone and doesn’t pivot on the frustration of a group to reward and make happy the other. It’s less OOC. The loss is always trivial and just an incentive to retry, as fast as possible. The actual gameplay becomes the center, the consequences of a fight become a side-effect as minimal as possible.

We move from a first phase where the penalties are everything to a phase where the penalties don’t exist anymore. We lose the depth, the meaning, the purpose. The goal now isn’t about going back. But it’s about how we can mantain everything we have gained and *add* the depth we missed.

Shake your booties, It’s unexpected!

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So it seems that World of Warcraft is having problems with the servers. Unexpected!

Oh, the irony. Blizzard is fucking up its own localized server policy:

Right now, the realms listed in the Eastern and Central tabs of the Change Realm screen have large populations. To balance realm populations, we ask that players select realms listed in the Mountain and Pacific tabs when choosing where to play.

This will not result in lag

Weren’t the localized servers supposed to ease the lag letting the players choose the server more close to their location?

I repeat: this is a design issue. One that was expected way back in May, when I, along with other players, started to suggest various levels of solutions. Again in September, during the stress test, I wrote down a long post pointing out all the issues that needed to be solved. Proposing solutions to each. Obviously everything got blankly ignored.

I’ve already my own ideas about how to get rid of these problems and I do not accept when something says that they are “impossible to solve”. They aren’t, there’s only the need for better design. Better design that I tried to imagined for my dream mmorpg. Adapted here:

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– Part of the problems here are directly related to the choice to localize the servers. As I (along with others) explained months ago this makes the peak times more sharp, leaving the server empty for the rest of the time. If the servers were not bound to a local flag they would have reduced the overcrowding problems by 15-20%. Both now and in the long run.

– When I say that this can solve with the design I mean about addressing the problems. My proposed choice needs a game to be developed in that direction but it works and adds A LOT to the game itself. Forever and not just on day 1.

The idea is about allowing the players to walk between the shards, as a gameplay element. You build up “portals” in the game, attack them to PvP mechanics so that you need to conquer power nodes to open the portals. Then you can step in and have your character travel between different shards.

Now you can attach three kind of rules to these portals:

1- The first rule is a threshold on the load of a server. So that a portal cannot be opened if a server is overcrowded. This allows to solve lag-problems.

2- The second rule is a threshold on the PvP factions. So that you cannot move to a server where there are population balance issues. So that we solve another long-time and severe problem of massive PvP worlds.

3- The third rule is a PvP-gameplay related rule. Just an in-mechanic that tells you how to play to conquer the power nodes and open the portals. So that you can use them as part of the game world and not as an out-of-character mechanic.

That’s my solution. The players enter the game in a random server/shard. Yes, you CANNOT join your friends. You’ll have to play the game because joining your friend will be part of the gameplay. You’ll need to take part of the PvP, conquer power nodes and open the portal to travel where you need to go.

Why I expect this to work and be accepted by the players? Because I’m not going to ask them to make a new character, I’m not going them to ask to play forever away from their friends, I’m not telling them that where they choose to go is a one-time choice that cannot be changed. In my idea you never lose the progress you made with your character and you’ll always have the possibility to join a new community or reach your friends or your guild. The difference is that you’ll have to gain that with your play. Inside the game. You’ll need to earn a portal and gain the possibility to travel.

Perhaps you won’t succeed exactly when you want, but you can try the next day, or the day after that. It will be part of your achievement.

Not only we solve the load on the servers, not only we solve the population issues in PvP games, but we also build an interesting gameplay structure which provides purpose for the game. And instead of having 41 undependent servers we really build a massive world where the possibility of interaction are endless.

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Nick Walter:
That’s nice. But how does that solve the problem of player volume in the first week exceeding the average volume and therefore exceeding the available hardware/network resources? What you proposed is a rather complicated load balancer. One that doesn’t seem very reliable.

My idea works as a permanent gameplay element. It solves WoW’s current problem because right now they HAVE the power they need, but the players are ALL FOCUSING ON THE SAME SERVERS.

Exactly as a direct consequence of the local server plan. You CANNOT go play on a different server because you’ll know that you are cut away from your friends FOREVER. Can you see why my idea works? Because I wipe the “forever”. I can tell them: go play on a less crowded server today, because tomorrow you’ll still be able to join your friends. Without having to make a new character.

So, it’s clear till now?

Blizzard is currently swamped because some servers are packed while some are empty. My solution addresses directly this.

[Dream mmorpg] Combat system

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Started as a thread on Grimwell.

