[MUD-Dev2] [DESIGN] Where massive?

[Damion Schubert]

On 9/22/07, Aurel Mihai <aurel.gets.mail at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Imagine a game that's free to play once you buy the box, very nice
> graphically, and is not instanced. Now imagine the people populating
> that world. Scary thought, huh? MUDs are fun because they're free and
> not instanced, but the population of immature griefers is kept at bay by
> the fact that they don't do text. MMOs tend to keep griefers at bay
> because they're not free so griefers tend not to want to pay money just
> to bother others.


I don't have to imagine too hard.  Habbo Hotel, Maple Story, Kart Rider -
all free games.  All have huge teen populations, which anecdotally are
the worst of the worst of the populations.  All are not particularly
'scary'.

I fully concede that, as we move towards free play models in MMOs,
the scariest result is the loss of the credit card suspension as a means
of griefer punishment and mitigation.  That being said, we have to
concede some things when designing a social space.  People play
MMOs not just to be with their friends - they play MMOs largely because
-other people are interesting-.  Limiting player's interactions to a tiny
social circle, in the name of protecting them from the 1-2% of players
who are genuinely bad apples, is ultimately short sighted.  And all
too often, it creates a feeling of loneliness - a very ironic feeling in
a 'massively multiplayer' game.

Designers of classic MUDs and MMOs also have entirely too rosy
memories of the old days of text MUDs.  Most MUDs I worked and
played on were also played by griefers.  In some ways, they were
even more problematic, as they tended to be much more technically
proficient (in those days, you pretty much had to be a CS major at
a university to even know what telnet was).

Guild Wars managed the griefers by giving players an
> opportunity to group with whoever they wanted and allowing them to
> ignore all the other obnoxious people in the game. Griefers aren't just
> PKers, they're the people that ruin the game for everyone by ruining the
> atmosphere. Guild Wars 2 going non-instanced is a mistake because there
> will be no escape from that portion of the population, so eventually
> they will be the only ones left playing it.


This is a lot of doom and gloom.  It's also not very well founded.
Maintaining a healthy social environment is not particularly a new
problem, and I'm pretty sure that the Guild Wars team has enough
knowledge from their own experience on GW, as well as from other
games in NCSoft's arsenal, that they'll have some clues on how
to take this on.

--d