[MUD-Dev2] [Design] [REPOST] Food in MMOs

[Lachek Butalek]

Wow, lot of responses to a poorly-thought-out post that somehow got
dragged out of the deep pits of MUD-Dev hell. Thank you to everyone
who has responded so far. I'm getting a lot of fuel for an idea I have
about different MMO player types, not to speak of all the comments to
my original RFC.

On 5/14/07, Tess Snider <malkyne at gmail.com> wrote:
> I'm not sure I agree with this assertion.  If virtual worlds "should
> act like" the real world, why have virtual worlds at all?  I've got
> this perfectly good real world here that I don't even have to pay a
> subscription fee for, and man -- I tell you -- it's pretty darn
> realistic.  I can even taste the food.  Too bad about the permadeath,
> though.

Yeah, see, I like permadeath. In the virtual world, that is.

> Why play games when you can have death and taxes?
>
> A step in the right direction?  Do you think people enjoy being
> pointlessly slaughtered by randomly wandering uber-monsters that they
> have no chance of ever defending themselves against, just because they
> commit the grave sin of being in the wrong place at the wrong time?
>
> Well, see, the only possible justification I could think of for having
> wandering boss monsters  randomly slaughtering players all willy nilly
> was that there was a slim chance that the feeling of triumph they
> would get from eventually vanquishing the thing with their friends
> would *hopefully* compensate for the hours meaningless victimhood that
> had preceded it.  But now you're suggesting that it should be almost
> impossible for them to do that, too?

In an ideal (virtual) world, I do not believe that there needs to be
such an inflation of baddies that the randomly wandering uber-monsters
would actually become an issue. Sure, they would slaughter a player
here and an NPC there, but wouldn't make any more negative impact than
your average ninja griefer would (and would be In Character and
actually add to, rather than detract from, gameworld immersion). Word
would quickly spread that Jarvis the Red Dragon was on the loose in
Hintervale, and common people would temporarily abandon that area
while the national guard and high-level heroes prepared for the
assault.

Why is it that when an enemy corporation suddenly launches an assault
on your home system in Eve Online, players scrambling to evacuate
and/or organize a defense, it is seen as "fun and immersive gameplay"
but when an NPC mob does it in YAFMMORPG it is seen as gamebreaking
and disruptive?

And yes, I do believe that people who got stomped on by a "boss
monster" would be far, far more upset if they could claim "I'd be able
to kill it too, if I only had two more levels and a Sword of Sharp
Diamond" than if they knew the big foozle was more or less
undefeatable by anything but a nation-scale assault. In the first
scenario, the inability to properly plan for the assault due to its
more-or-less random appearance, coupled by the lost opportunity to get
all that phat lewt, could well be more frustrating than the
insta-death (unless, of course, your game features perma-death :).
More importantly, if one character can feasibly defeat a boss mob,
then a group would find it a piece of cake - which means that when a
boss mob's location has been reported, guilds will race to reach and
kill it first, rather than approach it with a healthy dose of respect
or (gasp!) work together to defeat it so as to protect their lands and
profits.

> > What is inherently wrong with making player characters more vulnerable
> > and helpless?
>
> The fact that people don't like feeling vulnerable and helpless?

I keep hearing this argument and think it very much plays into what
type of gamer you are. One of my favourite quotes comes from my
friend, who played SW:Galaxies religiously prior to the NGE, as he's
reading an interview with whoever was responsible for the NGE debacle.
The fellow being interviewed claims "We knew we had to do something
drastic, to make the players feel like they're being cast as heroes.
Nobody wants to be a moisture farmer on Tattooine." to which my friend
shouts at the monitor, "*I* wanted to be a damn moisture farmer on
Tattooine!".

The fact that the game allowed him to portray an actual character with
*potential* to become a hero - and he would meet heroes in the game
and gaze after them admiringly when they left - was a selling point.
If any Joe Blow could just roll up a new Jedi because he's tired of
his Smuggler, the hero title is devalued and the game becomes more
two-dimensional.

> Reducing the Monty-Hallism of MMOs does not require making players
> feel "helpless."

Note I said *more* helpless. Not incapable of action.

> Orcs?  Ha!  I'd like a show of hands of everyone who has never been
> killed by a rat, a barnyard animal, a bird, a frog, a housepet, an
> insect, or something that could otherwise be killed with a good puff
> of industrial strength roach spray.  I don't think there's any
> existing shortage of fatal game encounters that make players feel like
> pathetic goobs.

Yeah, well, see, that's just stupid, and part of the problem. Anyone
designer who favoured any amount of realism in their game should not
have players fighting birds with a sword - or potentially dying from
it. The issue there is that players want (or, people *think* players
want) to see drastic increases in character ability every few hours of
gameplay. This leads developers to set the power scale in the game to
range from "Slug" to "God-Like", rather than "Commoner" or perhaps
"Hero-in-Training" to "Accomplished Hero". This would cause the kind
of critters you would face to range from, say, "Giant Rat" or "Kobold"
to "Troll King". This would not make for a worse, less fun game (in
fact, it would make for a better game with more fun due to increased
ability to suspend disbelief) but may require a wee bit more patience
or at least appreciation for subtlety from the players.