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We always discuss about games, if they are fun or not, if they are boring or frustrating etc… One of the most important part of a “standard” mmorpg is the combat system, so… How would you build the “perfect” combat system for a “dream mmorpg”? The rules are simple: you can imagine anything possible with the current technology. If it exists on another mmorpg you can have it too, if it’s something new it must still happen inside the technical limitations that we know or imagine. So no negative ping gode, no broadband required and no absolute twitch.

Today I took the challenge myself and started to develop the combat system from the “dream mmorpg” I’m imagining and design from various months. So I’ll describe here the general “shape” of my idea. To begin with I need at least to explain the general principles of the character creation and management since the combat is tied to them. First: no levels. Woot! My game is based solely on skills. Both combat and miscellaneous skills work in the exact same way. They are in percents. Each character has a value that goes from a minimum of zero (with no modifiers) to a maximum of 150 (it’s possible to go above 100 even with no modifiers). Each time a character uses a skill, the server makes a check. So it rolls a 100 dice, applies possible modifiers (bonuses or maluses) and then the result is compared with the skill of the character. If it’s below it’s a success, if it’s above it’s a failure. Simple and smooth.

The characteristics of a character (Strength, Dexterity etc..) are fixed. The player won’t be able to increment them aside exceptions. Those exceptions are: by the use of magic equipment or as a side effect of a complex advancement system on the “planar levels” that I won’t explain here. So the stats aren’t meant to change directly with the progression. During the char creation the race will determine the values, so they are fixed. The same will be for the related stats. Health and mana directly depend on the stats so each players will be basically the same. A “tank” won’t be directly more “healthy” than a mage and the mage won’t have more “mana” than the tank. The only differences will be about a series of modifiers (armor used, magic, buffs etc..).

How a character advances? This again keeping a general glance and without delving. The whole progress of a character is related to: 1- Skills 2- “Tools” 3- Equipment. The skills are the general template of a character and the tools often depends directly on the skills. But they are a separate entity because you can get new tools even without related skills. So, if you reach 45% in “magic”, for example, you will unblock a new spell like “fireball”. But there will be spells and other tools that won’t be unblocked directly and you’ll have to research or gain them in another way. Now, how the skills go up? Not directly through the use. The WHOLE skill system is completely quest-driven. During your adventure in the world you’ll use the various skills to do stuff. When a skill is used (successfully) many times, the server “flags” it. You will see this in the UI. Once a skill is flagged it means that the skill can *potentially* go up but nothing will directly happen. To finally use the flag you need to accomplish something. It can be a PvE quest, it can be the kill of a major monster, it can be a PvP mission etc… These special events, when accomplished, will unblock the use of the “flag”. So, we assume that a character went through a quest and finished it. Now it will have to camp and rest. During his rest the player will be able to bring up the character sheet and choose two, and only two, precedently flagged skills. Plus he’ll be able to re-flag another one (I’ll explain later). When the two skills are choosed, the server will make a check. It will basically roll a 100 dice. If the result is *below* the value that the character has in that skill, the progression is failed, till the next attempt. If the result is *above* the progression is successful. This is repeated for the second skill choosen. After all the checks are done all the previous flagged skills (assuming that the character used more than two skills) will have the flag resetted aside the one that was re-flagged and saved by the character. The skill that is going to be improved now needs another check. The server rolls a 20 dice. And divides it by 10. The result is how much the skill is going up (going from a minimum of 0.1% to a maximum of 2%). So, let say that we have “stealth” at 40%, ok? We roll the 100 dice a first time and we score 78! Great, it means that the check is passed and the skill is going to be improved. Now we roll the 20 dice and we score 12. The stealth skill will then climb to 41.2 (original 40% + 1,2% of the 20 dice roll).

Now on the combat. I’ll explain just the melee to keep things easier. Each type of attack is obviously based on a weapon, assuming that even a fist is a weapon. Usually the player will have a different skill for every weapon type, but this isn’t directly true because there will be also a side-skill that will measure the “fondness”. So a character loosing a short sword will have the “fondness” reset to zero even if it will grab and use another very similar short sword. The weapon skill is the skill of the *weapon type* (short swords, long swords, axes, 2h swords, etc..) then the skill is modified by the “fondness”. This isn’t everything. Each weapon type has also two possible values. One to attack, one to parry. The character, on its own, will also have a dodge skill that will be always active but also directly modified by the equipment. It will have a low value, for example, if the character wears a plate armor, or a two handed sword, or a shield etc.. It will have an high value if the character has only a dirk. Shields and other non-standard weapons will also have attack and defensive skills (bash/block in the case of the shield). As far as the mechanic are concerned there’s no autoattack. Each “swing” is the result of a direct action of the player. Instead the defensive and reactive styles like dodging, parrying and blocking will be checked by default by the server. When a “possibility” for one of them triggers, the UI will show a power bar, near the character filling up quickly. The player will then be able to choose if to use the opportunity or not (will have effects on the tactic, so it can be also useful to avoid to parry or block to have then a different result). This will be as much “twitch” as possible since it must involve both reflex and tactics. At the same time I believe it can still be implemented by tolerating even a 800ms of ping. So semi-twitch and perhaps similar to EQ2 eroic styles.

