[MUD-Dev2] genre vs creativity [was: Rant against Vanguard]

[Lachek Butalek]

On 3/1/07, Damion Schubert <dschubert at gmail.com> wrote:
> Star Trek Online has an interesting problem - the license is about diplomacy
> more than gankity ganking.  But how do you turn the Picard experience
> into something that provides about 500 hours of fun to a thousand people
> playing on the same server at a time.  If they don't end up using combat
> as their central mechanism (which, to be clear, I don't think they
> necessarily should), they have to enter unexplored design space, providing
> all-new, untested game mechanisms in hopes that those mechanisms
> are ones that can entertain players nigh endlessly.  This is, ultimately, a
> very scary thing.

You have got to be kidding. Let me phrase a counterexample:

How do you turn the "kill the monster, get XP, level up, get new gear,
rinse, repeat" repetitive gameplay introduced with Akalabeth for the
Apple II - which in turn is a simplification of the ruleset from the
original D&D published in 1974 -  into something that provides about
500 hours of fun to a thousand people playing on the same server at a
time? And further - how do you do it when established games in the
same market have been doing the exact same thing for 15+ years?!?

Yes, it has been proven over and over again that even such a
simplistic formula can be entertained by millions of people worldwide,
and the gameplay mechanics required to keep such a system entertaining
has undergone massive market analysis and research.

Having said that, I would be very hard pressed to admit that such
gameplay mechanics are inherently suitable for Massively Multiplayer
Online Roleplaying Games. They are designed for, and well suited
towards, a single player up to a group of 4-8 people. Any more players
than that, and you have to worry about oddities like heroes
outnumbering peasants, mudflation, quest cycling, kill stealing and
boss spawn controls, to name a few. These are problems inherent in the
kill/ding/equip formula - good inside-the-box game design consists of
mitigating those factors.

The diplomacy formula for gameplay is inherently much better suited
towards MMORPGs than kill/ding/equip is, because it can actually
leverage the vast number of players per server instead of just trying
to mitigate its effects. Factional social games are not untested,
virgin territory - MU*s have been using such formulas for 10+ years,
it's used extensively in non-interactive popular entertainment mediums
such as books and TV shows, and recently tabletop roleplaying games
have started experimenting with it as well. That aside, there are
plenty of examples of factional social games appearing spontaneously
even in current Diku derivatives, and especially in games such as A
Tale in the Desert and Eve Online.

Certainly there will be oddities arising also in diplomacy-based
games, but the field is nowhere near as unexplored as you assume. My
prediction: the first major MMORPG that implements such a formula
fully will do very well in a niche market, but will not reach
mainstream. Frankly, most people prefer Skinner boxes to games of
strategy, cunning and tact.