[MUD-Dev] On socialization and convenience

[Dave Kennerly]

From: Caliban Tiresias Darklock:
> On Fri, 15 Jun 2001 22:33:34 -0700, "Sean Kelly" <sean at ffwd.cx> wrote:

>> One thing that's kind of surprised me is that none of the MMORPGs
>> I've played had any facility for sending messages to players who
>> aren't currently online (mail).

> I'm shocked. NONE of them have this? Why not? It's one of the
> primary wish-list features for my own system. Has been for years.

As Darklock did, I found it strange that I commonly hear that
community features like this are important (in MUD-Dev, on gaming
sites and magazines, in enough of 10,000+ customer e-mails in 3
years of customer support), but the most successful online games
don't have them in their game that I discovered, except for The
Kingdom of the Winds in Korea.  Maybe Lineage has mail/bulletin too?
I don't know.  Maybe I missed it in EverQuest, Asheron's Call, and a
few others?

It suggests some players may be stating something untrue about their
own preferences about game software features: that their conscious
communication of their preference correlates more weakly to their
preference than a close analysis of their behavior.  An example
question that leads to constructing an experiment: Given a scarcity
of alternatives, which alternative do players choose?  And/or
simply, e-mail already exists; therefore, the demand is basically
already met.



Raph Koster wrote:

> The logic against it goes like this:

>  * Yeesh! HOW much storage per player again? That's (takes out
>  * calculator) WAAAY too much money!

>  * Won't they use email anyway? We can't possibly make a nice
>  * enough email system to match Outlook!

>  * Yikes, think of the complications--email to account or to user?

> We did put it into UO, but it was badly implemented and never got
> used, and was removed eventually.

A subtly different decision factor: will players value the community
feature, such as mail/bulletins, enough?  Even if players do use the feature
and will complain about it being removed and praise its addition, how
valuable is it to the player?  Approximately what other features is it
equivalent to?  Since some features have to be cut to ever produce the game,
how much will this one feature cost or profit by exclusion or inclusion,
respectively?

I have a little personal experience with a few graphic MMOGs that do have
some community features, and are considerably less played than US's most
successful:

  Game Mail and Game Bulletin Board System

    Dark Ages (www.DarkAges.com) (including at the political
    centers, 8 religions, college, royal library, major adventure
    staging areas, markets) Nexus: The Kingdom of the Winds
    (www.NexusTK.com) These mail systems are run in the same process
    as the login server (separate from the world server), and are
    disk-based, delivered relatively infrequently (a few minutes)
    and are infrequently referenced by the recipient user.

    Meridian 59 (no longer operated by 3DO www.3do.com).  I only saw
    the Bulletin Board System here.  I don't know about how it
    worked.  I'd guess it was running in the main server process.
    Shattered Galaxy (www.sGalaxy.com).  Web/SQL separate from all
    other servers with client interface.

  Game Memo System (similar to an ICQ message)

    QuizQuiz (www.QuizQuiz.com) This is managed by an SQL database
    alongside the other SQL databases.

  Inscribable Objects, such as letters

    Nexus: The Kingdom of the Winds (www.NexusTK.com) Underlight
    (www.underlight.com)

    Inscribable objects were disabled from Nexus: The Kingdom of the
    Winds because the text field could overwhelm the user database,
    if the character had many of these object


Note that these Nexon game's features are heavily used
(mail/bulletin data is significant fraction of all user data and
updates frequently per user online), so obviously having more than 0
value.  And they do achieve community goals.  For example, last
night while playing Dark Ages I found several literary, excellent
on-theme posts on the Cail, God of Nature's, Temple bulletin board,
and found no generally agreed obnoxious posts for the past few days
thereat.  But in comparison, the customer base of Dark Ages is not
impressively large.  This doesn't bother me as a player, but as a
developer such an erroneous belief could considerably foreshorten a
game's survival.

I personally value community features very highly and have
implemented them whenever I even thought the experiment was
worthwhile or noble.  But, for example, I wouldn't expand the Dark
Ages College, until the College I'd already developed (teach and
attend classes to earn experience points based in a labor economy)
was being used a lot.  In this case, I have yet to witness it,
despite my best efforts for convenience and rewards in social and
game dimensions.  Therefore, I conclude I did it poorly, players
value the game feature very little, or a mixture thereof.  I haven't
heard of a game doing a college better yet, so I suspect it's low
usage is at least partially due to a lack of player preference for a
college (in this game, of course) at all.

J C Lawrence wrote a lot on conversation about a common interest.
It was a good read.  And he also wrote something about capturing an
event:

>  Why can't we sit playing EQ/UO/MudFoo and at any point, without
>  afore thought or planning, roll back the game and re-view it
>  exactly as it happened?

Battle Replay

  Shattered Galaxy (www.sGalaxy.com) Client-based file.

One replays battles.  Besides replaying battles for storytelling,
Shattered Galaxy team receives useful bug report information from
it, when the player sends his battle replay file.

I guess the technology for such replay is inherent in the Unreal,
Final Fantasy, Vagrant Story engine, or any other engine with
sufficiently complex scripting features.  If that game state can be
scripted, then that game state can be recorded as a script and
replayed as a script.  I'm not a programmer; I won't speculate on
how practical it is.

As a non-representative game player, replay not my priority
preference among alternative features.  Even in games that offer
replay, such as SoulCalibur, I bypass the replay in over 95% of the
cases.  It has to be rare, such as a Double K-O or a self-inflicted
Ring Out, and even then I don't miss it much.  I saw it once.  Like
an animal in John Hopson's behavioral psychology article 

  Behavioral Game Design:

    http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20010427/hopson_01.htm

I look forward to seeing an even more dramatic spectacle, instead of
the same thing again.  However, I still enjoy screenshots and chat
log captures just for the very reason of conversation or other
nostalgia.

Dave Kennerly


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