As I wrote at the beginning also the attacks are normal checks on the percent value of the attack skill. So the player presses a specific attack and for each “swing” there will be a check server-side. The revolution here is that the opponent IS NOT involved. The “to-hit” roll is completely undependent from the opponent. If the server’s check on the skill is successful, it means that the attack landed. This means that newbies don’t have any penalty when trying to attack even a demi-god. They only need to use successfully their skill. Only at this point (if the swing isn’t a miss) the opponent is involved. This is when the server checks for a parry, a block or a dodge. Before the combat the player is in fact able to distribute a value as a “style”. So you can chose to tell a server to always try to dodge, or dodge and parry together but the prevalence of dodging… and so on. This is what is called a “defensive style”. The plan is built outside the combat as a preference to set. During the actual fight all the defensive “work” is made by the server and only when the possibility is triggered the player will be involved to decide if effectively use the it or not. This explains how the whole defensive work happens.

Back to the offensive part. All the gameplay is basically about this one since the defense is semi-automatic. As in other games there will be a bunch of styles to choose and here I had a lot of fun to create the system. The styles are selected in a similar way to what happens in WoW or DAoC. You have a quickbar and you can see there the options. Now the fun is that the quickbar isn’t built by the player, instead it’s dynamically shifted by the client/server. Basically you can only see in a specific moment what you can directly use. The combat will be fragmented into various, consequent phases. If you choose an attack in the phase 1, you’ll be able to choose directly connected styles in the phase 2. A different choice during the phase 1 will produce different possible styles to choose in the phase 2 (this is built like a tree diagram). This brings a great deal of dynamic into the combat. The skills basically exist as “chains” of events based on effects and countereffects. Each previous choice brings to a consequent one so the whole flow not only is fast, but it is also exciting because you need to quickly plan and choose your tactic. To make this more fun and compelling I added two “aids”. The first is a way to get easily the segmentation of the combat. Instead of defining each phase as “phase 1”, “phase 2” etc… These will be graphically represented by “rubies”. I plan that the game will have a max of five “chains”, so five phases or five rubies (it’s possible to go forward, backwards and reset. So you start always at phase 1, then you can move to phase 2, then to 3. At 3 you can choose to go at 4 or go back at 2 or even reset and go back at 1. As an example). These five rubies will have five different recognizable colors. So for example, phase 1 -red- phase 2- blue- phase 3 -green- phase 4 -violet- phase 5 -black-. At a glance you’ll see the phase you are in that moment and the styles available on the quickbar that are tied to that specific phase will be colored so that you can see directly if they’ll made you move to the next or the previous phase.

More on the styles: the styles represent the whole direct interaction. These styles are acquired in the standard way. For the design level they aren’t “skills”. They are “tools” (as defined at the beginning). Like a spell. They will be unblocked when you improve a skill. So when you reach with “short sword” at 40% you will unblock a new style, and so on till a max of 150% (catassing for the win! Reaching 150% in a skill is basically impossible since to go above 100% you need to score 98-100 with a 100 dice roll each time you try to improve). Special styles can also be acquired through PvP or quests. Each style will have an effect. They can give you bonuses to the next “to-hit” roll, they can give you bonuses to damage or defence. They can hit all the targets in front of you in an arc of 60 degree etc.. Plus they will apply, remove or interact with five set “states”. I haven’t defined them yet but I expect them to symbolize effects like “stun” “dizzy” “poison” etc…

Two important side notes: The first is that each phase/ruby will have a maximum of six different styles available, so from “1” to “6” on the keyboard. But I didn’t say that each phase doesn’t represent a single attack, instead each phase groups TWO consequent attacks that will be performed in combo. In this way form a side I slow down the the combat a bit since the plan goes on from two actions to two actions, offering a wider timespan, from the other side I added some finger-twitch fun :) In fact it’s true that you can choose on the keyboard pressing the keys from “1” to “6”. But you need to do that in combo, pressing also the secondary style that is represented by “7” to “+” on the keyboard. The second side note is an important value that I didn’t consider till now: the speed of a weapon. Since there’s no autoattack, the speed has a strong role into the combat, it defines directly how fast is the interaction (so the duration of each phase/ruby). Since each phase includes two attacks it means that for weapon with a 2 second speed a phase will last 4 seconds.

