Muckbeast - Game Design, Virtual Worlds, MMORPGs, MUDs, RPGs

People keep asking me to write about how and why I designed things, so I guess it is about time I actually broke down and gave the readers what they want. As I noted in a comment post, when I look back over my 16+ years of computer game design my failures stand out for me more than my successes. I don’t think that is negativity. I think it is just a bit of perfectionism mixed with a desire to never forget my failures in order that I not repeat them. In this post, I am going to discuss an absolute disaster of a design failure from the early years of Threshold : allowing players to attack (and kill) themselves.

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I don’t do “tech news” type posts very often, but every now and then there are some technology issues I think it would be interesting to discuss. So here’s a grab bag of three issues:

1) A preview of Windows 7 (please be better than vista)

2) The MPAA getting a much deserved b-slap from the FCC.

3) And some insane patent related litigation that would be horrible for the MMO industry if it succeeds.

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That headline is a grabber, isn’t it? I did not purchase Wrath of the Lich King so I have no practical knowledge regarding the current state of WoW raiding. I suspect it is not significantly different and still has the same problems that always annoyed me. I created this topic so those of you playing WotLK can educate me. I will start the discussion off by recapping a few things I hate(d) about WoW raiding, and the readers can tell me if WotLK is more of the same, or a major improvement.

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Who Reads Muckbeast?

By “you all”, I mean the few folks reading here regularly. I know I lost a lot of readers during October and November when I wrote maybe 1 or 2 articles tops. Sorry about that. Muckbeast gets about 150 unique hits per day, and I have no idea if that is utterly horrible or decent considering how new it is and how specialized it is. Regardless, I really appreciate those of you who read and especially those of you who comment. I find your feedback (mostly as players) very, very valuable in my own game design.

Tell Me Some of Your Preferences

I will fire off a few questions in rapid fire format:

1) What do you think of the new site theme? I think it is a lot more readable, even though it now lacks a fancy graphic at the top. It is wider, and the content is in the middle rather than left justified.

2) CAPTCHA: I hate that I had to enable this for the comments, but we were getting tons of spam. I’m considering turning it off again soon to see what happens. How much of a pain is it when entering comments to have to use the captcha field thing.

3) The “READ MORE” prompt. This is a tough one. I have heard that RSS readers do not get the whole article if you have a “click here to keep reading” link. I use it on longer articles so the front page of the blog is a little more readable (so you can see more topics on the front). I also wonder if it is a good idea to encourage people to actually come to the site and click on internal pages in order to keep my host happy (maybe he gets more ad hits that way, I don’t know). I don’t get paid anything for the ads here, but I do get paid by Today.com to write posts so I try to be sensitive to their needs.

4) Rate of Topics: Is averaging 1 per day enough to make you enjoy reading the blog? Is more topics too much? So far, we don’t have much discussion, so it is hard to tell if more topics would generate more discussion or if it might make it harder to discuss a topic.

5) Suggestions for improvement?

Are You Out There?

If you read this blog, please take a moment to at least reply to this post with a quick “I’m here!” I would like to know who is reading so I have some idea who my audience is. If you want to include any additional information about yourself in the response, feel free.

Thanks for reading!

Achivements are the new hot feature in MMOs. I’m not sure who had them first, or who does them best, but there is no doubt they are popular as heck. In every game that has them, people seem to really get into collecting them. Even when there is no in-game benefit, just piling them on seems to be really popular.

For those of you unfamiliar with this feature, here is basically how Achivements systems work. There is some system in game that tracks the achivements - either a list of badges (like City of Heroes), a journal (like Warhammer Online), or just an achivement interface (WoW). There are generally categories (quest related, kill related, exploration related, etc.). Whenever you kill X number of a certain mob, or find a specific location, or meet a specific NPC, or perform a task a certain number of times, you get an Achivement unlock. Unlocking achivements can even trigger additional achivements (”You’ve unlocked 100 Achivements!”). These build up over time, and generally provide you with things like fluff titles or perhaps access to specific gear vendors or powers. The tangible benefits are nice, but do not appear to be completely necessary. People will hunt them down even if there are no specific rewards.

MMO Achivement Systems: What I Think.

