[MUD-Dev] MMORPGs & MUDs

[Dave Rickey]

From: Michael Tresca <talien at toast.net>
> Dave Rickey posted on Saturday, January 12, 2002 1:30 PM

>> Actually, I would point to AC's Allegiance system as an example
>> of what *not* to do.  By trying to impose a particular form on
>> the community, it actually stunted the natural community growth
>> and weakened the social groupings.

> I don't have personal experience with it to be able to comment on
> it in depth.  I do know three players who are at the upper echelon
> of their Allegiance.  It created something that sounds
> suspiciously like work and having a boss (who makes money off of
> you) so I don't find it personally appealing.

The problem is that it creates a strict heirarchy, which is only one
of the potential structures for a community, and a player's place in
the heirarchy has more to do with how soon they joined and how
effective they were at recruiting players (who are good at
recruiting good recruiters), than their actual organizational input
or community awareness.

>> We could write a book on this point alone.  What it comes down to
>> is that if group activities are more efficient means of
>> accomplishing the goals, groups form.  The classic
>> Tank/Nuker/Healer dependance triad is the simplest form of this.

> Sure, let's write a book! :)

Basicly, players are not by nature team-oriented, and teams have
hidden overhead when it comes to pursuing goals.  The gains of
cooperation have to outweigh the overhead by a major margin before
they will feel they need to work together (at which point they start
complaining about how they *have* to work together).

EQ's UberGuilds are centered on the "Planes Raid" class of
encounter, to get the individual rewards they are after (phat
lewtz), they need to hit the encounter with 30-100 people, many of
whome will be "killed" in the encounter.  The reward structure
certainly fosters community forming, but with some...interesting,
side effects.

>> Okay, major conceptual break here.  You see, players *will* just
>> "work it out", what they will work out depends on the challenge
>> that is presented to them.  Social grouping is an emergent
>> phenomenon, each individual in the grouping is not participating
>> in the social grouping because he likes the other people in the
>> grouping, he's participating because he has some goal he is
>> pursuing that he needs the other people to achieve.  He may
>> actively dislike the other members (as in some EQ "UberGuilds").

>> In fact, you *need* to let the players just work it out, they'll
>> find a better solution than you could.

> I disagree.  Players will work it out, absolutely.  Their way.
> Their game.  However they want.

This is bad because?  "Who's game is it, anyway?" is the constant
refrain on every element of design on these games, and giving the
players *less* control is not the direction we seem to be moving.

> Let me stress this: early adopters are NOT necessarily the people
> you want establishing the tone of your game.

> This is VERY significant.  Early adopters may be twinks, they may
> be goofballs, they may be whatever -- but if you do not make any
> effort to help shape your cultural environment, early adopters
> shape it for you.  Get the wrong "community hopping" from say, a
> purely PK MMORPG filled with dudes, and you've just flushed your
> MMORPG down the toilet for any other gaming style.  I've seen it
> happen on MUDs before, on an obviously smaller scale.

That's more a PR issue than a design factor.  Yes, certainly there
are market segments you don't *want* to actively court.

> If you are not actively involved with that early stage of your
> game, you roll the dice and hope the dominant group is a group
> that is in line with your game's vision.  I saw Ultima Online's
> vision being much more complex than the roving group of PKers who
> laid waste to everything that moved, including players.

Barring PR issues, your early adopters tend to be hard-core
explorers, who put more of an emphasis on game mechanics than other
things.  UO's early adopters *weren't* PK's, in fact PK in Beta was
a much more limited affair than it became shortly after release.

>> Nyet, nein, no, unh-uh.  Social communities form as a response to
>> the challenges the developers code into the system, and the goals
>> that players find to pursue within the system.  They cannot be
>> formed in a vacuum with neat slots and heirarchies.

> Social communities will form because there's lots of people
> sitting around in a group.  We'd love to think that they form
> because WE want them to (due to the challenges).  They might,
> sometimes.  But a much more powerful force is the social hub
> interaction, the element that is so often left outside of games.
> They don't have to have a goal.  They don't have to have anything.

Social hubs turn on axles of game mechanics.  The game sets the
focus, the players *are* the community.

--Dave

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