Final quirk: a player can also choose to do “nothing” in a phase. It can be a choice or it can be “lag”. This is a mechanic anyway. The fact that the players isn’t attacking actively means that the defensive skills are boosted up till the character will perform again another action. But still remember that if a defensive style is triggered the character still needs to choose and activate it dynamically. Movement is also considered as a bonus/malus over the defensive styles.

Basically the gameplay offered is a chain (phases/rubies) of combos (two attacks for each phase to select at the same time) paced by the speed of the weapon with defensive styles to activate as reactive, occasional events. The speed determining the pace can also be used to define playstyles. From the highly twitch based combat of a rogue, with super fast daggers, to a more tactical, slow view of a 2h sword guy.

Final note: a roll of 1-3 represents a critical failure. In the combat it means you’ll loose a few turns. A roll of 98-100 is a critical success and in combat represents double damage.

Big Bartle calls earth, where is my MUG?

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This article didn’t come out easily. Now I’m happy that it’s done, good or bad. More then once I was on the point to delete everything.
Since it’s long enough you’ll have to follow the link on the right and “read more” ->

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I have a few points to underline. It all started with the article that Richard Bartle wrote to explain why the mmorpg genre doesn’t seem to improve over its (self-imposed) limits. The fact that there’s a dissatisfaction seems widely accepted, both between the players and the intellectual elitists. Instead there’s some controversy about what this dissatisfaction is about. The players find MMOGs, for various reasons, not appealing, not involving, not fun. The developers, from the other side, are splitted between those trying to figure out how to reach the mass market and exploit it (and why it didn’t happen already) and those, like Big Bartle in this case, arguing about the quality standards.

More or less Big Bartle starts from this perspective to analyze the negative reaction that is being produced. The mix of the players as a “blind” group, with needs but without ways to express clearly these needs, and the developers that have to try hard to figure out “how to please” and satisfy two unrelated layers: the economic needs and the artistic “quality”. Knowing that the first definitely owns the second. This rationally and logically. We know we live in this situation. But we can also add to this logic possibility, because we have also the diachronic dimension. The time. Or the actual shape of time in this context: the wisdom.

The logic tells us that we need money and that the artistic quality we want to address is still a subordinate. But the Bartle-wisdom and our experience also tell us that, in the long term, the king is naked. Naked because the money isn’t there on its own. The money, even in its super virtuality, still depends on something concrete. And this is our quality. Without quality, in the long term (again), we won’t even have the money. Because we can fool ourselves all we want but we still need to accept that, at the end, a mmorpg will sell only if it has a value to offer. An artistic, emotional or social value. Somewhere. Somehow. The type doesn’t matter, same for the genre, but there must be definitely something “solid” in there so that we can hope to tansform into “money”.

Bartle’s theory is that MMOGs are being designed by the players. This because the devs, in the desperate attempt to please their customers, are forced to second all they ask. But the customers don’t know what they are really looking for, their “needs” aren’t that obvious and easy to get. So what they search for? According to Big Bartle they search for what they know already because their previous experiences are the frame to measure and judge all they’ll encounter as they go on. In order to fulfill their desires the developers need to shape their world after models that are broken but that are able at least to quickly put the experienced players “at ease” with groups of features that they feel “theirs”. Like a way to reassure the players, to make them comfy. Now I believe that Big Bartle doesn’t like this because he feels the process as a menace. If the developers second every request of the players they’ll mostly provide solutions that are qualitatively mediocre. And not just for an abstract quality standard, but both for the developers and the players themselves. Why? Because, again, the players don’t know exactly what they like, in particular they don’t know what they could like, and their only resort is to ask what they know already. But what they know already is nowhere near an “improvement”. This like a recursive circle with no exit.