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MMOs are all about community and playing with (or around) other players. This means population management is vitally important. If the game is too crowded, because get sick of not being able to do things. If the game is too empty, the game is no fun because they cannot find people to play with, group with, team with, or compete against. This is an extremely delicate balancing act. This was hard enough in the old days of MUDs when everyone played on the same server. Then, the only thing you had to worry about was spreading people too thin around the world. But now, with the exception of a small handful of games, all MMOs have tons of servers. Companies that run multi-server (or multi-shard) MMOs have that issue to deal with on top of the matter of figuring out ways to keep players geographically close to each other inside the game.

Geographical Population

This is the type of population problem MUDs and one-shared MMOs deal with. They need to make sure the do not design their game universe in a manner that spreads people out too much. On Threshold, I accomplished this by only having ONE major city with shopkeepers, training halls, and a tavern. As a result, everyone naturally concentrated in a single place between adventures. It was not until the game had grown significantly that I added another major city with shops and taverns.

Server Population

This is a new problem that modern, large MMOs have to deal with. This is a particularly serious problem because most graphical MMOs these days waste so much of their content. The overwhelming majority of their world is total throw away. People blaze through entire zones in an hour or two and will never visit it again. With content being consumed so fast, it needs to be readily available to a lot of people. Thus, a server cannot support more than a few hundred players (or a few thousand tops) all playing at the same time.

This is a particularly serious issue for PvP related games. If you do not have other players to fight against, this entire type of content is rendered moot. This is one of the issues Warhammer Online is currently struggling with. They released with too many servers, they are drastically in need of consolidation, but they don’t do it because they are too afraid of the PR hit from server merger. In the meantime, their players (and subscriptions) suffer.

Your Experiences with Popluation Issues

So as I so like to do, I leave you players (and devs) reading this with a question. What type of population issues have you experienced in games? What have the developers done to solve the problems, and were they successful?

It has become standard fare for MMOs to have some kind of special event around holiday time. Most have something at Christmas and all other major holidays, but some will run special events even for minor stuff (including Hallmark Day… oops, I mean Valentine’s Day.) The current trend is to create some kind of faux-In Character name for the event (All Hallows Eve, Feast of Winter Veil, Keg End, etc.) that dimly creates a lore reason for the event. This is often a very weak excuse, since in-game time rarely relates to real life time.

Before you assume I am down on the idea, I think these events are good and interesting things. I think they are an example of developers giving something fun to their community, and they create a bit of an emotional connection from the game world to the real world. When you are celebrating something special in real life you are also celebrating something special in the game. If anything, the only negative thing I have to say about the idea is the fact that all too often this is the ONLY type of special event developers run. That’s a shame. Events directly related to the game world itself are far more interesting and should be a bigger priority.

What Do Players Think About Holiday MMO Events?

As players (or visiting developers), what do you think about these holiday events? I will get you started with a few specific questions:

1) Are these kinds of events fun?

2) Are they worth the time developers put into them?

3) Do you have a problem with developers trotting out the same event each year, or mostly the same with a few things added?

4) Do events like this break immersion, add to it, or neither?

Feel free to also share examples of good or bad holiday MMO events you have experienced.

Merry Christmas!

If you follow MMOs, you will frequently read complaints that the majority of MMOs are fantasy based. There are many reasons for this, the largest being the simple fact that gamers just like the setting. The historical connection to Dungeons and Dragons also cannot be ignored.

The MMO industry is definitely very healthy right now - even beyond the huge success of World of Warcraft. Both Age of Conan and Warhammer Online surpassed 800,000 subscribers within the first month of their release. This is pretty amazing when you consider it was just a few years ago that 100,000 subscribers was the number that defined an MMO as a “hit.”

But those games were both fantasy. On the flip side, Tabula Rasa recently announced that it will close its servers in February of 2009. The epic fail of Star Wars: Galaxies is widely known. After all, SWG was supposed to be the game of WoW-like proportions that dominated the MMO market. City of Heroes is hanging on to a thread at about 120,000 subscribers - down from a peak of near 200,000 when the City of Villains expansion came out.