> > The traditional fantasy MMO/MUD suffers from inflation from the moment
> > it goes into public beta - possibly before. In a tabletop session of
> > D&D, the player characters are protagonists, with special abilities and
> > skills that sets them apart from the common rabble. They are likely some
> > of the most talented, skilled and all around powerful people in their
> > corner of the world - or they will be right after they reappear from the
> > newbie dungeon. The problem with MMO/MUDs is that there are literally
> > thousands of these Nietzchean Ubermensch in the same province or even
> > city, which is a major game balance and realism problem even before you
> > start taking mudflation into account.
>
> Ah, now, yes.  This has pretty much always been a problem with MUDs.
> On AmberMUSH, we used to say "Everyone wants to be the World's
> Greatest Swordsman."  The trouble is that nobody wants to play "Civil
> Servant Online" or "Oppressed Peasant Online" or "Barefoot and
> Pregnant For Half Your Life Online."  Even in "A Tale in the Desert"
> -- a game where you pick grass and rot camel dung, among other things
> -- the player characters still become larger than life, over time.
>
> That's one of the reasons that we play, I think.  I have come to
> accept, on some level, that there are an extraordinary number of
> exceptional people about.. and that, moreover, I'm not going to have a
> very compelling conversation with the robot who grows the wheat to
> make my bread.  Even if there's some guy out there who wants to play
> "Wheat Farmer Online," he's not a large enough market to write code
> for him.

Ah, but when "Rat Killer Online" involves the exact same
button-mashing motions as "Wheat Farmer Online" does, and RKO seems
like a cardboard cutout virtual world designed to fulfill some 14-year
old's testosterone-driven fantasies of being a cool hero decked out in
all purples, while WFO actually properly simulates an economy and I
can see how my wheat farming has a real impact in the world - do you
still stand by that argument?

I maintain that if companies put as much time and effort into cool
animations of wheat flowing in the wind as they do to animate some
Bonebreaker Gnoll's death animation, lots of people would be a whole
lot more interested in crafting.

> Crippled?  I'm not so sure you want to cripple people.  Please see my
> earlier post, entitled "Framing and Player Psychology."

Without hindrances there is nothing to overcome. With nothing to
overcome, there is no game. By introducing a new hindrance, and a
mechanism for overcoming that hindrance, you create new gameplay. If
all you want is the flavour of killing monsters, then Progress Quest
is a fantastic game.

> If there's so much travel in the game that you have to worry about
> food, it's too much travel.

This sentence is worthy of an entire article in and of itself. To
summarize that non-existent article:
Everyone seems to want larger and larger game worlds. Further, many
MMO players consider themselves Explorers, who enjoy simply visiting
new places, talking to new NPCs and experiencing new vistas. These
folks loathe teleportation / fast travel in all its forms - in fact,
until recently Vanguard claimed the lack of teleportation as one of
its features, and Turbine got a lot of flak when they introduced Fast
Travel in LOTRO. This all leads to travel, sometimes considerable
travel. If that travel can be entertaining - by including random
encounters, socializing/bantering with other players on the
caravan/boat/spaceship, weather effects, diversions such as resources
gathering and so on, it can be made an enjoyable and integral part in
an MMO.

One such element could be the accumulation or acquisition of
foodstuffs to actually enable to character to complete such travel.
This is no different than the acquisition of gold to buy a new skill
to defeat some foozle - it is simply yet another sink in the economy.
However, it would be a fairly realistic sink, would enable diverse
gameplay for many other players who enjoy creating and trading the
resource you're after, and would serve to somewhat limit travel
opportunities for characters who are destitute or have different
fiscal priorities.

As I mentioned above, limiting opportunity gives an incentive to work
towards gaining that opportunity. It is not a penalty, it is an
opportunity for gameplay.

> Pretty much, unless I'm playing a strategy game or a sim, I abhor all
> maintenance.  Food is maintenance.  So, I would say, you'd have to
> find some way to make food *not* maintenance to get me on-board.
>
> Many games use food.  In "A Tale in the Desert" and "Star Wars
> Galaxies," it is used for temporary buffs.  In "World of Warcraft," it
> is used for faster healing, and sometimes buffs.  In "Everquest," back
> when I played it, your character became weak if she didn't eat
> constantly, so you had waste a bag slot carrying around a stupid stack
> of muffins everywhere you went.  Buffs are fun.  Carrying around
> muffins so you don't get weak is not fun.  See, it's all about
> framing. :)

This is useful. Given this feedback, my implementation would involve:

#1: A food "stat" rather than multiple inventory items. You can buy
individual items, and it increases your food stat, i.e. available food
at hand (if you're anal you could increase encumbrance by the same
amount I suppose). Your food stat would decrease at regular intervals,
giving you notifications as it does so. You would not have to reach
into your backpack as you're fighting an orc in order to eat a muffin
because you're hungry and losing Endurance. The game system would
abstract that you ate "something" "around this time". This decreases
the requirement for maintenance and battling with the UI. I did not
intend for a food system to introduce a whole lot more tedium.

#2: Possibly, a system whereby staying at a particular food level
increases your XP accumulation rate, similar to WoW's "rested" state
which comes after downtime or rest at an inn. In WoW, players
complained because they felt "hardcore players were penalized" by the
system, but in actuality it served to allow casual gamers to keep
somewhat of a pace with their friends, and most importantly, encourage
people to log off and on in an inn and not out in the wilderness.
Similarly, I wouldn't want anyone dying from lack of food, but their
ability to advance would be penalized enough that they would want to
ensure access to nourishment if they were serious about advancing in
the game.

Lachek