I don’t share this point of view. I believe that the real problem Big Bartle is observing here has nothing to share with design. This is exquisitely a problem about the communication level. Something that I discussed a lot. The developers aren’t captured in the process he described but I agree that they easily fall there. This because what is really in a very bad shape is the relationship between the developers (system) and the community (ambient). A sociologic problem that generates, as a consequence, all the “symptoms” that Bartle sees and points out. But even if I believe that this is the key to solve the whole issue, I also want to discuss the design directly. So…

One of the biggest errors, I think, is about considering this genre “new”. This is why there are peoples like Raph Koster feeling like pioneers. This is why there is a place like MUD-dev shaped into a brainstorming group about a new media and all its implications. A new horizon, a “far west”. But the truth is that there’s nothing new. This genre is everything but a “discovery”. It’s its opposite. A melting-pot. This genre is the result of an hibridization. It’s derivative, syncretic. It’s an amass of junk collected from everywhere, in particular the very essence of the culture: the myth. This is the reason why fantasy themed games are so common: they are a common and shared form of modern myth. What are designers here? Not gods. They are storytellers. “Nothing else”. They do not create. They shape. They observe and fix (focus) things into a point of view, then they offer this elaboration to others. It’s “art” in its purest form. Yes, the art has the originality as one of its basic traits, but the art is simply defined as: “discovering an hidden aspect of the world”. A discovery that starts from an observation and this observation produces a stimulation and the stimulation is then elaborated into art. And offered. But at the beginning there isn’t a blank page or a space to define and discover from zero. At the beginning there’s what I define “a symbolic shared system“.

What should be done, after these considerations and after accepting this level, is about observing and recognize what is new from what is coming from the past, inherited. This is where I think Big Bartle “falls”, like his love for for ideas that are still surely valid but also tied to a precise context. And with a value directly consequent to that context. A value that derivates and depends on that context. Here starts the old debate between a textual and a visual space. On one of the spawned threads on a message board, Raph says that MUDs definitely share aspects with MMORPG. Just to give an idea he says that they are 80% the same. I agree, they are both about the same stuff but the *form* completely changes and we are in a (virtual) genre where the form is basically everything. It is not “fluff”. These theories are new? No. This is the same when we moved from the press to the photography and cinema. Then we moved from the mute movie to the sound. Then the color. Then the TV. Each of these “jumps” produced both “losses” and new possibilities. There are a good numbers of high profile intellectuals theorizing that these jumps actually modified the structures of our brain. Something relevant enough, I guess. Marshall McLuhan rings a bell? One of his most famous quotes is:

In Jesus Christ, there is no separation or distance between the medium and the message; it is the one case where we can say that the medium and the message are fully one and the same.

Moving from a textual interface to a graphical one isn’t fluff. It isn’t a new “dress” for the same model. It’s a whole new level of the expression. The graphic isn’t just graphic but it is a COMPLETE revolution of the approach. Exactly mimicking what happened when we moved from the press to the movies and the TV. A strictly logic approach is being replaced by an emotional-driven one. This is completely different and if we fail to perceive this big change we also fail to focus what is the real potential of the medium we are going to use. We diminish the real essence of the change and all the consequent results.

This is why it’s surely indispensable to observe what the MUDs did and are doing. But we still need to observe the medium that we are going to use or we do the same mistake of directors making a movie for the TV like a movie for the cinema. They will fail because the medium they use is relevant and each has different possibilities and rules to understand. It is AFTER we are conscious of this that we can toy with hybridizations, perhaps bringing the style of the TV into the cinema (someone has seen “Bambaloozed” of Spike Lee?).

Now lets go back in topic. I said that the genre is nothing new, that what we need to do is to observe more than “design” because there’s the need to re-read more than create. This is an important point. There are two layers: the perceptive structure and the symbolic-social space. The first depends a lot on the medium we use. A different medium is a whole new dimension with new rules to consider. It’s a level about the form and, again, I have to underline how the form is important when we are dealing with something already “virtual”. Then we have the symbolyc-social space. I defined this above as a “modern myth”. This concept is easy to understand if we take an example like Star Wars and its “translation” as a mmorpg. One of the things I criticized about it is the approach. It’s not possible to build a generic mmorpg infrastructure coming from well thought but high-level theories and *then* paste the game, the setting elements specific of Star Wars. Like a plug & play content. We cannot pretend to codify something, because “Star Wars” even if a movie, a book or a game, is already strongly codified. This is why I wrote that this genre need way more to be (re-)read and experienced instead of invented. I don’t agree when Raph Koster says that the genre is new and we are only starting to build and understand the theories on which it can and will be built. I do not accept that the design can be detached so easily from the object of what we are creating (and here I’m doing a crossover to what Jeff Freeman wrote).