And what do we have over the horizon? Darkfall is scheduled for release in early 2009, but it is a smaller budget game and fantasy. Primordiax is scheduled for release in 2009, but it is also fantasy and is made by a small developer (full disclosure: that small developer would be my company, Frogdice). There are two possible super hero games for 2009 - Champions Online and Marvel Universe Online. Bioware announced their Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic MMO, but I would be shocked if that game comes out before 2010. And even if it does, the Star Wars genre is only borderline sci-fi. With the force, jedi, light sabers, rancors, and fantasy elements, Star Wars is at best a fantasy/sci-fi hybrid.

So a few questions for you all:

1. Are we going to see a non-fantasy MMO that can break the new “big market success” barrier of 500,000 subscribers?
2. If so, which one do you think it will be?
3. If not, why not?
4. What will be required for a non-fantasy MMO to attain fantasy-MMO type success?

Follow Your Nerf Assiduously After the Fact

After nerfing something, a developer has a duty and a responsibility to its customers to keep a close eye on the effects of that nerf. Simply releasing the nerf into the wild and just leaving players do deal with the aftershock is irresponsible and downright cruel. Your players are going to be somewhere between mildly annoyed and absolutely miserable as a result of the nerf. You owe it to them to watch it closely and find out if the nerf went father than you expected or intended.

All too often, developers just assume they can count on players to raise a huge stink if the nerf went to far. A sloppy, lazy attitude all too common in developers is that they only need to use their tracking metrics to find things that are too good and too powerful, since players will be far more honest about reporting things that are weak. While it is true that players are more likely to report things that are weak, relying on this depends on your staff having a really good ability to sort through the din of forum posts and other feedback methods. Good luck with that.

If You Need to Nerf Again, Consider Undoing the First Nerf

Everyone has seen this happen countless times. Some class or ability in a game is too powerful, it gets nerfed, it continues to be too powerful, and it gets nerfed again (or perhaps again, and again, and again). Eventually, one of (or some of) these nerfs actually does the trick and results in the ability no longer being overpowered. At this point, all previous nerfs should be reviewed as potentially being unnecessary. Sometimes it is hard to properly diagnose why something is too powerful. Perhaps the ability is getting used in surprising ways, or perhaps when seems like the problem at first is not the real problem. That is fine. There is no shame in admitting that. But do not compound the problem by lazily or stubbornly refusing to re-examine and possibly undoing previous nerfs.

Example: 

A certain power seems too strong. In round 1, the damage gets nerfed. In round 2, the cooldown is increased. In round 3, the “real problem” is discovered, that the damage from this power is being delivered untyped, or unresistable, or resistances simply are not working against it. Round 3 successfully makes the power reasonable. The developer should now go back and consider undoing nerf #1 and nerf #2 now that the real problem has been found.

Nerfs… How to do them right (Part 1)

Nerfs… How to do them right (Part 2)

Soften the Blow

It surprises me how few MMO developers make any effort to soften the blow of a nerf. Didn’t any of these people watch Mary Poppins? “A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine, go down.”   No matter how reasonable or needed a nerf is, the players negative affected by it are going to be unhappy. Even if they agree with the developers about the nerf, there is simply no way to be pleased when your character, realm, race, or class is weaker one day than it was the day before.

How NOT to Soften the Blow

Fixing a couple negative bugs for someone is not a way to soften the blow. Sure, it is nice, but players EXPECT developers to fix bugs. You are rarely going to get much gratitude from players as a result of bug fixing, and it certainly won’t make up for nerfs.

Give Them Something Useful

The most direct way to soften the blow is to give them something else that is useful. Perhaps this is an ability or feature you had been planning to give this group of people for a while, and now is a great time to release it. This gets back to my previous point about not rushing nerfs - if you hold off the nerf until you have some new content to give at the same time, you might be able to completely eliminate unhappy feelings from the nerf portion.

Give Them Something Fun

Game balance or your development cycle might make it impossible to give them something useful. In that case, figure out a way to give them something fun. Either come up with your own ideas, or comb your player feedback systems (forums, email, whatever) for some fun or pure fluff suggestions. Sometimes purely fun things mean more to players than actually “useful” things.

