[MUD-Dev] MMORPGs & MUDs

[Koster]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Michael Tresca

> My argument is that big, graphical MMOs are artistic in their
> implementation.  They are beautiful.  Impressive.  Massive.
 
>   They are not:
 
>     1) conducive to role-playing

I agree so much I made it a Law. :)

I also think that judging virtual environments on their suitability
for roleplaying is a huge misstep. Roleplaying is one possible use
for a virtual environment. Might as well judge them on their quality
for being a classroom or a writing group. Putting roleplaying in a
position of primacy is just revealing biases, IMHO.

>     2) conducive to long-term gaming styles

How so?

>     3) conducive to creating social groups

Again, how so? Are you referring to *single* social groups? If so,
I'd agree. But based on *quantity* of social groups I'd
disagree. But perhaps you mean *quality* of social groups, which is
rather hard to assess...!

>     4) discouraging griefers

Agreed, for many reasons which I have written about extensively on
this list, including lack of peer pressure, difficulty of
information dissemination and inconstancy of information, etc.

>     5) rewarding non-griefers

One more "how so?" Surely the things that a given mud explicitly
rewards are a design issue unrelated to scale. Now, scale can
certainly affect the things that are implicitly rewarded. But
there's things I consider pernicious that are implicitly rewarded by
small muds too...

> Players are partners in creating a social structure.  Failing to
> recognizing that they, not the developer, ultimately sets the tone
> of the game, is to be irresponsible.

Yep.

> My argument about art vs. entertainment is that, from a player's
> perspective, he doesn't necessarily even perceive art.  He knows
> what he likes.  It's a basic shameless, selfish need.  He's going
> to do "what's fun."

Yep.

Of course, there's lots of people who perceive different things as
fun, and there's no shame in targeting a particular group of
them. There's also no shame in leading a player to particular
aspects of a game--just about every game does it, via choosing which
elements of the game to reward.

> Developers worry about much more than fun.  But insofar that I've
> seen the concern over the inner workings of MMORPGs, the
> intricacies seem wasted in light of more basic social
> functionality.  Who gives two figs what color map is used for an
> umber hulk if you can't create a game that people play "as
> intended"?  That's the art side.

I think "playing as intended" is overvalued--*except* insofar as it
means that players play longer or get more enjoyment out of the game
or do not ruin the enjoyment of others.

The first one has obvious basis for commercial ventures, and the
latter is likewise obvious. The middle one--a good example is Motor
City Online.  Because of how the game is designed, there's more
advantage to running the oval tracks over and over again for points
and cash than there is from actually playing the full range of
offerings the game has. This makes the game less fun for everyone,
IMHO. I don't think there's anything wrong with trying to rectify
that, and even applaud the effort, even if it is definable as
"fixing it so they play as intended."

I guess my key point is this:

Players will do things that are not fun, because we the designers
reward them for doing it. And then they bitch mightily. But if we
reward them enough, they keep doing it. Even when we tell them to
stop and go *have fun* they won't, by and large.

So if people aren't playing as intended, it's because your game
mechanics are broken. You'll just have to assess whether the way
they *are* playing is more or less fun than what you had
hoped. Often, it's MORE, in which case you should embrace it. I
think that The Sims is practically a poster child for this.

> I believe that MUDs have a valuable, non-tangible lesson that has
> yet to be learned by MMORPGs.  It's a lesson in human dynamics.
> MUDs are managing to generate fun without graphics and have been
> doing it for over a decade.

Many many muds have failed to do so, too. :P

And the ways in which they have done it are often

  a) infeasible with graphics (no point in arguing about whether or
  not one should go back to text, it's as silly as debating whether
  studio multitracking ruined music)

or

  b) fun only to a niche (and often tired mechanics that we on this
  list often decry, such as levelling treadmills. In fact, it's
  interesting how quickly the graphical mud community has exhausted
  the "level game" compared to the text community. Perhaps simply
  because there's more games in text muds).

I think debating whether the current big graphical muds are fun is
frankly silly, given the undeniable audience they have. It's an
audience that is sticking, not fading away--it's not all
fad-driven. UO's subscriber base did not plateau until fairly
recently--for a game that launched in 1997. Based on text muds, it
might well cruise along at a stable figure for quite a
while. There've been a heck of a lot of text muds that have launched
and closed between Sept 1997 and today. :P

> Instead of building on MUD errors and failures (a road littered
> with the stinking corpses of a thousand ill-conceived MUDs),
> MMORPGs are venturing into the universe of multiple players
> unprepared because everyone thinks that it's a different gaming
> paradigm.

Well, it's not, and I know many, many, many MMORPG designers and
developers who were mudders first and know perfectly well that it's
not.

But I can also tell you that it damn well IS a different ball game
once it comes to issues such as policing the environment, dealing
with issues with the playerbase, the level of technical complexity
required, the level of engineering required, etc.

> It isn't.  It's just larger.  And on a larger scale, the small,
> player-focused approach is critical in ensuring player loyalty.

It would be very interesting to see the stats on loyalty for text
muds. It's too bad that it's hard to obtain them. Is it typical for
a text mud to retain half of all players who have ever logged in
over the course of three years? What about a mud retaining 1/4 of
all players who have ever logged in over the course of 4? I'd bet
it's not (in large part because the barreir to entry is low and
therefore the barrier to departure is also low).

> Flashy graphics, exciting gameplay, cool effects -- that draw
> players.  Viable social communities keeps them there.

I think the commercial industry agrees with you there. :)

> For my own curiosity, what's the average lifespan of a single
> character (not player) on a MMORPG?  That is, how long does one
> player play one character consistently before permanently retiring
> them?

I have no idea for a single character. The play patterns for players
with multiple characters are something I should look into more. Do
people tend to have a "favorite" and how much more play time does it
get versus others? How many play multiples, and how many of those
multiples are rarely played? Hmm.

For players... A year, roughly. This is the average player. It's
longer for some games and shorter for others, and has changed over
time for some games and not for others. I can't go into further
details than that.

Back when I was working on text muds more actively, the average
character seemed to drop out in three months. This still the case?

-Raph
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