I believe that what needs to be done is to rethink the approach. Look back and focus again to what is really relevant:

1- The medium, or the shape of what we doing. In this case the visual approach, the image, the interface, the sound. The cinema here is able to teach a lot. Bring in directors of photography and let them work with the artists on the game. Or at least remember to study attentively these perspectives.
2- The myth, or the symbolic shared system(s). If we are working on a fantasy setting we should go back, read a book. Trying to capture what is the *real* essence of that myth. Capture *why* it became so relevant in our imaginary.

If we do that, everything will change. The design of the interface, the sound and the overall visual experience will transform completely. And I’m sure that also the design will completely change direction (and the mass of players with it), focusing on the “adventure” as a feeling, discovering again how to produce content to offer *emotions* and system to let the players themselves recreate those emotions. Going back at the *roots* of a myth, trying to discover where its real value lies.

I’m absolutely certain that the symbolic shared system that we call “fantasy” is way more than a grind of monsters to gain more experience.
The mission of a new game and a new genre is an “exploration” of what made this myth so important. And capture its essence.

Looking backwards more than looking ahead.

Races in WoW and their role

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I’m copying here a message I wrote where I try to defend the last changes to World of Warcraft about the racial traits system that they finally completed and patched into the servers.

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Olaf:
I think its another example of the game being made worse by trying to balance PvE and PvP under one ruleset.

PvE? Where exactly the new changes impact the PvE? It was a PvP-only mechanic before and the change is again about PvP only.

From the system point of view they “healed” a not cohesive mechanic. The previous behaviour of the undead race was an exception inside the system. It was unbalanced already in the design level.

What they did is complete the design and remove the exceptions in the previous system to make it more stable and understandable. Now not only the undead have their “perks” but each race provides differences. In this case the undeads can:

Will of the Forsaken: Activate to become immune to fear, sleep, and charm effects
Cannibalize: Increase health regeneration while consuming a corpse
Underwater Breathing: Underwater breath increased
Shadow Resistance: Increase Shadow Resistance

This is what makes them undead. Along with their shape and the role they have into the game (the classes they can access and being part of the Horde). Undead have their specific equipment graphically and still have specific animations.

Both graphically and from the gameplay point of view, they have specific traits that make sense and are part of the lore and the roleplay layer of the game.

Each other race follows this path and what is built is a coherent system.

Look instead to SWG. They recently added two new races and these races simply add *zero* to the game. From the gameplay point of view they are still exactly the same aside minor changes to the stats (and we have this in WoW too). They don’t behave in the game in a different way, there aren’t race-specific gameplay elements. They are simply “shapes”. And from the graphical point of view? Even worst. Sure, they look different. But they still wear the same pieces of clothes (aside exceptions) and their animations are generic and shared between *all* the races (and this brings to frequent clipping issues and bad animations).

A wookie run in the same way of an Ithorian and the Ithorian run the same way as a human.

This while in WoW a race has a meaning and a specific identity BOTH in the gameplay (faction, access to classes, racial traits) and in its graphic (shape, animations, equipment).

So where the style has relevance? In WoW or in SWG?

What you are doing, instead, is the common whining when a beta REALLY behaves as a beta. Presenting an unfinished game that WILL change as the development goes on. The undeads were like you saw them exactly because the system about the racial traits was INCOMPLETE. Now each race has its own perks and the undeads have been tweaked to fit in the new, complete system.

What makes sense, instead, is the fact that priests and paladins now have spells that don’t have anymore an use. This is why something will change because this will bring up again a problem with the balance.

It’s not perfect but it is going in the right direction. Since this is a game what is important is how these changes will PLAY. And I really don’t believe that the change makes the game less fun. The design is about how the game PLAYS. Nothing else. It’s a translation of a myth into a game. The design is an adaptation process, like transforming a book into a movie.

Reductionism and godlike development

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Fancy title for a cut&paste comment I write on Jeff Freeman’s blog. He explains the new approach to the design that the team tried to have with JTL, space expansion of SWG. The original article is here, my comment is here below.

The fun is that all this has its origin on Big Bartle’s article. I’m trying to write something about it, but it isn’t coming out easily. Most of the points I underline here below are similar to my critics to Big Bartle.

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My first impression after reading what you wrote is that the mistake was the consequence of a start directly from raw, abstract design theories.

It’s true that we can draw a line between content and systems like Ubiq and Raph did, but this is useful only if we still consider, and never forget, that they are still two aspects of the same “unit”.