 No Matter What You Decide, at Least Try Something

Whatever you decide to go with, make sure you at least do something. Show some effort. Show the players you TRIED to soften the blow. Show them you care about their feelings and reactions to a nerf. Do not make them believe you could care less what they think, and that you heartlessly nerfed them out of some kind of sick joy. When players believe the developers are actually looking out for their interests, and trying to maintain a fun environment, they will forgive a lot of necessary nerfs or balance tweaks.

Nerfs… How to do them right (Part 1)

Nerfs… How to do them right (Part 3)

I finally had to change the theme. The old one handled white space (empty blank lines, to help set off paragraphs) poorly, and it did not give enough room to the middle content column. I have less options for actual look now (and no custom header), but that is life. I think the site is more readable now in general which is better.

Also, you will see a lot more posts from me this month. So please check back often and post your thoughts!

Finally, I had to enable captcha for a bit because the spammers were totally out of control. I hope that is a temporary measure. Thank you for your patience. I know it makes posting a little more annoying.

What is a nerf? In most of the world, it is a soft, spongy toy like the eponymous Nerf Football. In the world of gaming, a nerf is a reduction in power, utility, or usefulness of a character class, race, realm, zone, item, etc. Nerfs are very controversial because people do not enjoy being nerfed. Unsurprisingly, people often enjoy seeing OTHER PEOPLE get nerfed… especially in PvP or conflict oriented games.

Generally, players think anything of theirs is fine, and many things of their opponent’s is too powerful. Anything of their opponent’s that is weak, is “fine”, and if such people ask to be improved they are told to “learn to play.” This is expressed succinctly and cleverly by the following axiom:

“Hi. This is rock. Nerf paper. Scissors is fine.”

The sad, unfortunate reality is that nerfs occasionally must happen. The problem is, most developers handle this situation very poorly. They do not think things through, they rush the job, and they take no steps to soften the blow. In this article, I will discuss how developers nerf without thinking things through.

Think Before You Nerf… Then Think Some More

Developers need to understand that whenever you nerf something, the ripple effect is going to be huge. Actually, I should call it a tsunami effect. Everyone affected is going to be angry, and some of the people unaffected will also be angry because they might feel you didn’t nerf enough.

Anytime you are considering a nerf, you need to make sure you analyze the ever-lovin’ heck out of the situation. You need to constantly ask yourself “What EXACTLY is the problem with this class/item/etc. What EXACTLY is making it too powerful?” The answer is very often not the most obvious thing. An overpowered DPS class may not be overpowered because it does too much damage. It might be overpowered because the damage is of a type that is not resisted or defended against (solution: give players a way/choice to defend against it). It might be overpowered because that class has too many escape or utility powers, which make the class unstoppable combined with its damage. It might be overpowered because whatever negatives you have given the class are too easily overcome or remedied.

I cannot stress enough how important it is to PROPERLY DIAGNOSE THE PROBLEM. If you rush into the nerf, you are very likely to misdiagnose.

Nerfs… How to do them right (Part 2)

Nerfs… How to do them right (Part 3)

Ril asked this question in a comment: “Writer’s Block?”

That is a good question, but it is not the problem. I have been super busy with work MAKING games lately, and haven’t had time to write about them. I also haven’t played any new games since Spore, so I haven’t had reviews to post for you either. Tsk tsk on me.

I have also been hoping that if I gave Today.com a little time, they’d release a few new style setups that would make post and comment formatting a little prettier. I am going to take a look at that today and see if they added anything.

So, are any of my readers still checking here? If so, drop me a comment. Feel free to suggest a topic you’d like me to address from a game developer’s perspective.

I probably will not be able to post as many anti-WoW raiding posts, since I have no plans to buy their expansion. As a result, my knowledge of the game is going to fall way behind, and it will be very easy for the die hard supporters to rightly say “You don’t know how the game is now.” Of course, they always say such things even when the game is not fundamentally different. I mean the first expansion did not make fundamental changes, and from what I have read the second one will not either. And why should it? They have millions of customers who like the game the way it is. Fundamentally changing it would be unfair to all those customers. Let someone else make a different style of MMO and let people who want something different play that. That is why I don’t understand Blizzard’s recent habit of unleashing their PR blitzkrieg to slam any new MMO that comes out. It is good for Blizzard if customers have choice - even their customers.

