MMO Communities (wasRE: [MUD-Dev]MMORPG Cancellations:Theskyisfalling?)

[Matt Mihaly]

Byron Ellacott wrote:
> Matt Mihaly wrote:

>>> Until the creation of such quests is a sufficiently small amount
>>> of work that it's OK to have only one person able to consume
>>> that work, it's impractical to have the solving of a quest
>>> affect the game world.  If you have around two thousand players
>>> per shard, that means you'd need to put in two thousand times as
>>> much effort to get the same number of quests for each player as
>>> you would when quests can be repeated by others.

>> Well, remember that MMOs that are sharded are in the distinct
>> minority, as are MMOs with 2000 players online, period.

> I'd agree with that if you had spoken about online games, or
> multiplayer online games, or multiuser dungeons, even, but not
> when you speak about massively multiplayer online games. :)

Differing definitions then. Massively multiplayer means anything
above about 64 simultaneous to me.

> I do see your point, though.  To counter it, a game that has 2000
> players total, instead of 20,000 players total, probably has a
> similarly scaled down budget as well, and the problem remains.

> If you want quests to have consequences, that means they can only
> be done once (or have a reasonably long elapsed time between being
> repeatable), which means that if you have n players in your world,
> to give them the same number of quests you will have to do n times
> as much work.  Players online simultaneously isn't as important a
> measurement - Bubba's rats are still dead, regardless whether I
> was online at the time they were killed or not.

I disagree. You're looking at quests as basically individual
only. One of the reasons I harp on using political structures as
quest tools is that it allows the admins to more easily treat
arbitrarily-sized groups of players as single actors/entities.

Further, and most unfortunately for the biggest MMOs, I'd say that
if you want quests to have intelligent, logical consequences that
take into account context, you need human admins that are able to
adapt the game world to the outcome of a quest in real time. That
method has yet to show itself as feasible for all quests in an MMO,
but it is both possible and long-ago accomplished for sporadic
"big/epic" quests, in both hobbyist and commercial MMOs. It's hard
insofar as it generally has to involve multiple "Dungeon Masters"
(or whatever you want to call them) trying to manage far more
players than tabletop roleplaying games are designed for. (Those
political structures are extremely useful here.)

--matt
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