You can dismantle something to analyze it but then you cannot start from the pieces and hope to create the unity. This is also know as “reductionism”. Considering that a game is a complex system, by definition, the reductionism will never work to understand it.

I’m starting to believe that the problem in this genre is about having too many specialists about math and logic problems. When, instead, the genre itself would need a sociologic approach. To be analyzed as a complex system and not as an array of elements.

Interesting read anyway. What you did is EXACTLY what I explained a few months ago on Grimwell when I strongly criticized Raph. My main theory is that he broke the “third wall”. He let the design shape the game instead of the game shaping the design. This is basically a broken approach and there are theories (not mines) explaining this.

We are building a world. The “design” isn’t really a creation from a blank page. Instead it is way more about “reading”, “observing” and shaping what was already codified. In particular when we have to deal with a game about Star Wars, something that has its first quality as: a symbolic/social structure. But the same even if we are in a generic fantasy world. There’s still a MAIN component that is about “myth”. Something that has a strong and deep-rooted definition. Even before we consider the game aspect. This is also what the mistake in what Big Bartle wrote recently. There’s nothing new in the genre. We are dealing with something that was already there. We have different mediums and shapes but we are still dealing with myths and simbolic social structures that we fill with meaning.

At this point we cannot revert the system. We cannot start from a raw theory and build a world because the world itself, in it’s “being a world”, has already a long list of rules that MUST be respected and not simply discarded. Observing and shaping. Re-reading a genre that is ALREADY codified and not trying to build a theory from scratch because the genre is completely new. Like Raph is saying. This genre is OLD as much as the world. The structures and the content is the same. It is the SHAPE to change. And I agree that in a virtual space the shape is also the content, so relevant. But we cannot negate and discard all the rest.

So if we build a game, about a shared symbolic system (in particular Star Wars is a STRONG symbolic shared system way before Raph put his fingers on it). We need to RESPECT it. We need to shape it from the inside so that the frame is not shattered.

This is why SWG feels too faked. It’s a meta-game, speaking more about design than a real fictional space inside which the players makes an experience. What the player experiences is the meta-language. The design itself. And this obviously breaks the third wall, the immersion, the relationship between cause and effect and so on.

Designers need to stop to be gods shaping stuff on a blank page. These games are strongly typified and a lot can still be done by observing what they are and want to be already. Rediscover the fictional aspect, rediscover the relationships, rediscover the adventurous dimension. And rediscover all the feelings involved.

All already codified, with a strong identity that MUST be respected. What we should do is about studying the medium to see how all this stuff can be shaped in the best way.

But our studies about the medium CANNOT replace the respect of the content that is already there.

> From a development standpoint, it ensures that you don’t have more canvas than paint.

Because the canvas isn’t a result. The canvas is a tool. There’s dependence. There’s a strict priority system that must be respected and not violated. We build already inside a frame. This frame for us is fictional and with preexistent, codified rules. What we are going to paint must exist (must be seen) from the inside, thought from the inside. And only THEN, shaped.

Okay, I’m done.

Instancing is bad, okay?

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After writing an endless essay about Guild Wars I need something where I explain that instancing is bad, bad! Or I’ll feel too guilty.

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Raph Koster copies HRose:

Raph Koster:
Because nothing you do in an instance affects the world state. That’s the realbenefit of an MMO, in my opinion–the shared world you inhabit. If you want all your gameplay in instances, you may as well just play Diablo–you still get 3000 people in the lobby to trade and socialize with.

Don’t get me wrong. Instances are a cool technique and tool. But fundamentally what they are is “single-player games or limited multiplayer ones embedded in an MMO.” They are not an MMO themselves.

I said (end of May F13 thread):

HRose:
The basic idea about why I said that mmorpgs have failed is just because they simply don’t take advantage of the massive aspect. This aspect is just a way to be included in a popular genre but it’s obvious that even huge projects like WoW don’t have A CLUE about why they should be massive instead of cooperative/instanced.

We have a bunch of mmorpgs that don’t know why they are mmorpgs. Like a case of lost identity.

[…]

Instanced is everything cooperative you already play, from Doom to Counterstrike.

This is Diablo with NOTHING different aside that you have a graphical chat instead of a textual chat.

I don’t see an innovation, nor progress. I see a natural collapse of a situation that hasn’t found an effective way to develop. We are going back because the technology ALREADY supports massive worlds. But the *ideas* still don’t support them.

[…]

As I said above the result is better and funnier because they brought the game where it belongs: in a cooperative experience. But CoH isn’t a mmorpg from this point of view. Take Ultima Online and CoH and you see that, aside the setting, one strives to be a word, the other strives to be an arcade.