Spore is the recently released game from game design genius Will Wright. Reviews have been somewhat mixed, ranging from good to great, with a few occasional mediocre reviews. For the most part, I think this is due to excessive hype, and the impossible expectations caused by following The Sims. But make no mistake, Spore is an excellent game. I recently completed a review titled: Spore - A Detailed Review of the latest Will Wright creation. An exerpt:

The open ended gameplay, the enormous variety of options, the opportunities to express one’s creativity through creation or storytelling, and the sheer fun and joy you get from playing Spore are all major reasons this is such an excellent game. The potential for replayability is great, while the potential to keep playing a single game is equally great.

There is a lesson for all POW developers from Spore. Give your players a way to express their creativity and imagination, and you give them unlimited content. Probably the only thing still keeping City of Heroes alive is the amazing character and costume creator. It is a shortsighted shame when a POW fails to give its players tools to create their own content, customize their characters, and customize some part of the world (generally a house, but other options are good as well).

I have always felt that my customers at Threshold were exceptional people. For over a decade, I have found them to be intelligent, creative, interesting, and for the most part successful people. I never doubted these conclusions, but I do so love being proved right.    A research group headed by Dmitri Williams (and sponsored by the National Science Foundation) was given unprecedented, anonymous access to almost every bit of data SOE (Sony Online Entertainment) had about its customers. SOE gave them “full data logs generated and collected by the world Everquest II.” This amounted to many terabytes of data that they hosted and analyzed on supercomuters at NCSA . They have begun releasing some of their findings , and they are impressive though not surprising. Inspired by Raph Koster ’s list of his favorite findings, here is mine:

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I absolutely despise the MMORPG acronym. It is virtually unpronounceable. It is too long. Perhaps worst of all, it does a poor job describing what a Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game really is, or what is most distinctive about it. I started a discussion recently on a game developer mailing list in which I sought a replacement for MMORPG. My favorite response suggested POW for Persistent Online World (thanks, “cruise“). In this article I will break down the flaws (as I perceive them) in the term “MMORPG”, and then I will explain why POW - Persistent Online World - should supplant it.

Breaking Down the atrocity that is “MMORPG”

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The purpose of this post is to discuss a few functional things with my readers here to try and make Muckbeast a more enjoyable blog.

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Content creation is widely considered the most time consuming and costly area of MMO/MUD development. I agree with this. In graphical MUDs, you have animations, mob AI, scripting, zone design, and all the additional graphics and visual effects that go along with zones, powers, items, etc. These are very expensive. In text MUDs, you have to craft a story, you have tons of writing to do, and all of it has to weave together in a legible, clear, enjoyable way. The creative aspects of all that writing take a lot of time. Then on top of that, you have the minutiae of making all the rooms, linking them, describing the tiny details so they don’t seem ignored or drab, and all that.

So bearing this in mind, why do so many developers deliberately make their own content obsolete? And why do they often do it at such a rapid clip? The trend these days is for games to encourage you to race to the cap and then sit. Then they want you to make alts, or farm gear. Soon enough, the population is top heavy at the level cap, and nobody visits 90% of the game. If someone makes a “real newbie” character, everywhere they go is vacant.

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Flagship Studios is in its final death throes, and the post mortems and blame games are in full force. Recently some major players in the utter failure that is Hellgate: London finally spoke out. Of course, the interviews and statements were full of the usual weak excuses: players were not patient enough with us, evil internet people unfairly slammed the game, we were misunderstood, blah blah blah. The Electronic Arts mouthpiece was specially bad since he completely ignored the main reason the game failed: its completely idiotic subscription model.

First we have the words of EA’s David Demartini:

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As I noted in one of the comments, I have also taken a few writing jobs elsewhere. Occasionally I will link to the articles here and then open things up for discussion. I recently had a 4 part review of Age of Conan published , and I am not spoiling much to tell you the review is far from positive. In fact, I’d say my review is downright savage, but that’s hardly my fault. Age of Conan is a disaster of almost epic proportions. Bloated, inefficient code (32 gig install, and it runs poorly even at recommended specs), terrible design choices (the much hyped combo system is a wreck), bugs, and missing features are just a few of the problems. In my review, I did not even have time to address the weak PvP or the rampant sexism.

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