Now I don’t say CoH isn’t a good game because it is an arcade. I don’t think that building a good game like that isn’t noteworthy, but it’s simply not what a mmorpg should be. Or where the true potential to discover is.

[…]

Dry design for me is a situation (a software house, a designer, a publisher or whatever) that doesn’t react the best possible to a situation. So, in this case, I rant about “instances” because they killed the purpose of building on the strenght of the genre (the idea of a world).

About this whole issue I just think that it could be easy to develop a successful game by exploiting the *strenghts* of a massive world and not just “reacting” passively to a situation that is the result of the design hitting a wall with no ideas about how to go further.

Raph Koster:
Retreating to single-player games to fix the problems in MMOs isn’t exactly solving the problems.

HRose:
Instancing is a profitable workaround but isn’t about addressing the real problem to move further.

Instead of surpassing the obstacle they are going backward.

He says “retreating”, I say “going backward” :D

Design for immersion and accessibility

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This is a reply I wrote in a thread at Grimwell about the /con system used in EQ2. My conclusions suggest a completely different approach to rediscover the genre and its mechanics.

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Argh, I really dislike the title of this thread. In particular when I always fight to have a better newbie experience.

Can I make an analogy? It’s the same as asking if the night in the game should be relevant or should be nerfed out of any effect like in WoW. This is a design issue, in its purest form. It’s not a good or bad choice on its own. The same for the use of “guidelines” to nerf some core mechanics.

As I wrote already in the first EQ2 thread, I consider this con system simply retarded. The main mistake about these considerations is that you are messing the mechanics with the learning process (setting aside the playerstyles as we discussed weeks ago).

A good tutorial or a good newbie experience isn’t about making the game easy or dumb. A good tutorial is about the ACCESS. It’s all about HOW, not WHAT. “What” is irrelevant on this level. The point is that in EQ2 the designer have accepted to nerf the gameplay, not its accessibility.

Your argument about Allakhazam, imho, is pointless. I completely agree that if the game needs you to read spoiler sites, the game is broken. But the way to fix this isn’t only to integrate that site inside the game.

The point is to really design something from the ground up. This is how you can innovate and build something strong. As an example lets just take DAoC’s character creation. You /need/ a spoiler site, even then it’s still HARD to not screw your stat and your initial spec points. But what this adds to the game? Nothing. It’s well known how irrelevant is that choice. There are just forced choices that you can only screw. This is why WoW, during the character creation, gives you just the control of what you can manage: how you look. We have lost the possibility to choose and the possibility to further differentiate the characters, but is this really relevant? Not at all.

Instead what is happening in EQ2 is the opposite. They aren’t removing a broken, useless mechanic. Instead they are dumbing down the game, they are removing relevant mechanics. The point now is simply to consider if these mechanics CAN be transformed or rethink to be fun, interesting and, in particular, self-consistent (as we discussed weeks ago, remember?). I think this IS possible and it’s also absolutely needed. As I wrote in other forums the duty isn’t to imagine fancy solution with loads of creativity, I think the genre (as fantasy genre) must be re-discovered. Re-read. We need to go back and push back in the adventurous aspect and not chase the fun by simply reducing all the gameplay into a subpar arcade. CoH demonstrated how important is FUN gameplay, but this doesn’t mean that creating an arcade is the only way possible to reach that fun.

And this is a link to Raph’s book that also ties to what I believe. There are different types of fun, I think the most relevant between these types is the learning process. Fun here doesn’t mean that the game is accessible because it’s stupidly simple. It’s the opposite, it’s about offering complex mechanics and also the tools to access those mechanics. /How/ you access the complexity is what must be developed. Not whether the game should be complex or not.

Imho what EQ2 did was about fixing the consequence of the problem, instead of addressing the real reason. Bandaids are the reasons why games finish to crumble or become weak and bland.

You know? You gave me an idea, removing names from the mobs could be interesting. I wonder if it’s really possible to develop a completely immersive mmorpg. I think it is, in fact I once played with a wonderful D&D gamemaster and he used to describe in detail the monsters, without EVER reaveal directly the names. And it was great.

But one last point. You CANNOT follow what I write here above and take EQ2 or WoW and simply remove the con system pretending they will be better games. This is a viable path ONLY if you start to develop a complete new system. The point is to trasform the “Out Of Char con system” we have now in a “In Char con system”. This transition will make a better game, but if we simply remove the first without adding something else we are simply breaking the game itself.